You’ve no doubt heard by now all the hullabaloo about how Dave Chappelle left his eponymous show mid-season last year and decided in the end to walk away from a $55M business deal. Some people think he ought to grow up. Others have thought he’s just an underachiever or just crazy. Personally, I think he walked away because he has integrity.

Look, I’ll admit my bias up front: I’m a big fan of Chappelle. For a decade or more, my family and I were the only Asians living in a small, rural, conservative town in Tennessee. Just imagine how blown away I was the first time I saw his Clayton Bigsby sketch. Chappelle’s comedy is definitely unique and controversial because his skits and standup often talk about race relations, discrimination, and other commonly unpalatable subjects. But he’s managed to present these subjects in a way in which people might feel just comfortable enough to start talking and thinking about them. That’s certainly not easy to do, and my impression is that he’s not just doing it to get laughs and a paycheck.

Earlier this year, I watched his 2-hour long interview on Inside the Actor’s Studio, and a few days ago, I caught his brief discussion on Anderson Cooper. He’s also spoken on Oprah. When I watched my first interview with him, I was initially surprised, and later impressed, that Chappelle responded honestly and seriously to the many questions and opinions raised by his comedy. He’s put a lot of thought into what he does, and even though he admitted he didn’t know whether what he was doing was “right”, he believed in doing it because he felt that certain issues needed to be talked about more in this country, and if he helped that get going, great.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m completely baffled: should I be disgusted by the excess or impressed by the creativity of The World Islands being created off the coast of Dubai? The video presentation looks like something out of Total Recall: man-made island real estate properties for sale to suit your every fantasy, assuming you have the funds. Opinions?

Just got a copy of this week’s Economist in the mail today. I assume that’s the nice thing about living close to one of their editorial offices — I used to receive them on Mondays or Tuesdays when I lived in the Pacific Northwest. Leafing through the issue, I noticed that:

1. They certainly have a quick turnaround time to be able to headline al-Zarqawi’s demise on the front cover
2. The blog Lifehacker.com got mentioned twice in a special article about technology and living
3. Mittal Steel (MT), the world’s largest steelmaker, which has been attempting to make a hostile takeover of Arcelor for the last several months, took out a full page ad addressing Arcelor shareholders directly, in an attempt to convince them to approve their offer

As usual, many other interesting articles, making for lots of reading to do this weekend.

If you’re ever out of gift ideas, check out Grand Illusions Toy Shop. They’ve honestly got unique and timeless gifts for Dad or anyone you can think of that enjoys illusions, scientific principles, and just generally neat objects. Even if you don’t buy, they do a good job of explaining the principles behind their toys and sharing video demonstrations. Why Boing Boing hasn’t found this yet, I’m not sure.

Grand Illusions used to sell a pseudoscope, a device that makes things look inside out, for a price that I couldn’t justify for a toy. Luckily someone’s come up with instructions on how to make a pseudoscope.

Looking for something more frugal? Check out Archie McPhee’s!

From the person who brought you One Thousand Paintings (about which much has been written) is a fun little applet that displays a visual representation of your website. Neatest thing about it to me is that it combines some aspect of particle physics. Yes, I do love cross-disciplinary stuff. I think the creator’s doing pretty well so far as his two biggest projects have both gotten a lot of interest in the last week.

Below is the graph for this site, and the colors represent different pieces of common HTML tags. What does yours look like?