Kip Austin Hinton

in 1994, at ohio state university, i learned two important things: the depth of african american writers, and website design. the internet was still very young. most content was for tech nerds, the military-industrial complex, and usenet communities (dinosaurs left over from 1979). email, back then, required a program called eudora . and file-sharing required an archaic protocol called gopher . - i was studying literature. and realized that unless you were interested in the core canon of white male english-speaking authors -- shakespeare, dickens, whitman, frost, twain, hemingway (and lessers like bradbury, clarke, orwell, and asimov, who did science fiction, favored by those tech nerds) -- the "world wide web" (it was called by all three names then) was not for you. - in this context, an african studies professor at ohio state taught us about zora neale hurston , a black woman who wrote books in the 1930s. in the 1930s, if you were a rich white male in america, literature wa...

this is a good chart from the houston chronicle . it shows delegate counts. the relationship between counties, districts, votes, and delegates. - clinton wins some - district 26 is san antonio, and it doesn't matter that clinton won, because the delegate count comes out as a tie (2 - 2). district 27, east rio grande valley, clinton won by a landslide. but in the delegate count, she gets only a small advantage (2 - 1). - obama wins some - district 13 is downtown houston, obama won in a landslide and gets a huge delegate advantage (5 - 2). district 14 is austin, obama also gets a good advantage (5 - 3). - district 26 has about the same population as district 14. but in Austin, more people voted for a democrat two years ago. so they got a delegate bonus. the pattern extends throughout texas, and most of the districts turned out as close as district 26 or 27. this is a strange system, but it adds up to one thing. - clinton won a majority of the votes in about 90% of texas counties. ver...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/opinion/11krugman.html Hate Springs Eternal 'The bitterness of the fight for the Democratic nomination is, on the face of it, bizarre. Both candidates are smart and appealing. Why, then, is there so much venom out there?' - By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: February 11, 2008 - ... Both have progressive agendas (although I believe that Hillary Clinton is more serious about achieving universal health care, and that Barack Obama has staked out positions that will undermine his own efforts). Both have broad support among the party’s grass roots and are favorably viewed by Democratic voters. Supporters of each candidate should have no trouble rallying behind the other if he or she gets the nod. ...most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — ...

totino's ad campaign - okay, there are these commercials on TV about a thing called "totino's pizza rolls." apparently it is a very tiny hot pocket. the gimmick seems to be that kids can prepare this food themselves (not sure how this is any different from every other convenience food). of all the features these cubes have, the commercial focuses on taste as a selling point. obviously, frozen cubes of bleached white flour taste great no matter what. - so this kid microwaves a bag of these things, then serves them to his friends in the middle of the night. he warns they must be quiet, i guess to avoid waking his parents. but it turns out the cubes are so delicious his friends are unable to stay quiet. "i love totino's pizza rolls!" screams the first taster. - as screams erupt from everyone, the betrayed boy-chef expresses dismay at the punishment which will surely follow. oh, i jest. his parents will probably eat the cubes themselves after they come dow...