Friday grumblings
On a dim, rainy day in Chicago, here are some grumblings and rumblings from around the internet:
Read Leslie Anderson’s comic about angst at this year’s AWP Conference. We can relate.
An essay in The Awl decries the laxity of the penalty for guessing on online Scrabble:
There's a dark side to “Words with Friends”. . . that represents the greatest smartphone-induced threat to our nation’s integrity since the Blackberry ruined pub trivia. It appears in the form of “zax” or “hame” or “henting,” each of which are underlined in red as I type this in Microsoft Word, and each of which have been successfully deployed against me in “Words with Friends."
Can you relate? Don't answer.
An unfunny complaint: Unpaid bloggers are suing Huffington Post for $105 million, a one-third share of AOL’s purchase price of that site. When journalist and labor activist Jonathan Tasini, who filed the class action suit, referred to bloggers as “modern day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation,” he lost a fair amount of popular sympathy for using that thoughtless metaphor. Other skeptics opine that while HuffPost’s position may be unfair, it’s not clearly illegal.
If you’re in Chicago and ready for something to cheer you up, check out The MDW Fair, a gathering of independent art initiatives, spaces, galleries and artist groups from the Chicago metropolitan area this weekend. The exhibition includes a sculpture garden featuring local artists. There’s a party on location at the Geolofts building at 7PM, followed by an after-party with more music and libations nearby. Tickets to the fair are $5 each, and $5 for the after-party.
