US uses songs to deter immigrants

The US Border Patrol quietly enters the music industry, commissioning a CD of songs reminding people in northern Mexico how dangerous it is to cross the border.

In one, called The Biggest Enemy, a singer called Abelardo from the Mexican state of Michoacan and his cousin Rafael set off to cross the border.

They reach the US but nature defeats them, as they wander the desert without water. Exhausted they lie down with Abelardo waking later to find his cousin dead by his side:

“He decided to come back/ And have a burial in their town/ And as a vow/ He told his dead cousin/ If God will take my life/ That it be in my beloved land.”

You can to listen to two of the songs on The Guardian’s website.

Where should a thought bubble point?

Magic Paper
[via rodcorp]
“. . . because this is honestly the most exciting thing in the world.”

Thelonious Monk’s advice to saxophonist Steve Lacy (1960)
[via TomC]
My favorite line: “What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play” (italics substituted for underlines). For some reason, everybody keeps lopping off play at the end of the sentence; but it’s right there in Monk’s handwriting, just below the last syllable of important.

If you’d like to swim upstream on this link: Swiss Miss got it from Eric Alba who got it from Neven Mrgan who doesn’t tell us where he found it.

It’s been floating around the web for a while, though. Do The Math did a little legwork on this and discovered that the original document is mentioned or used in Steve Lacy’s introduction to Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music.

Comics grammar and tradition
[via TomC]
A style guide for comics letterers. I’m intrigued by all the traditions—”[a balloon] tail should terminate at roughly 50-60% of the distance between the balloon and the character’s head”—and recent trends:

Thought balloons have fallen out of fashion in recent years in preference for narrative captions. Text in a thought balloon can be italicized. The tail on a thought balloon is made up of smaller bubbles and should point towards a character’s head (not mouth, as in a standard balloon tails). Generally you should have at least three little bubbles of decreasing size that reach toward the character. Two seems insufficient and more than four or five seems excessive.

GOP.gov Anywhere API
[via migurski]
Innovative. Slick. Beige.

Kansas rethinks its prison policies
[via bfunk]
Among other initiatives, there’s been a major push to soften the traditional, cop-like approach used by parole officers when dealing with parolees.

The new strategy seems to be working: five years ago around 203 parolees returned to Kansas prisons each month but by 2007, the number reduced by 100 per month and the number of new crimes—felony convictions that people pick up while they are on parole supervision—also nearly halved.

Homogenizing the internet, criminalizing ornamentation, writing to learn & two blogs

We start with two rants, a hundred years apart. The first is concerned that internet search results increasingly favor a more homogenous bunch of information sources; the second argues that it’s criminal to add ornamentation to useful things.

All hail the information triumvirate!

[via migurski]
For the third consecutive year, Nick Carr reproduces ten Google searches of ten general topics. In 2006 Wikipedia held the top spot in two of the ten searches; in 2007 Wikipedia held the top spot in eight of the ten searches; this year Wikipedia held the top spot in all ten. Carr worries about the homogenization of the internet:

in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine.

I agree with Michal:  ”Google is the only one that’s an actual problem: its methods are secret, its data is proprietary, and its goals explicitly commercial.”

Ornament and crime

[via rodcorp]
Written in 1908, this essay by Austrian architect Adolf Loos argues that “[t]he evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects” and that because ornamentation often forces objects to go out of style it is a crime to waste resources adding ornamentation. The first few pages of the essay are available via Google Books.

Becoming writing, becoming writers

 [via mathemagenic]
I’ve recently finished reading a stack of articles about writing, particularly about writing literature reviews. They’ve helped immensely. The article linked here offers an idea of writing “as a learning tool which enables what researchers know about themselves and their topics” and suggests “that writing should be included more intentionally in our research methods courses” (from abstract).

Designculture in brief

[via anne]
A new tumblelog, centering on “the cultures of design and the designs of culture.”

Sunday is for sounds

[via mtchl]
An mp3 blog. His top five albums of 2008:

1. Fleet Foxes - Sun Giant EP/Fleet Foxes
2. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
3. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
5. The Walkmen - You & Me