Meta uncle Bob and meta cousin Georgia! Too bad blogger really stinks at uploading photos, it was a lot higher quality when it was sent to me... But anyways, here is how I would characterize this brainteaser: a picture of Bob taking a picture of Bob; or even a photo of a reflection in a reflector of a photo.
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But cannibalism is only genius when it comes to meta. Thanks to Marina, here is a flickr pool of anthropomorphized foods (and animals) eating themselves: http://www.flickr.com/grou ps/autophagy/pool/ Here's your cannibal creation eating itself today; a cone licking a cone:
Subject: A green frame within a wooden frame, talking about framing an issue. Analysis: This is triple meta, and it proves that the physical and mental meta (both something literally and concretely being within something else; and the more conceptual version of that too). ...AND ....... Subject: This little racoon fellow: a picture of a picture. Analysis: The faces of coal campaign - a somewhat sickening attempt to glorify and justify the dangerous coal mining industry, IMHO - lists this little guy as one of its "supporters." Really. Go to the "our supporters tab of Faces of Coal , ACCCE's advocacy website.
This is a tattoo of Tattoo, Mr. Roarke's midget assistant from the show Fantasy Island . Played by Herve Villechaize. No, I had never heard of Tattoo either. It's probably a generational thing. I've included a video of the real Tattoo, for reference. See below.. AWESOME UPDATE!!** The fellow whose arm this is commented below, sharing his story about the tattoo with the world. Thanks Joey! Joey said... "That's my arm you got up there =). The story behind this is my dad asked me why I get tattoos. I told him because I love art. I asked him if he would ever get one. Being the smart ass he is he said "I would get a tattoo of Tattoo from Fantasy Island". I thought that was brilliant and since I have tattoos for my mother, grandmother's and past ex's, I thought it would be nice to get something for the man that raised me. Here's to you Pop"
Coworker I sit near sighs loudly out loud. Then, on gchat: Coworker: sigh Me : that was so meta i heard you sigh outloud as you typed sigh into gchat A sigh within a sigh? Sort of. Ok this one might be a stretch.
The channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ youtube?blend=1&ob=4 Q: Is this meta? a youtube channel about youtube? A: You betcha. Watch it:
The now showing Morgan Spurlock ' Greatest Movie Ever Sold ' is entirely funded by product placement, and as the NYT says, "The layers of meta can get pretty thick." Morgan Spurlock, made famous in part by his past film Super Size Me, raises the following key points and questions: -the curtain is one of the values of product placement; why would you want to pull back the curtain on it, ruining marketing? -approached 600 brands, ended up with 20 partners -where do we draw the line, both in films and society? -do we want to live in a world where everything is brought to you by a sponsor? That's where we're heading. Longer NYT excerpt below: The business model of product placement — in which studios and television networks defray their costs by highlighting products on-screen in exchange for money or their free use — is a fact of life in Hollywood. And it’s nothing new: Jules Verne sold naming rights to the shipping companies in “ Around the World in 80 Day
Many of you have asked me why, if I want to be truly meta, do I not just blog about blogging? My answer was unsubstantive but valid: that it's already been done. A lot. As proof of that point, below is a list of what objective criteria have established as the top 25 blogs about blogging. So many to pick from! The following is a repost from DailyBlogTips. Quality reading. The “Top 25 Blogs About Blogging” list ranks blogs according to their Google Pagerank, Alexa rank, number of Bloglines subscribers and Technorati authority. Each of the four factors range from 0 to 10, where 10 is the best score. The maximum total score for each blog, therefore, is 40. There will be monthly updates. Below the table you will find the details about the algorithm (check also the Top 25 SEO Blog s). #1 Problogger 6 10 10 10 36 #2 Copyblogger 6 9 10 10 35 #3 John Chow 6 10 6 10 32 #4 Quick Online Tips 6 8 10 6 30 #5 Daily Blog Tips 5 8 7 9
Take it or leave it http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/business/media/22times.html?_r=1&hp Profit Down At Times Co., But Web Plan Shows Upside The New York Times Company reported a sharp drop in net income in the first quarter as the print advertising market remained stubbornly depressed for newspapers. The company said net income fell 57.6 percent, to $5.4 million, compared with $12.8 million in the quarter a year ago. etc...
Guest blog by Lady A. (a real name, I swear) and Ariel B. sorta. Consider this: Google chrome crashes. You have a question about Google Mail, Google Calendar, etc. The immediate online resources is Google! Google, by virtue of being everyone’s go-to for the answers to all questions must necessarily be meta. Indeed, google is so meta, that it uses meta tags, HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page (google referred me to Wikipedia for this one). Metadata is data about data, and is also known as metalanguage. This is trippy. Basically, google can be at once self-referential and hetero-referential. In fact, when you google something, you are not searching the web, but are searching googles index of the web. Therefore, googling, regardless of what you’re googling, can put you in some sort of mise en abyme , and subsequently drive you to further googling, which is just another word for procrastination, which may be the antidote to metaness.... Editor's
When I tell my coworker about this blog's theme, he comments: This reminds of the story about the "worst tattoo contest" that must be an urban legend. O ne person gets a bicycle, someone else gets Spiderman boots, but the clear winner is the Magritte-style "This is not a face" down the cheek. Indeed.
Thank you "anonymous contributor" for this guest post. (To all who follow Susan's twitter @suzliz: I was the one who left that voicemail. If you've got a problem with that, the door's in the back.) And this one comes from a friend of a friend: A "HIATUS" is when the cigarette is being passed around a circle of people; it comes to you, and instead of hitting and passing, you "Hit It And Tell A (think of it phonetically - "Uh") Story". (The story could be about anything. The point is that you're telling it, and the cigarette is wasting away between your fingers. You're doing a HIATUS, taking a HIATUS, whatever.) The meta here is when a cigarette is traveling around; the cigarette comes to you, and you take the time to explain what a HIATUS is... thus doing a HIATUS right then and there. ** Editor's note: I'm pretty sure this is the PG version of this post, but I'll leave that to your speculation.
Uncle Blyon (is this Bob, or Bill? My guess is Bill...but too many options!) wonders aloud: "Is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, meta? The question occurred to me after I saw a "Chile Relleno Burrito" on the menu." Good question, uncle. Winston Churchill originally said this referring to Russia, but I think it can be applied to mysterious taco bell esque foods, too.
On Jonathan Franzen's "Farther Away" in this week's New Yorker, accessible here or by liking it on facebook. He writes about his time on a remote (and, apparently, quite boring) Chilean island: "In a very direct way, according to Watt, the English novel had risen from the ashes of boredom. And boredom was what I was suffering from. The more you pursue distractions, the less effective any particular distraction is, and so I’d had to up various dosages, until, before I knew it, I was checking my e-mail every ten minutes, and my plugs of tobacco were getting ever larger, and my two drinks a night had worsened to four, and I’d achieved such deep mastery of computer solitaire that my goal was no longer to win a game but to win two or more games in a row—a kind of meta-solitaire whose fascination consisted not in playing the cards but in surfing the streaks of wins and losses . My longest winning streak so far was eight." I like his eerily accurate characteriza
Twitter is so inherently meta that this blog post doesn't really need making. But I thought I would share such a prime, beautiful example of what we are talking about that its natural beauty cannot be overlooked. It's just so... layered! Like an onion. LisbethKaufman RT @suzliz RT tweet about a tweet RT @ lisbethkaufman office within an office on blog on blog. Meta Tiny. http://bit.ly/bipA2w and http://bit.ly/dREMIE
http://www.hulu.com/watch/231769/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-mon-apr-11-2011 J Stu had a good meta segment on the averted federal gov shutdown.
I did not have a very meta weekend. Becca and I journeyed to Southern Virginia to hike waterfalls, go in historic hot springs (located in Hot Springs, VA - I guess that's something), etc. The weekend was a reminder to me that, not surprisingly, not all things in life are meta. For example, here are some things that are definitely NOT meta: *waterfalls *sunburns *expensive drinks *scenic drives *warm sulfur springs (debatable) They are what they are, which is what we perceive them as. There is also a whole school of philosophy on that (direct realism ). I don't know how anyone majors in philosophy. In fact, there was only one meta incident all weekend, when we drove through Front Royal , a somewhat depressing " bedroom community " - also known as a dormitory town - where basically everyone commutes to somewhere else to work and they just sleep there at night. These 'outer suburbs ' are by definition "suburbs of suburbs," thereby encompassing probably
Here's the weekend blog, folks - I'll be gone for two days. Story below brought to you by Richard Lyon, father and meta-nerd.... * My first exposure to meta, besides meta-physics, which I took to mean religion, and therefore not nearly as interesting as physics, was the meta key on keyboards at the MIT AI Artificial Intelligence lab in the late 1970s. They had invented this moby text editor called "emacs" (according to its radical inventor rms, NOT named for the nearby Boston ice-cream shop, Emack & Bolio's , which was named for a couple of homeless guys , even if the text justifier "bolio" was so named). Emacs used what we call "control" or "modifier" keys to control its actions; but "ctrl" was not enough--no, they also had super, meta , and hyper, not to mention front, shift, and top on their space-cadet keyboards . Typical long-form commands were like "meta-x query replace"; here the text "qu
Today's capitalism is an interesting beast. As this video points out, "it's not just what you are buying - it's what you are buying into." It's something bigger than a cup of coffee --- it's coffee ethics, free trade, fair trade, whatever whatever. Thanks Lady A. for this video and this fine metaphysical note: "In the very act of buying coffee, you're not just a consumer, but you're also buying your redemption from consumerism."
My first, best, favorite, and only Seattle friend Sean reached out to me yesterday with this fine gem. I actually recall this meta-incident happening about 3 months ago, when he posted his account of it on facebook. I've enlarged it for your viewing pleasure (you can see it better if you click on it though): Basically, it's really sketchy to see a ton of huge bags being moved out of your neighbor's apartment (unless they are actually moving and have a moving truck). It's probably even creepier to find out that it's just bags full of bags, because what was your neighbor doing with hundreds of plastic bags anyways? Apparently, not reusing them.
Today, my tour de force colleague Jorge put a "conversation about a conversation" on the agenda for our weekly team meeting. We needed to preliminarily discuss what needed discussing at next week's team meeting, to prepare for it. I'm not even joking, this happened. Meta is for real, people.
It has come to my attention that some readers do not understand what meta is, or they wish I would specify a rule or criterion in deciding what is meta or what is not. I am too lazy to do this, and I would refer these people back to my 2nd blog post where Rachel lays out what meta means in philosophy speak. And I would add that the whole point of meta is that sometimes, you just KNOW. It doesn't require explanation. It's that gut feel, "oh hey, how meta!" What, you haven't had that? But I will say this. There are two main lines of questioning when it comes to meta. First we have the comparatives: "Out of X, Y, and Z, which is the most meta?" Then we have the absolutes: "Is there such a thing as a meta X or Can a meta version of a Y exist or Is Z meta? I can't decide." I'm still grappling with which sort to pursue, so for now it will be a mix of both.
Dear all, It has come to my attention that a meta-play is coming to DC. Venus in Fur , the play by David Ives and directed by David Muse, will open in DC on May 25th and run through early July. I've been indirectly offered free tickets to be used at an upcoming Studio production and will hopefully report back soon either on this one or another one. Not only that, but it is coming to DC's beautiful Studio Theater on 14th Street, an amazing and borderline-meta venue, if I do say so myself. I mean come on - it calls itself the Studio Theater? Why not call itself the Theater Studio, or the Theatre Theater, or the Studio Studio, or some such? On the inspiration for Venus and Fur though, startingly, the theater's description of it does not once make use of the term 'meta ' in its blurb: In Venus in Fur , David Ives’s completely reimagines Sacher-Masoch’s novella, shifting the action to a contemporary rehearsal room, and turning the characters into an actress and
You may be thinking that no good blog starts off with a guest post about why such a blog should not exist (indirectly at least - see below). I one hundred percent agree, which is why I've decided to follow it up with a running brainstorm list about things that are meta in my own life, as a constant reminder that we can bring Aristotle down to earth, yo. Or not really that. It's just that I wanted my own niche blog topic to blog about, much like those who blog about tiny things , or hipster athletes , or cool graphs , or ' Turning 30 Finally ,' for instance. Note, I do NOT approve of niche blogs such as Asians sleeping in the library . As you see, I've been on the hunt for awhile now for a good personal fit niche blog topic. See? That paragraph exhibited some successful blogging about blogs - how meta. Anyways, back to the point, why is meta relevant and NOT a blunder blog, you may ask? So here we have it. My job : I consume energy to use a computer to write abo
Hi. My name is Susan and I decided to start a blog about things that are meta, in between the other things that I do (work; drink; sleep; eat; zumba). It has been pointed out to me already that if I were truly being meta, I would start a blog about blogs. But alas, that has already been done. For context, please note that my use of the word meta tends to drive my ex college roomie a bit crazy, as she is a bona fide philosphy major who actually knows what meta means. She didn't like it then [when we tried to create a 'metaism of the day' #MOD hashtag on twitter], and she probably doesn't like it now [that I am creating a blog two years later]. To that end, and to get this blog started off on the right (or less wrong) foot, I have commissioned an introduction to the word 'meta' by philosophy expert, sports journalist, and meta expert herself, Rachel Orland. Her guest entry is as follows, and please note that any and all reader contributions on viewing life th
It's happened. I've started a blog about meta. Stay tuned. An introduction by an expert will occur soon.