Joshuah Bearman

As I get ready to maybe drive across the Rockies

I realize how much I love these photos of stranded motorists by Amy Stein: 

What happens when you spend a month alone

You have the time, late at night, when you've brushed your teeth and there's nothing on basic cable but old episodes of Futurama, which are pretty good by the way but still don't quite capture your attention enough to prevent you from monkeying around with the special features on the I Am T-Pain iPhone application, during which time you discover the World button, which is sort of like T-Pain roulette, playing songs that are being recorded at that moment by various ding dongs around the world. You see the globe spinning, and on the surface of that globe shines a light into the sky. This is the geographic location of the amateur auto-tuned sonic magic you are hearing. Adding to the 2.0-ness of it all, you can thumbs up the song, and comment  as you listen. You can also see other peoples thumbs ups, which are also geographically oriented, telling you a lot of people in the plains states really dig Chunky Strap III, while their comments -- hahahah; dope shit yo; wack; sexy shawty! -- float above the glove at random. If you have it, try it. Even the bad songs are good. For a little while. You can fwd the unlistenable tunes. But it only took four fwds for me to get straight to this gem right here.

I'm going to go out on a limb here

And say that an "interactive Holocaust memorial" built by a church in Fresno with reconstructed crematoria is just plain weird: 

Built by Cornerstone Church in Fresno, the Holocaust Experience will guide visitors through scenes of 12 major events that took place between 1933 and 1945. The scenes span from the rise of Adolf Hitler to Kristallnacht, or "the Night of Broken Glass," when nearly 1,000 synagogues were set on fire across Germany, to Hitler's decision to execute genocide as "the final solution to the Jewish question."

...Using nearly 100 actors from the church, which is housed in a historic Fresno theater, the Holocaust Experience begins at an induction center, complete with Nazi soldiers stationed at guard towers.

Visitors then view a documentary showing how Hitler rose to power and move through a series of scenes, including a depiction of the Warsaw Ghetto that features actual video footage and a reconstructed prison train car featuring the recorded account of a Jewish rabbi who at age 8 rode one of the trains to Auschwitz.

The exhibit also includes scenes depicting the gas chambers and ovens where mass murders and cremations took place, as well as a timeline of the Holocaust that adorns a long hallway. The exhibit ends in an auditorium displaying a memorial and a video with survivors' testimonies.