An interesting short film on Barbie, Jews, identity and about a million other topics. It is so packed with material - some of which seems extremely random - that it is hard to know where to even start with any commentary. See what you think.

For your weekend listening pleasure, some Hungarian political campaign music. I had meant to blog about this a few weeks ago during the elections (it’s just one of about a dozen posts I haven’t managed to get around to recently), but it’s not as though it’s any less relevant now.

The song was written explicitly for the Hungarian Socialist Party’s campaign in the recent parliamentary elections. I like it - it’s reminiscent of Hungarian pop/covertly political songs from the 1970s. I didn’t like it the first time I listened to it, but got pretty hooked the second time. I wonder if it’s at all of interest if you do not understand the language and/or are not familiar with the style. (No need to get into how unique the style is, maybe it’s not, but it still reminds me of lots of Hungarian songs from a while ago, songs that don’t tend to make it to the Billboard charts despite being quite good.)

The most commonly recurring words are “igen”, which means “yes” and “Magyarország”, which means “Hungary”. The bottom of the page suggests that the song was also made available as a ring tone for cell phones, which seems like an interesting idea.

So what are other exampes of political campaigns creating their own songs? I can think of campaigns adopting songs for their purposes and playing them at victory time, but those songs weren’t written for the campaigns explicitly. Bonus points if you can link to the examples.

Today (Friday), the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School is hosting a conference on Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture. In addition to the face-to-face discussions, the conference is also integrating digital media in neat ways for participation by those who can’t be at the meeting physically. For example, there is a Berkman Island (including a 3D replica of the Ames Courtroom at the Harvard Law School) in Second Life. If you get a chance, come join us, it looks like there will be some very interesting presentations and discussions.

How random: YouTube’s hosting a bunch of Hungarian TV ads from the 80s. Here is one I even remember. It was for a big department store that still exists. It’s hard to translate what the little guy is saying as it’s a nice play on words. The basic script: “I go in. I come out. I do so well when I go in.” - The play on words is that “I do so well” is based on the same word as “I come out”. I doubt this makes much sense, but that’s how iit goes and it’s pretty clever in the original.

UPDATE: I’m adding another one that I remember. It’s for a bank (or the only bank at the time).

Translation:

Some come to us, because they have money.
Some come to us, because they don’t have money.
Some understand money, that’s why they trust us.
Some don’t understand money, that’s why they trust us with it. [Works better in Hungarian.]
Some save, because that’s what they saw at home.
Some save, because that’s not what they saw at home.
There are some who haven’t yet come to us. This film is for them.

Via Lifehacker, I found a helpful video on how to peel potatoes without too much trouble. Not wanting to pass on a recommendation without having tried it myself, I dutifully boiled a potato to test the method. It worked great! Note that the water at the end doens’t have to be ice water, it’s enough to put the boiled potato in some cold water.

While we’re on the topic of how-to videos, if anybody missed the instructions for folding a shirt, it’s also worth a visit. I found it harder to follow than the potato-peeling guide though. It may help to look at this piece as well to figure out what’s going on. I haven’t made this technique part of my everydays, but depending on your current method you may decide differently.

I started playing ping pong again a few weeks ago so I may appreciate this more than most, but I don’t think you have to be a practitioner for it to be worth a look.

While we’re on the topic of ping pong, check out this massively multiplayer online pong game. It’s not so much that it’s hours of fun (it’s not), what’s intriguing is that people come up with and create these things.

If all this has gotten you in the mood for some pong then try king pong [requires Shockwave]. It’s a pretty good version of a game that probably has hundreds if not thousands of variants.

I guess at this point I should probably include this here: .

Thanks to Geeked for the Ping pong link and Waxy for the MMOP link. I found King Pong all by myself (well, with a little help from a search engine).

As I noted earlier, last month I was interviewed on Milt Rosenberg’s Extension 720 radio show in the company of Dan Drezner and Sean Carroll, two other Chicagoland academic bloggers.

Segments of the interview are now available as an mp3 file.

The first part of the podcast is from another interview. If you want to skip ahead to the sections from our show then here is where you’ll want to slide the player once the file has loaded:

Reading the comments to this post on the Social Software Weblog I got inspired to try vSocial, a service that lets you embed videos easily into blogs posts, including social features attached to the video such as tags and comments others may have made on it elsewhere.

This video is more like an audio file with a nice image attached to it. I recorded it at a piano concert I attended during the World Science Forum in Budapest last month. The pianist is Gergely Bogányi, an extremely talented young artist. His concert in the main hall of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences kicked off the World Science Forum on November 9th.

Just in case the video above is not working, I have also put up a copy of it on Google Video.

Yahoo! has launched a new site: Hot Zone featuring the first news correspondent of its own: Kevin Sites. Sites will transmit news from around the world - mostly from areas underreported by the mainstream press - using various forms of media to Hot Zone readers. The articles often come with accompanying photo essays, audio or video material. Comments are open (for those with a Yahoo! ID, which readers can get for free) on the pieces so readers can contribute to the content.