On Having a Black Name

This blogger, a white woman, happens to have a “black” name. Result: every time she’s in contact with someone who knows her name but can’t see her, she lives out Black Like Me.

[From Daisy’s Dead Air: On having a black name]

When I did customer service, I worked with mostly black women. And we were supposed to give our names, like good customer service robots: “Thank you for calling blabbity blabbity, I’m _____, how may I help you?”

“WHAT did you say your name was?”

Here it comes.

I always repeated it, obediently. And I often heard lots of illuminating stuff after that. A few:

“Are you a n-gger?”

“Are you black? Give me someone white. I want someone who can find their ass with both hands, no offense.”

“Oh, God no.”

(to someone else in the room) “Oh guess what, guys? I’ve got ______ on the phone, and she’s gonna -solve- our problem!!!!” (room responds with hoots, hollers, boos, laughter, etc.)

“Give me someone white, and don’t argue with me about it, just do it.” (On these calls, I very much enjoyed getting the black supervisor with the British accent on the line; we both enjoyed putting one over on them. But I always made sure to tell the supervisor what was up.)

Carnac The Magnificent Speaks

holds sealed envelope to his head

Obama will do very well; Clinton will do badly; she and the media will spin it so that it sounds like she did better than she in fact did; she will vow to continue till the bitter end, and if it costs the Democrats the election, that’s too bad, they can try again in ’12 with her as a candidate.

opens envelope, reads

It says “What will happen in Pennsylvania tomorrow?” Gosh, I got lucky. I was answering as if it said “what has happened in virtually every state so far.” But I was right anyway.

A Tasty Video Recipe

I like to download videos from youtube using the magically delicious DownloadHelper. Especially music videos. The only sad thing is that the video quality tends to be poor, and it can only get worse if you convert it to a less crappy format than the standard flv — such as mp4 for example.

But Youtube is being kind to us. Many, many videos on youtube, if not all, are available in a higher quality format — in fact, mp4, the format that is standard for things like iPods. The magic you do to get the higher quality is take the youtube url and add “&fmt=18” to it. That’s all. Just add that to the address in the address bar and reload and you will get a higher quality video, which you can then download with downloadhelper. You might need to change the .flv extension to .mp4 to play it back with Quicktime.

There’s also a thing in Youtube’s account preferences you can set to get higher quality stuff by default, but I don’t think it’s the same — I think (not sure) it gives you the fmt=6 version. (there are at least two different higher quality settings, &fmt=6 and &fmt=18 — I think the &fmt=6 is better than the default but not mp4-encoded like &fmt=18.)

There’s a greasemonkey userscript to do the fmt=18 for you.

UPDATE: if you see something in the downloadhelper.net menu called Video.mp4 that’s guaranteed to be the good stuff. I think it also shows up under other names sometimes too — downloadhelper sometimes offers several links to the same video so it’s confusing.

UPDATE: it ain’t just video. The audio is *noticeably* better in the higher quality downloads. Much crisper, makes the old kind sound muddy in comparision.

Media Priorities

It recently made the news that at high-level administration meetings, the major players in the Bush administration, particularly secretary of state Condoleeza Rice, explicitly and in detail approved the torture of prisoners.

Turn on the news. You’ll be hearing, nonstop, about the probable damaging effect of Barack Obama’s use of the word “bitter” to describe people who have lost their jobs.

Media priorities.

Check it out.