Have you had it with hipsters? Well, good, because hipsters have had it—or so they say.

“I think people are exhausted by trends that have the half-life of a millisecond,” says John Leland, author of “Hip: The History.” “You live in a state of perpetual whiplash, in which the minute you’re up on one trend it’s gone and you should be on to another.”

And so the LA Times gives us a grouping of post-scenesters who have abandoned the loft-party life of pop-cultural exhibitionism to embrace the forgotten wonder of true life and actual conversation.

The take-away: Authenticity isn’t just for losers anymore.

Hipsters are resented, especially by themselves, for always going about as if nothing can touch them. The word evokes a particular brand of icily detached individualism—that knowing aloofness practiced by those who will never say just what they mean, who would in fact deny meaning (all is in flux!), yet are above being bothered to actually do so. They hide behind barriers, all the while parading before us, simultaneously protecting and projecting themselves.

But if the cool now seek the real…I do not believe it will be their first time.

The hip are our cultural seekers—self-identified outsiders who somehow will the self to push beyond its own alienation to go in search of the new, the hidden, the unlikely yet possible. Exalting the rare and deriding the common, they began their quest with the implicit belief that by rejecting the need to belong and by seeking more nuanced forms of engagement they would ultimately arrive at a purer kind of belonging.

Of course, nothing remains new, and once the arbiters of cool have spoken, the rare is less so; and soon the formerly exalted must also be derided. After each repetition of the cycle you are left with even less to hold onto, and even derision runs up against the law of diminishing returns.

So, is hip…over?

What a question. Of course the hip will always be with us. While the hipsters of our most recent yesterdays may abandon the militant pose, I suspect they cannot make a clean break. Their sensibility is too ingrained. (Besides: They’re addicts.) What’s more, every day brings new creation. As the splintering of culture accelerates, our long struggle to arrive at some kind of accommodation with modernity can only mutate into ever more arcane forms. (If you fear tomorrow, just think of the cartoons.) Hip can never be over.

And the carping? That’s surely not going away.

Being real is fine. We just wish people wouldn’t talk about it.

A mini-robot has managed to infiltrate cockroach society. In an experiment, scientists in Switzerland used the robot to draw a group of darkness-loving roaches out into the light, according to silicon.com:

Called InsBot, for “insect-like robot”, the mechanical bug mimics the insects’ smell and movements to the point that the roaches have accepted it as their own.

Yes, but can they ever be real friends?

An African parrot named Alex has learned to identify 50 objects and to recognize shapes and colors, according to Wired News. What’s more, he seems to have taught himself a “zero-like concept.” Humans usually don’t grasp what zero means until they’re several years old.

RCA has quite a web site. Which is surprising, really, all these years after it stopped being an actual company. I was expecting the internet equivalent of Buford’s Grocery, an old corner store I remember from childhood–they went out of business one day, but their sign (provided by the makers of 7UP) remained up for years afterward, rusting, and if you looked through the dusty plate-glass windows you could see boxes of Quaker Oats still rotting on the shelves.

The company that was once the Radio Corporation of America got swallowed up by General Electric long ago. But the RCA name lives on, and you can still find its funky ’70s-kitsch logo stamped onto a wide range of brand-new products made by other companies that bought the rights to the name. I’m always baffled by these zombie brands. If I walk into Best Buy and see the RCA logo on a TV, it feels pointless and a little bit ghoulish. On an MP3 player? Dissonance gives way to annoyance—they abuse nostalgia, as if trying to implant false memories.

The problem is that for me RCA is not just an obsolete company, but a company still mourned; and as much as I know it shouldn’t matter, I cannot quite shake it, any more than I can erase an RCA jingle that remains etched in my mind. A brand is a mind worm; perhaps that is why they can live on long after the corporate body has expired.

The web site is a tasteful Flash tableau featuring Nipper, the RCA mascot (and a second dog, either the parent or spawn of Nipper—I don’t see how we’re to know which). The twirly glass-wind-chime effect is peculiarly mesmerizing, almost ethereal, and the dogs look like apparitions.

The internet isn’t so big, if you’re small. To find out how much children understand about the net and its complexity, researcher Zheng Yan gathered responses from 83 kids.

One five-year-old-boy said “Um, it has two computers on it. It is ten square feet large. It wouldn’t hurt you”.

The children aged between nine and ten appeared to be in a transition phase. They had limited online experience but showed greater awareness of the internet’s uses and dangers. “It’s somewhere for finding stuff” and is made “of a thousand computers,” one nine-year-old explained. But the internet “can give us bad ideas,” a 10-year-old girl warned.

She probably said that right after stumbling onto totse.com. Or perhaps the National Review Online.

(Via the British Psychological Society’s Digest Blog.)

It happened to ginger ale, licorice and the Beach Boys. Now the humble scone is prepared to sacrifice its essential self to pander to Milquetoast tastes (and just in time for its “500th anniversary in the UK”).

A new line of scones launched by a Scottish company has been formulated to taste “more buttery.” It’s a response to “growing consumer demand for scones without the product’s well-known bi-carb aftertaste.”

No aftertaste?

That’s not a scone. It’s a cookie.

Watching someone else getting an injection always makes me flinch, if only within (I’m not what you’d call expressive). That sense of inner recoil as the needle goes in is something so palpable—and yet so thin, so fleeting as to afterward seem merely imagined.

But we live in a time when the evanescent can be captured by equipment, and located with almost spooky precision. Now researchers have found that watching a needle prick someone else’s hand inhibits neurons connected to a specific corresponding spot on the witness’s hand, as they would if the witness were the one actually receiving the injection.

It’s as though our brain has specifically identified where the other person has been hurt and mapped this information onto our own mental body map. The finding adds to an emerging picture that suggests we empathize with other people’s pain by simulating their suffering in our own central nervous system….The amount of activity triggered in a participant’s hand muscle was reduced when they watched a video of someone being injected in that same hand region, but not when they watched a foot injection, a tomato being injected or a non-painful cue tip being used instead.

In such “mirror neuron” effects we find that the supposedly impenetrable line between self and other begins to break down. In fact, our very brains are sculpted by others, as Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn explains:

“When you learn something knew, it’s not your liver that changed, not your heart, it’s your brain—there have been new connections set up. When you learn about someone else, essentially part of your brain has changed, I mean it has to have otherwise you wouldn’t store it in memory.”

In a play that offers a fresh take on impossible relationships, a young man falls for a shark. It’s Jaws meets Trick in Rhode Island:

Is it love at first bite? Swimming in the Shallows treats its unusual infatuation as your everyday teen crush, all giddy apprehension and nervous fumbling. Clearly, a little man-shark love is no big deal in playwright Adam Bock’s sweetly absurdist view of life.

Now, isn’t this the very thing Jerry Falwell warned us about (but denied later)?

A librarian pedaled a mile and a half to her parents’ house, unaware of the bomb planted under her bicycle seat.

It’s the work of a man known as “Italy’s Unabomber,” says The Guardian.

It’s almost reassuring to know that Western Union, whose relentless TV commercials strain to make it seem natural that you should wire wads of cash to the hapless, maintains its legacy telegram business, albeit halfheartedly.

You can even send a telegram via their web site. (But where would you send it? To 1946, perhaps?) They do seem to understand that some people may need to be walked through the process, however:

1. What is a Telegram?

A message that is delivered to the receiver via a delivery service. It can be used for special occasions as a keepsake memento, or for normal, everyday communications.

If rock needs a consciousness movement, Ian Svenonius may be just the guy to lead the revolution.

“I feel like people who are in bands, it’s almost like they are people who work in a bomb factory who think they’re making pencils. They’re totally oblivious to their role in the culture. It’s because of all the misinformation, the fake history; they’re living out a fake narrative.”

Svenonius, “a sort of Baudrillard of rock,” sings for D.C. band Weird War—formerly the Scene Creamers, until losing a legal dispute to a group of French graffiti artists also called “Scene Creamers.” Clearly, what these folks are creating isn’t just music. If you’re fascinated by the ironic, post-ironic cultural mash-up that is today, Curtis McCrary’s Tuscon Weekly article is a must-read, if only to find out whether Alan Greenspan deserves to be called “the father of electroclash.”

Japan SAQ (Seldom Asked Questions) unravels that country’s everyday mysteries for bemused foreigners:

Q. Last summer I was looking around Tokyo for an apartment with my girlfriend. Outside one of the rental offices there was a placard advertising REALLY nice places for super cheap rent. Then my g.f. warned me that they were `bad luck` apartments. I looked and they all had the same apartment number. I can`t for the life of me remember what the number was. It was a three digit number like 691 or something. Anyway, she told me that it was Japanese police code for homicide…I THINK. Akin to Western apartments having a 666 or a 13th floor in an office building. Have you heard anything about this? I`ve since questioned other Japanese people about it. They`ve confirmed it but they can never remember the number.

A. The answer is 964. This is quite unlucky because 9 (ku) sounds like “suffering” (kurushimu), 96 (kuro) sounds like “troubles” kuro-suru, and 4 (shi) sounds like death (shinu).

(Via Marginal Revolution)

Even in the face of terror, some people manage to find creative ways to cope. Case in point: Scarlett Littlemore of London, who added this item to her 43 Things list:

      Survive an Al-Qaeda attack right by my home

(Authorities are still trying to sort out who’s responsible for the London bombings, according to the New York Times.)

That harrowing item comes in at only No. 10 on this plucky young Londoner’s list of goals. No. 1 is to “get a tophat for free before I’m 16.” How wonderful it would be if both dreams came true.

Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood is leaving Berlin, for who knows where. She dressed the Sex Pistols in the ’70s, and in 1984 she said something that would make a sassy epitaph for this queen of punk:

“Sometimes you need to transport your idea to a world that doesn’t exist and then populate it with fantastic-looking people.”

Know where she should move? My Imaginary Tokyo. It’s a mesmerizing place where all streets and sidewalks are replaced by gleaming black terazzo floors with glowing rays of Art Deco metal spokes that converge in the city’s absolute center, where a wickedly futuristic castle of silent dark glass holds icy court.

It’s a dream I had. You, too?

Actually, while tracing that quote, I found that it was associated with a particular Westwood collection, one that included “Day-Glo patches inspired by Tokyo’s neon signs.” The name of the collection, however, was Clint Eastwood, and it “hankered after the wide-open spaces in western films,” according to the New York Times. She sounds considerably less enchanted with the U.S. of today:

“The world has become so Americanized that people look uglier than before. The more you consume, the less you think. People should buy less,” she said.

Related:
Momus asks: Why doesn’t the world’s richest nation have the world’s richest texture?