• To be celebrated this weekend: one hundred years of Volunteer Park.
• Paul Constant attends an “American Idol for Startups.” He finds a bunch of hopeful entrepreneurs showing off gimmicky little smartphone apps based on “tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality,” and promoted using jargon “as tepid and lifeless and dumb as any language that ever existed.”
• Now that all companies, nonprofits, and individuals in the western world have been exhorted to revamp their entire existences around the Web, they’re about to be exhorted to forget all that and re-revamp their entire existences around “mobile media.”
• We knew it was coming (it’s in the way of Amazon’s TriTowers HQ project), but it’s still sad to see the King Cat Theater closed for good.
• The “24 hour news cycle” is sooooo day-before-yesterday. But it does make for a lot of fun reporting mistakes.
• Meet this election’s top right wing attack groups (or at least as much about them as has been uncovered to date, which isn’t much).
• A Portland motivational blogger meets one of the original computing pioneers, and gets, well, motivated.
• Media reports about Olympic champion Gabby Douglas have been loaded with racial dog-whistle jargon.
• A self-professed “skeptic” and “rationalist” claims to be more skeptical and rational than other self-professed “skeptics” and “rationalists”:

Let’s admit it, skepticism does have a way to make us feel intellectually superior to others. They are the ones believing in absurd notions like UFOs, ghosts, and the like! We are on the side of science and reason. Except when we aren’t, which ought to at least give us pause and enroll in the nearest hubris-reducing ten-step program.