Facebook on the Radio, Swedish Hip Hop, and Fighting over Fighting over Fallujah

A Tuesday morning’s random harvest:

• Facebook ups its Washington profile (hah!) and the Kojo Nnamdi show takes notice, with Kojo bringing public policy director Tim Sparapani in for a stern grilling about the company’s spreading tentacles. Live today at noon Eastern, archived later. My prediction: Adam Conner is revealed to be a robot infiltration unit, not that anyone would notice.
• Next, if you didn’t catch Swedish jazz/hip hop band Movits! on The Colbert Report last night, you missed out — but not for long, since I embedded the clip below. Hey mom, remember when we were talking about the lack of oomph in the contemporary jazz you’ve been hearing on the internet radio? It’s because actual jazz creativity takes a lot of different directions these days, like this one — particularly when you can’t understand the words, you can really hear the vocals as a verbal riff. Hmmm, dig on the clip some for now, but let’s think on this more later.
• Finally, are video games a valid means of exploring the reality of battle? Some relatives of soldiers killed in action in Iraq are opposing the release of a new game that simulates the experience of being a Marine in 2004’s Second Battle of Fallujah, down to the kind of split-second decisions that mean life and death in battle: for you, for an enemy or for a civilian caught in between. Because of their immersive nature, video games have a unique power to draw people in — like a movie but one that you control, and often for much longer block of time than you would devote to watching any film. What makes them any less valid an expressive medium than books, recorded music or a website? Only the word “games,” and that’s just semantics.

But for now, back to Swedish jazz/hip hop. Enjoy — and crank up the bass to catch the sound of the stand-up.

– cpd