Freyburg

Ah, Pirate Bay, your insolence never fails to both amuse and inspire me. The latest salvo across the bow from the people who tried to buy Sealand is a site called Oscartorrents.com, which aims to compile torrents of every movie nominated for an Academy Award this year. I suspect this site won’t be around for long, but it’s a nice big stick in the eye to the motion picture industry.

The United States, bogged down as it is in Iraq, can’t (or at least, won’t) face off with Iran militarily. But they will conduct what amounts to a second cold war with the closest thing to a superpower in the Middle East.

Yahoo introduced (and were promptly swamped into dysfunction by) their new “Pipes” service yesterday. Near as I can tell, the idea behind Pipes is to take RSS feeds, tags and the like and mash them together in new and interesting ways. The most popular one so far is a pipe that takes keywords from the New York Times and matches them with Flickr, giving you a sorta-kinda real time picture gallery of whatever is making headlines.

Projects like this have been attempted before, such as mashing together Google Maps and Craigslist into the ultimate apartment finder. But what Pipes promises is the ability to create these mashups without having to muck around vith various APIs and other such voodoo. Tim O’Reilly, something of a seer on these matters, explains the significance of Yahoo Pipes on his blog.

Cintra Wilson is one of my favorite pop culture writers. She has an acidic tongue and a fascination/repulsion for the twisted zoo that is Hollywood that expresses itself in gloriously wordy bile. “A Massive Swelling,” her first book, is one of the funniest (and meanest) takedowns of our celebrity-obsessed culture I’ve ever read, and her novel “Colors Insulting to Nature” ain’t bad either. So I was glad to see she’s ranting fairly regularly on her blog, the Dregulator. Bathe in her snarky wit, and marvel at how prosaic contempt can be.

Not that this comes as a shock to anyone, but the once vaunted Sundance film festival, originally created as an alternative to Hollywood’s commerical grist mill, has slouched towards corporate whoredom of late. Celebrities, gift bags, and safe but cheap movies are the rule, as are exclusive parties and other such claptrap. In the age of Youtube and digital film making, I question the relevance of Sundance and other festivals, but when it’s essentially a trade show for the cheap stuff, Hollywood would be dumb not to co-opt it.

The second half of our Tom Baker retrospective clocks in at over an hour and a bit of jaunty ramblings about The Scarf’s (like how I invented that new nickname for him? Clever….) further adventures in the Vortex. It took a little Garageband noodlng to get this epic tome onto the Internets, but anything for you, dear listeners. (feed, web, direct download)

It should come as no surprise to anyone that funds destined to reconstruct Iraq somehow got diverted into the pockets of unscrupulous Americans and Iraqis. The Guardian lays out the details of one of the biggest financial scandals of all time.

So last month I snagged freyburg.tv, mostly to keep some link-farmer from getting it before I did, but also out of some half-formed wish to get more video on this site. Myself and Cam have been throwing various ideas back and forth, but I think that having a section of the site devoted to both my own video projects and other stuff from around the web is the way to go. My new Mac comes with a iSight camera built in, so I’m thinking about putting together a “best of” video podcast twice a week highlighting some of the zanier stuff I’ve spotted and posted about, complete with my usual caustic wit. And of course I want to have an outlet for documentary work, short films and the like. I’d also like somewhere other than the main page to compile all the Radio Free Skaro links, along with any other podcasts I eventually end up doing.

But I’m already a busy guy, what with one full time job and another part time gig, and a raft of other stuff on the go, so I also think the new section/site will highlight some of the best/weirdest/most intriguing video I run across while surfing. It’s pretty clear that video is the new blog (heh), so I’d like to make it easy for my readers to check out what’s out there without clogging up the main site.

Any thoughts, people? We’re still probably a couple of weeks away from anything besides the static being on freyburg.tv, but any input is appreciated. And if you have your own video projects (or podcasts), there’s no reason I can’t link to those too.

Just when you think the world can’t possibly get any weirder, an astronaut love triangle almost ends in murder. This is the kind of plot drunken screenwriters would cobble together to out-stupid each other. Except that it’s all true.

Enough with the blog politics, what the world needs badly is more really terrible Star Wars costumes. Beckstar is on the case.