The Guardian has an interesting article about how the singles charts are almost completely irrelevant, so the fact Elvis just got his 1,0000 number one hit song is at best a mixed accomplishment. Bet the King didn’t see that one coming. Seeing as how he’s dead, and all. 🙂
This time it’s a cleric, who resigned as one of Iran’s theocratic vice-presidents in protest of his Parliament’s hard-line ways, and is blogging like a maniac in protest.
A lot of North American bloggers sometimes seem to have grasped the “dot.com revolution will change everything” bumph by the horns and channeled it towards the blog “movement”, if there is such a thing. That probably isn’t surprising, as I’d bet a lot of the A-List bloggers are dot.com refugees to begin with. But these Iranian dissenters appear to be the real deal.
I got my dad a copy of Delicious Library for Christmas. It’s a real cool program that lets you catalog your books, films, and whatever else by scanning its barcode. It goes out and gets all the data it needs from Amazon and elsewhere. Apparently the next version will be able to share libraries between friends, so my dad and I can browse each other’s libraries whenever we want.
Anyway, turns out the guys who built the program use a coffee shop in Seattle as an office. They pipe into the wireless Internet connection, suck down caffeine, and network with each other using Rendezvous.
I can see this becoming more and more prevalent as time goes on; if you’re some start-up of smart cats with laptops, why spend the money on rent when you don’t have to? Of course, it all depends on what your business is selling; ephemeral computer data tends to lend itself to a virtual office more than, say, selling shoes.
In keeping with the half-assed musical theme that seems to be developing, here’s some bizarre album covers.
A singer named Nina Gordon has a great singing voice, a website, and an awesome, folky(!) cover of NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton.” GOLD!
The National Intelligence Council has put out a long but quite interesting study about how current trends in globalization, politics and growing economies will play out by 2020. The upshot of it all is that Asia is going to be kicking ass and taking names.
Of course, this is the same community that claimed the WMD in Iraq were a “slam dunk,” so take their prognosticating with a grain of salt.
Russell Smith is the Globe and Mail’s resident metrosexual and cultural commentator. His latest missive is about how much he hates going to the movie theatre, seeing as how he has to share space with the great unwashed and see sub-par Hollywood tripe. (It’s the first article in the list; Google gets it for free but going directly to the page hits a ‘subscription’ wall.)
While I’m forced to agree with him that the opening weekend movie experience sometimes ain’t all that, he bitches in such a godawful, pretentious, “I’m superior and did I mention I wrote a book about the Toronto art scene” way that you want to reach through the screen and strangle him by his immaculately knotted tie.
Part of the problem for me is that I love movies, and I love most of the movie going experience. Yeah, you can run into some real idiots, and the deluge of ads is a little ridiculous. But when things click, and you see a really good movie like Lord of the Rings on opening weekend, with a crowd that’s just as hyped as you are to see a glorious big screen spectacle, the movie theatre is almost magic. That’s something ol’ Russ will never get, not that he’d bother trying.
When I first went to Tokyo in late 2001, phone companies had just rolled out their advanced 3G cell phones, which could do nifty stuff like videoconferencing, sending movies back and forth, and other cool stuff. According tot he New York Times, North American mobile phone services are poised to introduce some 3G whizzbangery of their own soon.
Now, that’s the States. I’d be willing to bet Canada will see none of this stuff, as we tend to be about a year behind the US for phone innovations. Not that I really care; though I love gadgets, I only use my phone for phone calls, and it’d have to be pretty damned amazing for me to do otherwise. Still, the Treo 600 is a sweet little unit.
One of my new favorites in Blogistan is Bookslut, which is like a snarky version of the Globe and Mail’s book section, minus the tenured professors justifying their existence and plus a healthy respect for graphic novels. If you’re into them there printed boo-uuks, this is a good site to visit on a daily basis.
No WMD, eh? And you came to this conclusion after an election? What a surprise.