Every picture tells a story. The tale here is: “Oops.” Focus was supposed to be on the lamppost. I salvaged the image because the house is clear as viewed through the glass. The “House Behind” is […]
Virgin Mobile ‘Crazy Life’
[vimeo https://vimeo.com/43487168] I simply lo-o-o-o-ve the Virgin Mobile “Crazy Life” marketing campaign. The commercials are energetic, provocative and true! When your life is your mobile you don’t have a life. Take my iPhone 4 […]
The Imperfectly-Priced Perfect Butt Boyfriend Sweatpants
Have you ever heard of a “test” store? I hadn’t until yesterday (Aug. 25, 2010). Abercrombie & Fitch supposedly has one in downtown San Diego. Shopping there meant spending 20 percent more on a pair of sweatpants for my daughter than at another store a few miles away.
The Case for Curating Comments
Five days ago, I quietly turned on commenting two months after turning it off. Comments are temporarily back at my personal website. Perhaps this second stage of experimentation will lead to my making comments a permanent fixture or instead giving John Gruber the apology I promised should the commenting feature be permanently removed. I’m still wondering if John’s approach might be right.
Before my mid-June post “Be a Man, John Gruber,” his blog had no commenting system, while mine offered Disqus. I insisted that “his no-comments approach is out of place in an era when so many Websites or services provide discussion tools and encourage readers/viewers to use them.” There was much more to the reasoning. Read the post to get it all.
Mundo Secreto
[vimeo https://vimeo.com/2006845]
Americans really are musically deprived. Even I’ll admit that Katy Perry’s smash hit “California Gurls” is a catchy tune, but there’s better music pretty much everywhere else. We just don’t get to hear it much. Mundo Secreto’s “PÕE A MÃO NO AR” is one example. I discovered the song while watching music videos on the now, sadly defunct International Music Feed. I loved the video channel and chose my cable/IPTV provider based on IMF’s availablity.
Les Voisines
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-L4jPVoNAE] While browsing hats at the local Urban Outfitters last week, I Shazamed a French song playing over the store speakers. Shazam is among my three most-used smartphone applications—to discover music everywhere. If […]
Darwin Was Wrong
Somebody at the BBC sure knows how to write a story lead: “Charles Darwin may have been wrong when he argued that competition was the major driving force of evolution.” Say what? I always believed Darwin was wrong—not that I’ll here pitch for Creationism. Darwin being wrong doesn’t make his major opponents right.
My Pitch for a Truly Gruesome Vampire Story
This week I got PR email about new “True Blood” comics, and I received Rolling Stone issue 1112 with cast members from the HBO series on the cover. Suddenly, an idea came to me for a different, modern vampire drama. Here is the plotline of the story I’d tell:
Google Brain
In an interview published today in the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt lays out the next stage in his company’s ambitious plan to replace human agency with automated data processing, freeing us all […]
Le Soleil and Me
My cousin Dan emailed several old photos he recently obtained while vacationing in Maine. That’s me, probably age 11, but only a guess. The newspaper’s date isn’t visible. I don’t recall the photo or its taking but the shot must have been posed by either my father or uncle. I don’t read French. (Le Soleil was published out of Quebec City. This evening, a quick Web search left me wondering if the newspaper still exists.)
‘The China Question’ Revisited
In March 2009, I asked “The China Question,” highlighting shocking parallels between the 1920s and `00s (the “Noughties”). Both decades similarly started off and ended, with boom and bust. Other parallels show how quickly an empire collapses—the Brits during early last century and quite possibly the yanks during this decade.
I resurface the post in context of incessant chatter about China’s increasing global economic dominance and America’s growing mountain of debt. Additionally, the United States is close to entering a double-dip recession, if it’s not there already. Recent economic indicators are disconcerting. China has largely exited the global recession fairly unscathed, while the United States is an economy divided: Public companies are reporting record profits, while the American public struggles to relieve record debt.
Old Media Should Pay Up If It Wants to Tumblr
There goes the neighborhood. Big media is invading Tumblr. For weeks I had been meaning to blog about how old media might ruin Tumblr. I shouldn’t have waited. Monday’s New York Times story “Media Companies Try Getting Social With Tumblr” raises the topic without rightly razing it. How could Jenna Wortham’s story have been any different, since The Times is among the old media vanguard invading Tumblr. Jenna’s story positions the big media invasion as something good. I most certainly don’t agree, given Tumblr’s free-for-all embrace.