directorcommentary | jasonbentley.org

This is the last entry in my first blog, and I'll admit - it's harder to write than I expected. It's been hard to write lately, period. I write so much at work, too often my will to write any more is seriously tapped. I began directorcommentary at a time when I had a more time for verbose writing - and a time when I had a different concept of what a blog is. Now, any visitor to jasonbentley.org can see the streams of traffic from all my blogs, and my various other feeds. The need to write long entries with lots of links to cool stuff isn't there, when you can easily see what I bookmark. I've let directorcommentary lapse into dead air, and it deserves a better exit than neglectful dormancy.

But anyway, before you start the suicide watch, I'm only ending this blog so that I can begin anew. I've started a new blog for shorter written entries about what's going on in my life and career, which I'll announce as soon as I get the look and logistics pinned down. I'll archive the entirely of directorcommentary at a new address, and my other blogs (The Jasons Bentley, sundry glossolalia, etc) aren't going anywhere. The best way to keep up is at jasonbentley.org or by subscribing to my jaiku rss feed (http://jasonbentley/jaiku.com/feed/rss). I'll announce the new blog shortly, and thank all directorcommentary's readers for their loyalty and patience. Stay tuned to jasonbentley.org. :-)

722 posts.

...and cut. Print. That's a wrap.

I don't know about you, but I can't think of a more chilling, Stephen King-ian, dark-side-of-summer story than the little two-year-old witness to something horrible, found left alone in his ransacked house, who keeps repeating, like a mantra, "Mommy's in the rug...mommy's in the rug."

However, this is real, and events in this story are still unfolding.

Labels: disappearance, event, news

I started uploading all my old OLGA files to Scribd less than 24 hours ago. And...holy crap. First, some figures. These refer to total views of all documents that I've ever uploaded to Scribd:

The charts show it better:


And I'm not even half done! In other words...holy crap!

Labels: olga, scribd, statistics

So, there was a time when everyone I know was showing everyone else the "Shoes" video. I've stepped away from it for a while, but watched it again today with headphones, and nearly spewed soda when, for the first time, I actually heard Kelly's brother's response after she says, "I'm gonna betch slap, you, shetbag." He says, "No, I'm an athlete.

LOL.

Labels: kelly, liam sullivan, meme, omg shoes, shoes

Okay...WTF.

I had a surreal experience today. And I mean surreal. In my life, the surreal is fairly common, and this one tips the charts.

I stayed up in South City last night, and came back down this morning with Jodi, who dropped me off at the Mountain View Caltrain. I decided to do another check at the San Jose Caltrain lost and found to see if anybody had turned in my lost phone, so I bought a ticket to the Diridon station. The train arrived shortly afterward, and I boarded the first car - the one right behind the engine. I sat on the second tier, in the double seat just adjacent to the stairs.

I had just opened my laptop when I noticed a teenage boy - he looked maybe 16, 17 - looking straight at me from the other end of the car on the opposite side. His back was to me, but I could clearly see that his long shirt barely hid the fact that his pants were down. I met his gaze, and looked back to my laptop. That's when he proceeded to continue having sex with his girlfriend. Right there. I realized it was just me and them on the second tier, and he clearly knew I was there. They were quiet, but it was obvious what they were doing. I could see...things.

And in the time it took us to get from Mountain View to Santa Clara, he finished and the both of them walked past me along the opposite side. The girl never looked me in the eye, but the boy sure did.

We're such exhibitionists, aren't we?

But anyway, here's the *really* surreal part. As they leave, the boy is dropping little pink flyers on the train seats. When they get to the middle of the car, he reaches over, hands me one, smiles, and they're out. The flyer is an ad for Hikkup.com, a web site that - get this - lets you set anonymous messages to friends. But its in invite only beta.

Does a locomotive sex show and a pink flyer count as an invite? :-)

Wow.

Labels: bizarre, caltrain, exhibitionism, public_sex, sex, train, viral_marketing

RSS and OPML mostly remain a mystery to the masses. Sure, most media people are clued in now, but few get beyond clicking on the little orange box to subscribe to a feed in in their mail reader. I'm not going to go into a long Utopian rant about how RSS, XML, et al will change the world and how we relate to information... even though it is. Syndicated feeds, hyperfeeds really, are very powerful things. But so far, there hasn't been no carrier wave - no iPodesque catalyst to light the fire.

Grazr is a step in the right direction. Grazr is unique among OPML/RSS readers, and Grazr's default "slider" setting jettisons the mind-numbing newsreader format (and the underdefined Live Bookmark concept), in favor of a smooth, backward-and-forward glide through as many layers of feeds as necessary. There's in 'it' quality that Grazr brings to the syndication experience that's hard to define...but I'll try. I think the basic backward and forward slide effect adds a third dimension to the web of feeds and links that makes it more tangible - a bit like a book. Gah - that's the best I can do right now.

The effect isn't as noticable with run-of-the-mill news reading (Google Reader remains my favorite in that arena), as it is with more complex, syndicated data structures, like the Rhapsody online music service. Here's one of the root Rhapsody feeds (http://feeds.rhapsody.com/data.opml), first in Optimal, a PHP-based OPML viewer that's more traditionally hierarchical:



Pretty, but the limitations become clear pretty quickly. Now here's the same content in Grazr:



You can even switch to a more traditional "3-pane" view when its appropriate:


So why am I going on about all this? Well, this whole blog entry was basically the answer to why you want to drag one or more of these bookmarklets to your browser toolbar. I was getting frustrated that there was no Grazr subscription option in Firefox's default RSS style sheet, so I whipped these up to do the trick. If at any point you run into an RSS feel or the cryptic blank OPML page, just click Grazrize and voila, instant readability.

Each bookmarklet does the same thing, I just made different ones for a few of Grazr's style options.

Happy grazing. :-)

Grazrize (Noir)
Grazrize (Blanc)
Grazrize (Bleu)
Grazrize

Labels: browser, feeds, grazr, opml, reader, rss

Surprise o' the day: I'm now a featured director on the Flektor homepage! :-) I guess this would be a good time to congratulate the Flektor guys on their reported $10-20 million acquisition by Fox/MySpace. Glad I could help. :-) Need a committed technology evangelist and community facilitator? I'm available. :-)

No, seriously. I'm available.

Labels: flektor, kudos, myspace

If a Google Simple search bar plug-in wasn't geeky enough, I've also put together a style sheet that makes the results a bit prettier (and removes the page-wide input box that's sorta redundant if you're already using a search box anyway.

http://jasonbentley.org/css/googlesimple.css

Labels: css, google, results

For the "Well, if I wanted it, someone else might file:"




I created a Firefox searchbox plugin called "Google Simple," which uses a Google API interface that displays simplified query results in lists of hyperlinked titles only: no description, cache links, green url, nada. Just the title. It's not a hack or a transformation. Google provides the feature so that results can be integrated into a sidebar (like SeaMonkey), but I find it helpful as a general option when I want a title without wading through descriptions, or when my search necessitates visual pattern matching, or whenever when I want a simple, quick, clean experience.

If you're using Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7 (or something newer), you can install the Google Simple search plugin it by visiting my homepage (http://jasonbentley.org). Your search box should automatically detect the plugin.



The search box displays results in list of 100 with SafeSearch turned off.

Labels: google search box mozilla plug-in opensearch engine google_simple

So my friends can roll their eyes and tune out now - for this is an unsolicited open letter to the peeps down at CNN. Now, as all y'all know, I watch a goodly amount of the cable news outlet, and I've been a steady watcher since my mom first ordered cable back in - gack! - 1983. Anyway, this all, naturally, nore than qualifies me to weigh in on staffing decisions at the Time Warner subsidiary, so you bitches best put on your mouseears and listen up. :-)

Please, please do something with Paula Zahn and give Kyra Phillips the slot now occupied by the often ludicrous Paula Zahn Now. You an even keep the sensationalist "Out In The Open" motif. But Kyra Phillips, during her week as anchor during Zahn's vacation, was more charismatic and likable than Zahn - with those damn fluttering eyelids - has ever been. Phillips was all business when it was appropriate, moderated the discussions with ease, asked interesting questions, and rightfully couldn't keep a straight face during red-meat segments like "Is There a Secret Indoor Pot Farm In Your Neighborhood?"

And move her to New York. She looked so luminous under the New York studio lights, I couldn't take my eyes off her. And no fluttering eyelids. :-)

Labels: cnn, kyra_phillips, paula_zahn

This evening I find myself in the odd situation whereby two of my self-published documents at Scribd are burning up the day's chart, hovering neck-and-neck at 2 and 3, trailing way behind Xenu at #1 but kicking the United States Constitution's ass rather nicely. Which is the ultimate irony, since as an American, the Constitution's precisely what gives me (and Hubbard's minions) the right to write, publish, and speak who we are.

And I think to myself, what a wonderful shotgun shack. :-)

Labels: charts, document publishing, documents, scribd, stats

That's just awesome. No, not the silly pot ad, but the embedded viewer from Scribd (www.scribd.com), a free web service from a couple of YAPOGS* that's positioning itself as a YouTube for documents. I think Scribd has a lot of potential.

In a nutshell, Scribd will host your documents for free, and you can choose whether to make them public or keep them private. You can upload in just about any major format (including cut/paste), and Scribd will automatically OCR the text. Within minutes, Scribed publishes the document available a downloadable PDF, the cool embeddable FlashPaper PDF, a Word doc, plain text, and (get this) an mp3 of the text of your document as read by a satisfyingly futuristic computerized female voice, complete with an authoritative English accent straight out of the Sci-Fi channel.

Listen as she reads what you're reading:

Scribd makes it very easy to bulk-upload many documents at once and attach tags, descriptions, and friendly titles. There's also some very well-implemented maps and tables that detail basic stats, traffic analytics, and document attributes that're available on each document's unique homepage.



Scribd's community aspect is still forming, and, like YouTube's more freewheeling early months, there's a healthy dose of blatant copyright violation. But there's also some compelling content mixed in with the odd personal tidbits, the inevitable furry art, various 9/11 conspiracy 'reports', slapdash amateur 'how-to' guides and the persistent oeuvre of Cory Doctorow. Anyone who's ever taken a passing glance an an e-book Usenet newsgroup will recognize a lot of stuff.

I wonder if Lawrence Lessig's seen this. Moreover, I wonder if Google's seen this.




*YAPOGS (abbr.) Yet Another Pair of Geeks from Stanford

Labels: cool, document publishing, doument hosting, scribd, web 2.0, web service

This is a word frequency analysis of all listed Craigslist personals for the North Bay, South Bay, East Bay, Peninsula, and San Francisco at approx midnight on March 14, 2007. I removed the automated city notation, age declaration, and anonymous email address and ran the word on exclusively on the title and body text. —jasonbentley

Labels: craigslist analysis word_frequency gay personals personal_ads swivel.com craigslist

My Canadian friends will certainly sip their Molsons and roll their eyes politely at my sudden enlightenment to a compelling piece of their history, but I'll admit, in my 32 years I'd never heard of the Halifax Explosion of 6 December 1917. Not once, never. No teacher ever mentioned it - I would have remembered. My brain always latches on vividly to stories of great disasters, and this was one of the most terrible disasters to befall a western city - ever. It was a terrible bookend to the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 - but Halifax was a city destroyed by fire instead of water and wind.

Briefly, here's what happened:

At the height of World War I, Halifax, Nova Scotia is one of the busiest, economically booming ports on the Atlantic Seaboard. Port regulations are few and relegated to an honor system, even though this was five years after the Titanic disaster. The laissez-faire approach to traffic management led to a collision between two ships. One of these ships was a Royal Navy munitions transport vessel, filled to capacity with the most lethal explosives available at the time. To avoid any detection by German ships, the munitions ship gave no outward evidence of its cargo.

The munitions ship caught fire, and hundreds of people from Halifax and the surrounding towns and settlements ringed the harbor to watch the burning ship. Only a handful of people knew what was on the ship, and though many tried to warn the spectators, it was to little avail.

Without warning, the ship exploded with unimaginable force, shattering its steel hull into thousands of pieces and wiping much of Halifax, Dartmouth, and the surrounding communities literally off the map. It is estimated nearly 1,000 people died instantly from the force of the blast - still the largest non-nuclear man-made explosion known in human history. Entire families were wiped out in an instant. The blast itself was 1/2 mile in diameter. The explosion was heard and felt up to 200 miles away.

Much of the damange came from flying glass, blinding those spared in the blast. The force of the explosion was so great that it sent a tsunami wave out across the harbor, inundating much of the blast area in several feet of freezing water. The next day, the entire area was hit with a blizzard. Eventually, nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the Halifax Explosion. And have you ever heard of it?

There's much more to the story, and I'll spare you my recount in favor of far superior ones at the CBC and the Wikipedia. But an interesting side-note - this is why I love the associative nature of the web. I came upon this story like so:

Looking for some advanced RSS readers, I try out Amphetadesk, which is bundled with a huge opml file of feeds. One of these feeds had a link to a website that is assembling a directory of bloggers along with their years of birth, in the hopes of painting a picture of the Internet as an age-diverse place. Looking up their oldest members, I found the blog of 94-year-old Donald Crowdis, one of the world's oldest known bloggers and - the Wikipedia says - one of the few remining survivors of, yep, the Halifax Explosion of 1917.

.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_explosion

http://www.cbc.ca/halifaxexplosion/index.html

Labels: halifax_explosion halifax

Swivel.com lets you make cool graphs from any data that you upload. Not to let technology stand in the way of personal vanity, here's how my Google Videos are doing :-)

Labels: google_video, graph, swivel.com

Okay, when I start getting error messages like this one, I begin thinking that Yahoo Pipes and I have started to form a relationship that may or may not be too healthy. Jury's still out. One thing's for certain, we know how to push each others' buttons. :-)

Labels: dysfunction, error message, yahoo pipes

The BBC has run a lengthy article on the decline of Detroit (my hometown), and for me, it's just so *sad.* I was a little boy when the oil crisis hit, starting the Big 3 on the inexorable path to obscurity, so I'd never known a time when Detroit was the Silicon Valley of its day, just as I've never known what it means to respect a President in the pre-Watergate sense.

The dot-com bubble's burst in 2000-2001 was a shocking blow, but recovery here has been steady and relatively swift. Detroit has been limping and wheezing in a slow torturous death for decades, and one wonders what that does to a population that's already disillusioned, disaffected, without promise or hope.

While I'm not surprised that my family didn't see it coming (hindsight being what it is), but what does amaze me is how vehemently they argued against my leaving the area, and lobbied for me to return in 2003.

This could be Silicon Valley in 40 years or less.

Labels: article, bbc, decline, detroit, michigan, news, urban

I'm not easily offended. Annoyed, sure. Pissed off, definately. But offended? Nah. I can contextualize most opinions and points of view that I don't necessarily agree with.

But this... this is offensive. Deeply offensive. Jawdroppingly offensive. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, have moved beyond their cartoonish "God Hates Fags" campaign and have begun picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. And now this: a television ad called "Thank God for IED's."

It's unclear if it's been aired. One thing's for certain: it's revolting. As such, everyone should see it. This is the logical conclusion of religious fundamentalism in America.

Labels: advertisement, fred phelps, fundamentalism, tv

As you already know, Anna Nicole Smith died today. The Trimspa website has been replaced with this block of text:

Whippany, NJ, February 8, 2007 – Today, Anna Nicole Smith’s grief stricken and tumultuous personal life came to an end. Anna came to our Company as a customer, but she departs it as a friend. While life for Anna Nicole was not easy these past few months, she held dear her husband, Howard K. Stern, her daughter, Dannielynn Hope, her most cherished friends, beloved dogs, and finally, her work with TRIMSPA.

Anna knew both the joy of giving life, and the heartache of losing a child. We pray that she is granted the peace that eluded her more recent days on earth, and that she find comfort in the presence of her son, Daniel.

-- Alex Goen, CEO and Founder, TRIMSPA

Labels: anna_nicole_smith, trimspa

Labels: flash, lions, taco_bell

Labels: corporate identity, favicons, logo, logos, ransom note, silly

Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter) stars in a West End revival of Peter Shaffer's Equus. "Nude" publicity stills of Radcliffe are posted to the play's official website. The world reacts:

• Muggles the world over are shocked and wonder why nobody "thinks of the children(TM)".
  
• Wizards yawn and shrug at yet another Hogwart's alumni posing in nude photos with horses.
  
• Closeted teenage gay boys across the world begin several days of wistful pining.
• Closeted middle age married men on the downlow begin several days of not making eye contact with their teenaged sons.
  
• Furries seethe with jealousy.
  

It amazes me that there's still shock over a happy trail. Didn't we deal with this, like, back in the 1970's? It's David Cassidy on Rolling Stone all over again (no word, however, on whether Cassidy, a noted equestrian, also poses nude with horses). I mean, it's not like these are shots of Harry Potter in-character playing naked twister with the Weasley boys. Though that'd be kinda hot. Especially if the twins got in on it. The photographers seem to have gone out of their way to make Radcliffe look as un-Potteresque as possible.

How long d'you think before the world gets its first view of Hermione's boobs?

Oh, how funny, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom just issued an apology for having an affair with his campaign manager's wife. And where are the damn pictures of that?

And there begins another moist day in the Bay Area.

Links:
http://jasonbentley.org/blog/img/cassidy_leibovitz_rs.jpg
http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=1538
http://equustheplay.com

Labels: daniel radcliffe, equus, harry potter, nude, photos

Magnoto is a site that offers visually-rich AJAX web pages with limited functionality...you can't even add RSS feeds or widgets. But you can place rich-text notes (which support linking, etc), audio files, and video files. The cumulative effect is much like an Internet-accessible white board or refrigerator door, which is great for kids, but it's something I've little use for. I set up a page months ago to try it out and then promptly forgot about it.

So you can imagine my surprise when I went to the main Magnoto homepage today and saw a capture of the page I set up (with a link to it) right in the middle of the main page as example of notable sites. Well...sweet...but wouldn't ya know it? The one page I spent, like, zero thought on...is the one that gets the front-page-above-the-fold shoutout. I...oy.



Links:
http://magnoto.com
http://jasonbentley.magnoto.com

Labels: ajax, kudos, magnoto

Zelda on the blunted chill tip.



Sleek, sessy li'l playa courtesy of boomp3.com.

Labels: blunted, music, stony, zelda

After showing my cousin Matt the viral track I made ahead of the local furry convention, I had the heretofore unknown experience of explaining furries to a member of my family. I sent him some links. The following snippet ensued:

(16:30:46) me: furry is by 'n large about anthropromorphics
(16:32:41) me: and some of it's funny: [link redacted]
(16:32:48) me: (intentionally funny, that is)
(16:34:02) matt: i saw a lions taint, that was odd
(16:35:25) me: Uh, yeah...you'll see a lot of lion taints

*buries face in hands* What have I done? :-)

You can hear the track here:

Labels: chat, family, funny, furry, im, log, matt

Labels: link, video, zandrews

Omygod...wikis. Meet Ottowiki.com

This website is gay, but doesn't want to say it overtly. I bet if Ottowiki could talk, it'd say it has never seen a single episode of "Will and Grace" and that it 'doesn't like labels' and considers itself 'spiritual, but not religious.' This site has a CD of Tori b-sides that 'a certain person' made for it a long time ago that you can neither listen to nor borrow cuz while the songs are available, the particular track order is too meaningul to share. Ottowiki drives a Jetta, has a Kelly Clarkson "Since U Been Gone" AIM buddy icon, and a framed lobby poster of Kenneth Branagh's "Much Ado About Nothing" on it's cube wall. Ottowiki would secretly love to do Sergey Brin. Ottowiki is seriously easy.



Link: http://ottowiki.com

From a LiveJournal found behind a random link:

Needless to say, this April incident was one of the hardest things for me to get over, ever, and I've never been so mad in my life. I'll never let any of my females be around daddy without me being there. Scott said April had called and talked to him that night telling him that she was "lonely and scared." I knew April and daddy were about the two biggest sluts in history of mankind, but I still can't believe either would stoop so low as to do this. That was one of the sorriest things a dad or a girlfriend could ever possibly do. And it's been seven years ago, to the month.

You can read the rest of the story here.

Link: http://retrowens.livejournal.com/53729.html

Labels: alabama, blog, scary

Lately, I've been using RocketDock, a free Windows clone of the Apple OSX dock for frequently used/minimized programs. I like it, except some applications still use low-res icons that look just fine at 16x16, but then get all pixellated when zoomed in close. One such icon is for CNN Pipeline, so I've created a large-format icon for it that looks decent under scrutiny.

I've made the icon available here just in case anybody's Googling for that sort of thing. :-)

Download the CNN Icon (png format)

Link: http://jasonbentley.org/img/ico/cnn01.png

Labels: cnn, cnn pipeline, dock, icon, rocketdock

I've decided to use the word "pornão" to refer specifically to the particularly hot brand of Brazilian stud porn that's all over the major free 'amateur' porn sites. I think the line between amateur and professional porn is blurring. Oh, and I've decided I like pronouncing Xtube as "Zhtoobé." You know, like Xuxia or Xeni Jardin. Xtube sounds like some retro future Stan Lee-invented transit system. And those poor bastards in the old new wave band the Tubes. They'll hafta live with being ex-Tubes for the rest of their lives. :-)

Ya know, now that I think of it, the Tubes appeared in a performance cameo in...wait for it... "Xanadu," Olivia Netwon-John's post-Grease, pre-Physical musical extravaganza that brought together Disco, Greek Mythology, 1980's Los Angeles, Gene Kelly on roller skates, weird hair, interdimensional/time travel, father-daugher relationships, animation, and the Electric Light Orchestra. The Tubes were featured in a sequence where Gene Kelly and his young protege describe their seemingly opposite visions for what kind of far-out roller-disco night club Xanadu would become. The protege, Sonny Malone (I'm not making this up), envisions...well, the 80's (he even says it..."hey, c'mon...this is the 80's!") where slithery dancers gyrate to the Tubes' synth brimstone.

Gene Kelly, of an earlier generation, does not endear to the idea and he describes his vision of a big Glenn Miller-style swing band fronted by an Andrews Sistersesque trio, whose featured singer is the ghostly sepia image of the girl Gene left band during the War...you know... the good one. The singer is played by Olivia Newton-John, who also plays the spacey hippy girl that Sonny is "dating." Is she...the same woman? No! Because she's not a woman. She's a muse. Who lives with her father, Zeus, who - with preemptive apologies to the peoples of the Book - is still God in this universe, thank you very much. And this God argues with his wife and has roughly the same dysfunctional relationship with his daughter that his brother Triton has with that Little Mermaid of his.

As Gene Kelly and Sonny Malone describe their visions of Xanadu, we see their delirious hallucinations made manfiest. It looks as though the screechy coked up New Wavers might never sit under the apple tree with the boozier swingin' homefront. But then, at the zenith of their reverie, young and old realize that, hey, music's music, where by the Tubes and the big band magically meld into the same song and performance to form - voila - the first onscreen mashup. If the Tubes, Olivia Newton-John, and Gene Kelly could bridge hedonistic ideals of 80's Los Angeles and the retro wholesomness of the new Reagan reality - maybe there will be peace in our time after all. All thanks to Zeus.

This moment of movie magic has even inspired live stage recreations.


Video link: http://www.youtube.com/v/bhAmHMHb0mc

Thanks to YouTube, Xanadu's, neon lights will shine. Mash 'em up, you get Xtube. Circle of life, Hakuna Matata, Tuesday's Wednesday. ;-) All together now... shake-a shake-a shake, tap-tap-clap-CLAP, left, right, "Xanadu!"


Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B7GUjlY-5Q

Labels: brazilian, gene kelly, mashup, movies, new wave, olivia newton-john, porn, tubes, xanadu, xtube

Labels: 80's, fair oaks, location, michael j. fox, movies, sunnyvale, teen wolf, wolfe

Either that or my friend raverlion isn't telling me something.

Labels: amateur, friends, porn

I had an interesting experience this New Years. I went up to Gary and Robey's in San Francisco, cuz I wanted to go somewhere. I'd felt pretty isolated since Christmas.

Yeah, I had a crappy Christmas. I'd made plans I looked forward to on Christmas Eve/Day , and they were pulled out from underneath at the last minute. By the time I joined the rest of the group late in the afternoon on Christmas day, I felt like an afterthought. When I realized that I'd spent way too much money I shouldn't have on gifts and didn't receive even a thoughtless trifle, I felt even less than that. I know yer not supposed to say shallow things like that, but goddammit, there it is. I put too much weight on the little things that feel important to me in relationships, I want to feel that the closest relationships aren't entirely transactional. Then I remember that close is relative, and given that, the free-spiritedness that I felt grateful to be a part of feels less welcoming as it reveals itself as a desperate fight against the ticking clock. Why don't I act with an unpredictable hedonistic selfishness befitting a permanent, socially-reinforced midlife crisis? Oh wait, I do. Then why does your arrested development look more fun than mine?

Christ, I sound bitter. No wonder I haven't been blogging.

New Years made up for it, and as always, it's the small moments that made the night feel good. At one point I was uploading video from my camera to my laptop, and turned on CNN Pipeline to see some fireworks. A party guest came up and asked what I was doing, and I told him that I was watching multiple streams of New Years celebrations around the world. Then I'd a sense of deja vu strong enough that I stopped talking. The guest looked at me, and I had to apologize. I explained to him that I suddenly realized that I was doing what the girl in the "future" segment of the Carousel of Progress was doing all those years that I went to Walt Disney World growing up...that is, surfing the NYE celebrations around the world. I said that it was a neat full-circle kinda thing, and the guy looked at me funny and went back to playing something on the Wii.

Trust me, in my head, the moment was very cool indeed.

Labels: bitter, carousel of progress, friends, new year, whine

Um, Google, this isn't a f****** error message. I gotta call this one pathetic.

Labels: error message, google, google docs and spreadsheets, lame

Nothing says "without dignity" quite like this story from the Gilroy (California) Dispatch:

A small airplane crashed into the city wastewater treatment plant Monday afternoon, apparently killing all on board.

Pieces of the two-seater plane were scattered along cement platforms adjacent to treatment ponds, while the main fuselage was submerged under roughly 20 feet of wastewater. There were no signs of survivors.

Crews began draining the ponds Monday evening to recover victims, a process expected to take up to 15 hours.

Labels: cats, del.icio.us, meme

There's something oddly brilliant about this video. From the Indian-Canadian valley girl to the kid with the righteous hair who seems to be on Planet Crispin Glover. I think they got some good smokums up there. This shouldn't be funny, but it is.

My favo(u)rite lines:

"Yeah, we're in Ontario."

"Sir, it takes 24 hours to process food poisoning."

Labels: canada canadian funny video mcdonalds

I am n ur base
writin a haiku about
a meme! LOL!

Labels: haiku, meme

The web is weird today.

The Age.com in Austrailia is saying that Google Maps may have killed James Kim. CNN.com is being snarky on other matters:


My friend Chris Garcia posts pictures that indicate he's reached new, Seacrest-ian levels of metrosexuality (with a girl a girl who looks oddly like Kelly Clarkson)...



Someone get these adorable kids a makeover reality show to host. :-)

And lastly, I checked out Musestorm, one of the recent glut of widgets-for-your-myspace framework upstarts. First I see that - coolness! - they've widgetized a search of Google's underpromoted definitions capability. Then it gives me my embeddable widget and...

Ooooh, Detnifion?!! Must be a new stealth beta. :-)

And it's not even noon!

Labels: funny, web, widget

Michel Gondry makes the most simply innovative music videos out there right now, including this one:



and especially this one:



Here's how he made them

Labels: chemical_brothers, michel_gondry, video, videos, white_stripes

Okay, take a quick listen to this or any random episode of The Web Hosting Show's podcasts and tell me if host/web vivant Mitch Keeler isn't the vocal doppelganger of Mr. Garrison on South Park.

Here's some live video from the EvilAlien Clandestine party last night. HEADS UP! CLIPS ARE LOUD! I took a bunch of still photos too.

I don't know why I find this screen cap funny, but I do. It has nothing to do with the user...more the particular wording and its isolation amongst the misspellings and white space on xtube.

Fry's is selling these teeny-tiny 2 Gigabyte Lexar flash memory sticks for around $30. Sticker price is $79, it's marked down to $54, and there's a $20something rebate.

Jerry and I were geeking out while listening to the most recent Morning Becomes Eclectic podcast from KCRW last night, which featured a performance by Jim James and Carl Broeml of My Morning Jacket, a band I like a lot. Maybe it was the lack of cavernous echo in the intimate Santa Monica studio, but Jim James sounded so much like Kermit the Frog during the performance that neither Jerry nor I could take it seriously and we had to shut it off.

I also imagined Grandaddy as a band of nonspecific, sullen Muppets. But not so much that I expected spoken bon mots de l'amour to Miss Piggy at the end of the song. :-)

Listen: http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/mb/

Holy klep!

"Eric Kleptone," one (or possibly all) of the members of remix/mashup dieties The Kleptones, will be speaking on the subject of remixing, mashups, and copyright law at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, which starts November 7. On the conference website, there's a detailed speaker's bio with some juicy tidbits about upcoming Kleptones projects and releases:

The band entered 2005 by releasing "From Detroit To J.A.," an album-length mix created for James Hyman's "The Rinse" show on XFM in London. Soon after this it was announced they were to be awarded the 2005 Webby Award as "Artists Of The Year" by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), who declared the band to have "achieved new critical heights" and to be "true internet renegades."

For the rest of 2005 the band were quiet, whilst working on new material in their studio in Brighton, England. It took till March 2006 for them to break their silence with a series of online EPs heralding the arrival of their next release -- the double album "24 Hours," their most ambitious release yet. Alongside this came the announcement that the band were to produce the soundtrack for the Creative Commons licenced feature film project A Swarm Of Angels, due for release in 2007.

...Their long-threatened move into the live arena looks set to happen soon...

You can read the entire bio here. And wouldn't ya know it, the damn con's sold out. Anybody know where I can snag a pass? :-)

Link: http://web2con.com/

If you think about it, there are a lot of ways to write song lyrics. There's the straightforward narrative, the confessional, the screed, the boast, the joke, the deceptively dumb joke, the list. Artists with longevity eventually try them all, and the best invent new ones. My approach is squarely with practitioners of...hmm...I guess I'll call it "oblique evocation." Our lyrics rarely address a subject directly, rather we prefer to conjure a sense of a mood or a story through syntax driven by suggestion, tone, and especially phonics. These are songs that some people look at and say "what the hell does this mean?"

Naturally, some of my favorite songs are written this way, and I was reminded this morning of how integral the lyrics are to the success of the song. I heard the following two songs back to back this morning thanks to Pandora's Quick Mix feature, and after looking up the lyrics, I decided to post them here. If you've never heard one or either song, look 'em up. They're awesome.

"Letter From An Occupant"
The New Pornographers

I'm told the eventual downfall
is just a bill from the restaurant.
You told me I could order the moon, babe,
just as long as I shoot what I want.

What the last ten minutes have taught me:
bet the hand that your money's on.
Where the hell have the '70s brought me?
You trade me away long gone.

For the love of a god, you say,
not a letter from an occupant.

The time that your enemy gives you,
good times are not the ones you want.
I cried five rivers on the way here,
which one will you skate away on?

The tune you'll be humming forever,
all the words are replaced and wrong,
with a shower of yeahs and whatevers,
you trade me away long gone.

For the love of a god, you said,
not a letter from an occupant.

Where have all sensations gone?
Where have all sensations gone?
Where have all sensations gone?
Where have all sensations gone?

The song is shaking me.

And...

"Surf's Up"
The Beach Boys (lyrics by Van Dyke Parks)

A diamond necklace played the pawn
Hand in hand some drummed along, oh
To a handsome man and baton
A blind class aristocracy
Back through the op'ra glass you see
The pit and the pendulum drawn
Columnated ruins domino

Canvass the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping?

Hung velvet overtaken me
Dim chandelier awaken me
To a song dissolved in the dawn
The music hall a costly bow
The music all is lost for now
To a muted trumperter swan
Columnated ruins domino

Canvass the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping, Brother John?

Dove nested towers the hour was
Strike the street quicksilver moon
Carriage across the fog
Two-Step to lamplight cellar tune
The laughs come hard in Auld Lang Syne

The glass was raised, the fired rose
The fullness of the wine, the dim last toasting
While at port, adieu or die

A choke of grief hard hardened I
Beyond belief a broken man too tough to cry

Surf's Up
Aboard a tidal wave
Come about hard and join
The young and often spring you gave
I heard the word
Wonderful thing
A children's song

I'm writing this while sitting in a beanbag chair watching The Big Lebowski with Kevin in a faux-living room set up at the San Francisco Wonders of Cannabis Festival in Golden Gate Park. There's a sofa and plants and a some guy is rolling a Dutch joint to our right. I have just eaten the best baklava that I've ever had in my life and I have a broadband Internet connection in my lap. ... and apparently cute floppy-haired stoner boys flock to The Big Lebowski like moths to a flame.

I love California. :-)

It's election time in California, and while we have the garden variety political ditty with topical lyrics (about voter propositions) sung to a familiar children's tune...




...we also have what might be the first rap video produced by, um...activist nurses. It's got a funky Spearhead-like groove that's very Bay Area and not bad. Get out yo seat, y'all! We got nurses up in this piece right here! Jeeeeah! From Flo to flow, they can't, they won't, and they don't stop!