so i've grown tired of my snarkiness today and spent a little time looking at things i really love, like robots, and cool, fun stuff.
once i got my head back on all straight and optimistic, i went straight over to see some smart happening on Faris Yakob's blog. because that's where you go when you need an intellectual pick-me-up.
The Notebook Blog is a strange, yet beguiling, charming thing. Put together by writer Claire Cameron, the site is composed of digital photographs of physical collages Claire has created.
It thus exists in a pleasingly liminal space between old and new, electronic and paper, sincere and wry. With titles like Page 35's "We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die", or Page 28's "I Believe Mustard To Be One Of The Most Amazing Condiments", it almost out-Tumblrs Tumblr for that mix of the heartfelt and sheer post-ironic oddness.
Yet, like Tumblr, it's the occasional juxtaposition that's most jarring - most likely to stop you dead in your tracks as you careen through your feeds - like the contrast in pictures and text that appear on "We're a Virus With Shoes, That's All We Are". -NA
h+ magazine is an online publication that purports to talk about the scientific and cultural trends that will fundamentally change humanity - and occasionally feels like the imaginary lovechild of Donna Haraway and the guys at Snarkmarket.
The interesting thing about this defense of shyness [via] is that it suggests that the more 'we live in public', the more diffidence is counter-cultural - i.e. it kinda' makes you unreadable in way that Facebook/Twitter et al obviously do not. -NA
Tim Rogers has lived in Japan for several years. He's sick of it -- very, very, very sick of it. So sick of it, he's written one of the longest* blog posts in the history of blog posts to explain all the ways he's sick of it. I didn't read the whole thing, but most of it seems to be because they put meat on everything and scream all the time.
The hit squad that killed the Hamas commander in Dubai apparently used a fast acting muscle relaxant to disable him before they smothered him. Earlier reports on the execution said the door was latched from the inside when the body was discovered. Anyone have any idea how they might have done that? --ADM
Why is Toyoda not spelled 'Toyota'? The Washington Post explains. Executive summary: His grandfather started the company, but they changed the name because "Toyota" has a luckier number of brush strokes (8). --ADM [via Consumerist]
Gay couples seeking surrogate mothers are the latest group looking to outsource to India through cheap "rent a womb" plans: "We feel we hit the jackpot because we got two healthy and beautiful twins for a fraction of what it would have cost in the U.S." --FD
From "Destination: Haiti," an unsentimental yet illustrative account of Port-Au-Prince by a young freelancer based in Mexico City: --FD
As the bus pulled into Petionville, on the hills north of Port-au-Prince, some Texas evangelists I had met on the ride invited me to stay with them at the home of a Haitian pastor. We piled into the pastor's white Montero, driving carefully past people sleeping on the streets, too terrified of aftershocks to spend the night in their homes. That night Jose, a freelance photographer I had met on the bus, and I camped in the pastor's large garden. Getting more than one thing done a day in Haiti required an act of violence, the pastor's wife said.
Just in case it got lost in the shuffle of decade nostalgia, Alex Pareene's Encyclopedia of Counterintuitive Thought, which itemizes all the ways in which convention wisdom has been undermined, reveals what may have been the prevailing intellectual trick of the decade.
Have you ever picked up a pill, wondered what exactly it was, noticed an indiscriminate marking on it, and pondered whether you should just toss it down your gullet? Wouldn't it be cool if could look up what exactly the drug was from those indiscriminate markings? Well, there's a website for that!
I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.
This has never happened to me, yet I feel like it's happened to me a hundred times. (Guy goes to Europe for two weeks, but somehow his girlfriend forgot the conversation in which he tells her this. She goes a little crazy. It's nearly eight minutes long, but it's pretty great.)
[via]
This is the kind of thing that someone usually leaves as spam in the comments of my site, but is actually pretty cool: A Pictorial History of Dentistry. Those 700 BC braces are wicked.
Trope is the New Meme. "A few years ago it felt like one could scarcely read a think-piece in any newspaper or magazine without coming across some mention of the word 'meme.' Now it seems as though the new meme is the word 'trope.' Trope is everywhere." See also: recent xkcd.
The best thing you're going to read on the internet for a while is Errol Morris' seven-part series on frauds and fakes for NYTimes.com. Part 1 is about art forger Han van Meegeren; Part 2 is an interview about the Uncanny Valley with Edward Dolnick; the rest are forthcoming.
I attended the n+1panel discussion on the '90s on Friday. I had a question that I wanted to ask, but the q&a was dragging on, and raising my hand felt like a complicated extension of a prolonged My So-Called Life marathon (so good, yet who has the time?). Had I raised my hand, this is what I might have asked:
Nostalgia wasn't always like this, right?
History wasn't always this flat, and everything didn't always seem to happen at once. While we like to point at a decade where "accelerated culture" became normative, nothing actually sped up in the '90s. Everything just ground down to a black hole slacker halt. It was timeless, dude.
Sure, there was that whole internet thing, gnawing at time and space while scrapping our quaint notions of subculture and identity politics. But postmodernism was pimpin, and all of history was being prepped for the pillage. Beavis and Butthead, the Beastie Boys, Jeff Koons, Napster -- these were the princes of pastiche, gobbling up the table scraps the Boomers left behind.
Let me say it more clearly: the '90s invented nostalgia. Or at least nostalgia as we commonly now know it. There was always that anxiety of influence playing its fatherly games, but the '90s morphed anxious fear into an international pastime. The decade obsessed about historicizing itself precisely because history felt as flimsy as the Berlin Wall that had crashed into it. I Love The '70s could not have existed in the '80s, but I Love The '90s could only have existed, instantaneously, in 2000.
This way of thinking -- nostalgia for nostalgia -- now seems commonplace. But it didn't exist in the Reagan '80s or the Wategate '70s. Fukuyama was fugged up enough to see these signs and declare it the end of history (the '00s version of which is the world is flat). He saw the right symptoms, but came up with the wrong diagnosis.
Nostalgic for itself, the '90s were indeed a trap. But never mistake ambivalence for apathy. While the rock gods of yesteryear all perished in accidental pools of vomit, it took an act of will -- a shotgun blast to the head -- to break with the past. Or at least try. It was like that Dostoyevsky Wannabe character in Slacker who asks "Who's ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?"
And that's why this panel itself seemed yanked out of the past, like that Indiana Jones scene where they find the Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse. The format itself seems tied to the days when the culture wars still mattered and you couldn't Skype your way to Tokyo. I remember panel discussions about "the future" all the time on CNN circa 1995. Now they prop up two bozos to fight out the definition of torture. (Look! Nostalgia for nostalgia!)
Oh yeah, a question? Can we talk about Courtney Love please? Oh well, whatever, nevermind.
Slate launched a new woman-focused site today: DoubleX. They made an infomercial that's pretty good, but they also sent out the most embarrassing accidentally-non-BCCed announcement email of all time. Update #1: The Trouble With Jezebel. Hrm. Update #2: Oh yeah, The Stimulist also launched today. Spiers is involved but I don't get it at all.
Adderall gets the New Yorker treatment. In trying to balance the good and the bad effects, it ends up like an affectless jumble. Or wait, maybe that's the point?
Conversant Life: Are You a Christian Hipster? If you don't like contemporary Christian music, megachurches, and mimes, yet do like "Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important," then yes, you are a Christian Hipster!
Village Voice does something linkable: Interview with Carles of Hipster Runoff. The guy uses square quotes like there's no tomorrow: "I don't think I'm looking to 'shame' people. I just think that 'being yourself' is a bold decision. However, the decision to declare 'yourself' can leave you vulnerable to criticism. Not sure if that has to do with our modern world or if it has 'always been that way.' So whether you attach yourself to a band, an idea, a fashion sense, or a general aesthetic, I feel like we're all open to criticism and analysis from various perspectives. I just feel like in our world, 'how you present yourself' matters more than ever to everyone else but you." [via]
This feels eerie familiar: The Gig Economy, which "helps explain why it now takes a good ten minutes to get the answer to the once-breezy question, 'So, what are you up to these days?'"
Snarkmarket rewinds a year and looks at last year's miserable predictions. Jim Cramer's prediction about Goldman Sachs closing the year at $300/share is particularly spicy.
Kottke breaks down the cultural logic of old, by showing the half-life of movies and music. "Watching The Godfather today is like watching Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) in 1972." While this is certainly true in purely linear terms, I wonder if something has happened (postmodernism!) to cause the timeline to shrink in the past couple decades.
Huh, Einstein and Freud corresponded. Einstein sends the first volley: "I greatly admire your passion to ascertain the truth -- a passion that has come to dominate all else in your thinking." [via]
I told Carney last night that I'd like to do a YouTube show with him where we sit around and review movies like two old curmudgeons. But then I realized that the Glynnie & Carney financial show would be much better.
Ad Busters: Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization. "The hipster represents the end of Western civilization -- a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new." [via]
Getty Images + Flickr Make a Deal. Under the terms, Getty will scour Flickr for photos they think should be part of the Getty library, and if the photographer agrees, Getty pays residuals.
Recommended: NYT Mag's story on suicide, which focuses on issues like location, historical trends, and method. An interesting stat, among many: twice as many people die from suicide as homicide.
Ron Rosenbaum has always been obsessed with catch phrases. Back when he was at The Observer, I remember a column in which he went on a tangent about the coinage of playahata, which was brand new to the vernacular at the time. Whatevs, he has now devoted a whole column to the idea, which rips through dozens of catch phrases like "not so much," "it is what it is," "my bad," "the party is over," "teh," "at the end of the day," "stay classy," and on and on...
If I see one more editorial about how texting is going to destroy the English language, I'm going to take away all your typewriters. I'm looking at you, Boston Globe.
In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button.
You know what SXSW really needs? Some social networking device that will tell me exactly which of my friends are going, so I can stop asking everyone in little IM windows, in drunken bar conversation, in garbled Twitter threads. So if you're going, leave a comment, and I'll buy you a drink, or twelve.
Okay, just one more Tay Zonday link. When my pal Steve Marsh interviewed him, he asked if Tay understood what it means to sell out. Tay opened up a can of theoretical whoop ass on him: "The subtext of that is that this somehow relates to social justice. That's what's behind that. The implication is there is a social justice politic, and somehow a piece of art undermines the social justice politic. And I don't believe an image can cause social oppression. I don't think it can be the origin of social injustice." It goes even more crazy from there.
The first time you try to describe EveryBlock to someone, it can sound kinda boring. It aggregates piles of local information, like restaurant reviews and crime stats, which are then displayed block-by-block. Hm, that's interesting, but is it compelling?
If you give it some time, the answer is absolutely. Once you start playing with the site (and "playing" might be the best word to describe the meandering sensation of floating around in the data pools), your mind begins to wander with speculation: how did they get that? what does this say about my neighborhood? what else could be done with all this data? how can I add to this?
Those were just some of the many questions I had about EveryBlock, which launched a few weeks ago with the help of a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant. A few stories and interviews popped up when the site launched, but I noticed that the interviewers seldom asked the other questions that I had about the site. So I decided to ask site's founder, Adrian Holovaty, some questions directly. Here's our exchange:
Last year, New York City famously banned trans fats in restaurants. I found a page on EveryBlock that shows all the violations of this ban -- several every day! I love these little hidden narratives inside of EveryBlock. Do you have any favorites?
Great question. Here are a few interesting nuggets:
Also, more generally, it's fascinating to follow address-specific breaking news/events on our site. For example, a couple of weeks ago, a water main broke on the north side of Chicago. Afterward, on the relevant EveryBlock pages -- for example, Ravenswood or the 1800 block of W. Montrose -- you could see a bunch of assorted news items about the incident: newspaper articles from the Trib and Sun-Times, TV station reports and Flickr photos of the torn-up street that were taken by some people who happen to live nearby. Each of those "raw" chunks of information was displayed in the timeline of news for that block.
We've seen a similar thing happen with trendy new restaurants. First you see the business license, then (possibly) the liquor license application a few days later, then the restaurant inspection, then a Yelp review or two, then a writeup by the newspaper's dining critic. The story slowly unfolds over time.
One of our post-launch priorities is to clean up the fire-hose of raw information, to introduce concepts of priority and improved relevance -- but I do think there's a certain appeal to that raw dump of "here's everything that's happened around this address, in simple, reverse-chronological order." When significant events happen, they sort of "pop out" of the list.
Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing behind-the-scenes? Are you using Django as a framework?
Sure. The first layer is the army of scripts that compile data from all over the Web. This includes public APIs, private APIs, screen-scraping the "deep Web," crawling news sites, plus harvesting data from PDFs and other non-Web-friendly documents. Some data also comes to us manually, like in spreadsheets e-mailed to us on a weekly basis. For each bit of data, we determine geographic relevance and normalize it so that it fits into our system.
The second layer is the data storage layer, which we built in a way that can handle an arbitrary number of data types, each with arbitrary attributes. For example, a restaurant inspection has a violation (or multiple violations), whereas a crime has a crime type (e.g., homicide). Of course, we want to be able to query across that whole database to get a geographic "slice," so there's a strong geo focus baked into everything.
The next layer is the Web layer, which is standard Django. Oh, and I should mention that we use Python for everything, from the ground up.
What has been the hardest piece to accomplish so far?
I honestly can't decide what the hardest piece has been. A number of pieces were all hard to pull off in their own way.
The user interface was, and continues to be, a challenge. How do you display so many disparate pieces of data together, without overwhelming people? How do you account for the variety of distinct data types? (That's both a user-interface and a backend challenge.) How do you maintain visual interest when dealing with so much raw textual data? How do you make the block page feel like a geographic home page rather than a search result? Wilson, our designer, has done a great job within these constraints, but we all agree there's still much room for experimentation and gradual improvement.
Dealing with structured data is relatively easy, but attempting to determine structure from unstructured data is a challenge. The main example of unstructured data parsing is our geocoding of news articles. We do a pretty good job here, but we're not crawling all of the sources we want to crawl -- again, there's a lot of room to grow.
On a completely different note, it's been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we've run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn't make it any less of a challenge.
How much of your data aggregation is scraping html pages versus getting structured data?
At this point, we're doing more scraping than consuming formal APIs and data feeds, but I expect (and hope) the balance will shift over time. It's been tricky explaining our concept to data providers in government, but we're hoping that gets easier now that we have a public site that people can browse and understand.
Do you have any fears of scaling the system?
Yes and no. We knew from the start that EveryBlock isn't something that can be scaled overnight to every city in the world. There are too many special cases, too many relationships to build, too many local quirks to work out. There's no nationwide database of restaurant inspections or building permits that we can magically tap into; every city is different. Aggregating local information is a deep, difficult problem.
Some companies try to scale pieces of what we're doing -- like geocoding every news story in the U.S., or making maps of blog entries, or aggregating crime, or aggregating restaurant inspections -- but we're the first ones to do all of that. That's why we're taking a depth, not a breadth, approach: I'd much rather do three cities well than 1,000 cities poorly.
Rather than use Google Maps or Microsoft's Virtual Earth, you built your own mapping service application. Why?
We use an open-source library called Mapnik to render the maps, so that library does the heavy lifting for us. Paul is also working on a how-to article, in the spirit of giving back to the open-source community, that explains how to use Mapnik.
In many ways, what you're doing is taking a bunch of data sources and normalizing them for a single use case. Now that it's normalized, I imagine developers could do a ton of interesting things with this data. Are there plans to do an API?
Yes, I strongly suspect we'll have an API eventually -- it's one of the many things on our site wish list. We had to draw a line and call the thing "ready" at some point, so despite the fact that we're launched, we've got hundreds more features and data sources to add.
I was talking to someone recently about all the cool mashups you could do, and we decided that looking for patterns between Republicans and sex offenders would be the best!
Beyond the technical difficulties of creating parsers and algorithms for geotagging this data, have you had any political/legal obstacles? Is there data you'd like to get your hands on but can't for some reason?
Yes, and yes. I'd estimate we only have about 10% of the data we'd like in the long term, for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. As we expected, some government agencies haven't been able to provide us their public data, and the reasons vary. A common reason is a lack of resources. In other cases, we've simply been stymied by bureaucracy. But we're keeping at it.
An obvious example of data that's EveryBlocky (EveryBlockish? Um, location-specific?) but not yet on our site is the set of recent home sales -- lots of local relevance there. Of course, we're a news site, not a real-estate site, so it'll be interesting managing people's expectations about what real-estate data and features we offer.
I'd like to even out the three cities' data offerings, too. We publish building permits in San Francisco and New York, but not in Chicago. We publish filming locations in Chicago, but not in New York or San Francisco. We publish zoning agenda items in San Francisco, but not in the other two cities.
We're also working on improving the data we already have. An example is crime in San Francisco. After running into some problems having requested a formal data feed from them directly, we get the data by screen-scraping the SFPD's site -- but that site doesn't publish the location of each crime. In fact, the only location data the SFPD site publishes is implicit in the searches you do. The site lets you search for crimes by police district, ZIP code or neighborhood, so the best we can do is to deduce the police district, ZIP code and neighborhood that contain a particular crime. (If you search for ZIP code 94109, you can safely assume the resulting crimes are in that ZIP code.)
That's why San Francisco crime on EveryBlock, lamely, only geocodes crimes to the ZIP code level: because that's the only data we could get, and something is better than nothing. But, anyway, we're hoping the SFPD will release more granular locations in their crime data.
You've mentioned your hope that EveryBlock could introduce some standards for news organizations to do geotagging. I'm sure you've discovered wholes swaths of civic data that could use standardization. Can you talk a little bit about what you want to do in this area?
The standards we're thinking about are related to the geotagging of unstructured data -- namely, news articles. I guess there'd be some value in standardizing approaches to structured data (like, building a nationwide crime database), but we're more immediately interested in standardizing the geocoding of "blobs." The main premise is that locations in news articles should be defined in a machine-readable way. Look for something from us soon.
Everyblock lets me find everything in my neighborhood... except other people. Why is that? Do you have any plans to incorporate direct input of local voices into the site?
In time, Rex. In time. :-)
If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not --
are in support of that core goal.
Besides, we already have the problem of offering so many interesting data sets and features that people can only focus on one or two of them. The classic example is that a lot of people haven't noticed that we rolled our own maps (your question above notwithstanding).
I know you constantly get asked the question about scaling the site to other local areas, but here's an idea: say I'm an enterprising small town citizen who's willing to plug in data from my city by matching data to similar fields that you are using. Possible?
Yes, that's possible -- we've built the system in a way that would allow that to happen. Again, as in my response to your reader-generated content question, it's just a matter of implementing it. We had to launch with something, and if we'd included every one of our ideas in the launch version, we'd be on target for a launch in mid 2017. :-)
One of the obligations of the Knight grant is to make all the source code available. Does that affect how you think about the site as an asset?
The open-source requirement affects both our technology and business decisions. We've engineered the thing so that it can be replicated in any area, with any data. I suppose we would've done that anyway, even without the open-source requirement, because it's just the Right Way to do it, but the open-source requirement certainly influenced us.
I'll paraphrase something really smart that Wilson, our designer, said recently: We've created a machine that's capable of publishing address-specific news, and our initial launch is a demonstration of its potential. Now that we're live, it's time to improve the machine and improve the demonstration.
On the business side, clearly we'll have to figure out how the site is going to sustain itself after our grant money is spent. I have a feeling some solution will make itself apparent at some point over the next year and a half. But even before that, we'll find out whether our idea is something that catches on with our audience -- this whole thing is an experiment, after all! For all we know, EveryBlock might be a novelty that doesn't sustain an audience in the long term. Being honest Chicago people, happily far away from the Silicon Valley BS, we have no delusions of grandeur.
I liked your answer to whether EveryBlock constitutes journalism in the OJR interview ("People can define 'journalism' however they'd like"). I'm curious, do you have traffic goals for the site? Or let me ask it a different way: how are you evaluating success?
This is cheesy, but I aim to help people, or improve the world in some way. The tricky thing is that there aren't many concrete ways of measuring that, aside from anecdotes. I suppose we could look at traffic numbers, but, no, we haven't set any traffic goals.
Okay, last question. It's a weird one. Your interest in gypsy jazz is well known. (The last time I saw you, it was in a Toronto bar that supposedly had a jazz scene, but was actually a frat bar. We were both gravely disappointed.) Do you ever think about the relationships between your musical interest and your programming/information interests? Is there anything -- structural, cognitive, performative, whatever -- that makes EveryBlock similar to Django Reinhardt?
Wow, a weird question indeed! Hmm. I guess that, in both music and programing, I strive for subtlety, for elegance.
And EveryBlock cannot be compared to Django Reinhardt. That's sacrilege.
Thanks, Adrian!
(Thanks to Ben, Matt, Robin, Andy, and Matt for suggesting questions for this interview.)
When I revisited the first issue of Wired last week, it was obvious that I had unfortunately glossed over several areas (the design, in particular, got an unfair treatment). But as Valleywag ruefully noted, it was already 1,600 words long.
So I was thrilled when the founding editor, Louis Rossetto, emailed me a lengthy response, which serves as a great Round 2 of the first issue. With his approval, the email is printed below.
Rex,
Liked your piece on Wired 1.1.
A few things:
1. There was a beta. Actually two. Back in April 1992, John, Barb, Jane, and I created a "Manifesto" in a three day-and-night charette in the studio of photographer Neil Selkirk in Chelsea that stated what Wired was about, and set out the design philosophy. Barlow was on the cover, swiped from the New York Times Magazine, if I remember correctly. It had a proposed table of contents, proposed masthead (we still hadn't contacted any writers except for Markoff and Michael Schrage), an ad or two, the opening spread of a story. Six months later, I created a second prototype on my own. Learned how to use Quark, Photoshop, and Illustrator in the same month -- and juggle too. Eugene Mosier, who was later to join us as head of production, called in sick to his day job and helped put it together (making him employee number zero since we couldn't pay him anything but cookies). Jane sweet-talked equipment out of Radius (a name from the past) and others, since we not only didn't have money to pay people like Eugene but to buy equipment either. This beta was a full-on 120 page prototype, with actual stories re-purposed from other places, actual art, actual ads (someone quipped that it was the ultimate editor's wet dream to be able to pick their own ads), and then all the sections and pacing that was to go into the actual magazine. The cover was lifted from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage; it was the startling black and white image of a guy's head with a big ear where his eyes should have been. The whole thing got printed and laminated in a copy shop in Berkeley that had just got a new Kodak color copier and rip. Jane, Eugene, and I went in when the shop closed on Friday evening and worked round the clock through the weekend. Took 45 minutes to print out one color page! We emerged Monday morning with the prototype, which we had spiral-bound in a shop in South San Francisco, before we boarded a plane for Amsterdam to present it to Origin's founder and CEO Eckart Wintzen, to see if he would approve the concept, agree to advertise in the magazine, and then give us the advance we crucially needed to keep the project alive. He did, hence Origin's ads in our early issues.
2. Nicholas's statement about HD was not inaccurate. Resolution is not the big deal -- delivery and access is. YouTube is a bigger revolution than HD by a mile, regardless of how many big flat panels are in people's homes.
3. True, Nicholas's email address was laughably wrong, but I'm not sure even now I know why. It's certainly not because we were shy about printing email addresses. Addresses of writers appear throughout the issue -- a first for any magazine, as far as I know. My email address appeared under my editorial -- got hundreds of replies, each of which I answered. I think there was some kind of screw up in the handling of the text, perhaps someone slugged something in waiting for his real address, and then, in the insane rush to get out the first issue, it ended up being published as is. Nicholas himself was perhaps the most chagrined. It was corrected by the second issue, and yes, that address reached him.
4. I think you radically underestimate John and Barb's design work. As they often said, their job was to imagine what the future looked like, and do it on a medium out of the past. They brought amazing design smarts to the process of putting out the magazine, as well as incredible production chops, which were reflected in Wired from the first issue. That opening multi-page spread illuminating the McLuhan quote which launched the issue, that incredible graphic indulgence which continued for the entire time I was editor, and which is conspicuously absent from the current, was true modern graphic art -- in the case of the first one, a collaboration between John and Erik Adigard (Erik's work would appear regularly in the mag, and, for a while, he worked at HotWired/Wired Digital helping Barb create it's graphic sensibility). John and Barb were the ones who landed us our printer, a company back East in Connecticut John had worked with on slick annual reports. They had just taken delivery of a brand spanking new Heidelberg six color (CMYK plus two spot colors -- ah, that's how it was done!) press as big as a couple of box cars. We were the first clients on the press. The first issue was on press over Xmas 1992, and John, Barb, Eugene, and I were on press check. The pressmen were grizzled 30-year pros. They set up the press, they put on the VW size rolls of our special matte paper, they poured in the gallons and gallons of our eye-burning fluorescent ink, they started the press, they adjusted the print flow, they ripped off the first pages and put it under the calibrated lights to check color, they looked at it through a loop to check the dot gain, they did this half a dozen time, then they pronounced it perfect -- calibration was absolutely nominal. I can still remember how John took one look and said: put more ink on the page. The pressmen were aghast. It was perfect as is, just the way it was supposed to be. John insisted. They ultimately relented. He looked at the new sample. He told them he wanted still more ink. They protested again. They finally relented again. John looked at the new sheet. This time he told them: I want you to turn the ink up until it smears, and then dial back to where it's only just not smearing; and that's how I want the entire job done. The pressmen were appalled, outraged, embarrassed. But ultimately, they did what John told them. That's why the magazine looked and felt the way it did, because it literally carried more and brighter inks than a normal magazine -- they leaped off the matte paper. Later, as the magazine started to get recognition, the Wired job became the one the pressmen all wanted to work on. Under John's direction.
P.S. We collected the opening spreads of the first few years of Wired when we started our book company Hardwired. Called it Mind Grenades. Each of those introductions reflected my trolling through an issue and finding a quote somewhere that seemed portentous enough to be chiseled onto the side of a public building. Funny thing was, taken all together and in sequence, those randomly picked quotes made a coherent argument. As well as a mindblowing visual statement. Eugene did the press check, in Singapore. That book reprinted the original colors used in the intro spreads, which meant, I believe, something like 26 spot colors. Not many printed objects with 26 spot colors.
5. The baby pissing ad got us some shit. We were glad.
6. Wired/Tired was an afterthought, John Plunkett's idea, I think. On the last day of production, we would shout stuff around the office as we were working, and I'd write it down. Utterly subjective. Except, for about the first two years, we made sure that Manhattan was always in the Tired column in some way, trying to stick to the know-it-alls in what they parochially thought was the center of the universe. It was either Clay Felker or Jann Wenner who said that it's not only important for a magazine to have heros, but also pick the right enemies. Course, NY got its revenge at the time of the IPO, but that's another story.
7. The dotcom stock market bubble occurred after I already left the magazine, so I will decline to comment on whether Wired abetted it or not. But while I was there, we frequently indulged our cynicism, as with Chip Bayers' story in our April 1996 issue, "The Great Web Wipeout."
8. The colophon was fun. I wanted to list the stuff we used to make the magazine, because I wanted people to see that it didn't require a huge operation to make a great magazine -- in other words, that you didn't need Hearst or TimeLife or IDG overhead to produce a magazine that looked better than theirs. I think it was Eugene who added the drugs, with some notable exceptions, given that we were figuratively and literally at the epicenter of the SF rave culture. For that first issue, I might have also added adrenaline and optimism.
Thanks for taking the time. Hope your archaeology didn't screw up your issue too much. If so, let me know, maybe I can scrounge up a replacement.
Best,
Louis Rossetto
Thanks Louis!
For anyone who is really into this history, I also recommend Gary Wolf's book, Wired: A Romance, which is basically a biography of the magazine.
Rickrolling the Church of Scientology. I can't even explain how complex and brilliant and stupid and wonderful and retarded that doing an IRL Rickroll on Scientology is.
Ze Frank's video for SXSW Interactive, "the one that's screwing up those other two's business models." (You're going, right? I'm doing the trifecta again this year.)
Convergence! Synergy! Well, this one gets some points for modest ingenuity if nothing else... Celebutantes is a new novel coming out next month that has an accompanying web tv series, which will immediately carve out the lovers/haters of the book (is there really any way to intellectualize superficiality?). Tilzy describes it as "a young Sophia Coppola farce with an exaggerated Entourage and/or Californication aesthetic."
I had this stupid idea this morning that -- you know what? -- relationships and recessions work in exactly the same type of cyclical patterns. Suddenly, a 2,000-word essay popped into my head. Thank god Twitter exists, so I don't actually have to write it.
Do you remember the guy who went to every Starbucks in Manhattan in 24 hours (171starbucks.com)? His new gimmick is living in Ikea (MarkLivesInIkea.com).
Awesome. The English language has always needed a gender-neutral pronoun, but prescribed words like hir reek of east-coast liberal elitism. So I'm down with flipping this inner-city and going with yo.
Interesting USA Today story on how government subsidies keep small-town airports alive. Marginal Revolution makes a chart out of it, illustrating a shocking passenger-per-flight ratio.
Greg responds to NYT's 53 Places to Go in 2008. "I was intrigued as the next guy by the list of 53 Places we're supposed to go in 2008, then I realized that almost without exception, the 'reason' to go is the opening at long last of that destination's first 'luxury' accommodations. Which seems about the dumbest reason I can think of for choosing where to travel."
If you haven't been paying attention, the temp editor at Kottke.org this week has been lonelysandwich15 -- haha, I mean lonelysandwich -- better known around these parts as the-jerk-who-is-trying-to-be-a-better-Twitterer-than-me (and winning). The best thing so far has been the bit on fictional products becoming real (also covered by Buzzfeed and Karina). Anyway, I'm secretly writing a book about fake things (which I'll probably never finish, so it's ultimately fake too), so I love this little meme and now find it everywhere -- like today when I saw Gothamist report that the fictional grilled fontina cheese sandwich with truffle oil that Serena van der Woodsen eats in Gossip Girl has become real. (Editor's note: If this post had tags, they would be kottke, twitter, defiction, gossipgirl, lonelysandwich, and cheesesandwich. I win.)
Forbes has a SPECIAL REPORT on the THE FUTURE. Okay, I'm teasing, it doesn't look that bad -- and there's some fiction at the bottom that looks worth checking out.
The NY Times Mag this week is all about college, with several readable pieces, but I'm most intrigued by the college essay "The Posteverything Generation". I often wonder how Gen Y posits itself in relationship to Gen X, simply because there was so much acrimony between Gen X and Baby Boomers 15 years ago. However, this piece suggests that the kids in college today still view themselves, like me, as post-Cold War, post-Boomer. It reads exactly like something I would have written in college, Jameson quotes and all.
"We're drowning in quirk. It is the ruling sensibility of today's Gen-X indie culture, defined territorially by the gentle ministrations of public radio's This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers's McSweeney's Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs." --The Atlantic.
I haven't ever posted a job listing here, but my pal Ted from Dogster is looking for a Community Manager, which seemed like a gig that might interest someone here.
Good (even though Gawker will make fun of it in 5... 4...): 50 Things You Should Never Say. "We met on eHarmony.com." "Bros before hos." "I actually make my own granola."
Y'all know about the Steampunk meme, right? I haven't linked to any of it because BoingBoing has been all over it like... yeah, that. Anyway, Wired has a decent slideshow to catch you up.
One of the best blog features around is Cynical-C's Two O'Clock Trailers, a simple daily link to a random movie trailer that somehow manages to apply an element of programming on a seemingly un-programmable medium (by their very nature, blogs resist time-sensitive "programmed" features). I frankly want to steal this idea and link to random video clips every day (today it would be the old John Hodgman interview on the Daily Show for the release of The Areas of My Expertise), but I lack the discipline to be here every day at 2:00.
Wikipedia: gigantic list of protologisms, which are make-believe words you hope become real words. So for those of you keeping score, a protoprotologism would be a sniglet (both, uh, literally and semantically).
So apparently a quote from Edward O. Wilson -- "Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth, available everywhere by single access on command" -- led to the idea of The Encyclopedia of Life. And this video makes it look like a very impressive project.
Someone needs to explain this one. XXXchurch.com, "the #1 Christian porn website" (WTF?), is holding something called Unscripted 2007 that has something to do with Stryper, Ron Jeremy, and professional wrestling. (UPDATE: ABC News story on XXX Church. [via])
NYT Mag has a fascinating little article on something that I think about constantly: to what degree random historical factors and self-fulfilling markets determine the success of cultural products. A study from the authors suggests that social influence can affect judgments of quality to exponential degrees.
Slate.com: The You Decade. Christopher Hitchens asks, "So, whatever happened to the Me Decade? The answer is that nothing happened to it. It mutated quite easily and smoothly into a decade centered on another narcissistic pronoun."
On the list of articles that I want to pitch but haven't gotten around to is something called "The Rise of Hatah Culture." (Think: Simon Cowell, Gawker, Pitchfork, etc.) Although not exactly my story, NYT Styles (dammit! trite idea!) has something today on "The Rise of the Takedown."
Recently trapped in the Columbus, OH airport, I opened up my MacBook to discover that I had free WiFi. Huh, that's weird, I mused. But apparently I completely missed the trend that has led to so many airports offering free WiFi -- according to this chart, it looks like about two-thirds. (A story in the Times about Starbucks and WiFi elicited this irrelevant post.)
Esquire.com redesigned (or perhaps, designed) and now includes some fresh bits, including Chuck on Britney's hair cut: "Because she is a celebrity, it is always assumed that what she does is driven by motive. I see no evidence of this.... Think of the dumbest, goofiest, richest 25-year-old woman you've ever known: Did her day-to-day decision-making process reflect anything about her ambition, her self-awareness, or her ability to deal with reality?"
New Edge question for 2007: What are you optimistic about? Over 150 answers, including those from Daniel Dennett, Walter Isaacson, Chris Anderson, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Jared Diamond, Ray Kurzweil, Douglas Rushkoff, Freeman Dyson, Clay Shirky, Xeni Jardin, Rudy Rucker, Richard Dawkins, Jaron Lanier, Jason Calacanis, Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Michael Wolff, and Cory Doctorow.
Khat is the new craze drug, yet one Village Voice writer can't seem to find the stuff anywhere. People talked about it in Minneapolis (the home to the largest Somali population in the U.S.) all the time, but it never seemed to be on the street either, probably cuz it sounds about as strong as caffeine.
Saying you hate Paris Hilton is pretty much the most trite thing you can possibly say. Asking why Americans love hating Paris Hilton -- hey, now there's something to think about.
My mom sent me this article from home. I'll just give you the lede: "Prosecution of a case involving alleged sexual contact with a dead deer may hinge on the legal definition of the word 'animal'."
This is pretty cool. The faculty at Cornell was asked to each pick a chart (graph, map, diagram, table, etc.) that has been "the most important, remarkable, meaningful or valuable." The results include some of the best info porn of all time.
"The sexual compatibility questionnaire is a way for you and your partner to discreetly and easily compare your sexual interests without any of the embarrassing chatter and looks that may come up by doing so in person."
Someone who apparently knows her (an actual writer) tries to convince you that Paris Hilton isn't an airhead. Like with Marilyn Monroe, I've honestly wanted this theory to be true, but I still really doubt it.
I like asking people how many best friends they have, and then asking them to compare it to the number of best friends they had at different points in their life. The Times Maglooks at a study that reveals people say they have fewer confidants than 20 years ago, but then opens up the reasons to some good speculation.
This week's Consumed notices an interesting cellphone development: the wireless headset jumped right over youth culture and into middle-management. Can it work its way back, despite the Star Trek factor?
The best part of The Stranger's coverage of the exodus of the Seattle Weekly editor is this line: "The New Times frat boy, Libertarian, hard-news formula is certainly at odds with Berger's utopian, ponderous, hippie vibe." With one quick dash of the pencil, a swipe at all of alt-media!
Usually, when famous people become weird, we start to hate them. There are only a few rare exceptions to this including Bob Dylan, Andy Kaufman, and a handful of other people it hurts my brain to remember. Given this theory, one must ask: where exactly does Amy Sedaris fit in?
Believe it or not, I've actually read every single Zaha Hadid story over the past few weeks (her Guggenheim retrospective has created more press than anything since Bilbao). The only one I'll bother linking to is Slate's contrarian is she really visionary?
The Nerve.com Future Issue, which will feature writing from Joel Stein, Walter Kirn, Jay McInerney, Douglas Rushkoff, Rick Moody, Ana Marie Cox, and others.
Screens (Virginia Heffernan!) is a new tv/internet convergence blog on... yep, NYtimes.com. I'm calling it a "Lost Remote killer." (Sorry Cory, I kid.)
I'm not on Second Life yet, though I know I should be. I've been watching the site pretty closely for years, and it's fascinating that it's finally taking off, though I have no idea why now. Anyway, there's some reportage that Amazon.com is planning on extending their web services to support virtual stores within Second Life.
I wonder what would happen if I tried to drink only beverages from Amazon's Sports & Energy Drink grocery category.
ARCHITECTURE
Believe it or not, I've actually read every single Zaha Hadid story over the past few weeks (her Guggenheim retrospective has created more press than anything since Bilbao). The only one I'll bother linking to is Slate's contrarian is she really visionary?
So in Minneapolis last weekend, I saw both the new Cesar Pelli library and the Jean Nouvel theater. L.A. Times has a good review of the latter. Those two plus the new Walker and new Michael Graves MIA expansion make Minneapolis the hottest architectural city of the last couple years. (UPDATE: Newsweek's "Design Dozen" drops Minneapolis as #1 in its Design City issue.)
So that little movie that got me in a little t-shirt trouble last Fall finally came out this weekend. I wish I still had enough agitprop in me to call for a boycott, but I'll probably go see it this week.
MUSIC
I doubt you watched VH1's Story of Heavy Metal last week, but the best part was a puffy, wasted, maudlin Jani Lane saying he could "shoot himself in the fucking head" for writing "Cherry Pie." Dude, Decline of the Western Civilization was decades ago!
North Dakota continues to befuddle me. I don't know how one can measure this, but it must be the most conservative state in the union, yet it still somehow elects Democrats to congress and has occasional socialist streaks. The latest is the North Dakota Farmers Union opening a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Agraria, which cost about $4 million to open, will feature home-grown product shipped directly from farmers -- about a third of it from North Dakota and the rest from family farms in 25 states. AP has somephotos.
Using Cobain's suicide note to see what Google Ads turn up. Ouch.
Awesome history of a ubiquitious six-second drum break, sampled in everything from NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" to jeep commercials. You've heard it a million times but never even realized it.
This is weird. Both The Times (Sia Michel) and The Sun write up Tapes 'N Tapes and cite blogs (positively and negatively, respectively) as the primary reason for their success.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
Ya know, I haven't seen the Al Gore movie yet, but how fucking awesome is it that a gigantic powerpoint has been getting raves? It give nerds hope.... too much hope. On with the links:
Guardian Magprofile of Douglas Coupland, in which 1) he subtly disses Steven Berlin Johnson's game book, 2) we learn he has a movie called Everything's Gone Green coming out, and 3) he delivers his definition of irony.
I was just thinking the other day how strange it is that Amazon hasn't significantly monetized IMDB.com. Then along came this NYT profile of the founder.
Is Lost the best thing on TV, like, ever? There are too many topics to link to (Dickens?), but here's a strange interview on Jimmy Kimmel with the Communications Director of the Hanso Foundation?
Amazon.com has launched a grocery section. In other news, a certain nerd in Seattle decides his entire life will consists of the Microsoft cafeteria and whatever he can buy off Amazon.
ONLINE
PopURLS.com aggregates the aggregators, or something like that.
Brian Grazer and Malcolm Gladwell have a hair-off on the Charlie Rose show. Among other things, they talk about Gawker.
MEDIA
At the end of last year, I chose Arianna Huffington as an "artist of the year." My lede: "The Huffington Post should completely suck." David Carr notices the one-year anniversary of The Huffington Post in The Times. His lede?
"When it began a year ago, The Huffington Post seemed like a remarkably bad idea." Yo, just sayin.
WORDS
NYT Mag: Scan This Book! Surprisingly polemic towards the end, but spot-on.
Klosterman texted me from the ooh-ooh-big-deal GNR show in NYC ("Axl got thin again!"), but the big news is that Axl is obsessed with his online persona.
MNstories has a couplevideos of Mark Hosler of Negativland setting up his exhibit at Creative Electric in Minneapolis. Hosler has been hanging out in MSP for a few weeks now -- makes me miss home.
Excellent Daily Showsegment on Mini Kiss versus Tiny Kiss.
Remix David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
The Lloyd Dobler moment for a new generation, from The Office finale: Jim says "I'm in love with you." Response: "What are you doing?"
ONLINE
On the page listing the NYTimes.com blogs, I see they've given Stanley Fish an education blog called "Think Again," but it's barred in behind Times Select.
Back in Minneapolis, the new Ceasar Pelli library is opening, which could rival the Seattle Koohaas library. Alt-Text has some pics.
MUSIC
The new Gnarles Barkley video for "Crazy," from the album, St. Elsewhere, which comes out this week. It will be the best album of the summer. (See also: performing live on Top of the Pops.)
Syndey Pollack has made a documentary of Frank Gehry. Trailer.
The movie that almost got me sued has premiered in St. Paul. Back when the movie was being filmed, I published some exclusive photos of a sickly Lindsay Lohan from the set. She looks so much... less sickly now.
While recently packing my belongings to move across the country, I unearthed a box of wallet-sized high school photographs. I'm not actually sure if the rest of the country did this, but back in the Midwest we would all write little phrases on the back of these photos (similar to the yearbook phenom) and hand them around to our friends. Gathered below is a collection of actual inscriptions from every high school photo I still have:
"Even though it may not seem like it, I think your a real cool guy and good friend." -Kevin
"I'm glad I'm getting to know you better. You're fun to be with." -Diana
"Don't forget we're drinkin' J.D. at the graduation party." -Tom
"To a real loser with the ugly shades. Keep rockin' and breakin' curfew. You have a nice car. I had fun running with and against you. If you want to be backstabbed, just call." -Devin
"To a crazy guy who has a heap of shit for a car, if you call it that. Good luck in the future & hope you party more." -Tommy
"To a pretty cool guy that I have gotten to know a little better this year. Hopefully we can get out and party together some weekend. Take it e-z on the girls and stay out of trouble." -Steph
"To the biggest dirtbag I know who has nothing going for him except a severe case of the herpes and a tight-ass girlfriend who is a dyke. But I still hope we can be butt-buddies. Don't suck too much dick and take it EZ." -William
"You're such an original. You really changed over the summer; I feel that you did, anyway. I consider you a close friend of mine, even if you don't. May God Bless You." -Sandra
"To a funny guy in school. Stay away from Todd in the future and if I will stay away we'll be friends." -Kasey
"To one cool ass guy who knows how to party and get into Deep Shit. Good luck trying to get something off Mac." -Mark
"To a neat and very cool guy. We have had some good times. We can maybe get another Santa. We have to party more." -Danny
"To a real nut who I feel like killing sometimes. But a funny guy. People change, I have told you that. But I hope you don't change too much. Hope we can party together sometime." -Connie
"You are the oddest S.O.B. I know but it's cool I guess." -Troy
Finally, a follow-up to my very old Amazon list "College Friends Who Punched Me," I have created "My Year As..." in response to the spate of recent books in which people do something (strip, change genders, read the encyclopedia, etc.) for a year. Let me know what's missing from the list.
Do you remember Bill Paxton and Judge Reinhold being in the video to Pat Benatar's "Shadow of the Night"? And that it has a Nazi theme? And that it has Pat as a Dancer In The Dark-era Bjork-like character fantasizing in a Rosie the Riveter get-up? Is this really what the '80s were like?
Kerouac onThe Steve Allen Show, interviewed by William F. Buckley, and eulogized by Walter Cronkite. Is this really what the '60s were like?
SODA
I'm obsessed with Coke Blak in the same way I was obsessed with OK Soda.
Nearly a dozen years ago, Douglas Coupland published his third novel, Microserfs, at a moment where everyone knew the future was about to happen, but no one knew quite what it would look like.
After moving to Seattle a month ago to work on the campus depicted in the novel, I returned to the same book that many years ago intrigued this Midwestern twenty-something, to see how the world (and my perspective on it) has changed. I have several conclusions, which I'm aggregating for a longer analysis. In the mean time, I have gathered the notes that I scribbled in the margins of the book. Below is a mish-mash of observations about cities, companies, and Microserfs, then and now.
+ The basic plot arc of Microserfs is that an ensemble of 'softies quit their jobs and move to San Fran to create a new software start-up. They begin building something called Oop! (can this sound any more like present?), which actually is a pun off object-oriented programming, but is essentially a 3D modeling program which you can use to create pretty much anything. The idea is loosely inspired by Legos, but in the intervening decade nothing has been invented to compare it to -- until I recently saw Will Wright demo his new game, Spore.
+ Even though the inaccurate predictions are less numerable, they say more about the mid-'90s than the accurate ones.
+ The descriptions of Microsoft campus life -- right down to the soccer fields and hidden paths -- are still quite accurate. The detail that seems to have changed the most is the relationship of employees to Bill. He was apparently a Geek God in 1994, whereas now he's more of a beleaguered Yoda. It's good we skipped over the anti-trust days though.
+ There's a great observation early in the book about how Microsofties don't put bumper stickers on their cars. This is still startlingly true, and it gives campus a sort of post-political feel. Or at least as post-political as 20,000 Audis lined up in a cement parking garage can be.
+ Except for occasional baby pictures and markup boards, Microserfs don't decorate their offices. At all.
+ At the beginning of the book, Apple is at the top of the world -- the computer company that all geeks aspire to. By the end of the book, the boys from Cupertino are sliding into oblivion, rumored to be bought out by Samsung. How many times has Apple died and been resurrected?
+ Quick quiz: what was the subtitle of Coupland's first novel, Generation X? Bzzt. "Tales for an Accelerated Culture." So much for slackers.
+ Off-topic: Has anyone else noticed that Ginsberg's "Howl" needs an update? I'll take a shot at it: "I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by Aeron chairs, tattooed hyper fresh, dragging themselves though Ikea on Sundays looking for an angry futon." Perhaps this is where a Wiki could help. Wiki Howl!
+ It seems unfathomable now, but this book was published before Windows 95 even came out.
+ Know what else people forget about this book? It's written in diary form. And you know what else? Less than a third of it happens in Seattle -- the rest occurs in Silicon Valley, except for the second-to-last chapter which is in Vegas (at CES).
+Microserfs places Seattle in opposition to San Francisco. While there is still a tension between the Emerald City and Silicon Valley, Seattle now posits itself in relationship to Los Angeles.
+ Since moving here from Minneapolis, I constantly find myself appending rows to a grid that I've drawn in my mind with two simple columns: Minneapolis | Seattle. When I decide which city has "won" a particular feature, checkmarks get added to new rows of the mental grid. Traffic, for instance, of course gets a Minneapolis check, while food goes to Seattle. Daily papers, Minneapolis; weekly papers, Seattle; malls, Minneapolis; record stores, Seattle; pizza, Minneapolis. I already have hundreds of rows in my micro-niche grid. By the way, Seattle's Ikea totally sucks.
+ I am convinced this book could not exist today -- not in its current form, as fiction. Our first-person culture would undoubtedly force it into a memoir. Or perhaps Scoble is the modern equivalent. Microserfs even hints at its historical future by being structured like a journal. We all speculate about how blogging is changing journalism, but one should ask if memoirs are doing the same thing to fiction, especially in light of Freygate. Exploring this, you see, is partially why I moved to Seattle, and I hope to devote more thinking in this space. To be continued...
Six months ago, I wanted to write about the trend in which a new type of blogger was emerging -- one who was not happy with just one blog, but needed two or three to satisfy different appetites. Now, however, I want to write about all the bloggers who seem to have let their sites go a little gray as they work double-time for big companies or small startups. Oh wait, both of those are autobiographical stories.
Hey look, some links:
MEDIA
The Times is hiring a futurist. Too bad I'm too busy with the present right now.
Sebadoh III is being reissued and Pitchfork reviews it. Love this line, from Barlow himself: "Turning personal vendetta and small-minded revenge tactics into eventual cult status."
PERSONAL
Kurt Cobain died 12 years ago today in the city I now live in.
You know what? My workspace ain't that much different from Bill's. Except I think I have bigger monitors.
I can't possibly be the only one who saw Google Romance (April Fools!) and thought it was real. "When you think about it, love is just another search problem." Nay, hoped it was real.
Traffic is to Seattle as weather is to Minneapolis. People love to talk about hating it, but they're all resigned to its existence. Alright, here are a few links:
MEDIA
So I'm listening to last week's On The Media via podcast, and I hear Bob Garfield start swearing at an FCC official. It's both really funny and really good. But I'm thinking, "This can't possibly have aired. This must just be on the podcast." But no, it turns out that it actually was broadcast. There appears to be no fall-out yet, but I can't wait until next week's reax pieces, which seem inevitable.
I have much to talk about, but first here are some updates from various Friends of Fimoculous:
Tapes 'N Tapes were on last week's Best Week Ever. After taking SXSW by storm (and landing an 8.3 on Pitchfork), last night they played the last show on this tour here in Seattle. They were awesome.
Michaelangelo Matos has exited his perch as the music critic at the Seattle Weekly to join the up-and-coming eMusic. For his final goodbye, he gives a farewell mixed tape to Seattle.
Whoa, did you know Andy Milonakis is 30 years old? According to The Times, he has a growth hormone condition. He's the Gary Coleman of our times!
In addition to VH1's Web Junk 20 and Bravo's Viral Videos, other upcoming projects include a show on USA based upon eBaum's World and a show on NBC called The Net With Carson Daly. In the future, everyone will create a viral video.
Which is more peculiar -- that Terry Gross' interview with J.T. LeRoy is online without any notation of recent events, or that J.T. LeRoy sounds so obviously like a chick in the interview?
Enter the ISBN number of a book into BarnesAndNoble.com and get a quote for how much they will buy it for. Cool.
I've been busy alphabetizing my CDs and running to Ikea for book shelves, so somewhere along the way I missed that Malcolm Gladwell started a blog.
Although I'm morally obligated to read every book even remotely related to the internet (especially if it has something to do with blogging), I haven't decided whether to dive into Kos' Crashing The Gate. The decent NYTBR review includes the first chapter, so maybe that's a good starting point.
FILM
[Insert Snakes on a Plane link here.]
Well, at least William Gibson likedV is for Vendetta.
One of the many things I like about Wired is that it truly is a magazine. That is, for all the talk about the death of print, Wired stories are the best example of the perfection of a medium that doesn't easily translate into other mediums. You can, for instance, read most of Will Wright's game issue online, but it's not nearly the experience that the magazine is. (See also: Wright doing a walk-through of Spore.)
Every side-street around Microsoft campus seems to have one of those create-a-home-meal shops, so I'm not surprised to learn that Seattle is home to one of the biggest chains. From the NYT story: "The prototype, a kind of elevated cooking session among friends in a commercial kitchen, popped up in the Northwest in 1999. The concept did not take off until 2002, when two Seattle-area women streamlined the process so customers could make 12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200. That company became Dream Dinners, which opened a year later and now has 112 franchise stores, with 64 under construction." (Old MNspeak thread on the MSP-based versions.)
I'm moving to Seattle in a few weeks and can't decide whether to change my phone number -- from a 612 area code to a 206 area code. NYT Styles tells me this is the existential crisis of our times, or something like that.
Similarly, there's also this little trend piece about girls taking pictures of themselves. I've asked girlfriends about this peculiar obsession, and they all claim that it's somehow liberating.
Did anyone else think that the scene in last week's Lost in which Hurley was caught with a stash of food was simply a ploy to explain that he wasn't losing weight on the island? Well, according to a Maxim interview, he has lost 30 pounds.
Could this be my first link to a William Safire column? Let's just assume so: Blargon, which looks at blog jargon. Some people are already looking for errors.
Good interview with The Smoking Gun regarding the Frey scandal.
FOOD
The real reason that people like a New York Times food critic should have a blog is so that they can occasionally write about Hooter's.
City Pages this week has interviews with Craig Newmark and... ME! It reads pretty nerdy, but it sprawled into an interesting citizen journalism conversation on MNspeak.
USA Todaygives props to our Olympics videoplayer strategy, but points to a future in which everything will likely be online. (This topic is huge, and maybe I'll write about it after the Olympics.)
Fox Reality is a new entire channel dedicated to reality tv. Reality Remix is a show -- staring Kennedy! -- that is now completely available online.
FILM
When did this sneak up us? Basic Instinct 2, starring MILF-ish Sharon Stone. Who knows, it could even be okay (I actually love the campiness of the first). No Michael Douglas though.
I've ditched my Netflix account because I had stopped using it (too much TiVo, too much DVD buying), but now I see they are testing a $5/month plan, which could bring me back.
DRUNKS
Nerve.com: Last Night on Earth, a photo-essay inspired by the wrtings of Bukowski.
MUSIC
Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the New Yorker. Would you like to see the video for the first single? Okay.
Did you skip the Olympics to see the last two hours of Arrested Development? Thank you, TiVo. (The show finished fifth in ratings for the night -- after the Olympics, Dancing with the Stars, WWE's Friday Night Smackdown, and a Ghost Whisperer re-run. Go America!)
It was pretty good, but it's also a mystery why the Pamela Anderson roast is being released on DVD.
TiVo is holding a Wishlist Mixer in San Fran. Dammit, I'm moving to the wrong city.
The editor of Modern Love give his stake on the state of love in contemporary America. I seem to disagree with half of it.
Mike Figgis made a short film, Tied up at the Office [not safe for the office], for lingerie peddlers Agent Provocateur. I get it as much as I got Demon Lover.
I don't care what you say, these last few Madonna vids have been good. Her new video for "Sorry" has more street dancing, this tine looking like crumping-meets-Barbarella-meets-Mad-Max.
This feels like turning in a term paper a month late, but here's an idea I've been playing with: James Frey blew it.
Or rather, James Frey blew it twice. First, he blew it by writing a mediocre fictional tale and passing it off as the truth. But then, he blew it again by posturing as guilty and sorrowful and repentant and worst of all -- tedious.
Hear me out.
Do you remember how Jason Blair handled his succès de scandale? Bold, without regret. How about the author of Sokal Text? With absolute glee. Sure, these are different scenarios (Blair was trapped; Sokal's entire plan was to expose the academic publishing as fraudulent), but they open a glimpse into a radical alternate history, one in which James Frey had scoffed at Oprah's wimpy "embarrassment" and laughed this in her face:
"Ha, ha, gotchya sucka."
Frey could have quickly followed it up with a perfectly lucid explanation: he was merely trying to expose the slippery line between fact and fiction that our age has created. He could have pointed out that his book isn't all that different from, say, Brett Easton Ellis' novel Lunar Park. In fact, Lunar Park has probably as much truth in it as A Million Little Pieces, and everyone wanted to know which of the stories were real. He could have laughed in the face of authenticity, chuckled at the do-gooders and their truthiness. He could have cited that Harold Pinter nobel speech that everyone surprisingly saw online. He could have ripped apart the artifice of reality tv and MySpace profiles and tabloids. He could have torn down the curtain that is PR being passed as news -- and don't forget our government's staged news events. Instead of the pathetic villain, James Frey could have been the heroic villain, the necessary foil that exposes the weakness of all you self-righteous supermen.
Who oh why, James, didn't you just suck it up and call the whole damn thing a sham, one big fucking Matrix, dude.
Imagine for a moment how the punditocracy would have reacted. Would Gawker have applauded him? Would Oprah book clubbers have gasped? Would Jon Stewart have called him wile? What the hell would the Situation Room have said? Who would get the next night's interview -- Charlie Rose? Or just Larry King? Would he have sold more books? Would Gawker have changed its mind by the end of the day and condemned him?
Would Oprah have recanted?
James, I wish you could go back and do it all over again -- not erase the lies, but dared us to live with them. Alternate histories are always the scariest.
Look at all this: 1) NBC is producing an internet-only reality tv show called Star Tomorrow. 2) Bravo will launch a site, OutZone.tv, with original gay programming. 3) AOL and Mark Burnett are working on an internet reality tv show called Gold Rush. 4) NBC is greenlightingCarson's Cyberhood, a showcase of homemade videos. 5) Amazon is starting an original talk show hosted by Bill Maher called Amazon Fishbowl. All of these online-only -- no broadcast.
Occasionally funny: MySpace: The Movie. "Why am I not in your top eight?"
Or how about fake trailers? Tarantino and Rodriguez have crazy ideas.
What was the weirdest part of the Super Bowl? Noticing during the Mission Impossible III trailer that Philip Seymour Hoffman is the main villain in the movie. Here's a PSH interview with David Remnick.
SPORTS
Klosterman's ESPN.com Super Bowl blog was quite fun, right? He talks about blogging here.
MEDIA
The editor of the SF Bay Guardianthinks that Craig Newmark isn't the hero you think he is. Anil responds.
TV
Time's tv critic, James Poniewozik, has a blog: Tuned In.
FAKE NEWS
A new journal for cross-disciplinary studies in plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification: Plagiary. [via NYTstory.]
Next time. Next time I'll live blog Frey on Oprah too. Kick it:
PERSONAL
Hey, I sold my community website, MNspeak.com. Now if I could only sell this dumb thing...
ROCKETBOOM
Psst, Amanda is going to be on this Thursday's episode of CSI.
Andrew has decided to auction off his first Rocketboom advertising on eBay.
ONLINE
So I had been away from the blogging world for a few weeks and I come back to see embedded video everywhere via You Tube. Looks like this could quickly become what Google Video and Current.TV and Brightcove (and several others) wanted to be overnight.
Wow, someone did the research that I've been dying to know: how much is a viewer in advertising revenue versus download revenue? The answer: $.57 for advertising to $1.44 for download (with a ton of caveats applied).
Media pundits are flopping around like suffocating carp over Soderbergh's new movie, Bubble (trailer), which will be released on DVD (now available for pre-order on Amazon) just a few days after it comes out in theaters.
From last month, a Rolling Stone profile of the guy who created NowThatsFuckedUp.com, which is extremely fucked up -- among other things, the site contains gruesome unedited photos of people killed in Iraq.
Anyone else notice that nearly all the skits on this weekend's SNL contained musical numbers, including the intro monologue by Scarlett Johanson? Lazy Sunday, what have you wrought?
Did you catch the first episode of Web Junk 20, the new show created by Viacom for VH1 after purchasing iFilm (VH1 link | iFIlm link). Why does it suck so much?
Think your a hot shot in forecasting the big events in 2006 culture? Take the USA Today quiz to make your predictions.
BOOKS
I've had several conversations with people who so greatly misinterpreted Gladwell's Blink that it seemed they never read it, but I never realized someone could write a whole book about his misinterpretation: Think.
Apologies for the navel-gazing nature of this post, but a lot has happened in my life lately, and since this is ostensibly a personal blog (hi Mom!), here are some notes on recent personal events:
+ At work, we recently launched this new little site: NBCOlympics.com. The winter games are in Torino, Italy in February.
+ Friends, family, and pretty much all of Minneapolis already knows this, but I've never officially announced it to the estranged readers of Fimoculous: After the Olympics, I will be moving to Seattle, where I took a new job at MSNBC.com. As you probably know, MSNBC.com is co-owned by NBC and Microsoft, so I'll be working on the Microsoft campus in a fun new capacity. I'll have more to say about it later, but in the meantime... Seattle, holla fo' me, yo.
+ I was hoping to make an exciting announcement on the future of MNspeak (my local citizen journalism site) by now, but we're still sorting that out. Soon....
+ I have an essay in the new book Digital Think from the New Media Institute.
+ Random quote in a Pioneer Press story about the effect blogging will have on the '06 political season: "I'm not sure those kinds of blogs are going to change anything in the world."
That's all for now. My '06 resolution: Make Fimoculous cool again.
Although I'll continue to add lists as they come in, it looks like List of Lists: 2005 is winding down. As a final punctuating coda to the year, here are my Top 20 Lists of 2005:
Okay, it wasn't a great year, but at least you didn't hear anyone use the phrase "year of the blog" anymore. So just thank your lucky stars the whole friggin world didn't blow up, and prepare yourself for next year when it undoubtedly will.
And with that shot of optimism, I present my idiosyncratic mix of Predictions for 2006 in Media, Technology, and Pop Culture.
1) Netflix will be bought by TiVo, which will be bought by Yahoo. Since I obviously should be drawn and quartered for last year's prediction that Apple would buy TiVo, I might as well double-down on my bet.
2) Absolutely no one will buy Knight Ridder. C'mon, would you?
3) NBC's new Thursday comedy line up will be a big enough success that tv execs will once again try to invoke the phrase "destination tv," while the rest of us have no idea what network or time the shows are even on because our TiVo neglects to tell us.
4) A new Pew study will reveal something about internet use that will be drastically over-cited by people who are reading this blog post.
5) David Chappelle will do something that makes everyone ask "why the hell did he do that?" It will be "brilliant," but "enigmatic and frustrating."
6) Showtime will pick up Arrested Development. And then Showtime will announce a deal with iTunes in which the show becomes the first of its kind to have more viewers watching via portable player than on tv.
7) "Hello Katie, welcome to CBS."
8) After a guest appearance on Veronica Mars, Amanda Congdon will sign a deal to host a new show on UPN. That's Viacom-owned UPN, peeps. You know, CBS. So get ready for the Katie and Amanda show in '07.
9) Book publishers will drop their silly little fiat and announce a triumphant partnership with Google Print.
10) Nonetheless, Google's stock price will slip 20% by the end of the year.
11) Someone in Seattle or San Francisco will get beaten to death at a dinner party after saying the words "Web 2.0" for the five-trillionth time before the first course.
12) 2005: the year of search. 2006: the year of mobile. No, for real this time! The big change will be that carriers open up the deck to external providers. Why? Because Google releases the killer mobile apps that everyone needs. Seriously!
13)Current TV will start to show up in Nielsen. The numbers will be good, not great.
14) The break-up of Viacom will have unforeseen repercussions. Okay, that's vague, but I predict no less than three essays from Marketwatch.com about the failure of the split.
15) Steve Jobs will announce a DVR. That one's a no-brainer, but the big deal here is that iTunes video downloads will skyrocket. No wait, that's a no-brainer too. Fine, I predict...
16) iTunes will give in to record labels and adjust pricing such that songs will range from $.50 to $2. Oh hell, another no-brainer.
17) Sirius will double subscribers but it still won't be enough to pay Howard Stern's salary.
18) David Letterman will announce his retirement. Or at least I hope so, because right now it's like watching your favorite band from the '80s do a reunion show.
19) Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, will launch in mid-summer, and will get surprisingly good reviews.
20) Despite the L.A. Times' dismal failure, several media organizations will release successful wikis -- this time, in areas that actually make sense.
21) Martha Stewart will quietly become a nobody. Donald Trump, however, will still somehow manage to remain famous.
22) Mary-Kate and Ashley will return. Where the hell did they go, anyway? Some upcoming indie film director will cast them in a "quirky New York film" with Parker Posey playing their mom. Gen-Xers suddenly realize they're the next Baby Boomers.
23) One person will finally figure out a cool use for Google Base, sparking over-use of the word "mashup" by Slashdot nerds.
24) At the end of the year, the New York Times will drop Times Select. Soon after, CNN.com will make Pipeline free.
25) Despite some inspired ideas, Craig Newmark's new journalism project won't be a gigantic success, but it will inspire others sites that quickly take off.
26) News Corp's purchase of MySpace will yield a decent record label that has a surprise hit.
27) FBC -- Fox Business Channel -- will launch. Pundits describe it as "more fun" than CNBC.
28) Ten major cities will release city-wide WiFi.
29) Fergie from Black-Eyed Peas will announce a solo album. It will be Entertainment Weekly's worst album of the year for 2006.
30) The New York Times Sunday Styles section will write a trend piece about the trend of trend pieces. It will then implode.
31) Chuck Klosterman will announce he's writing new columns for Vanity Fair, Wired, and Modern Midwestern Living.
32) Fimoculous.com makes a triumphant return as an "almost decent" blog.
33) Anderson Cooper will claim he's the father of Katie Holmes' baby. A wicked paternity suit -- in which everyone refuses to take DNA tests -- ensues.
Note: I have zero insider knowledge on any of these predictions. And except for the last one, I actually believe them all, if only metaphorically in some cases.
The teaser on the print edition of this NYT story was "Pamela Rogers Turner was 28; her lover, or victim, 13. Discuss." I've had about a dozen conversations recently about these cases.
So best. Amazon has put up a page for GNR's Chinese Democracy -- check out the release date. It seems optimistic that Axl will be dead by then. (Update: drat, it's already been removed. For those who missed it, the release date was listed as December 31, 2025.)
Someone did a parody of Jakob Nielsen's infamous 2000 column about Flash1996 column about frames and pretty much just supplanted "Ajax" for "Flash" "Frames" -- even the Slashdotters got tricked for a bit.
iTunes now sells more music than Tower Records, Sam Goody, and Borders (but it's still behind Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Amazon, etc.).
Who's gonna play Janis Joplin in that new biopic? Pink!
Here's a clip of Kanye on BET in which he talks about his Bush-hates-black-people remarks, plays a strange game of name-that-historical-quote, and introduces his new video for "Heard 'Em Say."
TV
Remember the guy who won a bjillion dollars on Press Your Luck? Here's the video from the episode.
1)The Boondocks is much better than you've heard. Some dude on NPR said he didn't like the show, but wondered aloud whether it was because he was a politically correct white guy. Word.
2) No fibbing, Breaking Bonaduce has been one of the most amazing reality tv shows of all time. The night in which Danny goes ballistic and the producers are all scattering around, dropping their cameras, and trying to prevent him from killing himself or others -- it's that Man Bites Dog moment you wished would happen on every show. The fourth wall has fallen.
3) Talking about Lost is better than watching Lost.
4)Prison Break is less believable than Harry Potter, but ya gotta love these kinds of confined structural puzzles. Marti Noxon of Buffy fame is a producer on the show, and I credit her with every harrowingly claustrophobic moment.
5) Did you watch the short movie that the kids on the Real World created at SXSW? It sucked so hard that they only put it on the internet.
6) There was the briefest moment in the last episode of The Girls Next Door where the lead hen quit playing her role and blurted out something about being a clone who was probably too smart for Hef's taste. Then she cocked her Stepford head back into place, and with a quick giggle was a blonde bimbo again. Those two seconds have made the show the most important reality tv show of the year. It is the definition of simulacra.
7) Because America isn't as classist as Britain, The Office isn't quite as good here in the States.
9) Did you see that episode of Veronica Mars where Joss Whedon and the lesbian chick from America's Next Top Model guest starred as coworkers in a car rental shop? More of that, please.
10)Invasion is still on the TiVo sked -- just barely. At any second it could take a red state turn, and it's bye-bye baby squid martians.
11) Though it took a while to get used to, shows like Politically Incorrect and The Daily Show have made us accustomed to this kind of joke interview where media celebs are asked a mix of funny and serious questions. The Colbert Report has extended that idea into some sort of hyperreal fantasy of what talk shows are like in another dimension. Let's get this straight: Colbert interviews serious people in character -- and not only that, but pretending to be a real character from another show (Bill O'Reilly). Yes, we live in an era in which no one finds anything odd in what is effectively Space Ghost: Coast To Coast for the Charlie Rose set. Can he possibly do this 200 times per year? I hope so.
12) When did Letterman stop mattering? And why can't Conan stop that humility shtick? And can we possibly say that Jimmy Kimmel is the best thing on late night network tv? Is there any chance Chappelle comes home and saves us?
13) I told you that the new Daily Show set would eventually grow on you.
For those of you who read this site via RSS, I've launched the 2005 List of Lists page. (Previously: 2004 | 2003 | 2001.) As usual, email me if I'm missing something.
DATING
Is it true that Match.com had its employees go on bogus dates just to keep people subscribed to the service? And do they post faux-profiles that present flirtatious intent? Yes, according to a lawsuit...
GalleyCat has an excellent first-hand account of last week's New York Public Library debate between Google and publishers groups. (Also in NYT.)
I didn't even realize that NYT gave Marjane Satrapi (the author of Persepolis) a blog which apparently illustrates her experience growing up in Iran. I say "apparently" because it's behind Time Select.
MUSIC
The only good thing about reissues is getting to read contemporary rock critics on classics. Pitchfork, somewhat surprisingly, rolls out a 10.0 for Springsteen's Born To Run 30th Anniversary Edition.
Biz Week's interview with MTV's Jason Hirschhorn covers a lot of interesting ground, including Comedy Central's Motherload, MTV's Overdrive, and iFilm.
MEDIA
NY Mag's long look at Mike Lacey (New Times' exec editor) and the history of the Village Voice is the best piece so far on this whole alt-weekly skirmish.
ONLINE
WaPo does a conspiratorial Google rant, but it's also the first mention of Google's dream to make your DNA searchable. You read that right: "Sergey Brin says searching all of the world's information includes examining the genetic makeup of our own bodies, and he foresees a day when each of us will be able to learn more about our own predisposition for various illnesses, allergies and other important biological predictors by comparing our personal genetic code with the human genome, a process known as 'Googling Your Genes'."
Entertainment Weekly did a story on the average age of viewers on some tv shows. Here are some of the published results:
AGESHOW
29.0 The Simpsons
30.5 The O.C.
31.3 Veronica Mars
32.0 Everybody Hates Chris
35.6 Prison Break
42.6 Desperate Housewives
43.3 Lost
43.7 ER
45.0 Survivor
46.4 House
48.7 Medium
49.1 CSI
49.6 Two and a Half Men
51.8 Without Trace
53.0 Ghost Whisperer
54.0 Commander In Chief
Some surprises in there, no? Who would've thought that Jennifer Love Hewitt's new show (Ghost Whisperer) would draw mostly 50-year-olds?
While being interviewed the other day, someone asked me about my political affiliations. After stammering for a bit, I said, "Do you know the phrase 'South Park Republican'? I suppose I'm a 'Daily Show Democrat'." You heard it here first.
TV
Metacritic.com (which you might remember was recently purchased by CNet) has added tv reviews. So far, Prison Break has been my favorite show of the year, while critics haveEverybody Hates Chris as the best.
So you're watching Lost, right? At first all this talk about the curse of The X-Files / Twin Peaks seemed a worthwhile concern, but season two has been great so far. So "4 8 15 16 23 42," right? The site 4815162342.com has been the best for gossip and theories, including one that concludes that the numbers are GPS coordinates. Damn, that's so... post-Google.
ONLINE
Back when my pal Andy launched Upcoming.org, I asked him what he'd do with all that money when Google bought him out. I was only wrong about one thing. Congrats, man.
