unionize

ONLINE

Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson did a 8-minute faux-documentary imagining online media in the year 2014. EPIC is a cool look at the future of personalized and robotic news. (MetaFilter thread takes some jabs at it.)

16-year-old girl murders her mother and blogs about it.

Nathalie Chicha (she of Cup of Chicha) is newest addition to the MediaBistro blogger set. GalleyCat covers books and publishing.

Spoof of SubservientChicken: Subservient Stickman

MEDIA

Embarrassingly obligatory Frank Rich column link. (This one's about Desperate Housewives and the FCC and such.)

COOL

The 2005 SXSW Conference has been announced. (Music: March 16-20; Film: March 11-19; Interactive: March 11-15.) Price to attend all: $650. Ouch, that's almost $200 more than last year.

House of Flying Daggers trailer.

ONLINE CONSUMPTION

Border's launched a viral personalized web gift-finder, GiftMixer 3000, which bases choice on five personality criteria: Romantic, Adventurous, Brainy, Imaginative and Funny.

Froogle has launched a wishlist feature.

Target.com starts its own strange quasi-film experiment: Wake-Up Call.

SEX

Call the FCC! Boobies on CSPAN.

L.A. Weekly is trying to make the case that the handjob is back. Silly kids, it never left the midwest.

Request a "realistic kidnapping" at ExtremeKidnapping.com.

Women from The Apprentice in Maxim.

SPORTS/ART

The Pistons/Pacers brawl reimagined as Picasso's Guernica.

MUSIC

Trapped in car for 8+ hours this weekend, I listened to the new Gwen Stefani album three times. It sucks, but I bet Kelefa Sanneh would try to convince me it's awesome. (Conclusion also reached in the car: Kelefa's anti-rockism screed reminds me of girls in high school who tried to convince me on the greatness of Richard Marx.)

FOOD

My high school girlfriend is the pastry chef at Django in Midtown Manhattan. New York Daily News asked her to do something cool with cranberries, so she did.

LOCAL

Okay, it's gonna take a second to get to the "LOCAL" angle of this one, but hang on.... Do you remember the rumor from last week that the Bush twins showed up at a downtown Manhattan restaurant and were told they couldn't get a table -- and that the restaurant would be booked for four more years. Har! For reasons that are a bit mystifying, NYT Styles profiles the restaurant's founder, Taavo Somer. If he looks familiar (he does to me), it turns out he was an architect in Minneapolis a few years ago. (He's also the guy behind the "Morally Bankrupt," "Emotionally Unavailable," and "Until Somebody Better Comes Along" t-shirts you may have seen.) In the profile, Somer cites the now-defunct Loring Cafe as his inspiration for the restaurant, Freeman's. "[The Loring] was a bohemian hangout where you had older people, young people, Eurotrash, everything. They had food, drinks and even a ballet company. It was the circus freak show of life." Over two-and-a-half years ago, I described the Loring as "the place in which all the not-quite-ethnic-yet-ethnic hotties converged." Let the Loring nostalgia commence.

Uptown Borders allowed to unionize.