is a blog by Brendan
“As I’ve said to friends, we can’t expect to tell our fans ‘see you in court’ and then ‘see you at Massey Hall next fall’–we have to choose one, and I choose the latter. This current litigious atmosphere is simply a product of the record business trying to prop up a dying, obsolete business model.”
It’s so great to know that BNL gets it.
For better or worse, (Ultimate) The Office is the new Arrested Development. The Tuesday Night Ballers gave it up after four episodes last year, when it came on after Scrubs; the first season was like watching a Christopher Guest movie with all the jokes surgically excised. But Yale, persistent fan, got Maria and me to try it again last week. And it got funny! Funny and poignant! They put the jokes back in!
It’s not as edgy or fast or thick as AD, and probably no show on network TV will be again. But it’s self-aware, filmed with handhelds, and clever. It’s good.
Also, I think Jim from the show is the subject of Jimmy Eat World’s name. Not because he eats the world. Because he angsts charmingly.
I only found out by way of Jon and Amanda that my second cousin Dawn blogs. Her writing is frank, observant, self-deprecating and frequently caustic. It’s also really, really funny:
“Does this say something about my friend group?
I lost my virginity in room 116 of the Economy Inn in Danville, KY. Centre College students called it the pink hotel, in reference to the color of the neon lights decorating its roof. Oh, and immediately after the completion of the act my loving then-boyfriend (also a virgin) looked at me and said, ‘You know, that was alright, but I’m definitely glad I didn’t wait to get married.’
After taking Heather’s virginity, her boyfriend said, ‘Well, you had to pay for your dinner somehow.’
An anonymous friend lost her virginity to her 31-year-old manager at the Honey-Baked Ham store.
Katherine lost her virginity to a boy nick-named ‘Soup Can’. She cried the whole time.
My personal consolation is that the Pink Hotel has since been bull-dozed to the ground.”
She and I went to Centre together, and we were always friendly, but also a few degrees of network-separation apart. If you read this, Dawn, I’d like to state that I officially regret not hanging out with you more.
A little obsessed with the Narnia movie.
Man, all I post lately is little link blurbs, but I have to plug this: Holly’s amazing crossword-based constrained-writing project and PhD thesis is finally going online! Two stories in and I am already jealous of her ideas, in both format and content.
I was disappointed to notice My Morning Jacket, Louisville band turned critical darling and national success, on the list of Sony CDs carrying MediaMax DRM software, which has recently shown to cause vulnerabilities as badly as the infamous XCP rootkit. I knew the band probably had little input in whether their CD would be DRMed, but it was still bad news. Then the EFF blog brought to my attention that MMJ is offering their own recall–a more ethical, more friendly and more business-sensible path to their audience than the one their own label has taken. I am positively flush with Louisville pride.
BellSouth–among many other providers of broadband pipe–wants to be allowed to charge for discrimination. That’s not how they’re selling it, of course; they make reasonable-sounding analogies like “If I go to the airport” and “I can get two-day air [shipping] or six-day ground.” It almost works.
But bandwidth isn’t a service–it’s a resource, closer in application to electricity or water. Can you charge more money for people who use more of those? Sure. Can you charge more to guarantee that when other people lose access to electricity or water, you’ll still have it? Nope. Telcos build over and under public and private land to run their wires, which means they’re doing it under public license. That in turn means they must provide equal priority to all uses, public and private alike.
Google is on the right side of this fight, predictably, as are Amazon, eBay, et cetera. Seeing Google’s name attached to this discussion makes me think, though: how long until search is a resource rather than a service? Until they stop being good at it, is my guess, or until it stops being a top-layer application (ie shipping uses roads; roads are a bottom-layer resource, shipping is a top-layer service; roads are regulated and shipping isn’t).
I’ve said before that I think Google will end up under government control, but their diversification over the last couple of years (and their reputation, at least, for business ethics) might forestall that. Then again, Microsoft almost got split into Ops and Apps. I wonder if Google will end up facing a choice between Search and Labs.
Okay, let’s be men for a minute. 101 words isn’t much of a challenge anymore. I’ve been cramming stuff into that space for almost two and a half years and, like a man who plays Tetris every day, I pretty much know what is going to fit where.
I don’t want to change that constraint on Anacrusis because, while challenge is an important part of a constraint, it’s not the only part. It’s an easy selling point; it’s a convenient finish line on days when I’ve got very little material. Besides, I like the form and I’m not done playing with it. But the fact remains that as a device, the word limit has lost much of its ability to stir up ideas.
So. Something new, with occasional interruptions, starting today.
Man, today’s new virus email was pretty cool! The subject line was “You visit illegal websites,” and it was spoofed to appear like it came from “Department@fbi.gov.” Attachment: the standard ZIP file. Little do they know that all the illegal websites I visit are based outside the US, and would fall under the purview of the CIA! AH HA!
Seriously, if you get that or a similar email, don’t open the attachment, don’t open the email, don’t even preview it. Just hit the Junk button in Thunderbird and whistle a merry tune. (You are using Thunderbird, right?)