2007 February » Hello World

Bring Back Free Clicking!

Economics and Advertising, Links, Media 2 Responses »

Feb 282007

Man, I’m really glad someone wrote this.

Short summary: the NY Times has implemented a new function where double-clicking on any word on the site (i.e., not links, just regular text) makes a new window pop up with a helpful definition of the word. This includes such words as “the,” “green,” and “Spanish.” For those of us who semi-compulsively mess around with the text we read, this is a disruptive disaster. Thus the campaign to bring back free clicking. Please consider passing this along to your many friends and encouraging them to do the same, until we bring the paper of record to its east-coast liberal knees.

This post written by Kevin Spacey!

Media, Movies, Politics/Law 2 Responses »

Feb 282007

An op-ed by Angelina Jolie. Yes! It’s just a matter of time before she gets her Nobel Peace Prize!

Anyway, whenever I read something like this, I wonder how much (if any) of the writing comes from the celebrity whose name is on the top. I know that people ghostwrite books all the time, but do they ghostwrite these bite-size polemics? Just based on the eloquence of the language and the artful structure of many of these pieces, I’m guessing yes, but it just seems wrong. Outsourcing a heartfelt plea for global justice smacks of inauthenticity–it’s one thing to hire a hack to help you make a quick buck off your hardcore fans (not a good thing, necessarily, but defensible at least) but it’s another thing to say to a staffer, “I’m against landmine use, could you put together an emotional essay about it for the Times?” Of course, this whole post is incredibly unfair; I have no idea whether Jolie actually wrote that thing, and there’s no evidence suggesting that she didn’t. But it doesn’t feel very likely to me.

At any rate, I actually think it’s great that Jolie is using her celebrity for a good cause (and “suggesting” to Brad that he might want to do the same). And she’s been doing it for a decade now, so it’s hard to chalk it up to a cynical stunt. Ultimately, even if she’s just lending her name to someone else’s writing, she’s contributing to a cause she cares about and trying to make the world a better place. That’s a huge improvement over this guy, even if he did write it himself.

You may not have three or four but you got ONE, man.

Economics and Advertising, Music No Responses »

Feb 262007

Nike Commissions a Rap Song in Honor of Its Air Force 1 Shoe. Um… again? How many songs about Air Force Ones does Nike want? And isn’t it a lot less cheesy when you don’t have to bribe someone to record one? And is there any way that the new one, KRS-One or not, is better than Nelly’s game-changing ode to materialism? Granted, the new song has some heavy hitters working on it:

To recognize the 25th anniversary of its Air Force 1 sneaker, the company commissioned a song from some prominent hip-hop musicians: the producer Rick Rubin and the rappers Kanye West, Nas and KRS-One. It also paid for a remix by D J Premier that features the rapper Rakim. The song, “Better Than I’ve Ever Been,” has been available on iTunes since Tuesday.

But it’s just going to reek of inauthenticity. I’ll be very surprised if this song goes anywhere. That said, if it’s good I don’t have any problem with it. The world could always use more good music.

HBO: Cinemax’s Respected Older Brother

Economics and Advertising, Television No Responses »

Feb 232007

As someone about to cancel HBO (since my 6 months of cheapness runs out next month), this story in Good Magazine was of especial interest to me.

“I think that when your sole goal is to be good,” Strauss says, “when everyone who’s working there has that frame of reference, then, right away, you’re dealing with something special. That may be a little bit different than when your goal is to sell ad time, or drive up ratings—not that ratings aren’t important to us, they are important to us—but we live in a world where what we’re selling is HBO.” In other words, HBO is selling quality; and to sell it, it has to achieve it.

Amazingly, HBO gets its quality points even if no one is watching. HBO’s single most critically acclaimed series is not The Sopranos, but The Wire, which gets a fraction of the ratings of the mob drama. David Baldwin, HBO’s executive VP of program planning, breaks it down: “We don’t have to have mass, broad audience hits. Because I have one segment of my audience base that do think [The Wire] is absolutely brilliant, and will not miss it, and that’s a large part of their faith in HBO: that we could make something like this—the story of why urban America is failing—that no one else would touch.”

Worth a read.

[via Fimoculous]

I think we’re going to need a new term for this one.

Economics and Advertising, Music 1 Response »

Feb 232007

Yes, that is “I Think I Need a New Heart,” by the Magnetic Fields, in a commercial for DOG FOOD. This has got to be a wry commentary on capitalism or something. Either that, or Stephin Merritt died and left his estate to Richard Milstein.

That’s it, I want a Wii.

Tech 1 Response »

Feb 212007

Iwata: I just want to confirm in retrospect how on earth we were able to do something so drastic. I’m sure other companies have thought of using a one-handed controller. Such devices have definitely been released by peripheral makers. But it’s not so easy for a hardware maker to, in a sense, turn their back on the past and race in an entirely different direction. Why do you think we’ve been able to do this?
Ashida: …Isn’t it because we’re Nintendo?
Iwata: That’s not an answer! (laughs)
All: (laughter)
Takeda: To rephrase Mr Ashida’s answer, Nintendo is a company where you are praised for doing something different from everyone else. In this company, when an individual wants to do something different, everyone else lends their support to help them overcome any hurdles. I think this is how we made the challenge of Wii a possibility.
Iwata: That’s true. Wii’s one-handed controller is not the great idea of a single person, but a fantastic fusion of ideas from all kinds of people. Looking back, I think that it was destined to turn out this way. We’ve seen that the sequence of events leading up to this moment unfolded in a truly unimaginable fashion.

From this page in a series of transcripts (and translations, I presume) of a roundtable discussion between Nintendo execs/engineers (full series begins here. I really enjoyed it, especially all the subtle and not-so-subtle digs at Sony and Microsoft’s consoles.

[Kottke]

Your daily “mysterious object not a severed limb from a fictitious beast” story.

Media, WTF 1 Response »

Feb 212007

Foot Found at Dump Not Bigfoot.
Foot Also Not:

The Tooth Fairy
Chupacabra
Galactus, Destroyer of Worlds
John Gotti
Lock Ness Monster
The Holy Grail

Foot is:

A skinned bear foot. SPOOKY!!!!

I guess anytime you find something strange in a -sylvania you have to assume the worst. I’m just relieved our long national nightmare is finally over.

A cockfight, only we’re using human beings.

Television, Writing No Responses »

Feb 202007

This Slate story about Ultimate Fighting is pretty much just hilarious:

Stoking the fury of aficionados and piquing the curiosity of novices, the announcers began to wind up the hype: “There is dislike. There is distrust. There is simply hatred.” In a clip, Shamrock, a veteran known as “the most dangerous man in the world,” expressed his belief that Ortiz is a punk. Meanwhile, Ortiz, a punk, forwarded the notion that Shamrock is over the hill. Cut back to Shamrock: “Tito Ortiz is going to find out who Ken Shamrock is, was, and is now.” The “is now” in that sentence wasn’t really a redundancy. Shamrock was employing a new tense—the ultimate tense—to describe how he was about to be bringing it, how it was about to have been brung.

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