Julien 'Spike' Galbraith born 21:12 on Jan 11.
I am so, so happy.
Intravenous tea, Radio 4 and doctors calling themselves Mister again, when becoming surgeons, are the lifeblood of a particularly understated and delicate cultural facet that, along with aggressive guitar music and appropriate use of swearwords like cunt, are the things that I miss about the UK.
Even when I worked in an office designing rock concert sets for bands like the Rolling Stones, all we actually listened to all day was the calming sound of BBC Radio 4.
My favorite show was Loose Ends, presented by Ned Sherrin. He died Sunday. Bugger.
Ned Sherrin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
OObject the latest Wists site launches today.
Oobject is a gadget blog, but with a difference. Instead of posts, there are 'charts' constantly updated image galleries with the best items in each category, voted on by users. As usual, the focus is or quirky, unusual or well designed lists of things.
OObject is a bit like Billboard charts for gadgets.
OObject is a major leap forward in terms of the way our sites work as it completely couples the wists publishing system into a customized version of Wordpress, and uses the new editorial back-end of wists for management.
According to the Global House Prices blog: "At the peak of the Japanese real estate bubble, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than the entire state of California".
Looking at the graph of US and Japanese Real estate prices is sobering, the US one is like a ski slope and the Japanese one, a mountain.
But none of this seems to make sense to us Brits. Housing in America still seems cheap, by UK standards, even in New York. Consider that the average house price across the whole of the UK, not just the expensive bits, is over $400,000.
The fact that I could barely afford to buy back the building that I bought in my 20s, despite having earned much more than most, since, means that something is fundamentally out of whack in the UK and by an order of magnitude that is much larger than in the US.
And it's not just housing. When I was last there I bought a glass of wine in a pub in a smallish town several hours drive from London. It was $17. A drink in a five star hotel in the center of Manhattan is cheaper.
Yet despite this, when I go back to the UK, this is what I hear "house prices may stop rising, but they'll flatten out, they never go down". Then I get a lecture about how stupid I was to have sold.
People in the US are waking up, while those in the UK are deluded.
Global House Prices: Housing Bubble Facts and Figures
Wists users continue to rise, and monthly uniques are around the 350K mark, but our Alexa is dropping and deliberately so.
The reason is that we have decided to ruthlessly cull spam users, which account for a large number on many social shopping sites and social networks.
Social network spam doesn't tend to be that visible since the items on front pages and showcased category links (top items etc.) of many social websites are hand picked by editors or users. But do a search for high value Adsense terms within many user generated sites and you will see that the automated publishing tools have blasted them, creating useless ballast that companies are reluctant to get rid of since it generates organic search engine traffic, and makes the numbers look good.
Since the type of spam we get is SEO spam and a greater percentage of these people use Alexa toolbars , this is a risky thing to do for your 'industry' image, since it lowers your numbers - but we think it is the right thing to do in the long term, since it obviously makes a better product for users.
Social shopping is extremely prone to spam, for obvious commercial reasons, do a search for Viagra on Kaboodle, for example, and ponder as to how many of those users that Hearst just bought are useful. Of course I shouldn't single out Kaboodle, they deserve congratulations on their acquisition and their technology is very solid, but they show the considerable pressure these days shared by many Internet startups to quote raw numbers and eyeballs, which sometimes obscures true, long-term value.
After the dot-com crash, the somewhat obnoxious phrase 'eye-balls' seemed to disappear. It's back, but with Wists we are ultimately only interested in what people see, not how many people are looking.
Tony Wilson: Driven by music and Manchester - Independent Online Edition >Tony Wilson Obit
Congrats to Graham, Olga, Nick and Shane and the rest of the the Treehugger team. Plenty of green-backs for the green-heads.
DISCOVERY BUYS GREEN | By PETER LAURIA | Business News | Financial | Business and Money
I am the real fake real fake Steve Jobs.
I'm Spartacus.
The other real Fake Steve Jobs
Seems that two overgrown fratboys got gored at this years Pamplona bull run. Good!
Running Bulls Gore 7 In Pamplona - Photos - KNBC | Los Angeles
Count Gottfried von Bismarck...was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
Ouch.
Count Gottfried von Bismarck | Obituaries | News | Telegraph
Jesus Phone Crucified by ATT
And it came to pass that on the morning of the Sabbath, there were no lines at the Apple Store in Soho. For lo, there were hordes of people on the previous eve. It was decided that the Lord had shined down on me and I wouldn't have to wait in line like those who had not been chosen.
Three score and ten seconds later I had the one they call 'Jesus Phone'. And indeed it was truly a wondrous thing from the one they call Steve. I tapped the button and there was light - and a little slidey thing and emergency call hotline-to-God thing. But not much else before activation with the people of ATT.
But the activation by the people called ATT did not work, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and hours of moronic playing with the single slidey thing.
And it came to pass that on the morning after the Sabbath the people of ATT did have conflicting messages for they knew not what they were doing. Some did prophesize that my Jesus phone number was being ported and some did prophesize that my number was not portable. And so the Baptism of Jesus Phone was caught in an endless loop. ATT did have a direct number and it was the number of the beast - with 2 hour hold times.
One of the people of the telephone book, ATT, did prophesize that "if I had walked into an ATT store and bought any other phone than an iPhone, that I wouldn't have had any problems."
And this made the one they call Steve very upset and there was more wailing and gnashing of teeth, for the one they call Steve was good and he had done an exclusive deal with the people of ATT, who were not good and couldn't customer service their way out of a paper bag.
After 40 hours and 40 minutes on the phone with the people of the telephone book and consulting all the other plagues set upon people like Steve Rubel it was decided that I would go to the park with my wife and return Jesus Phone from whence he came, and sell my Apple stock. For. lo, the son doth shine and I'm not wasting my effing Sunday on the - PHONE.
Micro Persuasion: Blogging on Twitter Today
The Apartment has kindly offered Design Blogfest their Crosby Street window for the duration of New York Design Week. We thought it would be fun to show some indie design... are you a designer with a prototype that we could put in the window? If yes, please upload an image from your website or Flickr, a brief description and the keyword "designblogfest" here in Wists. All the entries will be available at wists.com/everyone/designblogfest. The Design Blogfest bloggers will create a shortlist on Monday afternoon after which we'll ask you the readers to vote on the best design. Yeah, we know, it's short notice, but then that's what blogs are all about. ;)
Important dates:
- Now, upload an image from your website or Flickr to Wists and tag "designblogfest"
- Monday May 14, 12noon EST, deadline for entries via Wists
- Tuesday May 15, shortlist of finalists, voting begins
- Wednesday, May 16, 12noon EST, voting ends
Any questions? Leave a comment at MocoLoco
What better time than Spring and New York Design Week for another Design Blogfest party. It’s official, Wists' Cribcandy.com, along with Apartment Therapy, TreeHugger, Curbed, MoCo Loco and Blogfest newcomers The Apartment, Cool Hunting and NOTCOT are throwing a party on May 18th in NYC and you’re invited. This time we’ve partnered with The Apartment (thanks Stefan!), we’ll be using their space in SoHo on Crosby. It’s from 6pm-9pm and we’ll have food and drink on hand compliments of Swich and 10 Cane Rum. Thanks too to Freeset for the graphics. More details to follow…
+ Please RSVP at icff@theapt.com
Richard Dawkins will be interviewed by Fox's Colbert style, fake, sensationalist newscaster, Bill O'Reilly, on Monday, April 23, at 8.00pm EST on FOX. The program will be rebroadcast at 11.00pm.
Should be fun.
Bill O’Reilly | The O’Reilly Factor - FOXNews.com
Killian Fox on 'Smashing Telly', in the Observer:
Watch this other space. Better picture quality takes online TV to the next level
I'm launching a new site called Smashing Telly.
Over the last 6 months, I have rarely watched regular TV, but did not have the patience to download programs, having found a wealth of timeless classics such as Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (sic) available instantly, as a streamed video of 'good enough' quality.
Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free TV on the web. Not 30 second clips of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but full length programs.
Over the next week I'll be posting a bunch of new items.
I coined the term 'Social Shopping' and put it in the masthead of Wists, largely as a joke.
The joke was that I could imagine people pitching an idea like Wists to VC's as: look we've wedded social networking to shopping, i.e. community plus money equals more money.
Unfortunately three people did pitch this and they all raised money, and one of them is actually rather good.
I'll post more about Wists and 'social shopping', over the next few weeks.
In the mean time, it seems that It seems that Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester and Kate Kaye of Click Z are seeing social shopping with a clear head.
On the way back from a nice walk this afternoon, I learned the truth about the BODIES...The Exhibition. At the South Street Seaport, near where we live.
Some background to this. When I was a student I worked at the Royal Academy in London, during the holidays. In the basement there is a sculpture of a crucifiction, with one unusual aspect - its real. The artist, Stubbs, bought an executed prisoner's corpse, flayed him, nailed him to a cross and took a plaster cast, in order to do anatomical studies. Seeing this a night in the darkened basement of a near deserted museum after closing time made some impact.
Now I learn that plagiarized versions of the Van Hagens Bodyworks exhibitions, such as the 'Bodies' exhibition use corpses that probably come from executed Chinese prisoners, possibly prisoners of conscience.
I have absolutely no problem with anatomical exhibits, however the use of an executed prisoners body in this manner is the moral equivalent of rape for entertainment.
I so hope that the spirits of the dead haunt every living moment of the morally bankrupt individuals that put this exhibition on.
If you feel the same way, why not write to Katherine Morgenstern who runs Media and Publicity for 'Bodies'' organizers Premier Exhibitions Inc, and hopefully has trouble sleeping at night.
(404) 842-2675
kmorgenstern@prxi.com
Wists in Wahsington post article on the post Thanksgiving online retail brawl:
Online Retailers Can't Wait to Snare Shoppers - washingtonpost.com
There's some good stand up comedy material in Japanese shoe measurements:
"Foot Morphology and Fitting of the Shoe to the Foot"
In the Japanese shoe size system, shoe size is determined by length and ball girth. The shoe size indicates the size of the foot that fits the shoe, not the size of shoe itself.
A shoe is manufactured on a last, so last size and shape determines the size and shape of the shoe.
The foot shape may vary even when the foot length is the same. Any shape mismatch causes disuncomfort [sic]. Through research into the size and shape variations of Japanese feet, we are developing a method of shoe design that takes shape characteristics into consideration.
Foot Morphology and Fitting of the Shoe to the Foot
Based on the new version of Wists, in progress - Cribcandy version 2 launches. Enjoy!
Friends, Alex, Helen, James and Nancy built a geodesic dome for burning man.
By built, I mean completely from scratch i.e. they fabricated the tube connectors. Now admittedly James is a NASA engineer, but if this had been me the dome would still consist of a bunch of steel rods and a few empty wine bottles.
Google news archive has just launched.
I searched for the most life changing experience I ever had. It was there, and emotional to read. In February 1983, a group of us fell 800 ft while climbing in Wales.
RIP David Solomons and Richard Palmer. I won't forget you.
Some people from The Twelve Tribes : The Commonwealth of Israel parked up three really nicely restored old 50s buses in Washington Square last night.
I think they are Christans, but are playing 'Irish/ Israeli' folk music in NYC next week. I would suggest that they should be called Oi Vay Maria.
Anyway, I learned this really interesting fact - If you are a hippy traveller, the best place to park up your trailer for free, is the car park at a mega Walmart.
Hippies and ultra-consumer capitalism have a symbiotic relationship after all.
"Divebars. Jukeboxes. Allen Iverson. Beerball. Super Mario Kart. NetFlix. LiveFuckingJournal. The way my girl looks in that skirt."
Very well written piece about loving America for the good things, after seeing it fresh after backpacking abroad. The Musty Man - Hating America
I've switched to 'outliner style' for my blog, as default, so that I can post more quick links and to help prevent me from writing boring diatribes.
Apparently Starbucks is suing because someone is using their trademark 'double shot'.
From now on I will refuse to use Starbucks trademarked terminology when ordering coffee just to mess with them (I could always just not buy Starbucks coffee, but that would be adult and mature and inconvenient):
I will ask for Small, Medium or Large instead of the stupid: Tall; Grande; Venti, Party Bucket and Swimming Pool or whatever.
I will ask for Skimmed milk in California and Non- Fat milk in New York (this apparently seems to confuse them).
I will remind them I wasn't invited every time I am referred to as a "guest".
When asked for my name, it will be: "freecoffeeforeveryone" or "Hugh Janus" or something equally hilarious.
And I will ask for a "doubleshoto (sic) expresso" from now on.
I'm sure Starbucks are trembling at the thought, but its probably just too much coffee.
US based BBC journalist Matt Wells launches his blog - worth checking out.
I put together a wists list of locations in Greenwich Village, which were frequented by Bob Dylan in the early 60s.
Part of Wists rev 2 which I'm busy working on, Wists maps is being released early for a really cool showcase application which will be live shortly.
What is wists maps?
When you click on 'add to wists' bookmarklet and are in the edit screen before you submit your new item, there is a checkbox at the bottom, marked ‘Map this’. Check this and an address form allows you to attach a map to your wists item. Items with addresses will have a ‘map this’ icon below them.
Automatic location tagging.
When an address is added tags are automatically created or the city and zip, of the form location=zip and location=city.
Automatic address addition.
If you highlight a US address with your mouse, then click the add to wists bookmarklet, after choosing your thumbnail image you will see a dropdown menu in the item edit screen asking you to choose whether to use look up a map for the address automatically.
The dropdown also allows you to use the highlighted text in the description field. This means that you can add text from the page you are bookmarking, just by highlighting text.
Future enhancements.
Wists will soon have a complete map making tool built in, so that you can make your own Google Maps ‘mashups’: favorite restaurants; places to go etc. complete with image icons, as easily as bookmarking a page. In addition we will add full addresses in a new profile page, so that you can view all wists near your location.
Yesterday I snuck out in the afternoon to see a documentary called Desert Wind, an unintentional comic masterpiece.
Have you heard the one about the Belgian the Frenchman and the Canadian in the Desert?
The plot of Desert Wind involves following 13 unlucky Frenchmen, Belgians, Canadians and Swiss as they traipse aimlessly around the Sahara Desert with their sickly looking Swiss therapist. It is presumably set outside and in the desert, since watching paint dry or grass grow would provide pretty stiff competition if you took the film seriously.
For starters, the presence of the sickly man begs the question, wouldn't a real guide rather than a metaphorical one be a less risky choice in the middle of nowhere, with no paddle? In the background are a bunch of bemused Berbers who serve as real guides but only get cameo roles on account of their lack of psychology degrees.
The film opens with hackneyed symbolism, the magnificent 13 writing something that they want to give up on a piece of paper and throwing it into a fire. This all goes to dull plan until the French chef (even the people are cliches) decides that he is going to burn his clothing. At this point, someone in the movie audience audibly laughed - before getting abruptly shushed (it is possibly against the law to make fun of therapy, in New York).
What follows is a bunch of mediocre desert travelogue, interspersed with grown men complaining about their mothers. As they open up more and more, we seem to learn less and less about their characters and personalities. By showing the endpoint of dialog, often accompanied by shots of people weeping, the film ignores the subtlety of less dramatic details, and in doing so erases any context or depth.
After bouts of desert Sumo wrestling and Kendo with duct taped staves, the sickly therapist who has been watching too many Kung Fu movies, encourages the Chef to open up and let go of his emotions. After 2 minutes of vacant grinning, the chef's face begins to contort - we don't know if he is laughing or crying, and by this stage in the film, we know the feeling. When the chef finally collapses his quantum emotional state into floods of tears the sickly therapist continues to ask him to open up. The only avenue open to the chef now is to turn a genuine emotional reaction into a fake one. To satisfy the therapist he produces a truly weird but utterly insincere primal screamy type thing. The sickly man is proud of his patient's progress.
By this stage, if it weren't for the fact that I'm a certified, foaming at the mouth, atheist I'd be clamoring to join the religion of the Berber guides, rather than this self indulgent secular bullshit.
Towards the end of the film, the self parody reaches a triumphant zenith, as the unlucky 13 are told to take their clothes off and describe their relationships with their bodies. The sickly therapist does not lead by example. The camera inches slowly down the first victim's torso - oh no, they can't be - they are actually going to gaze in their navels. Alas, they only talk about their dicks, what a let down.
The last scene has each hapless victim stand on the edge of an escarpment and shout a promise into their audience of nobody. Its a bit like a Bon Jovi pop promo i once saw, except without the swirling helicopter shots that a decent budget buys you, or the screams of adoring fans, just empty, desert silence. Then comes the voice over.
My high school teacher told me that the worst thing you can do to end a story is say it was all a dream. That is, in fact, the second worst way to end a story.
Desert wind ends with 'Their journey is over, but the real journey is just beginning'.
How true! Mine was a two stop subway ride, back downtown.
First store in Manhattan to open in Union Square in 3 months - all hail Trader Joe's.
Considering that we hired a car and spent 4 hours going to Trader Joe's and back again, only last weekend, I am, as they say - stoked.
Even better news is that they are opening a separate wine store next door to get round the stupid New York license laws which are a throwback to prohibition.
Trader Joe's to Open in New York - New York Times
The Wistslist is a metalist, a top ten of top tens.
Not yer average gift guide:
The Cribcandy holiday gift guide is up - quirky, unusual or good value gifts for around the home, with some good stuff by emerging young designers.
Cribcandy - a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home
Oooh - I treated myself to the DVD of Scorcese's Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, having missed it on the telly.
Bob Dylan was the first person I ever saw in concert, I was 14 and someone gave me two tickets for free as I lined up outside Earls Court with my pocket money. Dylan was my current age then, and already had more than a lifetime's worth of achievement behind him.
It strikes me that Dylan's generation, my parents', were the children of people who had been through one of the most bestial periods in human history. Those who had experienced war, my grandparents' generation, were ready for change and it manifested itself through their children who were brought up differently. These people created the cultural renaissance that was the latter half of the 50's and early 60's.
Is a shame that not everyone believes that war is the absolute last resort. I owe it to my grandparents' generation to never forget, and to tell those who do to go fuck themselves in the same way that my parents' did.
Anyway, suffice to say that No Direction Home is truly great, genius portraying genius.
Cribcandy is today's Yahoo pick:
"A sleek catalog of nifty gadgets and hip furniture... like a Gizmodo or Engadget for Eames chair enthusiasts. You may also be looking at the future of online shopping -- this site uses "wists," or bookmarkable thumbnails, to create its constant feed of tiny images from boutiques and blogs across the Web."
Over at Wists we have launched our first thumbnail product blog with bookmarkable cool things for your home, Cribcandy.com.
Cribcandy is a regularly updated link blog with a difference, since it uses Wists as its back end publishing tool, all the links have thumbnail images as well as headline links.
Wists enables us to add, categorize and create thumbnail image links with a couple of clicks, meaning that we can post decent image links to cool products very quickly.
In addition you can bookmark anything on Cribcandy with one click, complete with its thumbnail image, to add to you own wists bookmarks.
If you want to send up tips, tag any of your own wists with 'cribcandy' and we will be monitoring it.
Cribcandy - a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home
The company that Nick Denton, Angus Bankes and I started on my kitchen table in Shoreditch, in 1998, sells to Verisign - I can't comment, but Tom Foremski has the scoop and Rafat Ali more details, including a link to a good piece on Moreover by Jason Kottke, who use to work in my team:
Moreover was early on some things, news search before Google news and RSS and weblog search. The thing that we did with Evan and Meg, from Blogger, Newsblogger, was kinda cool - and we almost bought Blogger, but who knows.
I have been banging on about the importance of ping servers for a while, perhaps Versign with Moreover and Weblogs.com can do something or perhaps another startup will.
Whatever happens, the architecture of online publishing is changing and with it, the entire architecture of search - pinged instead of crawled. That is a very big deal for Google.
Half way through Kingdom of Heaven our hero is given a choice: Marry the good king's, beautiful, nice daughter, who he is in love with and she is in love with him, and become king of Jerusalem, rule it wisely and keep the peace. In exchange, the corrupt guy who is going out with said daughter, who is trying to provoke war and murders people periodically and who wants to murder our hero, will be arrested and executed.
Sounded like a no-brainer to me.
However, our hero, does not want to sell his soul, to have his enemy arrested on a trumped up charge.
At this point I switched off and enjoyed the cinematography.
The good king dies, the corrupt guy marries the beautiful princess and provokes a war where thousands of people die and he is captured.
The hero takes over and manages to kill enough of the enemy that they agree a truce where the citizens of Jerusalem will not be slaughtered.
So thousands of innocent deaths later, the hero, soul presumably intact, gets the girl and peace.
It could have been so much simpler.
The BBC have a very moving picture of an old, old man crying at a VE day remembrance service in Europe.
WWII is refered to as a 'just war' to allude to the idea that a declaration of war can be on morally solid ground. But even if that were the case, justification is not the same as success.
If 40 million deaths and many more injuries, homes lost and lives ruined and half of an entire race wiped out in genocide is not an unprecedented disaster then what the hell is? The allied victory in the Second World War was entirely Pyrrhic.
For me, remembrance is second hand, of the lessons I learned from my grandparents' generation who lived through WWI and WWII. Remembrance of a 16 year old boy with shell shock, shot for desertion to the allied refusal to bomb the railroad to Auschwitz.
Because of the fact that what has later been sited as one of the justifications for war was later ignored, I find it immoral when people refer to the second world war as a 'just' war.
Even if a war could ever be justified, all wars are clearly shit, and the war-weary wisdom of a generation that knows this first hand is dying out.
Europe honours war dead on VE Day
Om Malik points out that today is 05.05.05.
I can remember exactly where I was at 12:34 on the 5th June 78. 12345678 - (If you were in the US, and not in the army or government, perhaps, May the 6th would have been the day).
I was in a Math(s) class, at St. John's School in Northwood, in North London. In the dusty creaky floored classroom to the right of the headmaster's study. It was a sunny day and you could smell newly mown grass from outside the whitewashed sash windows, I was 12 years old.
(Unfortunately the Math(s) teacher resigned and the headmaster, who looked like Oswald Moseley and had similar political leanings, lined the whole school up and blamed it on me being annoying.)
Now I can remember that I remembered 12:34 5/6/78 on 05/05/05, or next year on the 6th June.
Am selling my car for the move to NY, its a 66 Mustang convertible. Mail me if you are interested!
(Also using the out=plain layout parameter and forsale= metatag to experiment with using wists to create galleries of things for sale)
Will post more shortly - such as what features will be adding. My new project is called Wists.
Have a play, mail me If you like it or don’t like it.
The idea is to bridge the gap between blogging and bookmarking.
It aims to make simple list blogging as easy as bookmarking and make bookmarking take advantages of weblog publishing, with automatic thumbnail image creation etc.
Like Newsblogger (which we worked on at Moreover in conjunction with Blogger to create aggregated bloggable news content) in addition to bookmarking, Wists aggregates content from online stores link to directly.
Wists is simple to start with but the ongoing aim is to treat thumbnails as an image equivalent of a headline and slowly evolve a tool for managing and syndicating image headlines.
(Basically we built it because I am really lazy, I like pictures and hate writing and it takes lots of clicks to blog thumbnails.)
I am moving to New York at the end of the month, to continue working on a product which I hope to launch next week.
The product is somewhere between Flickr and delicious and, amongst other things, will build upon the concept of tagging, to allow 'metatagging', where anyone can create their own types of category: restaurant, location=ny etc.
While I'm really looking forward to it (I am still an architect at heart and NY is an architect's wet dream), I will miss San Francisco.
For me, San Francisco is a model of a 21st century city, it is at the heart of an area which is the world capital of both science and liberal thinking. As such, it is one of the few places where engineering is taken to a truly creative level, becoming an art as much as a science.
One of the most memorable things that I have done since living in San Francisco is see Jimmy Smith play at Bimbo's, with my good friend Nick Rossi, who is also an awesome Hammond B3 player.
Jimmy Smith was a true genius, taking an instrument normally associated with church services and inventing a sound worthy of its spiritual origins.
R.I.P Jimmy Smith.
There was an ad on my site today that read:
Iraq
Visiting Iraq? Compare
hotel prices, reviews,
maps
travel.yahoo.com
There is one genuine looking review from an aid worker, where the Palestine Intl. Hotel in Baghdad, gets one star:
"Nice swimming pool, otherwise a dump
Service and food were terrible, bed was uncomfortable, dirty. The pool, however, was clean and very nice."
If you are at a loose end for something to do in San Francisco this Saturday, you could register for the 2004 Masturbate-a-thon. A Massmasturbate I guess.
Half off if you're participating in the
Bay-to-Breakers!
Masturbate-A-Thon 2004: Come for a Cause!
Playlist from April's Casanova lounge session: Uppers | Nick Rossi and David Galbraith @ The Turnaround, April 2004
Anyone welcome to show up for the next scintillating installment.
This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Steve Malkmus at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland.
This dance hall has one of the last remaining sprung floors in the US and was built at a time when the Tango was illegal in Portland. A city ordinance proclaimed a standard dance position be adopted so that 'no undue familiarity between partners shall be permitted'.
Christie's is auctioning off parts from the now defunct Concorde.
I wouldn't mind the 'extremite du nez' (nosecone). I could paint a D on it and stand in the corner all day wearing it as a hat.
Things to love about the US: seeing Hammond B3 legend Jimmy Smith play 'back at the chicken shack' at Bimbos last night.
Smith, Jimmy Sermon at CD Universe
Why is it that in IM conversations some people stick to you like flies to the proverbial crap?
New to IM Person: OK we'll meet there
Other Person: Cool, bye. [conversation is over in theory]
New Person: Cheers see you then - its at 6 right?[nope, its started again. Rule 1. do not end with a question]
Other Person: Yup, Cheers
New Person: what do you think of Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia? [it was over, you should have stopped and you've started again. Rule 2. look for hints]
Other Person: I think its total bollocks, gotta run
New Person: Yeah I guess so, BTW, did we say 6?[GOTO line 2340, please sod off now. Rule 3. don't ever read philosophers, they can't write and they create more questions than people can answer - a bit like some people on IM]
etc, etc.
The New York Post "panned Victoria's singing career and said David was the star of a sport that, in America, 'is largely played by young girls'."
Headline news from Sky News - Witness the event
In the early seventies people were nice, even sarcastic Brits behaved like earnest Northern Californians, and Mike Oldfield, looking like a biblical Christ, produced his Masterpiece, Ommadawn
I just found my copy, aaah.
So nice to see that the right people are getting funded.
Six Apart: Six Apart Ltd. Announces New Weblogging Service, Investment, Executives and Board
Ken Layne offers sound advice for haircuts:
"Anyway, when in doubt, go to the barber shop closest to your local military base ... unless that base houses Marines, in which case you may just want to leave your hair as is."
I like old fashioned barbershops - currently I go to one that hasn't changed since the 40's (including the barbers) and is located opposite the Bank of America on Pine St. in San Francisco.
It offers the following key barbershop features:
1. 15 minute turnaround, no appointment.
2. Cab-driver style conversation.
3. Overall ambience of the urinal area in an expensive old hotel.
4. Proper barber chairs - expensive poncy salons have chairs that are not designed for cutting hair.
5. Non-PC reading material.
6. Hair cut facing away from mirror.
7. No referring to hair gel, pomade or grease as 'product'.
8. Ability to pretend to be Al Capone whilst wearing cape.
Of course the haircut looks like a stray dog has chewed at your head, but who cares.
Edwin Starr, creator of the anti-war song 'War' has died.
RollingStone.com: News: "War" Singer Edwin Starr Dead
Hmm, despite the magic of WiFi at conferences these days, very few of the Bloggerati present at SXSW seem to have updated their weblogs.
Perhaps speaking to people in person is back in fashion.
I have three types of possession: useful; sentimental/decorative (perhaps was useful) and might be useful or needed in the future.
Items in the last category really, really bug me. A large proportion of the might be useful stuff could easily be online. Take for example product manuals or bank statements (my bank will only allow access going back a limited time).
Today I threw out a shed load of product manuals for the various bits of near obsolete technology that I am continually acquiring - cos if I want to find out how to troubleshoot the thing gathering dust in the corner I can look it up on the web.
Google is increasingly my virtual repository of 'might be useful'.
Amen
OK, so most of the brain drain claims about Silicon Valley are bullshit. Everything is cyclical and the valley is in a down cycle for sure. But the Bay Area as a whole is unique - it is the global capital of science and its non Metropolis, campus style, environment is a testimony to its modernity and university style intellectual prowess not its parochialism.
For all that, Dave Winer's departure from the Bay Area - appropriately enough to an esteemed campus will leave a vacuum. Kevin Werbach said that "Web services, Weblogs and WiFi are the new WWW". Dave Winer pioneered two of these and 'two out of three aint bad'.
Aaaanyway, so I was sitting in a ludicrously trendy bar somewhere in the 'Schmillage', feeling mildly inadequate, when it was pointed out that because there were two people with Mohicans, this was clearly the start of a global trend. My first instinct - bollocks, but now I am seeing them everywhere. Conclusion - I have either lost my mind or everyone else has.
This time the Mohican is different - it is not the six inch, superglued, punk rebel thing, but a sort of ironic, wear it with designer clothes, look - a post modern Mohican or Pomohawk.
The genealogy of this haircut is different too - clearly there has been a progression from 1. the mop-top messy haircut that it now mainstream to 2. the 'Hoxton fin' where the mess is brushed into the middle currently claiming victims all over London, leading finally to 3. shaving the sides off and leaving nothing but the mess in the middle.
Off to Gaby's place on the Island of Mull, off the West coast of Scotland, for New Year, so will be in 'blog silence' for the next few days. However, am taking the avalanche of books I recieved for Christmas, so there will be plenty to rant about when I get back.
In New York and had drinks at Nick's lair in a hollowed out volcano - sorry, in his too-roomy-by-half NY appartment. Other members of Spekter were also there, Jason, Meg, Jeff, Cameron and Elizabeth. Jason pointed me to Metacritic which seems better than Yahoo for aggregated scores for critic reviews. My favorite being a review of the all-time low scoring movie, "Divorce: The Musical"
"The movie climaxes with an entire audience farting -- a more concise review than this one."
A couple of years ago I found myself in a large room in the National Gallery in London. The room was unusually empty except for a tall middle-aged man who was standing next to me, looking at the same painting. I was suddenly overcome with the smell of putrefying flesh and Sulphur as he broke the golden rule of farting (don't break wind when there are less than three people in the room). I glanced round and it was none other than Charlton Heston, the star of 'A Touch of Evil', he blushed and promptly made a swift exit.
'From my warm moist...'
So I finally went to see 'Bowling for Columbine this weekend, and sure enough Heston himself appeared on the silver screen holding a rifle and bellowing 'from my cold dead hands...' - and a curious thing happened, I could have sworn I smelled putrefying flesh and Sulphur.
I once tried to impress a girl by putting Philip Glass on the stereo, she shot me a look of faint disgust - 'oh, architect music'. I was an architect at the time and most of my more anally retentive 0.1mm ink drawings were fuelled by the mechanical trance that onsets after six hours of Glassworks on repeat play.
So Philip Glass came to San Francisco this week, and we went to see him play along to a series of short films which were mostly great, but then we had to sit through half an hour of turgid travelog and cutesy, derivative nature shots sponsored by Bulgari - sorry Bvlgari!
Philip Glass is the apotheosis of modern, a musician that even dresses like a modernist architect, how weird then to be watching his troupe accompany silent films. How strange also that the only people wearing black polo necks last night were the 'Glass Ensemble' and that Mr. Retro himself, Tom Waits (namedrop - come on, you don't get the opportunity that often in SF), should be in the audience.
Christopher Hitchens' excellent
'Why Orwell Matters' will be the subject of a week long dialog between Hitchens and Sullivan