Archive for 2009

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So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star – Part I

[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 29, 2009 by admin in Music

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

A few of the music industry’s most successful artists share how.


Are you sure you wanna
go down this road?

Music won’t leave me alone. Not that I mind; I’ve been in love with music since I was about four, when my mom managed a music store and would bring home demo models of pianos and dual-keyboard Hammonds with beatboxes built into them. As a teen, I had an Arp Axxe synthesizer before most people knew what a synthesizer was. In the early 80′s I had a good-looking but tragically Human League-like band, and in 1989 was convinced by a very savvy manager to turn down a major label deal. At that point I put music on the backburner as a career, doing occasional soundtrack drivel (well, maybe my stuff’s not that bad) through the nineties, until 2005 when I came close  to jumping into the fray of on-line music distribution by expanding my web business. Recently, I’ve been hired to research and plan some marketing for a couple of artists (including Ann Arbor’s Khalid Hanifi), and among other things, was blown away by this 2007 article (which I somehow missed at the time) in which Columbia Records’ Rick Rubin actually says out loud that the traditional music business model is toast. More interestingly though, I’ve been impressed by the wealth of information shared by artists who’ve been very successful with the new business model, much of which can be distilled down to one simple idea: forget unit sales and Read the rest of this entry »

If Beef Is So Bad For Us, Why Are Aliens Always Stealing Our Cows?

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 28, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Some say you can’t beat the meat for nutrition. I disagree. To quote Rutger Hauer’s character in Blade Runner: It’s not only irrational, it’s unsportsmanlike!

I haven’t been much of a meat eater for a long time, but I think I’m going to finally commit to a rule that will make me more or less vegetarian: I won’t eat it unless I kill it myself. When you take an objective look at eating meat, there’s virtually no rational reason to do it. Even if you don’t care about the brutality of “harvesting” it, it doesn’t offer nutrients that can’t be found elsewhere, it’s arguably unhealthy, it has multiple negative impacts on the environment including deforestation and habitat destruction, excessive water consumption, pollution and greenhouse gas production, and on top of all that, it contributes to starvation worldwide. Not a very good scorecard. I’m even finding it hard to justify eating fish; as I joked with a friend the other day: Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll be starving in 50 years. So why have I suddenly decided on the change in diet? It’s not really so sudden. I’ve avoided corn-centric food and gone light on meat proteins since the 80′s, because of Diet for a New America, but recently I watched three films in a one-week period that drove it all home: Read the rest of this entry »

Just Who The Heck Do You Think You Are?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 27, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Monday, July 27th, 2009

Whatever your answer is, I hope you’re happy with yourself. Find out who you are with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. And then get happy!

I am absolutely fascinated with people’s fascination with personality quizzes, which is why I’ve written about the topic before. I don’t need a multimillion dollar study to tell me that clearly, people take them because they either truly want to understand themselves better, or they simply want to reaffirm whatever they already believe about themselves (or in the case of Facebook quizzes like “Which Old-School Obscure Seasame Street character are you?“, do neither, while entertaining their friends). If you answer a well-designed test honestly and with self-awareness, they can be very helpful, but obviously a poorly-designed test leaves a lot of room for “Self-Report Bias”. So. If you really do want to to get to know yourself better, there are only a few credible methods on line to do so. And you can trust me, because according to this simple Jungian word pair test, I’m an ENFJ. Which means I’m a “Persuader. An outstanding leader of groups. Aggressive at helping others to be the best that they can be, and represent only 2.5% of the total population“. Hmm. I always suspected I was an outsider somehow. But my low self-intelligence result on this Multiple Intelligence Quiz prevented me from figuring it out. But now that I know, and since I do want to help you be the best you can be, here’s a whole page of these tests. After you’ve spent most of the day coming to a better understanding of yourself, ask yourself: are Read the rest of this entry »

Is The Internet Becoming A Giant Flesh-Eating Robot?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 26, 2009 by admin in Technology

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

The human race. It’s what’s for dinner.

Great. Not only does the Internet eat all our time, now it’s going to start eating us. We treat the idea of a self-aware Internet as science fiction that only exists in the form of the Terminator franchise’s Skynet or old 70′s movies like Colossus – The Forbin Project. Personally though, I’ve been saying to friends for a while that the Internet already is self-aware. It’s controlling our time and modifying our behaviour slowly and subtly, by forcing us into social networking, mobile devices, and pornography. Sure. Go ahead and convince yourself that it was your personal volition that turned you into an ADD-afflicted, Facebook-obsessed, Tivo-ing, CrackBerry textaholic, but I’m convinced the Internet is slowly training us to communicate in its preferred mode – text and images. And apparently I’m not too crazy for pondering this line of thought. Two respected scientists in this NewScientist article say that a self-aware Internet may already exist, and there was recently a serious scientific summit addressing the concern that machines may soon outsmart man. Combine this with the fact that military researchers are developing corpse-eating robots (which of course the company involved immediately denied, claiming they’re vegetarians) and you have some pretty scary scenarios brewing, even if they seem a little silly at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Green Hornet Generates More Buzz

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 25, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Unfortunately not much of it is positive. Will they really be recasting Kato as a non-Asian?

I’ve never been a big fan of comic books or the films based on them, but I’ll be really disappointed if they mishandle the film version of The Green Hornet. As a kid in the sixties, I of course watched shows like Batman, but was much more drawn to things like The Avengers, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and especially the short-lived Green Hornet. I was in fact convinced that I had some mysterious connection with the show, a belief that was probably fueled by a few things: the fact that my dad drove a 1966 Imperial (the car the show’s Black Beauty was based on), that we had a mysterious Asian student boarding with us (unusual in the sixties) and that I’ve always had a strange connection with the idea that good things come from darkness. Although the show had some of the camp that many other 60′s spy or superhero shows had, it also had a little dark edginess that set it apart. And maybe doomed it to its one-season run. It also had some kick-ass music (yeah, Rimsky-Korsakov can be kick-ass) and was – as you may know – a huge break for Asian talent in the states. Although the central character of the show was supposedly the Britt Reid/Green Hornet figure, we all know the real star was his sidekick Kato, played by martial arts legend Bruce Lee. This is a story element which sadly may be changed in the film. Although the film version is slated for release on July 9, 2010 (my birthday, by the way), the production has had a bumpy ride. Originally Stephen Chow was directing and starring as Kato, now he’s doing neither. It also appears they’re broadening the type as they cast the new Kato. I’m hoping for the best; I really don’t get the casting of Seth Rogen as the Green Hornet, but Michael Gondry is directing, and so far the car looks pretty cool.

Read the rest of this entry »

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