How To Be A Robo-Dork
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 2, 2009 by admin in Technology
It seems the Segway was just a segue into even dorkier means of personal transport
This probably wouldn’t look so cool if it weren’t shot in Paris with a Daft Punk soundtrack. |
I rely a lot on a rather sophisticated means of bipedal transport. It’s called WALKING. I have some issues with those clunky combustion-engine monstrosities that many of you drive, so I’m always intrigued with unique new methods for personal transport. The Segway
August Holidays: A Time To Honor Clowns, Friends, and Breasts
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 1, 2009 by admin in Holidays
Well, maybe not all at the same time.
 Even John Wayne Gacy Loves Clown Week! |
It’s somehow fitting that it was the U.S. Congress and Richard Nixon that were responsible for authorizing National Clown Week. It’s also not surprising that the entire Clown Week site is presented in Comic Sans. August is a little light on holidays steeped in deeper tradition, so be careful not to get confused that Friendship Day coincides with Clown Week and World Breastfeeding Week. Things could get peculiar. If you do happen to commit a serious faux pas because of this, you won’t have much time to remedy things; International Forgiveness Day is also on August 2. On a more serious note, Ramadan begins on August 22, so try to be a little respectful of your Muslim friends that observe the month of Ramadan in a more traditional fashion; when was the last time you fasted between sunrise and sunset for a month? Otherwise, aside from a lot of “Hallmark Holidays” and peculiarities like Lefthanders Day or National Underwear Day, August is marked only by a couple of tragic observances like Hiroshima Day and the creation of federal taxes.
We’re All So Meta
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on July 31, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
I want my Verfremdungseffekt back. Our collective tech and media savvy makes me feel like I’m living a fictionalized version of my own life.
William Shatner Gets Meta |
Sometimes I feel like my friends and I are living a fictionalized version of our lives as products. How many times a day do you hear someone reference what they said or heard on Facebook or Twitter that day, rather than talking about something that occurred in reality? How many times a day do you hear someone who doesn’t even have a job in advertising or marketing talk about branding, or someone who does have a marketing job talk about utilizing social media as if they have the secret that makes it work? We live in a culture that thinks itself so media-savvy that the best source of news is a comedy show , the most revered art form is reality shows, and the hippest people totally aren’t. I mean, once you move to Williamsburg to be hip, how hip are you? I love metafiction, in fact, I have a half-written novel (Don’t we all? Here’s an excerpt of mine, 116KB PDF) which uses the narrator’s time-traveling and alcohol abuse as the device to explain the writer’s block that prevents him from resolving the story for you. To add an extra layer of “meta” to the whole thing, I plan on not finishing the novel. This kind of hip media self-awareness was cool back when AdBusters was new, or when William Shatner acknowledged his own absurdity in things like this parody trailer for the movie Seven, but now it’s so pervasive that it’s actually cannibalized back into advertising. It’s gotten to the point that I honestly can’t suspend my disbelief about my own life any more, let alone a movie or a product. My fourth wall is gone. I want my Verfremdungseffekt back.
American Health Care – Isn’t The Problem Really Just Greed?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 30, 2009 by admin in Politics
What would YOU do to fix America’s health care?
I’ve always thought that health care would improve significantly if doctors started out at a very high salary which went down with every patient they lost. Since that will never happen, it appears health care costs are going to remain a slight problem. I must confess that I’m about as ignorant as one can get when it comes to what’s going on with the health care plans the senate is working on right now (it’s more than one bill). I’m also astounded that there is so much disagreement about the root causes of our high health costs. I have a simplistic belief about why health care is such a shambles in the states, and almost zero faith that legislation will fix it. I believe that most discussions about the topic skip over the two fundamental causes: greed and denial. I think that our national psyche has lost touch with the fact that taking care of each other is a fundamental aspect of being a happy human, and that when we turn human life into a commodity that can have a price, you’ll end up with the morass that is American healthcare. And if you don’t think it’s a mess, look around at other capitalist democracies . Pretty much across the board, America fails, with the highest cost per-capita , lowest life expectancy (38th out of 100), and highest infant mortality rate. Do you think Washington is on track to fix these problems? What do YOU think is the problem or the solution?
So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star – Part I
[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 29, 2009 by admin in Music
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 »