Living Sisters’ New “How Are You Doing” Video Directed By Michel Gondry

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 6, 2011 by admin in Music

If The Living Sisters’ voices sound familiar, it may be because one third of them are provided by Inara George of The Bird and the Bee.

I’ve said this before, but I wish I had more time to listen to all the amazing new indy music  that’s been flooding the market the last few years. Then it wouldn’t take a torrent of links flooding the web talking about a new Michael Gondry music video (see below) to get me to notice a cool band like The Living Sisters. I hadn’t heard of them until yesterday, but like most anyone with ears would be, I was immediately struck by their uniquely witty harmonies. They sort of reminded me of The Roches (who, unlike The Living Sisters, are sisters), not because of their sound, but because of the quirky vibe. And The Living Sisters’ voicing sounded familiar too, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then it hit me. Well, it didn’t actually hit me – I had to read this LA Weekly piece from last year to learn – that the reason that something about the voices sounded so familiar was because exactly one third of them were being provided by Inara George of The Bird and The Bee, who we touched on a few weeks ago. I guess on top of needing to listen to more stuff, I should follow up better on the stuff I already am listening to as well. So I don’t have much more to say about The Living Sisters, because until I finish downloading the album Love To Live from Amazon in a few minutes, I’ve only heard previews and watched some YouTube clips. I included a live one below, which proves pretty effectively that Inara George doesn’t need the autotune that seems so pervasive in The Bird and the Bee recordings. These ladies have amazing voices. Or maybe an amazing voice; at times the similarity of their timbre makes them sound like one person singing along with a Theremin…

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The Internet Of Things & Augmented Reality

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 5, 2011 by admin in Technology

Your first life wasn’t enough, so they created Second Life. Apparently that wasn’t enough for you either. No worries, soon you can augment your reality and live in your “Internet of Things”.


Having trouble recognizing
reality? There’s an app for that.

Reality just not real enough for you lately? Having a hard time identifying the objects around you? Well, no worries. There’s an app for that. Or at least there will be before too long. We’ve talked about Augmented Reality before, but another concept is gaining traction as the next big thing. It’s called the Internet of Things . It’s based on the idea that since the coming IPv6 addressing system for the web will make it possible to encode 50 to 100 trillion objects, well heck, we just might as well. And since the average person only has about 1000 to 5000 objects around them, we’ll just give all of them addresses so we can attach information to them, since there are plenty of URL’s for everyone! We jest of course. In (ahem) reality, these technologies make some amazing stuff possible. One implementation of the idea that has gotten some press is Green Goose, an activity monitoring system that uses green, egg-shaped sensors to track your activities and help you to reach goals that you select. Their tagline is “Play Real Life”. ReadWriteWeb covered the start-up in February of last year and again this year,  if you’d like to learn more. Personally, I’m already busy enough living my life that I don’t feel a need to do it twice. But the system points to interesting possibilities. We’ve already seen some of the cool tools made possible by object or environment analysis and universal connectivity. The song recognition app SoundHound and Quest Visual’s instant translator app Word Lens are two popular examples. But in the future, we may be able to access information about nearly anything around us, with tools similar to the “terminator vision” used in T2: Judgment Day. Let’s just hope this stuff works better than autocorrect. Below is just one example of the possibilities of having detailed information about the things and people around you with point and shoot simplicity. Just make sure you keep that antivirus software updated! Read the rest of this entry »

Fake It ’til You Make It – Not Until You Break It

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on March 4, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Kidding yourself to get through tough times with your venture is a powerful tool. Just don’t make it your business model.


Some of this content is excerpted
from a book I’m working on.

You’ve probably heard of the “fake it ’til you make it” approach. It has been espoused by everyone from Amway and Alcoholics Anonymous, to Zig Ziglar. While it may sound like a trite slogan, there’s actually a tremendous amount of value in exploring the notion, both in terms of how it may benefit you, or on the other hand, impair your progress. It’s also probably important to note that there are two distinct interpretations of what this expression actually means. To a network marketer or gimmick-driven salesperson, it means pretending to be a lot more than you are until you “get there”. Something that may never in fact happen, especially if you get involved with network marketing at the wrong level or a late stage in the product’s delivery. The other version of what this means is based more on maintaining a positive attitude until you achieve results that match the attitude you’ve taken, and that’s mostly what I’ll be talking about here. I’m going to share my experiences with how this simple principle has both helped me and hindered me, but first, let’s explore whether or not the idea has any basis in reality, or whether in fact it is just more motivational mumbo-jumbo… Read the rest of this entry »

I’d Gladly Walk Your Dogma But I’d Have To Park My Karma

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 3, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

A special thanks to Charlie Sheen, Craig Ferguson, and the Milky Way.

If I adhered to established but unspoken Internet Dogma (let’s call it “Blogma”), I should be assembling some kind of witty piece comparing Charlie Sheen’s recent rants with those of Muammar Gaddafi, like this Guardian Whose Line Is It? quiz. But the fact is, I’m failing to find much humor in an insane dictator who dresses like Little Richard and kills his own citizens with hired guns from nearby devastated African countries. I also have a little trouble seeing any real humor in a deranged, egotistical, embattled drug addict embarrassing himself in the media. Regarding the first issue, I’ve always believed that killing is a really, really horrible thing. I’ve only actually watched two people die in person, but I can’t imagine why someone would cause that to happen to someone else on purpose. And regarding the second issue? As fun as drugs can be, they don’t really do anything positive that can’t be accomplished without them. I speak with a little experience in that area too; although I finally knocked it off a few years ago, I managed to consume pretty much every drug available to man, and in excess for many years. At the height of that silliness, I was “banging three gram rocks”, not seven grams like Charlie. But that’s “war story” stuff, and as any veteran of either real war or a personal war on one’s own addictions knows, war stories are stupid. They try to glorify something that fundamentally sucks. So lately, as I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the human dramas and catastrophes around the world – from the Middle East to the Midwest to down under, I realized I needed to re-center. To put things in perspective, and focus on sensible things. And watching Charlie Sheen’s rants actually helped, because he reminded me of the self-deluded person I was not too long ago. But what probably helped more was the clip below from Craig Ferguson’s TV show in which he compares making fun of Sheen to making fun of lunatics in Bedlam in the 17th century. I’ve never watched Ferguson’s show, but it was heartening to see a pop media figure showing a little humanity without coming across as preachy. And what probably has given me even more perspective over the last couple of days is the video below that one, which is simply a time-lapse clip of the Milky Way and a night of stars moving across the sky over Lake Tahoe. As I grasp for brief moments what it is that I’m seeing seeing, as our planet spins in one direction against a background of stars in the shape of a huge spiral moving another direction, with space debris occasionally streaking across the sky as it burns up in our atmosphere, for those brief moments I get a little perspective on how grand and magical the universe really is, and how maybe I need to just focus on my little corner for a bit. Thanks Charlie. Thanks Craig. Thanks Milky Way.

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Are American Politicians Being Brainwashed?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 2, 2011 by admin in Politics

Probably not. But I’m pretty sure the average American voter these days is a cult member.


Although politicians DO seem to enjoy
bizarre rituals like rubbing bundles of cash
on each other’s heads for good luck, this
should not be mistaken for brainwashing.

Although it’s easy to assert the idea that voters are for all practical purposes masses of brainwashed individuals, it’s not often that we question whether politicians have been brainwashed. I mean, although the millions of lobby and corporate interest dollars that wash over a politician in their career is a little like brainwashing, at the end of the day, that shower of dollars is really just good old-fashioned lubrication. Or bribery, or whatever you want to call it. So it’s interesting that in spite of the fact that the recent Rolling Stone piece Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators never once used the word “brainwashing”, it prompted enough references to the movie The Manchurian Candidate that experts felt compelled to publicly clarify that Psy-Ops is not “brainwashing”. At no point denying that brainwashing is employed by the military on politicians of course, but at least making that one important semantic distinction. But the truth is, it’s almost universally agreed upon by experts that even if the military were trying to brainwash politicians, it would probably fail, because brainwashing in the familiar sense simply does not exist. Pretty much all the high-profile scenarios typically cited as examples of brainwashing can be explained away as basic forms of coercion and persuasion. If the spy-novel motif of communist-brainwashed operatives that are triggered by simple visual cues like a playing card (as in The Manchurian Candidate) or a copy of Catcher in the Rye (as in Conspiracy Theory) were a reality, probably one of our greatest national liabilities would be John McCain, who has twice run for president, and was a POW in communist Vietnam for five solid years. But the absurdity of that notion just points up the fallacy of the idea that our politicians are literally being brainwashed. Frankly, I’m more worried about the American voter. As a person who might describe himself as residing somewhere in the realm between fiscally conservative Democrat and socially liberal Republican, I’ve almost entirely given up on talking about politics with friends that strongly identify with either party; the conversations tend to be so irrational that they border on delusional. But while perusing material about brainwashing and cult behavior after reading that Rolling Stone piece, I ran across something that describes this tendency in today’s political discourse disturbingly well. It’s the standard “Cult Checklist”. Below is one suggested by professor Eileen Barker, see a broader selection here.

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