Went to Zulu tonight and got my ticket to TV on the Radio. Last one they had. Based on their new album (deliciously named http://mountaintopcampground.com/camper-rental/the-hornet-2/ Return to Cookie Mountain), TV on the Radio has gone from a group I was barely interested in to one I’m really excited about seeing!
Here they are rocking Dave and Paul (thanks to Gillian for the link).
The last week or so has been pretty aggravating and stressful — I’m working on a project which I can’t yet talk about, but it involves a lot of ActionScript coding on a tight deadline. I’m sure there are worse languages to implement math-heavy algorithms in than ActionScript, with its see-no-evil approach to syntax checking and hair-pullingly slow arithmetic, but thankfully, I’ve never had to use them.
Still, as aggravating as it has been, I’m grateful I’m not a film critic, because then I would have to see The Last Kiss. I can’t imagine a cinematic experience more tooth-grindingly odious than Zach Braff speaking the words of Paul Haggis. Unless it somehow included Julia Roberts.
Leave it to the The AV Club to make (sour) lemonaid by using this as an excuse to launch a week-long snarkathon featuring the calculated earnestness of Zach Braff. Oh sure, we all hated Garden State. But the AV Club turns that into an art.
You know, I generally (but not always) fall to the left on most social and political issues, but frankly, sometimes that makes me pretty embarrassed about the company that would imply I keep. Case in point: Project Censored, which claims to compile the stories the mainstream media censors.
Let’s leave aside the fact that they don’t supply any actual evidence of censorship, and every single item they list is a beloved leftie cause — I’m sure these people have read their Chomsky, and thus have the magical insight that allows them to detect how “structural forces” are causing censorship before there’s any need to actually, you know, censor. And, of course, only left-wing issues ever need to be censored. Duh. But are all of these stories even underreported? The number one “censored” story is about the US battle over network neutrality. It took me roughly twelve seconds to find 22 mentions in the New York Times alone, and Google lists over 2 million occurrences of the phrase “network neutrality”. Clearly the censors (sorry, I mean “structures”) have not been doing a very good job.
At #18 we have “Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story”, about the massively overreported, widely debunked, BYU conspiracy theorist Steven E Jones. The real underreported story? “Every Other Physicist on Planet Thinks Steven E Jones is a Nut.” #24 tells us the explosive truth about Dick Cheney — he has connections to Halliburton and (get this) stands to profit from them. If only the mainstream (sorry, I mean “corporate”) media had ever made any mention of this whatsoever!
Okay, okay, now I’m just getting sarcastic. I think some of the other stories may really be underreported, though not because of censorship. But really, as an actual thinking person, why should I trust an organization with the same commitment to fairness and balance as Fox News? Just because I happen to sometimes agree with them?
Gillian at The Templeton, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.
The Templeton is a little diner on Granville St, wedged uncomfortably into a block of sex shops. It’s been running since 1934 and has lots of vintage diner touches, but the free wireless and video projector showing cartoons are probably more recent additions. It also has lots of greasy food and sour coffee and deep fried Mars bars. I dig it
I find this plot by tech analysts Gartner, Inc. to be quite the amusing, especially since I’ve had professional or research encounters with several of these technologies, and I think that yes, folksonomies and social network analysis are about to disillusion a lot of people, and speech translation, augmented reality and prediction markets are all quite likely to get a lot more hype in the near future.
That said, I wonder about the wisdom of trying to fit the evolution of every technology onto this kind of line. Was Ajax really as hyped as Web 2.0 and I somehow missed it? ‘Cause from my point of view Ajax just popped up one day and made Gmail kinda awesome. And biometric payments? Seriously?
I wonder how this will look in five years? Or two?