Once again, the “real news” is mimicking the Onion. This is an actual headline from today’s Washington Post:
U.S., Citing Abuse in Iraqi Prisons, Holds Detainees
The military will not turn over detainees to Iraq until officials are satisfied that Iraqis are meeting U.S. standards.
No… no… You’re not doing it right. You hold the whip this way!
Did Wired just change their design?
ps. I didn’t know that Lycos still existed.
I was looking through my the various draft posts that I have left in Wordpress. I often start to write a post and then realize I haven’t yet formalized a coherent thought. Other times I know I want to flesh out an idea but don’t have the time to finish. This one is from December.
I can’t take it anymore. There is simply too much information for me to digest in any useable fashion. I have 3 email accounts (personal, school, and one for signup forms), 2 IM clients (AIM and GTalk). Accounts I use daily include, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Bloglines. I maintain two blogs, and try to keep up on news, events and other goings on by monitoring over 100 websites.
The wheels are coming off.
I suppose I never posted this half thought because it made more sense to do something about it.
I stumbled across this site and it made my day. Happynews.com’s credo is “Real News, Compelling Stories, Always Positive.” Headlines today include:
Even the weather carried good news.
The weather sure is nice in Atlanta today!
Atlanta, Georgia
Clear 45° F
Humidity: 46%
Winds: W 13 MPH
Barometer: 30.13 in
Heat Index: 45° F
Wind Chill: 38° F
The stocks, however, are covered with a big image that reads: Warning! Unhappy news Alert - Click at your own risk.
As of this morning, only two private bus lines that are in the process of being taken over by the MTA are on strike - all subways are running. The bus strike covers about 750 workers and affects approximately 50,000 riders a day. What upsets me about this “mini-strike” is that it only affects those people who need the transportation the most. The lines service parts of Queens where there is little alternative transportation. So this “mini-strike” is screwing over working class people.
I would have closed the 4,5 and 6 stations between Grand Central and the 110th Street. Keep the trains running, but have each station manager shut down his or her station. The 4,5 and 6 trains then would run express and pass all of the stops between Grand Central and the 110th Street.
If you are going to do a selective shut-down, screw over people who have options and will be merely be inconvenienced by the strike.
Update:
The NYTimes points out that they chose the Jamaica and Triboro Lines because they are private lines. New York state has a law that makes it illegal for public employees to walk off job. The state can impose heavy fines on the unions and on the workers directly. This “mini-strike” doesn’t fall under those rules since the drivers are employees of a private company.
I still would shut down the 4, 5 and 6 between grand Central and 110th.
Tim Boucher points to an article in USA Today about the return of late fees at Blockbuster. Apparently, they are blaming their customers for not returning movies, thus causing a shortage of titles. As Cosby’s Noah would say:
Riiiiiight….
Anyway, as I said before:
I stopped going to Blockbuster and Hollywood video when I tried to rent Casablanca and the clerk told me they didn’t carry that title. It was Hollywood video, but I banned Blockbuster by association.
Richard Pryor died today.
What blows my mind about Richard is that when you listen to much of his material, it doesn’t sound all that different from the likes of Chris Rock or a Eddie Murphy. Then it dawns on you. He was talking about having sex with white women on stage in the early 1970s! That was less than a decade after the death of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and John F. Kennedy. It was less than a decade after the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. I read somewhere that Pryor was the Malcom to Dick Gregory’s Martin. I haven’t had any exposure to Gregory’s work, but I can see where the Malcolm reference is apropos. Pryor’s routines must have scared the bejesus out of some white folks at the time. When viewed in that context, Pryor’s material was truly political (and revolutionary).
Later tonight, I am going to dust off my copy of the Bicentennial Nigger LP, pore a glass of bourbon over ice, and spend some time with Mr. Pryor.
Rest in Peace Richard.
Update: I really hope that they do a tribute show for Pryor. The talent that would line up for that show might be unmatched in history.
I am interested to hear mroe about this deal. Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 seemed to have most of the functionality that del.icio.us had and it had the added benefit of saving a cached copy of the web page - a feature that del.icio.us was sorely lacking.
I wonder if they bought it for the brand or if del.icio.us has something on the inside that the average user is not aware of (besides a ton of data). I do hope that they consolidate the two services.
I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Yahoo as they acquire some of the web’s most useful services - del.icio.us, flickr, upcoming.
Update:
I just realized that almost no one is using Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 (what an awful name). As of today, the entire service only has 459,842 pages and 110,620 tags. I just misplaced the stats for del.icio.us but they tower over that. So, Yahoo wasn’t only buying data, they were buying users.
I am becoming convinced that this administration is just mean-spirited:
From the Washington Post:
Last month’s budget-cutting bill would save $50 billion over five years by imposing new fees on Medicaid recipients, trimming the food stamp rolls, squeezing student lenders and cutting federal child support enforcement.
Let me get this straight…
We don’t want the kid to get child support. If he manages to get it, we are going to make sure that he has a diffuclt time getting fed. If he manages to escape this fate and gets to college, we will try to bankrupt him. And if he lives through all of this, we are going to try to kill him in his golden years, and short of killing him we will make it as painful and expensive as possible.
I was reading something about ferrofluid (don’t ask) and came across this funny footnote:
Thought process of the guy who invented coffee: “I have an idea. Let’s pick these red cherry things, then dry them in the sun for a week or two, then throw away the fruit and keep the seed, then bake the seed for ten minutes, then grind up the burnt seed, then pour hot water through it, and then drink the brown liquid.
Rumour has it that Google will be launching a calendar program as early as December 6th.
The url http://calendar.google.com/ is live but points to the Google homepage right now. Typically when they activate a new sub-domain it indicates that a new service is imminent.
I’ll be interested to see how they do. Gmail and Google maps were absolute genius. Google Reader and Google Base… no so much.
Update: As of the 11th the site is still not live. Oh well.
Steven Soderbergh is set to release his newest movie, Bubble, on January 27 in the theaters, on DVD and on HDTV simultaneously.
Soderbergh makes a great point in his interview with Xeni:
Name any big-title movie that’s come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It’s called piracy. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Ocean’s Eleven, and Ocean’s Twelve - I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We’re just trying to gain control over it.
I remember reading a while back that Mark Cuban has been planning to pull of this stunt for a while. Wait a minute…
Yep. This was from an interview in 2003 with… Xeni Jardin. Mark owns Landmark Theaters and HDNet. In the interview he talks about simultaneous releases. I bet he is doing this with Soderbergh.
Yep. Cuban is the Executive Producer
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