Daily Blah

Summer of the Supervillain

2008-07-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

First it was Iron Man, Marvel's best movie yet, made all the more watchable by a thoroughly ambiguous bad-guy-turned-nice-guy, Robert Downey Jr. Then Heath Ledger posthumously steals the show as the Joker in The Dark Knight. And now the day of the supervillain has truly arrived in Joss Whedon's latest venture, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Dr. Horrible's first two acts (of three) are up on the site now, and well worth half an hour of your time (unless, of course, you have no sense of humor and hated Moulin Rouge). Neal Patrick Harris' character is the most sympathetic anti-hero of our times, and Nathan Filion -- Mal from Firefly/Serenity -- is a joy as the noxious narcissist Captain Hammer. No wonder that Craigslist guy was looking for a nemesis.

Monkeys With Typewriters

2008-07-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

One Million Monkeys is a fascinating idea for a website -- sort of a variation on "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories, a genre I have an abiding love for, and one which I always thought would work well on the web. It still might. With One Million Monkeys, stories are written in 200- or 300-word snippets, then branch off in multiple directions as multiple writers try their hand at penning the next bit. Readers get to vote up or down on whether any given branch of the story works. In theory, the strongest branches should thrive, and a strong tall story will sprout up organically.

For now, however, the stories are spotty, uneven, and have the kind of written-by-committee feel you might expect from such an environment. There seems to be little connection between the number of votes a story branch has received and its quality -- perhaps you need a critical mass of readers on the site to drown out the multiple votes of the writer, his friends and his mother.

Given the potential to run into weak branches, therefore, One Million Monkeys is not yet a compelling reading experience. Perhaps if it were more of a game, with two teams of monkeys racing to reach a separate conclusion within a set number of words, but were forced to swap branches every turn. Now that I'd read.

Move Over, Obama

2008-07-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

For those who haven't seen the news:

Wanted: Nemesis

2008-07-16T23:24:00.000-07:00

This intriguing, if badly spell-checked item showed up on the best of Craigslist:

I've been trying to think of ways to spice up my life. I'm 35 years old, happily married with two kids and I have a good job in insurance. But somethings [sic] missing. I feel like I'm old before my time. I need to inject some excitement into my daily routine through my arm before its too late. I need a challenge, something to get the adrenaline pumping again. An addiction would be nice, but, in short, I need a nemesis. I'm willing to pay $350 up front for you [sic] services as an arch enemy over the next six months. Nothing crazy. Steal my parking space, knock my coffee over, trip me when Im running to catch the BART and occasionaly [sic] whisper in my ear, "Ahha, we meet again". That kind of thing. Just keep me on my toes. Complacency will be the death of me. You need to have an evil streak and be blessed with innate guile and cunning. You should also be adept at inconspicuous pursuit. Evil laugh preferred. Send me a photo and a brief explanation why you would be a good nemesis. British accent preferred.

My response to the list this showed up on:

If I were to accept $350 for my full raft of services, I'd be laughed out of UBAN -- the Union of British-Accented Nemeses.

For $350, I can do a slightly surly English mutter, and I'll throw in an Evil Chuckle. But no more.

You want the full vendetta package, it's going to cost you ... (evil pause) One. Meeeellion. Dollars!

(Thanks, Nina!)

Rejected Video Games

2008-06-25T12:48:00.000-07:00

Very funny and well-designed, from a friend of a friend of a friend:

Banksy, Eat Your Heart Out

2008-06-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

Check out this astonishing stop motion graffiti animation, with an evolutionary theme, from the streets of Buenos Aires. Actually, given the amount of white-out paint used, it's more like anti-graffiti. Banksy may be a genre-defining artist, but has he ever thought of branching out into animation like Blu?

The Hour of Bewilder Bride

2008-06-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

My dear bride-to-be, Jess, has started a blog with the excellent title Bewilder Bride, a nod to one of her favorite artists, Badly Drawn Boy. It details the joys and the angst of planning a wedding on an island in the middle of San Francisco bay. Check it out here.

Who Wants to Be a World-Feeder?

2008-06-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Kaila for this link to the Free Rice website. Instead of just mindlessly clicking away to donate rice to the starving, you now have to answer multiple choice vocabulary questions -- just tough enough to test a hack writer. Get it wrong, and you'll face the same question some time later, turning it into a memory test. Twenty grains of rice are donated per correct answer. Result: an addictive game that actually makes a difference. I'm up to 7,420 grains -- see if you can beat that today.

Signs of the McCain Apocalypse, Part 2

2008-06-09T17:29:00.000-07:00

Barack B Goode

2008-06-09T17:05:00.000-07:00

Signs the McCain campaign is going to crash and burn: No 1 in an occasional series

From a Yahoo! News story on Chuck Berry backing Barack Obama, despite McCain's use of Berry's music:

McCain, now preparing to take on Obama in the November presidential election, used Berry's hit "Johnny B. Goode" as an early campaign theme, although he has since switched to ABBA's "Take a Chance On Me."

Seriously? I mean, you can see the reason. He's making a timely play for disaffected Hillary voters. It couldn't be more obvious if he started wearing a T-shirt reading "Hey Ladies! Feeling Jilted?" Who knows, it may win him some portion of the Mama Mia moms demographic. Hillary, now there was an ABBA candidate. Sometimes her campaign seemed like one long mix-tape. I haven't heard her concession speech yet, but I imagine it goes something like this:

Walking through an empty house, tears in my eyes /
Here is where the story ends, this is goodbye.

Point is, look at it this way: John McCain just chose a gay anthem for his campaign song. That is not going to endear him to Joe Sixpack. In 2004, Rove's droves of conservative voters came out for Bush because they wanted gay marriage bans in their state constitutions. Their ideal campaign song -- sorry, anthem, song sounds too gay -- would be something manly and country-ish. The Brooks and Dunn crowd was already considering staying home for McCain.

Meanwhile, if Berry feels the way he does about Barry, how about recording a new version of the song McCain stole? "Barack B Goode" has a nice ring to it.

His mother told him "Someday you will be a man,
And you will be the leader of a big old band.
Many people coming from miles around
To hear you play your music when the sun go down
Maybe someday your name will be in lights
Saying Barack B. Goode tonight."

The Road to Ecotopia

2008-04-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

A thought-provoking set of articles and essays in Forbes on one of my favorite topics: Modern Utopias. The first, Ecotopia, is required reading, a great little piece of reporting on one of those under-the-radar trends. The others you can take or leave. From Ecotopia:

The academics and organizations who track "intentional communities" today--a tricky task, given that some don't want to be found--say the U.S. and other Western countries have been experiencing a wave of community-forming since the mid 1990s. Saving the planet has replaced godly fervor and free love as the driving emotional force.

Fantastic! Lead me to these Edens where you can hold your head up high and say you're really doing something about global warming. (thanks to the Internet, now you can work a regular knowledge job from whereever you are, phone in ear, laptop to hand, at the same time as you bring in the harvest.)

Only one problem -- this website, the Fellowship of Intentional Community's tracking portal, supposedly the best way to get to your local Ecotopia. It's a poorly-designed mish-mash of self-promotional materials, with a confusing directory. I found 200 Ecotopias in California, in this unhelpful close-typed list. How about a search by zip code? And while we're at it, where is the online community? Wither user comments and ratings on each community? Seems to me, Ecotopia could use more than a little Web 2.0.

This is Not a Test

2008-04-16T22:35:00.001-07:00

Now posting to Twitter, Facebook, and Daily Blah combined. Have joined Dark Side. Facebook, or rather a Facebook app called Blog It, offered me access to all three if I would enter via Facebook. Also, Facebook now offering Chat application. Yes master ... I shall migrate my online life to Facebook ...

Bitter? You're damn right we're bitter ...

2008-04-15T16:33:00.001-07:00

After seven years of Bush, in the midst of a tanking economy, who wouldn't be?

So glad to see Hillary's desperate decision to attack Obama's comments about "bitter voters ... clinging to guns and church" blow up in her face. First she gets heckled when she tries to bring it up at a campaign event. Now this grassroots website has sprung up: Bitter Voters for Barak, a nifty collection of responses from avowedly bitter voters.

We're getting savvier. We have the Internet. We won't get fooled again.

Burning a Hole in Our Pockets

2008-04-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

3Trillion.org is a nice idea for a website. It takes the premise that the Iraq war will end up costing the U.S. three trillion dollars -- a conservative estimate, if Mr. McCain keeps us there for 10,000 years -- and presents this startling fact in a way any web dweller will understand. To wit: if there were an Amazon-style site where you could spend $3 trillion in any way you choose, what would you put in your shopping cart? For example, I picked up the entire city of San Francisco for $100 billion. (That's the combined value of all its real estate, though I have to imagine I'd get some sort of bulk discount.)

It's almost impossible to max out your cart. I snapped up a private Carribean island, constructed a moon base, ended world hunger for a year, funded universal literacy, took over Google (a bargain at $20 billion), built infrastructure across the U.S. for solar power and hydrogen cars, and in a kind of impulse decision at the checkout stand, bought the world's most expensive book (a $20 million Benedictine Bible). And still, I hadn't even broken $2 trillion. I had to pay back all of Social Security's debt, fix the Katrina damage, replace all U.S. agriculture with sustainable organic farming, give one dollar to every human being on the planet. Even then, I only maxed out my cart when I tried to buy Yahoo as well.

Wild Endings

2008-03-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

Lest you think I simply praise any movie I see to the high heavens, let me first tell you about the ho-hum flicks I've seen recently. This is England: no it wasn't. A very incomplete, lazily-ended slice of life about skinheads in 1983, it spent too much time trying to draw some unexplained connection to the Falklands War and not enough tying up its characters' loose ends. Sweeney Todd: not bad, a nice cameo by Sasha Baron Coen, but again, it squandered itself in a lazy ending. U23D: could have been great, probably was great on a digital IMAX. The analogue version made me go a little cross-eyed behind my outsize 3D glasses.

Okay, critical duty done. Now excuse me while I rave about Into the Wild, which just came out on DVD. (Yes, I know I'm a little behind the curve on this one). Most movies of this kind of length -- 2 hours 30 minutes -- tend to drag by the end. But this one, the (mostly) true story of Chris McCandless, a Thoreau-reading graduate who fled his family, gave his college fund to charity and walked the land, ending up in the Alaskan wilderness, could easily have been longer. Emile Hirsch, an astonishing fusion of Jack Black and young Leo DiCaprio, gives an incandescent performance as McCandless, and Hal Holbrook's bit part as an equally lonely old man brought me to tears. But the real star of the movie is the great American west: the vast deserts, the cornfields, the Colorado river, the ocean, the Pacific Coastal Trail, the eagles, horses, moose and bears; none have ever looked so beautiful on film. Nor is it tame or pastoral; it simulataneously manages to look rough, dusty, raw, and feral. It's more red in tooth and claw than any late-night National Geographic documentary.

I was enraptured for every minute of the movie. There was so much life in this ultimately mortal voyage that it was hard not to feel the way you feel when you've been out in nature for a week or so: a little more free, a little more grateful, a little less "civilized" in all the right ways. I was reminded somewhat of Burning Man, but substantially more of the trips I took on the Green Tortoise at McCandless' age. Those communal bus adventures were, in many senses, the opposite of his one-man wanderings, but they shared his disgust with American cities and suburbs, and his Emersonian devotion to truth in nature. And of course, he ends up in Alaska in a "magic bus" of his own.

The film didn't mention this, but the bus was heartbreakingly close to food, shelter and a river crossing at the end, according to this Outside article by the author of the book the movie is based on. McCandless didn't know this, as he had neglected -- or shunned -- the carrying of a map. Getting back to the wilderness is all well and good. Informing yourself about it, as Emerson and Thoreau and Burning Man and the drivers of the Green Tortoise would all agree, is the only thing that stops the journey being suicide.

Bush Clinton Bush Clinton

2008-03-06T17:15:00.001-08:00

For a brief, shining moment, all was right with the world. Hillary's increasingly desperate attacks on Obama were like water off his back, and the press took a faintly bemused attitude to it all. She's the one to fix healthcare? Um, right. She has tons of foreign policy experience because of all those trips she took as first lady? Okay. Ready on day one? Gotcha.

Then came Ohio and Texas, and it appeared that the constant Clinton barrage of negativity had worked. Now, it seems, anything goes. Hillary's advisers compare Obama to Ken Starr because he said he'd start scrutinizing her as intensely as she was looking at him, and the press reports it uncritically. We're back down the rabbit hole, still living in the years of Bush insanity. Black still equals white. We have always been at war with Eastasia. A tiny bomb in Times Square is the end of civilization.

This, you see, is why I never became a political reporter. I burst enough blood vessels just reading campaign news. It feels like we're stuck in a timewarp: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. No escape.

Swede the Internet

2008-03-05T00:43:00.000-08:00

Since I got back from Paris and London, I've been encouraging everyone I meet to see Be Kind Rewind. It's a must for anyone who likes movies, or electricity, or pizza, or being silly. Like the pathetic video shop full of outmode -- worse, erased -- video tapes which it depicts, it needs help. It's in danger of becoming one of those movies banished to VHS -- not literally, but you know what I mean. A "lost classic." But the truth is, this is Michel Gondry's best film since "Eternal Sunshine," and may even surpass that masterwork.

At its core is the can-do, cardboard-cut-out-and-string spirit of childhood. A movie for the forthcoming Obama era, it declares: yes you can remake a video library of hit movies using nothing but a camera, cheap props, and pluck. Gondry goes so far as to suggest this spirit can save the world, or at least a video shop threatened with compulsory demolition. Be Kind Rewind, for such is the name of the New Jersey store, is the center of a sad, run-down but also blissfully innocent world; a building reputed to be the birthplace of Fats Waller, a building whose owner takes an old-fashioned train journey to do some old-fashioned industrial spying on a competitor who sells 'em newfangled DVDs.

A tinfoil conspiracy nut and a man-child accidentally erase the entire stock while the owner is away, and feel responsible enough to film their own utterly sincere attempt at a remake of the first film requested by a customer. This is the kind of community where a customer is patient enough to wait until 6pm that day, allowing the pair to shoot twenty minutes of film as a replacement. The result, of course, charms the town. They're not fooled, but who could fail to be won over -- or prefer this heartfelt amateurism to the prepackaged dreck you pick up at a regular video store?

You can almost hear the Web 2.0 crowd cheering (and booing when the Hollywood copyright lawyers come along and destroy the stock). This is the world if it were run by Flickr or Wikipedia or YouTube. "Sweding" is the term Gondry uses; it's a nonsense word gabbled by one of the video makers when asked to name the process by which these Hollywood movies were made so good. Sweding: A tacit admission that mainstream dreck has been entirely perverted, and redeemed, through the filter of outsider art.

You can see it on the Be Kind Rewind website, which adapts a great Eddie Izzard joke about technofear -- "I've deleted the Internet?" --and replaces said Internet with a cardboard-and-string version -- beginning, of course, with Google. Your search results will be sweded.

So, Dear Blah reader, here is your meme of the day, possibly the meme of the year. Go forth and swede yourself.

Do Not Adjust Your Blah

2008-02-02T02:02:00.000-08:00

Nothing to see here, either ...

Blah Test Image

2008-02-02T00:22:00.000-08:00

Nothing to see here. Carry on, please.

Big Google is Watching You

2008-01-31T16:41:00.000-08:00

We at Daily Blah continue to be excited about the street view feature on Google Maps. It's like taking a vacation in a city without actually going there. It continues to inspire the younger generation, too. We remember leading a class of kids in journalism brainstorming at 826 Valencia, and the story that most inspired interest was one about the privacy aspects of street view. "My neighbor was caught on his doorstep in pink furry slippers," said one kid excitedly. When we dialed up a contact at Google to discuss the story over speakerphone, a once rowdy class became suddenly still, like they were listening to the voice of God.

At first, we were saddened that Daily Blah world headquarters was not really featured in street view -- you can sort of see it from the main road, but because it's on a cul-de-sac, the Google van evidently did not come to visit. But after watching this video, we're actually rather glad. Easily the most disturbing thing I've seen in months.

Macworld Haiku

2008-01-09T16:27:00.000-08:00

Oh, and one more thing
Reality distortion
Is mandatory

Whereas a blog ...

2007-12-29T00:41:00.001-08:00

Is written on the first, most spontaneous draft of thought, or it is not written at all. :D

Aphorism of the Day

2007-12-29T00:38:00.001-08:00

A novel is written in two drafts, or it is not written at all.

Aphorism of the day

2007-12-28T11:14:00.001-08:00

The first thing we should do with the future is learn how to respect it, then how to please it � and never dare presume we are so worthy as to predict it.
-- Future Boy

The Blah is Back

2007-10-11T02:06:00.000-07:00