Monday, May 31, 2004

Bob Stepno on the World Editors Forum in Istanbul. 

Last night's 60 Minutes had a controversial segment, I watched it this morning on TiVO, a 10-minute scroll of pictures of American soldiers who died in Iraq. Some observations. When people say it's just Americans in Iraq they're missing something, America is so diverse, we have people of European, African, Asian, Latin descent. All those young people's lives gone, it's profoundly sad, and you feel it differently when you see all their faces scrolling by. In Andy Rooney's lead-up he got in a dig at men, saying most of the people working on new ways to kill people are men. He didn't mention that most of the soldiers who die in wars are men too. Next week I'd like to see CBS run a similar segment with all the Iraqis who have died in the war. Their deaths are no less tragic. I suspect you'd see a lot of small children, mothers and grandparents among their dead. It would take much longer than sixty minutes.  

New York: "Falsely accused of having an affair with John Kerry, the 'intern' sifts through the mud and the people who threw it." 

Wired: "Companies prefer authoritarianism to democracy." 

I left California for Boston in March last year, throwing out four dumpsters of posessions, put most of the rest in storage, and happily got on the road with what would fit in my car. In the last year, I've accumulated so much stuff that I either have to put it in storage in Boston, or leave it behind. Reading this NY Times article about household junk reminded me that I still need to leave cities periodically to keep the load reasonably light. Still don't know where I'm going btw. July 1 is moving day.  

Trial balloon: Solving the "silent data loss" problem in RSS 2.0. 

UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics. 

Okay they can't have elections in Iraq for some time. Makes sense. They've never had real elections. You can't bootstrap democracy overnight. But you can do a poll. Ask a scientifically-chosen random sample of Iraqis of voting age (over 18?) which of three or four people they want to be the interim president of the country. It's not the best solution, but it seems better than the US creating a puppet regime.  

Adam Curry and his colleagues created a wireless LAN on their flight home from Las Vegas to Amsterdam.  

Netflix RSS feeds? 

Watching movies in the age of the Internet is way different. Now I can look something up after watching a movie, like for example, did you know how many future stars were in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? It's pretty amazing. Scatman Crothers, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd.

Last night I went to see Troy with a friend, a perfectly awful movie. So much for the theory that I like everything. This one just goes on and on. At one point the camera focuses on an old man who at first looks like he might be Peter O'Toole. Oh good, we'll have some real acting now, I said to myself. But on closer examination, it's just a sad old man, not O'Toole. And the acting continues to be absolutely terrible. The best moments are when Brad Pitt preens, looking beautiful. And that's pretty bad. Anyway on getting home I looked up some reviews, and hold on, that was Peter O'Toole. Holy hanna. He's aged so poorly, and has become a really shitty actor (or is it really shitty direction). Either way, a shame.

It seems that Netflix would be just the kind of network service to give me an RSS feed I can subscribe to, where they would give me interesting articles about movies I just saw, or ones I'm about to see, or movies playing near my house that I would probably like, movies my friends liked, etc etc. They already do a bunch of stuff like that on their site, so why not do it in a feed?

Also, did I write this just so I could include a picture of a youngish Jack Nicholson? I'm not telling.