Call off the UN! We know where he is. Dave.ofMassDestruction is in Kilgali, Rwanda and blogging about his experiences there. Great stories of traveling and on doing the good thing.
Month: February 2008 (Page 1 of 2)
CNet notices that Peter Spellman of Berklee blogging for KnowTheMusicBiz.com has some good ideas on how bands and musicians might get paid through Crowdfunding/Crowdsourcing. Peter names names of services that can help fans pay bands and then comes to this conclusion, which is straight out of the ClueTrain Manifesto (if you ask me):
Today’s consumers are no longer passive recipients of brand messages. They’ve become active participants in co-creating the brands (and bands) they love. One more reason why you need to build community around your own product and service experience at your site. It’s a worthwhile investment toward building customers, er, believers, who will be there for life.
Most of us, in the USA, can understand Lordi — Finnish heavy metalists who are also heavy on costume and makeup in a monsterly way. And a song like “Hard Rock Hallelujah” sounds somewhat familiar. So when Lordi won the EuroSong contest, we were relieved that there was something there more that mind deadening Euro-pop.
But now the Irish have upped the ante but offering a sock puppet named Dustin the Turkey singing “Irelande Douze Pointe”. Oddly I think that Dustin is onto the essence of EuroSong!
As a side note, I’d say that Dustin is not a turkey as we in the USA know turkeys, but more properly — if the word proper can be used in connection with Dustin — he is a turkey buzzard.Neither birds are native to Europe, which might make Dustin the first bird of American ancestry to represent Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest
Carl and Cory (and I) bleed over from Boingboing to Slashdot with our posts of the arrangement between Microsoft and the Library of Congress.
PJ explains the Microsoft Open Source announcement on Groklaw.
Larry Lessig ultimately rejects the Draft Lessig, but place his contributions and his energy in Change Congress.
Howard Rheindgold loves Twitter and tells you why in this love note.
Cuter, more costly and less kinky than you might think — and you can buy the whole company for the cost of only 1,000 t-shirts!
But Carl is on the case reporting to BoingBoing:
Library of Congress sells itself out to Microsoft for a mere $3 mil
Posted by Cory Doctorow, February 20, 2008 12:00 PM | permalink
Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes:
Paul Jones of iBiblio tipped me off to some recent M&A activity by Microsoft, this time involving the Library of Congress.
This deal involves the donation of “technology, services and funding” (e.g., mostly not money) with a purported value of $3m from Microsoft to the Library of Congress. The Library, in turn, agrees to put kiosks running Vista in the library and to use Microsoft Silverlight to “help power the library’s new Web site, www.myloc.gov.”
The official blogger of the library, Matt Raymond, says “this is really a quantum leap for the library.” Perhaps it is, but it sure smells like a whole lot of proprietary.
As usual, BoingBoingers add a variety of intelligent conversation in the comments to the article. Well, a few of the comments are intelligent.
At least he admits that he is “considering” running for Congress in the California 12th District and he announces a considered platform of change and he actually defines change — in this video at Lessig 08.
Larry’s video is called “10 Minutes to Announce 2 Ideas” His considering running and what is going into that consideration including a bit about his opponent in the primary is one of those ideas. The other is the “Change Congress” movement which seems to be still launching.
You need to know about sweet tea. If you live above the Sweet Tea Line, you are not in the South and you donno what sweet tea is. Do not explain to anyone about how you make tea in, say, New Jersey or Ohio. We will not listen.
About BBQ. You know how I feel. Don’t explain it to me. Eat the good stuff and hush up. Unless you are from the “mustard area of South Carolina”, in which case you best keep your distance. That’s for your own good.
Adam sends a link to this photo couple reminding me that I have kept a list of my favorite films that feature gorilla suits.
With a little help from my friends including Ruth Anderson Barnett and Andy Ihnatko, they are:
Caberet (1972) Joel Gray as the MC of a pre-Hitler Berlin nightclub, singing “If You Could See Her With My Eyes” to his gorilla beloved (in frills and a bonnet, if I remember aright), supplying the musical subtext to the growing romance between Jewish Marisa Berenson and her “aryan” lover. Sounds very incorrect, politically, but if you’ve seen the film you know how the cabaret scenes play ironically against the plot.
Morgan (1966) Swinging London in which an artist obsessed with Karl Marx and Gorillas is having difficulty facing up to his ex-wife’s remarriage. Vanessa Redgrave was nominated for an Oscar from her part as the ex-wife in this screwball comedy.
King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) possibly the corniest gorilla suit of all times. “Kingukongu tai Gojira” for you purists.
Octopussy (1983) Roger Moore as James Bond dons the gorilla suit. Also if you listen carefully a Tarzan yell is in the movie someplace.
Men aka Männer… (1985) A German Comedy written and directed by Doris Dörrie. IMDB says: “A successful, womanizing middle-aged man decides to move out of the house he shares with his wife after she confesses to having an affair. He looks for a new place to live and ends up moving into his wife’s lover’s apartment as a roommate.” One of my favorite gorilla suit scenes.
Robot Monster (1953) Possibly the worst sci-fi movie of all time. The alien, in a gorilla suit, wears a goldfish bowl on his head. Makes Plan 9 look professional. (thanks to Miles Efron for reminding me of this one)
Blonde Venus (1932) Marlene Dietrich and a very young Cary Grant! But it’s Dietrich that ends up wearing the gorilla suit while singing “Hot Voodoo.” I believe this to be one of the first, if not the first, gorilla suit film in which the character is not actually supposed to be a gorilla. Does anyone know an earlier one; this predates King Kong by a year.
Wise Blood (1979) Based on Flannery O’Connor’s novel, which itself is a threading together of several of her short stories. Hazel Mote founds the Church of Christ Without Christ but his buddy Enoch Emory, who has a thing about mummies and monkeys, runs off in a stolen gorilla suit. John Huston directing.
Trading Places (1983), the Dan Ackroyd/Eddie Murphy movie in which a man in a very, very good gorilla suit and a man in a very, very bad gorilla suit are crucial to the resolution of Act 4; features lots of hot, man-in-gorilla-suit-playing-amorous-gorilla on man-in-gorilla-suit-playing-panicky-man-in-gorilla-suit action.
The Pink Panther (1963) which features burglars in gorilla suits — one played by Robert Wagner — zipping around the narrow streets of the Paris suburbs in tiny little convertibles, hopelessly lost, making their getaway. Bonus points for use of the classic Town Drunk Who Calmly Concludes That He’s Just Hallucinating All Of This.
Africa Screams (1949), the best Abbott and Costello movie, judged through the prism of Bad Gorilla Suit scenes.
Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), and if the presence of a junkie-era Bela Lugosi isn’t enough of a tip-off about the level of the production, it also stars Sammy Petrillo, known to history “The Jerry Lewis you hired if you couldn’t afford to hire Jerry Lewis.”
In the past week, mail from ibiblio sites was falsely blocked as spam when sending to any Yahoo.com addresses (at the Yahoo! end). Folks from all kinds of our mailing lists have been complaining. Don responded and has the false positive turned off at least for now.
Simultaneously, this blog has been getting a load of Italian language comment spam from xxxx@yahoo.com dumped into the moderation queue.
Just in time to get us primed for the big Microsoft Open Source announcement due out on February 28. And for my trip out to Redmond for the Microsoft Technology Summit (aka MSFT haters go into the belly of the beast at its expense) in mid-March.
Coincidences? More news as it happens.
We saw the Deep Dish performance of State of the Union last night. It was played close to the 1946 original. I ran down to pick up a copy of the 1948 movie version directed by Frank Capra with Tracy, Hepburn, Lansbury, Johnson and company.
Now as I check the RSS from Slashdot, I see that Larry Lessig could be up for a version of the Spencer Tracy role as a congressional version of Grant Matthews. Facebook “Draft Lessig for Congress.”
Will Larry be like Grant, who ends up saying he will work from the outside of the process, or like Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)” taking on corruption face-to-face?
Last night in the cold dark rain, I slogged over to Carroll Hall to be part of a panel on new media and journalism [report from Wayne’s blog] for the Carolina Association of Black Journalists with Nichole Norfleet, Teresa Artis from Capitol Broadcasting Company, Wayne Sutton (on Twitter as @waynesutton), and Ryan Thornburg. Great conversations with enthusiastic future journalists.
You thought you were only walking down the street pushing your bike and talking to friends, but you were being immortalized by Google StreetView! Now you can write to say “I R IMMORTAL!” and I believe you. We won’t say your name but we will point to the Google Maps StreetView (just released for Chapel Hill and small nearby towns like Raleigh and Durham).
There are more than a few artifacts of Paul Miller’s aka DJ Spooky’s visit to Chapel Hill and Duke:
- John Rees’ Photos on Flickr and on Facebook
- Steve Burnett’s blog entry
- “Bigshine”‘s pictures on Flickr
- Kirk Ross’ video of TJ Anderson talking with DJ Spooky and Lyneise Williams.
- Bret Dougherty’s audio interview with Paul/Spooky and his blog entry.
- Holden Richards’ blog entry
- Tola’s Sonecast site which aggregates a lot of Spooky material from all over
- and Here’s Paul/Spooky’s remix on Will.i.am’s Yes We Can video.
JJB announces KITTEHS FOR OBAMA
Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 – Present is out (as it should be) just in time for Valentine’s Day. One poem, a translation of a 14th Century Welsh poem, is mentioned by Gwyn Williams in his 1953 “An Introduction to Welsh Poetry: From the Beginnings to the 16th Century” thusly:
If some of the poems attributed to Dafydd [ap Gwilym] in the manuscripts are really his, then his expression of erotic experience went far beyond our present limits of printability. I find no difficulty in believing him capable of indecency, though the style of some of these poems seems to indicate 15th century composition,for the re is nothing very nasty about them, only a bolder extension of the happy paganism we see in Dafydd’s indubitable work, an extension within the limit of taste of that age, and unhappily, beyond the limit of ours. It is the task of scholarship unhampered by nonconformist prejudice to estimate the authenticity of these poems whilst we hope for the advent of a cleaner social conscience to allow them to be made available to the general reader.
And so 350 years or so after Dafydd’s poem was set in ink, we see that it cannot be named in a book review as Marcy Smith writes in today’s News and Observer Book Pages (thanks Marcy BTW):
[An interlude for the under-18-year-olds reading this column: Hey, isn’t that your cell phone ringing?]
Find more perilous pleasures in “The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present” edited by David Lehman (Scribner, 336 pages). Erotic love letters abound, from Walt Whitman’s exuberant “I Sing the Body Electric” to Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!” up to “Letter to My Love” by the youthful Heather Christle. In between you’ll find a love note by Chapel Hill’s own Paul Jones: “To [Mr. Happy]” — do read it, but note that you may have trouble meeting his eye at a cocktail party afterward.
[OK, you can call the kids back.]
Nice writeups leading up to DJ Spooky‘s visit to UNC this afternoon in the Daily Tar Heel by Kevin Turner and in the News and Observer by David Menconi.
DJ Spooky, himself, here at the Carolina Union’s Great Hall at 3 pm today. Facebook event here.
Just somehow got a minimally addressed package from Tibetan (in exile) Lobsang Wangyal. It was addressed to my University address but ended up in my home carport. There is something charmed there for sure. Adding to the charm is that the package arrived on the Tibetan New Year aka Losar.
Inside the package were stickers advertising the Tibetan Olympics to be held May 15 – 25, 2008 in Dharmasala, India and two wonderful 13 month calendars for 2008 and the Year of the Earth Mouse filled with photographs by Lobsang and marked with important dates.
Thanks for the gifts and for making sure I recall, and recall fondly, my own trip to Dharmasala, Lobsang.
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