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.
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< class="pagetitle">Archive for February, 2008>
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):
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.
But Carl is on the case reporting to BoingBoing:
As usual, BoingBoingers add a variety of intelligent conversation in the comments to the article. Well, a few of the comments are intelligent.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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):
DJ Spooky, himself, here at the Carolina Union’s Great Hall at 3 pm today. Facebook event here.
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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