this is a land of mystery and wonder
I’m thinking of selling my Linux box and replacing it with a dedicated NAS. It’s a fairly decent machine for MythTV or similar usage, with 4x300GB SATA drives, two TV tuners, and various other specs that I’d have to go look up. Anyone interested?
Edit: Details inside
I’ll be lucky if a single reader gets this joke. If you do, post a comment, but don’t spoil me for _Life on Mars_: I’m still mid-season 1.
From a Television Without Pity message board discussing the most recent _Doctor Who_ episode which involves angel statues whose touch sends people back in time:
Caffeine Junkie: One sends you back to what we can assume is London in 1969, another to Hull in 1920. Who knows when and where the other 2 send people.
Nuallain: Manchester, 1973?
Fiene: My name is Sam Tyler, bladiblah. Am I mad, in a coma, or touched by a quantum locked angel?
An anonymous fan has digitized for YouTube three segments from Charles Kuralt’s On the Road series that aired on the _CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite_ beginning in 1967. “A Stop Along the [Oregon] Trail,” “Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal,” and “Thanksgiving in Prairie Mississippi” are beautiful examples of Americana, and a great introduction, for those of us too young to have seen it, to Kuralt’s brand of journalism.
This brief essay by Professor Lewis Hyde was published in this month’s edition of The Filter, the Berkman Center newsletter. I like it, especially the ending.
In his keynote to the IS2K7 conference, John Palfrey noted that in front of each Harvard library one now usually finds a sign saying “Harvard ID Holders Only.” What sort of signs, Palfrey was asking, should greet those who approach these libraries not in their physical manifestations but as they appear in cyberspace?
Sex with a minor: one year in prison. Sex with a minor plus some emails: 30 years. Because he was using the internet, you see. Well that makes sense.
Recently I signed up with Boston Organics. I’m paying them $27 week, or about half of my traditional grocery shopping allotment, for fresh organic produce and vegetables. (Depending on usage I may drop to biweekly delivery.) My hope is that by being “forced” to make use of various fruits and vegetables that I might not otherwise have bought, I’ll improve my diet and try new things. Yesterday I got home to a green box full of stuff, and instead of some less healthy after-work snack, I chose a plum. For dinner I made a salad. And for breakfast I had an omelette. And today I packed a lunch for work for the first time in…well…a while.
So we’ll see how long this lasts.
Here’s what I got in my first box:
* 2 Abate pears
* 5 Bananas
* 2 Gala apples
* 1 Haitian mango
* 3 Red plums
* 1 Box strawberries
* 2 Valencia oranges
* 1 Avocado
* 1 Head broccoli
* 1 Head red leaf lettuce
* 3 Roma tomatoes
* 2 Ears yellow corn
* 2 Nectarines
* 2 Peaches
* 1 loaf 7 grain bread (with dates, an unwelcomed surprise)
Why DRM won’t ever work. The most insightful bit is near the end when he talks about the US government.
Somewhere around one in every 5000 people is born “intersex,” with biological or chromosomal characteristics that are both male and female. Says Wikipedia, “[i]ronically since the advancements in surgery have made it possible for intersex conditions to be concealed, many people are not aware of how frequently intersex conditions arise in human beings or that they occur at all.” However some cultures recognize a “third sex” that is neither male nor female.
!>/files/2007/06/paradebrown.jpg! In 1913 Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, was accused of murdering a child employee, Mary Phagan, on Confederate Memorial Day. The violent murder provoked feelings of rage in a town and region uncertain about its place in the world and its future. The subsequent conviction, sentencing to death, and then commutation to life imprisonment of Frank led to a resurgent of the Ku Klux Klan as well as the founding of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. While there is substantial evidence that Frank was falsely accused and improperly convicted, his sentence has never been overturned, and many to this day continue to proclaim his guilt.
I saw _Parade_, a musical retelling of the Leo Frank story, back in 2003 and took issue with the book, worrying that the complexities and ambiguities of the story were lost in this retelling. And while the story was powerful, it was hard to get a real feel for the players.
In the SpeakEasy production, running at the Boston Center for the Arts through June 15th, some of these problems have been remedied in brilliant fashion, while other fundamental flaws in the book remain.
It’s weird, I got back from the Internet & Society Conference today and put on an old episode of the _Daily Show_, and in the middle of Jon Stewart’s interview with Al Gore about the news media’s abdication of its civic duty, I went to pull up the question tool or the backchannel chat to put in a question to Mr. Gore about his thoughts on the Fairness Doctrine. It took me a second to realize that, in addition to being pre-recorded, the Daily Show is not, in fact, the least bit interactive or democratic. I felt momentarily angry that there was no way to inject my voice into the process. I guess that’s what a day of talking about participatory culture will do to you.
If you have seen both _Boogie Nights_ and the original _Star Wars_ films, this trailer mash-up is brilliant.
We checked out the Boston Public Gardens during Jessica’s visit. We also wandered down to Newport, RI and took an awkward tour of the Astor Mansion led by actors pretending to be period gentry.
Ethan, who has had a tough six months, reflects poignantly on living with uncertainty and dealing with problems cryptogenic.
Lots of TV shows are now releasing recorded commentary tracks as podcasts, but here’s the thing: they’re generally awful. The two best are Ron Moore’s _Battlestar Galactica_ commentaries and Colin Ferguson’s _Eureka_ podcasts. What makes a good commentary track? Going in with some things you want to talk about. Information about how stories took shape, fun stories from the set, the compromises necessary to produce a show, the last-minute changes required by time or weather or budget. What were you trying to accomplish in a scene? Did it work? What would you do differently? How do you hope people will interpret things? Why did you make one creative choice over another? If your role isn’t well understood (i.e. focus puller, second AD, propmaster, dialect coach, whatever), what is it you do? How did you get into that line of work? How is this show different from or similar to others, in terms of your experiences?
The worst possible podcasts are the ones where they grab three or four people who may be interesting (say a writer, a DP, and a cast regular and a guest star) but who don’t really know each other, don’t know what they’re going to talk about, and are seeing the show for the first time. Most of the time is going to be filled with silence, some “oohs” and “aahs” as they see things in finished form, a bit of chat about how great it is to work with everyone and how amazing it is to be on the show, and a few awkward questions from the one person who decides they’d better try to get everyone else talking so that the whole podcast isn’t a complete bust.
Its great that shows are giving us value-add in the form of behind the scenes videos, blog posts, message boards, Q&As, and podcast commentaries. It gives the dedicated fans a much-appreciated look at the realities of the television business and a much better understanding of what it takes to make good television. But sometimes it seems like someone up above says “we need to put up interactive content” without really getting any buy-in from down below, and the end result is pretty disappointing. I’m generally of the opinion that if you’re going to do something, you should do it the best you can (given, of course, the various constraints of life that so often get in our way). I can’t say that the _Doctor Who_ or _Scrubs_ podcasts in particular live up to these expectations.
When I first heard about Microsoft’s Vista ReadyBoost technology, it sounded ridiculous. Using a flash drive to speed up your computer? Right. PC World’s testing confirms its uselessness.
After more than a decade of tightening guidelines, Europe has made green architecture an everyday reality. […] In the United States, architects cannot make the same claim with equal confidence. Despite the media attention showered on ‘green’ issues, the federal government has yet to establish universal efficiency standards for buildings. Yet, according to some estimates, buildings consume nearly as much energy as industry and transportation combined. And the average building in the U.S. uses roughly a third more energy than its German counterpart.
— "Why Are They Greener Than We Are?" by Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times Magazine
!the show is officially cancelled. I know I wanted this — well, sorta — but it still hits harder than I thought it would. Damn, I’m gonna miss the characters, the stories, the mysteries, all of it. Sniffle. _VM_ was pretty darn amazing. Farewell, Veronica, farewell Neptune.
But then, as Duncan’s fortune cookie says, “true love stories never have endings.” I’m putting you on my shelf in the honored place next to _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_. You earned it.
Several very vocal editors at Wikipedia seem to be swaying consensus on spoilers. Very soon now “spoiler warnings” may be banished from Wikipedia, meaning that it will be impossible to visit an article about, say, a recent movie or book, without being exposed to plot twists and ending details. As someone who frequently visits Wikipedia pages about movies and books I have not yet consumed, this makes me sad. Said one commentor:
I’m afraid it all boils down to my blank incomprehension of suggestions that we should put redundant warnings into our articles just to mollycoddle people who, knowing of their own personal wishes not to have foreknowledge of the details of fictional works, would stupidly or perversely choose to read articles about those works.
Well, err, I got some useful information about _The Departed_ out of the article without being spoiled, including a good write-up of the Boston setting, information about awards won, actors in the film, the soundtrack, box office gross, and its origins. And I was able to easily avoid plot details because of the clear spoiler tags. But apparently I’m just an idiot who doesn’t deserve to read Wikipedia?
(Warning: the discussion itself contains several spoilers for recent notable books and movies. Jerks.)
The Undiscovered Bedrooms of Manhattan. Apparently everyone fantisizes about having more space in one of the most cramped cities in the world.