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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Mark Who?
I've been thoroughly enjoying watching coverage of the revelation of Deep Throat unfold. The most important question for media circus junkies like me: is today's news going to be perceived as an anti-climax, a footnote to Watergate? All signs point to yes. Watergate was such a huge story, the only scandal to ever topple a President, that I think we were all expecting (and yes, perhaps hoping for) a bigger bang from the grand unmasking. That whole who-is-Deep-Throat party game/book industry was fueled by a desire for the meltdown of a celebrity image, be that celebrity Kissenger, Al Haig, Pat Buchanan or even -- the tabloid jackpot! -- Diane Sawyer. Could you imagine the feeding frenzy that would follow, if it turned out Nixon had been brought down by one of his own?
One could not imagine a more boring answer to the question than this: it's an FBI functionary passed over for Hoover's job who felt going to the WaPo was the right thing to do. Announce that theory at a dinner party, and the hostess would have started clearing away the plates and talking about dessert. No wonder the theory -- which was such a hot theory among Watergate wonks that dozens of writers are now claiming "I told you so" -- never gained any mass traction.
But that's life: never as exciting as the movies. Bob Woodward is no Robert Redford, Carl Bernstein is definitely no Dustin Hoffman, and Mark Felt? He's clearly no Hal Holbrook. (Wither the gravely, chain-smoking voice, the smouldering face of truth shrouded in the darkness of a DC garage?) Curiously, though, Ben Bradlee is Jason Robards.
Exterminate Trace!
All this Doctor Who talk has made me hungry for the idea of building a 15 ft.-Dalek to roam around the Playa at Burning Man this year. And of course, someone has already posted Dalek-building plans online. Even more luckily, I have friends prepared to devote their summers to such a project at the drop of a phone call.
David Who?
A Tenth Doctor Who has been announced, and I would like to file an official complaint with the universe that no one informed me of this until a month after the fact (and even then, I only discovered via an unrelated Google search). This is like a Catholic not finding out they chose a new Pope. So my own personal "Ratzing-whu?" moment is: who the heck is David Tennant? A star in the BBC show Casanova, apparently, which has not yet reached these shores (unlike Christopher Eccleston's work).
But hang on a minute. Casanova? Doctors used to be chosen for their eccentricity, their otherworldlyness. Sure, they were adventurous time-travelers, but in a big-toothed British kind of way. They were wizened and wizardly. No matter how old you were, you could look up to them as being every minute the (roughly) 900 years this guy was supposed to be.
In the last decade, though, it seems the Doctor has to be a dashing romantic lead in his twenties -- Paul McGann, Ecclestone (not traditionally romantic, to be sure, but still dashingly leather-bound) and now Casanova bloke. Yes, I know, the world has changed, and yes, I know the Doctor's regenerating body has been getting consistently younger (not to mention smaller and thinner -- are there too many fashion magazines lying around the TARDIS?)
I'll reserve final judgment on Tennant until I see him in action, naturally, but he looks barely old enough to shave. Who's going to play the Doctor after him, and will there be a court order to prevent Michael Jackson from watching?
Mr. Wiki's Wild Ride
Here's my latest Time piece, the business lead this week, on wikis and the Wikipedia. It's a long 'un, but was a breeze to report and write. That's partly because the main characters -- Wales, Cunningham, Sanger and everyone else I interviewed -- are easygoing, helpful and fascinatingly smart. But mostly it was easy because wikis are such a beautifully simple idea, and they really work. I love it when democracy and technology get together.
It's a Wiki, Wiki World
Want to add your 2 cents to an encyclopedia? Join the crowd
Being the founder of the Internet's largest encyclopedia means Jimmy Wales gets a lot of bizarre e-mail. There are the correspondents who assume he wrote Wikipedia himself and is therefore an expert on everything—like the guy who found vials of mercury in his late grandfather's attic and wanted Wales, a former options trader, to tell him what to do with them. There are kooks who claim to have found, say, a 9,000-year-old, 15-ft.-tall human skeleton and wonder whether Wales would be interested. But the e-mails that make him laugh out loud come from concerned newcomers who have just discovered they have total freedom to edit just about any Wikipedia entry at the click of a button. Oh my God, they write, you've got a major security flaw!
As the old techie saying goes, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in 76 languages—and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. (An Encyclopaedia Britannica editor once compared Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don't know who used it last.) Loyal Wikipedians argue that collaboration improves articles over time, just as free open-source software like Linux and Firefox is more robust than for-profit competitors because thousands of amateur programmers get to look at the code and suggest changes. It's the same principle that New Yorker writer James Surowiecki asserted in his best seller The Wisdom of Crowds: large groups of people are inherently smarter than an élite few.
Wikipedia is in the vanguard of a whole wave of wikis built on that idea. A wiki is a deceptively simple piece of software (little more than five lines of computer code) that you can download for free and use to make a website that can be edited by anyone you like. Need to solve a thorny business problem overnight and all members of your team are in different time zones? Start a wiki. In Silicon Valley, at least, wiki culture has already taken root. "A lot of corporations are using wikis without top management even knowing it," says John Seely Brown, the legendary former chief scientist at Xerox PARC. "It's a bottom-up phenomenon. The CIO may not get it, but the people actually doing the work see the need for them."
Inspired by Wikipedia, a Silicon Valley start-up called Socialtext has helped set up wikis at a hundred companies, including Nokia and Kodak. Business wikis are being used for project management, mission statements and cross-company collaborations. Instead of e-mailing a vital Word document to your co-workers—and creating confusion about which version is the most up-to-date—you can now literally all be on the same page: as a wiki Web page, the document automatically reflects all changes by team members. Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield claims that accelerates project cycles 25%. "A lot of people are afraid because they have to give up control over information," he says. "But in the end, wikis foster trust."
The father of the wiki is Ward Cunningham, a programmer who created the WikiWikiWeb in 1995. The name came from his honeymoon in Hawaii, where you catch the "wiki wiki" (a Hawaiian term for "quick") bus from the airport. The WikiWikiWeb was an online help manual for all kinds of software, written a little bit at a time by hundreds of people around the world. Users of any given product, Cunningham knew, were like the proverbial blind men feeling an elephant. Their knowledge was far greater than the sum of its parts—greater than even the product's creator—if only you could piece it together in the right way. "Wikis favor the author who isn't skilled enough to see the whole," he says.
Meanwhile, as the WikiWikiWeb was chugging along happily in semi-obscurity, Wales was looking for a way to combine his life's two major hobbies. As a home-schooled child growing up in Huntsville, Ala., he loved to spend his free hours getting lost in Britannica or the World Book. Then there was the Internet, which Wales stumbled across in college as early as 1989. "I met all these great people online," he says, "and we were all discussing things on mailing lists no one ever looks at. I thought, Why not use the smarts of my friends and build something more long lasting, more fun?"
Ah, fun. Spend enough time talking to Wales—a confessed "pathological optimist"—and you'll believe his life has been one long laugh riot. Options and futures trading, which Wales did in Chicago for much of the 1990s, was "fun and cool." Quitting his job and moving to San Diego to start an Internet company? Delightful. Paying the mortgage purely from investments, even to this day? Fantastic. Spending two years trying to start an online encyclopedia called Nupedia yet getting no further than the first 12 articles? Not a lot of fun, actually.
Nupedia's problem was that it was a centralized, top-down system. The software had seven laborious stages of fact checking and peer review. Then Wales discovered wikis, and the pathological optimist had his eureka moment. His new goal was to create a free encyclopedia for all, in their own language, written by anyone. It took Wikipedia just two weeks to grow larger than its predecessor.
Four years later, Wikipedia is the cumulative work of 16,000 pairs of hands, the bulk of it done by a hard-core group of about 1,000 volunteers. Its 500,000 entries in English alone make it far larger than the 65,000-article 2005 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wales' nonprofit Wikimedia foundation pays just one employee, who keeps the servers ticking. The foundation survives on donations and Wales' modest fortune. "This is a softball league for geeks," he says. "And there are more geeks out there than anyone suspected."
Naturally, there are also a lot of idiots, vandals and fanatics, who take advantage of Wikipedia's open system to deface, delete or push one-sided views. Sometimes extreme action has to be taken. For example, Wales locked the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush for most of 2004. But for the most part, the geeks have a huge advantage: they care more. Wikipedia lets you put your favorite articles on a watch list and notifies you if anyone else adds to or changes them. According to an M.I.T. study, an obscenity randomly inserted on Wikipedia is removed in 1.7 min., on average. Vandals might as well be spray-painting walls with disappearing ink.
As for edit wars, in which two geeks with opposing views delete each other's assertions over and over, well, they're not much of a problem these days. All kinds of viewpoints coexist in the same article. Take the Wikipedia entry on, er, Wikipedia: "Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority. It is considered to have no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians [and] academics."
Therein lies the rub. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's former editor in chief (and now a lecturer at Ohio State) still loves the site but thinks his fellow professionals have a point. "The wide-open nature of the Internet encourages people to disregard the importance of expertise," he says. Sanger does not let his students use Wikipedia for their papers, partly because he knows they could confirm anything they like by adding it themselves.
Whatever happens to Wikipedia, the wiki genie is out of the bottle. There are wikibooks for collaborative nonfiction, wikipes for recipes and wikimedia for citizen journalists. Wales has a for-profit website, Wikicities, where anyone can form a community. (The two largest are geeking out on the chronologies of Star Wars and Star Trek.) "It's a form of brainstorming that's bigger than one person standing at a flip chart," says Cunningham. "And there's a timelessness to it. You can do a wiki over one year or 10." And have almost as much fun as Jimmy Wales does for the whole decade.
Daily Blah for... Friday, May 27, 2005
DJ Voyager
Turn off the lights, break open a glowstick, and have a listen to these trippy, bleepy sounds from the Voyager spacecraft as it hits plasma waves at the very edge of the solar system. Some day, all electronica will be made this way. Can't wait for the sixty-hour remix.
Vote For Me, and Drink Pepsi
We all know the Governator is a new kind of politician. It's true -- that fawning Wired cover told us so. Now comes further evidence of his political genius news that Ahnuld has created the first ever political ad with product placement: "Donors connected to Pepsi Co. and Arrowhead Water's parent company, Nestle, gave the governor a total of $279,800 in campaign contributions. Also recognizable on-screen are Ruffles, Sun Chips, Cheetos and a SoBe Beverage, all brands owned by Pepsi."
Genius! But why stop there? Where are the wrap-around ads for the capitol dome in Sacramento? (That city could do with a bit of colorful corporate sprucing up.) How about billboards in Yosemite? And just think how fast you could solve the Bay Bridge's financial woes by simply placing a banner ad every hundred yards. Coke must be fuming at being left out of the ad; let them sponsor all earthquake retrofitting.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Air Hockey is the new Halo
One final word on the E3 madness, and then I'll shut up about it. So I spent the week with the herd, wandering around the booths that only seem to get noiser and more laughably macho every year. (Even Nintendo, the least testosterone-driven of the major companies forced its poor Japanese president to pepper his talk with phrases like "who's your daddy?") The demos all blended into one. Every company had a Grand Theft Auto or Half-Life 2 knock-off. I salivated over Civ IV, of course, but not all my fellow journalists are into such sweeping historical strategy games. Indeed, none of them could agree on a clear winner, a killer app. There was no Halo 2 this year. They all seemed to have adopted my weary cynicism about the industry, best summed up in the Macbeth quote that kept popping up unbidden in my brain: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
On Wednesday night, though, my friend Dan (of Wired News fame) and I took a walk down Santa Monica pier, and we found a couple of games that utterly outshone all the crap we'd seen during the day: Foosball and Air Hockey. The latter I'd never played before, and it was an absolute revelation. The speed, the energy, the smoothness of the puck as it sails across an oceanic airstream ... it was love, and I immediately knew that my dream home must contain an Air Hockey table. You're not staring at a screen, and yet the 3-D physics are dynamite. You actually expend real calories. And is there any more satisfying sound than that clunk when the puck enters your opponents' goal? Sometimes game technology reaches perfection, and all the Cell processors in the world can't outshine it.
Why Good Stories are Getting Buried
I don't mean to keep attacking the Washington Post -- I have no particular beef against the paper, and it is one of the more Bush-critical of the major dailies. But as eagle-eyed bloggers have pointed out, they took what was going to be a major front page story on the Downing Street memo (you do know what the Downing Street memo is, don't you? If not, read this website or watch this BBC documentary), cut it severely and moved it page 26 at the very last minute. So last minute that early-bird web readers noticed the switch and did screen grabs.
Why? Did some editor get skittish in the face of the fall-out over one line in sister publication Newsweek? Has a piece of solid investigative journalism once again been buried because of lazy reporting in an unrelated story, as happened at CBS last summer?
I've long said that the biggest problem with my profession is that journalists overcompensate. By and large, they vote Democratic -- of course they do, they nearly all live in cities, and cities are Democrat strongholds -- and because it is drilled into them that they must be objective, they play up the opposing point of view and fatally diminish their own. So when the truth happens to lie within their worldview, they inherently distrust it. The miniority of Republican journalists, as Fox News viewers know, are not hamstrung by the same intellectual self-doubting. And that is why their world view is winning, and why it is so easy for an assertive White House to bully the mainstream media -- like our dear old friend, the WaPo.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, May 24, 2005
This is the Best Headline I Ever Wrote
Oh, right, so scientsts have discovered which part of the brain is responsible for sarcasm. No, they really have. It's completely true. They're so smart.
Actually, they have. It's a major breakthrough. Seriously. A decade from now, we'll all be carrying around dry humor detectors, which will come in especially handy for American visitors to the UK.
Preach It, Brother
This Gamers' Manifesto on pointlesswasteoftime.com should be read by every developer and publisher in the industry, especially the bit about unoriginality: "Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?"
Daily Blah for... Monday, May 23, 2005
Speaking of Editing ...
Here are the dispatches I wrote on my top three most interesting games from E3 -- and below, in italics, are the edited versions of each that they managed to squeeze into the little space alloted in the magazine. Just another example of why you can't be precious about your prose in this business.
CIVILIZATION IV That Old Time Religion
Every version of Sid Meier's strategy classic Civilization has been hailed by critics as the best game of all time. All of them make you want to take a tiny tribe in 4000 BC and obsessively build it into a spacefaring, world-dominating empire by 2050 AD. Civilization IV, due in November, is no exception to either of this rules. But for the first time, Meier's addictive turn-based game does not shy away from the impact of religion on world history. If your people are the first in the world to discover certain metaphysical concepts, a religion is born in your cities. Polytheism leads to people worshipping Hindu gods. Monotheism begets Judaism. Theology creates Christianity. Then you can choose to peacefully convert your neighbors with missionaries, or rip them to pieces in bloody wars of religion. Just like real life.
50 CENT: BULLETPROOF Better than Bling Bling
Forget gold chains -- the hottest new accessory for hip-hop heroes is starring in their own videogame. In Bulletproof, out this holiday season for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, you play a gun-toting 50 Cent protecting the hood and rescuing G Unit homies (with a little help from Dr. Dre, who plays a weapons dealer, and Eminem in a quirky turn as a private detective named McVicker). Parents beware: the language and violence makes Grand Theft Auto seem like Pong. Nevertheless, a script from Sopranos writer Terry Winter adds to the gritty realism. And you get to mix your choice of the game's soundtrack from 50 tunes by 50, including three brand new cuts. What gangsta could resist?
NINTENDOGS Barking Up a Wireless Tree
No one knows cute game characters like Nintendo's in-house genius, Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario Bros., Donkey Kong). But with Nintendogs for the Nintendo DS handheld, already a bestseller in Japan, Miyamoto has found the holy grail of cute. Pick up one of a variety of playful puppy breeds from the virtual pound, each one so adorably realistic that you just want to scratch behind their ears (and with the DS touch screen, you can). With enough training, they respond to their name and ever more unusual voice commands via microphone. (Sit! Shake! Speak! Sing!) Thus tricked out, your new best friend is ready for a whole series of mini-games -- which, best of all, can be shared with other players' pups over a wireless Internet connection. Weekends at the dog run may never look the same.
CIVILIZATION IV
Religion has a starring role in Sid Meier's latest (for PC), in which you try to convert your neighbors--or rip them to pieces in bloody, crusading wars
50 CENT: BULLETPROOF
You play a gun-toting rapper protecting the hood and rescuing your homies (for PlayStation 2 and Xbox). It makes Grand Theft Auto seem like Pong
NINTENDOGS
Game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, known for his cute characters, delivers the Holy Grail of cute: pick a puppy from the virtual pound and teach it endless tricks
Reality Solved, Simply ...
... was supposed to be the last sentence in this, my latest Your Time piece explaining a technology that you, dear Blah reader, probably know all about already. But I guess someone up the editorial chain of command didn't appreciate my alternate acronym. Here's the piece:
Let RSS Go Fetch
By CHRIS TAYLOR
If you're a regular reader of blogs, or indeed of any kind of news website, you've probably been frustrated from time to time by information overload: the blogosphere creates way too much material for any human being to comfortably digest. Plus, there's no way of knowing when your favorite sites are updated. Some of the best blog writers publish once a week or less, and who has time to keep visiting these sites in the hope of finding a fresh item?
But there's a solution to these problems, and it's simple. Actually, it's called Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. You start by downloading free software called a newsreader. For PC users, we recommend Bloglines bloglines.com) NewsGator newsgator.com or You yousoftware.com) which plug into Microsoft Outlook. If you're using Mac OS X, try NetNewsWire Lite ranchero.com/netnewswire/) Each of these has a pay version, generally about $30, with more features, but beginners won't need them.
Then head over to your favorite websites and subscribe to their RSS feeds by clicking on any button that says RSS or XML (the computer language RSS uses). Your newsreader does the rest, a sort of e-dog that fetches new headlines as soon as they're available. All this happens in a single window that looks like an e-mail program.
Depending on the source, RSS will deliver the entire text of the story to your newsreader, or just the first paragraph or just the headline. In any case, clicking on a headline will take you straight to the full story via your web browser. Almost every major newspaper and news website has an RSS feed these days. (The Los Angeles Times and Denver Post are probably the most significant exceptions, and that's because they are working on advertising-driven newsreader software.)
RSS allows you to play news editor and zero in on the information you really need, even as you expand the number of sites you sample. You can subscribe to just the parts of the Seattle Times, for example, that cover biotech and the Mariners. Or you can go even deeper: instead of looking through all the new apartment-rental ads on Craigslist, say, you can enter your price range and your preferred neighborhoods, and save that search result as an RSS feed. The appropriate listings pop up in your newsreader every day, just as if you'd hired a real estate agent to do the legwork.
RSS is so easy to use, you might be surprised by how much more productive you become. Before I installed RSS, I was perusing some 20 websites a day. Now the figure is more like 70--yet the information is so targeted, I'm getting more of what I really want. Instead of inefficiently searching, I never have to worry if I'm wasting my time. Problem solved, simply. •
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Taking Stage-Managed Press Events to the Next Level
I came down to LA early this time. Normally I get to E3 as late as I possibly can, and leave on the earliest available flight when it's all over on Friday. (I've just realized with a sense of horror that this is my sixth E3). But I'd never done the Big Three press conferences before -- Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo -- and this year all three were announcing new consoles (the PS3, Xbox 360 and Revolution, respectively). So if I was going to have the full week experience, this would be the year.
Press conferences? That's a laugh. Nobody could imagine having a question and answer session after these things. These were more like staged rallies, with thousands of journalists standing before a soundstage so overly grandiose it would have embarrassed the Nuremberg event planning council. Microsoft had rows of demographically sound young stooges of all races behind the presentation, as if this were a political rally. In many ways, it was. Swathes of executives appeared before us, reading scripts from giant teleprompters (which many of us journalists prefered to look at, rather than the executives) and told us how excited they were to tell us how they were going to take gaming to the next level, and other such cliched rot. Then we'd get quick video clips of unfinished games that won't be out for a year, all set to what sounded like the exact same industrial techno track with unecessary levels of bass. Somewhere in this hellish city, someone is making a big pile of money by blending testosterone filled guitars and beats for game demos.
Meanwhile, we were still seething from the hideous organization -- an hour wait to get our valet-parked cars back after the Sony event, an hour wait to get our press passes from Microsoft -- and laughing at the Sony security guard who threatened to take away our film if we kept taking pictures of the Sony lot. Film? What's that?
That said, for all the dismal and overly technical presentation that surrounded it, the PS3 rocks harder than Gibraltar. The games shown were all much of a muchness -- the same old racing, fighting and shooting stuff front-and-center -- but as demonstrations of what the machine was capable of, they were breathtaking. The lighting and skin effects were stunning. They captured Alfred Molina from Spider Man 2, made him virtual, and you could barely tell the difference. So I'm glad I went. But next year, I'm staying home and catching the webcast instead.
No-Fly Guy
Flying down to LA yesterday morning, I almost fell at the first hurdle. The ticket machine at SFO refused to retrieve my reservation. To my horror, the guy behind the counter told me that this was because someone with my name was on the no-fly list. The FBI, Homeland Security, Big Brother anti-terrorist no-fly list.
I was saved by a single initial on my driver's license; apparently the no-fly guy does not share my middle name. They let me board. One quick call to Time's travel services, telling them to always add my middle initial when making bookings, and it was all taken care of. Hopefully I'll never have that problem again. But still, as you can imagine, it left me shaken. Shaken at the potential mistaken identity -- real fuel for a Kafkaesque novel there -- and at my proximity to this shadow war. (Of course, Teddy Kennedy and Cat Stevens have been refused flights because of this damn list, so I would have been in good company). But most of all, shaken that any terrorist would sully the good name of Chris Taylor. If you're going for a common name, why choose mine? What, was "John Smith" already taken?
Daily Blah for... Thursday, May 12, 2005
Is The Washington Post on the Same Planet?
Here's all the once-venerable D.C. paper had to say about the Real ID outrage, which passed today as part of a $82 billion spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan: "Most of the debate in Congress revolved not around the money but around unrelated immigration measures. The bill includes a provision that would make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to acquire driver's licenses that the federal government would recognize as identification."
Er, no. First of all, the bill will make it more difficult for all of us to get driver's licenses and driver's license renewals, unless you happen to carry your birth certificate and Soc Sec card around in your pocket. Secondly, the bill allows Homeland Security to establish national standards for driver's licenses, making them in effect a National ID card.
Why the WaPo writers (who I will name and shame as Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray, partly so they will see this when they next Google their names) ignored this enormous chunk of news is beyond me. Why they chose instead to focus on the fact that this spending bill pushes the cost of Iraq past $200 billion -- big frickin' deal, wars are expensive, Iraq is expensive, we knew that, and this nice round number is a meaningless milestone -- is also beyond me. Maybe they bought the hype that this is merely a measure to control illegal immigration. Maybe they need to go back to journalism school.
Daily Blah for... Friday, May 06, 2005
The Gates Killer
With a surprising lack of fanfare, Apple has made its new networking software, Bonjour, available for Windows as a free download. A step on the road to a Gates-killing release of Mac OS X for PCs, which is what I've long suspected Jobs is up to.
Edge-of-the-seat stuff
Watching the BBC coverage of British election results on C-SPAN 2 (Thank you, C-SPAN 2! There's a phrase I never thought I'd utter) left me with a warm, squishy, nostalgic feeling. Practically every Brit reading this will know what I'm talking about. Peter Snow, David Dimbelby, Jeremy Paxman ... these people are national insitutions, and they've been at it for so long that there is a highly enjoyable, easy intellectual chemistry between their characters (which are, respectively, caffeinated loon, amused patrician and outraged cynic). Every election the technology advances a little more, and the in-studio graphics are a feast for the eyes. You'd be surprised what you can do with 650 virtual Members of Parliament and three primary colors. Though the result contained no seismic shift, and all three parties emerged a little disappointed, the Beeb contrived to make the whole night seem like edge-of-the-seat stuff.
A mug of Yorkshire Gold and a crumpet with cherry jam, and my San Francisco afternoon was complete. My homeland ought to throw national elections every year.
Real Evil
Real ID is real, although the amount of hype and hysteria surrounding the soon-to-be-passed act has left a lot of people wondering what on Earth the thing actually is. Is it a national ID card? Not necessarily. Is it a pernicious, potentially evil federalization of identity? Yes. Basically, starting in 2008, you will have to show four items of ID to get a new driver's license (as if waiting at the DMV wasn't hideous enough), and Homeland Security will have the power to insist that all states issue the exact same kind of license. CNet's Declan McCullagh has a good FAQ on the topic.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Let's Meet Tonight's Contestant: You
It's time to play Guess-the-google, the game that shows you a mosaic of images culled from the Google image search and gives you twenty seconds to guess what the keyword was. A hyper-smart invention that will do nothing but spread glee and drive down America's productivity. I love it.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Happy to Hitch
Hitchhiker's Guide is the number one movie in America. I saw it on Sunday night and was pleasantly surprised that the Adams legacy has not been completely defiled. (Which just goes to show the power of lowering one's expectations, something I'm trying to do a great deal of with movies right now. If just one actor is able to convey a genuine emotion at any point during Revenge of the Sith, I'll be on my feet cheering.)
Sure, the film had been force-fed its fair share of cringeworthy cliches – the whole love story between Arthur and Trillian, for one. The scene in the shower where he hands her a towel is about the worst bastardization of the whole Hitchhiker's concept imaginable (Disney execs brought in another writer after Adams died to "add some romance"). We could have done without the music entirely – all terribly typical Hollywood strings stuff – and it was a nasty shock to learn afterwards that it came from the talented baton of the Divine Comedy's Joby Talbot (at least he preserved the Journey of the Sorcerer theme tune). And something about this new Marvin didn't quite sit right – the Hello Kitty style cartoon head? The limp body language of the guy wearing the suit? Nah, it was the woeful underuse of Alan Rickman. He needed about 50 better lines.
But here's the thing: I had a smile plastered on my face from start to finish. It was a smile of recognition at the sheer amount of original stuff remaining -- amazing, isn't it, that a joke about a sentient bowl of petunias can make it all the way through the Hollywood sausage-making factory? -- and at seeing Adams' last gift to his fans, those extra scenes with the Great Green Arkleseizure-worshipping John Malkovitch. It was a smile of surprise at the performances of Martin Freeman and Mos Def (yes, I take back what I said about not being comfortable with him as Ford). And it was a smile of squishy warm delight at the animated Guide bits with the voice of Stephen Fry. Again, there needed to be about 50 more of those.
Take note, O greenlighters of sequels at Disney. Yes, we'd like to be taken out to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. But don't push the romance too hard. Not here. Instead, show us you're interested in our minds.
Daily Blah for... Monday, May 02, 2005
Time Convention
Daily Blah today extends a special welcome to all its time-traveling surfers. If you happen to be reading this page in the future or the past -- or indeed, in the present -- please set your machine dials to 10 pm on May 7, 2005. That is when The Time Traveler Convention takes place at MIT, and your attendance is requested by the organizers.
If your time machine happens to be stuck at a single physical location on the planet, dial back a couple of days and make travel plans. Special discount for car rentals. Just tell them you're a time traveler.
As for the more mobile chrononauts -- MIT may have been destroyed in the centuries between us and you, so the organizers have helpfully provided the GPS coordinates of the exact meeting point in the East Campus Courtyard. 42:21:36.025°N,71:05:16.332°W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees).
You're welcome. Send me a postcard.
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