4 December 2006
It’s no trick to getting heaps of features from your mobile device. Just buy an expensive, kludgy, bulky, heavy smartphone (Treo, Q, Crackberry, etc) and let your provider (who will, I’ll admit, award you VIP status for your expenditures) run riot through your bank account each month.
Continue...27 November 2006
16 November 2006
There was a strange confluence of events in my life this week; a financial nexus, so to speak. I removed the last bits of cash from the accounts I set up at my hometown bank. It’s pretty typical of what you’d find in rural, sleepy, well-to-do town. The guy in charge is the father of a friend of mine, the tellers are former babysitters and siblings of elementary school teachers. Pretty much all the nametags carry familiar, local surnames like “Sweet”, “Laplante” and “Carridi”. A bumpkin bank if I’ve ever seen one.
My new financial institution is the massive and far-reaching Bank of America. I didn’t select it for any service advantage, or the perceived security of a multinational company, but merely to avoid ATM fees (there are roughly twice as many BoAm ATMs in Greater Boston as subway stations). You’d expect that it, as the largest bank in the country, would try to carry itself with the slow-moving grace monetary titans project in their TV commercials; or, at the very least, to pin up some veneer of gravitas. You’d be wrong.
Continue...12 November 2006
So it opens with a CGI bunny rabbit, hopping merrily about in CGI field of smiling CGI daisies. Then the logo, complete with gravelly-voiced Moe Szyslack, slams down on top of it all. “In this era of computer animation” declares the voice-over “one movie dares to be ugly”.
Cut to Homer in a wrecking ball-equiped crane, in a long, sweeping take so clearly put in motion through computer animation that you might mistake it for a Futurama outtake. Does whoever put this clip together think we’re stupid?
With a tagline like “One movie dares to be ugly”, apparently so. Not only has South Park set both the “ugly” and “daring” marks in modern animation, but it also beat its looming abecedary to the big screen by seven years. Was this approach to selling the film seriously the best the Fox marketing team could muster?
Not that it matters. Like Starwars I-III, The Simpsons Movie is essentially critic-proof, making marketing little more than a frivilous expectation of the film industry. Here’s to hoping they didn’t treat the script writing with similar disrespect.
But after what I saw during the remainder of the ad, I’m not hopeful. A single spark of real humor (the wrecking ball swinging into the cab of the crane) choking slowly to death through a strained, predictable and repetitive sight gag; a demise all too familiar to viewers of the show’s late corpus.
2 November 2006
Though mechanisms that I’ve spent the past 44 or so hours trying to figure out, our humble The Hanover Collaboration got a link from Gawker, the digital crackpipe that keeps Manhattanite gossips foaming at the mouth.
Other than a shared sense of snark and a decidedly liberal bent, it’s hard to imagine a webpage less like us than Gawker. Though we’ll occasionally sound off on entertainment news, it’s never in the tasty sound bites of successful blogs, and never, ever focused on stories surrounding the Empire State’s 13-mile urban suppository.
Continue...25 October 2006
Chewing up Reuters yesterday seems to have given me a taste for half-baked media. So for today’s lunch, I sampled a little Slate magazine, brazed in a light sauce of urban myopia, and served with a touch of upper-class condescension. Though well-presented, the dish combined flavors that were flatly incompatable, and left me with a decided aftertaste of half-assery.
This past Monday (Oct. 23), Slate magazine announced the Slate Green Challenge, a collaborative effort with eco-friendly ad magnet Trehugger.com, attempting to get Slate readers to realize the size of, and hopefully reduce, their collective impact on the planet’s ecosystem. I thought it a noble enough end, and being the sort who likes to gloat about their eco-friendliness, I eagerly began taking the quiz.
Problems arose immediately. What if your home is heated with something other than natural gas or oil? The quiz offered all sorts of transportation options (“Subway” “Bus in city”, “Bus on highway”, “Motorcycle” or “Taxi”), but plenty of folks live places without cities, highways, subways or a reliable taxi service. Do their carpooling, biking, walking, Segwaying, and scooter-riding miles not count toward reducing impact? The quiz also assumes all its takers own and use a dishwasher and washing machine. To top it all off, the quiz failed to produce a result the first time I took it, and rebuffed my repeated attempts at a retake.
I wasn’t the only one to see these shortcomings. A brief look at The Fray shows plenty of other readers taking up similar issues (not that Slate acknowledged any of this in their Fraywatch section). But I figured, hey, this quiz is just to establish a baseline. What really matters are the improvement suggestions, right? Yes – so long as you don’t realize the magazine’s suggestions suck. Just look at their transportation tips ; it’s all “tire pressures”, “air filters” and “fly less” – no “use mass transit” or “buy a bicycle”.
I can understand living in the city and not being aware of things like pellet stoves. But it’s all of 3 miles from Jersey to the Bronx – does Slate not think that’s manageable on a bike? Or perhaps using the largest subway system in the world? God forbid someone mention a bus. It may just be a touch of rural-bred Bryanism, but why do I get the feeling this article ignored obvious transportation solutions based on the social perceptions of its author and target audience?
Progressivist ranting aside, the real pièce de résistance from these self-indulgent chefs was not served until a few hours later, when the e-zine published this lovely article on the gasification of coal. Yes, on one page, they stressed the importance of reducing carbon emissions and curbing the greenhouse effect, while praising an inescapably inefficient means of producing cheap gas on another. Is this obviously self-defeating juxtaposition reflective of the ineptitude of Slate’s editors – or just their opinion of the readership?
24 October 2006
Check out this Reuters news capsule (you might want to pause the accompanying video before it gets past the ad) about burlesque star Dita von Teese. Now check have a look at the corresponding Wikipedia article about Ms. von Teese. If you’re inattentive or pressed for time, these two DeepQuote links cut straight to the chase.
I’m not entirely sure Reuters plagiarism republication of that Wikipedia article fits entirely under “fair use” in the GPL. It’s surprising, frankly, that this problem doesn’t occur more in the opposite direction, with ill-informed netizens copying wholesale onto Wikipedia from existing pages; at any rate, people have been fired for ripping off The Free Encyclopedia before.
23 September 2006
If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ve probably been subjected to corporate art. It’s the grown-up version of those signs you used to see in gym class that said “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” or “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. I’d imagine companies spend billions of dollars on this crap, which is fucking fascinating because its blandness and predictability only reinforce the despair of slaving away for a soulless corporate entity. Well, I’m sick of it. So in the great tradition of Maddox, I present you with “I Am Better Than Your Corporate Art”.
Continue...15 September 2006
If you knew thousands of poor children were being kindnapped every year and essentialy forced into slavery for the amusement of the rich, you’d want to stop it, right? Why, you’d probably be the first to march out to the town square with a big banner saying “Save the [insert group name for opressed children here]”, right? Well, would you still feel the same way if these children were (lowering voice, looking around furtively)...camel jockeys?
No, not these camel jockeys! These camel jockeys – literally, children who race around a track on the back of a camel. If this slanted-but-well-cited Wikipedia article is correct, child camel jockies live some of the most wretched lives imaginable, and the very existence of such a sickening institution is a blight against humanity. Clearly, the lack of widespread awareness is the only reason the child camel jockey system continues to exist, but how can the media possibly get the word out?
Imagine the reaction if the New York Times ran a “The Plight of Camel Jockies” headline. Half the country would would be outraged at the paper’s cultural insensitivity, while the other half would decry the Times’ sympathy for terrorist killers. The few Americans who actually read the article would only further incense their friends by trying to explain. It’s the sort situation where continued struggle only leads to further entanglement – a situation that we used to have a word for, but that slips my mind just now.
8 September 2006
Tech news sites reverberated two weeks ago with the offbeat story of a 16-year-old caught spamming and summarily sentenced to a two-month grounding. CNet’s Crave section does a fine job spelling out why this is one of the stupidest decisions since Greedo firing first, but like so many other cyber criminal sentences in recent memory, it demonstrates the wild inconsistency and seeming bewilderment with which justice systems handle cybercrime.
Continue...5 September 2006
How ironic that a sister would trigger a defining moment in a sport so notable for kissing them. Seriously, though, if Materazzi’s account of events from this year’s World Cup final is accurate (and that seems to be up for debate, as no one’s recieved confirmation from Zidane), the Frenchman must have some seriously thin skin.
“I’d rather have your sister”? – honestly, when I played U14, if that was the best you could muster, you must have had some serious ballhandling skills to make up for it. “Very Special Episodes” of Full House struck with more incision, and anyone with cable access or a VHS copy of “Major League” could have produced better material.
As is usually the case with this crap, everyone comes out looking like a total cheesedick: Materazzi for being immature and reacting to a headbutt as if it were a shotgun blast, Zidane for taking a huge dump all over his legacy while letting a weak-sauce insult eject him from the most important game of his career.
Worst off is FIFA, who’ve now codified trash talking as a $4000 offense, so long as offenders are good enough to make their opponents physically assualt them. Speaking of, Zidane’s penalty was only 50% harsher than Materazzi’s; seems to me that makes violent retaliation a bargain option for those too slow-witted to formulate an approprite response.
But hey, FIFA, at least this high profile incedent takes the spotlight off the real problems facing soccer, like flopping and match-fixing, right?
3 August 2006
These little guys might look like fun, but sources say they can be deadly to “smaller children”.
Oh, wait. There’s a correction to that article. Or rather, one has already been made. It seems these “Greenades” would lead to “serious effects” in small children, not death. Apparently, the guys at Narcanon Arrowhead forgot to change the byline. I wonder why an addiction counseling service would overstate the severity of a drug story?
I wonder also what they mean by serious effects? They say each gumball contained 1g of “high grade” cannabis. Let’s assume that means a ludicrous potency of 25% THC, or roughly five times the average concentration. Taking the LD50 from Wikipedia and applying it to a 30-pound toddler, we find that a reasonable leathal dose would require at least 40 gumballs.
Seeing as the three students charged in connection with this case had only two gumballs on hand, I’d imagine the most serious effects any l’il Hunter-S-in-Oshkosh would encounter is a gnarly case of the munchies. In fact, for any human bigger than a newborn (who wouldn’t have the the teeth to chew them, nor the motor function to bring them to their mouth), two gumballs’ worth is nowhere near a life-threatening dose.
2 August 2006
It’s pretty clear Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite. His father was a Holocaust denier, and Gibson has stated that “the man never lied to me”. Though I never saw the film myself, I’m told that even the blind come away from The Passion of the Christ with a diminshed opinion of Jews, and on many occasions, the devoutly-Catholic Gibson has taken issue with the findings of the Second Vatican Council, which officially renounced the doctrine that the Jews killed Jesus. So why has the media reacted with such shock and vitriol at Gibson’s drunken rantings during a recent DUI arrest?
Continue...31 July 2006
Massachusetts governor and prospective presidential candidate Mitt Romney found himself in something of a sticky situation over the weekend. The Republican, while speaking to a room full of supporters at an Iowa fundraiser, used the phrase “tar baby” in describing the massively over-budget and under-standard Central Artery Tunnel project. Romney isn’t the first high-level official to get snared like this; in May, White House press secretary Tony Snow used the same, apparently offensive term in when he declined to comment on the NSA’s call records database.
Continue...27 July 2006
Man, I simply cannot wait until mothballs are only sold behind the counter, with a sign-out sheet, and a mandatory 2-box maximum. I know, I know, most of you are saying “But Cosmo, how will you prevent moth larvae from chewing up your extensive collection of bespoke wool suits?” Well, you see, I’m going to go out tonight and make my rounds of local businesses, buying up all the mothballs I can. I’ll lay low and wait until the retail store restrictions fall into safely place, and then I’ll start selling my mothball stash online.
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