This tome is long overdue. Unfortunately, the reviews on Amazon indicate the book may not live up to its cover.
Dumbledore Was a Replicant
Sunday’s Chicago Tribune features an opinion piece by one Stephan Benzkofer ((being a blogger, i’m not constrained by usual journalistic standards to disclose that Stephan is my brother-in-law)) arguing that literary characters are canonically defined only by the published works in which they appear. He contends that a press-conference announcement by the author carries no more authority in developing a character than the criticism of a university scholar or a piece of fan fiction written by a 13 year old. His inspiration for making this point was the recent flap over the sexual orientation of a fictitious wizard. The piece attracted dozens hundreds of comments. Most completely miss the point and many irately accuse the article’s author of homophobic bigotry.
This is of course quite amusing to those of us fortunate enough to know Stephan personally.
CNN Goes Crappy
At some point, ‘crappy’ became an acceptable term for headlines from CNN. I’m not sure whether my surprise reflects changing societal standards or my continued descent into curmudgeondom.
I haven’t written for awhile, and claim a broken hip that put me on crutches for two months as an excuse, which is lame. However, I now have a shiny new Tablet PC that allows one to easily clip images from websites and complain about idiotic 23 year-old headline writers for major news outlets. So my six readers have that to look forward to.
I’d tell you all about my amazing new Lenovo X60T, but my wife might read this and she’s been enduring me telling her about all the wonderful details of this great machine for two weeks now, and she just might hit me over the head with it it if I keep carrying on.
update: The headline has been changed. It appears lousy is the new crappy.
Insomniac Bears
Insomniac bears are roaming the forests of southwestern Siberia scaring local people as the weather stays too warm for the animals to fall into their usual winter slumber.
I can sympathize. We’ve had a couple of insomniac bears to contend with the last few weeks, too.
James H. Lipsey, 1931-2006
He decided to go back to Vietnam for a few months to treat kids afflicted with Polio, though he had just landed a nice position in an orthopaedic practice in North Carolina—an opportunity that came after putting himself through medical school, serving in the Navy, and completing a difficult residency program in Chicago.
When his peers were contemplating retirement, Dad spent his evenings studying to become an Anglican priest.
He married Stephanie and me, and baptised our children.
And he wrote a novel.
Yesterday would have been his 75th birthday, though he wouldn’t have thought much of it.
There’s so much I’d like to share about Dad, and the wonderful father he was, but this is all I can manage right now.
We really miss him.
Boo Moo
Meet Moo, the newest online darling in the Web 2.0 age. Moo has all the fundamentals: a nice AJAXy interface, Web2.0 colors, gradient fills, rounded corners galore, and lots and lots of buzz. They even sell a physical product, which is downright revolutionary. Perhaps they’re Web 2.1?
So I spent a couple hours choosing, resizing, uploading and cropping 100 photos. Gave Moo $20 and waited 10 days for my 100 business-card-sized mini photos to arrive in their collectors’ case. Alas, Moo messed up and sent me only 11 photos, each repeated 9 or 10 times.
Time to contact support. Moo doesn’t have a phone number (that would be so 2003), just an online form that you fill out and hope for the best. I got an automated response:
Thank you for contacting the MOO Print Team. I’ve sent this mail to let you know that your inquiry is in our customer service queue and that a real live MOO Service Agent will get back to you within 24 hours.
It’s been three days and no avail.
Boo Moo.
update: Moo came through. Woo Moo!
Product Design Aimed at Limiting User Capability
In product development, a great deal of effort is made in specifying a product’s affordances – the capabilities and actions that it will provide to the user. A product developer in the UK recently launched Architectures of Control, a blog that documents the increasing practice of infecting products with ways to restrict, rather than expand, users’ capabilities. He has plenty of material to work with, from examples of planned obsolescence, to crippled software that forces customers toward more expensive options, to anti-skateboarding ribs that can be bolted all over public spaces.
Continue reading
Marketing Mascots Under Fire
I identified the use of mascots to be The Next Big Thing in retail marketing pretty early on, and even photographed representative examples while commuting. Other futurists have been talking about the potential effects of VOIP and bio-tech on our culture, but they all missed this one.
How do we know that silly costumes have caught on as a sales device?
Dog Bites Bear
Here’s how I think the whole thing played out.
Barney goes to K9 boot camp with a bunch of other dogs who are sent off to chase down drug smugglers and battle terrorism while he ends up guarding teddy bears in an obscure London museum. So naturally, one day he snaps.
Barney ripped the head off a brown stuffed bear once owned by the young [Elvis] Presley during the attack, leaving fluffy stuffing and bits of bears’ limbs and heads on the museum floor.
update – After finding this photo of Barney, I’m ready to adopt him. We’re already pretty good at handling charges that are inclined toward an occasional messy public outburst.
Celebrities in the House
Presenting the debut television performance of Zakary and Wynston. If you stayed up late watching HGTV on digital cable last month (and who hasn’t), you may have already seen it. W&Z share the role of ‘Toddler’. As an added bonus, look for a special cameo toward the end. While the Lipsey munchkins were naturals for this gig, landing the job had a little bit to do with me working for the company that designed the world’s first flushable toddler urinal. So I guess we all have a claim to fame.