BMW Hopes That Its Mini-Movies Will Sell Cars
"The BMW films tingle with zest in a way that car ads don't anymore. It's the tingle that most of us get to experience only when poring over Car and Driver, reading about skidpad performance."

I had been thinking about the amazing 'art-ads' at BMWFilms as a sort of 21st century art patronage. In this review, Elvis Mitchell points out something else about them: they shame the banal car ads we're inflicted with ever day.

The Masterpiece a Master Couldn't Get Right
"You can have a failed quest, but you can't have an achieved quest and no reward!"

This is a fascinating article about how Kubric struggled for years with the script for A.I.

Thanks to Farida for the link.

Stephen Needs a Reality Check

Every now and then I (yes, even I), come up with something at work that's just plain lame. When I do, some helpful co-worker always comes along to ask me "what were you thinking?" It's integral to the production of good work that someone gives you a reality check once in a while. Farida and I do the same thing for each other's writing. But I guess when you're a famous director, people don't correct your mistakes any more.

Don't get me wrong, A.I is worth seeing. Spielberg does tons of things with this movie that no one else could get away with. It's a gorgeous futuristic fairy tale with a touch of the horror of the Brothers Grimm. Sadly, the plot left me feeling cheated from time to time. Spielberg seems to feel compelled to save his characters from nasty situations in the lamest possible ways.

SPOILER ALERT

But what really marred the movie, what really left us saying "and here's another thing that made no sense" all the way home is the ending. All I can say to Stephen Spielberg is "If you can't explain it, don't explain it!" Take a look at 2001: A Space Odyssey". The bizarre ending stands on it's own. It doesn't try to explain the whole movie and, most of all, it's relatively short. In A.I., the narrator has to suddenly appear and bail you out for the last 30 minutes.

I'm not saying that A.I. isn't worth seeing. It is. Everyone puts on a good performance, there's lots of neat scenery, and even some though-provoking science fiction, but a masterpeice it certainly ain't.

PS. Evan was murdured.

A Seattle Lexicon: Dead Diners & Other Lost Locations
"Andy's Cafe. Shares top honors along with the Dog House on the list of Seattle's dead diners. Andy's was for years and years the main gathering place for, and the spiritual center of, Capitol Hill. In the years that I went there, and I started when Hot Turkey Sandwiches were 75 cents, the place never changed. The menu, except for the prices, remained almost exactly the same. Much mourned. Spent many a day there hopping tables, moving from one conversation to another, eating two, sometimes three, meals, without ever leaving the place. Now that it's gone I no longer know where to go when up on Capitol Hill. Just not the same place anymore. Andy's is not to be confused with Andy's Diner, which until fairly recently was a popular eating establishment located in a series of railcars down on Fourth Ave. S., although there are undoubtedly some, who did not frequent the Capitol Hill establishment, who refer to the latter as 'Andy's.'"

Ileen's may be closing (yet to be confirmed), but it won't be the first Broadway diner to disappear. I have heard the name 'Andy's' whispered in legend. Here's a blurb about it on an amazing site about Seattle pop culture, the Seattle Lexicon.

I was walking by Ileen's on Capitol Hill today and I noticed their dishwasher (looking none too clean) sitting in the street. Now I hear from onlyoncapitolhill.com that Ileen's is closing down! Ileens has got to be one of the oldest sports bars in town. I've probably had breakfast there a hundred times since I moved here.

Does anyone have any idea why the best Survivor satire site, Survivorsucks.com has disappeared without a trace?

Salon.com Technology | One big happy channel?

"Nowhere has that consolidation been more acutely felt than in radio -- where just two companies, Clear Channel and Infinity, now dominate the nation's commercial radio stations. The result, many longtime radio industry observers feel, has been the degradation of commercial radio as a creative, independent medium."

Damn, so that's why all the radio stations suck so uniformly!

Salon.com News | Pope celebrates Mass in Lviv, Ukraine "Do not go from the slavery of the communist regime to the slavery of consumerism."

Over at Salon.com, Scott Rosenberg announces,"We're screwed!"

So are we screwed? Are Microsoft, AOL, Napster and Yahoo fated to rule the web?

One thing is for sure, corporations will do whatever they think will improve their bottom line, and if they come to rule the Net, then the only content out there will be content that turns a profit. But maybe things aren't as bleak as they seem. The panic over the "Big 4" comes about from a Jupiter survey that announces that these four companies control half our surfing time. But as Scott points out, Jupiter's definition of "control" is shakey at best. And there may be a bigger flaw in the argument than that. Maybe control isn't the best way or only way to measure the effectiveness of the web. If I suddenly found out that readers of tony.dowler.com spent half their time on my site, I'd be mightily dismayed. The goal of a blog isn't to attract and keep, it's to form connections and encourage people to surf through. Think about it. How many people visit usr/bin/girl in a day. Is Zannah's site somehow not influential if these people happen to click a link and move on? At least one article (Brill's Content) has suggested that the biggies will ultimately fail until they learn the lesson of the small portal: it's not about control, it's about relevance.

Don't be fooled into using business measures for things non-business, it is as foolish as measuring the flow of a river with a yardstick.

NYPOST.COM National News: Hypocrite Streisand Takes the Heat
"Barbra Streisand is urging her fans to be more energy efficient - but she's not practicing what she preaches.
She still flies on fossil fuel-sucking private jets, roams the roads in gas-guzzling limos and SUVs, and vacations on big power boats."

I realize that mocking celebrities is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, but I just got up and I'm not looking for a challenge. Thanks to Zannah for the link.

It rained on the Pride Parade and everyone had to go indoors. We were down at Farida's haridresser's where we all had screwdriver mimosas and got gleefully tipsy. After the parade the street was strewn with flyers, posters and stickers. The street was a littler of bottle's cups and trampled bits of paper. Only the homeless folks and the panhandlers were out. Broadway looked like a budget post apocalypse movie.

I redesigned Julia-Z today. You can see a mockup at http://www.oz.net/~plato/testy.htm. Now I just need to get the commenting system up and set up hosting for our domain name and we're ready to go! When it's done, it will be a sort of a group blog, like gangbang, only we'll be posting poems and stories that people have submitted. Hopefuly each editor will be able to find stuff that fits their particular editing style, and the result will be something interesting.

Sorry for the lack up updates recently. It's been a stressful week, and I'm resting.

redhat.com | Red Hat Achieves Positive Cash Flows From Operations and Shows A Profit for the First Time in First Quarter Red Hat Achieves Positive Cash Flows From Operations and Shows A Profit for the First Time in First Quarter

"Since 1990 Theo Jansen is very busy making Artificial Evolution. His materials are electricity-tubes. He makes animals which are going to live on the beaches. They don't have to eat because they get their energy from the wind. They walk on the beach, making little hills to stimulate the developing of dunes. During the generation the animals become better and better. Not long ago Theo Jansen started to make a machine to make beach-animals. Evolution goes a lot faster this way. The machine is steered by a computer which multiplies the genetic qualities. Hopefully this spring (1996) the new machine-produced animals will run on the beach of The Hague."

A strange man with a strange dream.

"Our apartment's nice, but our building is typical of tall New York City residences. I understand my landlord saved a bundle on the paint after prisoners at Attica rioted because the color was considered too inhumane. And I'm not sure it's true, but I've heard the carpeting was pulled up from the floors of a nursing home sometime after a tragic fire took the lives of most of the patients there. It *is* a little singed, but the smoke smell and discloration are an improvement over the original. My landlord owns many buildings just like this throughout the city. He's considered one of the better New York landlords. The crack in the mirror? That's only on "special" floors like ours."

Jeffrey Zeldman at the Mirror Project.

"Through a gradual process of evolution and technology development, the voices have finally found a native online form through which to express themselves: a new kind of Website called the Weblog."

Kevin Werbach writes his brief history of weblogs. I learned HTML from this guy's site, the Barebones Guide to HTML!

This weekend I went out and threw boomerangs for 10 hours (and I have the unbeleivable aches and pains to prove it). If you've never thrown a boomerang, I suggest you try it out. I was more entranced with the artistry and craftsmanship of the 'rangs than with the competitive aspect. For many of these people, boomerangs are a hobby and a passion before they're a sport. Kendall Davis had some beautiful boomerangs, one of which, (a purpleheart wood lap-joint, if that means anything to you) I was fortunate enought to take home. Don Monroe lent me a 'rang (not one of his designs, though) for the 'maximum time aloft' portion of the tournament. I've never thrown a boomerang before, so I was quite pleased to score a few points in all but one of the categories. If you've never thrown a boomerang, I highly recommend it.

Author Matt Ruff's Home Page

Sometimes he's everything I wish Tom Robbin's could be. Sometimes he's not quite all the things that Tom Robbins is. I'm only halfway through Fool on the Hill right now, and I've already seen ancient Greek myths, faeries, telepathic cats and dogs and a writer who can call the wind, not to mention a bunch of very, very fine and quirky characters. I love novels with a strong sense of place, and this one makes you feel the presence of the Cornell University campus (with a few magical additions) as though you had been reared there. Watch out for the Tolkein-based fraternity and the re-telling of the Inferno as a dogfight in the suburbia of the damned.

Another Independent Coffee Shop Closes Down!

The No Way Cafe at 13th and Jefferson has closed down. I wasn't really a regular at the No Way, but when I did come in the owner was always friendly. The No Way was a real refuge for vegans and vegetarians and a well-known breakfast spot. There was always an interesting conversation going on. It will be missed.

Paul Andrews: Who Are Your Gatekeepers?

Net Music Countdown: NewsStream A white bikini clad Amber strikes a provocative pose for the July issue, available on newsstands nationwide on June 17th, and has some interesting things to say in the accompanying interview.

The thing that really amazed me about Amber's appearance in Stuff wasn't the vapid interview of the shamelessness of the whole thing, but the way that they managed to make Amber look exactly like every other girl who's ever appeared on the cover of Stuff. Amber, Amber, you should've held out for Playboy after all.

Check out Houston flood photos, posted by Alison Headley on her blog bluishorange.

Food: litre of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Dotcom Scoop and NetSlaves are getting hitched. While we're not exactly sure what this combination means yet, to us it was a no-brainer. Dotcom Scoop has news and a great bulletin board and NetSlaves has the attitude and the analysis.

Smart Tags ate my Cat

<PONTIFICATION>
There's a huge furor right now over a new feature that Microsoft has put in Office XP and is going to put in Windows XP. Why do I care? I happen to have been in on some of the first smart tag development efforts and was part of the team that wrote some of Microsoft's first smart tag whitepapers (yet to be released).

The smart tag furor epitomizes a lot of what's best and worst in the programming community. On the one hand, a single Slashdot article can focus dozens of the best and brightest that the industry has to offer. On the other hand, a lot of noise and heat gets produced by people who react first and educate themselves about technology later.

The truth of the matter is that more social and technical criticsm are often one and the same. The furthest reaching implications of a technology aren't neccessarily the technological or even the economic one. They are the social implications, the privacy issues, issues concerning speech, freedom and creativity. Technology, however, has a kind of hard-core knowledge around it that the social sciences just don't. Anybody can be an ersatz social critic, and some of those people are going to turn out to be right. But you can't criticize technology unless you do your homework first. So if, for example, you don't know that smart tags do not send any executable code with the document which contains them, of you think they are the same thing as hyperlinks, you've missed the boat. And then, even when you know all the technical details, you're still only halfway to understanding the technology.
</PONTIFICATION>

Paul Cornell (Microsoft): Developing Smart Tag Solutions

Dan Gilmore: Smart Tags a Surveillance Tool? No, Microsoft Says

Slashdot: a ton of frenzy flavored with an ounce of intelligent criticism

Connie Guglielmo (ZDNet): Microsoft Tries To Get Smart

Video Astronomy A number of amateur astronomers are successfully using video conferencing and webcam's for astronomical imaging.

Sorry for the few updates for the next few days. I am living in a whole new kind of deadline hell right now. But this one was just too good to miss: amateur astonromy using webcams.

sleeping like a baby.

Tony and Farida's wedding pictures are now online for all our family and friends.

Did you hear that another independent coffee shop is closing down in our neighborhood? That's the second, plus Pistil books and Games and Gizmos (which wasn't so independent, really) and Sammie Sue's restaurant (where we had the rehersal dinner for our wedding). But city officials say not to worry. This isn't loss of diversity or economic hard times. In fact all those jobs will be replaced and more. They're pulling down the storefront and putting in a nuclear power plant.

nasubi Nippon Television's (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn't have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn't have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn't have kept him there for over a year until he had won $10 000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn't have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

Also, an interview with nasubi.

CNEWS Science - Treasures recovered from sunken Egyptian city ALEXANDRIA, Egypt (AP) -- An earthquake 1,200 years ago sent the ancient port city of Herakleion crashing to the Mediterranean floor. On Thursday, archaeologists unveiled some of its hidden treasures, including a giant stone tablet that pinpointed the lost city's location.

OS death match - Software Reviews - CNET.com
Mac OS X versus Windows 2000 in the heavyweight round

This is a good review of the strengths and weaknesses of Windows 2000 and OSX.

NetSlaves: Comments According to a June 4th report in the Guardian, the UK's leading left of center newspaper, Salon is now up for sale and meeting little interest from buyers.

Also, check out bigboy. Odd.

Tony.dowler.com got linked at tribulations of a soul sista today. Go check it out.

I finally saw Barbarella today. What a totally rockin' movie. I especially loved Barabrella's fur-lined spaceship.

Ultimately, every roleplaying character is a Star Wars character
Darth Vader - Darth Vaders are fairly common in experienced adventuring parties, usually found amongst players who've tired of playing Chewbaccas and are more interested in directly seeking their own fortunes, even at the expense of fellow party members. While they're easily kept in check, the Darth types will occasionally get out of hand, especially if powerful magics are involved. You can bet that if there's a magical sword or piece of armor lying around, the Darth is not going to let anyone else in the party get their hands on it. The typically Lawful Evil Darth types don't get along well with Leias, because they're so domineering and will gradually take over leadership of any party they're a part of, but they're respected (if feared) by Lukes, Obis and Landos, because all three of those respect the Darth's power and capability.

I do not take any responsibility for injury or death caused by clicking here.

Rudy Park is a hilarious online comic. Check it out. Link thanks to Nelson.

Salon.com Books | The book of the century Although its popularity is unparalleled, intellectuals dismiss "The Lord of the Rings" as boyish fantasy. Now one scholar defends J.R.R. Tolkien's "true myth" as a modern masterpiece.

Salon.com People | Kramer for mayor! "If Jesse Ventura can be governor, why can't I be mayor?" he said.
Kramer runs for mayor!

A while back I posted a link to Hundred Years War, an online historical role-playing and strategy game. It seems that a company has build their own engine and is offereing several such hybrid games. The games vary from very MUD-like to very strategic with some role-playing. Personally, I think they lack the rich historical basis of HYW, but they also lack the serious technical problems that HYW had. Plus you can play with limited functionality for free.

BBC News | ARTS | Last Adams book planned"We are also looking at his PC to see how much he had completed of the novel he was working on when he died."
-- Ed Victor, Douglas Adams' literary agent.

Plans to publish the unfinished "Salmon of Doubt" and the hitchikers screenplay also announced. I gotta admit, Jason made this call weeks ago.

The Reviewer Who Wasn’t There David Manning of The Ridgefield Press is one of Columbia Pictures’ most reliable reviewers, praising Heath Ledger of “A Knight’s Tale” as “this year’s hottest new star!” and saluting “The Animal” as “another winner!” The studio plastered Manning’s raves over at least four different movie advertisements, including “Hollow Man” and “Vertical Limit.” But Manning’s own life story should be called “Charade,” because he doesn’t exist. Challenged last week by NEWSWEEK about the reviewer’s authenticity, Columbia parent Sony Pictures Entertainment admitted that Manning is a fake, a product of the studio’s advertising department.

Salon.com News | Nepalese king says murders were an accident Gyanendra issued a statement Sunday blaming "accidental firing of an automatic weapon" for the death of King Birendra, the queen and six other royals Friday. But he did not say who fired the weapon or explain how such an accident could have happened. Government officials and senior military sources inside the palace have maintained the royals were killed by Dipendra who then turned his gun on himself.
emphasis mine

WTF?
Marketing 'Narnia' Without a Christian Lion Now, borrowing a page from a literary upstart named Harry Potter, the Lewis estate and its publishers have started shaping a marketing makeover of Aslan and assorted Narnian habitués to expand readership and extend the brand.

Marketing isn't evil. It's just stupid in that pervasively banal Faulknerian way that corrupts everything it touches. Note:Nytimes.com requires a free login to view articles.

But Can We Talk On Our Cellphones, Ms. Shorey?

This came via the Missoula Public Library on one of my library listservs:

Missoulian - January 12, 1963
"Library Bans Teens"
York, PA (AP) Scholarly, gray-haired Katherine Shorey, bolstered by a vote of confidence from the York Library Board, remained firm Friday in her battle against teen-age socializing in the town library. "The ban stays," Miss Shorey, the chief librarian said in an interview. She referred to her edict placing library reading rooms off-limits to junior and senior high school students.Miss Shorey contends that the library had come to rival the corner drug store as an after-school hangout for teen-age romancing - much of it in the semi-darkened basement where old periodicals are kept. The board met Thursday and wound up expressing general support for Miss Shorey...The ban, in effect since Jan. 2, touched off a wave of controversy that included a flurry of student picketing and a threat by the state to cut off some $72,000 in state aid unless a solution is found.

The Seattle Times: Local News: Why bricks toppled a mystery In two different parts of Seattle - the Chinatown International District and Fremont - building owners and occupants were wondering what made tons of bricks fall to the ground over a span of about 12 hours.

I'm not sure this is even interesting. Just something that happened. Link courtesy of Narika.