Archive for January, 2007

That’s right, folks. It’s National Gorilla Suit Day today! And as one of my cats is in fact named for someone in a gorilla suit (go ahead, guess), I’m celebrating.

This despite the fact that Boston has been quaking with fear all day and it’s the fault of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Oy. I’ll be waiting for a personal apology from Master Shake.

Tags: National Gorilla Suit Day, Boston, Bomb Scare, ATHF, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Jesus’ General provides us with this pleasant discussion between Pat Leahy and Alberto Gonzales about Mr. Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was sent on a little detour to Syria on his way home to Montreal.

The RCMP and the Canadian government have officially apologized to Arar for their small role in this. The US government, not so much.

Dick Durbin says Dick Cheney is “delusional”.

That’s just silly. Cheney isn’t delusional. He’s a hardcore neoconservative idealogue and a liar, that’s all.

Oh, and evil. He’s evil too. But he isn’t delusional.

The dialogue below is from Tony Snow’s White House press briefing this morning. Pay particular attention to the sentence I’ve bolded.

Q With the President’s approval ratings as low as they are, with so much attention focused on Iraq, how concerned are you that most of the other stuff will be background noise, white noise, nobody is really going to pay much attention?

MR. SNOW: Well, if you take a look at what Americans care about — things like health care — they care about it. Americans want a system that’s going to be more patient-friendly and that’s going to meet their needs. The President will talk about that. When you ask about health care, that’s clearly important. You ask about education, always important — you’re a parent and you know. Immigration has been an issue of considerable concern within this country.

In other words, the President is going to address the areas that are foremost concern for Americans — energy and energy security.

Q I don’t doubt that he’s going to address them and I don’t doubt that they’re important to Americans. What I’m wondering about is, is he compromised at this point to an extent to which he can do anything about them?

MR. SNOW: What’s interesting is the President is going to offer some bold proposals that Congress could, in fact, enact, and in the process make itself look good and, more importantly, do the people ‘s business. So George W. Bush as a President is not somebody who is going to cease to be bold because there has been — because right now people are concerned about the progress of the war. Instead he understands his obligation as Commander-in-Chief is to go ahead forthrightly big problems and come up with solutions that not only are going to have political appeal, but they’re also going to be effective in making life better for Americans.

When you have a Democratic Congress that came in two weeks ago saying, we want to get things done, we’ve got some offers that they’re going to be pretty good for them.

The President of the United States is Commander-in-Chief of the military, not of everything — not of healthcare, energy and energy security — at least not unless we’re in a war about oil, I suppose, but we’re not in a war about oil, are we?

Update, 27 Jan: Yeah, what he said.

I swear. The nerve of some people.

It seems that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is setting things up with his allies in the legislature to get himself special powers that will allow him to rule by decree for eighteen months.

According to Reuters,

The former soldier has said he would use the expanded powers to end the autonomy of the nation’s central bank, create a national police force and boost state control over the nation’s oil industry, which provides around 11 percent of U.S. oil imports.

Here’s the important bit, though:

State Department spokesman Tom Casey on Friday said the legislation by decree proposal was “a sovereign right of Venezuela but certainly … a bit odd in terms of a democratic system.”

You’ve got to admit, Casey has a point. We’ve all seen what can happen when the leader of what had been a democracy grabs at power, refuses to work with other branches of government, claims that he has the power to simply ignore the law even as he’s signing bills, and insists that his constitutional powers basically let him get away with anything. For example… um…. I don’t know. I’m sure it’s happened somewhere in the past. Anyway, it’s bad, ok?

I found this over at TechCrunch. A student at Parson’s has created The Ad Generator, which combines words from advertisements, mixes them up, grabs an image from flickr and automatically generates ads.

From the site’s opening page:

The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

I let it run and wrote down some of the stuff it spit out:

• Build Innovation.
• So Good It’s Advanced.
• The Power Of Differences.
• I’m Driving It.
• Less Is Real.
• Expect Passion. Think Less.
• Start. Stay. Reach.
• Feel The Imagination.
• Dreaming Forward.
• Getting Is Wanting.
• Want The More Life
• Got Time?
• Obey Perspectives.
• Your Time. Our Innovation.
• The Flower Of Communication.
• Make Sense. Dare. Live.
• So Ultimate It’s More.

Remember in 1984, how novels and songs were written by machine? A bit late, but the day has come. Clearly, the advertising agency is now thoroughly obsolete.

Poor, poor Hala Gorani. It’s just not fair what they’ve done to her.

Just think about it: born in Seattle to Syrian parents, raised in Paris, fluent in English, French and Arabic, she’s worked for La Voix du Nord, Agence France-Presse and France 3 in Paris, Bloomberg Television in London, and then joined CNN, who relocated her to Atlanta. Atlanta? Why is it necessary to broadcast Your World Today, only one hour of which is even seen in the US, from Atlanta, of all places? Why not London, where they used to do the show, or Hong Kong, or if it had to be from the States, New York or Washington? Gorani still does Inside the Middle East every month. How much longer does it take to get to Damascus or Beirut from Atlanta than it does from London?

Sure, I get it. CNN was founded in Atlanta, by Ted Turner, Mr. Atlanta himself, and is still “based” in Atlanta, even though all of their main anchors and analysts (the names they count on to bring in ratings to rival Faux) are in NY and DC. But why is it still based in Atlanta? Sentimental value? Of course they could run the company from anywhere with a satellite uplink, but that’s not the point. The major news outlets broadcast from the major cities, and Atlanta isn’t one of them, not from a global perspective. CNN has been there since 1980, and they hosted the Olympic games, but when somebody in Armenia is asked to name some “international” cities, Atlanta isn’t going to make the list.

Ever watch the weather on CNN? They’ll run a crawl of a list of global cities, so you can see the weather in Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, Nairobi, Sydney, Berlin, Tehran, New York, Mumbai, Tokyo… and Atlanta. If the crawl happens to run through the A’s, Atlanta’s going to be on it. So if I decide to go on that tour of Coca-Cola’s headquarters, I’ll know whether to bring an umbrella. Thanks for being so considerate, CNN.

Look, just about every provincial city wants to be looked at as a big deal. Here in Boston, we like to think of ourselves as the academic capital of the world. Maybe we are, but we’re also a city of about 700,000, and we’re only about 400 km from New York City (die heißeste Stadt). It would be silly to compare us with them. New York is an international city. Boston isn’t. I’m OK with that. I grew up there, and I chose to live here.

I remember when our beloved feetsball team (who haven’t actually been based in Boston since the early 1970s, by the way) very nearly moved to Hartford Connecticut (now there’s a global kinda town). Some guy wrote an impassioned letter to the Boston Globe stating that Boston couldn’t consider itself an international city if it didn’t even have an NFL team. Yeah, that’s the yardstick for an international city. And now that I think of it, Atlanta has itself one of those, doesn’t it?

OK, I take it back.

I know I’ve already talked about this before, but this is just too much. Lookie here, ABC: you can tell me that Lost is coming back soon with “all new” episodes if you really feel that’s necessary, but the fact that its time slot is changing from Wednesday at 9:00 pm to Sunday at 10:00 pm does not mean that you can claim it’s at an “all new” time.

I’m fairly certain that Sundays have included a 10:00 pm for at least five or ten years now.

OK, so let’s see if I’ve got this straight… This is an iPhone:

Up until Steve Jobs gave his MacWorld keynote address on Tuesday, this was an iPhone:

According to Endgadget, Cisco Systems (which, as I’m sure you know, was a friend of mine) released the following to explain how Apple’s iPhone won’t run into any trademark issues with what had been their iPhone:

Given Apple’s numerous requests for permission to use Cisco’s iPhone trademark over the past several years and our extensive discussions with them recently, it is our belief that with their announcement today, Apple intends to agree to the final document and public statement that were distributed to them last night and that addressed a few remaining items. We expect to receive a signed agreement today.

But I’ve spoken about that third player in the game earlier. A Google search for [iPhone] still brings up the following at #3:

iPhone | Voice Over IP
iPhone offers local number service in the following areas: … iPhone offers competitive International pricing International Flags …
iphone.com/ – 16k – Cached – Similar pages

When I wrote the first post about that site, iphone.com was redirecting to iphone.nuvio.com, which promoted a VoIP service called “iPhone.” They didn’t have the trademark, but I guess that never stopped anybody. Yeah, alright, it’s stopped people a great many times. Earlier today, after reading about the lovely lovely new iPhone, I tried going back to that subdomain to see if they’d changed anything, and I was redirected to Apple’s iPhone page. Nuvio.com was still up, though.

But there’s more! While I was writing this, I went back to iphone.nuvio.com, and it was back! Here’s their page:

Earlier in the day, I’d used some of my handy dandy SEO tools (yes, it’s true — I’m that qwerty) to find that, before the redirect from iphone.com to iphone.nuvio.com took place, the following page would load (I don’t have the images; I just grabbed the raw HTML):

That’s an affiliate site selling Vonage services! Vonage should be iPhone’s, or Nuvio’s, competition! Gah! My head, it spins!

Later in the day, the redirect was dropped, and iphone.com just took you to this:

Now that’s gone too. iphone.com takes you nowhere, and Google won’t show you a cached copy of anything there. Google, of course is working with Apple on the iPhone, and their CEO, Eric Schmidt, is on Apple’s board.

Oops. Now it’s back. Have I said “gah” yet? Anyway, that Nuvio iPhone page: if you try to go to http://www.iphone.nuvio.com now, you get diddly. If you drop the www, and just try for http://iphone.nuvio.com, you hit a 302 (found) redirect to https://iphone.nuvio.com/ (note the https protocol). That URL then redirects to https://iphone.nuvio.com/html/. It’s a freaking conspiracy, but this Nuvio iPhone thingie is somehow still there.

I’ve never liked Mountain Dew. When I was a kid, at least according to my dim memories of my childhood, Mountain Dew was about as uncool as a drink could be. It was right up there with Fresca. Its coolness factor wasn’t the reason I hated it, of course. I hated it because it tasted like orange soda that somebody had pissed in.

I’m not sure how long ago it happened, but “the Dew” has been marketed for some time now as being the beverage of choice of the Dude set — you know, shredders, betties, skate-or-die thrillseekers, etc. I don’t know whether they changed the flavor of the drink when they changed the marketing strategy, but I don’t suppose that matters. If you want to be cool, you’ll drink orange soda that somebody pissed in. That’s the way things work nowadays. Something is cool because it’s labeled as cool by people who are labeled as cool.

In spite of my hatred for the beverage and the way it’s marketed, I have to admit that I love its new viral campaign: Sue Teller in “DO Your Own Adventure.” (Get it? “DO”?) Sue teaches us all about crafts, like using a woodburning tool to decorate sneakers, or, in the episode below, creating your own mashups.

Word to your great grandmother.