Okay, I don’t want to watch all the movies depicted in this 100 year overview of film special effects, but I did just add a few to my Netflix queue.

The full list, according to the description in YouTube:

• 1900 – The Enchanted Drawing
• 1903 – The Great Train Robbery
• 1923 – The Ten Commandments (Silent)
• 1927 – Sunrise
• 1933 – King Kong
• 1939 – The Wizard of Oz
• 1940 – The Thief of Bagdad
• 1954 – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• 1956 – Forbidden Planet
• 1963 – Jason and the Argonauts
• 1964 – Mary Poppins
• 1977 – Star Wars
• 1982 – Tron
• 1985 – Back to the Future
• 1988 – Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• 1989 – The Abyss
• 1991 – Terminator 2: Judgement Day
• 1992 – The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
• 1993 – Jurassic Park
• 2004 – Spider-Man 2
• 2005 – King Kong
• 2006 – Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
• 2007 – Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
• 2007 – The Golden Compass
• 2008 – The Spiderwick Chronicles
• 2008 – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at Amazon, a used book store, or your parent’s book shelf. Still, it’s available on the web as PDF, at least two text files — one, two — And even as a podcast (subscribe via iTunes).

Lots of people have re-traced the journey described in the book, at least one person has posted a travelogue about it to the web. Henry Gurr has posted Pirsig’s own photos, and Christoph Bartneck pointed out many locations in Google Maps:

• Minnesota > Minneapolis > Breckenridge
• North Dakota > Ellendale > Hague
• South Dakota > Herreid > Mobridge > Lemmon > Bowman
• Montana > Baker > Miles City > Laurel > Red Lodge > Cooke City > Yellowstone National Park > Gardiner > Bozeman > English Department at the Montana State University > Missoula > Three Forks > Butte > Anaconda > Philipsburg > Hall > Lolo Pass > Billings
• Idaho > White Bird > Riggins > New Meadows > Cambridge > Brownlee Dam
• Oregon > Richland > Baker > Unity > Dixie Pass > Prairie City > Dayville > Mitchell > Prineville > Bend > La Pine > Crater Lake > Klamath Lake > Medford > Grants Pass
• California > Crescent City > Arcata > Leggett > Mendocino > Caspar, CA, Point Cabrillo Road – The Climax of the book. > San Francisco, CA, Haight / Divisadero – The corner on which Chris died.

NPR interviewed the author at the book’s release in 1974, when he was living in Minnesota.

A while ago I discovered a great collection of scanned book covers from 1950s-ish pulp fiction in Flickr. I had gone looking for things to post on our clipboard wall, but these are too fun to walk away from — especially now that Sandee’s put cats up.

The 365 photos meme was quite popular last year (despite the 366 day leap year). I might have joined, but it’s unlikely I would have finished. Instead, I’ve been pushing my my brother-in-law Corey Blanchette, nicknamed CoreyB or CoreyB603, to do 365 songs in 2009. He launched on January first and since then has done songs about elves, the serotonin in Saratoga, Albert Ayler, and a bunch of others.

My favorite so far is An Empty Room Doesn’t Cry But an Empty Person Might, a song that comes from what he describes as a “pretty pretentious” phase of his recording history.

Some of his songs are new; a number of them are previously recorded. You can make a request here, and subscribe to the podcast with this link: http://coreyb603.com/feed/ .

duckett’s Wired But Disconnected on ccMixter is actually ironic: the whole song is the result of an online collaboration.

Listen

Brooklynite Joshua Longo’s crazy animals are showing at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont through October 26th. Sweet for me: I’ll be in town this weekend. I’m hoping to check it out.

I love remixes, mashups, and covers. I love it when bad songs get good covers, I love it more when it’s a bad cover. I’m a fan of Coverville and I get excited every time I find yet another version of Smells Like Teen Spirit (hey, this is just a sampling: lullaby version, Patti Smith, The Bad Plus, another jazz version, and another jazz version, a string version, no, two string versions, a tango, a damn chant version, some lounge thing, and one for the opium lounge).

But I think I have yet to hear a decent cover or remix of a track from a rock opera. Take One Night In Bangkok: sexing it up doesn’t help. You just can’t out rock a rock opera. (Really, look for yourself.) It might help that Chess featured a character loosely based on eccentric chess master Bobby Fischer, but rock operas just might be too weird for remixing.

Though…I’d like to be surprised. Perhaps a folk version?

I can, however, appreciate the irony in a sex-laden video for a song that had criticized moral decay. Video may be NSFW.

Not every song Johnny Cash has covered turned to gold (see Personal jesus), but Hurt is magic.

Have you ever argued with a member of the Flat Earth Society? It’s futile, because fundamentally they don’t car if something is true or false. To them, the measure of truth is how important it makes them feel. If telling the truth makes them feel important, then it’s true. If telling the truth makes them feel ashamed and small, then it’s false.

–from Louis Theroux’s The Call of the Weird

If this doesn’t warm your heart, check to see that it’s not made of stone.

Netflix for audio books: Simply Audiobooks. Though it makes me wonder why we don’t say “like a library for audiobooks where they send you the stuff you want.”

I guess the criticism is that it’s one thing for somebody to open up their music for remixing, but an entirely different thing to do the same with a movie. Or is it? Is it (click re-fragmented)?

Via Ryan: Brian Dettmer: Book Autopsies at Centripetal Notion.

awesome, book, books, art, sculpture

Story: Timbuk2 develops a new line of messenger bags that features fabric made of recycled material (engineered by RootPhi). Some of the fabric contains a symbol that Target lawyers say is their logo. Target lawyers cease and desist Timbuk2.

Thing is, the trademarked Target logo is a roundel, commonly used around the world (easily recognized in British aircraft of WWII). The particular design Target has chosen appears to be a copy of Peru’s official insignia.

Trademark law isn’t my thing, but I wonder if the roundel is trademarkable. “Most jurisdictions totally exclude certain types of terms and symbols from registration as trademarks, including the emblems, insignia and flags of nations….”

copyfight, trademark, Target, roundel, symbols, Timbuk2, cease and desist

Our intention is to feature “a series of books that challenge our beliefs and test our commitment to free speech,” but on this post about Holocaust denial I found myself unwilling (and unable) to link to the free, online PDF full text of David Irving’s Hitler’s War. And when we discovered it wasn’t in our collection (though it may have been lost/stolen, not replaced, and the record deleted), we decided not to purchase it.

Sometimes books are challenged. Sometimes they’re just not purchased.

bbw, bbw2007, banned books week, library, libraries, dilemma, holocaust denial

Hey, I’m a fan of that old book smell too, can I get some scratch-n-sniff stickers?

smell, scratch-n-sniff, libraries, ebooks

What’s really angering about instructions [...] is that they imply there’s only one way [...] their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually there are hundreds of ways [...] and when they make you follow just one way without showing you the overall problem the instructions become hard to follow in such a way as not to make mistakes. You lose feeling for the work. And not only that, it’s very unlikely that they’ve told you the best way.

Apologies to Mr. Pirsig.

usage, instructions, one way, zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, towelette, fresh nap

I wasn’t planning on posting much about Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, but I did. And now I find myself posting about it again. Thing is, I’m a sucker for historical analogy, and Clay Shirky yesterday posted a good one that compared the disruptive effects of mechanized cloth production to today’s internet.

Yes, that’s actually the birth of the Luddite movement, or at least where it got its name. And, though I was aware of the story, Shirky’s study offered details I’d not know previously.

Most interesting was the news that the handweavers largely opposed only the mills that sold their textiles cheaper than the handweavers did. And mills that sold their products at artificially high prices and used the efficiency of the mechanized looms to earn exorbitant profits weren’t opposed by the handweavers.

Hmmm….

Now back to Keen. Keen “doesn’t oppose all uses of technology, just ones that destroy older ways of doing things.”

But Keen is wrong. Using the internet without putting new capabilities into the hands of its users (who are, by definition, amateurs in most things they can now do) would be like using a mechanical loom and not lowering the cost of buying a coat — possible, but utterly beside the point.

The criticism here is that Keen wants technology to be controlled, and the value enjoyed exclusively by the establishment.

The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.

Keen is right in understanding that this massive supply-side shock to freedom will destabilize and in some cases destroy a number of older social institutions. He is wrong in believing that there is some third way — lets deploy the internet, but not use it to increase the freedom of amateurs to do as they like.

(Emphasis added.)

web 2.0, internet, anarchy, control, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, Clay Shirky, luddite, luddism, disruptive technology

Sweet bike

Originally uploaded by misterbisson.

Sent from my iPhone

Two books that just happened to be sitting next to eachother in the LC files:

001        47029455
003     DLC
005     20050826211147.0
008     761229s1946    xx            000 0 dut
010    _a   47029455
020    _a940.544
035    _a(OCoLC)2652163
040    _aDLC
       _cPBm
       _dDLC
042    _apremarc
050 00 _aD763.N42
       _bR64
100 1  _aToonder, Jan Gerhard,
       _d1914-
245 14 _aHet puin aan de Rotte,
       _cdoor J. Gerhard Toonder.
260    _aAmsterdam,
       _bA. J. G. Strengholt
       _c[c1946]
300    _a95 p.
       _billus.
       _c27 cm.
651  0 _aRotterdam (Netherlands)
       _yBombardment, 1940.

Note the 600 series fields above and below.

001        47029622
003     DLC
005     20050415202653.0
008     731204s1947    nyua     b    001 0 eng
010    _a   47029622
020    _a0820601128
035    _a(OCoLC)754199
040    _aDLC
       _cOY
       _dDLC
042    _apremarc
050 00 _aTP300
       _b.W4 1947
082    _a662.1
100 1  _aWeingart, George W.
       _q(George Washington),
       _d1871-
245 10 _aPyrotechnics /
       _cby George Weingart.
250    _a2d ed., rev. and enl.
260    _aBrooklyn :
       _bChemical Pub. Co.,
       _cc1947.
300    _axii, 244 p. :
       _bill. ;
       _c23 cm.
500    _aPub. 1937 under title: Dictionary and manual of pyrotechny; 1939 under title: Pyrotechny;
              a practical manual for manufacturers of fireworks, signals, flares and pyrotechnic displays;
              1943 under title: Pyrotechnics, civil and military.
500    _aIncludes index.
504    _a“List of pyrotechnical books”: p. 232-233.
650  0 _aFireworks.

library, libraries, next to eachother, fireworks, pyrotechnics, bombardment, proximity, shelf

The problem with working on Scriblio is that I end up running into so many interesting looking books. Just this morning I discovered a number of recent acquisitions in the 19th Century and 20th Century subject feeds in my development instance (also available via RSS).

All of this is under active development, so those links may or may not work, and the site is definitely changing URLs soon. Still, I had to bookmark these books somehow so I could come back to them.

books, scriblio, joy of discovery

Sure it’s a promo for his new book, but Bob Sutton is offering us all a chance to see if we’re assholes with the Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE).

After 24 questions like “You secretly enjoy watching other people suffer and squirm” (hey, what’s wrong with a little schaedenfreud?) you’ll find yourself placed somewhere on the scale from possible liar to full-blown certified asshole.

• You don’t sound like a certified asshole, unless you are fooling yourself.
• You sound like a borderline certified asshole, perhaps the time has come to start changing your behavior before it gets worse.
• You sound like a full-blown certified asshole to me, get help immediately. But, please, don’t come to me for help, as I would rather not meet you.

And if that isn’t enough self-abuse, another quiz asks “do you make air travel miserable for everyone else?”

I take some offense at the suggestion in one question that asking for extra refreshments is bad behavior, as I feel I can never get enough to drink on a plane, but at least the scale seems a little easier:

• You are too perfect to be true, I don’t believe you.
• You sound like a generally civilized passenger to me.
• You are a borderline “Flying ARSE,”
• You are a certified “Flying ARSE.” I hope that you don’t sit near me.
• You are a certified “Flaming Flying ARSE.” I wish that airlines could ban you from flying.

quiz, personality test, asshole, Bob Sutton, Robert I. Sutton, The No Asshole Rule, book

Speaking at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism last month, David Halberstam struck the chord of competition journalists must struggle with. As a newspaper man who started at the smallest newspaper in Mississippi and worked his way up to the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Vietnam War, he learned that television’s constant stream of images offered “drama and excitement,” but perhaps incomplete reporting. Not that he was criticizing TV, no, he praised it for bringing images and awareness into our living rooms nightly, raising questions among the viewing audience that “we [in newspapers] had the chance to answer if we used our skills properly.”

But, “if we’re to compete, we’d better be very good storytellers.”

There is, I think, craft. …Knowing where to look. Knowing how to build steam. Knowing how to sustain a narrative drive. How to keep a reader interested — this is a real challenge. Everybody’s attention span is short. We are really competing. I mean, it used to be just television. Now it’s 200 channels. It’s four channels of Law and Order. There’s 20 sports channels. And there’s the Internet, there’s the blog — every person is his or her own editor. First you have to get it right. You have to make it accurate. Then you have to learn how to dramatize it, to bring it alive, to find the people and the events that make it real. So you’re not just a reporter, and you’re not just a historian — not in the world we live in with all the competing forms of information. You are a playwright too. You’ve got to bring in the drama.

competition, David Halberstam, media, storytelling, dissemination, speech, tv vs. newspapers, television news, newspapers, news writing

Will, Cliff (both above), and I recorded this song in one take in late 1999. Though, calling it a “take” is overstating it. We were beyond silly drunk and lacked any talent for the task, but we had a mic in front of us, a guitar, and a willingness to open our mouths and let something — anything — fly out.

It wasn’t until Will said “This song is called Nukerator” that we knew what we were supposed to be singing about. We’d never sketched any of it out, or even discussed it. This was truly stream of consciousness, so as bad as it is, there’s also something endearing about it (well, at least to us).

Putting together the pieces from that night, we named our ad-hoc band “More Equipment Than Talent.” We’ve tried since to repeat the feat — the ingredients seemed easy enough — but we’ve had little success. Infighting, artistic differences, and a reasonable interest in raising the quality of our work have limited our efforts, but when this song appeared out of the blue the other day while iTunes was on random, I knew it was time to share.

Note: while listening to it last again night to get the lyrics, I realized there are a few lines about school violence that may be offensive to some today. The context, I hope, gives it the correct meaning.

Lyrics:

Will: This song is called Nukerator.

Cliff: No it’s not.

Cliff: What’s with you and f-major 7?

Casey: This is a song about a microwavable instant cook world. We live in this world, this over-abled world.

Casey: We got Cheez Whiz, we’ve got tacos, we got salsa, we got snack cakes, we got pizza feets. We’ve got everything we want.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: And it goes in the microwave and we eat it in five minutes. Cook it on 75% power, just throw it in the nukerator, just cook it now.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: Got pasteurized processed cheese spread.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: I love my bagel bites. My meatless breakfast sandwiches; seven minutes at 75% power

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: Microwavable hamburgers, spaghetti, and meatballs.

Cliff: It’s meaningless.

Casey: Microwaveable, inflatable girlfriend.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: A Solitary, confined sort-of-life between the refrigerator, and the microwave, and the Walmart. The Super Walmart with the superstore. The food products, the pasteurized processed cheese spread. the stuff I eat from the microwave after five minutes.

Cliff: It’s meaningless. It’s meaningless

Will: Nukerator. We’re nukrawavable. Nukerator.

Casey: Microwave, my cell phone, my pager. It’s my modern world and I love it.

Cliff: We find it only makes us fat.

Casey: My microwave fries the dynabites, and the cell phone fries my head. And I talk about it all day long. Meaningless

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: The average conversation on a cell phone goes like this: Hello, I’m here, I’ll be there later, no, I’m going there next.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: Meanwhile, driving my SUV, I drive through the school house, drive down all the kids, drive down the one with the gun who was gonna kill them all because he couldn’t stand it.

Cliff: Hello, I’m helping your environment. What can I do next?

Casey: I didn’t even realize it because I was on my phone with my counselor, who was fixing my hair. I didn’t understand it. My microwave was broken and my cheeze couldn’t be warmed. Just five minutes at 75% power.

Cliff: I hold no responsibility myself. I only put the responsibility on the head of my counselor. She has it all for herself. I don’t what I’m trying to say, but I don’t have any responsibility today. Will dropped his pick, it’s not his fault. He takes it in his hands. I’ll grab it for him…

Casey: I live in a microwavable, able world. A world of isolation and communication. False pretense, false friendships.

Cliff: Long hair is European, short hair is American.

At this point, Will and I looked at eachother and realized it’d gone too far. Sorry to all that we realized it so late.

drunkmusic, betrunkmusik, music, free mp3s, mp3, more equipment than talent, audio, song, silly, embarrassing, bad, nuke, microwave song, nukerator, drunk, alcohol induced poetry, social commentary, nuclear

I’m a newcomer CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, I started watching it with season six while suffering a flu that immobilized me for what seemed like a week or more. Dumb with illness, I went searching for a diversion at the iTunes store and stumbled into the series. I had the entire season downloaded quickly; it took me two marathon days to watch them all.

I got hooked.

Now I’m following season seven, again via iTunes. It’s more convenient than Tivo — each show arrives on schedule and free of commercials — and with the savings I get by going with DSL (naked, $30/month) versus cable (internet + TV, $100/month), a “season pass” on iTunes looks like chump change for the little bit of television I want.

And there’s a chance that consuming my media that way gives me a greater sense of ownership.

So when I say that CSI has jumped the shark, understand that it’s a rather considered opinion. I’m not alone, though some (35) people claim it jumped it as soon as Jorja Fox was cast and others (171) point to the plushies and furries episode (season four, I’ve been catching up on the back seasons via Netflix). Whatever the moment was, it became clear it had already passed a few weeks ago when they did a clip show reviewing the miniature houses subplot, loosely stitched together around lab rat Hodges.

csi, crime scene investigation, jumped the shark, television, decline, tv