MaisonBisson

macminicolo.net explains how to use it.

Michael Sauers pointed out Q-Unit, a mashup of Queen and 50 Cent. They’re sure to have Disney (the rights owner for Queen’s catalog) on their back soon. At least, it didn’t take Disney long to shut down The Kleptones, whose “A Night At The Hip-Hopera” has a spot on my iPod.

And that’s where the story comes around, are we at the point where we can say Queen’s music has taken on the status of a modern fairy tale? And are these artists — The Kleptones and Q-Unit — the new Disneys, remaking old tales for new times?

A friend of mine jokes that every conversation in Warren revolves around heat. But, it wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t at least a little bit true. As it turns out, most of the rest of the country is talking about heat too.

Pellet stoves have been all the rage this fall. I feel lucky to have gotten one before the rush, but I’m also a little dismayed about the selection. Why (as usual) do Europeans get good looking pellet stoves like this, but no American manufacturer can do anything that looks like it was designed in the past two centuries.

But I shouldn’t complain. At least I got the pellet fuel I need, others may not be so lucky. New York state’s Consumer Protection Board issued a press release asking retailers to ration supplies to three tons per household., but an AP report quotes a retailer saying “there is not a shortage of pellets, there is a shortage of pellets getting to us in a timely fashion.”

And all of that makes for good conversation in Warren.

open-ils blog » Blog Archive » OpenSRF Jabber: A Technical Review

Ryan Eby tells me that the current issue of Library Hi Tech includes some discussion of open source software’s uses in libraries.

Most of my reading is non-fiction, so I depend on Bob Garlitz to keep me current with the rest of the literary world and a bit of the art world.

Dave English explains why airport codes can be so darn confusing (even while some of them are stupid obvious).

We’ve all heard it before, but we just can’t get it out of our heads. Today’s movies make us feel dumb. Paulina Borsook joins the chorus and condemns contemporary cinema by praising movies of the 60s and 70s:

They were movies made for adults, even if they had been mainstream movies and/or nominally rated PG. They made presumptions about the intelligence of their audience, didn’t need things to be boldly spelled out, and they were predicated on the assumption that their audience was capable of making inferences. No semaphoring! No high-concept! Satire as opposed to scatology! Shades of gray in motive and character! Minimum numbers of car crashes! No fish out of water! No hilarious mixups!

Interestingly, she also found praise for The Interpreter:

The female characters didn’t simper, and didn’t seem like 30 going on 13 (hey, wasn’t there…). They were about themselves, subject rather than object.

The male characters had interior lives that made them seem human, creatures capable of emotional nuance.

So what else does she recommend? She’s made a list. Interestingly, all of this appears at GreenCine.com, a Netflix competitor I’d not heard of before it got a recommendation at O’Grady’s PowerPage.

The docs are in the codex, this tag plugin offers quite a few examples, as does Jerome’s Keywords plugin.

I don’t know how I missed cyberhobo‘s geo-mashup-plugin (also at wp-plugins.org) until now.

I might be reading this wrong, but it looks like I’ve been using AHAH when I’ve thought I was using AJAX. Hmm…

Yahoo! News tells me that Brigitte Hoffmann’s Tages-Bar in Berlin gets robbed a lot.

CMS Market Watch tells us that there are 1,800 CMS vendors, and some of them are getting a little feisty.

In a Washington Post column last week, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington proposed A Library for The New World:

[T]he time may be right for our country’s delegation to consider introducing to the [UNESCO] a proposal for the cooperative building of a World Digital Library. This would offer the promise of bringing people closer together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking.

And in this time of war and strife, what makes such a proposal so important?

Libraries are inherently islands of freedom and antidotes to fanaticism. They are temples of pluralism where books that contradict one another stand peacefully side by side just as intellectual antagonists work peacefully next to each other in reading rooms.

And I can’t think of a better message to start the holidays with.