Author: Adam (Page 143 of 224)

Poor Andy Rooney. It’s easy enough to make fun of him as a commentator who makes millions writing ’60 Minutes’ pieces about the contents of his desk drawer, or whether women make better lawn mowers than men. But things get even worse when Andy tries to make a serious point.

I found myself rubbing my eyes tonight as Rooney began to make a cogent, if simplistic, argument about the misuses of patriotism – to hawk products and advertise the Olympics. Then he had to go screw it up with this jaw-droppingly clueless ending:

“The rest of the world doesn’t like the way we behave as if no one else’s country is as good as ours and we ought to stop acting that way ? even if we’re right.”

Way to make your own point, Andy.

Went to Sam’s Club with my mother today. Sam’s Club, for those not familiar, is a subscription version of Wal-Mart, where people pay a yearly fee to be able to wander the gargantuan aisles, filled with trampolines, frozen giant shrimp, paperpack books, jewelry, jean jackets, pork roasts, and packages of toilet paper the size of a Buick. Everything is in massive quantities, stacked up inside the airplane-hangar-sized building like so much consumerist cordwood.

My mother, of course, goes there to get one item, and stands in line alongside people who are pushing giant double-sized flat-bottom carts, like the ones they use on the loading dock at the airport. Then you box up your own purchases, and get “checked-out” again at the door to make sure you aren’t carrying, oh, 40 pounds of frozen hamburger patties in your coat.

Usually when I go there, I just marvel at the culture that has created a place like this. But in my current grumpy-old-man mode, it made me almost physically ill to see all these people jockeying for position as they consumed massive quantities of a bunch of processed food and other junk they don’t need. Is this all there is?

In case you were wondering, I am not a veterinary assistant at an animal clinic in western Kentucky.

Just wanted to clear that up.

(Who are your online doppelgangers?)

Inspired by Robin’s wonderful collage of artifacts from her father’s house, I decided to do the same sort of thing for my father. I was surprised by the amount of stuff I had connected to him, and even more surprised there wasn’t more of it – his artistic and photographic output was prodigious. Every one of these items has a story behind it. I hope the resulting images will give you some flavor of my father’s personality.

My thanks to Robin for bringing back a lot of memories.

I’m going to take my Snickers and Mars Bar on the plane from Wisconsin to New Jersey. (via Xkot)

The web is an amazing organism. It routes around obstacles; it gives ordinary people extraordinary powers of communication; it blasts through barriers to information exchange; it rewards openness and punishes small-mindedness and corporatespeak.

So how is it that people are still screwing it up so much?

Dave Winer linked recently to a great article by Eve Andersson, one of the founders of ArsDigita, a cool web content management firm that was a pioneer in releasing web applications as open source. It details how a thriving web company was brought to its knees by venture capitalists, who came in knowing nothing about the web and dismantled everything good about the company.

Now, it could be said that it was the founders’ fault bringing in the suits in the first place, if everything was going just fine until then. I guess the lure of big bucks, especially before the internet bubble burst, was too much for most people to resist. Still, it shows how fragile the web culture can be.

The story reminded me of my former employer. We had a fun and useful web culture growing there, until some management types came in and wrecked it. They knew very little about technology and absolutely nothing about the web, and didn’t much care to learn either. Our mission and our very jobs were made irrelevant by flowcharts and directives and new complex chains of command. Where before we just jumped in and got things done, now any action meant three or four meetings and explaining things to people who couldn’t care less.

It’s no wonder I became a freelancer.

A recurring theme on this site has been my “let’s junk the culture and start again” moments. I think one of my first ones was when Hammacher Schlemmer was selling a plastic doodad whose only function was to form perfectly round snowballs. And then came Anne Heche, and each new Olsen twins series, and on and on.

Well, just when you think things can’t get any worse, they keep surprising you.

Rollerball
Huge stinker. The “no script” problem, which you would reasonably expect from a project like this, could have been overcome with decent direction. As it is, the action sequences are choppy and uninvolving. A large section of the movie is filmed in grainy green low-light goggles style, which gets annoying. LL Cool J tries (he made parts of “Deep Blue Sea” entertaining), but most of the movie is given over to Chris Klein and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos – need I say more?

If anyone has any suggestions for a mindless action movie that’s actually entertaining, it’s what I’m looking for right about now.

I’ve played most of the Sim games – SimCity (all versions), The Sims, etc. They were interesting, but my interest usually fell off pretty sharply after the first few “that’s cool” times playing them. The Sims moves too fast, and you spend too much time making sure that your little fella goes to the bathroom and doesn’t burn the house down to make it all that fun. SimCity I always found too complicated.

Well, now I’m seriously addicted to SimGolf, a collaboration between Sid Meier of Civilization fame and Maxis. And I don’t even like golf. The best thing about it is it doesn’t drown you in all kinds of detail right off the bat. Building a course is amazingly fun, and you get to see the little SimGolfers enjoying the course as you go along. Plus there are different environments: desert, coastal, tropical, and my favorite – “links,” which emulates European courses.

Highly recommended, especially if you liked other Sim games.

Read in Entertainment Weekly that if the “Friends” crew comes back for another season, they will likely each get $1 million per episode.

What this means is, for each episode, each “Friend” will make 50 times (!) what I made last year.

50 times.

Now far be it for me to question the law of supply and demand. But 50 times? For David Schwimmer? I just don’t get it.