New Microsoft/Smart Tags slogan (courtesy of Scripting News):
Where do [we] want [your visitors] to go today?

OK, I promise I’ll try to get off this topic and go back to talking about Bloussant, Britney Spears and Entertainment Tonight.

Extremely good rundown on many aspects of Smart Tags in A List Apart. I know I’ve been on the ‘Smart Tags are evil’ bandwagon somewhat heavily of late, but I honestly believe that they, or some later implementation of the same ideas, could be a major infringement on our freedom to publish on the web. Check it out and decide for yourself.

Wouldn’t you love to meet some of the people whose blogs you read on a daily basis? I know I would. It would be so great to have Mike, Melissa, Moira, Arthur, Miguel, Kevin, Mike C., and Tuesday all sitting out on the patio overlooking Lake Monona. All of the aforementioned have an open invitation to come by any time. I’d even spring for some pizza and beer.

Current web pet peeve: sites that break the back button, so you have to pull down the list of recently-visited sites to get the H-E-double-hockey-sticks out of there. A big BOO! to this passive agressive web behavior.

Apparently my new toothpaste, Colgate 2 in 1, is poison:
“If more than used for brushing is accidentally swallowed, get medical help or call a Poison Control Center right away.”

This is not a reassuring thing to see on the back of a package of something I put in my mouth every day.

Movie line trivia – where does this come from?

[nasally] “We stopped serving breakfast at 11:30.”

I’m thinking of using it as my weblog tagline at some point. Amazing movie, by the way. See it if you haven’t.

Going to “…River..” last night, I had to sit through a lot of pretentious “triumph of the human spirit” previews for foreign films about people suffering and hugging and dancing in faraway lands. Got me thinking about the sad state of movie previews these days. The primary offender, of course, is the “let’s tell the whole movie, including the ending” disease. This is actually a benefit for a movie like “The Wedding Planner,” where you’re relieved they told the whole thing so you don’t have to suffer through it in real time. But for a movie that you actually want to see, well…

I used to really enjoy the previews – they were like little movies unto themselves. Now I’m just a crabby old man who doesn’t want to see even two minutes of the latest Martin Lawrence train wreck. Maybe it’s just the avalanche of crappy movies in the theaters now, but these days I don’t mind if I come in just as the movie’s starting. That way, I’ll likely also be spared a mind-numbing commercial for Mountain Dew. And that’s a good thing.

Went to see “Keep the River on Your Right” last night at the Orpheum with Mike and Debbie. Mike is a documentary fanatic – almost all of his favorite movies are documentaries. So he suggested this one, about an artist/anthropologist who spent the 50s-70s living with primitive tribes in Peru and New Guinea; he returns to those places in his late 70s with a film crew. Not exactly my speed, and I’d avoided it up to this point.

But I was pleasantly surprised. This guy, Tobias Schneebaum, spent his life living it exactly as he wanted. He is infamous for living fully within these primitive societies, taking part in their homosexual practices and in one case, their cannibalism. (The best moment of the film, for me, is when the female co-host of the Mike Douglas show is disgusted by the thought of cannibalism, then two seconds later says breathlessly, “How did it taste?”) He often points out, gently, that the actions of these “primitive” people are no stranger than those in “modern” societies. He is photographed at the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, saying, “I’ve done everything in my life I wanted to do. If I die today, that’ll be all right.” How many people will get to that age and be able to say the same? Recommended.

Spent the day at Taliesin with my mother yesterday, taking both the school and the house tours. I realized this year it’s kind of silly that I’ve lived in the area most of my life, and my father was a Frank Lloyd Wright fanatic, but I’d never been to Taliesin, which is actually on the road to my mother’s house. I wish I had some pictures to post, but 1) they only let you take outdoor photos, 2) I had the old digital with me, so the ones I took aren’t that great, and 3) I didn’t even take that camera to the house tour, since I thought it was going to rain (it didn’t).

What struck me was how comfortable the spaces seemed. A few more inches in some of the ceiling heights, and you could move right in. Also, from every vantage point throughout the estate you saw something interesting – a roof line, a window, a terrace, a lamp, a curtain. Your eyes are always engaged without getting overwhelmed. The natural materials (mostly wood and stone from local forests and quarries) make you feel calm and centered.

Quite a contrast to the recent Madison Parade of Homes, which my mother visited as she does every year. She showed me the house catalog, and described to me how none of these showy, ostentatious, cold houses were worth living in. The choppy floor plans were in great contrast to Wright’s flowing spaces, which use ceiling height and other subtle changes to denote different areas. The triple-height formal living rooms, rarely entered, are mostly filled with the ugliest furniture a lot of money can buy. Most new houses these days, Parade or not, look and feel like they were stamped out of a plastic mold.

How much damage to our psyches are we doing living in houses like these?

Well, it appears that those geniuses at Microsoft, rather than backing down when faced with the furor over Smart Tags, are digging in. “To suggest that the author knows best how to write effectively to each individual reader is silly,” says John Wilcox. I find it frightening that MS, now with a virtual monopoly on how web pages are displayed, makes their first use of that monopoly to institute a scheme where they can add links to any web page, going wherever they want. As Dave Winer says, very 1984.

Anyone who writes on the web should be gearing up to do whatever it takes to stop this.