Thu, June 30
Giving new meaning to "Love"—12:03 PM
I heard Maria Sharapova would be playing Venus Williams at Wimbledon today, so I made sure to tune in.
Sure enough, NBC's coverage opens with a music-video montage of the two dancing, posing, and – yes – playing tennis, accompanied by Madonna's "Vogue".
Every so often, it's nice being exactly the mindless, lecherous schlub network television assumes me to be.
1 comment
Yipe! More Apple Propaganda!—11:37 AM
The following link will mean nothing to many of you, who don't care that much about Apple Computer, Inc. (Or, in some cases, actively hate it.) But – regardless of whether you like Apple or the iPod – I think it's a fascinating evaluation of marketing, design, and product engineering in the consumer technology sector.
Shuffling [Daring Fireball]
I just love the way Gruber thinks about things. There are times when I'm reading his stuff, when I think "Yes! That's exactly the reaction I'd have had." If I spent as much time thinking about these topics. I'm too busy analyzing The Family Feud to concentrate on Apple this much, but I'm glad someone with the right mindset is on the task. The same way I was impressed from a distance by Arksie's obsessive attention to statistics in Why Super Bowl XXXVIII Is Going To Be a Blowout.
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Wed, June 29
Reflections on the Brevity of Life—4:33 PM
The following is a poem that I wrote very spontaneously in high school and submitted to the school's literary magazine on a whim. To my great astonishment, it was selected for publication. Since I don't have a copy of the magazine, I thought it had been lost forever. (Once or twice, I've thought of contacting Julienne Rolfe – even though I haven't spoken with her in nearly a decade, she ran the magazine and might have a copy.)
As luck would have it, I just stumbled across a copy on an old floppy disc while looking for some ancient website assets.
Now, it can finally be shared:
Reflections on the Brevity of Life
He was the strongest man in the countryside
Hey, ho! Hey, ho! ZIMBABWE!
In battle he was wounded, and soon he died
Hey, ho! Hey, ho! ZIMBABWE!
His story isn't told to little children
His family doesn't even know his name.
But, even though his life was not historic,
He's still a mighty warrior just the same.
1 comment
Tue, June 28
The Girl in the Café
HBO offers a new film from rom-com megastar Richard Curtis, which mixes courtship with geopolitics. It's a sometimes rocky coupling, but still a satisfying and heartfelt story. (Read more.)
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The sky is falling – right in your lap!—12:01 PM
Our pal Darling Ben writes in today's "Variety" about a plan to bring Chicken Little into theatres with some sassy new 3D technology. (Chicken Little is Disney's first computer-animated feature produced in-house, rather than through partnership with Pixar.)
Disney, Dolby cook digital 'Chicken' [Variety]
The basic idea being: Chicken Little is a bit of a stinker – maybe if we can force the audience to see it through some special glasses, it'll make it more watchable. Zach Braff is a doll, but the more footage I see of Chicken Little the more obvious it is that Disney's still grasping at straws and refusing to do their homework.
Pixar focuses on characters and story at the expense of all else. Disney focuses on... technology, synergy, and strategic partnership? Good luck with that.
2 comments
Mon, June 27
Blue Tights
Warners and the producers of Superman Returns have displayed surprisingly good judgment – creating a movie website that serves fans as well as the studio, while delivering some very compelling content. (Read more.)
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King Kong Preview—9:33 PM
Well, regardless of anything else, Naomi Watts looks breathtaking. The movie definitely promises to be quite a ride. I wish there were a few more shots that hadn't been filmed against a green screen. I like Peter Jackson fine (more so after the Blue Tights on-set footage) but my chief complaint about his movies is that they're a little too fantastic. (Of course, I understand that LOTR is the definition of fantasy, so on that score the fault is my own.) Everything's so grand and surreal, with the virtual camera swooping and diving, and the scenery going on and on into infinity. When Kong throws a taxi, it lands and slides perfectly into the camera. It's a style, to be sure, but it's one that makes it hard for me to establish a connection to the movie. I'm hopeful that there's a great deal of character work in the scenes we (necessarily) don't see in the trailer. It would be nice for the actors to have a chance to act against something non-imaginary. (Not that acting against Adrien Brody is much different from acting against a blank wall painted bright blue.) I'm certainly optimistic that this will be the case. I look forward to seeing the movie.
(Still, the T. rex really doesn't sound right without the baby elephant.)
See the trailer.
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Fri, June 24
Eminent Domain—2:27 PM
I've been pretty chilled by this Supreme Court ruling about eminent domain. Well, as chilled as one can be when all he knows about it has been gleaned from one-sentence summaries on dozens of blogs. It doesn't seem in the spirit of the law to say that the Gubmint can just decide that what you're doing with your land isn't as exciting as it could be, then seize it and hand it over to another private individual to have a better crack at it. (And a corporation is a private individual – just ask The Corporation.)
Anyway, as luck would have it, Lileks provides this peek into how such a scenario can play out. Eerie, and oddly romantic. And, look! The villain in this story is our old friend Best Buy. Perfect.
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Thu, June 23
Trailer Watch
Quickie reviews of recent trailers: Dakota Fanning loves horses, Heather Locklear loves a paycheck, Terrence Malick loves syphilis blankets, America loves Jessica Simpson's taut little ass. (Read more.)
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No Cigar Dept.—7:42 PM
Other Wrong Guesses for a Challenging Final Jeopardy! Clue:
(The correct response was "Wedgewood" but two contestants put "Waterford" instead.)
- Waterboy
- Waferboard
- Whippersnap
- Wiffle Bat
- Wellington
- Simón Bolivar
2 comments
Markething—3:19 PM
More dividends from the practice of typing a random word (or, in this case, neologism) into a web browser:
I was nostalgically re-reading Salon's excellent 1999 exposé on the expensive, high-stakes practice of naming companies and products (The Name Game) – I still make frequent use of "Mescalanza" – and this lead to some quick online research into a lot of the companies that do corporate naming and brand strategy. (An astonishing number of the companies named in the article survived Clinton's dot-com bust and economic freefall, and continue to do the same work today.)
It's some interesting reading. There's a lot to be said for concepts like "speechstream," "notational visibility," and "phonetic transparency," as silly as they sound. I can tell you from experience that as phonetically transparent as "onebee" would seem to be, it is not. I constantly have to spell it out for people.
Anyway, my reaction to all this was pretty typical: "I can do that; easy!" I mean: Jamcracker, Calibrus, Spherion? Anybody can come up with gibberish like that! My first crack was "markething" – which I thought would score highly on speechstream and phonetic transparency, if not super-high on notational visibility. I figured it would be good for a boutique marketing/PR firm that takes a touchy-feely freeform approach: it appears to say "marketing" but also has "thing" in there, which kind of sounds like "whatever," sort of whimsical.
So, step one these days is to type it into a web browser. Sure enough, it's in use – although not the way I envisioned it. Still, pretty neat car sculpture!
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Tue, June 21
Madagascar, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Batman Begins
It's been a while since we've had capsule reviews at onebee, but it's also been a while since we stalled halfway through a handful of movie reviews simultaneously. Enjoy them in all their bite-sized glory! (Read more.)
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Thinking About Photo Galleries—4:14 PM
Today, Jason Kottke (the Internet's most famous full-time blogger) announced the redesign of his site's photo album feature.
Tweaked photo album template [Kottke]
Kottke has ripped off (sorry, "adopted") the same navigation that I adopted (sorry, "stole") from Doug Bowman's galleries.
If you mouseover the right half of the photo, you get an arrow overlaid on the photo that suggests that you can click to move to the next photo (which, of course, you can). Then you can click on the left side of the photo to go back.
My photo pages will do the same thing. You can't see it in the mockup, because it's just a static image, but the "previous" and "next" buttons atop every picture light up when you mouseover a) that half of the image, b) the buttons themselves, or c) the text links at the left which relate to the next and previous photos. Doug's gallery was the first place I'd ever seen this, and I think it's brilliant.
First of all, it's basic Fitts's law – giving people a larger area to click makes the photo gallery that much easier to navigate. And, giving a visual indicator helps viewers learn how to use the page. At first, they might be clicking on the text links, but after seeing the "next" button light up every time, they'll adapt to the easier way. It's the only place onebee will feature rollover graphics – which I did away with in last year's redesign – but I think it's a worthy exception to the rule.
Kottke chose to follow Doug's lead and also superimpose the navigation arrows right on the image:
If you're using Safari or Firefox or anything but IE really, the arrow images are tranparent png files that blend in with the photo in the background. Fun!
This is one of the reasons I chose to put my buttons outside the image: compatibility. Even a feature as simple as this will start to break in older browsers, and I wanted to preserve the full functionality for as many viewers as possible. Also, this will allow me to keep the size and placement of the buttons consistent even if the photo isn't always the same size – and that's another win for usability. The overlay effect is very pretty, but I like that my version will be more inclusive and easier to use – plus, you can keep your pointer over the right half of the photo the whole time you're navigating the gallery, and always be able to see the unobstructed image.
It's great fun to work through these design and usability challenges, and it's cool when others are in the same boat – fishing around for the best possible solution. Kottke and Doug Bowman were the inspiration for my ground-up redesign of the way photos will be treated at onebee: bigger images, easier navigation, friendlier layouts. I can't wait for the new onebee, when we'll all be able to use them.
Update: An example of what not to do: John Kerry's Challenge – could those navigation buttons be any smaller and harder to find?
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Fri, June 17
Comments, Login, and Ajax
Another update on the progress of the redesign. Featuring: capitulation to the masses, cookie-based login, and an in-depth discussion of Ajax – the frisky little web trend that's taking the 'net by storm. (Read more.)
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Buzzworthy: On The March!—4:27 PM
As I've mentioned before, the new onebee will support comments for the Buzzworthy links in addition to polls and columns and all the other wonderful stuff you can comment on now. The first step in activating this feature is coming up with a page layout to display a link along with its comments and related items.
Mine owes much of its beauty to a wholesale rip-off of Kottke. But it's damn charming. Why reinvent the wheel?
NEXT!!
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Thank me later, McRace pals!—12:46 PM
All my hours of watching Match Game and Family Feud at lunch have finally paid off in a MAJOR SCOOP:
Game Show Network (GSN for you kids) will begin airing reruns of The Amazing Race. From the beginning. Starting July 11. Nightly at 9pm.
So I guess our summer is pretty much set!
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Thu, June 16
Top Ten TV Shows, All-Time
A good list is fascinating, provocative, even enlightening. However, creating one (especially this one) is an exercise in painful introspection. Thankfully, I have a cruel taskmaster who forces me to do it. (Read more.)
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Tue, June 14
Veronica Mars—10:39 AM
Don't forget! If you were crazy enough to miss the best new show this season, UPN will begin airing the entire first season of Veronica Mars again tonight at 9pm (ET/PT).
Future episodes air in the new time slot at 9pm on Wednesdays. Currently UPN's online schedule indicates that this Wednesday will be episode 6, then they'll skip ahead to episode 10 next week. But that's gotta be a typo: why on Earth wouldn't they go in order? This is their chance to recruit new viewers.
Anyway, be sure to check it out. I'll keep you posted as I find out more about the scheduling.
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Math bees—10:09 AM
The onebee science corner continues, this time with an article that's (synergistically enough) about bees. Mathematician Barbara Shipman contends that bees can sense quantum fields and that sensitivity is what designs their well known dance patterns. If that sounds crazy, the key to remember here is that the bees don't know it's a quantum field. They just feel it – the way your inner ear allows you to feel balance, or the way bees "see" UV light, because their eyes are sensitive to that part of the spectrum.
What impresses me the most about this is that the discovery results entirely from Shipman's overlapping expertise – she studies quantum math, but just happens to have a long-standing interest in bee dances because her dad worked with bees in her childhood. That always fascinates me about creative and intellectually curious people: they pursue many different interests which may seem unrelated, but every so often the combination of two separate hobbies yields an unexpected discovery. Out of millions of researchers, Barbara Shipman happens to know about the two fields that come together to make the quantum bee connection.
I spent a few minutes on Google and couldn't find any mention of the theory more than a few months after this article was published in late 1997. I don't know if this means she abandoned the theory. Either way, I like the idea of bees as little math genius superheroes. I'd love it if they were able to measure quantum fields without disturbing them (the way scientists can't) and researchers had to use them like canaries in a mine. Think of the publicity for onebee!
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Fri, June 10
Dude, Where's My Empire?
Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith is not a good movie. (I know you expected me to say exactly that – and I strove to defy expectation here, I really did. But that's all I can tell you.) (Read more.)
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Thu, June 9
Intelligent Design Theory
Believe what you want. I think Bonnie Hunt is hotter than Nicole Kidman. But we've got to have standards about what we teach in our science classrooms as fact. And those standards should be reviewed by scientists, not legislators, and certainly not religious leaders. (Read more.)
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The Inside—1:02 AM
I enjoyed the premiere of Fox's new FBI profiler show The Inside tonight. My interest was piqued by a snappy-looking promo spot which wrapped up with the show's title in the Alias font. It also seemed like an interesting concept and before long I found out it was created by Tim Minear, who co-created the delightful Wonderfalls and also worked on Firefly (and Angel, which is somewhat of a red flag for me, but – bygones). Honestly, once I saw that Peter Coyote was going to be in it, I practically pre-ordered the Inside DVD.
Coyote's excellent, the new girl is great, and I like the way the show is paced and written. It's certainly not perfect (this is network TV after all), but it's very good. And this is summer, people. It's a bit gorier than I'd like, but I suppose I can get by. I wish the announcer didn't derive such apparent glee from the "Due to extremely violent content, viewer discretion is advised" disclaimer. It frustrates me to no end that "viewer discretion advised" has become as meaningless as "Homeland Security Threat Level: Elevated" through repeated wolf-crying. After Janet, the networks decided to "clean up their act," and the way they did that was by producing the same content (or worse) but slapping absolutely everything with the VDA label. Even last weekend's Family Guy – discretion advised for (their words): "animated nudity." We all laughed when puppet fucking nearly got Team America an NC-17, but now we live in a country where we're being advised to shield our eyes from animated nudity.
Anyway, a chick's face getting cut off totally merits the discretion advisory. What bothers me is that Fox wears it like a badge of honor. Soon it'll be the new way shows are promoted. "This week's 24 merits triple-discretion! Be there!"
The Inside has a great opening sequence, though. Just like Boomtown – somehow these slick LA justice shows really tap into the neat title graphics.
3 comments
Mon, June 6
Mr. Rogers: Still Gettin' It Said—11:43 PM
I know I link to Kung Fu Monkey way too much. I know I seem like Lisa Simpson to his Corey. (And, yes, I'd pay a few bucks a minute to hear him read the morning newspaper over the phone. I'd even pay for "Story, Allegory, Montessori.")
The thing is, he keeps agreeing with me completely on every issue of the day: politics, religion, the media, science, most movies ...even Lost! And he does so in an eminently readable and entertaining way.
This time around, it's the arch-religious, and their fight to protect future generations from the perils of rational free thought. (These are the people who cause weak-minded simpletons like me to hate religion and think of all Christians as nutjobs – they're so vocal it's hard to remember they represent a smallish, though growing, minority.)
[I]f you have so little faith in your faith, so little belief in its strength and beauty and inner radiant truth that you don't believe it can deal with, oh, say the real world ... then exactly what the hell kind of religion are you following anyway?
I'm sorry. I'm a fan. There will probably continue to be some Kung Fu linkage around these parts for a while to come.
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Thu, June 2
"Who's Coming With Me?"—12:15 PM
The "New York Times" has an article about Tom Cruise making a bit of a spectacle of himself lately, particularly during his Flubber-infused appearance on Oprah to talk about his new girlfriend, Katie Holmes. (Another Amazon! Tom's "you must be at least this tall" sign apparently features a diagram of Tom sitting on his own shoulders.) I think it's hilarious that the "Times" thinks this is important news. The paper gravely expresses concern in Hollywood that Cruise might be "doing long-term harm to his career" by whooping about Holmes and publicly proclaiming his devotion to Scientology. It's as though he's staged some sort of Jerry Maguire-style flip-out, and he'll be muttering in a bathtub within a week.
I admit, I found it kind of odd that he demanded a Scientology recruiting tent on the set of War of the Worlds, but it surprises me that anyone in Hollywood would worry about this hurting his career. First, he's Tom Cruise. Second, we all thought being really public about his kooky beliefs was going to seal Mel Gibson's fate – dropping him to B-rate Lifetime movie walk-ons and late-night cable pitches for direct-shipped diabetes medicine. But we were wrong; dead wrong.
Here's my favorite part, though. It's obvious to anyone with a calendar that even if Tom & Katie's romance is genuine, the timing of its press blitz release is extremely convenient for their respective summer tentpoles and magazine covers. If Tom Cruise says he's not gay, I believe he's not gay. If he says he's in love with Katie Holmes, I'll believe it. But the decision, timing, and fervor of the announcement? Pure publicity. However, some plucky cub reporter at the "Times" dug deeper (my emphasis):
Mr. Cruise's recent comments and behavior have been fodder for Internet bloggers, radio talk show hosts and late-night comedians, who, among other things, have questioned whether the love affair with Ms. Holmes was a publicity stunt. A spokeswoman for Mr. Cruise denied that this was the case.
Who asks that question of Mr. Cruise's spokeswoman? First, who cares what she says, we all know it is what it is. But more importantly, what did you think she was going to say? "Ah, well played, 'New York Times'. You've beaten us at our own game. Indeed, it is a publicity stunt. Enjoy six more weeks of magazine covers. See 'War of the Worlds' on June 29! 'Cocktail' isn't that bad after the first 20 minutes!" She's allegedly part of this giant publicity machine – don't you think they might have drilled her on how to deny that it's a publicity stunt?
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