Posted by
Matthew Dorrell on
Wednesday, September 13, 2000Village idiot and presidential hopeful George W. Bush is accused of using a subliminal message in an TV advertisement. After being advised on the meaning of the word "subliminal," Bush denies the allegations.
Full story here.
Posted by
Matthew Dorrell on
Wednesday, September 13, 2000Steve Martin's third book will be hitting stores soon (yes, that Steve Martin). The novella, titled Shopgirl, follows Mirabelle through her lonely job, budding relationships - you know the sort of thing people write about. I'm not sure what I expected from a work written by Steve Martin, but from the excerpts which I have read so far, it seems quite good.
An excerpt from an excerpt:
Six days after their first date, which had cut Mirabelle’s net worth by twenty percent, she runs into Jeremy again at the Laundromat. He waves at her, gives her the thumbs-up sign, then watches her as she loads clothes into the machines. He seems unable to move, but speaks just loudly enough for his voice to carry over twelve clanking washing machines, “did you watch the game last night?” Mirabelle is shocked when she later learns that Jeremy considers this their second date. This fact comes out when at one abortive get-together, Jeremy invokes the “third date” rule, believing he should be received at second base. Mirabelle is not fooled by any such third date rule, and she explains to Jeremy that she cannot conceive of any way their Laundromat encounter, or any encounter involving the thumbs-up sign, can be considered a date.
Two excerpts from Shopgirl are available at Contentville.com and at Previewport.com.
It should be noted that Contentville is an ugly site and will require a (phony) email address before giving you access to the excerpt.
I have mixed feelings about the unfortunately named Raging Search (raging.com) by AltaVista.
I like that I can choose my font and color scheme (I recommend verdana with the default colors). Other nice options include being able to turn off basically every feature (spelling suggestions, etc.) and choosing what info is displayed with the results (URL, date, size, etc.).
All in all it is quite a nice search engine with nice results. I do, however, feel a pang of guilt for using what is so obviously the result of a board meeting in which AltaVista execs decided they needed to be more like Google. I doubt they have the balls to make the enormously popular but cluttered altavista.com point to virtually advertising-free Raging Search.
May the simplest win.
re: Napster Thrives!
rob said:
I question CNN's line:
“That made Napster the fastest-growing software application ever recorded by the Internet research company.”
CNN may have their ‘fact’ straight, but the hell is the “Internet research company.”
I know we're all probably tired off all the Napster stuff we're fed, but this one is a little bit rementionable. With all the court-nonsense and other free advertising Napster's use has bloated four fold.
I question CNN's line:
“That made Napster the fastest-growing software application ever recorded by the Internet research company.”
Napster is now a 2 gig program.
It's true: You can now get Acts of Volition on your handheld (or PDA, or Palm, or whatever the hell you want to call it).
The handheld version of aov includes the 10 most recent posts to the site for your ‘waiting-in-line-at-the-bank’ reading pleasure.
The Acts of Volition AvantGo Channel works on both Palm and Microsoft PocketPC devices.
Add Acts of Volition to your handheld >>
The Open Directory Project at dmoz.org is another wacky love child of the AOL-TimeWarner merger. Other bizarre offspring of the corporate mega marriage include Mozilla and Gnutella.
Basically an open-source version of the Yahoo editorial system, dmoz has the advantage of having actual human beings (of varying quality) decide which site goes in which category, without the disadvantage of possible censorship associated with a central system. Anyone can signup to be an editor.
Anyone can use the Open Directory Project data on their site. Sites using it include Google, Altavista, Netcenter, Lycos, and Hotbot.
Acts of Volition is proud to be listed under on The Open Directory Project under:
Top: Computers: Internet: WWW: Web Logs: Personal: A
I'm not sure what this means but I'm sure you can deduce something from it. Here is a top-down view of the 50 most visited websites on the web.
I know criticism is easy but that doesn't mean you can't be particularly good at it. Jeff Stark, the associate editor of Salon Arts and Entertainment, is very good at it.
Read his article Rock is dead and well at the MTV;; Video Awards at Salon. Sure, criticizing the MTV;; VMAs for being low class and artless is kind of like criticizing *Nsync for pandering to teenage girls, but this is still a fun article.
A representative sample (italics mine):
Durst of Limp Bizkit (do not follow this link) said something about being in “the world's most hated rock band.” This is the same lame outlaw posturing Metallica specializes in. How unpopular can you be, Fred, if you're up onstage getting an award from Viacom?
