The Test Is Over
Diego points out that Quentin Tarantino wants to make a Bond movie.#
The Kill Bill director told the New York Daily News that he is aiming to get the rights to make a new version of Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel.
"I wanted it to be the follow-up to Pulp Fiction and do it with Pierce Brosnan, but have it take place after On Her Majesty's Secret Service, after Bond's wife, Tracy, has been killed," he said.
"From what I know of Brosnan, I think he'd want to go in the direction I'd want to take Bond," Tarantino said. "Though I'm not sure the producers of the series would agree."
The party was on the verge of breaking up. But I refused to let it. I don't know how the notion of a strip club had come up, but since it had, somehow, I insisted. In spite of the late hour and the flagging spirits of everyone I managed to convince the group that it would be a great idea to go look at half-dressed women dancing sultrily with poles.
Strip clubs are not somewhere you go with a boyfriend or girlfriend, I would say. Because strip clubs are after all about sex, and it's not necessarily to the advantage of your significant other to watch or be watched in that context. Souris went home, but Silvio stayed out. And the eight of us - seven boys and me - went to Flashdancers because it would, said David, be the cheapest.
Jessica suggests wearing your costume tomorrow at the Blogger's meeting.#
Jessica suggests having librarian trading cards to go with the action figure.#
Why not have librarian trading cards? That'd be a fun way to boost the profession. Then we'd need librarian gum to sell them with. (Oh, the irony.) Maybe gum erasers. Who'd be on your top ten list to see on librarian trading cards?
[...]
I can imagine a game like Magic with librarian cards. ("Oh no! Not a fireball!" "Wah ha ha ha! You've lost your Book of Kells!" "Not so fast! I've got a preservation librarian!")
The Ross notes a new Switch ad.#
(Cue cheesy music)
His ad might go something like this. "I was in the market for a new machine. I was hoping to get ten teraflops by the end of the year. I'd never used a Mac and had been looking at Dells and IBMs. Then Apple released the G5 on June 23. A week later I bought 1,100 duals online at the Apple Store. I'm Srinidhi Varadarajan and I build Supercomputers at Virginia Tech."
AKMA links to Richard Soderberg and his "Lessons learned from online journals."#
Write for an audience of friends.
When you have an audience of a million people, there's no way to anticipate what the best viewpoint to reach them all is; remember that your writing is an expression of your viewpoint, and express it as such. Express your viewpoint as if you were talking to a group of friends: clear, to the point, and perhaps a dash of humor.
AKMA's reason for linking:
Too many people want to pre-define what a blog can be, or how everyone has to write their blog; Richard just says, "This is what I learned." What he learned sounds right to me.
Randall Parker writes about how Upper and Middle Class people adopting lower class accents represents going too far with egalitarianism.#
The article,
None of this would matter very much — after all, only a fool would discount what someone said solely because of the accent in which he said it, or recognise that cultivation in speech is much more than a matter of accent — if it were not of a piece with other manifestations of the very marked downward cultural aspiration in this country. I have noticed, for example, that so great is the bullying ideological pressure on the young to manifest a thoroughly plebeian taste that even highly intelligent students feel constrained to distract themselves in exactly the same way as the semi-literates of their own age. Cultural refinement is suspect precisely because it is by nature elitist; almost no one makes the important distinction between elitism and social exclusivity, which are by no means the same. The one is made to stand for the other.
Randall,
Attempts to eliminate hierarchies cut against human nature. People arrange themselves into hierarchies every bit as naturally as do packs of wolves. The biggest damage comes when the process of judging and treating people as different - whether in abilities, moral beliefs, religious beliefs, ideological beliefs, conduct, or character - is blocked from operating. When drug dealers and toughs can't be thrown out of public housing or unruly students can't be removed from classes or applicants for positions can not be tested in the most efficient and accurate ways possible society functions less well. When some people make choices in life that impose more or less of a burden on others if that can not be pointed out then we can not encourage the best sorts of behavior and again society as a whole is worse off.
Wendy discusses power dynamics and relationships and attempts to subvert them - in the context of her screenwriting class.#
There's a person in the class who has subverted the student-student dynamic. I am not shy, and I've told this person how I feel about it. I haven't had a response yet. I think that what I did was subvert the power dynamic in exactly the same way, and perhaps that confused him. I fought fire with fire, hee. I want classmates and an instructor, not classmates who try to be instructors. I like feedback, but I have a strong aversion to having a classmate tell me what I can and cannot do. He chose to be in the class, rather than find a place to teach a class, and the class needs him as a peer more than they need him as a self-appointed ubercritic.
Sebastien Paquet has great quotes on his weblog all the time.#
"Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing."
- John Andrew Holmes
Real Live Preacher posts a story for the life of Jesus. Wonderful.#
Jesus, son of Joseph, what would you do if you met the smallest person in the world?
The smallest, Rabbi?
Yes, the person who matters the least. The person with absolutely no power. The smallest person in all the world.
How would I know this person, dear Rabbi?
Indeed, how WOULD you know this person? For when we speak of the smallest person in the world we are speaking of the very mathematics of God. It is only with the reckoning of The Almighty that we are able to make sense of a newborn infant, a fallen sparrow, a single hair on your head.
And yet God's math is not known nor can it be found. It can only be received in the instant when it is needed. It exists only in the present moment.
Bacchus links to an essay from the Wired Guy about how miscommunication and misunderstanding hurts the sex act.#
"Did you come?" We understand that you hate being asked that. We're not sure why this should be so, but we accept that it is. We hate asking, and we wouldn't, but it's important to us to know. Who's going to tell us if not you? Even the most liberated woman learns at an early age to keep men guessing.You go to so much trouble to do this that sometimes we don't know what an honest reaction looks like. Be honest with us. If you didn't come, say so, and either tell us it's all right, or tell us what we might have done differently. If you did come, the fact that we asked should tell you that the signs were too subtle or unfamiliar for us. No judgment is intended: tell us what the clues are, and we'll be happy.
Men only have one kind of orgasm, and it's fairly obvious when it happens. You have a variety of orgasms centered in various body parts, of various intensities, from a mild shudder to a raise-the-rafters full-throated ejaculatory out-of-body experience. I can't tell you how envious we are of that.
Kevin announces his new website.#
The political landscape is in sad shape. Maybe it's always been that way, and I'm just waking up to it. Either way, it disgusts me in a way I've never felt before. I'm angier than I've ever been about anything in my life. I have a feeling that I'm not the only one. They say that the country is polarized between Right and Left. I think that for a very vocal minority, that's true. I think for a good portion of the country, they could care less. For everyone else, which I have a feeling is a very large percentage of the country - the so-called "silent majority" that both parties try to claim - we feel helpless and unrepresented because the parties have moved so far to the deep corners of the political spectrum and are beholden to groups that we just can't stomach supporting.
Now that I've told you how I feel, let's talk about what I want to do about it. I want to create a community. I don't want a community defined by political parties, toxic buzzwords or preconceived notions. I want to find the silent majority. I have a feeling that it's this great chunk of the American populace in the middle places of the political spectrum that's just waiting to find a way to do something, or so disgusted with the process that they've dropped out of it. How do I find this mythical group? Since I'm not a terribly smart guy, or that organized, I'm falling back on what I do. I build websites and applications.
RPGamer reports on Tetsuya Nomura discussing the new Kingdom Hearts games.#
Regarding the Game Boy Advance title, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Nomura promised that it would have the same essence as the first title of the series, with the exception of some new features like the deck of cards. The story will fill in the gap between Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, and it will follow the adventures of Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they search for the enigmatic Chain of Memories.
As for the PlayStation 2 title Kingdom Hearts II, the story will take place one year after the events of the first game. Nomura pointed out that the series is not like Square Enix's successful Final Fantasy series. While each Final Fantasy features a new cast in a new world in every game, each Kingdom Hearts game will continue the story of Sora. In other words, the series will last as long as Sora's story goes on.
John, your weblog is great. Why don't you get an RSS feed?#
Dave Winer writes about how any medium is used and what it means to "Stand up."#
I get to see the worst of this medium. When people say it's nirvana, I laugh. It's humanity, and the power of the tools works for the worst of our species as well as they work for the best.
To me, standing up to help a person being attacked is the best we can do. If it's the US government or a BigCo trying to keep people from talking about them, or a lout with a website, trashing good people's reputations. I not only remember who did the deeds, but I remember who stood by and did nothing. And that's almost everyone. And that's our shame.
Brad DeLong explains the real reason that unemployment is up in the United States and why the Bush administration is pining it on China.#
It's a nice little representative thumbnail of how Bush administration economic policy is made: (i) See an economic policy need. (ii) Pretend that you're addressing the need while actually enacting big tax cuts for the $200,000-plus-a-year crowd and unbalancing the federal government's finances. (iii) Get into trouble. (iv) Lie about the source of the trouble. (v) Pretend that you're fixing the trouble by trying to do something that will not work. As the Financial Times's Gerard Baker put it, the "Bush administration's economic team... shoot[s] itself in the foot while trying to extract the same part of its anatomy from its mouth.... Since it took office, its economic policy pronouncements, from taxes to currencies and interest rates, have been opportunistic, ill-thought-out and incoherent..."
Every political-appointee economist working for the Bush administration needs to start thinking very, very carefully about what they are doing. Did they come to Washington to be a part of a project to blame U.S. unemployment on sinister manipulations by Asian governments? Is it not much, much better to be a professor teaching your courses than to be a bit player in the current remake of The Revenge of Dr. Fu Manchu?
Shelley links to Mark Morford writing about the new "Wiccan Barbie."#
Secret Spells Barbie is, despite her potential and much like every one of the 150,000 weird sub-subniche Barbies on the market, entirely pointless and disposable and, unless the girls who end up with her somehow tap into their inner badass witchiness and suddenly get inspired by some divine funky moonscream to rip off Barbie's arms and paint her hair bright red and tattoo her nipples with a Magic Marker and impale her on a red-hot hair pin and suspend her upside down from a dreamcatcher, well, she does nothing to further the cause of funky gorgeous goddess-thick witchness and nothing to further the cause of earthly luscious pagan interconnectedness or divine feminine power.
Not that she claims to. Not that this was ever Mattel's point, or Barbie's raison d'etre, really. And I suppose it's sort of wildly unfair to hope that Barbie might actually inspire girls beyond the hair-twirling saccharine fetishism of shopping and friends and cars and boys and shopping and money and dye jobs and shopping and fake careerism and shopping.
Doug Miller wrote my favourite comment on the Michael Hanscom thing.#
This poor guy wrote a post on his blog concerning how even Microsoft, his then current employer, was using Apple G5's. The next day, they canned him. What actually appears to have caused the termination were details he provided in the post concerning what building he worked in, along with an accompanying picture. Microsoft Security seems to have been behind the action.
In all fairness to Microsoft, I can easily see this happening at many another large company. Having said that, it's certainly ironic that a company that produces an operating system with an incredibly bad security record, which exposes millions of companies and individuals world-wide to security threats, would get so spooled up over an innocuous blog post.
Richard writes about emotional affairs.#
The article:
"The new infidelity is between people who unwittingly form deep, passionate connections before realizing that they've crossed the line from platonic friendship into romantic love," she wrote in "NOT 'Just Friends': Protect Your Relationship From Infidelity and Heal the Trauma of Betrayal."
[...]
"An emotional affair to me can be as damaging as a sexual affair, because an emotional connection is what people really want," says Rona Subotnik, a marriage and family therapist in Palm Desert, Calif., and author of books on infidelity, including Internet relationships.
Richard:
I imagine guys don't hang out with their friends—especially their female friends—nearly as much as when the guys get girlfriends because they're worried about what the girlfriend might think, or what the answers to the questions might be (the "wrong" answers would be "yes" to questions 1, 2, 6 and 8, "no" to the other questions) might say about the guy. That goes for women too, I imagine.
Yes, it's the year 2003, and we're supposed to be civilized and mature about these things, and people are supposed to have unproblematicly platonic relationships with friends of the opposite sex. But when it comes down to perceptions, well, perceptions, as they always have, matter.
Dave Winer talks about on of the goals of the Thursdays at Berkman.#
One of the things on the roadmap for Berkman-Thursdays is a series of mini-BloggerCons, half-to-full-day salons in Cambridge and/or San Francisco (maybe NYC), where we discuss the art and science of weblogs. As the culture and technology grow, the topics grow to be more inclusive. Being at Harvard has expanded my horizons, and I've tried to pass that on as much as I can. Now I'm thinking about having the first salon, possibly as soon as mid-November, to talk about weblogs and democracy. It's pretty clear, based on discussions we've been having with the campaigns, and with journalists covering the campaigns, and with academics covering both the journalists and the pols, that the shifting of power isn't done yet. Dean was a good first step. Clark clearly has missed some opportunities. Edwards is doing some things right. What we haven't done is define what over-the-top would be. What do we want? Should we be lining up behind candidates yet, or should we be figuring out what our new democracy will look like? And what about the rest of the world?
VATICAN CITY—As Pope John Paul II enters his 26th year as pontiff, the world is stopping to reflect on the legendary funnyman's career as one of the most influential performers in modern history. Standing staunchly against contraception and women's equality right through the turn of the 21st century, the pope and his quirky, deadpan comic persona still entertain audiences around the world.
Revered by multiple generations for his weird and wonderful wit, the 83-year-old pontiff is perhaps the best-known stand-up alive today. Throughout an amazing two and a half decades as head of the Catholic Church, the pope has produced, in both his live appearances and his published works, a treasure trove of humor second to none.
"I can still remember seeing him do his classic 'Galileo' bit in the early '90s," said fellow comedian George Carlin, referring to the pope's 1992 declaration that the church erred in condemning Galileo. "Here was this man, appearing on televisions around the world, making a proclamation that the sun does not move around the earth. I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks."
Ed Cone points out how weblogs have a role in campaigns.#
Elizabeth Edwards commented here that comments on her husband's campaign blog serve to inform him about people's real concerns. I ask for an example. She replies with a specific example about the Earned Income Tax Credit that led to Edwards refocusing on the issue:
"Scott was on top of it and let us know through the blog, and the criticism that John had expressed earlier but that had been dropped from more recent speeches has been reinserted...
"John and I actually read the blog. When there is something there he finds useful or intriguing, he picks it up. If more research is needed, it goes to Robert Gordon's policy operation. If not, it can got straight into his speech or his answers to questions."
Halley Suitt re-imagines her life and questions the choices are women is supposedly forced to make.#
Caterina has done a wonderful post below about knowing early on that she wanted to be a writer, reading books about women writers and getting the fairly well-informed opinion that being a woman writer and having kids was a tough act to pull off. I agree completely, but ironically, just as she read a book about being a woman writer in her youth which suggested being childless was the best path to follow, I read a book in my youth about how many successful women writers had one child! Colette, the French writer comes to mind as one of their examples. This book did have an influence on my life.
For this reason and many others, I've always been so glad I did have a son and I would say he has probably improved my writing ten fold, although as Caterina reasonably discusses, having a child has probably hindered my writing career in many ways too. There's no point in comparing one way to the other. I make no judgements. I know what worked for me. I would be very sorry not to have become a parent, but I really don't believe that's the best path for all people (men or women).
Via Jessa Crispin is an article in Flak Magazine about how Kill Bill is like James Joyce's "Ulysses."#
In this incomplete state, it's impossible to tell whether all of this adds up to anything. The piles and piles of allusions, ranging from Busby Berkley to Brian De Palma to Sergio Leone to Akira Kurosawa to a 20-minute anime interlude, certainly enrichens the texture of the film, and to his credit, Tarantino manages to agglomerate these styles into a unique cinematic voice. For the unskilled director, this type of meta-homage becomes disaster, but when a virtuoso like Tarantino is involved, the effect transcends the traditional tonal limitations of cinema. This happens to be precisely what exalts a wordsmith like James Joyce. Unfairly labeled as indecipherable by some critics for his excessive wordplay or pretentious for his volumes of mythological and literary references, a master like Joyce can create a phrase like "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" and couch a stream-of-conscious day-in-the-life narrative as an immortal mythological journey. The ambition of great artists is to create works that encompass everything — like the Sisyphean quest of quantam physicists to find that unified theory of the entire universe. Joyce pulled the trick and created what is considered the best English-language novel of the 20th century.
Tarantino shows the same kind of talent not just for finding relevant tangents in seemingly random associations, and also for puns and invented language — virtuosic compared to any other Gen X director. Who else could transition his main character from a Leone-style Woman With No Name to Foxy Brown kung fu artist to Kurosawa-style samurai warrior to Bruce Lee and make it work? Joyce once remarked that "Ulysses" would "keep the critics busy for 300 years," and the same could be said for Tarantino.
Doug Miller describes a day in the life of a Realtor. It's amazing how quickly things can change in the timeline of a deal.#
After that, it was back to the office. By now, it's around 4:00 PM, so I spend an hour or so finishing up calls and other to-do items I have, returning a few e-mails, and generally just cleaning up from the week. A little after 5:00 PM I head home.
I'm still not done, though. The family and I went out for dinner, and then drove over to Borders afterwards. On the way, I get a call from one of my clients. She and her family are headed out of town for the weekend. She wants to tell me that their home is ready for showings this weekend if we get any, but doesn't know if she should call the office to let them know she'll be gone, since showings on her home are by appointment only. I let her know that I'll take care of it, and call the office. I catch the night office staff just before they head out, and have them make a note in her file that showings this weekend are permitted without confirmation from the owner.
Repeat that, times six or seven, and you'll have a good idea of the life of a Realtor.
Michael Feldman discusses Dana Blankenhorn's post on politics in the blogosphere.#
An interesting post last week from Dana Blankenhorn, questioning the preponderance of political pontificating in the blogosphere. He points out that the majority of Blogstreet's 100 Most Influential Blogs are about - Politics. Dana makes a number of astute points (including concurring with the Dowbrigade in hailing Thomas Paine as a Natural Born Blogger). He also points out a number of similarities between blogging and talk radio, mainly that they are both the voice of authentic individuals, real live people with private lives they mention from time to time, and who make no pretense of presenting an "objective" take on the issues of the day.
Now, obviously a lot depends on which end of the blogosphere one inhabits. True, most of the most-linked-to blogs that people like US read revolve around politics. But what about the hundreds of thousands of hypothetical (or are they apocalyptical) 13-year-old girls blogging crazes and crushes in their 6th grade homerooms? They may not have as many inleading links as Glen Reynolds, but they are part of the phenomena, and behind them are many thousands of other blogs which serve personal, family, business or academic purposes and which have nothing at all to do with politics.
Richard links to Anne Kingston on What Women Want and the Feminist Backlash.#
We've done a 180-degree swing here. The mythical housewife Betty Friedan portrayed as being imprisoned in a plate-glass cage in The Feminine Mystique has been replaced by another commercialized myth -- the domestic goddess living a life of affluent leisure filled with lattes at Starbucks, Pilates classes, meetings with the feng shui consultant and romantic evenings with her rich, handsome and devoted husband.
It's ironic. Twentieth-century feminism is routinely trashed for having assumed all women wanted a hard-driving career. Even Friedan came to recognize the error of that presumption, writing in her memoir, Life So Far: "I couldn't define 'liberation' for women in terms that denied the sexual and human reality of our need to love, and even, sometimes, to depend upon a man."
Richard linked to me some awesome girl/boy advice:#
c) Never approach a woman assuming that, because she is cute and in a club, she is not intelligent. Never condescend and go on about subjects that you think make you look smart - there is a chance that she actually knows more than you do. Also, don't assume that all women will be impressed by how much money you make, what kind of car you drive, and how you will retire by the age of 30. If a woman did care, would you really want to be with her anyhow?
I love the idea of considering people who make you upset, not the type of people you should let make you upset. If some one pisses me off, they retroactively become a person who's actions don't bother me because they are so clueless.