Category: Music

  • Sushi, cognac, and coke

    Elizabeth Spiers does some original reporting for the Gawker, getting to the bottom of how the cocaine business really should be run. Maybe what these dealers need is a good CRM implementation. The article, long for the Gawker, runs in the form of a taped interview with a ditzy-but-funny Wall Streeter: Of Wall Street’s obsession…

  • I'll send Haldir or something. He's expendable.

    The condensed parody version of the Two Towers is densely witty. Here’s a snippet: TREEBEARD: We have opted, hoom, not to do a damn thing. PIPPIN: I didn’t expect that. PEOPLE WHO HAVE READ THE BOOK: Neither did I…

  • Shrevie Hoister's day off

    New current favorite blog of note: shrevie hoister’s LiveJournal. Jump in anywhere. Looks like shrevie’s been backfilling to 1995. Random shards of a mind (and fingers, and probably toes) at work, good linkage. Brain says: yummy.

  • If you can make it there…

    Nick Denton continues to bash the San Francisco bay area, now discerning a brain drain going on in the form of an exodus of notable bloggers: So Dave Winer, a Silicon Valley institution, is moving to the East Coast. Winer, an influential independent developer, as influential as he is crotchety, is taking up a fellowship…

  • WSJ 'Birdfeeders bad' meme deconstructed

    A recent forwarded newspaper article singing the ills of birdfeeders had us going for a while. If we had read more closely or paid more attention to the source (the Wall Street Journal), we may have more easily seen it in the light presented by Laura Erickson’s Wall Street Journal Bird Feeding Article Distorts Truth.…

  • Origin of 'shipper'?

    Reading a Buffy spoiler fan website today, I encountered an unfamiliar term: shipper. I know what slash fiction is (having stumbled on a book about k/s fanfic in the Princeton library a good 20 years ago), and I gather a shipper is someone who either likes to write slash fiction or who at least likes…

  • Ethics for software developers

    Dave Winer’s First Essay of the Year sums up some of the themes he has refined over the last year, partly in discussion/debate with Larry Lessig. One passage that particularly caught my attention was a brief discussion of the ethical issues involved in software development: I strongly believe there are ethical rules, we just have…

  • Looks like I'm a man

    You’ll hate this test but it gets more accurate with each submission. It was 86% sure I’m a man, close to my own level of certainty. A somewhat girly man perhaps (fairly near the middle on the linear scale — must be that preference for a blue bedroom over white), but a man nonetheless. Hear…

  • Saw you with a ticketstub in your hand

    I’m so out of it. After returning from a week and a half in New York I’m still reading The Gawker but without that same sense of immediacy (not that it matters where you are when you read about New York, and not that that prevents me from reading the Times, the Nation, the New…

  • Slate adopts our lingo

    It looks like Slate launched a feature called Meme Watch back in November and refers, semifacetiously, to a MemeTracker&tm; device. Hey, as long as they pay us royalties! No, honestly, the more of us tracking memes the better. Timothy Noah’s latest column observes the ups and downs of the “Lucky Duckies” meme:

  • Memebusting the 12 days of Xmas

    Leading up to Christmas this year I was several times sent chain mail claiming that the lyrics to the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” encoded forbidden Catholic catechistic information under Anglican repression. Something smelled fishy about this, not least because it was presented without any evidence, and the correspondence seemed fairly weak for most…

  • Bush/White House comment line: 202-456-1111

    GWB HOTLINE 202-456-1111 – 1 PHONE CALL EQUALS 10-20 PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T CALL, PLEASE PASS ON TO FRIENDS {source this?}

  • Where SBC Pacbell Customers Opt Out

    From a letter in the business section of today’s Sunday (S.F.) Chronicle thanking columnist David Lazarus for bringing out SBC Pacbell’s process for obtaining permission (or making it difficult for you to withhold permission) for sharing your personal information. Rather than suffering through a phone-tree thicket, go directly to http://sbc-pacbell.com/rescpni to opt out directly.

  • Drowning Mona

    About 5 minutes before the end of this movie, Danny DeVito’s character says, “Know this….” A good example of lame Hollywood writing, a crutch-phrase I’ve never heard anyone use in real life.

  • Google knows if you've been bad or good

    If you want to know what the wired globe cared about or thought about, or more exactly, searched for using Google in the past year, then check out Google’s 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist wrap-up. Naturally they filter out pr0n searches which would swamp everything else. (“You’ve got the most popular non-porn website on the Internet,” says…

  • I often dream of air raids

    Robyn Hitchcock daydreams as this week’s celebrity guest diary at Slate. Link courtesy of She’s Actual Side, Nationwide, Believe. Given that she has now outed herself as a Robyn fan, and her blog name gives away her TMBG allegiance, I am going to go out on a limb and guess that she is also a…

  • Justice a la Ashcroft. The

    Justice a la Ashcroft. The way the prosecutions of John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo are being handled can give us some good insight into what John Ashcroft considers “appropriate” in a criminal case.  While it’s certainly understandable that Ashcroft, and much of the public, want to see Muhammad and Malvo tried, sentenced and executed…

  • Total Information Awareness.. Pentagon Plans

    Total Information Awareness.. Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans By JOHN MARKOFF The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe

  • All's well that ends well.

    Now it can be told: In some ways the most frustrating thing about the deal I signed in August to write a guide to blogging for professionals was that I wasn’t permitted to discuss the project here or in my blog-about-blogging. This was probably a good business decision for my publisher, as they did not…

  • The other one

    Between the sets of last night’s The Other Ones show at the Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland (details to follow), Robert Hunter played for about 40 minutes, just his voice and his tricked-out electric guitar. A lyric stuck with me. …I hear the cries of childrenAnd the other songs of warIt’s like a mighty melodyThat rings…

  • Don't bite the lips that kiss you

    Check out The Unknown Hinson Jukebox for samples of such instant classics as “I Make Faces (When I Make Love)” and “In the Trunk of My Cadillac Car.” And who can forget these immortal stylings from “Put Out or Get Out”: I was in prison for 30 years, baby You learn a lot when you’re…