This year they’ve hit gold again with this ad. Look at the ad, now back at the blog, now back at the ad…:

What do you think? Any other ads that you like better?

A truly absurd moment when the best short Oscar was being accepted. Here’s what happened. The director and the producer of the film are in a huge fight. When the winner was announced, the director of the film ran down from his seat while his mom blocked the producer with her cane. The director started thanking people when the producer finally made it to the stage. She then proceeded to talk over him for the rest of the time allotted while we, the viewer at home, just stared and wondered, What the hell is going on?!. Watch the speech below and here’s a link to the story.

Sandra Bullock was a GINORMOUS upset. She was the last person i thought would win. Seriously, the last. I wanted Carey Mulligan, thought Meryl would win, but could have understood if Gabby or Helen had taken it. But Sandra?? No way. She totally made up for it with one of the best Oscar speeches i’ve heard. It was thoughtful, coherent, funny and to the point. Good work

Of course, i was wrong about Avatar and i feel good for Kathryn “Point Break” Bigelow (and Lizard) but i do feel that there is a James Cameron backlash going on. It’s too bad because it was the better film. I don’t care that much because he’ll buy everyone that doesn’t like him eventually.

Oh well, i can’t wait for next year when Tron cleans up.

My sister is a smart lovable gal.  Sometimes she is wrong and she hates it when people point this out to her.   She responded to my recent Oscar predictions post with some interesting comments.  She said,

I won’t remember Avatar in ten years. Hell, I can barely remember it now; I had to go re-read a review to remind myself of what the actual plot was. I left Avatar thinking “Wow, you know, that looked really cool.” But Best Picture? Really? No.

and

I should note now that my brother compares the Oscar race between Avatar and Hurt Locker to the Star Wars vs. Rocky Oscar race for Best Picture, and where he comes down on the side of Star Wars on that one, I’m firmly in the Rocky camp.

Interesting comments.  But totally wrong. As an older brother, it is my duty to explain why.  Here we go:

Liz, first off I can see why you’d think this way.  You said you got sick from the 3D for Avatar and in your review you can’t even remember what the plot of Avatar was.  Well if you were so sick and you don’t know what the movie was about, you probably shouldn’t pick it for Best Picture.  But just realize that you’re in the minority and the rest of the country is quite aware of what occurred on the screen and loved it.  Maybe you should to rewatch in non-3D

Now about Rocky vs. Star Wars.  Have you seen the first Rocky lately?  The dialogue is atrocious. Rocky’s relationship with Adrian is one of the worst written and acted relationship in cinema.  It’s severely dated.

Star Wars is a different story altogether.  If you don’t think Star Wars was a seminal film in cinema history, you’re retarded.

Star Wars references are so deeply embedded in popular culture that you don’t even realize it.  You can’t even watch CNN now without them trying to copy many of the technological ideas that were first shown in a movie over 30 years old now (election hologram anyone?)  Everyday references to the main characters and themes of Star Wars are casually made. Darth Vader has become an iconic villain.  Phrases like “evil empire” and “may the force be with you” have become part of the popular lexicon in EVERY industry and culture.  Do you even remember what Apollo Creed’s nickname was?

Rocky is a good movie, but Star Wars was a good movie that changed cinema forever.  Almost all (or the majority) of science fiction films have been influenced by Star Wars and it basically created the modern-day blockbuster genre.  How many Rocky parodies are there?  Could you imagine a Spaceballs or Fanboys of Rocky?  No, the only thing keeping the Rocky films alive are Sly Stone’s attempt to remake the original time and time again.

I could go on and on about how Star Wars impacted both society and film but i think you get my point.  It was a major game-changer. This is why i compare it to Avatar.  While i don’t think Avatar will have the impact of Star Wars, i do believe it represents a large step-function in how films will be made going forward.  Major dramatic films are being made in 3D.  Future films will be made, realistically, without actors.  Think about that.  Major realistic, dramatic films without actors.  That’s what Avatar has introduced.

Let me just say that in 2007, NASA launched a space shuttle carrying a pair of Rocky’s shorts into space to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film.  Wait, no, that’s a lie.  They didn’t.   What they DID do is launch the space shuttle with the original lightsaber on board.  It was the lightsaber that was used by Luke Skywalker. After spending two weeks in orbit, they brought the lightsaber back to Earth on November 7.  And you think this film, Star Wars, where they are doing event like this and making more references to over 30 years after the film was released shouldn’t win a “Best Picture” Oscar.  Really Liz?  Really?

The Oscars are coming this weekend. I’ve done a pretty good job this year of seeing most of the nominated movies.  So, without further blabbing, here’s my predictions for who will take the Oscar home and who I think should.

Best Picture

This is the most interesting race because we have two very different front-runners.  The Hurt Locker is a great story with an extremely authentic look at human nature and war.  Avatar is a technological marvel but is also has a thin plot.  It’s also interesting because this is the first year with the crazy new voting structure.  There are 10 films nominated.  The voters rank the ten in order of preference. If one film has over 50% of #1 votes, it wins.  If not, then the film with the least #1 votes is elinimated and those votes are redistributed and the process begins again.  This means a film that doesn’t originally have the most #1 votes could end up winning.  Whatever, i don’t really care that much.  Here’s what i think:

The Hurt Locker is a great film.  Maybe my favorite war movie ever. It’s raw and gutsy.  Avatar is also a great movie.  It has a generic story but the look and feel of the film was spectacular.  When i left the theater, I had a “holy crap, that was really something” feeling that rarely happens after a movie.  Ten years from now, i’ll remember my Avatar viewing but probably not my Hurt Locker experience.  Thus, i’m voting for Avatar. Which will win?  Star Wars, a similarly seminal film, lost out to Rocky in 1977.  But Lord of The Rings won in 2003.   I don’t think LOTR wins if it’s only one film.  I think in general, the Academy doesn’t like voting for big blockbusters but i have a hunch Avatar wins here.  I want:  Avatar / Should Win: Avatar

Best Actress

All i can say is that Carey Mulligan was the best performance this year.  Hands down. That girl will be a star.  Sure, Meryl Streep was good in a Julia Childs movie but that movie wasn’t good.  If Sandra Bullock wins, i’ll throw up on my TV.  She was good but she was playing Sandra Bullock with a southern accent. Puh-lease.   Give it to Carrey.  I didn’t see Precious but i heard that gal was great.  So caveat this pick.   That said, i know that the Academy has a love affair with Meryl Streep and loves her.  They also hate giving it to first-timers.  I want: Carey Mulligan / Should Win: Meryl Streep

Best Actor

I’ll tell you right now that Jeff Bridges wins here.  Everyone loves him.  He’s awesome.  He’s The Dude. This is a total lock.  I’m still pissed that the guy from Notorious was nominated.  This guy not only acted like Biggie Smalls but was able to rap like him.  He’s the most nuanced rapper in history and this guy got it down. We gave an Oscar to Jamie Fox for Ray Charles and Reese for June Carter, we should give one to this guy.   Of the nominees who were actually nominated, i like Jeremy Renner the best. His performance was amazing. He owned that movie.  The George Clooney and Morgan Freeman nominations are a total joke.  I like both those guys but those are the best acting performances of the year? Really? I don’t think so.  So, I want: Jeremy Renner / Should Win: Jeff Bridges

Best Director

This is so similar to Best Picture.  I love The Hurt Locker and i give her extra props because she directed Point Break (check out this for a great spoof) but you have to give it to James Cameron.  It was always believed we’d get to a point where human actors were necessary.  A world where you’re only limited by your imagination.  George Lucas wanted that with Jar Jar Binks.  Nobody had been able to do it.  Now we have. James accomplished it – all it took was perseverance and half a billion dollars.   BUT, everyone hates James Cameron. People think he’s a dick.  I see the Academy not wanting him on the podium. Especially after his “I’m the king of the world” speech last time.  I see an upset and Kathryn winning.  I want: James Cameron / Should Win: Kathryn Bigelow

Best Supporting Actor

This one is even easier than Best Actor.  Christoph Waltz wins hands down.  He rocked that movie so hard, it wasn’t even funny.  His personality was so cunning and creepy.  You could see him toying with the other actors.  A little gesture here, an inflection here.  He put on an acting seminar.  Everyone else just pulled up a chair and starting taking notes.  I want: Christoph Waltz / Should Win: Christoph Waltz

Best Supporting Actress

I have no idea who wins this. I hear the Precious gal was great.  Of the other 4, i like Vera Farmiga the best.  She was great in The Departed and was great here too.  Maggie was ok, but not award-winning.  Anna was good but more annoying than inspiring.  Penelope Cruz was in a horrible movie.  So it’s between Mo’nique and Vera.  I’ll wager that Mo’nique gets it because it seems to be more of a moving role.  I want: Vera Farmiga / Should Win: Mo’nique

Best Animated Film

Up is the best animated film but my favorite is Fantastic Mr. Fox.  It is one of my favorite films of the entire year.  Wes Anderson goodness.  I’ve seen the film twice and would be happy to see it another 20 times.  Loved it. I want: Fantastic Mr. Fox / Should Win: Up

Original Screenplay

The Hurt Locker takes this one.  The Coen brothers wrote a seriously awesome screenplay in Serious Man but it wasn’t that fun and the Academy hates not fun movies that aren’t about the Holocaust.  I don’t think anyone really took Inglorious Basterds seriously and people will feel bad voting for Avatar over Hurt Locker and want to throw the film at least one Oscar.  I want: Hurt Locker / Should Win: Hurt Locker

Adapted Screenplay

Everyone loves Jason Reitman.  He’s cool, he’s on a roll, his movies are good and his part of the Hollywood family.  People see Up In The Air and they think it’s a movie of our times.  It’s not, but they’ll give him the Oscar anyway.  I personally prefer An Education. That movie was creepy, joyful, and inspiring all at the same time. Nicky Hornby rocked that one.  He’s also been a on a roll with About a Boy and High Fidelity.  I want: An Education & Nick Hornby / Should Win: Jason Reitman

John Hughes wrote and directed some of my favorite childhood movies.  Movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Uncle Buck and more.  I was pretty sad to hear about his death last year.   There is a good article in Vanity Fair this month with quotes from actors from his movies including Matthew Broderick, Anthony Michael Hall, and Molly Ringwald.  Some good excerpts:

Ringwald: I remember the first thing that I saw of him—I didn’t know what he looked like; I didn’t know anything—were his tennis shoes. He was really into sneakers. It was not what I really thought of as a film director. His hair was spiky. He looked kind of relatable to me.

Hall: The word “dweebie”? Gotta credit Judd Nelson for that. I was on the Breakfast Clubset when he ad-libbed that. I think Judd’s responsible for that being part of our vernacular: him yelling, “You’re a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie!” I remember John laughing.

Broderick: It was extremely pleasing to make John laugh. He had a quiet, very real, uncontrollable laugh: an eyes-closed, head-half-down, bent-over-quiet thing.

Hall: There’s a scene in The Breakfast Club between the principal and the janitor, Paul Gleason and John Kapelos, where one asks, “Who’d you want to be when you grow up?” and the other says, “John Lennon.” I think that was really John to some extent. He was such a Beatles fan.

Hall: When I was doing Weird Science, I got a call from my agent on a Wednesday, saying, “Stanley Kubrick is interested in you for a role in his Vietnam drama that he’s doing, Full Metal Jacket.” Got a call back on a Friday saying, “Well, now he wants you for the lead, as Private Joker. He’s gonna call you tomorrow.”  All I can compare this to is waiting for Oz to call. The stories preceded him: his privacy, living in London, sort of extricating himself from Hollywood, all that shit. I was shaking in my boots. The phone rings. Stanley Kubrick gets on and says, “I want you to know: I just screened Sixteen Candles three times … and you’re my favorite actor since I saw Jack in Easy Rider!” I’m like, “Whaaa? Am I fucking hearing this?”

The long and short of it was, it was such a drawn-out, wild process of negotiating with Kubrick, via his attorneys, that it had a real effect on my family. [Hall ultimately withdrew from the negotiations.] But my point in telling this story is, had I not had this collaboration with this great guy, I never would have gotten that call from Kubrick. I received the greatest compliment of my life, and I owe that to John Hughes.

First there’s a new Puma phone that was announced this week at MWC (the largest mobile conference in the world) and instead of trying to compete with iPhone/Android and trying to do everything it’s just a cool phone, with some cool “fun” features (pedometer, compass, audio player with turntable) and a solar panel on the back so you don’t run out of juice.  Pretty sweet.

Second, there is some more solar powered stuff:

These are lamps on a highway that are wind powered. As far as practical renewable energy concepts go, these wind-powered highway lights are pretty elegant.  I don’t see why we don’t get these on EVERY highway.

Finally, there’s just some bike new from LA:

Los Angeles is known for its freeways, and those guys are impossible to ride a bike on. That’s where a proposal from a cycling activism organization called the L.A Bike Working Group comes in. The group recently proposed a “Backbone Bikeway Network”–a system of bikeways that is comparable to a freeway for cyclists.  I don’t see this happening any time soon, but it would be really great if it did

The movie has a good script, but the real story is the job played by British actress Carey Mulligan who plays the 16-year old girl.  Watching the movie with the Kesners, we all couldn’t help but comment how she reminds us of Audrey Hepburn.  There’s no one else that came to mind.  The movie could have been sad or creepy but because of Carey’s lightness and joy of character, it is instead it is a romance.  In 1998, I remember watching the movie Playing By Heart which has a few small roles for a little-known actress named Angelina Jolie.  I remember and seeing her absolutely kill every scene. I knew i was watching someone who was going to be a star.  Although two completely different actresses, I felt the same way about An Education and Carey.

Check it out – it’s a good movie.

The iPad is super-duper slick.  I can see some great use-cases for it, such as:

• If i was pitching a presentation to someone at a restaurant, in an elevator, or anywhere – the iPad would be a much better way to present the presentation than a laptop.  I could see it becoming a must-have for entrepreneurs
• If i had kids and a family room with lots of people, having a family iPad that people use publicly would be great. Anyone in the family could us it in front of the TV or as the home iTunes download system for movies and TV shows that syncs with their AppleTV
• Games. This could be one of the most sick gaming machines. It has the graphics, accelerometer, and connection needed to really be badass. I could see someone making a truly unique iPad gaming experience.

All these great ideas and reviews make me love the iPad but i’m not going to get one.  I’m not feeling it yet (not because of the video joke and jokes) and here’s why

• i have an iPhone and i have a Macbook. I’m not feeling a huge need to have an iPad. If i did, i would want to replace my MacBook and i don’t think the iPad is powerful enough to be a replacement yet. I want all my songs on it (need more than 64 GB) and i want to run a browser and email at the same time. Until those happen, my laptop is vastly superior.
• The A4 chip seems like a bad idea.  No way Apple is going to consistently be better than Intel or AMD at making low power chips.  Maybe they can now and early billions from it, but it can’t be a long-term solution
• No camera bums me out.  I’m not sure but i think I’m going to want to take pics with the iPad. Maybe not but i like video skyping and i like taking random pics.  Give me a camera

If you know, you know that i feel that i’ve seen the future. I know what i want and where i want Apple to take me.  It’s this:

• I want an iPhone device that has huge storage, enough for music (b/c i don’t see cloud music solution for another 5 years), and a fast enough processor that i can put all my files on it and use Google Docs and Dropbox for shared files
• A portable keyboard and docked monitor so i can plug my phone into them and use it as a desktop computer when i’m at home or at work.
• Over time, the files get saved more and more in the cloud and my phone become a portable processor, harddrive and network card.  That’s all

I saw with the iPad a keyboard doc and saw this future is coming.  It’s coming but slowly.  i can’t wait

Last week I read his article Nil By Mouth where he describes how it feels to not be able to eat following his throat surgery. He offers some great observations from religious to the social.  It’s an amazing essay and a must read for anyone who eats to appreciate what truly results from a meal. Hint: it’s not the food.  One passage:

One day in the hospital my brother-in-law Johnny Hammel and his wife Eunice came to visit. They are two of my favorite people. They’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, and know I’m not. I mention that because they interpreted my story in terms of their faith. I described my fantasies about root beer. I could smell it, taste it, feel it. I desired it. I said I’d remembered so clearly that day with my father for the first time in 60 years.

“You never thought about it before?” Johnny asked.

“Not once.”

“Could be, when the Lord took away your drinking, he gave you back that memory.”

Whether my higher power was the Lord or Cormac McCarthy, those were the words I needed to hear. And from that time I began to replace what I had lost with what I remembered. If I think I want an orange soda right now, it is after all only a desire. People have those all the time. For that matter, when I had the chance, when was the last time I held one of those tall Nehi glass bottles? I doubt I ever had one from a can.

In this latest essay Making Out Is Its Own Reward, Ebert provides a trip back in time to a period where America’s youth was held by all parts of society to the “3 foot rule” where when you’re with a girl/guy 3 of your 4 feet had to be on the floor. He discusses the impact it had on a poor professor who was a touch more liberal, what it meant for him and his life as a teenager in the 50’s, and how that relates to kids today.

The blog from Ebert is a treasure. Some article are solely focused on movies but regardless to topic the writing is fantastic. You get the sense that he’s willing to write about anything with honesty and care. I hope it continues as can’t wait to see what he writes next

I was listening today to an NPR podcast with George Lucas (download). He has a new book out where he discusses the 300 most influential and impressive blockbuster movies to him. For each film, he does some significant research into the casting, the shooting schedule, the budget, and the result. He adjusts for inflation so you can see the true impact older films had. Some interesting tidbits:

• The average ticket price in 1910 was $6 and the average ticket price today is $6. I find that amazing.
• The music licensing for Lucas’ first film American Graffiti cost him 70k because he was instructed to keep his costs under 10% of his 700k budget. He licensed 2 albums worth of rock. People told him that he was insane to do that. Every other film prior to that had be scored. Nobody had thrown music on top of film. First, it’s amazing that this is the film that changed that. Second, a year later the studio was trying to license all the music for an album to be released and it cost them $1 million. In one year, the industry changed that much. Wow
• Jurrasic Park was the one movie that really changed the digital landscape.  Prior to that everything looked like an effect. After JP he knew you could make anything
• Star Wars was revolutionary to Lucas in that you could make a 2 foot green person seem lifelike. That was the first time there had been an imaginary life-like character in film. Really changed the game. 2001 was the biggest movie at the time and was seen as the best, most creative sci-fi film ever. However, Lucas saw it as a set of still shots and wanted to introduce energy into special effects shot. He wanted to be able to pan the camera through space and not just have one shot.
• 3D is new and Lucas looked at using it for Episode I but the techology wasn’t there.
• He and Spielberg used to trade equity points in their films.  Lucas always thought Spielberg’s films were better than his and Spielberg thought the opposite so each trades a few points of equity in each of their films before they were released.  For example, Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind came out when Star Wars came out and Lucas preferred Close Encounters and Spielberg thought Star Wars would crush it.  Guess Steven knew better

For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a little clip you were around. The clip (called a “Tracker”) contains a motion sensor like the ones found in the Nintendo Wii. The Tracker senses my motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about my daily activities. The Tracker measures the intensity and duration of my physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, how long it took me to fall asleep, the number of times I woke up throughout the night and how long I was actually asleep vs just lying in bed.

It’s pretty awesome stats and all i have to do is wear this little clip. Also, the clip uploads the data to my Mac without attaching it. All in all, it’s pretty sweet.

One thing i’ve noticed is how nice the web interface is. Entering in foods, water, and stuff is a breeze. Anyway, it’s my first day with this thing. We’ll see how it works. Stay tuned.

Televisions. The TV’s were amazing. In the years past, it had all been about getting bigger and bigger and bigger. This year was different. This year the TV’s got better in different ways. Sure they got bigger. There’s a pic below of a 152″ plasma. It was ridiculous. But the also got thinner, they got 3D, they got wireless – both the video cable and the power cable, and they got Skype. I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more web on the TV but i guess that time hasn’t come yet.

eReaders. This show was all about the eReader. Last year there were thousands of Netbooks. Now the netbooks are all gone and the eReader has replaced them. The Skiff was the nicest although one of them has the ability to switch from an eReader to an LCD screen with a push of the button. I attribute this all to Android. There’s another reader that’s a full powered Android device with broswing, email and other stuff.

There were also a ton of iPhone accessories there – speakers, cases, grips, remotes, you name it. All in all it was a great show in my opinion – one of the best in years. Anyone else get a different impression?

There’s a good article in the NY Times about Vengence films.  It describes how the genre as existing, writing,

The formula’s popularity stems from the permission it gives viewers to experience the rush violence provides without feeling guilty about it. The plot gives the hero the same permission when a wife or daughter or brother or girlfriend (in Jodie Foster’s case a boyfriend) is abducted, injured or killed….

Once the atrocity has occurred, the hero acquires an unquestioned justification for whatever he or she then does; and as the hero’s proxy, the audience enjoys the same justification for vicariously participating in murder, mayhem and mutilation. In fact, the audience is really the main character in many of these films.

Personally, I really like these films.  I remember watching “Payback” with Mel Gibson and loving the gritty, matter-of-fact way he dispensed with the people who screwed him out of 80 grand.  The author of the article lists these 10 as his favorite:

• “Death Wish,” “Get Carter,” “A History of Violence,” “The Limey,” “Mad Max,” “Out for Justice,” “Point Blank,” “Straw Dogs,” “Taken,” “Valdez is Coming.”

I haven’t seen some of those.  My tops are:

• The Limey
• Payback
• History of Violence
• Braveheart
• Kill Bill
• Man on Fire
• Out for Justice
• Die Hard

What about you?

2009 was a fun year.  I traveled to 42 cities, 4 countries and logged over 100k miles.  I also found time to stay at home and do stuff.  Looking back on the year, some things really stand out.  For instance:

• Up’s tear-jerking silent vignette. With each new film, Pixar finds some way to top itself. The marvelous innovation inUp was the wordless sequence near the beginning, set to Michael Giacchino’s wistful score, depicting Carl and Ellie’s entire life together — including the sad fact that they can’t have children. Who else would dare to try that? And who but Pixar could pull it off so gracefully?
• I Like This Song.  I started a little experiment in May of placing a good song i like every day to the blog ilikethissong.com.  At first it was easy because there were so many songs i was bursting to share.  But as the year wore on, i got more selective and paid more attention to what i was putting up.  The real treat, however, has been the followers of ILTS who have sent me new music and tunes.
• The Android OS. I went to the largest mobile phone conference in the world last February and saw thousands of phones that were running Windows Mobile OS that was vastly inferior to the iPhone. I came away from there thinking that the iPhone was going to crush everyone for the next 10 years.  Luckily Google’s OS has grown up and is the real deal.  This is the year when the race for the future of mobile actually started
• Brett Favre.  Say what you want about him, but for me he has transformed the Vikings from a team that drove me crazy to watch to a team to be proud of every week.  He was inspiring and regardless of how early we go out in the playoffs (i’m thinking first round) i’ll always remember this season because of him.
• Zach Galifinakis and The Hangover.  Zach G. had slipeed under my radar until The Hangover which was this summer’s must-see movie.  I thought he made the film and i was even more delighted to see that his webepisodes of Between Two Ferns prove him a true comedic talent
• Death of Old Media.  Magazines crumbled.  Newspapers folded.  Online usage soared.  People who were in the print business ran scared.  Some tried to adjust their print properties.  Others just wove a white flag.  It become evident this year that online is where the users are and if you’re not moving your media business there, you’re either going to downsize or disappear.  This was of personal interest to me as i spent lots of 2009 looking at the advertising piece of this at Buzz and looking at the opportunities this new world creates with Tobes.
• In-N-Out burger.  I ate so much In-N-Out in 2009 that this could very well be the year of the Double-Double.  Thanks to JT, Pedro and JStreet for coming with me time after time after time.
• eReaders / Kindle.  The Kindle came on strong this year and The Nook is looking like a solid competitor.  While neither may be long solutions with their closed formats, they have gained serious attention and sales.  I also read my first books on electronically this year and i can easily picture a future when books are primarily sold without paper.
• Obama.  He came out of nowhere.  We were about to elect someone into the Presidency (Hilary) which would have had two families (Clinton’s and Bush’s) control the office for over 24 years.  THis was not the America i was down with and i was just about to write off the political system for good when Obama came along.  Sure, you can complain about different things he’s done in office thus far but he’s engaged me and he’s made me pay attention. I respect his reasoning.  That word, “hope,” is a strange one and it was a big part of 2009 for me due to him.
• Avatar, Star Trek and Sci-Fi. This year was an incredible year for sci-fi. I thought Star Trek was awesome, the little indie flick District 9 was refreshing and extremely well done, and of course James Cameron’s epic, Avatar – the film that needed new technology just to complete it – rocked the end of the year. These films showed that sci-fi is alive and kicking and isn’t some little repetitive genre reserved for geeks and nerds.
• A Personal Stream of Information From Friends.  Before 2009, my RSS feed dominated my web browsing experience.  Twitter and Facebook worked their tail off in ‘09 to change the web landscape.  Their impact has been incredible.  The personal stream of information is how many people are now receiving their news and media.  What this means is that the web (and possibly life) won’t ever be the same.  I can’t wait to see where it leads
• D Wood.  Last and most importantly it’s D. Say what you will about LA but it brought me to Diane and more than anything it will be a year remembered as the year i met her.  That one little meeting has changed everything.

Happy 2009 everyone. It’s been a fantastic year and I wish you all the best in 2010.

I saw the new James Cameron film Avatar this weekend and loved it.  Loved it. Once again, JC totally delievered.  The movie is quite a spectacle.  It’s not so much the chracters, but the story and the visuals that make this film.  Even if you’re not a sci-fi fan, you need to check this out to see how $250 million bucks should be spent. Or as Ebert says in his review:

“Avatar” is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It’s a technical breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message. It is predestined to launch a cult. It contains such visual detailing that it would reward repeating viewings. It invents a new language, Na’vi, as “Lord of the Rings” did, although mercifully I doubt this one can be spoken by humans, even teenage humans. It creates new movie stars. It is an Event, one of those films you feel you must see to keep up with the conversation.

If you haven’t seen the movie, the rest of this post isn’t for you.  If you have, here are some thoughts:

I found the plot to be a mishmash of movies i’ve already seen:

• So much of the story seem extremely similar to the Kevin Costner film Dances With Wolves.  Not a bad movie to rip off considering it took home 7 Oscars.  But seriously, check this out: a guy from a modern culture sent to live with the natives. He falls in love with the native ordered to teach him their ways and in the process begins to prefer their “primitive” ways to his.  He then switches sides in an epic battle for the natives’ survival.   Of course, Avatar does this battle is a much cooler way and the natives are 12 foot blue people.  But still, it’s much of the same
• When the machines are stampeding through the forrest and the natives are with bows and arrows and rocks trying to stop them, i couldn’t help but think of the Ewoks scene in Star Wars where the cute and awesome rebels put the kibosh down to destroy the shield.

The look of the film was incredible.  Really amazing.

• The colors and lighting in this film are a sight to see in the theater and in 3D which is the best 3D experience i’ve ever had.  None of the dimming that typically occurs happens here.
• I was worried about the Uncanny Valley effect.  This effect states that when a robot or CG person is made more and more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached (the valley) beyond which the response quickly becomes horrible (or a strong repulsion) which is what happened to me with most movies like this (remember Jar Jar or Polar Express).  However, the fact that Cameron was able to make the Na’vi human-like with CG opens the door for truly imaginative films to emerge.  This has NEVER happened before.
• The last time i saw CG so clear and real was when i saw the Lord Of The Ring films, so i wasn’t surprised to see that Peter Jackson’s New Zealand shop, WETA, was the shop responsible.  Those guys are just getting better and better

If you know James Cameron, you’ll recognize some of the pieces of his past films showing up here.  Some things that stood out for me

• I remember how obsessed Cameron was with the Harrier jets in “True Lies” and how he made Arnold hang from it for a major sequence.  So I wasn’t surprised when the main plane in this film was a smaller, sleeker Harrier.
• If you read Wired you’ll know that JC loves going underwater.  He’s built and patented his own submarines so he can go deeper than anyone has ever gone.  Also, you’ll remember Titanic has a big chunk dedicated to the team going through the wreckage. Thus, it was no surprise to see that the land of Pandora looks very much like an underwater environment.  There are Jellyfish floating, sea-like creatures flying in the air, and tropical coral as vegetation.
• Breathing is a big theme in the movie.  Similar to how the final scenes of “The Abyss” involve the main character running out of liquid air, this film ends in with Sully fighting to breathe.
• Am I the only one who remembers the big human-like machines in (Cameron-directed) Aliens that Sigourney Weaver used at the very end where the machines mimic your movements but with more power? (see this pic to remember what i’m talking about) Well those things are back in this movie and while they are a bit more nimble, they are exact ripoffs from Aliens.

Anyway, just some thoughts.  What did you think?

- In general the iPhone kicks its ass in usability.  Typing on the droid sucks so much that i find myself not wanting to send texts.  This is especially true in the car. I can text and drive fine with the iPhone but the Droid will cause a crash.

- Having your phone be an iPod is a huge benefit.  This is such a major differentiator for me as i listen to a ton of music and listen to podcast every day while driving.  The media players on the droid are a joke.

- Google Voice is awesome and i really wish it was on the iPhone.  Being able to sync calls and text messages with the web is really useful.  There are other GV competitors but they don’t compare for me

- The voice reception and quality on the Droid is heads and shoulders above ATT.  I can actually get calls at work and inside my home.   I’ve never been an ATT hater but the Droid is making me a Verizon lover.

In general, i think the Droid is pretty great and definitely a competitor to the iPhone but the slickness/enjoyment of the interface and iTunes will keep me on it – at least for the near future.

I think of our present situation as somewhat analogous to the mass migration from the country to the city that started several centuries ago in Europe: the bustle and stimulation and diversity of urban life made it harder to enjoy the slower, organic pleasures of rural living. Still those pleasures didn’t disappear. People continue to cherish them in mass numbers to this day.

I believe this wholeheartedly. Urban life totally disrupted the traditional calm of country life. Today there are plenty who prefer the hustle of the city and many others who prefer to keep it calm in the country. I fully appreciate both. However, i have no patience for people who bash city life (ask my sister about how i attacked her when she started ripping NYC).  Large city culture is unique and can be exhilarating, stimulating and inspiring. But it’s existence doesn’t preclude living in the country – just like the internet and technology doesn’t have to render reading and concentrating in large doses obsolete. Don’t fear the change, just recognize it for what it is: another option for your attention.

Fred

Those of you who aren’t familiar with Playdar, let me explain what it is. Playdar is a “Music Content Resolver.” Think a radar for music to play (play+radar = playdar). Now, i’m sure i probably just lost about 50% of my readers there. Those of you who are left, let me explain more in very general terms. Playdar allows a web page or a music service to take a song and then provide a source for that song. If the song is on your local computer it will play that file. If it is on your wife’s computer, it will play from there if it is connected. If it’s no where you specify, it will then look to the internet for the mp3 file. Basically, it will allow you to find any mp3 for any track.

As the co-founder of the music service Qloud I completely understand, respect, and fear the complexity around licensing music. And, any music service that charges users by play (Lala, Launch, etc.) is a challenging consumer experience. Something like Playdar, which allows the user to pay for content he/she doesn’t own and listen from a local (aka legal) location for the rest, could dramatically change the economic model for music services and allow more to experiment.

Even subscription services, which pay the music labels per play would benefit from something like this as many users play the same songs over and over. It might come to a point where once a user plays a track over 70 times the service just gives them the mp3 to download to caps the license fee for that track.

My hope is that many more legal options emerge around Playdar.   The new music services of Spotify and MOG are just Rhapsody with more features and a better interface.  It’s great to see some more innovation. Can’t wait to see what’s ahead

For this reason (and possibly others) wikipedia contributors are on the decline. Does this mean it will not be the dominant site it is today in the future? I wouldn’t surprised. I could see sites like Mahalo picking up the slack. What do you think?

You will see an advertising strategy from us in the very near future.  And i think that it will be…um…fascinating and completely non-traditional and people will love it…. The genuis of Google when Google first rolled out ads was that the ads were also the kinds of things that people were looking for.  So we want to do something that is organic and in the flow of the way people already use twitter and not here are the tweets and here are the ads.  So it’ll be very organic.  It’ll be very cool and people will love it when they see it.

This is exactly the right strategy.  I know from experience as does anyone who’s every tried to sell traffic to ad agencies that the banners are not working. The click-throughs and engagements are low.  The IAB unit needs some help and the best way to help is to generate ads organically within the content.  What Twitter’s strategy is, i’m not sure but i did see this video today where Steven Fry suggested that tweeters can sell access to their accounts.  That would be interesting.

Here’s Twitter COO below. The ad discussion is at 17 minute mark

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Just was reading about Google Maps, specifically their turn-by-turn, and its impact on the maps market.

As many people know, there are 2 main players in the map market: Tele Atlas and NavTeq.  Google licensed both of them for Google Maps for years.  While they licensed, they also sent cars all around the nation gathering their own data.  These two guys, Tele Atlas and NavTeq, were the only game in town.  TomTom, the leading portable GPS device maker, wanted to control their own destiny and agreed to buy Tele Atlas for US$2.7 billion. And Nokia, worried that they would lose access to the coveted map agreed to buy NavTeq for a cool $8.1 billion.

All was good until Google dropped a bomb.  About six weeks ago, they went independent and didn’t rely on either for their map data.  And then about a month ago they announced their own turn-by-turn navigation would be available in the Android OS.  Now anybody from BMW to GM to Samsung can provide turn-by-turn by simply using Google’s OS.

The big losers here are RIM and iPhone.  They either have to not allow that access or pay a large royalty.  And Windows Mobile and Symbian are in an even more difficult situation as paying to embed this data could be more than the license fee they get from handset manufacturers.  This all assumes, of course, that users really demand this feature. If they do, Google’s really in the catbird seat.

People will complain that this is incredibly anti-competitive.  That Google is using it’s money making machine to unfairly compete in the map market.  Well, the story is even worse than that.  To get carriers to use Android, Google offers a cut on the search revenue that the phones produce.  So not only is Android free but it’s actually paying providers to use it.  Some people are calling it “less than free.”  Google will go beyond cell phones with this strategy.  Any netbook manufacturer (Dell, Sony, etc.) will get a cut of search revenue by building on Android or Chrome instead of Windows or Linux.  It’s tough to compete with “less than free.”

It makes you think of the world of complements.  Chris Dixon discusses Google and how its complement are the web browser and the OS.  The best thing you can do as a company is drive your complements to become commodities.  Well there’s no better way than driving their prices to be below zero.  Kudos Google,  I’m impressed.

The first and main reason i didn’t like the book is this: Chuck writes about what he’s interested in. His past books were about Rock N Roll, Reality TV, Billy Joel, Dixie Chicks and other things. They had an interesting take on items i liked and were very familiar with. These essays expanded my thinking on these topics. For example, i had never realized that the Dixie Chicks were that similar to 80’s Van Halen, nor had i thought about how Billy Joels was a unique kind of cool different than almost all other rock stars (on a coolness range from white to black, he’s an orange). Also, past essays celebrated both the subjects and the concepts. The current essays are about philosophical views on the world. He asks questions and makes statements about society such as,

• Why we like or hate people who fail
• Why we interact with popular advertising in the manner we do
• Why Chuck hates laugh tracks in TV shows and america’s approach to humor
• Why NFL Football is great
• Why watching people (voyeurism) is exciting: (because there’s a possibility for anything to happen)

These are the topics of this book and they are just nowhere close to as interesting as his previous topics. His book of interviews, IV, had a great interview with Val Kilmer. Nothing here touches that.

Reason number 2 for not liking this book is that there are lots of quotes in the book. For some reason my Kindle never shows who says these quotes. That makes them WAY less interesting and just frustrating. Don’t read this book on a kindle.

My third reason is that I didn’t like the prose. I think i know why this is. I’ve tracked down Kloserman on podcasts and now seen him speak twice. I know what he sounds like in person. So much so that i now hear his voice talking when i read his text. Do you know when you notice someone is saying the word “like” too much and all of the sudden you find yourself pay attention to them actually say the work “like” over and over instead of whatever it is they are trying to say? Well, this happens with me and Chuck. He uses the words “idiom’ and italicizes his word “must” and i can hear his emphasis. It bothers me. Maybe i’ve just read too much of his stuff.

Finally, the last essay in the book is about his dislike of technology and I completely disagree with his opinion regarding the Internet. He has a part in the book where he criticizes anyone who publicly praises the internet because he argues they only like it because it now makes them relevant. He says,”the only people who insist the internet is wonderful are those who need it to give the life meaning.” I can’t begin to say how wrong that stance is.

At the end, Klosterman comes off as a guy who is just bitter that the world is changing. He reminds me of people who refuse to watch television, won’t own cell phones and only listen to music on vinyl. Grow up.

A Batman spoof:

A Point Break spoof. I love how Aziz does Keanu by just shouting. Click on the image to go to the video page:

A video describing all the ambiguous endings of movies. If you were unsure how they ended, now you know:

This is a company, Local Motors, i just found out about (from Toni) that crowd-sources the designs of cars and then builds them in a micro-production environment.  This is the next car their are building (below).  It looks totally sweet.  They build each car one by one and costs roughly $50k per car.  But they are (1) totally unique; (2) quite fast; (3) environmentally sound – 30 mpg on clean desiel; (4) and kick ass!

I’d love to have one of these.  To me, cars are getting more and more similar.  As a kid, i used to be able to identify the make of a car by their headlights in the dark.  Now i can’t even identify them in the daylight. A Nissan looks like a Toyota which looks like a Ford.

I love the thought of crowdsourcing and micro-producing for cars.  We’re already doing with t-shirts (threadless), shoes (nikeID), and airplanes (Epic planes)

Balsalmiq.  This is sick wireframing software.  It’s so easy and intuitive, it can allow anyone to make fairly decent wires.  It’s also a great way to get ideas across to other people.   Doing a full-screen demo of wires always seems to impress people.

YuuGuu.  If you want to share your screen to another person to either do a demo or just display a problem, this is the best way to do it. We’ve tried a bunch of different types (such as Vyew) and this is by far the best.

Dropbox.  We’re not the only one who loves this.   In fact, on the Balsalmiq blog they wrote, “If you don’t use DropBox, I will shake my head at you in disapproval.”  Dropbox is a network file times 1000.  It’s incredible.  We put lots of files into Dropbox as a way to share.   In fact, i’m about to start using it as a way to share all my files across my computers and my girlfriend’s.  A great way to just do backup to another machine.

Skype.  This remains the best way to do voice-to-voice communication.  It’s also a damn good IM client.  Haven’t experimented with the screen sharing yet.

Jing.  For debugging, there is nothing better than Jing.  If you don’t know Jing, here’s the use case it solves: (1) click a button, select an area of your screen, capture a video of that area for as long as you want, click to stop and here’s a URL of that video hosted on the Jing site.  Easy as pie and incredibly useful.

TripIt.  If you travel at all, this is a must have. When you make an airline or travel reservation, all you do is forward your email confirmation to tripit and they keep track of all the details.  Once you’re at the airport all you need is their iPhone app (or mobile site) to easily grab confirmation codes

Google Apps / Docs / Tasks.   Using corporate email through Google Apps is very easy to do and eliminates lots of effort of setting up Exchange or anything else – it’s both simpler and better.  Through that we get Google Docs which has always been a tremendous way to collaborate on documents with others.  For instance, i have a doc that i use that Nader (in San Francisco) can edit each day in real-time as i work on it.  I also use tasks as a great way to keep track of what i need to do.  I love that i can add tasks from the iPhone (great tasks interface) and then see them back on machine so i can knock ‘em out.

Any other items that you use that you’d recommend?  What are your favorite work tools?

Just finished reading the book In-N-Out Burger by Stacy Perlman about the creation of the iconic burger joint. The book has some great stories about the original founders. The husband/wife team Ester and Harry Snyder worked tirelessly and with lots of integrity to create a burger joint focused on “doing one thing an doing it better than anyone else”

The book begins when they founded the company in 1950 and the depiction of that time in LA was really interesting to learn about. The automobile was just coming on the scene and fast food restaurants were just starting. LA was a hotbed for them. In-N-Out, McDonald’s, Carls Jr, Taco Bell an others all started around the same time in the LA area. Los Angeles at that time was the Silicon Valley of fast food in the 50’s  There was a hype and boom around it and it was making many food entrepreneurs millionaires.

From the beginning In-N-Out wanted to be a place that was family owned and run. Harry and Ester continually turned away offers to sell, expand quickly or even change the scope of the business. Whether it was stubbornness or not, staying small and focused was Harry’s belief and it helped shape a truly unique restaurant that has – relative to other burger joints – healthier, better tasting burgers and a friendlier and cleaner environment all at a low price.

The book is also very much a out the Synder family – the dad, mom, 2 brothers, and granddaughter. Over 60 years of operation each one of these family members eventually ran the entire company. Harry was the main entrepreneur who built the core. When he died, he gave it to his youngest son who was equally talented and capable and built it up to be most like what it is today.  When he died, the oldest son stepped in.  He struggled with drug use and 6 years after taking over died from drug complications. After that, Harry’s wife, Ester, at age 82 took over again until her granddaughter was able to assume control.

The beginning is a great tale of growth and success, the middle is an interesting story of politics and growing pains, and the end is sort of tragic as the youngest Snyder (Lyndsi) is far from the dynamic inspiration of Harry nor nearly as competent.

I happy to have read the book and learn about In-N-Out’s secret sauce. If Harry, Ester or his son rich were still running the show I would bend I’ve backwards to eat there. But knowing that the company is now in somewhat incompetent and undeserving hands makes me believe that it’s only a matter of time before they chain tries to overexpand, maximize profits and become more of the same rather that a unique place with a special culture. Sure hope that doesn’t happen too soon

Some interesting facts:

• In the 1950’s car hops were all the craze. In 1949 Harry built a two-way speaker system that allowed people to order their burger on the way in and pick it up on their way out in a fast, streamlined process.  While Wendy’s claimed to have invented the drive-thru in 1973, In-N-Out used it right off the bat for over 20 years prior to that
• The entire chain lived by Harry’s quote: “Keep it simple, do one thing and do it the best you can”
• Harry felt he had to own the entire process on how to make beef patties and deliver to stores on daily basis.  What you won’t see in an In-N-Out are: freezers, infrared lights. or microwaves
• There’s a secret menu: the term, “animal style” came from the 60’s when the surfing community ordered the burgers with special sause.  The other customers who wanted the sause started calling it “animal style” as they viewed the surfers as animals.  Protein style. Lots think it came with the atlkins craze. But it came in the 70’s when the founder (harry) started eating burgers without the bun to try to lose weight.
• Harry always paid his employees way over minimum wage.  In 1950, min wage was 60 cents and he started everyone at $1
• Harry and Ester didn’t want to expand to more stores but their employees wanted more shifts.  Harry finally agreed to expand if he could staff an entire store with current employees and pay for it all in cash
• Every store opened is completely paid for – there is no debt
• LA is the birth place of fast-food and burgers.  Right by Baldwin Park in San Bernardino Valley, McDonalds opened it’s first store in 1948.  Similarly, Carl’s Jr started in 1945 and Fatburger in 1952 in LA
• Ray Kroc, who is credited for building the McDonald’s empire actually approached 4 other chains before the McDonald’s founders decided to sell exclusive franchise rights to him.   In-N-Out was one of the 4.  Harry declined almost immediately.  At that time, many people were getting quite rich by starting fast food chains and franchising them.  Harry felt lots of pressure to do the same.  You can imagine how every one in your industry is doing something one way and you feel like doing the completely opposite.  While he could have definitely made more money franchising, he has created a cult and beloved brand by doing the opposite.

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I was bummed however, to read of the new Barnes & Noble Nook not because it’s bad but because of what it represents.

The hardware of the Nook is better: It has expandable storage slot, it has wifi and it has a touch screen instead of a keyboard which means it’s more flexible for future functionality.

I now have library concerns. The Nook can take not only B&N’s eBooks but also Google’s and PDF’s.  While i’m not one to compare book counts, i am worried about my eBook library.  When i buy a book i want to own it forever.  I don’t want it attached to the device i have at that time.  Think of how bad it would be if the music you had was tied to your iPod.  Every time you got a new iPod, you could only put new music on it.   Granted, it’s not a great analogy because you listen to music over and over and you typically read a book only once.  But i think you see my point.

Vinyl vs. Books.  What i think could happen with me is that my book purchasing starts to look like how many music lovers purchase vinyl.  These people consume music digitally, through mp3’s, but for bands they really love they like to have the physical product – thus they purchase the vinyl record.  I could see myself doing this with books.  I read them all digitally and for authors/books that i really like, i’ll actually pay a premium and buy the physical copy.  Ideally i would like to have a format (like mp3) where i could save every book in and keep them all on a harddrive.

The Nook has sharing capabilities.  With the Nook you can send a book to a friend for 14 days.  This is nice but not a big deal for me.  What i want is the ability to share sections of the book to the web.  I want to post passages to my blog and i want to send to Facebook and twitter sentences that i enjoy.  I don’t see anyone allowing this and it’s troubling.  I want to be able to do much more with digital books then i could with the actual book. That’s why the mp3 is so much more powerful than the CD and that’s why the eBook could be much better than the book

Anyone else had similar concerns with their kindle?

In the Oct. Wired magazine they had a small blurb about things we’ll say to our grandkids.  Some of the good ones were:

• Back in my day, we only needed 140 characters
• There used to be so much snow up here, you could strap a board to your feet and slide all the way down
• TV contests gave cash to whoever could store the most data in their head
• Well, the screens were bigger, but they only showed the movies at certain times of day
• You used to keep the files on your computer, and you had to go back to the same computer to access them!

I thought it was an interesting topic.  Some more i thought of:

• Even though they were bigger, our cell phones were only for making calls
• It seems strange, but new artists didn’t pay us to listen to their music.  In fact, we had to buy the music from them
• When i was a kid, when we looked at cars we used to think “the bigger the better”
• People used to think that being tan was cool
• When kids were born, first of all they didn’t grab a clone for storage but also they had no way of not only knowing what hair color or muscle mass they kid would have and some patents didn’t even know if they were having a boy or a girl
• We had these things called “TV channels” and we had to order all the channels or none of them.  We only had a few hundred of them and you couldn’t search for anything on your TV.
• We used to go to watch the football/baseball game in person. I know it’s crazy but they used to have huge stadiums to watch the game with your own eyes.

What can you think of?

A girl is continously haunted by noises and strange occurances.  Her boyfriend, Micah, buys a camera and becomes obsessed with it.  Like any guy, he wants to get all of the strangeness on film.  The genius of the movie is that he places this camera on a tripod and films them sleeping to see what happens in the middle of the night.  And things happen.  When you see stuff occur, you see it happen through a static camera while their eyes are closed.  You feel for them and are legitamitely scared.  As Ebert says, “for extended periods here, nothing at all is happening, and believe me, you won’t be bored.”

If you like being on the edge of your seat, go check it out

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That quote made me thing of the activities around launching a company.  You never know what’s going to hit you but you know that you’ll be able to solve it when it comes.  It makes me think of one of my favorite quotes:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road

- Walt Whitman

I have found that you must be both excited and confident and if you are, it’s very fulfilling.  Just some words to think about over the weekend

As he says: “The challenge is in designing structures and transparency that will attract the good guys while burying or repelling those that seek the new technology (because they can’t find anywhere else to go). In other words, you either need to move the top left to the top right (not easy, but possible*), or educate the bottom left of the grid in how to contribute to the culture (really difficult indeed). The best new media (like blogs and possibly twitter) open doors to people who didn’t used to have a voice. The worst ones (like blogs and possibly twitter) merely create new venues for scams and senseless yelling.”

People like to bemoan new technologies but it’s just lazy to criticize the entire sector.  Some innovations move you ahead (upper right) and some introduce new problems (lower right)

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In the book there’s a good passage about the music business and radio.  In the late 1930’s, radio was emerging as a popular entertainment format but also one that made a mess of the old ways of paying musicians.  At the time most radio broadcasts were live, and the musicians and composers were paid for a single performance but to musicians and composers payment for a single radio performance alone did not seem fair when that one performance was being received by millions of listeners.  To them, if those millions were packed into one concert hall, the musicians share of the receipts would have been huge.

Broadcasters argued that it was impossible to pay licensing fees based on how many listeners tuned in b/c no one knew what that number was.  But ASCAP, which had a near-monopoly on the most popular artists, made the rules and insisted on royalties of 3 to 5 percent of a station’s gross advertising revenues in exchange for the right to play music – and it threatened to raise the rate in 1940 when the contract expired. Whoa.

Understandably, radio stations were pissed and took matters into their own hands and cut live performances entirely.  Recording technology was improving and more and more stations began playing these new things called “records” instead.  Music labels responded by selling records stamped with “NOT LICENSED FOR RADIO BROADCAST” but in 1940 the Supreme Court decided that radio stations could play any record they had purchased.

So ASCAP convinced its most prominent members (including Bing Crosby) to stop making recordings.   Let me repeat that, ASCAP convinced artists to stop making music because of how it was being distributed.  Amazing.

With a shrinking pool of music to play and a crappy deal on the table by ASCAP, the broadcasters struck out and formed their own royalty agency called Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) which had much better terms.  At first it was a magnet for regional musicians such as R&B or Country artists who were usually neglected by New York-based ASCAP.  Because these musicians wanted exposure more than money they agreed to let radio stations play their music for free – and thus business model for charging radio stations to pay a fortune for music collapsed. ASCAP never regained the right to get large royalties.

The irony is large is amazing.  Worried about a bad business model, ASCAP’s bad terms practically drove free music into the radio stations.  A free inferior version of music (radio) turned out to be a great marketer for the paid version.

Similarly today, free music on the web is driving more and more people to concerts. Music consumption continues to rise but record labels are collapsing.   You’d think today’s issues are unique but you only have to look back 80 years to see what we continue to repeat history.

This is why i love stories about people who were told they were wrong and they persevered and proved their naysayers wrong. Three stories stick out in my head:

Steve Jobs got forced out of Apple because he had a crazy idea that hardware can be beautiful. Years later he came back to prove that he was right 20 years before.  Now he’s dominating the music industry, the largest shareholder of the largest media company (Disney) and revolutionizing the mobile technology industry

In-N-Out Burger was a fast-food joint just like all the others in the 50’s. Ray Kroc wanted to buy it and franchise it. That was the thing to do.  McDonald’s was doing it, so was Taco Bell and Wendy’s and everyone else. But Harry Synder (the founder) of In-N-Out told Ray to pound salt.  He had a different idea. Instead of “lower costs and increase sales” it was “do one thing and do it as well as you can.” That one thing was the In-N-Out burger.  He never sold. The Synder family has purchased every In-N-Out with cash.  He wanted to know every meat distributor by his first name. That’s why the #1 requested meal backstage at the Oscars is In-N-Out and why there’s over an hour wait at a place where burgers are $2.

John Lasseter lost his job at Disney back in ‘86. He was fired by an old line animator who said there was no future in computer animation. Lasseter slept under his desk, and a decade later delivered Pixar’s first hit, “Toy Story”.  After story he and Pixar have gone for 10 for 10.  Nothing is a sure thing in media.  And John is 10 for 10.

All of these guys did it their way and the world is a better place because of it. We can only hope that we have the conviction and passion and talent of them in our own lives.

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I had no idea why Google would buy a company, reCaptcha, that does captchas. For those of you who don’t know, captchas are the little squiggly text that people enter to prove they are human. The word “captcha” actually stands for: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

With these things are all over the internet, why would Google buy this specific company? I found out a few reasons. First, they are the original gangsters – it turns out the guy who invented captchas is the founder of reCaptcha. Second, they way they do the captcha words is quite innovative. Check this out: reCAPTCHA takes scans from newsclippings, articles and old books that can’t be read by machines (because they are scans) then feeds them to humans in a captcha one at a time with other words that it knows. The user then enters both words. The word that reCAPTCHA knows is tested – if correct, it now learns an additional word to use on other challenges. This is how they build up their database of words from scans.

Google has for the past 6 years been scanning books like crazy. They have millions of books scanned. What they don’t have is text of those books available to be searched. The thought is that if you use captchas to surface all the words of those books one at a time, this will enable a massive crowdsourcing project to build a database of literature. Very interesting experiment. I never really hear of such clever business development deals. I love it.

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While at Dartmouth, Theodor was editor of Dartmouth’s comedy magazine called The Jacko. That is  until he got caught drinking on Easter eve and got kicked out.  By his fraternity (Caste and Gauntlet) he was voted least likely to succeed and he graduated with a 2.4 in 1925.  Given all that he managed to go out and sell  more than 222 million books (66 titles).  That’s pretty amazing

Here are some good quotes:

My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It’s the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-matuzz. You’ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond ‘Z’ and start poking around

Nonesense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It’s more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack

If you sat 50 years with your worms and your wishes, you’d grow a long beard before you catch fishes

I’d like to get beyond Z soon. It sounds like a good place to be.

There’s an interesting article in the NY Times called Taking Back The Knife: Girls Gone Gory in which it talks about the recent increasing in horror movies being made and the strange findings of recent box office receipts showing that women have an even bigger appetite for horror films than men.

This surprised me although i have seen it first hand; last weekend both Diane and Althea put Halloween 2 tops on their “want to see” list.  Some of the reasons that the NY Times said were:

• Women can identify more with horror films as their are other women as the main characters. Diablo Cody (writer of “Juno”) said, “When I watched movies like ‘The Goonies’ and ‘E.T.,’ it was boys having adventures. When I watched ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ it was Nancy beating” up Freddy. “It was that simple.”
• Women enjoy pure adrenaline rushes. As Cody says, “Some of us just like that stuff. We like suspense, we like to be scared, we like to have visceral reaction in the theater. Maybe I’m starved for adrenaline, but for me watching a horror movie is very pleasurable. So making one was kind of a dream.”

Diane, the resident expert here, claims it’s because horror films are much more emotional than other genres.  Most movies are event driven or just visually pleasing which caters more to the male.  Horror movies, on the other hand, are all about messing with your emotions – which is much more powerful to the woman than the male (in theory).

Whatever the reason is, i was surprised to hear this gender preference.  Any one else have any ideas?

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It makes me reflect on my time here in LA.  As some of you know, i’m moving to Denver in the next few weeks.  I’m out of here. While i’m excited about moving closer to the mountains and friends, i’m sad to leave LA.  The past 17 months have been an interesting time. Some thoughts on LA:

• The people are not as bad a place as people think.  Sure, there are some shitty people – and most of them work in “the industry” but if you avoid the industry and industry parties, then you really don’t run into these people that often.
• Side note: it’s interesting moving from one town where “the industry” was the government to LA where it is the film business.  As i see it, these are the two largest growth business the US will have in the next 30 years (except maybe health care) or if not the largest grown maybe the largest export
• LA is very entrepreneurial. However, the people i met here are quite different than the entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley.  Up there, a startup is typically an academic thought-based exploration.  Down here in LA, it’s much more about the hustle.  When i think about the two types of startups, i’ve found that  LA is more focused on making money and less on the ideas and philosophy behind the deals.
• Nature, nature, nature.  It’s all around LA.  People talk about Colorado’s proximity to mountains and nature – well it’s right here too.  You’ve got beach, mountains, desert – all within 2 hours.  And it’s beautiful.  If you can see past the smog, you’ll see some amazingly beautiful scenery. I wish i had spent more time exploring
• The beach is underrated.  There are lots of parts of LA.  You’ve got the Valley, Hollywood, West Hollywood, and Beverly Hills.  But what all of those don’t have is great weather year round and the beach.  The beach brings a calm to people’s attitude and a coolness to the air.  Both make a big difference day in and day out.
• Related to the above post: Beach Cruisers. I’ve always loved biking but it wasn’t till i moved to the beach that i discovered the cruiser.  This has 3 key characteristics: (1) a big comfy seat, (2) a basket for carrying stuff, (3) handlebars angled up so you can sit straight up and not hunched over.  All of these dramatically change the bike riding experience so it can be done recreationally and comfortably .  I love my cruiser
• Food: I love the Tacos.  Cactus Tacos, Dos Burritos, Loteria or all the others.  My taco standards have been raised forever.   I also love In-N-Out and ate there almost twice a month the entire time, as noted by JT and Jstreet and Nader.
• Movie theaters. As i’ve written before, LA does movie theaters the right way.  This means that they are big comfy seats and that you can pick your seat before you arrive so you can get there 5 min before showtime and have a nice center seat.  Or you can see that there are no good seats and wait for another show.  Game changer
• Dartmouth surely represents.  No matter what i wanted to do in LA, i found that there was a Dartmouth alum and friend who had figured it out and could take me along.  I was so fortunate to have soccer teammates, pong partners, business thinkers, rock band drummers, talent agents, concert goers and providers, and lots entrepreneurs all over the place.  They made LA an easily place to join and a hard place to leave.  I see lots of vacations back in my future.
• The Garfields.  Todd and Julie were one of my highlights of LA.  I’m very fortunate to have roped them into many meals and movies.

Of all of these, i think i’ll miss the beach and the people around the beaches the most.  Waking up to salt water in the air and a cool breeze is amazing.

Thank you LA, i’ll miss you.

• TV and traditional ad spending for Nike is down 80% over the past 4 years where as digital spend is up 200%.  They want to go where the consumers are and more and more that is online
• Nike Marketing Director Simon Pestridge says: “We don’t do advertising any more. We just do cool stuff. It sounds a bit wanky, but that’s just the way it is. Advertising is all about achieving awareness, and we no longer need awareness. We need to become part of people’s lives and digital allows us to do that.”
• For brands there’s a fundamental need to engage consumers rather than bombard them with ads
• Another good point in the article is that the days of interrupt-driven advertising is over.  The article claims, “Pestridge insists there will always be a place for traditional advertising, he acknowledges that the days of ‘interruptive marketing’ are over. ‘Now it’s all about deciding what you want to say and how you’re going to say it.’” In my opinion, sites that integrate a sponsors message into the content, whether paid or facilitated, is much more effective
• They spend more time making content that they put on the web than making taglines.  Content like Ronaldinho ‘Touch of Gold’ viral video has over 30 million views (see below)

I think this shows that the content is the ad now.  Advertisers increasingly don’t want to interrupt the user. They don’t want to just inform – they want the user to engage with them.  This is the where the future is.   It’s not in banners, but rather in, as Nike says, “cool stuff.”

sometime soon.  What i really want is an AppleTV – and i don’t mean the box that attaches to the TV.  I want an actual TV created by Apple that’s an LCD or Plasma that runs OSX.

The levels of convergence would be ridiculous.  You could use it as a Time Machine device to back up all your machines in your house.  It could have a built in cable modem and airport so it could broadcast wireless everywhere.  You’re basically converging Time Machine, Airport Express, the AppleTV box and adding a device that has a screen and processing power. The different models will vary by harddrive size.

The experience would be sick.  The TV would, of course, have an App Store so people could make living room applications.  This could be anything from a Party Playlist to Pictionary, or Charades.  The remote could be an iPod or an iPhone.

Apple tried to integrate iTunes into Motorola phones (such as the Rockr) and found it to be such a horrible experience that they just built the entire stack and worked with a service provider (AT&T) for the iPhone.  They’ve been doing the same with television.  They have the AppleTV which is an add-on and can never get into the experience.

There are so many possibilities.  Come on Steve Jobs.  Make it happen

Some facts: iLike has 50 million registered users.  That’s a huge number.  They are definitely one of the most popular applications on Facebook and one of the best applications anywhere for concerts. They have built some things that are quite hard to build such as:

• A mp3 download store (link)
• A music activity feed crawling millions of artists and millions of users
• A ticketing system integrated with Ticketmaster
• A self-serve advertising system

They have raised $16 million bucks and claim to be profitable.  Both Facebook and Amazon were interested in the deal.   If both of these are true why would they sell for $20 million? Selling for $20 means that the investors get their money back and then then $4 million gets spread around to shareholders.  Basically nobody makes any money that they are happy about.

To compare, Facebook just bought FriendFeed for $20 million and they have 1 million monthly uniques.  iLike has at least 3x that on the web and 50x total and they are growing.

Also, I can’t imagine why a dynamic, fast moving company would want to go work at MySpace instead of Facebook or Amazon.

• MySpace vs. Facebook. One is doing a fantastic job of innovating and developing new innovative software (FB).  The other is bleeding users, bleeding cash (MySpace Music) and restructuring.  iLike has also actively been courting Facebook for the past 3 years. They’ve thrown Facebook / iLike parties and done everything possible to try to get a FB acquisition.  Going with MySpace is strange
• MySpace vs. Amazon. One (Amazon) is in iLike’s backyard in Seattle and the other is down in LA.  One is making good inroads into providing a viable music store to iTunes.  The other (MySpace) started as a primary space for music but is now controlled by the labels and is getting worse and worse as they try to cut costs.

Both of those don’t make sense so then you have to conclude that they are just doing this for the money.  But if (a) they are profitable and (b) it’s only $20 million on $16m raised then that doesn’t make sense either.

My conclusion from all this non-sense:

• iLike was not profitable and were running out of money.  They needed to either raise more money or sell.
• Fatigue.  Working in the digital music industry and having success at it is exhausting.   Your main content source (music) brings with it tons of headaches.  The labels are working against you every step of the way
• Facebook had no interest in getting into the music business.  I think they see content area as something for partners and although iLike probably asked them repeatedly, they backed away from the deal.  There is no better content company that is more integrated into Facebook than iLike.  If FB didn’t want them, they’re not going to get anyone.
• MySpace paid more than $20 million.  They won’t disclose the terms but my guess is that there is some kicker in there that made the deal very attractive to the shareholders.  Too bad we don’t know what it is.

At least one or more of these have to be true.  What are your thoughts?

1. In the film, the main character is a guy who writes greeting cards. While this is his job, he’s actually an architect. When i heard this, the movie immediately became less original and unique

   to me. Being an architect is such a cliche now. Ever since Something About Mary it’s been used in every romantic-comedy around. I understand why. If you’re a woman, an architect embodies all the qualities you’d want in your man’s job: it’s creative, it’s independent, it’s the perfect mix between corporate and entrepreneur.

2. You must quit your job to be happy. Such a load of crap. In modern movies there are really only four types of themes: (1) “Believe in yourself and you can do anything.” (2) “We are all alike underneath.” (3) “Love conquers all” (4) “Good people win.”  Almost all movies are one or more of these themes.  I was sort of bummed that this movie became a #1 (Believe in yourself) movie when he quit his job.  It just made the whole thing more cliche to me.  Hollywood loves this message and it’s all over the place – almost every tv show and movie is saying this.  I was hoping for more realism
3. In real life, everyone knows the situation where there’s a couple where both people really like each other. They get along great and things seem fine. However, one person likes the other person way more. The other person is into the relationship, but not enough. They break up and people wonder why. This happens all the time. However, it never happens in movies. The only other movie i know of where this happens is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. I also think that just because this movie tackles this situation is why so many people see it as novel or unique.
4. It’s amazing how good the guy from 3rd Rock From The Sun looks (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).  He was so nerdy in that show and he’s really pretty cool in this movie. I liked him a lot as an actor – even though i thought his character was a sap.  I also didn’t even recognize him as the doctor in GI Joe.

All in all, i really liked the movie and thought it was fresh and fun.  I also like the music in it.  It’s worth checking out

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In the panel you had 7 actual authors of popular comic books and in the seats were about 1000 fans of the books. Questions stemmed from upcoming plot lines to questions about why certain characters behaved the way they did

On thing that occured to me during the Q & A session is that i’ve never experienced the written word in this way.  When i read something, either a book or an article, it’s always complete.  Never is it time-based.  Here’s a form where a user reads something and then has to wait a week or a month to continue reading.

Now I’m used to the anticipation and serial nature with TV shows but i realized that i have never experienced it with anything else.  That’s why i was so surprised to hear Radiohead’s announcement yesterday that they will no longer release albums but rather EP’s and singles.  This is cool. The album does seem like an antiquated concept now.

Imagine how cool it would be if a band released an album serially.  A new song each week for 10 weeks.  If this happened, I would look forward to hearing the 2009 Radiohead collection every week.  The anticipation would be half of the enjoyment.  This just shows that there is lots of innovation left in the industry.  Just because there are Walmart stores set up to sell albums doesn’t mean that’s the way it has to happen.

Imagine a world where Thom York says, “The single next week will blow your mind, while the single the week after that is one of the best love songs i’ve ever written.”  I’d mark those dates and download.  It’d be an event and it’d be a lot better than having to find out from friends when new albums drop

Wathching TV shows like Chuck and films like Twilight which have almost no emotional maturity, i really respect how he took teenagers seriously. Rarely today do films show teenagers as individuals having real hopes, ambitions, problems and behavior. He did – in fact, in invented the movie that did.

“Kids are smart enough to know that most teenage movies are just exploiting them,” he said on the set of “The Breakfast Club.” “They’ll respond to a film about teenagers as people. [My] movies are about the beauty of just growing up. I think teenage girls are especially ready for this kind of movie, after being grossed out by all the sex and violence in most teenage movies. People forget that when you’re 16, you’re probably more serious than you’ll ever be again. You think seriously about the big questions.”

Kevin Smith once saying, “Basically everything I do is just a raunchy John Hughes movie.”

He was a stud and the world will miss him

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As the media industry consolidates and more and more people are simply linking to news – you might start to wonder where all the news is going to come from. There’s a great quote that was passed along to me by Jordan that goes:

what no one seems to understand is that “news” doesn’t just magically appear on twitter/the web/etc. Most of it is scraped off these “old dead media” sources. I’m constantly amazed by the childlike mindset of the digerati to this process. It’s like kids thinking that food comes from the grocery store. Kill off the farmers and the journalists and see how much magic food and news just “finds you” for your consumption

Lots of stuff is derivative on the web and it makes you wonder if the world is going to just become one big echo chamber. Or will journalists do more stuff on their own?

Personally, i don’t think the analogy holds. Food must be grown but news doesn’t have to be paid for by journalists at major media companies.

• Not every newspaper needs to write a report on the ballgame. ESPN will cover that for us.
• We don’t need to pay reporters to go to town hall meetings and report back, people are doing that for free.
• We don’t need local papers writing opinions on what’s happening across the globe. A handful of paid opinion pieces plus organic perspectives (blogs / twitter / etc.) are enough for me.

What the world needs is not to cut off the supply of news but to radically change the way it’s published and the economics behind it. Most news is still being produced and most of it is being delivered at very low cost or free. If it’s more expensive than that, it has to go.

This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that’s when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to ‘howl at the moon’ from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn’t have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn’t settle for the first thing that comes to him.

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

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Why no Android phones?  I love Android as a concept but every time i hear about a new manufacturer releasing new handsets they are always on Windows Mobile.  I went to Mobile World Congress this year and saw a ton of new phones from Samsung, Acer, Sony/Ericsson, LG and others.  Every single one of them was using Windows Mobile.  For an OS that seems inferior to Android and dramatically inferior to the iPhone, why is it getting so much traction?  Why do device manufacturers keep choosing it.  Please tell me?

If they keep choosing it, it means there will be more and more phones that are essentially useless to me in my handset selection and this is a bad bad thing.

I was skeptical but i just watched this video (below) of Flynn’s summer league play and he looks fan-fricking-tastic.  I’m very excited to see what he can do with KLove, Big Al and rest of the squad.

Also, i want to touch on the fact that Mad Dog Madsen was traded to the Clippers.  While not the best player in the league i think he’s done a great job of communicating with the public.  His blog is good read and he’s clearly a very smart dude (from Stanford). He’s missing Minnesota and I’ll miss him too.

Check this out:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Now – onward and upward….

You could view William as a type of artist for he approaches a Flow-like state when he’s diffusing – all time stands still and like a surgeon he achieves the utmost clarity and focus.   He understands bombs inside and out and does it day after day after day until he could do it in his sleep.  He also tries to understand the bombers. He loves his job and could be the best in the military at it.

This movie is exciting – not because of the action scenes but because of the people – the characters.  There aren’t any big speeches but rather you can see each person examining their soul as the war takes it toll.  I felt as if i was truly watching someone feel the war.  The direction of this movie was top notch.  There weren’t lame quick cuts in the action scenes but rather the camera dwells on the situation at hand and allows the viewer to experience the situation just as the soldiers are.  It’s not action – it’s suspense.  It’s great and you can see why William James needs his drug.  It’s an approach to war i’ve never seen before

I thought that this was the first good film about the Iraq War that i’ve seen.  It shows how the troops are integrated in the streets and how tough it is for them to police in a city that doesn’t necessarily want them nor understands them.  I’ve talked to a few veterans and one of them has specifically mentioned the kids in the cities and how hard it is to look at someone and both want to help someone and also be afraid of them killing you.

This is a great film.  It’s on my list for nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow) and Best Actor (Jeremy Renner)

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The reason i believe is something I heard from Chris Connelly and that TV is the new indie movie. Shows like The Soprano’s, Band of Brothers, The Wire, and Mad Men – those are the best movies of the last decade.  Granted they didn’t come out on the big screen but this is where visionary directors are going to produce character-driven creative stories.   Cinema today is all about either (1) Big budget action movies or (2) formulaic stories in a specific genre whether it’s horror, comedy, romance, or thrillers.   It’s interesting to see that TV is picking up the slack that films are leaving.  This could also be why people are picking up TV DVD’s much more.   The production quality, the music and the cinematography is way better in these tv dramas than they ever were in 80’s and 90’s television – it’s no wonder that they can compete head on so well.

Personally, if i had to pick, i’d choose The Departed or No Country For Old Men as the best movies of the 00’s.  What do you think?  First, what is your top movie of the past decade?  And do you agree that TV is the new Indie film?

Regardless of what you may hear, YouTube costs are a fraction of any other company running similar operations. Most of Google’s bandwidth is free or near-free; its hardware is cost-optimized; and its data center costs are mostly committed or sunk. The top customers of our sourcing advisory service, whose prices are on average 20% better than the average market level, cannot deliver content as cheaply as Google’s massively scaled operation. Surprisingly enough, the ones that come closest are often thosethat leverage the scale of others through using cloud services.
But even if a fair accounting of its costs showed a loss, YouTube gives Google the ability to achieve needed improvements in lowering cost of other operations. Loud stories about YouTube’s losses can only help deter copyright lawsuits and demands from content owners. Skepticism is warranted — but be ready for surprise news of profitability in the future.

The article does explore the upside of allowing the market to believe the YouTube business is quick unprofitable.  With license-holders eager to renogotiate and reap larger profits, it’s better to all them to perceive that it’s much too expensive to host and deliver these files and thus license payments should be low.

But this is clearly wrong.  In yesterday’s earnings call, Google had this to say about YouTube:

“Monetized views” on YouTube have more than tripled over the last year, said SVP Jonathan Rosenberg. Executives would not say whether YouTube was profitable, although they did say it was on a trajectory to become a “very profitable business for us” in the “not too distant future,” giving a collective heart attack to analysts who have speculated about how much money the site is losing. In a follow-up call with analysts, CFO Patrick Pichette said that the company wanted to reaffirm that YouTube’s business model was credible. “There’s been so much press with all these documentations of massive costs and no business model,” he said.

Interesting to think about next time someone speaks up about how horrible the YouTube business is.

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• Here’s a page with all the music i’m listening to
• Here’s a page with all the websites i find that i like
• Here’s a page with all my photos from the past 5 years and beyond
• Here’s a page with all my workouts from each day
• Here’s a page that shows my activity around LA (stores and restaurants i go to)
• There’s more including videos (YouTube), payments (Mint), TV shows (Boxee), and books (GoodReads)

Fred wrote that he likes to keep this data because, “I am interested in this sector of implicit behavior data. I believe that publishing the things I do on the web will allow web services to get smarter about me and give me better experiences.” I keep track for different reasons.  I actually like to keep data about myself. I find it interesting and i use to remember events of my life.

But i see it going even further.  What i wrote was:

When i look at the web, i see people trying to capture experiences. They capture photos on flickr, videos on youtube, and notes with people on email. Their life is being tracked but not in a comprehensive way.

I could imagine a site – call it “Lifetracker.com” which tracks all the things you do. You plug in last.fm, gmail (or other email), google voice, flickr/picassa, twitter, credit card (mint), youtube and other web services. I then matches 3 things: the data, the contacts, and the time. It creates a timeline for you and marks who you’ve been interacting with and when. There’s an API so each new web service you start using you can plug into it.

There are several benefits: (1) as you mentioned, you can give this data to services for recommendations; (2) you can search your life. If google is web search, twitter is real-time search, this would be “me search”; (3) just like we don’t remember phone numbers anymore b/c we put them into our phone to retrieve any time we want, we can start throwing information into lifetracker such as meeting notes, audio recordings of phone calls, etc. so we don’t have to write stuff down and remember it. Use the cloud as a memory storage instead of your brain

I see this coming and it’s really exciting to think about it.

I do think it will happen.  What do you think?

Saw Bruno last night and here are some thoughts:

• The trailer was hilarious BUT gave away way too many scenes.  Watching the movie, I found that there was a setup and you already knew what was going to happen.  This was true for the camping trip and the military attempt. Similarly, he gave away too many jokes from the movie on the Today show too which i posted about yesterday.
  • Trailers giving away too much of a movie is a monstrous pet peeve of mine.  I hate that films do it. I understand that it helps get people into the theaters more but it really degrades the actual experience.   This is a whole other post for me.  But man does it tick me off.
• With Borat, they explained the camera because they were filming everything for the station back home, and you could tell when there was a hidden camera.  For Bruno, there was no explanation why the camera was following Bruno around for most of the time.  There are some scenes where you wonder how they are filming it – like the swingers party scene.   It made the movie feel less authentic and more fictional
• There are some great scenes that really show the insanity of America and of Hollywood.  Some parents should be totally ashamed of themselves for how they pimp out their kids.  Bruno is able to expose the absurdity of LA really well.
• The movie is lot like the movie Jackass except instead of doing anything just to be dumb, Bruno does gay things just to be dumb and films the reaction of other people.   There’s actually quite a lot of similarities between the two
• I found that the narrative of the movie was pretty contrived.  It was more a series of funny events strapped together than an actual story.  Sure it tried to be a story of Bruno’s attempt to become famous but that is not really an arc.
• This is the best marketed movie i’ve seen in a long time.  Everywhere i looked it was Bruno.  His appearance on Letterman and The Today show were great.  I really felt that this movie was an event which resulted in me marching out on opening night. I have to hand it to them – really great marketing.

So, i think as you can see, i felt the movie was hyped up abit too much for me and didn’t fully deliver.  I still think it was pretty damn funny.  I laughed a lot.  But, i think it’s more of a Borat sequel than another innovative step.  Personally i think Borat was better or at least more novel.  I’m going 7.5 out of 10

Related articles:

• Bruno: Sacha Baron Cohen interviewed on the Late Show with David Letterman (telegraph.co.uk)
• Bruno Tries To Get A Hug From Matt Lauer (socialitelife.celebuzz.com)
• Bruno Gets Up Close and Personal with Eminem (themovieblog.com)
• Woman sues Bruno actor over injuries (thestar.com)
• Bruno: Sacha Baron Cohen’s film gets 18 rating (telegraph.co.uk)
• Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno Fools Alabama National Guard (huffingtonpost.com)

I’m headed out to see Bruno tonight and i’m pretty excited as i’ve read some great reviews and saw that it’s at 71% at Rotten Tomatoes.  Ebert says:

Here is a film that is 82 minutes long and doesn’t contain 30 boring seconds.

that’s a pretty good endorsement – especially from someone who isn’t in to sophomoric comedies that much. I like Borat so i’m expecting great things. I actually think that people are much more outwardly homophobic than racist so i can imagine that Sacha Baron can have much more fun with peolple with Bruno than he did with Borat.

I got even more excited when i saw Bruno go on the Today show and talk about Isreal and Palastine and his war on carbs.  It is hilarious:

Related articles:

• A Beautiful Blend of Voice: Perpetuum Jazzile (converstations.com)

I last saw Marc in Paris

Over the past 8 years i’ve become friends with Marc Canter. I first met him while working at AOL as we needed new and fresh ideas there and boy did he have them.  We asked him again to come and help us out at Ruckus and he delivered again.

Marc lives in the San Francisco area – or at least he did. Marc has announced that he’s leaving heading to Ohio. You heard that right – OHIO. Why? Because he has big ideas and sometimes the best place to do them is not in the Bay Area. He’s also planning on tapping into some US resources that haven’t been utilized – unemployed people. His plan involves the unemployed force, a non=profit, private equity, grants, and lots of new ideas. You can read about it more here

I wish him the best of luck and hope to drop into OH soon to hear more about it.

I reread this morning Clay Shirky’s great SXSW piece about the media business and i wanted to share some of his thoughts here.  Let me go through the end of the article a bit.  He starts:

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.

I want to draw the obvious parallel to today’s revolution in publishing and in technology. I belive that just having email and IM has increased the literacy in America (maybe the world).  Not 15 years ago no kids were daily expressing themselves in written words, now they do all the time.  In 1996, i would frequently get emails in ALL CAPS and poorly written.  Now it’s a must-have skill.  But let’s continue with the speech….

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

I find this same thing is happening with columnist and journalism.  Poor articles just get overlooked or debunked in comments.  The threshhold for well researched facts is higher as the audience is double-checking you every step of the way.  What happened with Aristotle is happenign today with every sports, politcal, and news writer in the world.

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

Sound familiar to anyone? Can you say BLOG or TWITTER – such a simple concept.  Take publishing an article on a web page and shrink it to a blog or 140 characters.  What seems like a minor change has some profound responses.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Old stuff is indeed getting broken. Newspapers are gone or going fast.  Magazines are next.  Paper is being replaced by netbooks, iPhones and Kindles.  These devices are embracing different technologies and shorter-form content.  This is the real revolution that’s happening in front our face.  That Time Magazine you have in your mailbox will be a story you tell your grandkids about, “hey kids, get this, i used to walk to the mailbox and pick up a ‘magazine’ that had stories in it written down, printed once a week and sent to me.” and they will look at you the same way i look at my grandparents when they talk about a world with radio programs only and no TV.   Our new world has more content, better content, that is more easily shared and discussed – and it’s a beautiful thing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• This Is Our Media Revolution. Who Will Be Our Manutius? What Our Octavo? (snarkmarket.com)
• Gutenberg was a blogger (trishussey.com)
• The printing press as an agent of change (randomthougts101.blogspot.com)

As everyone knows, Michael Jackson died last Friday from heart complications in LA.  While i wasn’t shocked by his death, I was amazed by the reaction both by people and the media.  Some of my thoughts:

1. First off, while it’s nice to see such happy thoughts and words coming out of the media and blogosphere, i can’t believe how everyone has sort of forgotten about the past 15 years of Michael Jackson. I mean, multiple child molestation charges with 13-year old boys.  Whatever the cause of the guilt, do you know anyone who would leave their 12 year old with him alone?
2. Some Good Articles: There is a great recount of all those stories listed here in Vantity Fair and Ebert has posted a great article that weighs both his greatness and his fragility in a good article here called “The Boy Who Never Gave Up“
3. Thinking about his legacy, he’s definitely one of the best performers of all time – his dancing and on-stage presence seems unparalleled.
4. While Elvis brought in Rock n’ Roll, i feel that Michael Jackson brought in pop music.  He came to define the 80’s style while adding more production value to music.  To me, he invented the genre “pop”
5. It’s interesting to see how people react once someone dies.  The immediately become forgiven and can easily take on legendary status.  While that’s ok, i wish more people who feel this way while the artist is alive.  Two months ago nobody was saying how influential MJ was. Then hie dies and everyone in the world starts blabbing off about how influential and transformative he was.  Was he awesome? Yes.  But why didn’t people post how awesome he was before? The same thing happened with Kurt Kobain, Johnny Cash, Elvis and others.  As Chuck Klosterman says (who is an expert on his subject having written Killing Yourself To Live), “You’ll hear nobody stating how influential Boy George is, but the minute he dies it’ll come out with how he was able to break down the gender barriers before anyone else”  And he’s right.  In death, people are no longer people, they become symbols.

This could possibly be the most delicious keyboard ever constructed.  As the Murdock family can vouch for, i’m a sucker for S’mores.  It’s probably a good thing this isn’t in my office or else i’d be getting fatter and way less productive as keys start disappearing.  Probably would last about 25 minutes.  I’d also probably rest it on my Macbook laptop so the chocolate would melt a little bit.  Yum

There’s an article i read today (thanks to Lizard) about how Twitter can you a better and happier person.  The reasons listed in the article are:

1. Transparency & Values: Twitter constantly reminds me of who I want to be, and what I want to stand for
2. Reframing Reality: Twitter encourages me to search for ways to view reality in a funnier and/or more positive way
3. Helping Others: Twitter makes me think about how to make a positive impact on other people’s lives
4. Gratitude: Twitter helps me notice and appreciate the little things in life

I find all of these true.  Sometimes i want to post a tweet about my life and i have to reflect about what i’m really doing and how it’s interesting to others.  It often makes me adjust what i’m actually doing – and if i don’t do that then it makes me realize how i’m actually living my life.  In that respect, it’s quite helpful.

There’s a good article in the USA Today about John Grisham.  It’s the 20th anniversary of Time To Kill, his first novel about a young 10-year old woman who got raped, her father who took revenge into his own hands, and the lawyer representing him.  It was an autobiographical story for Grisham and a great book.  However, writing a great book doesn’t necessarily mean it will fly off the shelves.  The article states:

When Grisham finished A Time to Kill in January 1987, it was a stack of legal pads. When typed, the manuscript was 900 pages.

The first chapters went out to a couple dozen publishers and agents. The rejections stacked up.

That April 15, after Grisham returned from his accountant frustrated, broke and about to borrow money to pay his taxes, agent Jay Garon called wanting to represent him.

Wynwood Press, a small company in New York, bought the manuscript a year later and printed 5,000 copies of A Time to Kill — at a length about a third shorter than the original manuscript — in June 1989. Grisham ordered 1,000 himself.  Wynwood didn’t have marketing muscle, so Grisham concocted his own book tour.

“I had this scheme where I would throw a party in my local library and the whole town would show up and I would sell a lot. I have pictures of kids climbing on stacks of A Time to Kill.” But when the party was over, he still owned most of the copies.

It’s an interesting story – especially since we think of him as being so successful.

First, he found this song on the internet that a dad was singing for his daughter called “I’m going to whoop somebody’s ass”.  He took the song asked his fans to sign along and interact. The fans did that and more.  This song spawned countless numbers of remixes. A video was created. A video was story boarded by a member of the “audience”, then another member offered portrait sketches to anyone who would help fill in the video. The video was made.  The remix appeared in a movie, in a car commercial and countless other places and suddenly the creator – a unsuspecting PhD-turned-preacher nammed Ray, now finds the trajectory of his life shifted, as he is inundated with countless versions of his song, in audio and even video format.  Awesome.  (below is a video remix of Ray’s song)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbGtefy_Uqw]

Ze does a lot with songs.  Another intance, he created a song for a woman who wrote in that she was scared of the dark and he made up a song for her.  You can hear that song by clicking on the image below

Another fun thing that he did was called “youngme / nowme” where people take picturs of themselves when they were young and recreate those pictures now.  It’s hilarious to see what people have done.  Some are simple, some are very involved.  In both cases, they are fun to look at.  He’s got a whole site with the submissions here 2gfdyuszhp

There are lots of examples of cool things Ze has done in his talk.  These are just a few.  I always enjoy his creativity and if you have some time, it’s worth checking out.

From here

I’m just a little person,
One person in a sea
Of many little people
Who are not aware of me.

I do my little job
And live my little life,
Eat my little meals,
Miss my little kid and wife

And somewhere, maybe someday,
Maybe somewhere far away,
I’ll find a second little person
who will look at me and say,

“I know you
You’re the one I’ve waited for.
Let’s have some fun.”

Life is precious every minute,
and more precious with you in it,
so let’s have some fun

We’ll take a road trip way out west. You’re the one I like the best.
I’m glad I’ve found you,
Like being around you
You’re the one I like the best.

Somewhere, maybe someday,
Maybe somewhere far away,
I’ll meet a second little person
And we’ll go out and play.
— Little Person, “Synecdoche, New York”

The lines bring me back to the movie “Synecdoche, New York” which is extremely provocative.  I’m not sure i would call it entertaining but i definitely enjoyed it. I’m pretty sure i need to see it again.  I do think Charlie Kaufman (the writer and director) is a genius.  He’s written some incredible films – all about the mind and how we intereact with it. In fact, here’s how i categorize all his films:

• Most mainstream and accessible – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (How we deal with losing your mind)
• Most clever and funniest – Adaptation (Having a twin brother do what you cannot)
• Most creative and original – Being John Malkovich (Going into someone else’s mind)
• Most thought provoking – Synecdoche, New York (How the mind deals with age, discouragement, wisdom and uncertainty)
• Most exciting and sexy – Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (How the mind deals with two different lives)

I’m not sure which one is my favorite as they are all good in different ways.   Which ones do you like?

Related articles:

• Synecdoche New York review (telegraph.co.uk)

I decided that i needed to give you all (my readers) more music.  I get lots of requests for recommendations and thus i decided to expand my minuature blogging empire a little bit.  So, starting today there is a new site assciociated with Loo.me and it’s called ILikeThisSong.com

What is ILikeThisSong.com? It’s a site which will have a new song posted there every day.  These are my favorite songs of the moment.   Also, there is a popout player that will play ALL of the site’s tracks for you like a radio station.  This radio station will soon be linked on Loo.me.  I’m currently working on that.

For now though there is limited integration.  But feel free to check out the new site and let me know what you think

First, let me just say that the film begins with a montage of Carl and Ellie that is one of the best 10 minutes of film that i have ever seen. It is so sweet and wonderful that i’d go back and pay just to see that part.

The film is a funny adventure and the characters are often more real than human actors.  I find it refreshing that the main character is a 70-year old man instead of the latest hearthtrob of the moment.  Where Star Trek felt it had to have all youngsters dominate the film, Pixar handed the reins to what would seem a total unsympathetic character.  Instead, he’s completely refreshing.

It’s a funny thing to say but I wish more movies had the creativity of Up, the realism of Carl, and the emotional weight of this animated film.

Am i alone on this?

Related articles:

• How To Pull A Carl Fredricksen (cinemablend.com)
• Pixar’s Up reviewed. (slate.com)
• Mark Blankenship: In Pixar’s “Up,” Two Chairs Mean the World (SPOILERS) (huffingtonpost.com)

The new iPhone 3GS makes me think about the landscape of the computers out there.  If you don’t know it, there’s a new type of machine that’s becoming popular called The Netbook.  It’s a $200-400 machine that is quite small and sometimes comes attached to a wireless contract so it can be connected at all times.  In this regard, it is very similar to a cell phone purchase except in a bigger form factor. (click here to check out HP’s 200 dollar machine)

When i think about the machines out there, i think of this continuum:

One thing that is interesting is how Apple is has high priced machines in their Macbook Pro’s and Air devices and “lowend” machines in their iPhone.  Whatever market you’re at, Apple will have the slickest machine.  Microsoft, on the other hand, has less slick highend machines, and netbooks on the lowend.  Personally, i like Apple’s direction more but it’d be even better if they had a tablet or smaller sized laptop that was an iPhone/laptop hybrid for $400. I think the regular PC starts to disappear and all sales are Netbook sales.  Why would anyone pay $1000 when they can get a decently powerful machine for $200?

What will be great is the day day when all i have is my cell phone and i just plug it into monitors and keyboards when i want to work at a desk.  My iPhone cradle gets a lot more functional and my need for a second machine disappears.

Realizing his girl’s team is lacking the talent needed to compete, he decides to change the rules.  Instead of falling back into their half to play defense, they do a full-court press each time.  Their number 1 goal is to steal the opening pass.  After that, they try to keep the team from crossing the halfway line.  This approach is never used and its unconventional nature results in great success. He also pulls in the former San Francisco 49er, Roger Craig, as his assistant coach which makes the story that much more entertaining.

If that was the end of the story, it’d be an interesting piece but he overlays into the piece other stories of underdogs.  He talks about the battle of David vs. Goliath and Lawrence of Arabia’s revolt against the Ottoman Army near the end of the First World War.  In both cases, changing the nature of the game was the difference.  Gladwell remarks:

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases.

He always jumps back to the basketball example and has interviews with amazingly successful NCAA basketball coach Rick Pitino who talks about the press and overachieving.

Great article, check it out

Related articles:

• Recipe for an Underdog (myespn.go.com)
• Malcolm Gladwell Wants To Know Why Your Team Doesn’t Press More [Basketball] (deadspin.com)
• How underdogs win (kottke.org)

A few months ago i plowed through the book Slash which is “written” by the Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash.  I’m a huge fan so i really enjoyed the read.  Here are some interesting things i learned in the book:

• When Slash’s parents got divorced, the first guy his mom started dating was David Bowie. Slash and her would go to his shows with him and just hang out with the guy
• Slash’s mom was a professional costume designer named Ola Hudson. She was quite an artist and tailored outfits and album covers for such acts as John Lennon, Diana Ross and the Pointer Sisters.  He dad also did album covers – for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell
• His mom was also good friends with David Geffen. But when Slash was signed by Geffen’s label, he kept is a secret.  One Christmas, Geffen was eating lunch with Slash’s mom and asked how Slash was and she replied, “you should know, you signed him a few months ago.”  He was floored b/c he had no idea Slash was actually the same little kid that he knew for all those years.
• Slash was really into BMX bikes and at age 12 was considered one of the best riders in the country for his age bracket
• One of Slash’s good friend’s dad was Seymour Cassel, who is an actor (Max’s dad in Rushmore).  He is the one who gave Slash the name “Slash” because he never sat still and was always scheming
• Slash was so messed up on drugs the entire time that most of the success he realized has been forgotten.  For instance, he went to the MTV music awards and didn’t even know he was a nominee.  When they won, he went on stage and didn’t know that it was an acceptance speech.  The whole night was a blur and along the way he left the award in a cab.
• All the members of the band were so messed up on hard drugs that they really couldn’t function.  They had to have a fix before shows to operate.  Slash went to rehab several times and it never really worked until he was long done with GnR
• Alx comes off as a total dick in the book.  They were constantly waiting for him.  He’s arrive late to almost every show.  He wouldn’t show up for rehersals.  While i’m sure he was much more sane than the rest of the crew, he was also the main source of anxiety and stress for all members of the band
• The song November Rain was actually written for Appetite for Destruction but they left it off because they wanted only one ballad on the album and that was Sweet Child o’ Mine.
• Paradise City was written when they were all driving down from San Fran way before they were even getting good gigs and was just a chant they wrote when they were excited to get back to LA.  As the band grew and the egos grew, they never traveled like this again and lost all comraderie.  Reading the book you realize why songs like Welcome to the Jungle, Sweet Child, Paradise City, Rocket Queen never materialized.  They were written at a time when the band was incredibly tight and the lyrics of Alx, and the guitar playing of Duff and Slash were perfect compliments

It’s a good book and really interesting if you’re a Guns N’ Roses fan.  It’s a bit longer than The Dirt – Motley Crue’s autobiography – and it only focuses on one member so it has much more depth.  I recommend it. 3.5 to 4 stars (out of 5).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Rolling Stone Slash Article (rollingstone.com)
• Steven Adler Should Write His Own Music (therockdose.com)
• Slash To Record Led Zep Cover (idiomag.com)

A the book describes, one of the best predictors of polygamy in a society is income inequality.  While America doesn’t approach at all those of some African villages, we are certainly number one in the Western world in income inequality.

As Elsewhere describes:

The linkage between economic inequality and polygamy is two-way – that is, polygamy both causes and is caused by inequality.  Let’s start with the basic fact that a man can produce thousands of offspring by spreading his seed while a woman is limited to around twelve or so.  But when women choose their mates, they are not just after who can provide good sperm; they also want to make sure that a would-be father both has enough resources to support a child and will, in fact, invest time and money in that child.

Confronted with a distribution of income in which the distinctions across potential suitors is not terribly great, a woman will still try to land the best catch, but she probably will not be willing to share her man.  If there are a thousand fish in the sea; it’s not worth it to take one half (or 1/3, or 1/4) of the resources of any given man.  Better to go down a notch and enjoy the complete attention, time and money of the next richest fellow.  However, sometimes the distinctions between men are so great as to alter the calculations.  If a few men control almost all of the wealth while the vast majority have very little to offer in terms of a stable source of income, then it may be worth it to be the 4th wife of the very rich man rather than the first and only of a very poor one.  At least you can guarantee your babies will eat well.

Now that the US income is becoming increasingly unequal, we’re becoming polygamists as well. Our version however are different than the African versions in these ways:

1. Ours is not a static, mormon-type of polygamy but rather a dynamic version.  It’s better suited for a society with fluid status and class positions like ours
2. Ours is a polyandrous society – meaning multiple husbands
3. America’s polygamy is both a result and a cause of inequality

The first point called “dynamic polygamy” can also be called “serial monogamy”  It’s a semantic difference.  As the author says,

If “being married” means producing offspring and/or having ongoing mutual responsibilities, then when you get a divorce, you are not really pressing the erase button, you are just building another thatched hut across town where you may set up with another wife while still paying child support, alimony, or plain old respects to the first.  It doesn’t matter if the 2nd marriage started as an affair during the first, the end result from the point of view of family responsibilities is more or less the same: you have two wives (or husbands).

Our tendency to divorce is in many ways extremely similar to the form of polygamy that’s occurring in Africa.  This results in something interesting things in America.  For instance, many women today don’t get married at all as not all men have the means to support a family. It’s been calculated that there are now 60 eligible men for every 100 women.

Over the past 20 years, other things are happening in society.  According to the book, the concept of a “starter wife” is becoming more and more uncommon whereas dual-earner mairrages (both people earn high wages) dual-poor marraiges are rapidly increasing.  The rich are getting more rich and the poor are getting more poor (two low earning folks).

It’s interesting to think of divorce as a form of polygamy.  When you hear that – how does that make you feel?  Is it fair?

The point of the book is the strange paradox that is occuring in America.  People used to work and struggle so their kids wouldn’t have to.  Leiseure was something you attained at a certain income level.  Today however, this isn’t the case.  For the first time in history, the more we are paid, the more hours we work.  The rewards for working are so great they make the “opportunity cost” of not working all the more great.  The result is that there is no longer a leisure-class of elites. The rich are working harder than ever.  Now, leisure is something for the poor.  There is now a crazy measure of the income elasticity of leisure and this fundamentally changes how many of us (including me) live.   As it says in the book,

Obviously, this change has affected not just when we work, but also how we play, how we love, how we raise our children – how we live

Some interesting parts in the book are:

1. There’s now a fear amoung the successful that their success isn’t geniune and an axiety that a person’s personal house of economic card is about to collapse. One interesting stat behind this is that while drinking has declined, adult use of other mind-altering substances such as Valium or marajuana has risen to the point where mature adults consume more than teenagers for the first time since these trends were tracked
2. More and more, household income rising and falling has less to do with economic times but more about relationships.  About a quarter of American children experience two or more mother’s partners by the time they are fifteen. Over 8 percent experience three or more
3. Similar to the African areas of Mali and Malawi, America also practices a form of polygamy.  Post coming on this soon….
4. Religion and The Corporate man have been at odds.  A further description below:

In medieval Cathoic Europe, poverty was a virtue and to profit off one’s fellow man was considered evil.  The Protestant Reformation changed all that which led to one-on-one relationships to go and also spiritual insecurity.  This led to working harder and acculating lots of money. Success as salvation was a new incentive structure.  However, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the trade unionism eclipsed the Protestant Work Ethic in the mid 1900’s.  There was a truce found between expansive corporate America and organzied labor such that a communitarian eithos could reign supreme.

The rift remained though as Protestants valued thrift over consumption, work over leisure, and meritocracy over social connections.  But large organizations like IBM and GM put a premium on teamwork, compromise and being a “company man.”

Today these have been resolved through the redefinition of: leisure is work and work is leisure. Consumption is investment (home equity loan is savings).  Social connectoins don’t indicate nepotism but rather social capital and entrepreneurial skill.  Loyalty is replaced by value (you show your value by calculated displays of disloyalty – displaying offers from competitors).

——-

While it doesn’t offer many solutions, the book is thought provoking and a good read.  I recommend you pick it up.

1. Decrease of authority & differentiation
2. Lack of classified revenue

First, the decrease in authority and differentiation.  Every web site and publication needs to be an authority on something, anything.  Newspapers in the past were authorities for:

• local news
• international news
• sports
• entertainment

Over the past 8 years, they have no become the authority for only one of those: local news.  International news is dominated by CNN, Reuters and others who focus explicitly on that area.  Similarly, sports is dominated by ESPN and Fox News and Entertainment has a variety of outlets that provide much more in depth coverage and reviews than newspapers ever did.    This decrease in authority minimizes the importance of newspapers to readers.  For most categories listed above, it’s a nice piece of reading material to have but by no means necessary.

The second piece is Craigslist.  In 2000, newspapers pulled in $20 billion in revenue from classifieds. That went to $10 billion in 2008.  So, in 8 years revenues for newspapers got chopped in half (stats here).  Where did this money go, most of those services are now free on Craigslist.   Craigslist took $10 billion out of the industry and pocketed about $100 million of it.  To be exact, Craigslist is pulled in $80 million as of April ‘08 (stats).  Who knows what that will be for 2009 but prob at or around $100k.  With a  staff of 28 people so that’s pretty damn good.

Imagine that, a staff of 28 people is decimating an entire industry.  That is the true power of the internet.

Related articles:

• Rupert Murdoch on the future of newspapers (vator.tv)
• Newspaper ad revenue plummets! (ceoworld.biz)

I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road which is about a father and a son walking through post-apocalypic America.  While a quick read, it’s dark and sad.  I loved the end of the book but going from page to page was a challenge as i didn’t really want to go back to the world they inhabit.  It’s cold, uncomfortable and frightening.  But that’s what makes the book good – it feels quite raw.

While the book was good, the movie looks to be even better as it puts a face and picture to the madness.  And it has an amazing cast of Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, and Robert Duvall. Can’t wait to check it out later this year.  Trailer is below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbLgszfXTAY]

Related articles:

• The Weinstein Company Tampered With ‘The Road’ Trailer (screenrant.com)
• First Trailer for ‘The Road’ Misses The Mark (screenrant.com)

I’ve been listening to some good tunes for the past month and thought i’d share them with y’all.  Here they are:

1. Sad Song by Fredo Viola.  This was put on a mix for me by Lady Biasia and is a pretty mesmerizing tune.  You can listen to it back to back every day and not tire of it.  In fact, if you were going to throw a dinner party and didn’t want to destroy the mood with the music but keep it chill and interesting, this would be the track for you. Worth a listen.  MP3 HERE
2. If I Ever Leave This World by Flogging Molly.  Also on the same mix by Lady Biasia and is one of my new favorite running songs.  You may remember this song from the P.S. I Love You soundtrack.  What you don’t? You didn’t see it?  Oh that’s right, nobody did.  And the people who did where so sad that they lost 2 hours in the most horrific fashion that they refuse to admit it.  Unless you’re name is Diane Woodhouse and then you go out and buy the DVD (i kid, i kid). Anyway, regardless of how absolutely horrible the movie is, the track really pumps me up  MP3 HERE
3. Last of American Girls by Green Day.  Many of you might not know this, but Green Day just came out with a new album called 21st Century Breakdown.  Rolling Stone gave it 4.5 stars out of 5 and other people can’t stop slurping it. I think it half has to do with the fact we never expected Green Day to have any longevity or talent and it’s half that the album is just really good and unique (it’s a rock opera for chrimminey sakes). This track is my favorite but probably not for people who don’t like Green Day.  MP3 HERE
4. Starry Tilting Sizzle by Les Blanks.  The band Les Blanks is a my friend Parker’s band.  If you want to know how much Parker rocks the Buzznet psyche, you should look at this slide show.  While i admire his style and loud voice in the office, i never got into Les Blanks until i stumbled across this tight jam.  It rocks. That’s all i can really say. I don’t see how anyone wouldn’t like it.   MP3 HERE
5. Starry Stairs by Okkervil River.  This song came out last year but i didn’t really give it a chance until recently.  Like other Okkervil River songs, it’s heavy on the lyrics but is still quite catchy.  MP3 HERE
6. The Train by Matty Charles.  I went to go see Matty when he came to LA about two months ago and found out that he had put out a new album.  After listening to it for a while, it’s clear this is the best track.  As always, he completely delivers. I think he could be my favorite singer-songwriter of this decade.  MP3 HERE
7. Hikky-Burr by Bill Cosby and Quincy Jones.  I found this from Karen’s blog and loved the tracks so much that  I actually went out and bought this CD at Amoeba.  That’s right i paid for music.  People still do this.  Not you of course, but people.   This is fantastic jam from 1969 – back when people used to jam for no reason other than just to jam.  I wish i could have gotten in on that.  This track will have to do for now. MP3 HERE

Let me just repost what Aaron Gleeman wrote yesterday.  It should be no surprise to anyone that Joe Mauer is my favorite player in baseball.  The guy is  a total stud:

Mauer is such a great hitter that batting .417 or getting on base at a .500 clip during a 19-game stretch shouldn’t surprise anyone, but eight homers and five doubles in 72 at-bats is totally unexpected even without considering that he missed April with an injury. He hasn’t abandoned his patient approach at the plate and isn’t suddenly pulling the ball consistently. He’s still taking tons of pitches and going the the other way with most of the balls he hits, but the fly balls just seem to be traveling a little further.

I’m not sure how to explain it and have no idea whether it’ll last, but holy shit has Mauer been amazing. At .417/.500/.819 he’d be leading all of baseball in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage with enough plate appearances to qualify and he has one homer per 9.0 at-bats after going deep once every 46.8 at-bats coming into the season. Plus, Ron Gardenhire may even leave him in the No. 2 spot that I’ve been advocating for years now after the 20-run outburst with Mauer there yesterday.

Last Saturday i was part of the METal group that had breakfast with Nolan Bushnell.  It was a really thought provoking.  My favorite part was the beginning of the speech which he came out and said:

Ideas don’t mean shit.  Everyone has good ideas.  Some better than others.  Only over time and work can you own an idea.  Just having an idea doesn’t account for a thing, but if you spend a year making an idea a reality only then can you claim an ownership of it.

Prior to the breakfast, i had never heard of Nolan.  If you don’t know who he is, let me list some of his accomplishments:

• Founded the company Atari in 1972 and grew it to $2 billion in annual sales in 1982 and at the time was the fastest-growing company in the history of American business.
• Founded Chucky Cheese in 1977 and turned over day-to-day operations in 1981
• Founded in 1984 Etak which was the first company to digitize the maps of the world, as part of the first commercial automotive navigation system; the maps ultimately provided the backbone for Google maps, mapquest.com, and other navigation systems; it was sold to Rupert Murdoch in the 1980s. In May 2000 the company, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, became a wholly owned subsidiary of Tele Atlas.

Let’s just say he’s quite a badass.  At the breakfast he talked about those past ventures and some of the businesses he’s involved with – specifically bring social games back to an arcade-like area and transforming the educational system.

One piece he did talk about is how to stimulate creativity within a company.  He mentioned that he has a system to do this.  Saying:

With every company i’m involved with, I get the group of “thought leaders” together in a room. I then ask them to metaphorically to “keep one foot on base” and come up with what the 2-year product line should be. These are the logical products that a smart company should invest in.  I typically like to redo the 2 year roadmap every 4 months.

After i get the “one foot on base” ideas, then I ask people for their wild and crazy ideas. Each person must supply one. I’m a Nazi about getting each and every person to submit at least one off-the-wall idea.

Then we take a break, play football and drink a beer and go to bed.

The next day we get back together and i ask the group how they’d implement their wild & crazy idea. Doing so tends to lend credibility to a crazy idea and makes them actually possible. I have found that more good ideas and companies come from these crazy ideas than the  2-year product roadmaps

Related articles:

• Nolan Bushnell: “Games Are Good For You” (rockpapershotgun.com)
• Gaming luminaries chew the cud (bbc.co.uk)
• Meet Nolan Bushnell, the man who created the videogames industry (guardian.co.uk)

I went to the movie The Brothers Bloom last weekend and i have to say that it was a really fun flick.  It’s getting killed at Rotten Tomatoes (57%) but trust me it’s a great movie.  It’s written and directed by the guy who did the high school drug mystery movie Brick – which in my opinion was way overrated.  I remember watching it with my cousin Matt Lewis and waiting for it to end.  Granted we were recovering from a big night, but still it didn’t do it for me.  Maybe another viewing is needed

The movie The Brothers Bloom is different. The movie itself has a great beginning and middle.  The ending is the weakest part of the movie, but it’s not horrible.  And, i’ve heard that it had to cut quite a bit due to timing so i hope the Director’s Cut gets released on DVD.

The movie reminds me a lot of a Wes Anderson film in its quirkiness and style and the French movie Amelie in that it thrives around a quirky woman.  Rachel Weisz makes this movie.  Without her it’s just average.  She is fantastic.  The other woman, named Bang Bang, played by Rinko Kikuchi is also awesome even though she doesn’t speak at all. On another casting note, i was so happy that the older brother, Steve, was played by Mark Ruffalo instead of Owen Wilson. If it was a Wes Anderson film, Owen would have played the part and it would have been a worse movie.  I’m sick of him in those roles.

There are a series of great scenes in the movie.  From the early scene at the zoo to the first makeout between Adrian Brody and Rachel.  Something about making out with a girl who’s never kissed anyone before is intriguing to me. These are very very interesting characters and each subsequent scene of the movie was unpredictable.  As an avid moviegoer, being unpredictable and funny are two difficult and welcome characteristics.  I give this movie an 8.  Go see it.

Related articles

• ‘Brothers Bloom’: On The Con, And We’re The Marks (npr.org)
• Review: The Brothers Bloom (cinematical.com)
• Film: Review: The Brothers Bloom (avclub.com)
• A day on the set of Brothers Bloom (Ain’t It Cool News)

First, i think the address itself was really good.  I like how he keep’s it real.  Even though he now officially part of “The System” he can still talk about short-term election-winning activities and doing what’s good for the country.  That makes me happy.  He says:

In the face of these challenges, it may be tempting to fall back on the formulas for success that have dominated these recent years. Many of you have been taught to chase after the usual brass rings: being on this “who’s who” list or that top 100 list; how much money you make and how big your corner office is; whether you have a fancy enough title or a nice enough car.

You can take that road – and it may work for some of you. But at this difficult time, let me suggest that such an approach won’t get you where you want to go; that in fact, the elevation of appearance over substance, celebrity over character, short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.

I also thought it was cool how he was able to relate Winston Churchill to Kurt Warner:

Just look to history. Thomas Paine was a failed corset maker, a failed teacher, and a failed tax collector before he made his mark on history with a little book called Common Sense that helped ignite a revolution. Julia Child didn’t publish her first cookbook until she was almost fifty, and Colonel Sanders didn’t open up his first Kentucky Fried Chicken until he was in his sixties. Winston Churchill was dismissed as little more than a has-been, who enjoyed scotch just a bit too much, before he took over as Prime Minister and saw Great Britain through its finest hour. And no one thought a former football player stocking shelves at the local supermarket would return to the game he loved, become a Super Bowl MVP, and then come here to Arizona and lead your Cardinals to their first Super Bowl.

Each of them, at one point in their life, didn’t have any title or much status to speak of. But they had a passion, a commitment to following that passion wherever it would lead, and to working hard every step along the way.

But by far my favorite thing about him going to ASU and not getting an honorary degree is The Daily Show skit about it.  They just take ASU apart.  Click to watch:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21OH0wlkfbc]

Another good quote from The Sports Guy.  He had an email exchange with Macolm Gladwell and the subject of music and basketball came up.  The Sports Guys responds:

We had lunch a few weeks ago and discussed the parallels between music and basketball. The structure is fundamentally the same: You have a lead singer (the NBA alpha dog, like LeBron or Kobe), the lead guitarist (the sidekick, like Pippen or McHale), the drummer (an unsung third wheel, like Parish or Worthy), the bassist (a solid, reliable and ultimately disposable role player: like Byron Scott or Anderson Varejao); and then everyone else (the other rotation guys). Bands can go different ways just like successful basketball teams. McCartney and Lennon were two geniuses who ultimately needed one another (like Young Magic and Older Kareem, or Shaq and Young Kobe), whereas MJ and LeBron were more like Sting or Springsteen (someone who could carry the band by themselves). And if you want to drag hip-hop or rap into it, the best parallel would obviously be Jordan’s post-baseball Bulls: MJ was Chuck D, Pippen was Terminator X, and there is no effing doubt that Rodman was Flavor Flav.

It’s a great read if you’re into the NBA and what’s happening right now.  I like The Sports Guy’s take about Lebron.  This is a great time to be a viewer as Lebron is doing what Michael Jordan did in the early 90’s. He’s just destroying people and making it great to watch.  Plus, there’s a Spinal Tap refernce in there.  How could it be a bad article then.  It reads:

As the 2009 postseason rolls on, the King has become its most compelling story, not just because of his insane numbers, that Jordan-like hunger in his eyes, even the fact that he’s still on cruise control to some degree. (Note: I would compare

Image by Keith Allison via Flickr

him to Nigel Tufnel’s amp. He alternated between “9″ and “10″ in the regular season, and he’s been at 10 in the playoffs, but I can’t shake the feeling that he has an “11″ in store for Kobe and the Finals. An extra decibel level, if you will. In my lifetime, Jordan could go to 11. So could Bird. Shaq and Kobe could get there together, but not apart. And really, that’s it. Even Magic could get to 10 3/4 but never quite 11. It’s a whole other ball game: You aren’t just beating teams, you’re destroying their will. You never know when you’ll see another 11. I’m just glad we’re here. End of tangent.) But his relationship with his teammates continues to fascinate me; because of his character and the spirit of the players that surround him, it’s like watching a more animated/funny/bombastic version of Duncan’s Spurs, or even last season’s Boston team. I really get a kick out of them. Only LeBron and Magic could foster a climate like that just by being themselves.

Any other insight from my readers?

This month’s issue has an area where it has 75 movies that every man should watch.  I have seen most of them (Godfather, Sling Blade, The Good The Bad The Ugly) but there were 14 in there that i haven’t yet seen.   I wrote the list down and what Esquire said about them. I couldn’t be more excited to crack into them.  Here’s the list:

1. In The Heat of the Night. Never before has a man been in more wrong places at the wrong time.
2. Save The Tiger. The nominations for 1973 Best Actor: Brando, Nicholson, Redford, Pacino, and Lemmon. Lemmon got it.
3. Runaway Train.  Existential action flicks are tough to pull off.  But this is the way to do it: just get 2 escaped cons, a chick, an evil warden, and in a helicopter chase in Alaska.
4. Rosemary’s Baby.  You learn there ate bad people in the world
5. Shakes The Clown. A reviewer called it “the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies.” Faint praise. For every man or woman who ever hugged a toilet all night long
6. Dirty Harry. Sometimes a man has gotta break the rules and hunt the bastard down himself, even if it’s only a metaphor for the next sales call
7. Straw Dogs. Three words: Sam. Peckinpah. Revenge.
8. Giant. The history of Texas in the 20th century, as seen through the anguished lonesome eyes of James Dean
9. Down By Law. Weirdest prison escape movie ever
10. The Verdict. Watch the foray scene, in which Paul Newman is silhouetted against a barroom window, playing pinball: the man is acting with his shoulders.
11. The Warriors. Bloodthirsty mimes, clown-faced baseballers, ad bare-chested men in leather vests. Kind of makes you miss pre-giulliani NYC
12. Stalag 17. Because it inspired a sitcom. With Nazi’s
13. The Misfits. Two drunks and a blonde walk into a Reno bar, get hammered, and embark on a scheme to wrangle mustangs. Starting Clark Gable (who died before it was released), Marilyn Monroe (died 18 months later) and Montgomery Cliff (who died within 4 years)
14. HUD. “nobody gets out of life alive”

I just read a really good book called Daemon by Daniel Suarez (his first novel) about what someone could do if they had amazing control of the internet, a lot of free time and lots of money

Matthew Sobol, the best game designer in the world, has died. With his death, a stunning series of events begins to take place, starting with the deaths of a few programmers, and extending to the endangering of the entire world. Very few people can hope to stop his plan.

The story is incredibly fast.  There are no slow parts.  There is lots of plot, lots of detail and many characters.  It’s similar to a Michael Crichton novel except better. More accurate stories, more realistic, more detailed, more interesting characters.

The book is a cross between The Stand and The Matrix, two of the epics of our time. Like The Matrix, technology plays a central role in this story, and like the former, it about what happens to the people who are trying to cope with the world changing all around them.

This is not a masterful piece of literature. It’s book candy and really tasty.

I personally think he knows the intricacies of the league, the contracts the budgets and the trades to do the job rather well.  Plus he has good NBA common sense. He knows how it works – arguably more than any other journalist.  Here are some thoughts he has:

I would think outside the box, and really, that’s what a team like Minnesota needs from their GM. I would go out to dinner with every [original] Minny season ticket holder — and there can’t be many — in groups of eight or 10 just to let them know that someone appreciates that they stuck with the franchise for this long. I would make a vow that, if we are ever eliminated from the playoffs in any season, from that point on, every home game is half-price and all season ticket holders get a half-price refund on the remaining games so they aren’t paying for crappy tank jobs. I would make myself accountable at every game and via email. I would make a rule that any T-Wolves fan could trade in a jersey of a player no longer on the team and get 40% off a new one. I would have a contest to find two T-Wolves fans to announce all our home games on Timberwolves.com, kinda like Mystery Science Theater but with diehard fans of the team. Etc etc etc. I have a million ideas. Really, you have to be an idea guy to be an NBA GM – you deal with a lot of stuff beyond “Which players should I pick?” And anyone who reads my column knows that I never, ever, EVER run out of ideas.

I would LOVE for this to happen.  One can only hope

When driving this weekend down to Palm Springs, i came around a bend and saw thousands of windmills. It was an amazing site and got me thinking about our planet. Here are tons of windmills making electricity for all of us. They are reducing our need for foreign oil, and taking us out of the middle east. This wind is free and we’re taking advantage of it. It’s great.

It makes me wish i saw a lot more of these big guys on my drives through the dessert.  Or even on the great midwest plains.  Lord knows it is super windy there.

(note: i did this post directly from Flickr and it worked really well)

Check this out:

The US standard railroad distance between the rails is 4 feet, 8.5 inches which is a strange number. Why this distance? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the distance they used. The people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Wagons have particular odd wheel spacing, because if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

Those old rutted roads were build by Imperial Rome. They built all the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. The ruts in the road were formed by Roman war chariots. Because of the ruts, everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman army were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.  Crazy, eh.

Now get this —- When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters (SRBs). The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about the decline of print media these days. There were great speeches by Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson at SXSW.  Recently there was news of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine shutting down after plowing through $100 million in two years.  Some people have used this as an indication of the flawed model of print, but reading this story from an ex-employee i think it’s more an issue of mismanagement and lack of execution.  Here are some exerpts:

First, let me amplify, the magazine was a failure. It was not market conditions or the general economic meltdown that forced Si’s hand, it was a failure to create something that people wanted to read.

Yet in too many ways to enumerate here, we did not operate in what I fondly call a reality-based environment. In Lipman’s meetings, firings were never firings, stories were never bad or ill timed, mistakes were never made. The air had long been sucked out of that room, and few staffers seemed to believe anymore in the mission of the place, despite a collective desire, and I mean this, to do as good a job as they could do, given the circumstances.

Would the magazine succeeded if it was run currectly?  Who knows, but i do know from past experience at former companies that sometimes too much money is a bad thing as there is no urgency or common goal.  And when you have a leader making decisions that don’t make sense, you can’t help by become disillusioned and discouraged.  That seems to be what happened here.

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This is pretty cool.   A Danish photographer, Peter Funch, who lives and works in New York City has created a photo series called “Babel Tales” which consists of pictures of people passing New York City street corners.

Every photo is an edit of several photo’s he took at exactly the same spot in a period of two weeks. He then Photoshopped the images he captured to create the Babel Tales series.

The pictures are all pretty cool.  As a former New Yorker, i think these do a great job of catching the energy of the sidewalk.  People doing their own thing and creating a dynamic piece of art every second of the day.

For a view of the whole series check out the Flickr photos

Some movies get better and better the more you watch them and sometimes you pop a flick in 20 years after you first viewed it and it’s the best viewing yet.  The Sports Guy explains this by comparing movies to wine:

Most movies are like chardonnays or pinot noirs — you can drink them right away or any time within a span of 10 years. Many cabernets, Bordeaux and Barolos hold their vintage really well and you can actually enjoy them for as along as 10-20 years. Kinda like “Midnight Run” or “Hoosiers.” The best vintage ports are drinkable right away (although it’s not advised), but they’re specifically designed to get better and better the more they age. So, if you feel that way about a few of your favorite movies, I’d say that’s your vintage port collection. By the way, my mom helped me write this paragraph.

These movies for me are Boogie Nights, Spinal Tap, Rushmore, Good Will Hunting, Almost Famous, and Pulp Fiction. What’s your vintage port collection?

I read a really interesting article today.  It turns out that since 2005 the movie Crash has been the top rented movie from Netflix.  That’s 4 years of renting.  Crazy to think about.  The article interviews the writer/director Paul Haggis about this phenomenon. He has no idea why this is the case and has some funny quotes:

“I just assumed it was some sort of anomaly,” Haggis told the Tribune recently. “I have no idea why anyone went to the movie in the first place, let alone rent it. It was a little independent film, and when people started to see it, I was amazed.”

“It doesn’t make it any better of a film. I just know that these were things that were upsetting me, and I wanted to get them out,” said Haggis. “I happened to like my second film ['In the Valley of Elah'] better than ‘Crash,’ but no one went to see it.”

It doesn’t mention that maybe it’s because it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and nobody saw so everyone put it in their queue.  I wonder how many people got it delivered to them and sent it right back so they could get disk 3 of House a little bit faster.

There’s a good video by Fred Wilson about Twitter and what he, as an investor in it, thinks about it.  What he boils it down to is three points:

1. “the single most important is that twitter from day 1 is a platform that others can build upon”
2. “it is very one-dimensional…it doesn’t do anything that is not in the timeline….It’s power comes from that – it’s straightforward”
3. “Twitter is the news feed for the web” as people embed links in their tweets and it’s now an alerting system

What else is interesting is that Twitter wasn’t pitched to Fred but rather he was an early user of it and he pitched to them to try to get them to take money from Union Square Ventures.  This is why i think Fred is one of the best VC’s in the business because he uses the products.  The web is all about product.  It’s not like the industrial revolution, it is a consumer facing which means that the usability is extremely important.  He is an early adopter and gets into the weeds. I have a hard time imagining other VC’s using Twitter when it was still a part of Odeo.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzl5k2B84Kg]