Hustler of Culture
I told myself when I started this thing that I wouldn’t blog if I didn’t have something to say that day. And passing link floatsam from hand to hand doesn’t count. That’s why I haven’t in the last few days. I’m planning on sitting down tomorrow and stringing some thoughts together.
Just to keep you updated. That is all.
My friend Po Bronson has a new book out called What Should I Do With My Life? Ya’ll probably know Po as the guy who wrote a handful of books about Silicon Valley at the height of the dot com boom and drove gaggles of women crazy. He then, like lots of people in the maelstrom of it all, spent some time soul searching and recorded those searches and others in book form.
Hundreds of people showed up for his first San Francisco reading at Clean Well Lighted Place for Books leading me then believe the book would begin a nationwide trend of life assessment in some circles. Apparently it already has.
My copy is on the coffee table. I’m almost there.
Catch Me If You Can (2002): It’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart but it’s probably better to be both.
This is just what we need, more Why-San-Francisco-is-not-as-good-as-New-York windiness. Is it possible for one’s city ego to be so large that they A) must continually remind everyone of how great they are while B) being so insecure that they must pick a fight other cities whom they’ve already claimed ad nauseum to be better than?
Newsflash: No one in San Francisco cares (link via megnut).
The good folks at Sasquatch Books in Seattle were kind enough to send me One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry which I am mad excited about reading. My friend Laura has been pulling at my earlobe for a couple of years now to read Lynda Barry, a cartoonist for Salon and whose formidable writing talents give punch to both words in both “Graphic” and “Novel.” One Hundred Demons is getting great reviews every which way including a mention in Nick Hornby’s recent New York Times piece (reg. required) on 6 graphic novels worth watching.
I’m all over it.
Alex Good, the mind behind the wise Canadian book site Good Reports cracks me up every year with his annual awards, The Puffies, given to the emptiest windiest book jack blurbs. To wit…
“Behind each word, each sentence, you can feel the blood coursing, the flesh breathing and the sinews tensing.”
“A writer who sets his foot firmly on your throat from the start; he won’t let up and you won’t want him to.”
Ugh.
Lunch with my friend Matt yesterday provoked a better name for my streaming radio plug-in idea than I had thought of…Radio Tivo. I like it.
Many of us who have weblogs out there can’t program worth a plug nickel which is one reason why Lazy Web is a great idea. I’ve had a few ideas in the past that I think would make great use of web technology (but really now, what do I know?) and since I can’t program, they stay ideas.
Enter Lazy Web. Now you can post said ideas and an ambitious programmer will come on by, pluck your idea and she if he/she can make it happen.
My Best Idea: I love to listen to streaming radio while working at my computer but I’ll often lose track of time and forget when my favorite shows began. This invariably happens for shows that are in a different time zone, like afternoon drive time on my favorite radio station from childhood.
Ergo…
What about a Winamp or Real Player plug-in that allows you to program the player as if it were an alarm clock? For example, you could program Fresh Air to automatically come on at 1 PM PST and then switch over to drive time on some station on the east coast. You could also program which days would do what, so the player wouldn’t be going through its rotation of stations while you’re not at work (say on Saturday). Seems simple enough to me (link via Consolation Champs).
“Weapons of Mass Destruction” has been voted 2002’s Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. Whatever that means. Anybody got a better pick?
Is it me or does the trailer for Quinten Tarantino’s new film Kill Bill look an ad for some martial arts soft drink?