The Early Years (2002-2005)

The Guardian had a piece a while back on how DVD sales have overtaken receipts from the box office. That’s quite interesting - I know many people have souped-up home systems now, but many still watch DVDs on a regular 20-inch TV, and I’d imagine that would create a market for those more intimate, personal films.

In his first episode back after Johnny Carson’s death, David Letterman did a tribute show to Carson comprised entirely of jokes written by Carson. So Carson was sending jokes to Letterman and not Leno? I guess even though NBC chose Leno, Carson had his own private preference.

I’ve never understood why people use the phrase “circus mentality”. What’s wrong with circuses? Well, okay, the animal cruelty bit. But I like the Cirque du Soleil. And that’s a circus. All spectacle and wonder.

Via Blog Explosion, I found Another Chance to See, a blog that looks at the endangered animals written about in Last Chance to See, the book by the late Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine.

Just because I like talking about type: the Danish Design prizewinner for typeface of the year in 2004 was Kontrapunkt.

Man, one of the guys who helped develop the Firefox browser is only a teenager?! For some reason I’ve become acutely aware of the fact that I’m turning 27 soon, which is hardly old by any standards, but seems to be a point to take stock and say “hey, what’re you doing with your life?”. And looking at people who’ve done big things at tender ages just emphasises the point.

I’ve realised that for some reason people have been quite intrigued / horrified that I would choose not to buy an iPod because I don’t like its use of Chicago as a font. (Example - heck, I even got a link at the Cult of Mac blog.) To which I say, hey, it’s not like Apple needs my money. And typeface design is a very big thing to me - when I was working at the Let’s Go offices, I hung out with the designers and talked typefaces all day (and all night - we shared an apartment). So if I’m getting something that’s being sold on the quality of its design, all the parts of its design have to mean something to me. Of course, now that the iPod Photo uses Myriad, I don’t really have an excuse…

Just checked out Google Video, which returns results based on the closed captioning info of TV shows, along with a few freeze frames of the episode. Quite cool. Especially for those of us behind America in TV series - I get to see, for instance, what happened on the latest Law & Order.

Dr James Levine finds that fidgety people are skinnier than those who prefer to be sedentary - apparently you burn about 350 more calories a day if you’re the kind of person who prefers to move about rather than sit still. More importantly, beyond genetic dispositions, the research seems to indicate that if you redesign your life so that you have to walk and move about a bit there’ll be great health benefits. I personally like working on my desk, which is arranged in such a way that you have to stand up (or sit on a bar stool) to use it - given I haven’t exercised in forever, I’ll take the little chances I get.

My quick take on the Oscar nominees: seems like this is the Year of the Biopic, what with The Aviator Ray, and Vera Drake all receiving big noms, and Hotel Rwanda and Kinsey getting acting nods. Seems like the Great Man theory of history is on its way to a revival. Wish Richard Linklater had gotten a directing nod though, Before Sunset was quite an achievement.

It’s sad, I know, but I get a cheesy pleasure from seeing a grammatical/stylistic mistake in William Safire’s language column. This week, writing on the words associated with being vegetarian/vegan, Safire writes:

There’s nowt so queer as advertising folk who try to use “hot” catchphrases without really knowing what they mean - or at least without thinking of the implications… such as McDonald’s using “I’d hit it” in their new American ad campaign. Lovin’ it is one thing, actually hitting it might me taking it a step too far.

My published writing career grows, thanks to Blogcritics… this time a Paul Weller review snuck into Alabama.com.

The nominations for the 2005 Bloggies are out! One of the blogs I contributed in very small part to, the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog is nominated for a host of categories, and it’s worth a vote not just out of sympathy but for showing the potential for blogs as centres for information from disparate sources. Two Singaporean blogs, the ubiquitous Xiaxue and life in mono are also in the running, under “Best Asian Blog”, while some of my other favourites - PlasticBag.org, the London Underground Tube Blog, the Soxaholix, largehearted boy, and Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance Again, all made the cut in various categories. As a naff radio DJ might say, “lots of good stuff to see, check it out”.

Man pees way through avalanche. Creative, I must say.

Man, these online quizzes, they tell you things you don’t want to know about yourself…

Just signed Coconut up for a Dogster account. Here’s his profile. And Rerun the family dog also has a Dogster profile. Leave them bones, yeah?

The Economist this week has a nice article on how the Internet is starting to be accepted by linguists as a corpus for analysis of language usage. The advantages of the vast amount of data on the Net outweigh the disadvantages of its biases. (The biases: since it’s a published medium, it’s more formal than speech, but that’s a disadvantage many corpuses (corpi?) face; more problematic, Internet language usage may be deliberately skewed towards words used to attract people to gambling and pornography sites.)

The Village Voice has a personal history of the last executioner of New York state back in the day when New York still had the death penalty. Interesting how all the executioners ended up either quitting, speaking out against the penalty (“I hope that the day is not far distant when legal slaying, whether by electrocution, hanging, lethal gas, or any other method is outlawed throughout the United States”, said one back in 1939), and/or committing suicide. What a grim, grim job.

*Ever seen a blind man cross the road, Trying to make the other side. Ever seen a young girl growing old, Trying to make herself a bride. And what becomes of you my love,