The Early Years (2002-2005)

The Guardian interviews one of the funniest - and brightest (“Not content with having done gigs in French, he now wants to do them in German, and later, in Spanish, Italian and Arabic”) - comedians around:

Picasa’s a godsend in terms of prepping photos for upload onto the web. One click of “export as web page” and it’s all ready for FTP - like this new batch of photos of Coconut the Westie.

I still don’t know what to think of Nick Denton, blogging entrepreneur. Now the owner of Gawker/Wonkette/Defamer/Gizmodo/Fleshbot has gone all boys toys with Jalopnik (cars), Kotaku (games), and Screenhead (random stuff). The Denton sites are getting too slick for my tastes, I think.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of pieces on work and blogging. The New York Times talks about how blogs aid in job search (Before Applying, Check Out the Blogs), in which I noticed the following statement:

From Michelle, here’s Go Fug Yourself, dedicated to pictures of celebrities at their worst, and attendant snark. Like Tori Spelling. What the hell did she do to her pug?

Ooh, stuff on the Simpsons movie.

Come to think of it, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. What Classic Movie Are You? personality tests by similarminds.com

From the list-crazy Vitamin Q, a succinct summary of the bizarre topics covered by the Police in their hit songs. An excerpt: Synchronicity 2 - and this is certainly the only hit song about a Jungian philosophy to mention Rice Krispies, belches, cheap tarts, Scotland, a crotch, picket lines and lemmings.

Boy, beatification sure comes fast these days.

Pillow fight!

Disturbing trend I’ve noticed from clicking on the “next blog” button from Blogger: fake “blogs” set up on Blogspot by firms trying to hawk plastic surgery or video conferencing. Taking advantage of the “authenticity” of the blog format I presume. I’m not going to dignify those blogs with a link. Just suffice it to say that one’s called Plastic Surgery Portal and one’s called Weband Video, from Blogger users 3533829 and 3819163. Noise-to-signal ratio increasing… increasing…

More of the ever-kinetic Coconut with his more sedate pal Bogart.

A whole Wilco set for download. Be not so fearful.

Slate slashes Thom Mayne’s new California Dept of Transportation building. Nowhere near Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center in Cincy or Rem Koolhaas’ Seattle library apparently. Me, I’m not looking forward to any return of the brutish hulks of modernist architecture.

Got into a Maxicab (one of those van-like cabs that seat 6 people) that day and the cab driver told me the story of how a bunch of Indonesian women hired him for a whole day to follow a Korean actor around Singapore. Singapore’s cosmopolitanism expresses itself in strange ways sometimes. How would a group of (middle-aged, or so the driver said) Indonesian women even know that the Maxicab is the best kind of cab for following stars?

Douglas Rushkoff doesn’t like blog ads. Oh well, gotta pay the bills.

Just discovered betterPropaganda, which has a lot of great, decent-quality (128kbps) indie songs for download. Picked up The Streets’ “Fit But You Know It”, The Shins’ “Kissing the Lipless”, and !!!’s “Hello? Is This Thing On?”, among others. Good stuff.

“I began trying to create an out-of-focus world - a heightened reality better than real, that suggests, rather than tells you.” - Richard Avedon RIP, Richard Avedon. (There goes that dream of mine.) His photos for the New Yorker were weekly installments of art.

Random snippet from an online baseball forum that I take part in: 1st Guy, about his house problems: Apparently [his house has] water, mold, and carpenter ants. It could be worse, it seems to be isolated to 1 area.

Discovered a record store with some funky hip-hop breaks and acapellas at the basement of the Excelsior Shopping Centre yesterday. Didn’t even have a sign on the store, so Lord knows what it’s called. But I’ll be back. Ah, serendipity.