I've had the pleasure of knowing a handful of truly brilliant artists so far in my life. One of them is Peter Solymosi. I got to know Peter the first couple of year I lived in NY through our Hungarian network. He lived in a classic huge artist's loft over in Greenpoint, Brooklyn until a few months ago, when he had a big sale of some paintings and moved, first to Budapest, where he is presently and then to India, where he plans to spend a year or so before returning to NYC.

The Abandoned Pier, Oil on canvas, 2000, 54 x 48"

In addition to being a really inspired painter (I'll spare you my amateurish intellectualizing about his work; let me simply say I love his stuff), he also plays the part beautifully. Dishevelled, moody, crazed glint in his eye and extremely funny and puckish. One of my favorite annecdotes about him is that he took the image of one of his more provocative paintings, The Beauty and the Beast, and he put it on a postcard that looked very officially like it was printed by the Museum of Modern Art. He then stocked them in the museum's gift store and checked back periodically with pleasure to see they were selling nicely. Even though he didn't see any of the royalties, he got the satisfaction of exhibiting, as it were, at the MOMA.

Now, those of you in Budapest can enjoy his next thwarting of the traditional art distribution system. Deciding that he was not impressed with the way the Budapest gallery scene was run, he has arranged for an exhibition on fence on Andrasy Ut for three weeks in September. A friend said he's welcome to use the fence, so from September 9-29 you can see his work displayed at Andrass Ut 98. On September 11 at 6pm, the exhibition will include a dance performance titled "Panic" by his friend Bernadett Barna.

I should have mentioned this earlier but was busy and got distracted. Mark points out that on the 27th I had "Subway Cat" and "Underdogs" in successive headlines, and he wondered what was next. This was the best I could come up with.

As regular readers know, I [heart] Hungarians. The whole lot of them really, one in particular, and several hundred on a first name basis. Thus, I hope everyone agrees to find this funny.

I just came across a passage from the My Fair Lady song "You Did It," sung between Henry Doolittle and Colonel Pickering the day after Eliza's big coming-out party. I remembered only the excerpt used in the headline of this post from when Bob Cohen, master Magyar-baiter, first mentioned it some 10 years ago, as containing some of the most delicious Hungarian stereotyping ever put to music. I quote:

            Pickering
            And when the Prince of Transylvania
            Asked to meet her,
            And gave his arm to lead her to the floor...!
            I said to him: You did it!
            You did it! You did it!
            They thought she was ecstatic
            And so damned aristocratic,
            And they never knew
            That you
            Did it!

            Henry
            Thank Heavens for Zoltan Karparthy.
            If it weren't for him I would have died of boredom.
            He was there, all right. And up to his old tricks.

            Mrs. Pearce
            Karparthy? That dreadful Hungarian? Was he there?

            Henry
            Yes.
            That blackguard who uses the science of speech
            More to blackmail and swindle than teach;
            He made it the devilish business of his
            "To find out who this Miss Doolittle is."
            Ev'ry time we looked around
            There he was, that hairy hound
            From Budapest.
            Never leaving us alone,
            Never have I ever known
            A ruder pest
            Fin'lly I decided it was foolish
            Not to let him have his chance with her.
            So I stepped aside and let him dance with her.
            Oozing charm from ev'ry pore
            He oiled his way around the floor.
            Ev'ry trick that he could play,
            He used to strip her mask away.
            And when at last the dance was done,
            He glowed as if he knew he'd won!
            And with a voice to eager,
            And a smile too broad,
            He announced to the hostess
            That she was a fraud!

            Mrs. Pearce
            No!

            Henry
            Ja wohl!
            Her English is too good, he said,
            Which clearly indicates that she is foreign.
            Whereas others are instructed in their native language
            English people aren't.
            And although she may have studied with an expert
            Di'lectician and grammarian,
            I can tell that she was born Hungarian!
            Not only Hungarian, but of royal blood, she is a princess!

            Servants
            Congratulations, Professor Higgins,
            For your glorious victory!
            Congratulations, Professor Higgins!
            You'll be mentioned in history!

Heard a great piece the other day on NPR from the National Lampoon Radio Hour (Real Audio file) of the early 1970s, including the late greats John Belushi and Gilda Radner, among others, a very amusing pseudo-documentary about how hillbillies immigrated from places around Europe to the New World.

Also, another amusing installment from Fire Sign Theatre on NPR (Real Audio file) on the topic of Homeland Security and the government's TIPS program.

Major League Baseball, F*** You? Well, not quite, it's the MBA Fans Union, but same general idea. A bar owner near Chicago's Wrigley Field has formed an organization to file a class action suit if the MLB cancels games due to a player strike. I'm not a sports guy, so this whole thing is a bit irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, but I like the spirit of it. Great marketing ploy for his bar, in any event. I heard about it on NPR.

Cute story in today's Times about a cat that lives at the Fulton Street subway stop.

A little update on an earlier blog note about underdogs: My Hungarian wife watched two weeks ago live on TV in Hungary when the Budapest team Zalaegerszeg beat the soccer legends Manchester United 1-0, and she reported with disgust that it was a terrible match and a joke that Hungary won. Thus, she seems to take some perverse pleasure in reporting to me now that that Hungary got its ass kicked in a revenge match today, 5-0. That's Hungarians for you, the ultimate underdogs.

Meanwhile, in Harlem yesterday, the Harlem Little League All-Stars were greeted by 500 well-wishers celebrating the losing team's sixth-place finish in the Little League World Series. After all, it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. (All the Hungarians are rolling their eyes.)

Hey boys and girls, I invite you to bring along a folding chair to Grant's Tomb (Riverside & 122nd: map) tomorrow, Wed. the 28th at 7pm to hear Roy Hargrove, a terrific contemporary trumpet player as part of the Jazz Mobile free jazz series all around NYC every summer.

I'm pleased to hear that New York, along with San Francisco, was chosen by the U.S. Olympic Committee panel today to be the country's "semifinalists in the competition to host the 2012 Summer Olympics" (to quote the NY Times intro). I heard on NPR the spokesperson say that Sept. 11 didn't factor into the panel's decision. I'm sure. It should do, in my opinion.

Regardless, New York is clearly the better choice compared to San Francisco, in my opinion. San Francisco, where I lived for four years and don't mean to keep beating up on here, is, of course, a more beautiful city, and would make for awesome TV coverage and put a great face on America for the rest of the world. There is no more picturesque city in the U.S. than SF. And by that time, 11 years after that fateful day last autum, the world will be so sick of hearing about Sept. 11th that the last thing anyone in Brussels or Bogota or wherever is going to want to see in Olympic coverage is more shots of whatever monument they put up at the World Trade Center.

But strictly from a transportation point of view, New York is the obvious pick. This was apparent to me just hearing the headline on NPR that the U.S. contenders for host cities were NY and SF. I was thinking at that point they meant actually hosting the Olympics in San Francisco, as that's what the headlines all say. I thought, that's crazy, it's a city of 750,000 people. Traffic there is already horrible. Public transportation is non-existent. Drop an extra few tens of thousands of tourists, athletes and media folks from around the world in there, and no one would be able to move.

Then I actually looked at the online bid plans for San Francsico and New York, and there's no comparison. Not only does the NY web site kick SF's ass, but the respective maps for the two events say it all. The San Francisco Plan has nothing to do with San Francisco. Yes, some events would take place in that burb, but events are spread out all over the state. The map makers are apparently to chicken to even name what town the Olympic Village is situated in (I couldnt' find it anywhere on the site), but judging from where the star on the map is, it's down somewhere near Santa Clara. Not only are events spread all over the Bay Area, they're spread out as far as Sacramento, Monterey, Napa Valley and San Diego, for Christ sake.

The plan optimistically proposes a new bullet-train system to connect all the events. Yeah, right. I'd love to seem them get that through the state legislature in 11 years. This is a town that is still debating plans to rebuild the Bay Bridge after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the current plan is still a car-only bridge (no light rail, no bike paths, no vision for the future). Regardless, even with a bullet train, Sacramento and Monterey (much less San Diego) are still hours apart.

The NY plan, by comparison, takes place in the five boroughs on NYC and Newark, NJ, a mere 20 minutes by bus or car. As for the transit here, the athletes could all ride the subway and no one would take notice, as long as they all paid full fare.

Also, how telling is that the coverage to today's announcement on SFGate.com, which is produced by the city's main piece of garbage newspaper, The SF Chronicle, is a newswire feed from AP? The Chronicle didn't even have a reporter covering the story?

NY deserves the bid.

I see from DayPop a lot of bloggers are linking an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled "The Environmentalists Are Wrong" by Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book The Skeptical Enviornmentalist (you'll see I think so little of the book I'll sacrifice any potential Amazon affiliate fees and not link to it). I'm really sorry to see the Times giving this jackass a platform once again. Here is one passage from his recent essay:

There is, however, one problem: this litany [of environmental concerns] is not supported by the evidence. Energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so. More food is now produced per capita than at any time in the world's history. Fewer people are starving. Species are, it is true, becoming extinct. But only about 0.7 percent of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not the 20 percent to 50 percent that some have predicted.

And what about his litany? Where's the evidence for his ridiculous claims? Natural resources have become more abundant lately? Someone has figured out how to farm oil or what? I somehow missed that headline. He goes on to suggest that rather than battling global warming, we should just learn to adapt to warmer climates. Brilliant idea. Tell that to the people of the Marshall Islands, who will be under water in a few years.

Claming that we'd be better off to let the developing world concentrate on catching up to the living standards of America and Europe first and only then worry about environmental issues, he writes "Only when people are rich enough to feed themselves do they begin to think about the effect of their actions on the world around them and on future generations." Yeah, I see all the suburban soccer moms in SUVs really fretting about environmental issues. The U.S. uses 25% of the world's resources with 5% of its population. Frankly, I don't see many Americans worrying too much about changing their behaviors for the sake of the environment, particularly if it means giving up one iota of comfort that our overly indulgent lifestyle describes. But let's indeed get all of India and China driving SUVs, too, since we're growing oil on trees, and if it gets too hot, just crank up the AC.

This guy is a crank and has been amply debunked, if journalists or bloggers would take the trouble to do the research. My friend Colin Woodard, for example, wrote a scathing piece for TomPaine.com about all the journalists who have been suckered by this guy's book, and World Resources Institute provides an exhaustive analysis of his work.

Instead, I'd recommend bloggers pay attention to this story from The Guardian: "Ecological decline 'far worse' than official estimates" citing research from the OECD, not simply wishful thinking.

Cool new development: a congressional candidate in North Carolina, Tara Sue Grubb, has started web logging. She's 26-years-old, a libertarian, and hot. Almost wish I lived in North Carolina.

Thanks to sister Sue for turning me on to epinions.com's reviewer Leon, who is quite hilariouis.

It's really none of most of your business, but I had a whole lot of fun at a reunion of old college friends the weekend before last, and I just spent most of Sunday updating our little web site. If you love looking at other people's photographs and memories, go for it.

Won't someone please, please buy this for me? No offense to religious readers, but this is the kitchest thing I've ever seen. Really, anything anything from this series of a dozen statuettes would be swell. The gymnastics one is also amazing, tho perhaps a bit too racy in the wake of priest-gate.

Reminds me of the sports scenes depicted on a stained glass window at St. John The Divine in NY.

I'll take a bit of credit for this, thank you very much. (Very little credit, really, just gentle coaching on HTML 101.)

It's true, Americans suck at geography, but you'd think the leading international news TV network would have a better set of maps than, say, the CIA (remember that little faux paws of bombing the Chinese Embassy in Serbia, which they blamed on old maps?). Hugues Martin has apparently been keeping track of CNN's lapses in geography, as he points out in two pics he snapped of the network in recent months -- one online and one on the tube:

This is a screenshot Hugues captured of a pop-up window from CNN's site about the recent flooding in Europe. (Unfortunately, he converted it to JPG instead of GIF, so it's hard to make out.) Where he's circled "Hungary" is actually Austria. Whoops. (I've found a page on the flooding that has this pop-up map, but by now they've apparently recognized the mistake and deleted all surrounding country names.)

No, actually, that's the Czech Republic, not Switzerland.

Psst, CNN, one word: Maps.com. Here's what Germany and the Czech Republic actually boarder on.

I wish I had remembered this when I blogged about Doggles a week ago. ("Blogged about doggles" -- say that five times fast.) From Mark's cousin.

Grrrrr. Today's subject of my wrath is Road Runner, Time Warner Cable's highspeed Internet service, which has been out of service in my neighborhood for more than 24 hours. Apparently they're working on it. I'm sure, but in the meantime I'm surfing the Net on a 56Kbps connection. How awful is that? Is there anyone out there who actually still surfs like this? Yes, high-bandwidth is obscenely expensive, but once you've tasted pure oxygen like that, there's no going back.

Mark (who, let me point out again, really should have his own blog) calls my attention to this insane story about how the Santa Cruz District Attorney's Office, in an attempt to thwart new mothers from abandoning their infants, has issued thousands of stickers to be affixed to trash dumpsters that read "Don't Throw Your Baby Away." Great advice, if I've ever heard it.

How sad that punk music now makes me feel old.

Lots to catch up on after a short trip, but this one anecdote is priority blog material. Hanging out with a big gang of old college friends from nearly 20 years ago, Jeanne told how her 17-year-old nephew is in a band and considers himself a punk. His idea of punk, however, is the likes of Green Day. So she told him she needed to give him a re-education in punk, and she bought him a bunch of CDs, including The Circle Jerks, The Ramones, Black Flag and The Clash.

His response to The Clash: "This is folk music. You can keep it."

A friend just forwarded me the following:

DEAR SIR/DIRECTOR/CEO:

MY NAME IS MBEKI RHODES. IN 1991 MY COUNTRY WAS INVADED, MY CAR WAS REPOSSESSED, AND MY WIFE WAS WIDOWED IN OUR ANNUAL CIVIL WAR. THIS YEAR I AM TAKING OUT A NINE MILLION DOLLAR (U.S. $9,000,000) FREE DISCOUNT MORTGAGE FINANCED ON MY EMPIRE OF HERBAL VIAGRA AND LESBIAN TEEN PORN BUSINESSES. THIS MESSAGE MAY COME AS A SURPRISE TO YOU; I GOT YOUR ADDRESS FROM A LIST OF REPUTABLE BUSINESSES AND ELIGIBLE SPEED SEDUCTION BACHELORS IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA. WE WANT A RELIABLE PERSON TO TRANSFER MY FAMILY'S $9,000,000 (NINE MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) IN BREAST AND PENIS ENHANCEMENTS TO THE SANCTITY OF A WESTERN BANK ACCOUNT.

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*** WITHOUT CLICKING THROUGH TO THREE ADVERTISING LINKS CONSTITUTES A
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Sadly, I'm back from five glorious days in Montana. Details to come. Please standby for a resumption of normal programming.

Out of town till next Wednesday at a kick-ass reunion of old college friends in a forest somewhere in Montana. Blogging in the next few days doubtful, but who knows, you may get a little update...

I don't know whether this photo is legit, but it looks so to me. WARNING: The site this photo links to, Rotten.com, is in extremely poor taste and may be offensive to most everybody. Please click photo at your own risk.

My wonderful wife has been away in her native Budapest, partying her brains out at the Pepsi Island music festival, haning out with many friends, her twin brother, her mom, my dad (who moved back to Bp recently, oddly enough; a story for another time), and generally having lots of fun while I blog in solitude in insufferably hot Harlem. I miss her terribly. But that's really good.

I shall share with you one secret of our happy marriage: we spend a lot of time apart from each other. Over the last seven years we've lived back in America, she's spent perhaps an entire year's worth of time back in Hungary all told, and I've done my share of two-three-week trips here and there myself in that time. Nothing makes you as happy to see your spouse as several weeks apart.

That's just one of the secrets, but then if I let you in all of them, they wouldn't be secrets anymore, would they?

SkySports: "United Humbled By Late Goal in Hungary
Manchester United's lucrative annual Champions League campaign is in danger after Hungarian minnows Zalaegerszeg grabbed an injury time winner in their qualifying round first leg."

Newsday: "Comeback Kids Win a Wild One
Harlem triumphs in extra innings after trailing 4-0: Harlem's boys of summer are going to The Show.Displaying the tenacity that has marked their run to the Little League World Series, the Harlem Little League barreled their way to Williamsport, Pa., by eking out a 5-4 extra-inning win over the Lehigh, Pa., team in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Championship game last night."

Man, stories like this frustrate me so much. Six million people starving in Zimbabwe, and the government is encouraging citizen mobs to evict white farmers who, among the 2,700 or so of them, employ more than 1 million Zimbabweans. No plan in place, of course, for managing the lost food-producing capacity when the farmers are evicted. You sort of have to know how to run a farm, I would think.

Buckle up, Tokyo!

Congratulations and good luck to blogtrepreneur Nick Denton and tech writer Pete Rojas on their new commercial blog venture, Gizmodo.com, a site dedicated to cool technology stuff. Rojas will update the site daily with links and short commentary about product reviews on other sites, recall notices, new product releases, and so on. Roughly one out of every four posts features a "buy" link where readers can purchase the products on Amazon or elsewhere. Gizmodo, in those cases, earns affiliate network commissions if people make a purchase as a result of the link.

Nick, who's a good friend, claims for himself the ridiculous title as the blog's "publisher," in as much as he did well enough during the boom that he can afford to finance Rojas on salary for a while (hope they've got taxes sorted out, as it's out there in the public domain) in order to satisfy his curiousity about whether commercial blogs like this can be viable.

The blogirati are already debating the hell out of this, with Dave Winer predictably against it and Nick predictably fanning the flames of the discussion. The best comment I read on the subject came from a blogger I've never heard of, Jenny Berger, writing on Blogroots, who wrote:

Asking why blogging should be profitable is about as productive as asking why shouldn't it be profitable. Have we not yet figured out that on the Web, there is no "should," only "can?"

I totally agree. The market will answer Nick's question soon enough, and I wish him the best. I've been watching the site in beta for a few weeks, and I give it the thumbs up. I expect believe the site will succeed. I certainly hope so, as it would be a great precedent, if it worked. Who among us wouldn't love to know the secret of getting paid to blog all day.

I'm a bit worried about relying too much on the affiliate model, as its problems are widely known. Basically, you just have to have a lot of traffic to make it work, even if you have high conversion rates (which I think this site will do more so than most). Frankly, I think blogging represents a huge opportunity for affiliate networks themselves (e.g,. LinkShare, Commission Junction, ReferIt) all of whose businesses have stagnated in the last couple of years since the bloom is off that rose. But I doubt they're hip enough to have heard of blogs yet. The real opportunity is for the likes of Blogger or Userland. Sounds like Winer's a non-believer. Ev, are you reading?

If you haven't you read the Tipping Point you must (via my affiliate link here). One of the author's key theses is that it takes three types of personalities to make phenomena go epidemic: "connectors," who know lots of people and love putting them together; "mavins," who know every last detail about their subjects of interest and love sharing information, and "salespeople," who have a knack for gaining people's trust and pursuading behaviors. Could you possibly come up with a better definition of the blogger personality? (Interestingly, while the book was a must-read among the interlectual set a couple of years ago, it doesn't feature a single Internet story among its umteen case studies.)

Obviously, a lot of bloggers are already using affiliate links, myself included as I pointed out above. If you haven't noticed that I use them when I link to Amazon or Register, fine. If you do, I expect it won't much impugn my credibility, as I genuinely like the stuff I recommend. I'm not trying to make a living off my links, but if I get a check once a quarter for beer money, it's worth the extra 30 seconds I spend preparing the affiliate links. If I were Nick, I'd give Tony Pierce a call, as he's got the best affilate links woven into his site of any blogger I've seen.

But it's a pain in the ass presently to run affiliate links as a blogger. My link in the bottom of my left-hand margin for my beloved Samsung i300 PDA/phone, for example, has been dead for a couple of months since Amazon stopped carrying the product (just as I hit my blogging stride). I've spent a couple of hours searching for another e-com site in an affiliate program that carries the product without success. Having to join multiple networks is a real hurdle.

But imagine if the affiliate network were built seamlessly into Blogger Pro (either through a partnership with LinkShare or whoever, or through reinventing the wheel). When you as a blogger write a movie review, you could search for the film on a ticket system like Fandango right through Blogger and get paid for readers who buy tickets. Or when you rave about your new digital camera or whatever, a quick search in Blogger and you can create an affiliate link in under a minute. That, my friends, could be the killer app of the blogosphere.

But as for running a profitable affiliate blog, I don't know. You would need massive traffic to make it work. I know some affiliate sites can perform quite well, but it's a lot of work. At least Nick seems prepared to give it a good run for his money, and I applaud that. But I still think that's got to be only one leg of the stool from a revenue perspective. I hope (and believe) Nick has other ideas in mind.

As a bit of public feedback, I'd say the blog, while already compelling in its single-mindedness, could afford to ratchet up the personality a bit more, which is required to assure the blog a loyal following. Also, it could stand to be a bit more blog-like, if that's how the site is to position itself. I notice, for example, there are no links to other blogs on the site, which isn't really in the spirit of the whole blog thang (link to me! link to me!).

BTW, in case your'e wondering, this is not the big blog-related venture Nick has been hinting about for a while now. That goodness, b/c it would be rather lame if it were. This, I think, is more of a hopeful hobby on Nick's part. He is still going to pull another rabbit out of a hat to guarantee a position on DayPop sometime later this year.

As if I hadn't already solved the economic problems of this new medium already, here's another pearl of wisdom I just came up with. Pete, if you can swing me a sample Canon A40 digital camera, I'd be more than happy to write a review you could link to. But here's the rub: Get Gizmodo on the gravy train for review product samples. Then farm out the product reviews to quality bloggers, whose reviews the site can link to. If the reviewer doesn't like the product, she can give it back to Gizmodo. If she wants to keep it, Gizmodo will sell it to her for 25% of retail value. Everyone's happy. The manufacturer gets PR (of the really prestigeous blog variety). The reader gets an honest review. Gizmodo gets a revenue stream. Bloggers get cool shit at massive discounts for doing what they'd do anyway.

But for being so brilliant as to think that up, I want my Canon A40 for free.

I just decided to remove Seth Godin's blog from my recommended links. I put him in when I first came across his site, because he's a big name in my e-marketing sector (founder of early online promotions company Yoyodyne, later Yahoo! marketing wiz, author of the popular "Permission Marketing" among several other other knock-off books, frequent keynote speaker, etc.), and I thought it was cool that he blogged. I saw that it wasn't a very good blog, but I put it in any way.

Stopping back at it again, though, I see it's undeniably a bad blog. One that I shouldn't be recommending. He has no links to any other bloggers, he rarely updates it (once so far in August and twice in all of July), and all the posts are about him and his consulting stuff. Who wants to read that?

I wonder if Apple takes all the parody's of its Switch ad campaign as a complement. I've seen so many of these parodies, I would expect someone else has already gone ot the trouble of putting together a list of them, but not finding one, I did so myself:

• Ellen Feiss - this is actually one of the real commercials from Apple, but her performance is so funny, mainly because she's obviously completely stoned, that it's inspired all sorts of fan sites.

• Will Ferrell - was this actually on SNL? Slick, but given that it was shown at MacWorld (as you can see from the last couple of seconds) it's a bit too PR-friendly for real parody. Also, makes Mozilla 1.0 crash.

• DrunkerGamers.com - this is my favorite, after Ellen Feiss.

• LBStone.com's Big Macs - raw and amateurish, but funny.

• Move to Iceland - I blogged this once already, but this is a round-up, and it's the best of the animated ones I saw.

• Bill Gates - this one has gotten lots of exposure. Eh. Typical pro-maccie, anti-MS humor.

• Big Brother - another from MacBoy (author of the Bill Gates one). I'm not sure I get this. It's obviously a spoof on the famous Apple 1984 commercial, but I don't understand whether the point is that the Mac OS X is somehow supposed to be the new IBM (wishful thinking) or whether it's still saying Macs are the best, or what.

• Dude - yet another from MacBoy, and just not really funny to my mind, but then this is supposed to be a round-up, not a review. I gather he's also spoofing a Dell commercial I haven't seen, but I can't see that making it funnier.

What am I missing?

And a bonus animation. After all my trashing of MacBoy, he redeems himself with this really funny parody of his father, titled "Dad vs. AOL."

To further my support for the Zilla Liberation Front and my new copyleft )c( stance and my general dislike of Microsoft on principal, I decided to download the new Mozilla 1.0 open-source browser. So far, so good. Although I notice that certain Blogger.com functions (such as the HTML helpers like the hyperlink and bold buttons) dont' work...

Oh, what the hell, I gave her a buck. She's already raised more than $4,000 in Internet contributions to pay off her credit card debt. I do feel dubious about this beg-blogging trend (who actually gave money to that fat slob asking for a hooker?), but when I saw she just moved to Brooklyn and is afraid of roaches, I broke down. What the hell, it's only a buck and it's not like she's pan-handling on the subways. I found her on DayPop.

Moxie's sounding a bit desperate, too, these days, but at least she posts photos of herself in her underwear. A bit more self-obsessed, but then she lives in LA...

Help defend Dave's right to be a Zilla.

Don't know why I thought of it just now, but there is a tiny fish in the Amazon that might swim up your penis if you're not careful.

How much would you be earning today if your 1996 salary had grown at the same rate as the average CEO's? This handy calculator from the AFL-CIO graphs it a nice chart.

"Unlike ordinary sunglasses for dogs, Doggles actually protect dog's eyes from foreign objects, wind, and UV light."

There are "ordinary sunglasses for dogs"? Yet another reason why I'm a cat guy.
(Link from BoingBoing.)

My favorite new word, which Websters defines:

1 : biography of saints or venerated persons
2 : idealizing or idolizing biography

From Olivier, RE:

As the anniversary of that dreadful day grows close (which I'm not looking forward to; I found myself weeping the other night at a tribute to the heroic passengers of Flight 93 on a rebroadcast of the damn ESPY Awards), I want to point out something that has been really annoying me for many months now: the use of the phrase "nine-eleven" or, even worse, "nine-one-one." What's up with that?

This is not a normal way to talk about a date. My birth date is June 11. When someone asks my birth date, I don't say "six eleven" much less "six one-one." That would sound retarded.

What it is, is shorthand. In this post-MTV culture of ours, we waited only a matter of weeks or even days before we gave this horrific event a media nickname, a handle, jargon.

Why is this necessary? It's quicker and easier to say? "Nine eleven" is two syllables shorter than "September eleven." We're all in that big of a hurry?

Or is "nine eleven" catchier than "September eleven?" Yes, I think it is. "September eleven" or "September eleventh" has a somber sound to it. It's unavoidable to feel a bit of the agony of that day in those words. But "nine eleven" sounds lighter. It's a bit further removed from the recollection of the actual day itself; it's more of a "meme" for bigger "thing" that date represents. It's got a bit of marketing buzz to it. It sounds almost hip, or fun. And yes, it's a weird coincidence that the date numerically is the same as the telephone number for emergency services, but that was worth observing once, as a nod to numerology freaks, but it's hardly worth remembering every time we mention the event. It's like saying "dubya dubya two" or "'Nam" -- it just sounds hoaky and insincere.

I don't know if it's just my imagination or inflated sense of self-importance, but it seems to me that New Yorkers use the cute handle "9-11" less often than friends and commentators I hear from other parts of the country.

More than annoying, I find it offensive. September 11th was something profoundly sobering, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. It deserves much better than a cutsie nickname.

I suspect my mom will kill me for using this same headline (even though she's from Minneapolis). The fact remains, August 11 is the 10-year aniversary of the opening of The Mall of America, the country's largest shopping emporium. Whoopie!

I heard this factoid on an NPR interview with writer Ian Frazier, who wrote a piece in The Atlantic cleverly titled "Mall of America." I normally like Frazier's writing (though I was surprised to see him in The Atlantic as I thought he was a New Yorker man), but I was actually disappointed by the piece (maybe it read better in print), which I found long on self-indulgent reminiscence of his youth and so-what observations of everyday people at the mall and short on some perspective about the mall as a metaphor, an obscene cathedral to America's worship of consumerism. One of the few points along those lines he does make is to find that virtually nothing sold at The Mall of America was actually manufactured in the U.S.A., including not a single item at post-September-11 "USA America Pride" store.

The point that really caught my attention about this piece (hear on the NPR interview; the same stat was never mentioned in the article; I guess NPR turned it up themselves) was this: The Mall of America, with its 42.5 million annual visitors, is the single biggest attraction in America, bigger than Graceland, The Grand Canyon and Disneyland combined. What does that mean about our culture? On the other hand, would it be "better" to see more people at Graceland or Dinseyland? I don't know, but I wished the author had pondered that for me.

Incredibly, MOA is not even the biggest mall in the world. That dubious distinction goes to the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada. The article does point out, however, that The Mall of America does more business than the Edmonton Mall and, more importantly, is set to expand soon, so it will once again reclaim its rightful title as the largest mall in the world.

Thank God. In fact, God Bless the Mall of America!

TonyPierce.com is still just about my favorite blog. As such, I've just elevated him to the top position of my "Blogs of Interest" links on the left (the best I can do, as I've never met the man). I do this largely out of respect for his blog mastery (which I was reminded of by Copeland), but also because I noticed reading over his recent postings that he's offering advice on how to get him to link to you, which it seems to me he's selling pretty cheap: you can either have a "kick-ass" or even just "well-designed" site, or, barring that, just move him to the top of your recommended links, or donate as little as $1 to his site. One measily dollar for a link back from a bloggod. Tony, you're way underselling yourelf. In fact, I would have happily donated $5 or even more, but I couldnt' figure out how to reset the amount on your PayPal link. We shall see whether it really works. (I wonder if his friend Moxie ever saw my whole Moxie rant.)

Henry Copeland pointed out this really scary photo of the Iraqi Army at ease.

Taking on the assumption repeated in many articles that the Mac's iPod MP3 player is the best thing since sliced bread, the MorningNews.org puts the iPod and sliced bread to a head-to-head comparison.

Read on Jish.

(Whew, I got that in just before the date changed.)

I love you!

Christian Baily blogged last week about what he called "a great commercial" from the Ad Council that shows a kid being escorted out of a library by police because of a book he check out, with the tagline "What if America wasn't America?" A bunch of other bloggers picked up on his post, including Nick Denton and Boing Boing. Nobody apparently saw any irony in the commercial (which you can see for yourself here).

I've met Christian a few times, a swell guy and I mean him no disrespect, but I can't resist pointing out that I blogged about this a month ago on ExecutiveSummary.com when I heard the host of NPR's "On the Media" show, Brooke Gladstone, really rip into the creator of this "Campaign for Freedom" ad series. Her main beef was this particular library ad, which she pointed out stood in blatant hipocracy to the recently passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which explicitly allows for the F.B.I. to secretly monitor people's library habits (read my previous post for details and an amusing transcript).

I wouldn't have bothered calling much attention to this, but tonight I heard a great piece on exactly this subject -- the F.B.I.'s new powers to monitor library users -- on NPR: click here for the Real Audio file. Here's NPR's summary of the segment:

The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in the wake of Sept. 11, gives the FBI greatly expanded powers to search records of all kinds. NPR's Nancy Solomon reports on a recent survey showing that the Bureau has contacted 85 public libraries since the act was passed.

Didn't I just blog about The Bloggies the other day? Yes, I boldly predicted the inevitably of blog award ceremonies (still dizzy off the high of predicting BlogTree two weeks before it hit DayPop). Well, I hit gold again. I'm so damn visionary, I'm now predicting the past!

Blogging legend Jish stumbled upon the lowly Bruner Blog and pointed out that Nikolai Nolan has been organizing the Bloggy Awards already for the last two years. Jish would know, having won "Best Canadian Blog" in 2001 (a backhanded complement if I ever heard one), thanks no doubt in large part to his shamless "Nominate me!!!" appeal to readers. (That got me wondering whether Jish's distinctive .nu domain was perhaps for Newfoundland, but no, turns out it's for Niue, a tiny Polynesian island that apparently subsidizes its GDP by selling domain registrations.) Sadly, I see Jish failed in his bid to repeat his success in 2002 for "Best American Blog" (I don't know the backstory on the nationality switch; you know how tetchy those Canook's are about the whole "America" thing).

I'd say this still wasn't exactly what I had in mind, in that it appears to be a purly online effort of primarily one blogger and his blog circle, a worthy contribution to the blogosphere, to be sure, but not exactly on par with the Oscars or even the Webbies. But then, I suppose a real bloggers ceremony is impractical, as unlike the film and general web industries, there's no money in blogging, so no one is likely to underwrite the expenses of pomp and circumstance for a bunch of blog nerds. Besides, it's not like "the public" gives a rat's ass about the world's best blog. In any event, it would still be nice to see these awards formalized a bit more, at least with their own domain (TheBloggies.com is still available).

It's unregistered.

Don't know if it was really banned or not, but I found this preview (7MB MPEG) for the disappointing "Goldmember" film. (The KaZaA pirate who uploaded indicated it was banned). The preview is actually pretty funny, starring Verne Troyer (Mini-Me), who gets brutally slammed around in the film (pretty cruel slapstick for the poor little fella), but in this trailer he demonstrates his considerable talent.

The only happiness I can report is that I will now shut this ugly chapter of the blog with the report that the new printer (nearly $400, with the extended warantee and extra ink cartridge) works. Now I just have to reload all other apps...

Okay, I'm rested. I'll try to keep the foul language to a minimum. But by this afternoon I really, really hate computers. I hate computers with the white-hot intensity of a thousand burning suns.

Briefly, for anyone who could possibly care, here's the update since last night's ravings: first thing this morning (or thereabouts) I called IBM again, got right through to a technician who walked me through the critical erase-everything-and-start-over-from-scratch phase of my computer troubleshooting. So over the last couple of hours I've gotten email set up reasonably again and made the sad discovery of the first of what will doubtless prove to be many things I stupidly neglected to back up: all my Outlook files (e.g., a year's worth of bookmarks...). Oh well...

I still have many fun-filled hours of reconstructing my digital life in front of me, but here's the really hilarious part (hilarious in the way that you have to laugh like you're brain is about to exlode with insane fury): I still can't print. You see, that's hilarious because I have a ~300-page document that it's critical I print in order to complete a client project by Monday morning (which still lots more work besides justing printing, of course), which has driven me finally to face the wipe-everything-and-reinstall-the-operating-system test phase of my months of troubleshooting this stupid printer problem (during which time I've kludgily made do simply emailing documents to my wife who graciously prints them at her unsuspecting workplace; unfortunately, she's out of town at the moment), so that, after spending 15 of the last 23 hours starting reinstalling everything (and losing critical data and many necessary work hours in the process), the printer still doesn't work. I mean, that's like in-a-bell-tower-with-a-rifle funny!

Excuse me, I'm going to go to Circuit City and buy a new printer, and see if that might possibly help...

I don't see this on DayPop yet, but this is brilliant political commentary on the recent corporate scandals, in Flash, set to Pink Floyd's classic "Money." Thanks to sister Sue (and kisses to Little Ricky!).

Can't sleep. Too pissed off about computers. So I figured I'd get up and rant about something else. At least it's a rant I've been thinking of writing for quite a while.

I almost wish that I wanted a car, so I could get a weird French compressed air car, but thankfully I have no interest whatsoever in owning a car, and hopefully I never will. I've now been car-free for 18 years. One of the few excellent pieces of advice my step-father gave me that I actually listened to: "You don't want a car, they're nothing but trouble." Last time I owned a car I was 19, a '63 Chevy Belair, like this one, which, rumor has it, was last seen being pushed off the Rimrocks of Billings, MT. Good riddance.

True, I now live in NYC, where it's more impactical to have a car than not, and I don't begrudge friends living in places like Montana, LA, Maine, Maryland and elsewhere for having cars, where it would be completley impractical not to. That said, I did manage four years in SF without one. That wasn't completely impractical, though it certainly gave me a different impression of California. But by that time I'd lived long enough without one that I wanted to see how far I could push it. We rented cars periodically to get out of town, got really good at the buses, took a lot of taxis, and I was in extremely good shape from biking all across town over those hills. We probably would have enjoyed the Bay Area more were we more mobile, but I have no regrets.

Here are 15 reasons why not:

1. I don't have to spend thousands of dollars buying a car.

2. I don't have to spend hundreds of dollars a year on insurance.

3. I don't have to spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a year on unexpected repairs.

4. I don't have to spend hundreds of dollars a year on parking tickets, towing, speeding tickets and the like.

5. I don't have to spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on gasoline every year.

6. I don't get stuck in traffic or suffer from road rage.

7. I don't have to drive around the block for half an hour looking for parking.

8. I don't have to worry about having one more drink for the road, if I feel like it.

9. I don't have to worry about accidentally, heaven forbid, running over someone's child.

10. I don't have to worry about some jerk at the mall putting a huge scratch or dent in my perfect, beloved paint-job.

11. I don't have to feel guilty for being totally in love with a stupid car.

12. I don't have to feel guilty about further increasing the riches and power of Saudi Arabian princes and Texas Republican oil oligarchs.

13. I don't have to feel guilty about rewarding GM and the rest of the bastards for perpetrating one of the most dastardly conspiracies of the modern age (the destruction of public transportation in this country).

14. I don't have to feel guilty about ripping a hole bigger and bigger in the ozone layer as a gift to future generations (here's an idea: don't drive the SUV to the mall; shop online!)

15. To what extent I am in good shape at all anymore is still thanks to biking.

The only real downside is I have to suffer being such a sanctimonious prick all the time.

Per all the below, my email is out till next update. If for some unlikely reason you really need to reach me, call.

A little update, for those of you who can't sleep. Since my rant below, I backed up all the essential data on the harddrive (I hope) and got ready for the big erase-everything step of this fun computer-meltdown thing, but I ran into a little snag. The laptop wouldn't read the "Product Recovery CD-ROM." Rebooted with it in the drive several times and tried to launch it from the laptop OS, but no dice. Every which way I tried, couldn't boot on the disk or even launch any app off it. Great.

So at 12:15am, I call IBM tech support. Five minutes of voice options followed by 20 minutes of uninterrupted easy-listening jazz, followed by five minutes of easy-listening jazz with frequent interruptions to "Please hold on for the next available representative," followed by...nothing. Dead air. Held on that for another five minutes, with frequent interreptions of my shouting "HELLO?!?! IS ANYONE FUCKING THERE?!?!" followed by my hanging up in disgust and cracking another beer.

On top of all that, the trackpad on the wife's iBook is like some kind of stress detector and has gone completely haywire in response to my blood pressure so that I now have virtually no control over mouse functions. Barely keeping bodily functions in check. Plus, about half of the Blogger features are disabled on this ancient hunk of junk.

I really can't wait to see what tomorrow will bring. I'm positively going to spring out of bed first thing to greet this day.

I fucking hate computers. Fucking hate them! My hatred for them at the moment is riled. Details to come in a long series of essays when I get around to it.

For the moment, I am coming to you from a Macintosh, but don't any of you Mac zombies out there take that as a victory. This thing is a piece of shit, too. Still running 8.6 b/c who the hell has time to update the system. Anyway, it's her machine, so the OS is her problem. I was a loyal Apple customer from 1983 (my first machine was Dad's hand-me-down Apple II) till 1998 when my old business partner dragged me kicking and screeming into WinHell. Now you'd have to put a gun to my head to get me to switch back, for reasons maybe I'll get around to expounding upon at some later date.

Believe me, it's not for any love of Microsoft. Tonight, for example, my wrath is particularly directed at their piece of shit operating system, along with Palm, Brother and the whole lot of them, really. Ryze, for example, has sent me four losers in a row who flaked out on me before finishing a design for a new logo. (If you, dear reader are a real designer, email me.) Now Craig's List found me a young computer jock who spent four hours trying to make my Palm sync and my printer print, and left me in much worse shape than when he started. (Needless to say, he'd never heard of blogs. He did, however, remind me there was one other funny thing about Goldmember: the rap video. Tho it's not worth sitting thru the whole movie for. Look for it on KaZaA eventually.)

So, it's 10pm, and I'm going to get started on backing up everything, wiping my laptop clean, reinstalling Win 2000 and then call it a night. Tomorrow should be fun.

As I said, I'll be expounding on this theme shortly in my first column for MediaPost (which I had otherwise been planning to finish this evening), but let me summarize my thesis thusly: The biggest problem that the Internet still faces in becoming a fully developed medium on the scale of television or a shopping channel like catelogs or retail is that, when you come right down to it, computers still fucking suck. The old joke is still true: you've never had to reinstall the operating system on your television or your local grocery store.

I just caught a news snippet on WNYC to the effect that NASCAR has offered to (? - has begun?) training NY police and ambulance drivers on high-speed driving techniques. Searched around on the web, but can't confirm. Would love another source on that, if you know of it.