Here’s a few treats for today… Have fun playing the De-Animator, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s collection Herbert West: Reanimator (which you can read online; also made into a great pulp movie). If you like playing House of the Dead (one of the few video games I don’t completely suck at), you’ll love shooting the living [...]
Comic Lit: Groovy, Man
Nothing heavy here, man. Just a couple notes on some righteous comics from the past. Comic books have a mixed record on dealing with current events. I would argue that they did a pretty good job just before and during WWII. You may know that most of the major superheroes ended up fighting the Axis [...]
Gladwell & Kenna
I’m a big, big fan of Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, even though I’ve only directly written about him once on this blog. Gladwell devotes a chapter in Blink to the musician Kenna. Esentially, Gladwell writes that Kenna is clearly talented and is respected as such by industry insiders, but can’t [...]
A Spammy Proposal
From time to time, I have kept on eye on spam activity and viral content that turned out to be spam (or at least commercial). Someone entered an item in the comments on this blog and when I checked it out, it seems spammy to me. I post this item to shine a light. The [...]
Get on the Vote
I raved about it when I saw it at Silverdocs and I raved about it again this week, since it’s airing on TV. It’s a terrific documentary called Please Vote For Me and you’ll love it. Check out my new Spot-on column: Pretty Please, Vote For Me You can also see clips here and here. [...]
Days of Future Past
On the Oct. 21 edition of his radio program Le Show, Harry Shearer made the following observation: I’m amazed, ladies and gentlemen, that if thirty years ago you had placed a couple of seemingly obvious bets, you would have lost your shirt. Bet number one: On the night [10/2/76] when John Belushi and Joe Cocker [...]
WebbyConnect: Poppies, Pups & Profanity
There are other very interesting things I learned at the WebbyConnect conference. Global cultural things. The Tall Poppy For example, I was talking to an Australian guy about how sports figures are treated down there and he introduced me to the concept of the tall poppy. It sounds like the equivalent of the Japanese expression [...]
Radio and Salad
Here’s another excerpt from Fred Allen’s 1954 account of his time in radio, Treadmill to Oblivion, referenced below. He is describing his next venture after his first radio show, The Linit Bath Club Revue. I believe these events took place in 1932. This led to our next radio venture, the Salad Bowl Revue, which was [...]
WebbyConnect: Know Your History
Another interesting panel was “Your Favorite Video is a Commercial,” which had a lot to do with viral marketing campaigns utilizing amusing or interesting content (typically videos) that people love and share and while loving and sharing them, they do Corporate America’s bidding. Examples include Dove’s “Evolution” ad and Burger King’s Subservient Chicken website (or [...]
WebbyConnect: The Future is Calling
Last Thursday, during the WebbyConnect conference, there was a panel entitled “Hear, See Everything (Except This)” with Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr, and Shawn Gold, Head of Marketing & Content Development for MySpace. The general topic was the issue of privacy in the age of social networking. But it popped to mind because of [...]