November 2007
22 posts
Have you ever really watched the credits of a...
I just did. It’s a rather amazing enterprise. A vast collaboration. All those names. The writer, director, the lead actors, the children in the classroom, the man doing tai chi on the part bench. Prosthetics. Craft services. Subsidiary craft services. The person in charge of instant messaging effects. Vocal coaches. Editing. A bass player. A person whose sole job it is to tape down power...
I Fall to Pieces
What does a kiss mean in our kind of relationship?
A truce of lips? That though we’re both animals,
you won’t bite? After necking in the cemetery,
I felt scattered as that married couple’s ashes.
You read their plaque aloud: TOO BAD, WE HAD FUN.
Hope my crumbs and dust wind up feeding a cactus
whose fruit becomes your tequila. You’d drink me,
and I’d enter your...
Grrrr. Open Source Software.
I was reminded today of my love/hate relationship with Open Source. I couldn’t find any software to do what I wanted except TWiki (an open source structured wiki), so finally, I go to all the work of getting it installed, setting it up. It’s so lovely. So perfect. So powerful. So customizable.
Then it breaks, and I have no idea what to do.
“Freedom is participation. Freedom is distribution. Freedom is
interaction. ...”
– Jack Balkin, Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society 79 N.Y.U.
L. REV. 1 (2004)
The doggie lived. And we had this moment together: he gazed into my eyes and licked my face in what I think was the first moment of unconditional love I’ve ever felt. This was after he ate the chocolate, of course. Dogs are like whores. Their needs are perfectly base, and if you’re the one to fill them then their affection for you is boundless.
And I do love that poem.
S
1) It should be “which” pref “for which I am caring”
2) If it is a big dog or white chocolate don’t worry.
3) If it is a small dog make it drink charcoal and water until it throws up.
4) Buy another identical dog just in case.
5) Your dialogue in your Startup Musical is excellent. Proust used to
torture rats too.
6) I thought you may enjoy the poem below.
...
shbrown: Emergency! My sister's puppy (whom I am... →
Taking People Out of Politics →
Disparate Values May Still A Democracy Make →
Generalizing the Business Model
It’s about building demand before you build supply. Something similar to The Point.
The Last Two Lines of Kurosawa's Noir Film,...
Teenage girl to doctor (wide eyed): "Will-power can kill TB, can't it?"
Doctor to teenage girl: "Not just TB. It's the most important cure for humans."
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
– Leon Trotsky
Virgil: do I have people skills?
Sister: you have cult leadership skills
Like a Bird on the Wire
Ed Burns is the former Baltimore city homicide detective, who was one of David Simon’s sources when he wrote the crime beat for the Baltimore Sun. Now, they write the HBO television show “The Wire” together.
They met in 1985, when Simon was covering the criminal career of Melvin Williams, and Burns was the lead detective investigating him. Burns had an encyclopedic knowledge of...
“Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain.”
– The Believer - Interview with Dave Hickey
shbrown: Reading Emily Dickinson:
"Faith" is a... →
“More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to...”
– Margret Talbot, Stealing Life (a piece about the HBO television show “The Wire”), The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2007
A New Business Model for News
People pay not in the role of subscriber, but as patrons of the news they want to read.
I’m not a fan of citizen journalism, since I don’t want amateurs writing articles. I think news should be written by those that have the training to investigate, write, and behave socially as journalists. But, I think there may be something in citizens funding the media they want. They might be...
The Street Oscar
Filming on city streets in marginal neighborhoods carries its peculiar risks and rewards. On one occasion, a car involved in a high-speed chase smashed into one of the actors’ cars, and everybody had to dive out of the way. Another time, a man got shot yards away, staggered onto the set trailing blood, and was treated by the show’s medic. Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of...
“There’s a common myth that security and liberty are opposites, that...”
– Bruce Schneier in BW Online | September 2, 2003 | “We’ve Made Bad Security Tradeoffs”
More than 60 Chinese are serving time in prison... →