This is perhaps my favorite song of the past year (and by year, I mean 12 months, not just 09′ thus far), the Cut Copy remix of Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Forget”. In actuality, it’s less a remix than it is a brilliant mashup of “Never Forget” and Lifelike’s “So Electric” - a genius stroke that actually improves BOTH songs. The song starts slow and then begins to build towards anthemic proportions at around the 1:15 mark.
You know the scene in “Risky Business” where Joe Pantoliano’s character is chasing Joel and Miles down Lake Shore Drive after they pick up Lana from the Drake? Imagine this song playing in the background during that scene.
The domain Ad.com sold for $1.4 million yesterday at domain name registration company Moniker’s TRAFFIC conference in Silicon Valley. The winning bidder was Divyank Turakhia of Directi.com and CEO of Skenzo, a domain parking company.
Moniker made more than $2 million in domain names at the TRAFFIC auction, with Ad.com taking the highest bid. Bottledwater.com took the no. 2 spot at $45,000 and Athletic.com received the third highest amount, selling for $40,000.
$1.4 million may sound like a lot to spend on a domain, especially given the current state of the economy. But Ad.com is a two-letter domain that is easily pronouncable and actually means something, so it’s definitely valuable in the domain market. And a recession doesn’t seem to be stopping companies from spending the big bucks for desirable domain names so Turakhia may be able to flip Ad.com for a profit. Travelzoo bought Fly.com for $1.8 million in January. Vibrators.com was sold for $1 million a back in November and A&T’s YellowPages.com paid $3.85 million for YP.com in December.
This article is great. At the bottom the author talks about the hypocrisy of dressing like a hipster to reject the main stream culture. My opinion if you truly don’t care how you look, you would get dressed like I do. Take which ever jeans, shirt, underwear, and socks are on the top of the pile. And my cleaning lady is kind enough to place the clean clothes on the bottom of the pile so I don’t constantly wear the same 3 shirts.
Hipsters are taking a great bashing on the Internet these days, and it’s hard not to join in the uncharitable fun - contemporary urban fashion is at its most ridiculous point since at least the late 1960s, and there is something so cleverly smug about the skinny-jeans artist brigade that they cannot help but annoy. You have probably seen the “Hipster Olympics” video on YouTube, a fake contest in the spirit of Monty Python’s “Upper Class Twit of the Year,” in which young New Yorkers compete in choosing ironic T-shirts, photographing themselves for MySpace and criticizing a jock. So now I encourage you to check out my current favourite hipster-mocking site, the rudely named “Look at This [Expletive] Hipster,” which is a collection of candid photos of real people on the blog site Tumblr.
LATFH, as we will call it, is modelled on the famously cruel Vice magazine “Dos and Don’ts” photos, in which an anonymous, violently misogynist and racist, and very funny voice made comments about unfortunate people photographed in the street. There is the same tone here.
But where Vice magazine praises, with masturbatory enthusiasm, some of its subjects (the Dos), LATFH is purely negative. It’s all Don’ts. Which were always the funniest anyway.
Here are three textbook hipsters, for example, standing on the lawn of some college campus, all stick men with mandatory hipster slumped shoulders and mops of unwashed hair, in their super-narrow jeans and their striped T-shirts and their oversized glasses, and they are looking with some boredom at a girl sitting on the lawn in front of them, and she has a blanket over her legs. The caption reads, “There better be some torn leggings, bruised thighs and tattered cowboy boots under that blanket, or we are out of here.” Which actually made me laugh out loud. Or here is an extremely skinny, pale, androgynous boy in dark glasses, sitting next to his identical-looking girlfriend on the subway, and the caption reads, “I’m sorry. This is the last time I’ll ask, but are we a lesbian couple?” And here is a guy with the most unbelievably hideous, greasy mullet, big 1970s spectacles, an ugly mustache and a nasty acrylic sweater. He is saying, “Why yes, I do have ironic pubic hair.”
Now yes, of course, this is a juvenile and conservative humour, and it is not cool to find sexual androgyny ridiculous; it usually indicates some kind of insecurity. I have been on the receiving end of it so much in my life I am surprised by my own hostility here. Why is it that the hipsters irritate me so? I try, I try hard, to see something subversive or rebellious or aesthetically interesting in their determinedly ugly clothes and their determinedly unimpressed stance and I just can’t.
I see a certain hypocrisy: The hipster pose is of someone who rejects fashion, who is wearing second-hand clothes because she is poor and refusing to buy into consumer culture, who makes fun of sensual subcultures such as Goths and dandies, and yet the outfits she invariably concocts are so odd they cross the line into flamboyance. If you combine your second-hand 1970s dress with huge plastic sunglasses and canvas running shoes, you can’t deny you want to be looked at. And then of course there’s the weedy, whiny music, and the lack of interest in any cause or intellectual issue, other than possibly environmentalism (the default cause of the sensitive dropout).
The twist on hipster mockery, of course, is that (like all vicious satire), it comes from inside. That is, you have to recognize the subtle hipster tropes, which means that you are probably pretty much a hipster already. I myself wouldn’t be so irritated if I didn’t live in the thick of them. Vice magazine is the prime example of this self-deprecation, and LATFH itself is deeply in-the-know. One picture, of a guy in a plaid jacket listening to headphones, is captioned, “If I didn’t already know I was listening to Animal Collective on these headphones, I would bet myself $100 that I was listening to Animal Collective on these headphones.” Which is, of course, only funny to a hipster.
Indeed, this kind of photo blog, and Tumblr itself, are madly hip. This is exactly how hipsters communicate. Tumblr is a site where, for free, you can create your own “tumblelog,” a blog that is usually a collection of photos, links and oddities rather than of written entries. Like Twitter, it represents microblogging, a trend away from the page-long texts and arguments of blogs and toward brief flashes. You could call it post-literate.
And like any good Internet meme, LATFH has spawned iterations with similar names. “Look At This Lovely Hamster,” for example, is exactly the same, except it’s pictures of hamsters. Is it a parody, is it ironic, or is it completely serious? What’s the difference? I can’t tell. That’s how hip it is
In the race to the dumbest overreaction to the swine flu, Egypt jumps out to an early lead.
Or if not the dumbest, then perhaps the most offensive.
As just about anyone who’s watched four minutes of TV coverage or picked up a newspaper has been informed, you can’t get swine flu from eating pork. Nor is there any reason whatsoever why Egyptian pigs would be even fractionally more likely to be carrying the virus today than they were a week or a month or a year ago. The risk of the virus spreading across the globe comes solely from human-to-human contact.
So why is Egypt culling all of the more than 300,000 pigs in the country? Probably because it can.
When 90% of your population doesn’t eat pork, and there’s a virus named after pigs that’s causing worldwide panic, the political benefits of screwing over the 10 per cent who do eat it probably outweigh the negatives.
If that just meant that Egypt’s Christian population had to eat more chicken for a while, it would be hard to get worked up. But those Egyptians who raise pork - of whom there must be a significant number, if there are more than 300,000 pigs in the country - just had their livelihoods yanked out from under them.
If they weren’t part of a minority group, you have to figure they’d at least get compensation. Instead, Egypt’s health minister has informed them that no compensation is needed, because they can still sell the meat from the pigs being killed off.
That would be a great plan, except that it’s highly unlikely that the roughly 8 million pork eaters in the country would be up for consuming 300,000 pigs all at once at the best of times - let alone when the government has basically just finished linking pork to a potentially deadly virus, which has to at least subconsciously dull one’s appetite a bit.
On the list of the world’s great injustices, this little saga isn’t at or even near the top. But it does demonstrate that - outside of Mexico, obviously - overreaction to the swine flu has so far done more damage than the virus itself.
*This movie sounds hysterical. Not in this article, but of public knowledge, is the fact that my main “Miami Vice” Don Johnson is also going to be in this movie in the role of a porn director (spoofing Burt Reynolds in “Boogie Nights”). Nick Swardson is hilarious. Dorff is the man. Can’t Wait
"You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
From Variety:
Greed is good, once again.
After weeks of rumors, 20th Century Fox has set Oliver Stone to return as helmer of the sequel to his 1987 hit “Wall Street.” Shia LaBeouf is also in the mix for “Wall Street 2.”
LaBeouf is negotiating to join Michael Douglas, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in the original pic. The sequel will once again involve a young Wall Street trader, and the recent economic meltdown spurred by rampant greed and corruption will fit prominently into the plot.
LOS ANGELES — Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone are back together again with a sequel to their 1987 hit “Wall Street.”
Douglas is reprising his role as Gordon Gekko and Stone is on board again to direct the sequel, which for now has the working title “Wall Street 2,” said 20th Century Fox spokesman Gregg Brilliant.
Brilliant said the project is timely and relevant given the state of the world.
“We need to keep the story line under wraps, but it’s literally ripped from today’s headlines,” Brilliant said. “It’s going to be very big and very cool.”
With the economy and financial markets in a tailspin, it will be different times for Douglas’ Gekko. In the original film, corporate raider Gekko was a symbol of Wall Street greed and corruption during the boom era of the 1980s.
Gekko has endured because audiences give him the “same kind of respect we’ve got for the great white shark,” Douglas said in an interview Friday with Associated Press Television News for his upcoming life-achievement award from the American Film Institute.
“He’s a villain. Gordon Gekko is a great, old-fashioned villain,” Douglas said. “And, interestingly enough, if you look at most actors’ careers, their biggest achievement, not necessarily success, but (achievement), is playing a bad guy.”
Academy Awards voters agreed. Douglas earned the best-actor Oscar for Gekko.
The sequel is scheduled to start shooting this summer. Edward Pressman, who produced “Wall Street,” also is back for the sequel, while Allan Loeb (”21″) wrote the screenplay.
"Fuck a Blackberry!"
"You get me a tip on Bluestar, and I'll give you Heidi Fleiss's phone number...kabeesh?"
This was taken from the Freakonomics Blog. It was written by Author Steven Levitt:
Coke has a new ad that declares that only two people know Coke’s secret formula, and if something happened to one of them, the formula would be lost forever. It then goes on to talk, facetiously, about all the terrible things that would happen to the world if something bad happened to one of the two men and the formula was lost forever.
Perhaps I’m just losing my sense of humor, but every time I see the ad I get aggravated.
First, and this is not so important; if two people know the formula, then if something happened to one of them, the formula would not be lost. So what they don’t say, but must mean, is that there are two people who each know half the formula, and nobody who knows the whole formula.
More fundamentally, there is no way in the world that only two people know Coke’s secret formula. If that were really the case, then the shareholders should be filing suit against management. Are firms allowed to just blatantly lie in their advertising? Not that it matters, but I find it strange that a firm would knowingly say something like this when it is completely untrue.
(As an aside, the question of how much Pepsi would pay to get Coke’s secret formula has a surprising answer.)
Coke isn’t the only company lying these days. I was on an airplane the other day, and printed in capital letters on the headset the airline provided in the seat pocket in front of me were the words “OPERATES ONLY ON AIRCRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE.” It’s not hard to figure out that statement is not true. One look at the plug would tell you. Or if you wanted more concrete evidence, you could stick it into an iPod, perhaps even in that critical takeoff and landing period when all electronics must be turned
off, and prove that it works.
They are not the best headphones in the world, but at least sound comes out of both ears (which is more than I can say about the next best pair of headphones in my possession); so until I return them on my next flight, they will just have to do.
I was going to write that this didn’t surprise me, but it actually does because it’s not the FOX News channel.
The network is turning down the president’s request to show his prime-time news conference on Wednesday. The news conference marks Obama’s 100th day in office. Instead of the president, Fox viewers will see an episode of the Tim Roth drama “Lie to Me.”
It’s the first time a broadcast network has refused Obama’s request. This will be the third prime-time news conference in Obama’s presidency. ABC, CBS and NBC are airing it.
Fox Broadcasting Company issued a statement on their motives:
“The Fox Broadcasting Company will not air the Presidential News Conference,” Fox said in a statement. “Fox’s sister networks, Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network, will air the press conference in its entirety. Fox will be alerting viewers with an onscreen graphic at the top of the 8:00 PM (ET) hour that the press conference is available on Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network.”
If John McCain or George Bush were giving a prime time news conference, FOX would be giving it wall to wall coverage. Being the only network not to broadcast it kind of hits home the right wing bias that Rupert Murdock has brought to television. If Bill O’Reilly or Chris Wallace start whining about President Obama not appearing on their network they can only look at their own behavior, but this is much bigger than that. This is the president giving a speech to the nation at a critical time in our history and FOX just passed.
According to TechCrunch Verizon has been in talks with Apple over the release of the newest iPhone slated for this summer. However, an article today reports that Microsoft is now in competition with Apple to control Verizon. With so much Apple blood in the Verizon water, it was only a matter of time before the Microsoft shark surfaced.
A new report in The Wall Street Journal suggests that Microsoft is also talking with Verizon about getting a device on its service. To be clear, this apparently is not just a standard new Windows Mobile device, as there are already plenty of those on the Verizon network. What this apparently is, is some sort of new device, designed in part by Microsoft, but developed by a third party. This device is said to include access to Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile — its app store.
Once again, the codename “Pink” is being thrown out there. It’s been the subject of much debate over the past several months as to what Pink actually is. Some thought it was a Microsoft-built phone. Others thought it was simply the name of the Zune software tied into the Microsoft’s mobile experience. The WSJ report seems to indicate now that it’s a sort of cross between the two.
One thing seems clear: Microsoft is very interested in what both Apple and Google have done in the mobile space. Windows Mobile 6.5, which has been all but dubbed a “hold-over” until Windows Mobile 7 is ready, isn’t due until later this year. Windows Mobile 7 doesn’t seem likely to be on phones before late 2010, at the earliest. If Microsoft is thinking about branching off a bit with a new type of device/experience, that’s probably a smart play to stay in the rapidly evolving mobile game.
But can it score an exclusive deal with Verizon? That seems unlikely if Apple really is open to bringing its devices to the carrier as well. And how does Android play into the carrier’s plans?
The domain Ad.com sold for $1.4 million yesterday at domain name registration company Moniker’s TRAFFIC conference in Silicon Valley. The winning bidder was Divyank Turakhia of Directi.com and CEO of Skenzo, a domain parking company.
This was taken from the Freakonomics Blog. It was written by Author Steven Levitt:
I was going to write that this didn’t surprise me, but it actually does because it’s not the FOX News channel.
According to TechCrunch Verizon has been in talks with Apple over the release of the newest iPhone slated for this summer. However, an article today reports that Microsoft is now in competition with Apple to control Verizon. With so much Apple blood in the Verizon water, it was only a matter of time before the Microsoft shark surfaced.