Critique

Don’t like The Hives — still

While I love Swedish rock bands, I do not like the Hives. It’s just too much of a winking send up of the Rolling Stones in the late 70s / early 80s, too much mugging for the camera, too much focus on the outfits. I don’t like the late nite MTV ads with the skinny white guy dancing, struggling in a sweater, cavorting on a running track, or using gum to anchor his drink. I hate ads that are designed to annoy. That’s all.

Let me just say.

Theocracy sucks because men doing things in the name of God always ends up messed up. Keep church and state separate.

Ad I hate

I hate the Charmin bear ads. I mean, there’s a famous joke about bears and their necessity in the woods, and I think that this commercial is attempting to trade on that …. But … But … Ugh! It’s freaking disgusting “Don’t squeeze the Charmin” - Yes I’d prefer that by a mile. A trade of goods and commerce from the inventory stocking gentleman. But relieved ursae? Yeaaach! Imagining a bear needing toilet paper, if you’re lucky, merely gets dismissed as an absurdity and the mind rejects it. But if your mind lets it go past then – as I said before

More Ads I hate

“Waking up with the King” from Burger King. Some plastic headed monarch is on the other side of the bed when I wake up? HELL NO. That’s almost as bad as the Charmin shit-bear ads.

Yet even more ads I hate

OK - the Pepto ads where the people are doing the butt cheek grabbing conga. Ugh!

Ashlee Simpson, outed as lip-syncist

Why’d you have to lipsync your SNL appearance? And why didn’t your band ad-lib, start over? You’ve been outed as a Milli-Vanilli. The Train Wreck. At the end she blamed the band. Classy. I guess that’s why they kept on playing instead of helping you. Update: Update:

What to say....

Michael suggested in a comment to yesterday’s post that my pleas had fallen on a God whose ears, like Odysseyus’ oarsmens’, was stuffed with wax. Well, like Bono’s God - who doesn’t need Jimmy Swaggart to get money for Him - my God really doesn’t give a flying flip at a celestial donut about politics. I suffer no ire at the Almighty on this one. So here we are, facing the reality of a second Bush term in office, what am I to think, to do? Well every president walks into a world full of contingencies and issues that were not directly of his making.

Someday there will be a German word for this

word here: To needlessly remake a movie and, in doing so, demean the enjoyment of the original, raise contempt for its content, and raise ire against those that quickened the bastard spawn second version

Is stevengharms an e-snob?

Today I ask a question of great importance, is Steven G. Harms a snob in the key of e- ? Surely he is a musical snob, cursing the fan of Ashlee “I dance like i just pooped in my pants” Simpson as well as they who favour Slipknot or the Insane Clown Possee. But today a certain lady in SoCal proclaimed: you’re a techno-snob When I asserted that:

Need a job? Proofreader at AOL?

Anyone see something wrong in the pope’s activity?

Paris Hilton porn-burger

I just ate the Paris Hilton porn-burger. It was awesome. And I like that the ad pisses people off.

Emailing Corporate Overlords: McDonald’s

Have you seen the latest McDonalds ads, the creepy bobble-headed animated people going on about their “fruit buzz” ? It’s only slightly less creepy and irritating than those weird plastic suit people they used in the Energizer ads a couple years ago. In light of this, I thought I’d give Mickey D’s a smack of the cluebat and sent them the following email through their contact mechanism: I would like to encourage you to fire your ad agency. The last 3 years have been marked by horrible press for McDonalds followed-up with horrible advertising. Are the people who hire your advertising campaigns so out of touch that they consider 4 creepily animated women talking about a “fruit buzz” an insightful way of communicating “here are some healthy options”?

McDonalds wrote back

On the up side, they’rea responsive organization. Here was their take: I’ll put my commentary in blockquotes. Hello Steven: Thank you for taking the time to contact McDonald’s. We’re sorry you were disappointed with our advertising. We take pride in producing commercial messages that will be enjoyed. We certainly never intended for it to offend anyone [I didn’t say I was offended, I just thought it was bad]. Your comments have been shared with our advertising staff and independent advertising agency who work together to develop our commercials. Please know your feedback is helpful and will be considered in the future planning of our commercials.

More mau-mauing McDonalds

The League of Melbotis has taken up the standard of people mau-mauing the bureaucrats in the corporate overlordship. The League’s excellent sense of humour shines through in his mailing to the Golden Arches located here.

A movie cliché? that must go away`

Man engineers a machine. Lighting bolt! Machine becomes sentient. BONUS: Machine goes rampaging after bolt BONUS (alt.): Machine teaches mankind about being human Witness the latest clich? debacle: “Stealth”.

Finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The juggernaut that feeds J.K. Rowling’s bank account is not to be stopped and I, for one, shall certainly not be tossing myself beneath the wheels to use my corporeal mass to stop its onslaught. I visited Borderlands Books after the book’s release after grabbing a tasty cr?pe breakfast with my girl Elle chez Ti Couz. We headed up from 16th on a lazy Sunday past the hipster botiques and furniture stores as we picked our way up Valencia. I had only planned on grabbing a copy of Piers Anthony’s Macroscope, but I wound up favoring my independent bookstore my custom by grabbing the Anthony work and taking HP6 on the way.

Ethical birth-control OR The Coldplay Experience?

He was referring to the fact that ethical birth-control pills, the only legal form of birth control, made people numb from the waist down. Most men said their bottom halves felt like cold iron or balsawood. Most women said their bottom halves felt like wet cotton or stale ginger ale. The pills were so effective that you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell him to recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, and he wouldn’t miss a syllable. … The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral.

Interpol!

Thursday night Elle and I went to visit lovely downtown San Jose to see avant-garde rock band Interpol play. It was an excellent show in an intimate venue. Paul Banks’ powerful voice really belted out strong song after strong song. I was worried that I wasn’t going to hear “Roland” but they closed out the show with it. I was so pleased.

Finished...Macroscope

Today I finished Macroscope by Piers Anthony. Back in junior high I was really into Piers Anthony’s Xanth series. The original 10 or so of these books were very pleasant reads at the time. They had a real knack for suspense, humor, wordplay and mischief. I had put Anthony’s work away as something from a younger time, but recently, while doing some research on Snow Crash, it was noted that Macroscope also made use of the concept of an information bomb, a set of instructions that when encountered by the mind, could render it inoperable. I thought that perhaps it would provide some insight from the framework Stephenson was using for Snow Crash.

Worried about the new season of Numb3rs...

Today I had the chance to watch the season premiere of Numb3rs and I’m pretty worried about where it’s going this season. Here’s what made the first season work: Mathematically / scientifically competent technologists (nerds) #1, portrayed by hot women A really interesting family dynamic between genius Charlie (David Krumholz), FBI big-brother (Rob Morrow), and Dad (Judd Hirsch). What’s it like to be the older brother while your younger brother is at Ivy League? Assuming that the audience might actually be smart It was for all these reasons that I was sure such an inventive show would be cancelled. It scraped by, but I’m sure the no-talent, formulaic bozos up in CBS management had some ideas on how to “improve” things.

Steven on the state of pop music

I’m not a fan of the pop genre but here’s my dictum. The greatest pop singer in the world at the moment is Kelly Clarkson who is shedding American Idol now that she’s milked all that image was worth. Go Kelly. You can sing beautifully. The best pop song on the radio is Natasha Bedingfield’s “These Words” which is so happy and ecstatic it should make you bubble where you sit. It has an interesting writer’s block angle to it that I really like. Besides, this may be the first and last song where Keats and Shelley get name-dropped.

The upside of Empire: Rudyard Kipling

I was reading in National Geographic about the domestication of dogs and they cited a bit from “The Cat that Walked by Himself” from the Just-so Stories. When Wild Dog reached the mouth of the Cave he lifted up the dried horse-skin with his nose and sniffed the beautiful smell of the roast mutton, and the Woman, looking at the blade-bone, heard him, and laughed, and said, ‘Here comes the first. Wild Thing out of the Wild Woods, what do you want?’ Wild Dog said, ‘O my Enemy and Wife of my Enemy, what is this that smells so good in the Wild Woods?

Concert promoters need a reality check

At the Interpol show the tickets said that no cameras were allowed…. …yet it’s very obvious that the presence of recording devices such as cameraphones, phones used to record the music, and Canon Elph cameras would not be denied. It’s time for BGP and artists and promoters to come to their senses and realize that they cannot stop the shrinking and fidelity improvements of taping / recording / image producing devices. They should take an attitude whereby for some sliding scale percentage they will let you have access to a recording area. The better the equipment, the bigger the royalty.

The social bobcat lashes out against FoxNews

The Bobcat works in an office where all dey he is bombarded by FoxNews’ hysterical right-wing lunacy. Cracking, he opined: The Social Bobcat: i’m getting sick of seeing this alarmist news all day long Steven: FoxNews: scaring you shitless so you stay at home, watching us The Social Bobcat: Bird Flu! Are Stocks Next Target? How Will Inflation Affect The Cost of Your Ride on Charon’s Boat to Hades?

An in-depth explanation of the Asherah virus, as described in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

I finished Snow Crash a while back and was very pleased with the book. One aspect I found lacking was a discussion of the Asherah virus’ ( a key plot focus ) history, operation, place within the larger evolutionary scheme of

Reviewers without reviews

When researching reviews on the internets, I became aware of a particularly interesting development that I call the pure meta-review. It seems that it is more hip to discuss movies in purely meta-film reviews, perhaps because no up-and-coming edgy writer or _writer of substance _or _person writing as a day job until their 4 short-story novella is released _wants to be so mundane as to address the actual plot (was Kael the last honest movie reviewer?). Let’s take The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as an example. Now, in the run-up to the release of the film quite a lot of review ado was made from the question of “is this movie / is it not an secret weapon in the Christian front’s attempt to introduce all children to the Crucifixion?

Posted a number of articles over at nanostalgia.com

On The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe On Brokeback Mountain

Suck it ESPN - ‘Horns win the Rose Bowl

You couldn’t shut up for weeks and weeks about how USC had it in the bag. Just because the school is in the backyard of your corporate parent’s theme park, that’s no excuse to downplay the blood, sweat, and grit of my alma mater, The University of Texas. I am so proud of those men out there, and I enjoyed paying my Chili’s tab to the USC cheering waiter with my Texas Ex charge card. I looked into that mass of orange bodies, their hands moving to “The Eyes of Texas” in unison and I remembered the sunny days on the bleachers at Memorial Stadium, the windy ass-cold days in late October (usually the Tech game, who knows why), and how that song was the backdrop to a moment where the students and the players and all the spectators knew that somehow an “us” was being created.

I saw "Pirates II", it wasn’t very good (1/2)

I’ll just be another voice joining what appears to be a chorus of voices in saying that the latest installment of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise was a gross disappointment. I am a complete and total movie snob. It’s pretty hard to get me to go see a film, much less say that I thought it was good. Occasionally (twice) I have been proven mistaken: “Anchorman” and “Pirates: Blah Blah Black Pearl”. The movie disappoints on multiple levels, but let’s go with my primary concern, the storytelling angle. Isn’t this really the reason we go to the movies, to be amused by a good yarn (as a Neil Stephenson character would say)?

Pirates II continues to disappoint (2/2)

I had another idea in my previous post, but didn’t want to muddle up that round of bitching with this point. You’ll need to read the previous post to probably get where I’m coming from in this post. I said: Pirates I led us to ask the great spiritual questions of all time, and Pirates II distracted us from finding those answers. I, for one, am angry about it. The fact that both of the movies are being made simultaneously indicates to me that these most important questions will be ignored - and so I’m not expecting much for the second film.

Pre Thanksgiving goings-on

Hello my dear readership. Yesterday Lauren and I woke up late and had brunch at La Madeline in Westlake Village. It had been years since I had eaten at one of these fine provençal-style French cooking establishments so, upon rising later in the morning, it seemed like the perfect brunch spot. I had forgotten what a nice establishment it ( they ) are. The wood has that well-sanded French farmhouse feel, the chairs are simple, yet sturdy, and the cuisine prefers grainy breads and farmhouse produce. We found a solid oak table near the multi-paned glass windows and enjoyed our meal in the aenemic winter’s morning light.

Finished "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy

First things first, there is nothing manlier than the name Cormac McCarthy. I think if it were that name stitched into a leather belt… versus …a Ford F150 with a poker table in the bed around which cowboys were drinking a case of Black Label while arguing over football while getting straightrazor shaved by strippers while puffing on Cuban stogies …I think the name on the belt may have an edge. If you have a last name that can bear that manly weight, then I beg you, give us more Cormac-en. About The Road, it’s an unsentimental and very realistic portrayal about life after a global firestorm.

The Art of Dating A Developer Part I: Twitch Mode

In effort to contribute something to the internet community more substantial than my musings on music, people in the environment, and a laundry list of “what I did today”, I have decided to undertake ( perhaps ) a series of writings about living with the technology-minded partner. Today I will write on what I have come to call “twitch mode”: what it is, how it affects relationships, and how you and your partner can handle its presence. Your guy can’t focus on you, your attention is distracted after a day hard at work, everything feels too slow, after juggling chainsaws all day you feel like you’re can’t be involved at home?

Broadway shows not needing to be made...

I still subscribe to the Bay Area TicketMaster email to make sure i’m up on whose touring. Regrettably their search for Austin fixes on San Antonio and as Austin lacks an Amphitheatre-type venue ( thanks be to the FSM, PBUH ), it’s easier to say “oh, The Decemberists are on tour, where are they playing here?”. In any case, in my latest update I saw…. Omigod It’s the Pre-Broadway Premiere of Legally Blonde The Musical

Thoughts on Atlanta

I didn’t get to experience very much of Atlanta, being that I was whisked from the airport to the site, but I did have a few moments of interaction with the locals and I was struck by how different black / white relations are in this city. Atlanta may be the most racially integrated place I’ve ever been ( I’m talking to you, California ). This was a complete surprise. In California and liberally-minded campuses, we hear a lot about Diversity: this post-PC concept that all rational, enlightened people are supposed to accept and adapt to as they mature and move through life.

Steven: An Advertiser’s Best Friend

Millions of dollars each year are spent figuring out how best to position a product within the aisles of a grocery store. For the pleasure of having a rickety cardboard kiosk set up on the corner a company will pay a premium to the store owner, or, in to the drug store chain that Lauren and I were patronizing this afternoon. Now, as I walked past this kiosk I thought to myself: “This name is horrible, how can I improve this?”. And then the answer became clear….

Nancy Grace gets a lesson in ....

…Realizing that her show is a zero-value add to the news discourse …Having guests show the miracles of lip injections …Realizing that her crew thinks she’s a hack Meditate, young grasshoppers.

Political Correctness Trips over itself

I’ve recorded how I was recently in Boston at the beautiful Westin Boston Waterfront hotel. The foyer is beautiful, the bar dark and sleek, the staff courteous. In every way a high-calibre hotel should be enjoyable, it is. Ancillary to this aesthetic, when turning on the beautiful plasma LG screen, you are given, instead of some graphic menu of “here are the movies we hope to bilk you an extra x bucks for”, a rotating series of interactive vignettes with this lovely, non-offensive, pretty, but not threateningly hot-pretty, conservatively-dressed, non-Caucasian ( because we’re down wit’ diversitay ) lady as your virtual interlocutor.

Begging the question

I have a philosophy degree and, as such, I am uppity and snippy about a great many philosophical ideas that the non-philosophy-degree-holding public ( that is to say, those not asking “want fries with that” as the heart of their occupation ( I kid, I kid, my decadently over-educated bretheren )) believe they already know plenty about. Much like an engineering magazine left in marketing, which leads to promises of Flux Capacitors in the next release, the non-Philosophy students occasionally get exposed to strange ideas which enamor them and which they begin to speak of regularly and, more dangerously, knowingly.

Dorky or Awesome? Iron man and "Iron Man"

So The League informed the world of the availability of the Iron Man trailer. I must say Downey looks like he’s caught the disaffected playboy / Bush-era military-industrial-complex profiteer turns warrior for good ( but with a hint of misanthrope ) lightning in a jar in a way which is not “just the character formula of Batman” yet again. He can do that because he’s an excellent real actor. See counter-example: But the thing I’d like to lens in on is the use of Black Sabbath’s Ur-Metal song, uh, “Iron Man”. “Iron Man” is the Epic of Gilgamesh of Heavy Metal.

Reiser story coverage made worse by Gawker Media ads

Once upon a time there was a genius software developer named Hans Reiser. He used to join Linux forums and lambaste other hackers as being foolish, prodigal, indolent, and was generally a bit of an egomaniacal ass. In other words, par for the course in the world of software development. But then he was indicted, and convicted, for the murder of his wife amid a tale of S&M;, Linux development ( intimately linked ), Russian internet-ordered brides, and infidelity. A crucial feature of the trial was, well, that the cops couldn’t find the body. Upon being found guilty, Reiser seems to have copped a plea with the judge such that he could get a lesser sentence in exchange for the victim’s family and, nota bene, his own children being able to lay the body of their daughter / mother to rest.

Quotes from "Bicycle Diaries" by David Byrne

I really enjoy David Byrne as a commentator, artist, pretty much anything, except as a singer and except as the icon of the Talking Heads. I just am not really into their music besides the obligatory “Psycho Killer.” That said, the Heads were an influential musical act and I can hear their reach far and wide into today (No Talking Heads, no Lady Gaga). But I have always liked Byrne’s commentary and interviews, he seems like a really interesting cat and is a standard bearer for what my friend Alfredo calls “The White Guys who Make World Music (Sting, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, et al.

Finished: Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein

I’ve always had a soft spot for noir. Men are men, dames are dames, bartenders sling murky off-brand whiskey when they deign to look up from the LA Times crossword where they’ve been stuck on 46 across all day, the corrupt win, and with any luck the good scrape by to see another day, sometimes. This genre’s icons bear hard names like Chandler, Hammett, Leonard. The form dictates roughing-ups, sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, lonely codas of reflection and loss, and sticking it to Mr. Big, when you can, and the general chill that comes from the inescapable realization that it’s still all law of the jungle out there and that sometimes when you win, you lose.

I, too, am glad I did not come of age in the age of the internets

I think Ryan and I must be on a similar wavelength lately as I too was thinking the exact same thing as him: I am thankful to not have come of age in an era where the internet’s depthless hard drives could store my equally depthless teenage narcissism or youthful folly for-ever. As an early (may I say that?) adopter in the general populace (1994, dial up Unix shell on a SCO-V UNIX) of the Internet, I didn’t get off scot-free. Thanks to BBS’ and Usenet, I managed to write some pretty inane things (e.g. “Are you excited about Mike Modano and the Dallas Stars?