Dear Zagat,
Please stick to what you’re good at….
I really don’t need to read about cellphone carriers with “spotty service,” customer reps who “can’t tell incoming from outgoing” and don’t “speak English,” and “lame apps” that “don’t stand up” to the “iPhone.”
Posted in Gadgeteering, Unhappy Media
Tagged cell phones, guides, reviews, wireless carriers, zagat
You can take the hipster out of Brooklyn... but not out of her awesome shirt.
Ellen Page, everyone’s favorite post-Dawson’s-era sesquipedalian teen brought to you by everyone’s favorite post-pole stripper scribe, is writing and producing a new show for HBO called “Stitch N’ Bitch,” (seriously) which “follows two painfully cool hipster girls as they relocate from Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood to Los Angeles’ Silver Lake enclave in hopes of becoming artists — of any kind,” (seriously) according to the Hollywood Reporter. Of any kind – whatever the fuck that means.
The show’s premise initially gave me the sense that we’d have some kind of reverse “Simple Life” Hipster Edition on our hands. Two girls in Urban Outfitters flannels over teal high-rise skinny jeans puff their asymmetrical bangs with incredulous exhalations as they deal with the myopia and artistic vapidity of the privileged Left Coast elite. But sources in the 415 tell me that Silver Lake is just “California’s version of Williamsburg,” which I guess means that conflicts of a cultural nature will be kept to a minimum. I’m trying to fathom what the point of moving the characters from NY to CA is, then. Maybe one of the girls has asthma.
Possible upside: HBO’s overexposure of hipster culture to the washed masses stirs a sea change in the ‘Burg, all ironic mustaches get shaved off, vests go back to being part two in a three piece suit, and the L train is safe to ride once more.
[Via laist]
I lament the demise of cassette tapes as an acceptable form of music-listening and the subsequent obsolescence of car tape decks. And while I don’t condone melting your tapes, if there’s a coolest way to do it, this guy Brian Dettmer has got it down. Not only is this awesome skull sculpted from old cassettes, it includes recordings from such hard rock luminaries as Motley Crüe and Judas Priest.
Dettmer also seems to appreciate encyclopedias and science reference books as much as I do, if much more creatively. How dope is this “altered book” piece entitled Science in the Twentieth Century:
Click the photo above for more tome-manipulations, and check out Designboom for more awesome cassette tape artifacts, including a ram skull and a full skeleton.
Posted in Unhappy Media
Tagged brian dettmer, cassette tapes, defacing books, judas priest, motley crue
Ah, the power of the media to mislead. This truly riveting segment from a Massachusetts CNN affiliate reveals a new Tufts University policy against getting it on while your roommate is in the room and that prohibits “sexiling.” The piece confuses on two counts.
It makes Tufts students look like idiots and implies that they are getting lucky. That’s not how I remember it. Well, to be fair, there were plenty of idiots there.
We all hear plenty about the Death of Print, but rarely of Death by Print.
According to the BBC, a box of informational pamphlets dropped over a rural province of Afghanistan by Britain’s Royal Air Force struck and killed a young woman in June.
The box was supposed to open in midair, letting the leaflets’ message (about free elections or somesuch Democratic nonsense) float peacefully to the ground. A light sprinkling of liberation. But it failed to break apart during free fall and landed intact on the girl, who died later in a hospital.
“Leaflet drops,” said the BBC piece, “have been used extensively in Afghanistan by US and British forces in the battle to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local population.” Not this time, I reckon.
(BBC, from Wired via Boing Boing)
William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md., on Sunday. He was 79.
Over the weekend we lost our country’s most popular authority on words, the preeminent pundit of parlance. William Safire’s weekly On Language column in the New York Times Magazine was to usage mavens what US Weekly is to celeb-o-philes, and has been, to me, a consistent source of intellectual delight and professional inspiration. In fact, in June of last year Safire briefly noted at the end of an article that his researcher had taken another job. I took that as a cue, and sent him an earnest, if obsequious email pleading for the opportunity to apply. “I have oft pondered ways,” I admitted, “that I might scam my way under your tutelage.” (I received a call a few days later for an interview. Unfortunately the job was in DC. In retrospect, perhaps I should have considered the relo.)
From the Times obit:
The columns, many collected in books, made him an unofficial arbiter of usage and one of the most widely read writers on language. It also tapped into the lighter side of the dour-looking Mr. Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like “the president’s populism” and “the first lady’s momulism,” written during the Carter presidency.
There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
I should have known those rules were his.
I doff my digital cap to Mr. Safire. Here’s hoping I can help forward the cause for correctness on Earth, and that heaven offers an abundance of malapropisms, lest eternity be boring.
Posted in Unhappy Media, Write and Wrong
Saw U2 at Giants Stadium last night. Ahem, and the night before. Amazing show? Obviously. It’s U2. Bono is the ultimate showman (even if he can’t remember the words to his songs anymore) and the band’s as tight as ever (even if Larry Mullen Jr.’s starting to look a little tired). This was no question.
The stage was impressive, a transplantable theater in the round, surmounted by an enormous claw-like structure supporting a 360-degree jumbotron of the highest-resolution I’ve ever seen. Hilariously, Drum Master Mullen was quoted in the September issue of Spin as saying, in re the set up, “We don’t need another Pop Mart.” Yeah, this was much more tasteful and restrained than the giant lemon, sure.
In the same brief article, Bono explains that on tour the band aims to let the latest technologies push their shows to new levels. And I will certainly give them that. The screen was good. It was real good. In fact, it was too good.
Posted in Gadgeteering, Unhappy Media
Tagged bono, giants stadium, larry mullen jr, tom krueger, u2
In yet another example of the foreign media unable to tell the difference between nonsense and news, Germany’s national news wire was taken for a ride yesterday by a merry band of movie makers and fake rappers. Behold:
Here’s what DPA, Germany’s national news wire reported this past September 11th:
A terrorist attack occurred in the city of Bluewater, California. The suicide bombers were German rappers, the “Berlin Boys”.
A half hour later DPA issued a correction: there had been no bombing. The “Berlin Boys” are not a rap group. The city of Bluewater does not exist.
It was all an elaborate publicity stunt to promote the satirical German film Short Cut to Hollywood. Filmmaker Jan Henrik Stahlberg and his team fooled their entire nation by creating fake websites and videos:
Here’s the fake city of Bluewater (link).
Here’s the fake local Bluewater news station, KVPK (link).
And here are the “Berlin Boys” with their club hit “Hass”:
Story from Boing Boing. More info at Wired.
Posted in Information Stupor Highway, Unhappy Media
Tagged berlin boys, bluewater california, DPA, germany, rappers, terrorists
“We’ve since learned that the fun site runs false and juicy reports based on a historic incident.” So went the spot-on encapsulation of the Onion‘s editorial mission, as summarized by Bangladesh’s Daily Manabzamin tabloid newspaper. The revelation was part of a correction for reprinting an Onion story that reported Neil Armstrong had been convinced the Moon landing was a hoax.
Indeed a sad moment in global journalism. Ironically, it sounds like an Onion headline itself:
Bangladeshi Tabloid Reprints False Story, Gives the
Onion Fleeting Sense of Credibility
My first reaction to the story (via BBC News) was a hearty “Oh, my.” Then it just became funny.
But overall, I’m going to go with troubling. Thing is, true journalism and entertainment have been colluding for a while — The Daily Show, naturally; Smoking Gun; blogs in general, etc. etc. — but as they become more and more dangerously intertwined we should be becoming more and more vigilant. And we’re not. Quick example: I’d like to think that the recent news that Wikipedia is going to control the editing of the bios of living notables is a sign that we’re beginning to embrace the notion of accountability. But more likely it’s just a result of some PR team raising a stink about embarrassing facts making it into their boss’s page, and making their lives hell. People want the scoop now and they’ll take the apologies later.
I guess the real takeaway here is: If you’re going to read Bangladeshi tabloids, do so with a critical eye.
Posted in Unhappy Media, Write and Wrong
Tagged bangladesh, Daily Manab Zamin, Daily Manabzamin, moon landing hoax, neil armstrong, onion, wikipedia
Jay-Z — erroneously — heralded the death of Aut0-Tune with DOA, but where was he on the death of hip hip on the hiz-ole? The press materials on this new T-Pain Auto-tune app for the iPhone, which uses his studio technology to turn your voice into that wavering, wobbly filtered shit you hear every time you turn on the radio, captures the problem pretty neatly:
only I Am T-Pain allows you to become that star you always wanted to be. Just sing into the mic and listen.
So what you’re saying is that it really is that easy: Just Auto-Tune that shit and you’ll sound like any other modern rap hack. Here, see it in action. Old folks, JAPs and any average white guy, instantaneously as good as T-Pain.
Maybe it sounds like I’m just being a hater. And, fine, maybe I am. But my hating is fueled by love. Love of a genre that’s getting auto-tuned down the freakin toilet.
Posted in Unhappy Media
Tagged auto-tune, DOA, i am t-pain app, jay-z, smule, t-pain
No Happy Medium 