Monthly Archives: July 2010

Everything that makes Bill Murray…well, Bill Murray!… comes out in this interview in GQ.  Read it now. Because he is very very unlikely to do another one for years.

The History of The Beatles as told by their hair  can be found at the always inventive FlowingData web site.

Can you guess which head belongs to which Beatle?

It’s remarkable how much the Beatles changed their looks in such a short period of time.

If you have seen and loved “Inception”, you might want to go back and see Blade Runner: Final Cut.

In many ways, there is not much difference between the “Director’s Cut” and the “Final Cut”. Ridley Scott lengths some scenes slightly, and there are some small additional scenes (like the strippers in the bar). As well, he cleaned up some things (e.g. visible wires). I recommend the Final Cut, especially if you have only seen the original version of the film with the voiceovers.

Here’s the trailer:

Most guidance from writers for writers is worse than useless. I am not sure if they are trying to be clever, mystifying, or stupid with the guidance they provide, but the conclusion you are lead to is that it is impossible to give good advice to other writers. That’s simply not true, for if it were impossible to give guidance to writers, there would be no “Elements of Style”.

Fortunately there are writers who show it is possible to provide good advise. You can find it here in the LA Times: Janet Fitch’s 10 rules for writers.

Anyone who writes, be it for fiction or simply email, can benefit from reading this.

(Via kottke.org)

As you can see from this article, Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. As a parent, these things worry me. The person who wrote this closes with this:

And parents – children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

If you have the slightest doubt, save them first, and let them complain later that they weren’t drowning and you were overreacting.

(via kottke.org)

This explains alot, actually. From Flavorwire » Awesome Infographic: Hipster Fashion Cycle, and found via SwissMiss.

What is the great music TV show of our time? I was asking myself this after considering older shows like The Midnight Special and Night Music. Certainly there are great shows, like PBS’s Austin City Limits. And of course, there is alot of music video shows (though I don’t consider them great).

What I do think is great and certainly something that captures our time and our popular music is BBC’s Radio 1 Live Lounge. (Strictly it’s a radio show, but YouTube/the Internet makes that distinction somewhat irrelevant.)  It has great performers doing something unique and worth watching / listening to. I blogged about it before, and I recommend you go to the BBC web site or YouTube and look them up. In the meantime, here Lady GaGa doing a great cover — mistakes and all — of Coldplay’s Viva La Vida.

YouTube – Radio 1 Live Lounge – Lady GaGa – Viva La Vida

One pretty cool commercial:

YouTube – DieHard Battery vs. Gary Numan via BoingBoing.

I wrote about this before, but the quality of the video was poor. This version of on YouTube of Amy Winehouse performing He Can Only Hold Her – Doo Wop (That Thing) is Live HD and looks great. Sounds great too. A fantastic version of these two songs:

Sad to say it seems not long ago I was commenting on the new sound of people like Amy Winehouse, and now she already seems like so long ago.

Any place that makes you “Le Happy”

From the always great Oliveloaf Design blog

This is from the 60s, but I saw them in the 80s and they were still great. And decades later, this song is still great. And the perfect summer song.

There have been alot of delays on the TTC subways recently. Blame the G20 and the heat. It can be frustrating to deal with, not to mention unpleasant. What to do?

Well, if the subway is not going to be going your way for some time, and you have a laptop and a Metropass, consider hoping off, heading for your nearest Starbucks, and grabbing yourself a nice cold drink while you take advantage of their free WiFi. You can tell whomever you were supposed to meet that you were delayed, and that in the meantime you are catching up on your email, work, etc. You can also keep track of the subway — I follow @bradttc and @ttcupdates on twitter — so you will know that it is all clear and you can proceed to work (or wherever you are going).

Hey, when life gives you lemons, go to Starbucks and have a Tazo Black Shaken Iced Tea Lemonade! 🙂

Can be found here at http://www.homeperformance.com. They have a complete list of rebates, including advice on what information you need to gather in order to make sure you are eligible for your rebate.

Before you buy anything, make sure the person / company selling you a product or service conforms with the terms of the rebate. Don’t get caught buying an air conditioner, for example, that is not energy efficient enough. Not only will you not get your money, but you will end up with a less energy efficient product, which is doubly bad.  Cavaet emptor.

Then visit this site: everykilowattcounts.ca. It shows you how you can get rebates towards any air conditioner you purchased. Apparently it is retroactive to 2009, which means if you didn’t know about this when you bought your A/C last year, there is a chance you can still apply.

You can use the money to help pay for the new unit. Or you can do some other things around the house to make it even more energy efficient (e.g. replace light bulbs, seal up doors and windows against draughts).

Stay cool.

Is this. Besides the stilted language and the typographical errors, the reply-to email is an AOL site (highly/extremely unlikely to be the source of such a lucrative prize).

Anyway, here it is:

UK Games Commission
Victoria Square House,
Birmingham B2 4BP. London-UK.
Reference: BOGC/9887-44UK,
Batch: 44/0091-BO1/GC2

This Official Letter of Notification is displayed in the order of the 2012 Olympics Games that will next be held in London 2012. Your Email Address was gotten through United Kingdom Information Network Online and above is enclosed your Reference & Batch Number been for the International Promotions Program that was recently held.

Draws of Email Addresses was selected through a computer system from  Thirty Thousand email addresses across the world as part of the IPP and the winning sum for this draw is Five Million Pounds to be shared amound 5 eligible winners from this promotion and by receiving this notification, this makes you an eligible winner to lay claims.

Send your claimaint details to the below contact for payment processing and data programming and further steps of claim will be related with you.

Sex: | First Name: | Surname:| Occupation: |  Marital Status: |  Date of Birth: |  Residential |  Address: | Country of Origin: | Nationality/Citizenship: | Email: | Alternative Email: | Fax #:
Tel#: | Cell#:.

Fill in the details or write it out as it best suit you to send to the contatct below:

SEND DETAILS TO:
Mr. Perry Lyons
Tel: +44 702 402 7924
Email: bogcservice1@gmail.com

Quote your Reference and Batch numbers and avoid unnecessary delay/complications, all funds that are unclaimed within 2 weeks of notification will be revoke.

Congratulation,
Euro Tele Raff
Copy Right 2010

Three ways of dealing with procrastination that you might not have read before — I haven’t — are:

1. Acknowledge the difficulty of doing it (at first): one of the chief reasons I procrastinate is because I have something difficult to do, but I refuse to acknowledge it is difficult.That’s likely why I am not doing it!  Instead what I end up doing is subconsciously avoiding it by doing other important-but-not-as-important things. But if I acknowledge it is difficult, then I give myself some slack and I take other steps to ease the difficulty and get it done.
2. Bribe yourself: if what you have to do is difficult, then find rewards for yourself to motivate you to get it done. It can be small things and it doesn’t have to be monetary, but associating the difficult with something rewarding takes the sting out of the task.
3. Give yourself copious amounts of time to get it done: I find sometime that I have something difficult to do and little time to do it, the little time to do it in is my excuse for not doing it. One way to overcome that is to give yourself lots of time to do something. For example, if there is some unpleasant chore that I have to do that I can do in less than an hour, I will give myself three hours to do it. Even with procrastination, I will eventually get it done in the three hours.

And now a fourth step. After you complete the task, review the difficulty of it. Was it really that hard to do? If the answer is no, or not usually, then make an effort to acknowledge that it wasn’t that hard, then write that done or log it somewhere as a reminder to yourself for the next time you have to deal with a task that you are procrastinating about.

If you goto Youtube.com and search on “Midnight Special”, you will find a wealth of music from the late 1970s and you can see the progression of music from folk/disco to New Wave. You might think that the 1970s was only about disco, but there were lots of styles then, and the end of the decade was trending towards edgier music.

A great example of this is The Cars, who, like Cheap Trick, combined band members that embodied different styles of music yet came together to provide an integrated sound.

Here’s “Lets Go”

Can be found here at http://www.lauriegrassi.com/. Laurie has been working hard at it and the results are obvious. But don’t just listen to me: go see for yourself.