This superb video by fiilmaker, Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis addresses the first point. According to the artists, “Davis wrote the beautiful poem and performed in the video which Dorfman directed, shot, animated by hand and edited. The video was shot in Halifax, Nova Scotia and was produced by Bravo!FACT http://www.bravofact.com/“

You can see it here:

And find it here on YouTube – How To Be Alone

Not only is it a superb video, but it is also a video with quite alot of views. For the story behind that, see this blog post, Viral solitude – updated  at the always good Contrarian blog.

All in all, some excellent work by fellow Nova Scotians. As much as anything about the video, the N.S. settings, both inside and outl, made me homesick.

What am I talking about? Mini-goal chalkboards! You can see a number of them here at the always delightful blog, oliveloaf design.

Go to a dollar store, buy some paint, brushes, and small chalkboards with chalk, and soon you can have your own version.
So add that to your list of two things to do today:

1. buy supplies to make your own mini goal chalkboard
2. make your own mini goal chalkboard

See? Already you are having a productive day!

Jonah Weiner at Slate Magazine has a great review of Inception (How to make sense of all those dreams-within-dreams in Inception) that does a great job of tackling some of the criticisms of the film. If you’ve seen the film, and then read the reviews, I recommend you read his review. He nicely takes them to task.

And then there is this smart comment of his:

If there’s an element in Inception that mitigates the bleakness, it’s the giddy way in which Nolan pilfers from cinema history. The alpine showdown and Mombassa street chase are straight out of James Bond and Jason Bourne. The deathbed set in Robert Fischer’s unconscious recalls the Star Trek holodeck. The zero-gravity fight scenes evoke both The Matrix and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The spectral wife, Mal, haunts our hero like Hari in Solaris. Added up, Inception is something of a love letter to some of Nolan’s favorite films, and his extracting, forging, architecting heroes are not simply culture-bludgeoned victims, but emblems of that liberated Postmodern figure, the remixer, who bends and subverts mass culture to his will.

The more I think about the film, the more I am starting to think that it is a masterpiece that will be talked about and analyzed for time to come.

John Dickerson and his team at  Slate Magazine   have done an impressive review of how well Sarah Palin and her team manage her Facebook page in order to present her best side, so to speak. I was impressed not only by the analysis, but by the effort Palin and company put into the managing of comments on the page. Whatever you think of Sarah Palin and her politics, you should look at what her folks are doing. Just like Obama did during the last Presidential campaign, she is serious about social media, and it shows.

The film Inception has alot of ideas, but one I don’t hear people talking about is the notion of privacy. After all, what the characters are doing is an extreme case of invasion of privacy. There is alot to think about when you watch the film, but when you watch it, think of that, too.

For other thought on How to think about privacy, check out the rough notes I jotted down after reading Mark Zuckerberg say The Age of Privacy is Over, here on this blog, Smart People I Know.

Thanks!

Over at Slate is a great article — actually, it’s more a great conversation — by people with their own theories Inception. (Brow Beat : Five Ways of Looking at Inception)

While I like what the author, Nina Shen Rastogi, has put together as a list of ways to think about the movie, I highly recommend you also read through the comments. They are insightful, and the debate and discussion going on in that section is really good (unlike the commentary on alot of other sites).

Afterwards you may want to go back and give the film another look. I have seen it twice now and reading this article and the comments makes me want to go back and see it again.

P.S. There is talk about there being alot of material taken out of the movie: if so, that could make for a fantastic DVD when it comes out.

P.S.S. While the film is very intelligent in terms of content, it is a great film in cinematic terms, too. Here’s a trailer.

Even though I have not made many long distance trips by plane, most of them have more or less followed this humourous visual diary found at
amygeek’s posterous  site. For example:

Nice.

Thanks to Adam Schwabe for sharing this.

Rihanna’s Rude Boy feat. Miss Rani Taj ( The Punjabi Dhol Mix ) [ Awesome ]

Read this: At the Bar – But for the 14th Amendment, the Bill of Rights might not guarantee very much. – NYTimes.com.

Currently the battle is about preventing foreigners from having their children becoming American citizens. But the 14th Amendment is about much more than that. It is part of the Reconstruction Amendments that were created after the Civil War. They are three of them, and according to Wikipedia: “The Thirteenth Amendment (both proposed and ratified in 1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (proposed in 1866 and ratified in 1868) included a redefinition of citizenship, the Privileges or Immunities Clause, Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Fifteenth Amendment, (proposed in 1869 and ratified in 1870) grants voting rights regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. 

I find it mindboggling that anyone in the United States, especially anyone who knows the history of these amendments, would think of changing them. But read about them and decide for yourself.

How? By following the example set by this man at The Sartorialist.

He is wearing a simple outfit, but his shirt is a very casual dress shirt: white, loose, and rolled up; it makes him more dressed up than someone in a T shirt or a polo/golf shirt. Likewise his shorts are also casual, but they are dressier than cargo pants or swim trunks. Finally, he uses accessories really well and they also dress him up. Not to mention that he is wearing shoes, not sandals or swim shoes. It’s a great outfit that would look great reading in a park or on a patio in terribly hot weather. Smart.

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.

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.

It’s hard to know where to start with what is wrong with this article: Why Johnny can’t code – Education in Salon.com

First off, the author is making a virtue of a necessity we once had as users of computers in the 1970s and 1980s. Back when personal computers first came out, programming them in BASIC was something you did because, well, there wasn’t much else you could do with them! If you wanted your Commodore PET or 64 or TRS-80 to do something, you needed to program it. Later on came wordprocessors and spreadsheets that allowed you to use the computer without having to learn programming. But first, you had to program.

Second, most kids I knew back then did NOT use a computer. Did not program. That was for geeks.  I think that will always be the way it is with new technologies. There are a minority of kids who are tinkerers and changers of things, be it cars, computers, or some other new thing in the future. For the rest of them, they will be just happy to drive the car, or use the mobile phone or play the video game.

Third, young people have access to vastly more free technology and tools than kids of the 70s and 80s did. There is so much open source and free software to program with and use, be in Java or Python or Javascript or Clojure. You name it: there’s something that is easily downloadable with lots of great documentation and examples anyone can use to get coding.

Fourth, personal computers have had more layers of abstraction added to them, true, and you have less control over them than we had back then. But I would argue that as new technology comes along, that kids have that chance again. I am thinking in particular about mobile application development. Also, I look to things like Arduino devices which young people can get, attach to their computers, and program. It’s the same thing as kids from the 70s. In fact, looking at Arduino books and tech, it reminded me of being a kid back in the 70s. There’s still the same opportunities, but instead of programming the PC they are programming something else.

It’s a good article, and I think it is worth a read, but it subscribes to view of that time that I don’t have.

Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel in NYC

From Photos: Celebrities by The Times in 2010 – latimes.com

John Graham-Cumming, in his post, How to write a “Malcolm Gladwell Bestseller”, dissects the essence of Gladwell’s approach to bookwriting very successfully.

At first consideration, there seems to be something signfigant that Gladwell is attempting to say. But there is less there than it seems. It’s very good writing, and it is no worse and arguably much better than alot of business writing centered on case studies. But as this author says, they are a collection of interesting essays, and not a strong argument for some grand new idea.

While they don’t go as well together as other colours, this is a superb example of how to pull it off

It works well here because the brown suit is mid tone brown, while the blues are either very dark (shirt stripe, necktie) or very light (handkerchief).  To make it even better, he matches it all with a caramel colour briefcase. Lighter browns with reddish tones can work well with dark blues, and very light blues can work really well with dark browns.

Not surprising, this man is Florentine and was featured on The Sartorialist blog. The link is now gone.

P.S. The quality of the photograph, with the muted lighting, and the soft yellow/green walls and the terra cotta planter in the background, make it look even better. Then again, all the shots on this blog are great.

P.S. Thanks for reading this. If you have found it useful and you’d like to say thanks by buying me a coffee, you can do so here. Thanks! That’s awesome!

Via nymag.com

It’s this one:

Found on the always very smart blog, swissmiss

ThinkGeek totally pwns the lawyers of the National Pork Board. See: ThinkGeek :: Blurgh! The ThinkGeek Blog – Officially our best-ever cease and desist (via Andrew Sullivan).

Then you should read this: Hobbyists Use Etsy to Trade Day Job for Hard Work – NYTimes.com. This quote sums the article up well:

“Etsy saved my life,” Ms. Gibran said. But, she added, “this is the hardest job I’ve ever had.”

As anyone who has tried to make a go of it running a small business can tell you, it’s alot of hard work. Then again, it could be the best work you’ve ever had.

In this good article summing up the dire economic condidtion that California is in (California on ‘verge of system failure’ – The Globe and Mail), there is this quote:

Billionaire Warren Buffett, who advised U.S. President Barack Obama during his White House run, suggested recently that a Washington bailout of California and other troubled states is inevitable. How, he wondered, can Washington deny California after saying yes to General Motors, AIG and dozens of banks.

“I don’t know how you would tell a state you’re going to stiff-arm them with all the bailouts of corporations,” Mr. Buffett said.

Warren Buffett is a smart man when it comes to money, so I am wondering how he could have made that comparison. For the companies that accepted (or were made to accept) bailout money had to do so with signifigant strings attached. I wonder if the same could be said for states that were to accept bailout money. Would California turn governing over to the Feds? It seems unlikely, so that comparison seems invalid.

That said, there is a model of how this could be achieved that is already being demonstrated in the U.S. It’s the Race to the Top program that is part of the Stimulus Act (ARRA, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009). Perhaps something similar could be put in place to spur reform in areas other than education.