Sharing the music
As part of my renewed appreciation for the cloud, I’ve been uploading my collection of live television music performances, circa 2001-02, to my YouTube account. This is, of course, in blatant disregard to all copyright law. Sue me (or at least send me a strongly-worded takedown notice).
So far my efforts have been successful, save for live performances from Saturday Night Live. NBC Universal has a tight hold on those, and all four attempts I have made at uploading different clips have been rejected.
NBC, through Hulu, has made great strides in recognizing the usefulness of digital distribution. It’s disheartening, then, to find out that three-minute clips of shows aired over six years ago remain taboo.
Like sands through the hourglass
In this interview, Pamela Paul, author of “Parenting, Inc.”, slams Baby Einstein while also neatly summarizing my early childhood daycare experience, courtesy of my grandmother:
Baby Einstein is one of the most successful marketing bamboozlings of the American parenting marketplace. There is absolutely no evidence that Baby Einstein makes your baby smarter. We forget that 20 years ago, there was no programming for babies. If you wanted to really occupy your kid, if you didn’t have a playpen, or if that wasn’t enticing, you just turned on the TV and stuck them in front of “Days of Our Lives,” and they would stare at it. The fact is that they may even have gotten more from “Days of Our Lives” than they would from Baby Einstein, because it was actual human faces emoting, as opposed to these random blaring images.
Oh, how I long for the days of Totino’s Pizza, “Days” at noon, and Grandma Dorothy. (Via)
Honorable mentions
Several items, all deserving of more than just a quick link:
Pee-Wee makes a comeback
Paul Reubens, AKA Pee-Wee Herman, was on NPR’s Fresh Air today. The interview coincides with the DVD release of the complete Pee-Wee’s Playhouse collection. At the request of Reubens, the interview stayed far away from the unfortunate movie theater incident in 1991 that put an end to the show as well as his questionable art collection that was seized in 2001 (Reubens explains). What was aired was a fun look into the development of the Pee-Wee Herman character, the show, and a better understanding of Reubens himself.
To say I was (am) a Pee-Wee Herman fan is an understatement. My best friend, Buff, and I religiously watched his show every Saturday morning and went through a period in our childhood where we watched the movie about twice a week. We had all of the best lines memorized, could point out all of the production shortcomings in it, and yet laughed our heads off every time we watched it.
By the time of Reuben’s arrest in 1991, we were starting to outgrow our extreme fascination with Pee-Wee, but it was still a disappointment nonetheless. His TV show was a classic and was cut short of the long life it deserved.
Public Radio on the Web
One of the downfalls of living in Pittsburgh is the lack of an all-news Public Radio station, such as KNOW in Minneapolis. WDUQ does a fine job in the morning and early evenings, but the presence of Jazz the rest of the time has forced me to look elsewhere for informational edification. AM radio here is full of sports talk blowhards and right-wing nuts, both of which I do listen to, occasionally, for laughs.
For the past month, I have been enjoying a public radio station out of Boston, WBUR. I first came across it in the dark days of post-election America when I was looking for coverage of Kerry’s concession speech. It offers free, around-the-clock streaming audio in the three major streaming media formats. The quality of the stream is surprisingly good and the shows it broadcasts are top-notch.
I like the station so much that tonight I set up a $5/month pledge for a year. Even though we’re pretty much dirt-poor right now, this is a worthwhile $60. After all, without it, I would have missed out on hearing Pee-Wee Herman today. And that would have just sucked.
Optical illusion weirdness
This do-it-yourself optical illusion is really amazing. Not believing the video, I downloaded the PDF file and assembled it myself. And, amazingly, it works! The effect of slipping into and out of the illusion is somewhat akin to playing Q*Bert for a long time – at some point, your eyes will cross and everything that was concave is now convex and vice-versa. It’s disorienting but also very cool.
Patterns, patterns, everywhere
Although I haven’t read the book, I am familiar with the ideas of Christopher Alexander, as illustrated in his book A Pattern Language. His ideas inspired Design Patterns in the field of software engineering, and helped other disciplines break down their complex ideas into simpler components.
This website recognizes the networked structure of Alexander’s book and presents it as a series of interconnected pages, allowing one to build up a collection of patterns that can be applied to a specific architectural problem. Although it may be of limited direct applicable use to most, if one is creative with metaphors and abstractions, inspiration may result.
Computer Sweatshops
By the looks of this article, working at Electronic Arts is anything but a good time. 80 hour weeks? Some weeks, I can barely make it through 40.
More BT love
Thanks, Ben, for pushing my BitTorrent obsession even further. Now we’ll absolutely never need to get cable TV. Downloading and watching a genius episode of South Park such as this one all in less than 30 minutes was an eye-opening experience.
The end of an era?
Well, it had to happen sometime. Rumor has it that Ken Jennings lost on Tuesday, his 75th appearance on the show.
It will be odd watching him continue to win – due to the time difference between the taping and airing of the episodes, he’s going to be on for at least another month. It’s like watching American Beauty knowing that from the beginning, Lester Burnham will be dead by the end of the movie (“…in less than a year I will be dead. Of course I don’t know that yet…”).
How will Ken lose? Will it come as a sudden surprise in the midst of his usual utter domination, or will it be a long time coming, caused by fatigue and perhaps even paranoia of those scrambling to take his spot? Will the person that beats him put up a brilliant game, or will Ken’s downfall come solely from within? If not too many more details leak out and spoil the fun, the episode itself could prove to be a big event in popular culture (Ken Jennings is already enshrined in the annals of pop culture). No doubt it will be among the most-watched game show episodes in history.
