Scare Your Son and Scare Your Daughter Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Arcade Fire’s second Greek show a huge improvement over first
  While Win Butler running up the stairs at the Greek was cool, it wasn’t quite David Byrne doing laps around the US Festival stage at the end of "Life During Wartime" a quarter-century ago. However, you really can’t go wrong when the last two songs of a set are "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" and "Rebellion (Lies)" — the latter of which is the best anti-sleeping song ever.
• David Hyde Pierce is officially out
  This just in: "Frasier" reruns are going to be banned in Poland.
• Springfield, Minn., to Simpsons: Drop dead
  While we don’t necessarily disapprove of one of the Springfields not wanting to become part of the marketing juggernaut that is going to surround "The Simpsons Movie," we do note that they could do it with a little bit more, uh, humor. And also, no doubt Mayor Quinby would describe his Springfield in exactly the same terms.

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Earlier this week Google unveiled the new Street View feature on Google Maps. Street View takes the mapping service to a whole new level. Where previously we were awed by the detail of the aerial photography overlaid on Google’s mapping system, now users can zoom down to street level to see exactly what’s happening in any given neighborhood. It’s all there in Google Street View — every car, every pedestrian, every stray tabby.

Not surprisingly, the feature has met with mixed reviews. While most people are appropriately impressed by the technology, more than a few people are concerned by the privacy implications. Yesterday Boing Boing kept tabs on all of the interesting discoveries bloggers were able to find in just the first day of the Street View’s availability. There was a crazy lady concerned that her cat had been photographed, a guy walking out of a strip club on O’Farrel Street, and loads of innocent bystanders who just happened to be out walking around the day the Google van rolled through their neighborhood.

Predictably, “concerned citizens” are crawling out of the woodwork complaining that Google is on the verge of becoming Big Brother. Some fear that Google has access to too much information. I say that’s Nonsense. If anything, Google doesn’t have access to enough information. In the near future, when Google has access to ALL data, we’ll finally see some really innovative applications and services.

Like these:

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Historically,That’s Been the Case Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Why Apple TV is a dud
  Apple TV has been a huge disappointment (but we told you it would be). Still, it makes a great sushi platter.
• Music site Last.fm bought by CBS
  One of the first social music sites sells-out to CBS. The move doesn’t come as a surprising given the upcoming changes in royalty rates. Deep pockets are now required for anyone wanting to stream music from from the web. Let’s just hope that Last.fm remains relatively unchanged by this merger.
• Watchdog backs off "Teletubbies" comment
  Apparently, it turns out that they might have more productive things to do that ferreting out possible "promotion of homosexuality" — whatever in the hell that even means.

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Several reports today that Apple has started its experiment with offering music that isn’t restricted by any Digital Rights Management. They are calling it iTunes Plus — I guess that the “Plus” is the freedom to do whatever you want with the songs you download.

Which, of course, shouldn’t really be a plus, but rather a default. But “iTunes Default” or “iTunes As It Shoulda Been In The First Place” probably wouldn’t have gone over too well with the marketing folks, so “iTunes Plus” it is.

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Most of my peers wangled tickets to Cannes. There’s no reason for them to be at Cannes — we get screeners and free tickets, despite our lowly status on the motion picture totem pole — but it’s important to be seen. And you see a lot at Cannes, if you know what I mean. After Cannes, as we all know, the summer season begins in Hollywood.

Things are a little shaky, schedule-wise, now that Thursday are the new Fridays. It’s common knowledge that you can’t schedule anything on Friday. Now you have to navigate around “doctor’s appointments” and “leaving early because I can” issues on Thursday. Also, you cannot make any sort of solid plans for Mondays. Things happen.
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While you were busy capitulating to the worst President any of us will ever see in our lifetimes, here’s what we were looking at:

• A Small Piece of Advice For NBC Re: The “Friday Night Lights” DVD - Get it out there, now! I did read this week in the Chicago Tribune that they might be releasing it this summer, but there were no further details than that.
• Mike Gravel Meets The Metaverse - The instantly controversial Ronin Kurosawa takes on the Gravel Campaign in Second Life. Perhaps he should do a test run of his NI4D in Second Life itself — let the majority choose how its run — and see how that works out.
• They Wanna Bite The Hand That Feeds Them - Reason #459,098 that that music industry has pretty much not just lost its way, but it’s lost its way to finding its way.
• Better Than The iPhone: The Lightning Phone! - Somebody actually asked in the comments section if this was a hoax. To which I respond: of course not. We here at Medialoper do not traffic in hoaxes.
• Your Pocket Vibrator and You - Fun Fact: If Sherilyn had done her “That’s What I Like” about text messaging as actual text messages, it would have had to be broken up into 38 separate messages!

Face Your Fears And Watch ‘Em Die Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Jonathan Lethem, Richard Posner, and others reveal their favorite fonts
  We don’t begrudge ‘em for it, but right here is proof that Slate has pretty much packed it in for the weekend. For more proof, see the piece below, which could have been written anytime in the past 20 years.
• Why Chevy Chase’s Fletch is so abominably bad
  So many things to say here. First off, whatever comedy reputation "Fletch" has had over the years is more because it’s long been considered the best of the Chevy Chase movies, as opposed to a true comedy classic. Also, this seems so random, so left field that we wonder if that it’s even deserved. If maybe the 30-year backlash against Mr. Chase should finally be laid to rest.
• Facebook Opens Up to Developers
  It’s a whole new definition of "social networking."

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Cheating! That’s what I like, and it’s what I’m going to do right now. Three months back when I was still writing about Second Life, I tangented on the subject of text-messaging:

Hell, when I first heard about text-messaging, I scoffed. Scoffed, I tell you! I even remember whennish and whereabouts I was: walking down the Embarcadero in 2000 with my supervisor at CNET, a fellow who was much more on top of cutting-edge technology than myself. He was telling me about something called text-messaging, which was either just introduced in American or was about to be, but was all the rage overseas. I was five stubborn years away from even considering a cell phone, and text-messaging sounded like the most impractical thing ever. Words on a cell phone screen? And typing them via the number pad? Puh-leeze. As if.

The obvious punchline is that I’m now a text-messaging addict. A junkie. A filthy carpal-thumbed 160-character whore, I am. I got my first cell phone in October 2005 for use during a well-intended if poorly-attended book tour. (If you ever want to read to six rows of empty folding chairs near the Canadian border, drive to Bellingham, Washington. Builds character.) Empirically speaking I would still be alive right now, but emotionally I suspect the trip would have killed me if not for text-messaging. Waking up to messages from my girlfriend Vash made waking up seem worth the effort at all, and furiously thumbtyping back and forth with a friend during a particularly rough patch somewhere between Portland and Seattle was an excellent outlet.

Damn, quoting myself like that was all meta ‘n shit, wasn’t it? And certainly not narcissistic. It’s all true, though, and the ensuing quarter of a year has done nothing to diminish my love of the textiness.

A lot of people call it impersonal. I think it’s like any other form of communication: it’s as personal as you care to make it. Some of the coldest, most meaningless conversations I’ve ever had have been face to face, and I’ve been known to get teary standing on a streetcorner clutching my vaguely communicator-esque phone, SMSing away. (Last Saturday night around half past ten at Church and Market in San Francisco, dressed in black, long blonde pigtails, smeary eyeliner? That was me.) Language is too powerful to be entirely stymied just because it’s on a screen 1.25″ wide and 1.5″ tall. If they have a personal context, the word no can be devastating or yes uplifting or vice versa no matter how they’re conveyed.

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Fish in the Percolator Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Tough act to follow say musicians
  UK licensing rules are harming the musicians they aimed to protect.
• Copy-Protection Game Changes From Whac-A-Mole to Keep Away
  Ah, the challenges of being a hacker in this modern world.
• Borat’s Glorious Guide to the U.S. and A.
  New book that will blow the travel writing industry wide open.

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OK, sure, everybody is all anticipatory for Apple’s upcoming iPhone, which is set to conquer the world in a few short weeks. And why not? It’s essentially got everything: web, email, text, music, and it runs fracking OS X, to boot. And yet, it’s not even out yet and Nokia has gone and potentially trumped it.

Because Nokia is adding a true killer app to one of their upcoming phones: the Lightning Detector!

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