Guesswork

A couple of articles about music downloading caught my eye last week. The first was the news that the Songwriters Association of Canada wants somebody - the government, I guess - to tack an additional five bucks a month onto our Internet fees to help pay songwriters and artists for illegally downloaded music. I can […]

Does hair really equal sex? For me, I’m lucky enough to have a full, lustrous head of hair which if my maternal grandfather is any indication, I should expect to carry into senesence and the next life, so I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the Hair Club for Men.
However their […]

Predictions

About a year ago, I posted a lengthy, poorly researched piece suggesting that user-generated video was not the future of on-line entertainment because most of it sucked, and that professional content would be the mainstay of the YouTubes of tomorrow.
Well kudos to me for stating the obvious, because now Businessweek has jumped on my […]

From Asia, where it’s impossible to tell whether they take their Christianity very seriously or are mocking it all to hell, comes the Cross MP3 player. Manufactured by Chinavasion, this gadget is perfect for rocking out while you’re waiting to be Raptured.
The Cross comes in 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB sizes and […]

In a three-way battle royal of limelight hogs, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are begging Britney Spears to hand her dogs over to her ex, bestubbled opportunist Kevin Federline.
Now I’m a dog lover myself (although a little peevish this morning because Rupert crapped on the carpet for no good […]

If you want to reflect on both the prescience and the profound injustice of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame observation, look no further than Chris Crocker. He’s the hypersensitive 19-year-old who got 8 million hits on YouTube with his weepy shrieking defense of fellow Southern eccentric Britney Spears.
Now based on this vid, his […]

I’ve been watching a lot of TV lately and I’m intrigued by the rise of the modern anti-hero. The concept isn’t new, of course; audiences have sympathized with the deeply messed-up from Macbeth to Dirty Harry. However, small-screen wise, we seem to have entered the golden age of the bad guy we hate to […]

As in old school for realz; Business Week reports that an increasing number of older people are logging on to Facebook. Stats show that 41% of visitors to the networking site are over 35, and that doesn’t even account for those who are lying about their age.
The article caught my eye because I’m one […]

It’s rarely a good idea for corporate executives to be pitch-folks for their own companies. Wendy’s Dave Thomas had a homespun manner that let him pull it off, and Christine Magee makes it work for Sleep Country Canada because, lets face it, she’s kind of hot. However, having watched Galen Westons’ first spot […]

Just when you thought we’d maxed out voluntary human uglification with the piercing-branding-tattoo thing, Australian artist Stelarc has raised the bar with by implanting an ear made of cartilage into his forearm. At this point the ear doesn’t actually hear or do anything except look grotesque, but I imagine the chicks will […]

Some days I just hate people. The National Post reports on a survey that confirms what was already pretty obvious - Canadians are willing to work to save the planet as long as they don’t have to do anything personally.
In spite of all the rhetoric and fevered Inconvenient Truth-watching (17% named the […]

How did I miss this story for 2 days? The ashes of dead Star Trek alumnus James “Scotty” Doohan, which were recently fired into space along with a bunch of less famous remains, have apparently crash landed in a mountainous area of New Mexico.
Doohan died two years ago at the age of 85 […]

The Los Angeles Times reports that a Pasadena news website is outsourcing its local reporting to India. Pasadena Now has hired two journalists in India to watch webcasts of Pasadena City Council meetings and write the stories up for the site. The idea has raised some hackles, particularly among journalists who probably thought […]

Here’s a spot from Canadian mobile phone company Fido that I like. It opens with a close-up of a young man, pulling out to show him making out with a young woman on a couch. The couple and the furniture morph into domesticity and a baby appears, before another rapid shift where woman and child […]

Are you concerned that in spite of constant updates to your MySpace, FaceBook, and Friendster pages and incessant downloads of personal videos to YouTube and Zippy Videos, the wired world still isn’t getting enough of you? Well, good news….the latest trend in social networking are services which allow the tech-savvy and the desperate to […]

When I was a kid, my grandparents used to have shelves full of Readers Digest Condensed Books; classic or contemporary novels with about a third of the words expunged for easy reading. The idea worked because you could remove most of the words from “Valley of the Dolls” without making it any sillier, and […]

BBC NEWS reports on a meeting in the UK where experts will discuss the wisdom of allowing robots autonomous decision-making power. The debate is pointless,of course, because a robot understands free will about the way a dog understands the Immaculate Conception and besides, it’s already happening.
South Korea is planning to […]

From Reuters - a study from Hitwise indicates that very few people going to participatory websites are doing much in the way of participating. A miniscule .16% of visits to YouTube are for uploading video, while only .2% of visitors to Flickr are posting photos for others to view. The rest of us, apparently, […]