I’m an equal-opportunity list basher. Since I’ve already taken on PC World’s “Top 50 Best Tech Products of All Time,” it seems only fitting to take a look at PC Mag’s “10 Useless Firefox Extensions.” Though this one is less sweeping in its ambitions, it still hits close to home, since I pretty much live [...]
At around this time last year, I commented on my surprise at seeing so many otaku at the annual Brooklyn Botanic Garden Sakura Matsuri. This year, I was no longer surprised, though I did notice that their numbers seemed to be on the increase. I didn’t bother counting, but there were definitely a sizable number [...]
Continuing my recent sojourn back into the world of classic scifi, I just reread Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” and found it to be as chilling and remarkable as I first did some thirty years ago. Although Bradbury’s foreshadowing about the results of a recent election is a bit ham-handed, his handling of the [...]
This seems painfully obvious, and it’s a shame more people aren’t following Harry Shearer’s advice:
What is the possible journalistic explanation for splashing ***’s self-dramatizing poses and self-justifying bullshit over network and cable air? Did we learn anything useful during the spate of interviews of Charlie Manson years ago, except that he was one crazy motherfucker? [...]
It’s become something of a standard operating procedure for magazines to fold their print editions while keeping the online versions going. Premiere did it. Child did too. And so did Teen People. In all cases, editors or publishers boasted about how the magazines would thrive online. “To effectively reach these girls, we must invest in [...]
I wrote about Gmail’s “Paper” April Fool’s gag a couple of weeks ago, and said I thought the idea of a service to print email on paper “wasn’t entirely foolish.” Turns out I’m not alone. Just a few days after Gmail’s “announcement,” a new service called Postful launched its private beta. And Postful is, you [...]
As I spent two hours navigating flooded roads en route to work this morning (at one point I actually saw a police car towing a rowboat), I started to wonder whether this was a harbinger of things to come; whether climate change would lead to more storms similar to this week’s Nor’easter, and flooded highways [...]
I’m unstuck in time.
It’s 1978, and I’ve discovered Kurt Vonnegut for the first time. His writing is like nothing I’ve ever read before. It has the trappings of scifi, but is layered with bizarre situations, stranger characters and primitive line drawings. I burn through “Slaughterhouse Five,” “Breakfast of Champions,” “Cats Cradle” and the rest. [...]
Diabetes Mine has a great “open letter to Steve Jobs” about why Apple should get into the business of designing insulin pumps and blood glucose meters. While I somehow don’t see Apple jumping into the medical device market, this is definitely in keeping with the point I was trying to make in my post about [...]
I get a kick out of these “Top x of y” lists that magazines love to compile, since they’re almost always completely subjective, and usually have at least a few head-scratchers mixed in with the obvious wins. The latest case in point is PC World’s modestly titled “The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time.” [...]