While reading about the new History Channel series Life Without People (brief review: fun, highly derivative of the excellent World Without Us, but the movie-guy narration is ridiculously overblown), I happened upon a reference to the seventies BBC TV post-apocalyptic TV series Survivors. It turns out that they’re in the midst of remaking the series–they’re currently shooting season (which, in BBC terms, probably means six episodes) two.
I really dig post-apocalyptic works of art, so I immediately went looking to watch the remade series. I read on this (Official? Unofficial? Hard to tell) blog that season one was available on iTunes. Great, I thought, I’ve got some travel later in the week, I’ll plunk down my 20 bucks or whatever and download them.
Alas, “Survivors” is not available on iTunes Canada. Nor, as far as I can tell, is it available on the American or Canadian Amazon sites. I’d gladly pay for the show, even with iTunes’s imperfect system, but I can’t. What’s left? Illegally downloading the show using BitTorrent.
The Excellent Yet Distant Online Content Distribution Model
This is, of course, a very common complaint. Over the last decade, as Cory Doctorow likes to say, content producers must be ““dragged kicking and screaming to the money treeâ€Â. Farhad Manjoo reflects this ethos, and describes some of the reasons behind it, in his latest Slate article:
In my dreams, here’s what it would look like: a site that offers a huge selectionâ€â€50,000 or more titles to choose from, with lots of Hollywood new releases, indies, and a smorgasbord of old films and TV shows. (By comparison, Netflix says it offers more than 100,000 titles.)
Things, of course, are even worse up here in the Canadian digital ghetto.
We live in Victoria, but spend a lot of time in Vancouver. For the first couple of months of this year, when teaching a course at UBC, we were over every week. I actually don’t mind the ferry ride itself. I enjoy the opportunity to get an hour of work done without the distraction of the internet.
It’s the bus trips between Victoria and Sidney and Tsawassen and Vancouver that suck hard. They’re long, tedious and you can’t really work. Plus, I’m inevitably sitting near some cell-phone-talking douchebag who wants the whole bus to know about their new Ugg boots, or whatever.
I heard about a possible new passenger ferry service between downtown Vancouver and Victoria (here’s a short piece from Global, after the ad, thanks to 8chocolate for the link). Nautisol is still in the market research stage, and we’ll probably be living elsewhere if and when they put boats in the water, but I was still intrigued. From their website:
90 minute travel between city centers Victoria-Vancouver
Economy or Business Class
E-Ticketing with multi-language function
Kiosk ticket vending with multi-language function
Telephone ticketing
Terminal locations integrated with existing public and private transportation systems
Full service terminals to include Wi-Fi, ATM and Food Kiosks
Bicycle racks
Shuttle Bus Services
I see somebody caught the capitalization plague.
They’re running a rather peculiar customer survey, full of push questions (“Liquid Natural Gas is the fuel used to power this ferry service. LNG is one of the safest and cleanest fuels available.”), but I’m intrigued. Two attempts at providing alternative services have failed in the past. There’s the infamous PacificCats, rusting away in North Vancouver shipyards. Before that there was the Royal Sealink Express, which I remember taking a few times as a student in the early nineties. It’s a pity that didn’t work out–it was very convenient. The last time I was in the SeaBus terminal at Waterfront station, I’m pretty sure I saw a fading Sealink brand on an office door.
I’d imagine that, at some point, there will be enough people wanting to shuttle more efficiently between Vancouver and Victoria to make such a service viable. Has that day come?
On the weekend I was watching an English Premier League match between Stoke City and Blackburn Rovers. Stoke City has an Irish midfielder named Rory Delap, and he has a particular talent. From Wikipedia:
Delap, a former schoolboy javelin champion, is renowned for having one of the longest and most-feared throw-ins in football; his throws, noted by Aston Villa manager Martin O’Neill as equivalent to “a corner or a free kick”, often range 30–40 metres (98–130 ft) (averaging 38 m (120 ft)), and can reach the speed of 60 km/h (37 mph). They have served as an assist in more than one case before 2008. Numerous experts, including his manager Tony Pulis, have commented on the technique Delap employs, the length and flatness undoing many a defence.
Other players can execute long throw-ins, but clearly Delap is something special. In this video, he accidentally puts the ball over the crossbar:
That got me thinking about what I’ll call freakish outliers in sports. I’m not talking about the Gretzkys or Jordans or even the Fosburys. Rather, it’s those athletes who, by fluke of evolution or sudden insight, just do things differently. Sometimes the innovation is effective, sometimes it’s just weird.
Lucinda Ruh
Lucinda Ruh is, by any measure, a decent figure skater. She hasn’t won much beyond becoming Switzerland’s national champion a couple of times, but that still puts her among the top 1% in the world. She is, however, a ridiculously good spinner. Here she is apparently executing a world record spin, in which she rotates 115 times:
Chad Bradford
Chad Bradford is a relief pitcher with very unusual way of delivering the ball. The ball leaves his hand very close to the ground–something called a submarine delivery. He pitches so low, in fact, that sometimes his knuckles brush the pitching mound. I couldn’t find a decent embeddable video (the MLB has apparently been aggressive with the takedown notices), but here’s a clip. And here’s a nice photo, courtesy of Linda Thomas. Click for a much larger version:
On an unrelated note, there’s a charming non sequitur in the introduction to Bradford’s Wikipedia article: “Chadwick L Bradford (born in Mississippi) is also the name of a storied bioanalytical chemist.”. Storied, eh?
Mike Legg
Then there’s Mike Legg, who, during a US college hockey game, devises a very unorthodox way to score:
I don’t think anybody has ever scored this goal in the NHL, though several players have tried.
Björn Borg
Speaking of hockey, Björn Borg’s famous two-handed backhand was apparently adapted from ice hockey’s slapshot. I don’t know a lot about tennis, but he appears to have a very peculiar style:
Here’s some analysis of his backhand, with an explanation of “the immense topsin generated from his loose slap-shot style”. Thanks to James for suggesting Monsieur Borg.
Who else is there? Who played their game a little differently?
Those chants at the start of the trailer are the crowd saying “Ali bomaye”, which means “Ali, kill him”, in reference to his historic ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight with George Foreman.
The Discovery Channel brought my lazy channel surfing the other day to a resounding halt. They were doing a story on the Shweeb (I still think that ought to be “Schweeb”), a human-powered monorail in New Zealand:
That’s a bit Minority Report, isn’t it? I suppose it would keep you dry riding to and from work in Vancouver winters–but how would you turn corners when you reached an intersection?
Every time I hear Clay Shirky speak or read something he’s written, I think to myself “he’s an order of magnitude smarter than everybody else in the room”. Today’s blog post, on the fallout of the #AmazonFail business, is just the latest example:
Here’s how stupid that belief made me. I have been thinking about the internet as hard as I can for the better part of two decades, and for the latter half of that time, I’ve been thinking about the problems of categorization systems, and it never occurred to me that the possible explanation for systemic bias might be something having to do with a technological system instead of a human one, that a changed classification in the Amazon database could trigger the change in status of tens of thousands of books.
From the moment this particular controversy broke, it felt like Motrin Moms 2.0. Just as Twitter enables us to rapidly raise money and inspire positive action, it’s also exceptionally good at fostering reactionary fury. As Shirky writes, Amazon unquestionably got some stuff wrong, but they’re not nearly as guilty as the web was making them out to be.
Speaking as an occasional lynch mob member (and as someone put it a while back, a friend of the gays), we need to moderate our furious impulse to propagate scornful messages until we have enough of the facts. It’s only going to get easier and easier to direct angry online attention at something, so we need to get better and better at thinking before we retweet with vengeance.
I’ve been a bit remiss in writing blurb reviews of movies that I’ve seen over the last couple of months. It hasn’t exactly been chock full of winners. I’ve added these to the big list of every movie I see in 2009.
Watchmen – 6/10 – I reviewed it elsewhere, but it’s essentially two hours of back story and one hour of a pretty ordinary plot. It’s a movie made (and a story told) 25 years too late.
One Week – 6.5/10 – A love letter to our nation (at least the half between Toronto and Vancouver). It’s as much a travelogue as a film, following a stricken Joshua Jackson as he spontaneously rides his motorcycle out west. The script is wonderful in places, and quite clunky in others. I liked the lead performances (I could watch Liane Balaban read census results all day), and the film has a kick-ass soundtrack. If you’re looking for a little feel-good Canadiana, you could do worse.
I Love You, Man – 6.5/10 – Who doesn’t love a bromantic comedy? An ordinary movie with pretty ordinary themes. The cast is watchable (Jason Segel and J.K. Simmons in particular), and there are plenty of amusing moments. Still, it’s nothing to write home about.
Twilight – 5/10 – The broodiest movie in Sombre Town. Man, those teenage vampires are moody bastards. After Kirsten Stewart, the cast is unilaterally wooden. I’d imagine that, much like the Harry Potter series, subsequent films will get better as the cast matures and the burden of exposition lightens. I watched this on the plane, so that may have negatively impacted my impressions (though I doubt it). I’m not a fan of Catherine Hardwicke’s work generally, so that doesn’t help.
Duplicity – 7.5/10 – I really liked Clive Owen and Julia Roberts in Closer, but I found their scenes together in this film rather lifeless. They lacked the sizzle of, say, Clooney and Lopez in Out of Sight or Pitt and Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Perhaps it’s because they felt repetitive, and rarely advanced the plot. I did really dig the directorial work of Tony Gilroy, it felt stylized without being intrusive. In particular, the film’s opening scene (after the one the studio obviously required he add) is beautifully shot. The film’s plot is ridiculously byzantine, so don’t even try to follow it–just sit back and enjoy the good-if-not-spectacular ride.
For no particular reason, I’ve recently written a few guest posts on other sites. I’ve got a couple more pending, too. I thought I’d link to them in case they’re of interest:
There’s my wrap-up of the South by Southwest conference on Techvibes:
While there were big names at the sessions (hey, there’s Heather Armstrong! There’s Hugh McLeod! And so forth), I didn’t think they were any better, on average, than, say, Gnomedex or another, smaller geeky conference. They followed a similar bell curve from awful to excellent. This is no surprise, as there are hundreds of panels and being popular doesn’t necessarily make you insightful or a good public speaker.
I intentionally tried to go to sessions which had little to do with my day job. I quite enjoyed a session on video game marketing, and my favourite panel was a group of four archaeologists discussing how they use the web to talk about their work.
For the O’Reilly Radar blog, I wrote about a common hiring mistake that startup founders make:
Her response highlighted one of the most common mistakes we encounter when working with early-stage startups: the founders hire too much marketing talent too early.
Why does this happen? I’m not sure, but I wonder if it’s because many founders have a technical background. As such, they’re unfamiliar and sometimes a little intimidated by the challenges of promoting their startup. To assuage their concerns, they bring in a senior marketer with plenty of credentials.
In theory, this looks like a rational decision. After all, the more experienced the executive, the better. Practically speaking, things aren’t quite that simple.
It would be great if we worked for Apple or Volkswagen. Their products generate conversations because they are legitimately worth talking about–they’re beautifully designed, innovative and easy to love. They are, to use Seth Godin’s classic metaphor, a few purple cows among a vast pasture of Jerseys. And, of course, the social web loves purple cows.
But what do you do if it’s your job promote toilet paper or minivans on the web?
Find a gimmick. Devise an original way of talking about (or around) your plain old brown cow. Marketers like to describe this strategy as ‘creating a meme’, but that’s always struck me as needlessly high-minded. Let’s call it what it is: a gimmick. My dictionary describes a gimmick as “an ingenious or novel device, scheme, or stratagem, especially one designed to attract attention or increase appealâ€Â.
