Set Blog To Maximum Rationalization!

It's a well known fact amongst people with brain-stems that in every consumer transaction there is a winner and a loser. If you are NOT a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation, well the odds are pretty good that you're not the winner, either. But, even among the broad spectrum of bad deals, the initial offering of the iPhone had to be the worst.

Which is why it's a little strange that a site that so often publishes useful, level-headed advice, has just posted a huge piece of rationalization from one of their writers. Not that we've got anything else to say about the iPhone. We've been there already.

Zines + Time + Internet = Blogs

As someone who was very interested in zines back in the day, I thought this Essay by Tim W. Brown was pretty interesting:

"Originally static web pages, e-zines swiftly got more sophisticated until the arrival of the Web 2.0 paradigm, which has now made publishing a two-way street. The blog scene was born, and bloggers largely carry the flag of self-expression despite the continued presence of e-zines."

Justify My OS

Gizmodo writer doesn't still uses Windows because he's uses Windows. There, I just saved you some time.

Link via Chaos Theory

The Irony Expo

So, today we were given a free, plastic lunch-pail by a health insurance company rep. And it smells like a new shower curtain. Thanks, health insurance company!

Book-throwers' Anonymous

From the Times Online, several admission of book-tossing -- of which, this is but one:

Daisy Goodwin: "Patricia Cornwell [...] I threw her last book off a boat."

Good grief, people. I've run into books I didn't like, too, but none that have ever inspired me to waste the effort required to throw them. I close them gently, put them down, and abandon them on a bus, like unwanted children.

Review Proof

Mark Lawson:

"[...] [D]istributors and publicists are now increasingly trying to stop newspaper reviewers from seeing certain movies before the public does. These embargoes prevent daily critics (whose pieces traditionally appear on Thursday or Friday mornings) from noticing the films at all and force weekend writers to rush to multiplexes at lunchtime before their usual Friday night deadlines."

It's funny that movie studios spend almost a year lobbing unimpeded, high-intensity marketing at consumers, all of which could (apparently) be undone by a negative, Thursday-morning review. Maybe critics are super-powerful beings.

New Word Watch

From the comic "Able and Baker," an new word: Disasterisk.