Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
Yesterday was Groundhog day (apparently we’re likely to have six more weeks of winter), which naturally brings up that great movie, Groundhog Day. Now, I’m all for obsessive/compulsive behavior, but this analysis of how long Phil Connors was stuck in that Groundhog day time-loop is a little much.
Besides, everyone knows the answer is really seven years. Duh, they didn’t include every day in the movie!
This looks like it could get quite a bit more interesting before any sort of deal is actually made:
“Yahoo! and the future of the Internet,” from the Official Google Blog.
Update:
Microsquish responds. I tried to read it, but then I remembered why I didn’t want to go to law school after all.
I’m doing a unit in my English 516 class later this term on the implications of digitizing books, and this is news that seems very much up that alley: “One Million digitized books” at the U of M library. From DigitalKoans.
I’m not a huge fan of football, but I thought this little send up about the “Origins of Superbowl Sunday” on the Daily Kos was pretty funny. My favorite paragraph:
The saint whose career proved to be the best match for Super Bowl Sunday was Vincentius of Langobardia, commonly known in English as St. Vincent Lombardi. His early life is obscure, but he was probably born ~610 AD in Milan. He first enters history in 663 AD as a general in the armies of Grimoald, King of the Lombards. The Lombards had had many successes in Italy, but were facing an invasion by the Chiefs, a still pagan tribe from the East, led by their king Henricus Strammo. On account of Grimoald’s illness, Vincentius was charged with defending Lombardy from Chieftain depredations.
As I just mentioned to my father on the phone, I’ll probably watch the first half and if it isn’t a blow-out, maybe some of the second.
I’m sure there will be some fine commercials, but probably nothing like the best Superbowl commercial of all time:
Thanks to the Ypsi City Desk for reminding me about this one….
Here’s a good example of the challenges of posting stuff here that will reach different audiences, potentially in different ways.
The first one is pretty easy, and something I might before have put on my “official” blog, because it is an example of a “smart mob” phenomenon that gets talked up once in a while in computers and writing circles. From the group/organization (?) Improv Everywhere comes “Frozen Grand Central.”
Okay, and now the yang, the sort of thing I would have posted on my unofficial blog: I personally find Sarah Silverman funny, but she also is really really good at being pretty darn offensive and/or annoying. This video is an excellent example.
Helpful info before viewing:
This sounds like a book I want to take a look at: Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Apparently, there’s a podcast tease about it, available here.
“You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web.” Well, if you’re lucky. “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post” is a kind of fun/kind of informative Flash (I guess?) animation on Wired.com. Via Weblog Tools Collection.
Via CCE, I came across this NYT piece, “Thumbs race as Japan’s best sellers go cellular.” Basically, there is an increasingly popular phenomenon in Japan, mostly among women, of both reading and writing novels on cell phones. Here’s a quote:
One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.
After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.
Jeez, and I can barely send a text message on my phone….
Honestly, I really do believe that Sophie enjoyed this:
We had quite a bit of snow last night, but it looks like the additional 5 or 8 inches we were supposed to get today isn’t going to materialize.
Okay folks, I’m closing up Steve Krause’s Unofficial Blog. The time has come. So now, join me at my new “mega blog,” stevendkrause.com Update your links, etc.