Sunday Sep 5

Three ideas for someone to steal

Wednesday, 24 March 2010 03:29
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Three ideas for someone to steal

Sometimes I cook up ideas to make the world better. Rather than go nuts trying to come up with the money, expertise, and time to execute them and thereby become wealthy enough to hire a house cleaner, I usually just keep them to myself. These ideas rot away in my memory and disappear. How selfish! (Even if, as I suspect, the ideas usually suck.) Now that we are firmly ensconced in the era of share everything, I will do my best to spread these half-assed ideas to the rest of the planet via blogging and tweeting and social networking and human interface 2.0ing. Enjoy.

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How my crazy poodle has taught me to be more assertive

Thursday, 11 March 2010 09:34
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How my crazy poodle has taught me to be more assertive

Cricket is certifiably insane. I have expert confirmation of this fact. Sometimes, when she attacks and bites people or works herself into an aggressive tizzy, it isn’t funny in the least. But when she is under control, as she more or less has been for the past few months, her eccentricities can be amusing, even instructive.

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Media Bites


Gentlemen Broncos
If we politely ignore Nacho Libre, this movie is the true spiritual follow-up to Napoleon Dynamite for Jared Hess, and it accordingly suffers from sequelitis. More

Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy’s final novel scandalized England for its views on divorce, but there’s something more shocking at work in its dreary prose. More

Alice in Wonderland
Or, as the script would have it titled, Um in Underland. Now, I’m a Tim Burton apologist, so I’m inclined to forgive this movie for many faults, but… More

The Invention of Lying
Ricky Gervais is a master of the comedic reaction shot, which means he cast himself perfectly in this brilliant script about the only man in the world who knows how to lie. More

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Saving the Beach Flats Community Center

The hub of social programs and government outreach needs to become unforgettable

After spending most of its history in “la trailita”—a double-wide trailer parked next to Poet’s Park—the Beach Flats Community Center (BFCC) thought it had found a permanent home in 2003, when the Santa Cruz Redevelopment Agency completed construction of the colorful Nueva Vista housing development at 133 Liebrandt Avenue. The community center was given space at the heart of the ground floor with a computer lab, day-care center, and classrooms, surrounded by 48 units of low to very-low income housing. But only five years later, what the city had given would now be taken away; the building still stands, but the public funding for the BFCC, what Resource Coordinator Reyna Ruiz calls “the liaison between Beach Flats and the city government,” has disappeared into the void of deep budget cuts and economic woes.

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2010 MLB predictions (AL edition)
I think this will finally be the year when the Colorado Rockies are a powerhouse and not a Cinderella. I think the Texas Rangers will shake off some organizational accursedness to win a pennant. And I think I should probably trash this entry instead of publishing it, because my predictions are always wrong and I’m probably jinxing it all just by typing. Nonetheless, here’s my notoriously untrustworthy outlook for the 2010 Major League Baseball season: More
Brother, can you spare a micropayment?

Dan Gillmor, the head of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, has been enjoying a feisty and controversial run as guest blogger over at Boing Boing, calling for, among other things, a bloody revolution against the government for its collusion with financial institutions. (Okay, to be fair, he’s merely been wondering and questioning, loudly, why such a thing hasn’t already occurred.) Now, he posits a future for the news industry, in which the nation’s largest papers coalesce their newsrooms into one hegemonic entity that charges a subscription, thereby locking all the in-depth breaking news behind a wall.

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