I hate it when I have a Season Pass for a favorite TV show (Ed) that is airing its season premiere and the TiVO doesn't change the channel to the correct station. I have since changed the preference that controls the channel changing and set it to slow. I hope that works.
Michael Moore has written a thorough response to the critics of his disheartening, enraging film about American life, Bowling for Columbine, called "How to Deal with the Lies and the Lying Liars When They Lie about 'Bowling for Columbine.'" He promises to keep this page updated with responses to all his attackers, so, "if you hear something about me that doesn't sound quite right, check in here."
When you see me going in to the bank and walking out with my new gun in "Bowling for Columbine" – that is exactly as it happened. Nothing was done out of the ordinary other than to phone ahead and ask permission to let me bring a camera in to film me opening up my account. I walked into that bank in northern Michigan for the first time ever on that day in June 2001, and, with cameras rolling, gave the bank teller $1,000 – and opened up a 20-year CD account. After you see me filling out the required federal forms ("How do you spell Caucasian?") – which I am filling out here for the first time – the bank manager faxed it to the bank's main office for them to do the background check. The bank is a licensed federal arms dealer and thus can have guns on the premises and do the instant background checks (the ATF's Federal Firearms database—which includes all federally approved gun dealers—lists North Country Bank with Federal Firearms License #4-38-153-01-5C-39922).
Within 10 minutes, the "OK" came through from the firearms background check agency and, 5 minutes later, just as you see it in the film, they handed me a Weatherby Mark V Magnum rifle (If you'd like to see the outtakes, click here).
And it is that very gun that I still own to this day. I have decided the best thing to do with this gun is to melt it down into a bust of John Ashcroft and auction it off on E-Bay (more details on that later). All the proceeds will go to The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence to fight all these lying gun nuts who have attacked my film and make it possible on a daily basis for America's gun epidemic to rage on.
(via K5) [Boing Boing]
The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art presents the first ever Time Based Arts festival: a convergence of art and ideas featuring new works by performance artists from around the world. The TBA Festival starts today. There's even a blog.
"Wordblog is an opportunity to practice your word skills.
Every day, I'll be updating the site with a new set of 7 tiles. Make the highest scoring words you can and post them in the comments. Obviously, there are those who may feel the need to cheat, but ultimately you'll just be cheating yourself, and there's no fun in that."
Fun site to waste time at...[via kottke]
Does Justin really live up to all the hype? That's what I was wondering when I happened upon this review...
The basic details: Justin took to the stage at 1:30am after the end of the VMAs, where he won 2 moonmen. Performance lasted one and a half hours, and onstage guest performers included Timbaland, Pharrell, Black Eyed Peas, and John Mayer sat in on guitar all evening. Except for guest songs and a brief interlude of "On Broadway", all songs were from the current album, Justified.
[via anil]Great Edward Tufte rant about PowerPoint and other slideware, and why we should all avoid it. I did a talk a couple months ago and the conference organizers nearly insisted that I bring a PowerPoint presentation to accompany my speech. I told them that I didn't believe in slides for the kind of talk I was giving, and they responded, "But what will keep the audience from getting bored?" Urr, possibly the words coming out of my mouth?
Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.
Salon has published a vicious broadside aimed at Chuck "Fight Club" Palahniuk, a brilliant and savage novelist whose new book, Diary, has just been published.
I just started reading Palahniuk this year, with Survivor, but once I'd read that, I sought out every one of his novels and read them one after another. His got the glibness and popcult sensibility of Douglas Coupland, the drunken-master prose of William S Burroughs, and the ferocity of Charles Bukowski. Can't wait to read Diary, even though Salon panned it -- the reviewer admits up front that she hates all of Palahniuk's books, so it's a little mysterious as to why she'd decide to pick up his latest...
The latest is "Diary," the story of Misty Marie Wilmot, who works as a waitress on a tourist-plagued island off the New England coast. Peter, her building-contractor husband, lies in a coma after a suicide attempt. Early on, it's fairly obvious that Misty's 13-year-old daughter and mother-in-law are colluding with the rest of the island's old-family residents in a homicidal plot to drive the tourists away by forcing Misty to become a painter. Misty, however, remains clueless about this despite everyone's egregiously suspicious, "Rosemary's Baby"-style behavior and despite the fact that shortly before Peter shut himself up in the garage with the car motor running, he went around scrawling graffiti about the plot in the houses of his clients, then walling off the vandalized rooms to make it look as if they'd never existed. (By the way, the car now smells like urine.)