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May 15, 2008

Did You Know...?

... that today is Peace Officers Memorial Day? And that every year on May 15th, flags are to be flown at half-staff to mourn their losses and memorialize their service?

Neither did I. But as I was walking to my office this morning I noticed that the flags were at half-staff. So, I asked the helpful information desk attendant at our new $50+ million dollar student/conference center why the flags were lowered. She didn't know, but she went back into the main operations office and asked someone who might.

If you've ever played the game of "Telephone," you may have an inkling of what's coming up.

When she returned, she solemnly told me that there was a Presidential Proclamation declaring that all flags should be lowered to half-staff today to celebrate the National Peace Memorial.

I am not making this up. Once I processed what she'd said, I was indignant that the President would "celebrate" peace with the international symbol for state mourning, but I thanked the attendant for checking into it for me and walked away in a bit of a huff.

Then, once at my office, I pulled up Google and started searching for what was really going on.

So, we have two things to be thankful for: 1) the dedication and sacrifice of our police officers; and 2) that our President didn't attempt to force us all to mourn the promise of peace.

Posted by reparent at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)

May 14, 2008

Meditations on Cool

As the Vermont Summer kicks in and temperatures soar into the upper 70s (swoon, swelter, I know), here are some things to think about on and around the topic of cool.

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Our friend Attic Man sent us this news report, which is a little late now, but it was timely when he sent it. And though Obama didn't actually win everywhere in the Pennsylvania primary election, it continues to illustrate the divide between election coolness and un-coolness. Notice the band, Earl Pickens and the Band Named Thunder (a pretty cool name) is pretty cool. Notice the Obama supporters dancing in the video... are not.

From a mass media and electioneering standpoint I think this is perfect. It attaches coolness to the campaign without alienating all of the dorky wanna-be supporters out there who may feel not nearly cool enough to vote with all of the pretty celebrities in the other videos. (Much like the Lipton commercials playing before films now that ask if you're "young enough" to drink their white tea. I suspect that many iced tea drinkers are not.)

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Regulatory oversight and control of abusive commercial practices is cool. While in England outer space, The Spouse and I heard BBC reports of the European Union's impending action against British cell phone providers. Last year, when we were in Scotland, the big news was that this same agency was about to force cell phone providers in the UK to stop charging outrageous fees for calls made from other EU countries. For instance, if you lived in Dover, England and took the hovercraft over to Calais, France, calling your mum at home would have become 10-100 times more expensive than if you'd called her from Belfast, Northern Ireland, even though Belfast is much farther away.

Well, the cell phone companies complied, but refused to change their texting rates. So, now a call from Calais to Dover costs less than texting her: "hi mum, home @ 9." Now the EU regulators are going after texting charges, with action promised this summer. Imagine how cool it would be to live in a place where the government (or at least parts of it) care more about you than they do about Verizon Wireless! Cool.

Boing Boing adds fuel to the fire by reporting that we pay more per megabyte of data for even normal-costing text messages than NASA pays to get pictures of the Crab Nebula!

Now that's not cool.

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Design Observer wants us to think about how cool tables of contents can be, with 30 beautiful ToCs.

Above: ToC #27, from The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee. Jürg Spiller, ed. George Wittenborn, 1961.

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A former student (hi J!) sent me this article from the New York Times about sports blogging, which raises a number of cool questions. As Times reporter Tim Arango writes, "At the heart of the issue, which people on both sides alternately describe as a commercial dispute and a First Amendment fight, is a simple question: Who owns sports coverage?" Interestingly, this isn't a fight between bloggers and mainstream, establishment media organizations. In this conflict mainstream and popular media are aligned against the sports organizations who want to control not only the sports event, but also what can be said and shown about the sports event.

Mike Fannin identifies one of the key issues:

Ten years ago newspapers weren’t in the world of video and audio,” [Mike Fannin, president of the Associated Press Sports Editors and the managing editor for sports and features at the Kansas City Star] said. “We were in the world of print. The leagues don’t have a print product. Their view of this is that we entered their world.

As the mainstream print media (newspapers and magazines) become increasingly digital, their coverage becomes, of course, increasingly multimodal. And suddenly what they're doing looks a lot like what the television networks pay millions of dollars each year to broadcast.

Not only that, but the digital coverage provided by the establishment "print" media increasingly comes to resemble what bloggers do. And if bloggers are already doing it, and if some of them are doing it much better than the establishment writers, what's to stop bloggers from increasing their coverage? Well, the team owners, for one. Except when they're stopped, that is.

Last month [Dallas Mavericks owner Mark] Cuban sought to ban bloggers from the Mavericks’ locker room, but the National Basketball Association intervened, ruling that bloggers from credentialed news organizations must be admitted.

Mr. Cuban then decided to let in any blogger — "someone on Blogspot who has been posting for a couple weeks, kids blogging for their middle school Web site or those that work for big companies."

It's a petulant response, but one that has precedent in other venues. In 2004 the national election conventions both had a large and active corps of citizen bloggers who were given "press/media" credentials and access to the events. Why not sports events? And if this does catch on in professional sports, you can expect many, many of my future posts (especially during spring training and the fall/winter season) to be coming to you from the New England Patriots locker room. Everyone wins.

Except for the athletes, who are suddenly having to face the fact that with the democritization of publishing that blogging and online communication presents, everyone and anyone around them could be a blogger, and anything and everything they say could end up "in print" around the world.

“It’s a new world,” said Jason Zillo, the head of media relations for the Yankees, surveying the team taking batting practice. “We spend a lot of time in spring training on media training.

It's not just professional sports, either, that's getting into the "who owns sports coverage" game.

The limits of coverage is a hot issue in athletics at the college level as well. The National Collegiate Athletic Association issued new guidelines this year: in women’s water polo, bloggers are allowed three posts a quarter and one at halftime; in fencing or bowling, 10 posts are allowed for each day or session.

“I think we’re hitting the ridiculous button here,” said John Cherwa, chair of the legal affairs committee for the Associated Press Sports Editors and the sports projects editor at The Orlando Sentinel. “We’re getting tired of everyone trying to tell us how to do our business.”

Damn right you are, John Cherwa. For the uninitiated, what the NCAA is trying to do with these restrictions is to prevent "liveblogging" college sports events, the practice of writing a continuously updated stream of reportage and reflection during an event. Luckily for Cherwa, that horse is already out of the barn. With mobile and ubiquitous computing, and the microminiaturization of increasingly powerful computers means that just about anyone at any event could be liveblogging and most people would never know.

Many cool and uncool things here to ponder...

Posted by reparent at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

May 8, 2008

I'm Back

And just in time for my birthday! Yes, today is my 37th birthday, and thanks to the relativistic effects of traveling close to the speed of light, I have it on the highest authority that I don't look a day over 37!

I know you want to know all about my recent trip to outer space, and I was worried that I wouldn't be allowed to discuss it for global security reasons. However, we're lucky that film footage of this top-secret mission has been leaked to the press, with more to come, I am certain.

Now that the space-cat is out of the moon-bag, so to speak, I can speak candidly about the mission I was on. If you haven't seen the leaked clips, watch this:

Yes, the truth can finally be told.

I was on a mission to fight the Evil Space Nazis (ESNs) on the dark side of the moon.

It was very exciting. We've got lots of pictures from the whole shebang, and I'll post some of them in the next few days.

But this adventure with ESNs started me thinking about retro-futurism. Why is it so cool to mix the past into our frothy futurist cocktails? Blade Runner (ha! The Spouse hates it when I go on and on about Blade Runner) famously made 2018 Los Angeles a 1940s-esque noir-fest.

But I digress. Over at his Sweet Homo Alabama blog, Z.C. Byrnes points us to a very cool mashup of canonical western film High Noon and... um, killer robots. How cool is that?!

"Have you forgotten he's got his own deflector shield?" Classic!

Watching this video I was reminded of a tune we heard while in space heading toward the ESN base. In space we got fabulous radio reception from all over the globe, and the crew and I were treated to a fun track on the BBC: The Last Shadow Puppet's "The Age of The Understatement." It's a hoot. Check it out:

Now, while the video gives us Soviet tanks and choruses, the music is heavily influenced by Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores. But with a modern twist. I could imagine killer robots being behind that twist. In fact, I bet it was the killer robots who were running the Soviet army. You read it here first, people.

Which, of course, makes me think of that other great recent western-themed future fantasia in song, Muse's "Knights of Cydonia." If you've been living in a retro-futurist-proof bomb shelter for the past year or so, you might not have heard this song. But even if you've heard the seriously western-themed song, have you seen the video?

Oh, Gustof von Musterhausen, your little film is so full of awesome it hurts my brain.

I've written before about remix culture and prosumers (producer/consumers with the near-professional quality modern tech allows), but with "Knights of Cydonia" we get the full circle -- professional video producers remixing genres, effects, narratives, and throwing in a whole heaping of allusions to other works.

And it's all wrapped in a laser-shooting, kung-fu fighting, unicorn-riding sci-fi western package. Excellent.

P.S. Bonus points go to whoever identifies the most allusions in the Muse video!

Posted by reparent at 4:39 PM | Comments (4)