MiamiGirl posits an interesting question: Do Miamians read blogs? Outside of the insular (some might say incestuous) circle of bloggers* reading each others’ sites, how many people make blogs part of their infotainment routine? I know that Hidden City gets a fair number of comments from people who don’t have their own sites, which is [...]
I admit it, I use a lot of Google products. While it’s taken me a while, I’m getting used to Gmail, and of course I’m still a Blogger user (in spite of appearances). I use Google Talk on those rare occasions where I need an IM service, and Google Calendar is working its way into [...]
Last night I spoke with my ex-wife. She called out of the blue, two years since our last conversation. It seems she was doing some reorganization at home and came across a box of old photos she thought I might like to have, and took a chance that I hadn’t changed my cell number. We [...]
I am beginning to suffer a bit of outrage fatigue. I’ve been going through spells of it for the last, say, twenty-five years, but it’s been particularly bad for the last six. Let’s be serious. Just off the top of my head we have the wholesale destruction of civil liberties under the guise of fighting [...]
So I’ve heard enough people talking out their asses about the corrupting horrors contained within Vamos a Cuba that I decided I needed to see it for myself. I ordered the Spanish language version, and a friend ordered the English. The Vamos a… series includes Spanish language books on Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Puerto [...]
I have friends who work in executive recruiting, so I hear the inside stories of HR hell — how often laws and policies regarding “don’t ask, don’t tell” situations are circumvented through informal phone calls and non-work e-mail addresses, and so on. And since American business has moved away from an environment of rewarding employee [...]
Porch view looking south-east, Sunday morning It is undoubtedly a gloomy Sunday. I’m certain Björk would agree. Share/Bookmark
As of this afternoon, anyway, a Google search for “book banning and Cubans” returns Hidden City as the first hit. Although on reflection, perhaps I should be a little more circumspect in using the term “hit” in conjunction with this story. Share/Bookmark
From Neil Gaiman, on writing: The lady on the plane next to me yesterday explained, when I told her I was a writer, that as a former English Major she had had dreams of being a major novelist, but she was making a living instead, and she hoped to one day have enough free time [...]
Here’s a little exercise in conspiracy theory and pointless political theorizing for you. Given that Fidel has been in power for coming up on 50 years, and given that it is a hideous dictatorship bereft of humanity, and given that the US has denounced the regime ad nauseum for decades, why is the old man [...]
My thanks to Maximus of Voltage for pointing me to this NYC public service announcement. It is one of the finest and creepiest things I have seen this year, but then, I do so love David Lynch… And on the other end of the spectrum, while still related, we have the musical stylings of Crispin [...]
American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, Inc., Greater Miami Chapter, et. al. v. Miami-Dade County School Board. In other news, my Spanish version of Vamos a Cuba arived yesterday, via the communists at Amazon.com. Once I put it side-by-side with the English version I’ll give you my review. Share/Bookmark
Through circumstances too complex to recount, I had dinner at Smith and Wollensky last evening. The food was very good, and the view outside the private room’s window was also quite nice. Share/Bookmark
I have had this recurring dream since I was a child. There are actually a few of them, repetitive images and scenes, stock footage if you like, churned around into themes to suit the arcane needs of my unconscious mind. It is as if someone is remixing my persona on a nightly basis. The frequency [...]
“A lot of people imagine that mashup culture is something unique to the digital age, but it goes all the way back to Benjamin Franklin taking popular songs and changing the lyrics to make a comment or a protest about a political situation.” From an interview with the authors of Tales from the Public Domain: [...]
Back in April I set up an experimental calendar using the new Google Calendar service. It’s been freely available to anyone interested in using the service to track events at the New World Symphony and/or Fairchild Tropical Garden, but it hasn’t gotten much traffic. That’s understandable, since using it required you to either have software [...]
Korea’s Odd-i N700D portable TV I don’t watch enough television to make one of these worthwhile, but I confess to be a certain fascination with the portable TVs available in the Asian markets. They use certain proprietary formats not in use in the US (DMB, for example) to send a digital signal to handheld sets [...]
“Okay, enough with the heavy-handed political shit, guy. Talk about something else for a change.” “Okay, fine. Got any suggestions?” “Sure. Don’t you have an entire Drafts folder full of half-baked ideas and ‘Isn’t this cool?’ links? Use some of them.” “But I’m only halfway through my non-stop month of posting — what if I [...]
Dear School Board members Hantman, Logan, Barerra, Perez, and Bolaños: You are an embarrassment to education and to America. When the opportunity presented itself to demonstrate the strength of reason over emotion, you choose to act from emotion rather than reason. I should expect no less from you, but I keep hoping that exposure to [...]
Rick has a great collection of links and some good introductory analysis of the swiftly approaching court case involving the Committee for Politically Motivated Book Banning and the ACLU. If you think that the school board is right in their decision to censor books for purely political purposes without any regard for educational propriety, read [...]
Last night, on getting the news that the five Hispanic members of the Miami-Dade Country School board love Castro so much they are bringing his policies to Miami, I flew into a venomous rage. I was so incensed that I wrote a screed so vitriolic I am certain I would have started my car one [...]
A while ago I heard of an interesting project to change the way movies are made: A Swarm of Angels. In their own words, “A Swarm of Angels is a new way to create cult media. The project is a giant new media experiment to gather 50,000 people paying £25 each to create a new [...]
Here are a few posts and essays of interest from my regular haunts. From the Wide Lawns Subservient Worker we get this tale of a fistful of nature run amok among the elite and effete. Filmbrain — one of the best film commentary sites I’ve found to date — discusses the Greatest Story Ever Retold [...]
If there is there anything better than returning to your office after a week away at training and dealing with the tremendous backlog of work awaiting your solomonic decisions, it would be returning to the office and the stacks of projects needing review when there is a storm coming in and you are on the [...]
Say hello for Tropical Storm Alberto, the first Atlantic sector tropical cyclone of 2006 to get a name. It doesn’t look as though Alberto is any threat to South Florida, I’m still impressed that we managed to get something to Tropical Storm status just eleven days into the season. If it manages to turn into [...]
Having made it home in the proper number of pieces, I am now dealing with the after-effects of five-and-a-half days away, many of which I do not wish to speak of at this time. The most difficult aspect of returning home from a trip is the lack of housekeeping. Five nights in a room where [...]
The concierge at the hotel and the instructors at the training facility agreed that we needed to leave the hotel at 3pm to have a decent chance of making a 7:30pm flight, to account for the rush hour traffic and the long security checkpoints at the airport. So we dutifully started our southbound trip at [...]
dialog05 is a collective of German industrial designers who have a peculiar fascination with USB. It’s a fun and interesting conceit, and one perfectly inline with my own sensibilities; as much as I would like to imagine I am old school (being a writer and all that), data is an essential to me as food, [...]
The photo is a little blurry, but it was the best I could manage. When we saw this work of art I knew I had to turn around and go back and capture the moment. Believe it or not, the beak opens and closes, and the eyes roll around. This astounds me — it is [...]
“An Unlikely Prophet brings up an important question about Superman: What makes people want to meet him so badly? [...]Superman is different because he doesn’t really belong to the writers who’ve created his adventures over the last 68-plus years. He has evolved into a folk hero, a fable, and the public feels like it has [...]
As a follow-up to an earlier post, I am finding the Google Notebook to be an indispensable tool for research. With the Firefox plug-ins installed I can capture text and images from any page, jot down a quick note to myself, and then save the information to a private notebook accessible from anywhere with Internet [...]
Actually, it’s very pleasant here, with mild temperatures and low humidity, compared to the swamp this is South Florida. If only this was a vacation, and not a week of brain-burning training. The training isn’t even really that difficult, it’s just that long hours in a non-ergonomic chair is not good for my demeanor. Finishing [...]
Maximus of SubIntSoc has done a little mash-up, replacing Miami Beach with Manhattan. Some parts of it are surprisingly accurate. There’s no word as yet as to how the SoBe crowd feels about moving to New York. Share/Bookmark
Whenever I fly, I am struck with the surprising dimensions of clouds. When earthbound I tend to think of them as matte paintings, more special effect than natural phenomenon. The idea that they have such varied textures is conveniently forgotten until the next time my plane flies through this ethereal topology. They do, however, lose [...]
In spite of having nearly drowned when I was a child, I am fascinated with the sea. Perhaps some part of me still hopes to find the lovely creatures depicted in the marvelous underwater Sous la Mer photos cavorting in the waves. [link contains nudity]. Perhaps I might see them if I booked a stay [...]
The Hurricane Newspapers Archive provides scans of newspapers covering past hurricanes through American history. Seeing the American death tolls decrease while those of the Caribbean remain high provides an interesting insight into the value of structurally sound housing in surviving a hurricane. [via Infomaniac] Share/Bookmark
Well, Google doesn’t think I have a strong enough opinion on the English-only debate. Among my search hits for last week were both “miami spanish speaking neighborhoods” and “where to live in Miami if you speak english”. But today I got hits for “anglo-saxon domination” and “sunny Manola.” Well, it isn’t like the good ol’ [...]
I’ve been rearranging my music collection this week, which — given the amount of music I have — is leading me to rediscover some items that had fallen down the list a bit. One of these is the works of Warren Zevon, one of the best songwriters American has produced. When he died in 2003, [...]
The salesman concluded with a hearty recap. “I’m glad we had the chance to meet in person; this is not a conversation I’d want to have on the phone, for obvious reasons,” he roared. Everyone laughed heartily. The above quote is from Crashing the Wiretapper’s Ball, where Thomas Greene describes sneaking into a closed trade [...]
For each item seen here I often have at least six or eight which never make it past the draft stage. They go into pending purgatory either because I decided it wasn’t an appropriate topic for the site, I wasn’t satisfied was the tone, more research was needed, or I sobered up. Sometimes they emerge [...]