In the interests of punditry, I will be waking up at 5 am tomorrow to make my third appearance on “Richmond’s Morning News with Jimmy Barrett” (WRVA 1140 AM Richmond).
I will be talking about household robots, including the Nuvo robot and the Roomba.
I was on WRVA on April 28 2005 and April 5 2005.
I know this is really geeky, but it needs to be said. In NPR’s tribute to James Doohan, the intro music is to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which James Doohan never had anything to do with and never appeared on. C’mon guys, not all Star Treks are created equal. Learn your theme music.
AP: LOS ANGELES (AP) — James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original ”Star Trek” TV series and movies who responded to the command ”Beam me up, Scotty,” died Wednesday. He was 85.
Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, he said.
He had said farewell to public life in August 2004, a few months after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
The Canadian-born Doohan was enjoying a busy career as a character actor when he auditioned for a role as an engineer in a new space adventure on NBC in 1966. A master of dialects from his early years in radio, he tried seven different accents.
”The producers asked me which one I preferred,” Doohan recalled 30 years later. ”I believed the Scot voice was the most commanding. So I told them, ‘If this character is going to be an engineer, you’d better make him a Scotsman.”’
The series, which starred William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as the enigmatic Mr. Spock, attracted an enthusiastic following of science fiction fans, especially among teenagers and children, but not enough ratings power. NBC canceled it after three seasons.
For his first piece (the lead story, no less) in Wired News, on Cambodian blogs.
Matt emailed me awhile back asking how to break into the freelance world, and will be attending Columbia this fall.
Great job, Matt!
Last night, after going through a debriefing of my first day, Becky pointed out an inconsistency with two of the fringe benefits that I get as an employee of Macworld (parent company IDG). On the one hand, they subsidize gym membership (sweet!), to encourage their employees to stay healthy and work out, etc. Now in addition to that, there’s a shuttle bus that takes employees from the Montgomery BART station (2nd and Market St.) to the office (2nd and Bryant St.), a distance of 0.6 miles (0.96 km for you international readers). That’s less than a 10 minute walk at a normal walking pace. So IDG wants their employees to be lazy some of the time, too.
And can I say for the record that I far prefer Sarah Vowell (to Maureen Dowd) as an intelligent and funny female voice on the NYT Editorial page.
On a final note, the NYT also writes about Zheng He, a 15th-century Chinese explorer, who is the main guy in the book 1421, a neat historical look at 15th-century Chinese exploration which ranged from East Africa to California. I still would like to hear if there are any critiques to this view — I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention, assuming that this is true, because it radically changes world history in terms of knowledge and exploration.
Yesterday, I was driving Boyk and I home from Fruitvale. We had just eaten 10 tacos between four taquerias and polished it all off with a few churros. We got stuck in some brief traffic on the 80.
Cyrus: “You know what sucks? Traffic.”
Boyk: “Yeah, it’s definately not as good as churros.”
One of my best friends, Dallas Bluth is enjoying his summer in Lyon, France, where he lived from Fall 1996 until 1999. Through family friends, he recently met a woman named Fanny, who is to be married to a Crown Prince of Kuwait. The new couple will be moving to Dubai in a few months, where Fanny is to open a small chain of lingerie stores. Dallas fell into this, and is becoming Fanny’s new English tutor and will likely more to Dubai to help them run the stores.
This email is from July 17, 2005:
Yeah, this whole Dubai thing *is* really nuts. I spoke with Prince Feras on the phone earlier this week and it seems that he wants me to teach him French… He’s coming to Lyon this week to visit with Fanny (who henceforth I must refer to as Princess Radjidja) so I’ll probably be dining with him in a matter of days.
As for Dubai, P. Radjidja seems to have complete confidence that I can run the entire store – and eventually the entire chain – for her. Payroll, computers, software, inventory, the whole shabang, so now it’s up to me to figure out how I’m going to do it. I have about 5 weeks left in Lyon without much to do so I’m going to start designing my own Perl/CGI scripts to see if it’s realistic to do this from scratch. I know I can buy software that can do the job, but I think if I wrote it from scratch I could really streamline the whole process and make things much more idoit resistant. I’ve worked in some stores before and seen the kinds of problems that crop up, and I think I can avoid a number of them by simply writing and changing the software to manage store policies. And besides, it’s geeky as hell and what a cool item to have on your resume!
Assuming all goes well, I should have a nice salary and cool pad by February/March so all visitors are welcome!
I spent most of last night camped out in Dulles airport. Managed to get a standby to Chicago and then to Oakland this morning. Not fun.
However you should go buy your tickets to the Senegalese rap group Daara J (along with Lateef the Truthspeaker) show at 12 Galaxies at 9 pm on Saturday August 6. $13/advance. $15/door. Get them now. Daara J is awesome.
So three points on the Arabic Assassin story.
1) Clearly, this guy isn’t all that bright if he thinks that as a Palestinian-American his rapping about terrorism isn’t going to raise any red flags. Oh, and he’s a baggage screener, too? In the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston? Yeah, no red flags at all. (That being said, what exactly is an intercontinental airport?)
2) He does have a point that he’s not the first to write crazy lyrics for shock-value:
Khalaf said his terrorist-themed rhymes are more about marketing. He called his songs art and pointed to other rappers who have rhymed about terrorism. He specifically cites Eminem’s song, “My Dad’s Gone Crazy,” which discusses blowing everything on the map up except Afghanistan and says: “There’s no tower too high, no plane that I can’t learn how to fly.”
3) But then again, he calls himself “Arabic”. I hate to break it to you, buddy, but Arabic is a language, not an ethnic group. You are Arab (and for Rich’s sake, “not Persian”), not Arabic.
Arab is a noun for a person, and is used as an adjective, as in “Arab country.” Arabic is the name of the language and generally is not used as an adjective. Arabian is an adjective that refers to Saudi Arabia, the Arabian Peninsula, or as in Arabian horse.
In case you’re not a journalist/journalism geek, you may have missed that Matt Cooper talked to Karl Rove on “double super secret background”. The Daily Show’s Stephen Colbert explained the other night what, exactly, that means:
Double super secret background: “Just like regular background but with no tagbacks, frontsies or backsies, taken to infinity plus one on opposite day, circle circle dot dot now you’ve got a cootie shot. It was first pioneered by Edward R. Murrow.”
– Stephen Colbert
July 12, 2005
(Thanks to Sam Gustin for reminding me of this.)
