-with this “banned” Xbox commercial.
Though didn’t “banned” once mean “you can’t see it,” as opposed to “TV stations won’t run it so it’s shows up on the Internet, where it’s watched by hoards of teenagers for whom viewing something online described as “banned” is seen as a cool thing?”
[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, “Achilles Last Stand,” from the album “Box Set (Disc 3)”.]
Technorati Tags: games
Via cityofsound, a cool interview with Renzo Piano in The Guardian:
Every Sunday his father would take him to Genoa’s harbour and Piano would watch the ships, which he thought of as “immense buildings that move”. When they sailed, he watched them cross the water and imagined that they were flying. These notions converged in his mind to form an idea of buildings as structures that “fought against gravity”, as “miracles”. What he calls his “obsession with lightness” - lightness as both a physical and an emotional property - comes from these experiences. Piano describes Genoa as “the austere version of Venice - Venice is the city of extroversion and Genoa the city of introversion” - and says he carries the memory of it in his “skin”.
As a parent, I wonder what kinds of experiences my children might remember in this way?
The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians . . . They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be.
The mistake, he says, has been a conceptual one. France’s politicians have failed to understand that for a community to work, it cannot be a “ghetto”; it must be a place in which people work, and sleep, and socialise and, most importantly, “merge” in some way…. He is not naive enough to believe that his field of endeavour can fix this. But does he believe that architecture can help build that tolerance? “Architecture in some way has the duty to suggest behaviour. In some way. Places are the portrait of communities, and if the place is impossible, the community becomes impossible.”
[To the tune of Sting, “Forget About the Future,” from the album “Sacred Love“.]
Technorati Tags: architecture, city, place/space
Pop diva gags wedding guests with pre-nup
What do you give as a wedding gift to a millionaire pop star who has everything? If the bride is Christina Aguilera, you give her the signed copy of the three-page confidentiality agreement she sent you.
Each of the 150 guests invited to watch the pint-sized pop princess exchange vows with her music-manager fiance Jordan Bratman in California’s wine country had to hand over the legal document before they were allowed to take part in the celebrations.
All the guests were sent the contract in a bid to ensure that even the tiniest detail of the wedding remains secret - although photographers were camped out at a farmhouse in the Napa Valley from the start of the festivities on Thursday….
Banned subjects included the cake, the rings, entertainment, speeches, food, the venue and other guests. As for the dress, nothing about the train, cut, colour, designer or material can be revealed.
Joho asks the obvious question: “I wonder if her pre-nup has a non-compete?”
Technorati Tags: law, privacy
The Wall Street Journal has an article on tech-savvy kids; this snippet via Gizmodo:
8-year-old Lauren’s Christmas list includes a cellphone, an iPod, a laptop computer, and no toys. Kids have become the same gadget-obsessed zombies as their adult counterparts, but, boo-hoo, they’re often overwhelmed when trying to decide between an iPod nano and the video iPod.
Technorati Tags: children
The Discovery Channel reports, “Thanksgiving Foods Different 100 Yrs Ago:” “Deep-dish onion and egg pie was a popular meal, washed down with root beer.”
Also, “Pilgrims Mistook Natives for Israelites.”
Evidence in favor of the proposition: the first statue honoring kung fu legend Bruce Lee is in Mostar, Bosnia.
Seen on flickr, from near near future.
Technorati Tags: globalization
From JD on MX, writing on cell use in Korea and Hong Kong:
I saw more people using full-time electronic prosthetics, usually a phone earpiece perpetually attached, instead of used intermittently as I see in San Francisco. People in clubs always had their earpiece on, and were taking & making calls continually. I didn’t see large numbers of people walking around talking to themselves, but did see a shift from using a phone to being a phone. [emphasis added]
[To the tune of Asia, “Open Your Eyes,” from the album “Alpha“.]
Technorati Tags: Asia, cyborg, Korea, mobility, wearables
Two trackback spammers, blog57.com and blogjeeves, have sent something on the order of 100 trackbacks to this blog or Future Now in the last few days. Typepad seems to try to ban them, but they just come back a couple hours later.
I have to wonder how many blogs they’ve hit? And is there a special circle of Hell for people who do this?
[To the tune of Robert Goulet, “You’ve Got a Friend In Me (Wheezy’s Version),” from the album “Toy Story 2“.]
Technorati Tags: blogging
Gizmodo points to the very cool Pong Clock, a wall-mounted clock that plays Pong:
The game of pong is played until another minute has passed, then one of the paddles misses a shot, resulting in an adjustment of the score that matches the time of day. Check out the link for more pictures and whatnot.
Technorati Tags: games
Because of an amazingly persistent TrackBack spam, I’ve turned on the TypePad feature that puts comments and trackbacks on hold for verification. Apologies to anyone who feels inconvenienced.
The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul
© 2017 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.
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