sputter sputter
Once again I am technological meltdown mode. My I-book crashed and is off in the shop. . .
It turns out that some of Apple’s I-books have a design flaw, which causes the video chip to short out against the inside of the case, when the laptop gets *moved*.
Aren’t laptops supposed to get moved? Anyway, I’m reduced to blogging on the communal computer without (sigh) my bookmarks, or files.
So, I get to watch way more TV, and grow increasingly more apoplectic.
A case in point:
BBC World reported last week that gangsters in the Russian Far East are directing and producing big budget gangster movies starring- *themselves* AND, they use real bullets. I guess there is a lot of respect for the institution of authenticity in contemporary Russian film. Not even Godard could have come up with this interesting twist on Kino, but BBC World’s web site is so impenetrable and Byzantine, I couldn’t snag the link. .
PBS’s NOW reports that the National Rifle Association is mobilizing to buy up radio and television stations to get its “political message across” and to escape new rules, preventing groups that take corporate or union money from buying certain types of political ads on radio or TV 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. It’s so much easier to buy a whole TV station than just some little old ad. Maybe those guys from the Russian Mafia could find a market for their films on “NRA TV.” Russia and America have so much more in common now that the Cold War is over. The NRA is even prepared to launch *pirate* radio stations from ships at sea to make Americans buy more guns. (I wonder if they’ll fly the skull and crossbones flag?)
Blogger has developed a weird new bug which *vaporizes postings* that I have been working on in draft mode. (Time to jump to Moveable Type !) I hope they get it fixed soon or I will really truly bail. I’m sure glad I’m composing in BBEdit . . .
I was pleasantly surprised to receive a few copies of the new Walrus magazine. I’m embarrassed to say that I stopped reading most Canadian magazines because they became so parochial and preachy, but Walrus is great ! The inaugural issue features a wonderful review by Lewis Lapham of the film McLuhan Reloaded, an homage to garbage by Douglas Coupland, an article on Tel Aviv becoming a Bauhaus World Heritage Site, and tons of other interesting stuff. I’m subscribing! So far, Walrus stacks up pretty nicely against the New Yorker and Harpers and it even has an easy to navigate website. And it’s *Canadian*
The folks over at travelersdiagram have been kind enough to link to my blog. Travelersdiagram links to a lot of amazing blogs. One of my favourites is geisha asobi who always has some very *whacked* links. This week she links (among many others) to J-Walk’s blog, who in turn links to the Connected Thesaurus which is extremely useful. Check out his links to an amazing image gallery called colofinder in which
aerial views of nuclear weapon storage areas caught my eye, as did the heavily visited messy cables.
