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WATCHING: Shopgirl Anand Tucker, director Based on a Steve Martin novella, this adaption - starring Martin, Claire Danes and Jason Schwartz - is a disaster. Maybe it was trying to be true to the book (I haven't read), but there were too many "What the hell...." moments, too many voice-overs by Martin to explain what was obvious, and no true explorations of the characters. I like Martin and Danes, but I'll never watch this again, that's for sure. This has the flavor of the movie Martin succeeded with - L.A. Story - but everyone stumbles badly here. (I take that back - Danes was pretty believable.) All movies

The following is just an eclectic firing of neurons that have occurred over the past few days; nothing worth more than a sentence or two.

• Presidential elections?: We're barely two months past the mid-term elections, and already the presidential candidates are lining up. And most of the folks running currently hold public office, but are running around the country making speeches and so on; great - our well-oiled government machine at work.


• iTunes random play isn't: If I'm on random play and jump down to a Lou Reed song, for example, I'll hear three or four more Reed songs over the course of the evening. I'll hear 0-1 Reed songs on an average night.


• The web is getting boring: I've mentioned this before, but I still say it's true. Even fuckedcompany.com - a must-read site during the Internet boom - is a shadow of its former self. The infrastructure is in place and Pud just publishes a few fucks a week. Whoopee....


• DRM is dumb: I understand the argument for DRM (digital rights management), I just don't agree with the argument. I understand the argument for horses to pull horseless carriages, I just don't agree with the argument.


• Blogs as abstracts: Back in the day of peer-reviewed science journals, abstract journals - magazines that gave the synopsis of select papers from various disciplines - served a valuable function: No one can read everything (unless an abstracter, and then it's your only job), so these Cliff Notes of sorts help separate the wheat from the chaff, as well as point out what one may have otherwise totally missed. Blogs - and sites like Google News - serve the same purpose in many ways. While Kottke is way less interesting today than it was a year or two ago, he still has an impressive list of links - with short comments - that give one an overview of what one may have missed; what you might like/not like to read. That's valuable. A lot of politically oriented blogs work this way, with quick comments on a MSM article, with link to full article. Powerful shit.


• WWW: You're Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Do you ever wake up at night and shout, "Holy crap - I can't believe I began all this!"?


• Macs are too damn expensive: I like Macs, I love (as a Linux dweeb) the BSD underpinnings (it has built-in SSH!), but the boxes are too damn expensive. To outfit a decidedly lower end Mac - the Mac Mini - in a configuration (more RAM, bigger drive) that makes sense for me, it'd be over $1200 for only a single 160M drive. Ouch. I'd love it, however.