I got a box of Christmas cookies in the mail today. At least I think they were Christmas cookies. The snowman is definitely Christmassy and the tiny gingerbread men probably count, but I think the pumpkin and the bunny might be leftovers from other holidays. I'm not sure how the squirrel and the foot fit in either. And that's to say nothing about the most disturbing cookie of all...the hand that appears to be giving me the finger. I swear the cookie arrived with its fingers already broken. I didn't break them as some sort of protest against rampant holiday consumerism.
I wrote the following more than a year ago. TNT has been showing it so I thought I would post this again. I have one important (and obvious) point to add. The 'munchkins' are the 'little people' being all of us.
TBS showed The Wizard of Oz last night, or the night before, again and again and again… I have written about the political symbolism before but feel the need to do it again. The last time I looked stuff up but I am going to pull a ‘Stephen Colbert’ and write about my thoughts from the gut. (For those of you who like looking stuff up, that came directly from Mr. Colbert’s performance at the 2006 White House Correspondence Dinner.)
The first thing to note about this legendary movie is the infamous suicide that takes place in the background. Now you can research this and believe the stories that it’s a hoax, my gut tells me this is totally true. Right after the Wicked Witch of the West sets fire to the Scarecrow, the trio set off on the Yellow Brick Road singing. If you look carefully, you have to have the DVD, you will see a figure walk out and place a chair in the background. The figure then stands on the chair and is next seen swinging from a rope. Don’t believe me? My roommates and I spent hours reviewing this DVD frame by frame (and you had better ways to waste your time in college?). I think it’s true. Don’t believe me. Look at the DVD and trust your gut.
The Wizard of Oz, the book, was obviously published before the movie (no, dud, idiot). The story took place during a time of political turmoil – I’d bet my life that people then said that whatever election came around then was ‘the most important election of our lives!” If I had a million dollars I would give it to the campaign that said, Yes, we would like you to vote for us but you, this election’s not that important. If you’re too busy… On second thought that could be a way the GOP will suppress turnout. Anyway…
What did the whole thing mean? In the book, Dorothy’s shoes were silver, not ruby. At the time we were moving from the gold to silver standard and oz is the abbreviation for ounces , you know measurement. The Emerald City was Washington. The Scarecrow was Midwest farmers without much intelligence. The Tin Man was industry without any heart. The Cowardly Lion was Congress without any courage. The Wizard was the president without any power. The wicked Witch of the East was eastern bankers. The wicked witch of the west was the untamed western US. What the movie could do that the book could not, was use color. Kansas scenes are all black and white vs. the bright colors of Oz to show the depression, perhaps also the dust bowl but that’s conjecture.
Side note; Judy Garland was not slated to play Dorothy. They wanted a blond – a younger girl and they wanted to use less makeup. People think she was lucky for landing that role. I don’t know. At the end of her life, after she became an alcoholic, she said she had ‘rainbows coming out of her ass.’ I am sure she was speaking metaphorically because otherwise, that would suck.
Why does this matter? It matters because we write off a lot of things as being ‘just entertainment.’ I do not support censorship in fact my point is the opposite. It is easy to watch movies like Syriana and get the take home message but it’s often more subtle. In that way it’s more special. The Wizard of Oz was a story about populism and that theme still resonates today.
Yesterday, it was announced that I was voted Sweden's Speaker of the Year in 2009. I am overwhelmed and overjoyed at Talarforum's announcement. If you voted, thank you. Below is a clip from an interview with me on Swedish TV (unfortunately in Swedish)
Yesterday in London, UK Google launched a massive advertising campaign for the Google Chromium Chrome floss free libre open open-source browser project !
Chromium aims to build a
safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience
the web. The Chromium site contains design documents, architecture overviews,
testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with
the Chromium source code.
STOP PRESS and now on the front page of The Stylist and The Shortlist too !
Nokia OVI already has 70m users and is aiming for 300m by the end of next year ! Now Vodafone is trying to get a slice of the mobile social media cake by launching Vodafone 360 !
I wonder which will be first to 500m members and when ?
frappr is now platial
frappr is now platial
Dear Blog,
It is with great pleasure and relief that I am able to announce that the second volume of The Ba-Ba Box Set is complete. The song selection and ordering process took me twelve hours. I'm not exaggerating either; it literally took me an entire day (spread out over a week) to compile this mix. And I'm not even counting all the time spent uploading the songs. I'm just talking about the choosing and ordering. Let's say I had difficulties and leave it at that.
You might be thinking "sophomore slump", but I say "screw that". The sophomore slump is for losers. Volume 2 might go down in history as one of my Top 5 compilations of all-time. When it comes to finding a great number of great songs that all feature a particular vocal idiosyncrasy and then compiling them into a series of mixes that nobody will ever hear, I totally kick ass. I'm the best in the world. Of course, I couldn't have done it without the help of my Vox neighbors. Homebody, Silverchimes, and Hotrod each recommended two songs that made the cut for Volume 2. Genuine thanks go out to them...and to everyone who has sent song titles my way.
The first volume in the series was called This Is What It Sounds Like. I've decided to call the second volume Hey, Let's Try This Again...But With More Songs About Car Crashes. It had a nice ring to it.
Here's the track listing for Hey, Let's Try This Again:
- Chrysanthemums - Care of Cell 44
- Jessica Fletchers - I Got News (buy)
- Flatmates - I Could Be in Heaven (buy)
- Beards - All About You (buy)
- Crabs - 1863
- Heavenly - Escort Crash on Marston Street
- Beulah - A Good Man is Easy to Kill (buy)
- New Pornographers - The Electric Version (buy)
- Julian Cope - The Greatness & Perfection of Love
- Teenage Fanclub - I Need Direction (buy)
- Orange Juice - Wan Light (buy)
- Lloyd Cole & the Commotions - Jennifer She Said (buy)
- Jenny Toomey - Breezewood, PA (buy)
- Go-Betweens - Heart and Home
- Kingsbury Manx - Grape to Grain (buy)
- Velvet Underground - Who Loves the Sun (buy)
- Dream Syndicate - Until Lately (buy)
- Yo La Tengo - Wizard's Sleeve (buy)
Apparently the real Google Ubuntu Chromium OS is based on Ubuntu and not on OpenSuse ! And the official download is only available as sourcecode which you have to build-it-yourself ! So by implication any other ISO or VM downloads that claim to be Chromium OS are possibly spoofs or fakes !
- http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/building-chromium-os
- http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxBuildInstructionsPrerequisites
- http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/building-chromium-os/build-instructions
- http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs
- http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/getting-dev-hardware/dev-hardware-list
Thanks to Alan Pope for alerting me to the spoof ISO i downloaded last week !
Key to the calendar. Yellow: days when Vox worked normally. Pink: days when the compose screen took minutes or hours to load. Red: days when Vox would not allow me to compose at all.
I’m sure most of you will agree that putting up with a compose screen that will not load for hours or days since October 28 is being pretty patient.
In that time, Daisy and Six Apart have been great at trying to help me troubleshoot why this is happening. They have confirmed that there is something wrong and that, even at Six Apart HQ in California, they cannot get the compose screen to come up when logged on as me.
A number of solutions have been proposed, but despite carrying them out, the loading delay remains intolerably long.
It’s as though the Six Apart servers (after becoming self-aware!) know it’s me and fail to serve the compose page. No code is downloaded.
I remain convinced that whatever is happening to me is connected to what happened to Patricia (who has only made 50-odd posts on Vox, but has exactly the same symptoms) and Ninja (who can no longer compose with this site without switching to Internet Explorer—Vox is the only site which he has to make a browser switch for). I also believe the bug is connected to the one that locked out all the Australians I knew on this service in August 2009.
We also have the mysterious period between November 16 and 18 when the site operated normally, and the compose screen came up on demand. What happened on those three days? I had more tags in my account than when the site first blocked me from composing, and possibly more neighbours. Yet for those days, everything was normal here.
I have never suggested seriously that the block was malicious (though it was fun to entertain some outlandish theories), but it does seem to be rather coincidental that I come across bugs on Vox, Blogger, Facebook and other services continually. Many have been documented on this blog. I just never thought that among the last regular blog posts, the bugs I write about would be Vox’s.
One day I am sure they will find the error, or there will be a new version of Vox which remedies it. The underlying code is updated a lot more frequently with incremental improvements than Team Vox will have us know. Until then, I will check in here periodically—to read your posts, delete spammers, and administer the many groups that I run—but we will have to say farewell to my regular updates. I will also click on ‘Create’ from time to time to see if the bug has been fixed, and, if the site ever lets me, post the odd private neighbourhood or friends-only entry.
Finally, you could say, my disappointment outweighed my patience. As some of you read in a private post yesterday, this is a good time to move on.
Vox is, after all, still in beta, if its terms and conditions (revised a few months ago) are to be believed, so there’s no point my getting mad about this. It is what I signed up for in 2006 when I began as a Vox beta tester. Three years on, it appears I was still in the same boat, but with a less reliable site.
Thank you for all your friendships over the last three years. I have enjoyed it and everything this blog has offered. You can still find me on Facebook (a site with far worse issues than Vox ever had), Tumblr and at my main blog, where I am already ramping up the posting I do. I have a campaign site for the 2010 mayoral election here in Wellington, and will offer occasional commentary at Lucire’s web edition. If the Vox cravings get too much, I might enter the odd thing at lucire.vox.com, but even that account began to fail a few days ago.
This is not a total farewell. In the words of Gen Douglas MacArthur, ‘I shall return.’
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