Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Chet Helms was part of the inspirition behind the art and music of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury community, Summer of Love and Avalon Ballroom. Joel attended the concert in his memory last October, and we’ve put some photos up on the site. Somehow the Rock Pix Gallery feels completely blessed, and blissed too, by the presence of a tribal leader.

So I’m goofing off, browsing Google Video and come across this silly Bollywood Comedy video… a cute idea, mouthing the words and aping to one of those syrupy Hindu pop songs. Then the comedian throws in an added feature, a strange little finger puppet. Hey, wait a second! That looks like something a friend, puppeteer Hobey Ford, showed me 4 or 5 years ago… a toy that he developed and patented, the Peepers Puppet. Small world, even if you’re not a puppet.

Turns out, it’s a cheating world too. Hobey tells me the peepers in the video are knock-offs, with enlarged pupils… the tell-tale sign of drug using finger puppets from the underworld.

One of my current projects is working with geocoding and problems of graphic expressions and user interfaces on maps. The above example is from the German Yellow pages, and is a fairly wide view of southern Germany with the Alps at the bottom. The second picture is the result after selecting “Services” at the left. A myriad of services appear, which can only be made sense of when zooming closer into a city.

Another map from Topix.net an online chat forum, shows the areas of the country indicating the quantity and recency of their forum activity. This has caught the attention of marketing mavens, who make a study of consumer trends and behavior.

Joining in Robert Scoble’s blog search test getting volunteering bloggers to post the word brrreeeport and see how various blog search engines perform.

Another top blog word is Cheney, because of his tempest in a teakettle hunting mishap. We all know Cheney is tight lipped and private, so this is pretty much a non-story. Bush is probably glad it deflects from the bigger NSA eavesdropping story. Then there’s the distorted uproar over Al Gore apologizing to Saudi Arabians for racial profiling seems to have gotten typically blown out of proportion by the NASCAR heads. People will continue to believe what they want to believe, without doing their own research, so meanwhile let’s get back to what the science of search engines will pick up.

Google Maps Mania, an unofficial Google Maps blog, was recently covered in an NPR news story. The site has many cool links to individual interests based on locations.

A related site, Google Sightseeing, is themed around collecting eye catching satellite photographs.

Yahoo’s new Flash-based maps also have an API that can be accessed and customized, as seen at the Programmable Web blog. Yahoo is also developing a Local Events browser based on their maps, as described by a Yahoo! developer’s blog. Other Yahoo map users linked their videos to locations.

The foundation films of John Waters early Divine classics shot in Baltimore involved local gangs competing for King and Queens of Filth. Following in his trashy tradition, John Waters has a series coming out on Here! TV, America’s first gay televison network, entitled John Waters Presents Movies that will Corrupt You.

Here is the stuff that will test the mettle of curious Right-wing Puritans: films such as Freeway, Beefcake, and Sissy Boy Slap Party are just a few of the irreverent titles in the series. The movies Mr. Waters has chosen are designed to disturb you in a delightful way. Take walk on the wild side with John Waters hosting and adding commentary before and after each title.

Forming his own anti-Martha Stewart taste setting niche, Waters released A John Waters Christmas CD in time for this past holiday season, including gems by Tiny Tim and Fat Daddy.

You can sign up to look for interstellar particles using an online Virtual Microscope at Stardust@Home.

As well as being the first mission to return samples from a comet, Stardust is the first sample return mission from the Galaxy. But finding the incredibly tiny interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) will be extremely difficult.

Volunteers will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home collaboration announcing the discovery of the particle.

I love this classic animation from the early formative years. Here is an archived 1937 cartoon by Paul Terry and his Terrytoons studio. It appears that a crucial shot early in the cartoon, where the little goat drinks alcohol is absent.

Fortunately, The International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood has embarked on an ambitious project to create an animation archive, museum, and library for the benefit of the animation community, students and general public. The first phase of this project involves the creation of a virtual archive which will house images, movie clips and sound files pertaining to the art of animation. Their blog is loaded with art and information of interest to animation fans.