Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

There’s too much goooogling on these days. A few days ago I attended the first Google AdSense Forum at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. I got overstimulated by meeting fellow Google AdSense webmasters, enthused presenters and smart Google team members, and liked it! Jennifer Slegg was one of three presenters, and she has dutifully written the Forum up in greater detail at her blog, Jensense. Another panelist, Chris Pirillo founder of Lockergnome.com gushed all over Google AdSense arousing curiousity and laughter. The next few days I’ve spent furiously tweaking parts of mediaspin.com to reflect improvements and techniques discussed at the meeting.

Did I mention that I am moving and will be off-line for almost a week? Does anyone care? I for one care, and will write to Congress to have them act immediately to prevent me from being unplugged, and becoming a brain dead demonic monster, or worse. More on this political hot potato topic later…

I’ve got a feeling in my bones. What do my bones tell me? Do I trust my bones? Kay Cordell Whitaker knows about Bone Throwing and their ability to predict for 2005. Worth a look. Of course there are cyber shaman bone throwers. Levitated, also worth a roll. Trust your bones.

Hey kids! Wanna do some cool Digital Effects on Spider-Man 3 or Stuart Little 3? Great! Well, get the air out of your heads and listen up punks! Your colossal boss will be a bean-counting professional, much like Digital Domain’s Scott Ross, quoted in the Phil LoPiccolo’s editorial in Computer Graphics World, “Making movies is an art, but it’s also a business,” he adds. “I tell my people, if you want to be Vincent van Gogh, go cut off your ear and live in the South of France.”

Is Scott still feeling his lumps from Titanic’s near suicidal artistic excesses? And folks, if you catch Boss Ross’s drift, be ready to work long hours at Van Gogh-ish salaries. Or move to Singapore. What wuz ya thinkin’… this is ‘spose to be fun? Fuggetaboutit!

Got to admit, I like monkeys. So, I was shocked by the grisly news story about a chimp loving couple who were bitten and mauled by two escaped monkeys at an animal sanctuary. The highly trained and restrained Mike Tyson was unavailable for comment. A wild wake-up call, as Siegfried and Roy got, that animals are mysterious, unpredictable, and not fully understood.
There are good and bad monkeys. Having more fun than a barrel full of monkeys, might end up as a horrific human blender. Yet we still identify with the affable ape, such as 9622.net, and Monkey Vortex. Can you trust these cute chimps? Roll over the photo above and see.

An obvious trick photograph on the cover of the current Newsweet magazine, portrays soon to be released from prison Martha Stewart sweetly, as they imagined we’d like to see her: comfortable, relaxed and in good shape. Reality is sour and distasteful, and we applaud big media and politicians for sweetening it up for us.

P.S. I gave Martha a demo of interactive technology back when we both worked in the Time-Life building. She really is a smart cookie.

Here’s his side of fronting as an upstanding White House journalist, but a few other meanies pick on a naked guy, a poor crappy, fake-named press conference stooge. Work that Bush smirk and let it slide. That’s the Texas-American version of reality today. Or maybe part of the whole American Idol fascination with bad performances.

Detailed reconstructions of a number of visual effects shots from The Aviator.

It was the 77th Annual Kentucky Fried Oscars, as Chris Rock acknowledged in a bewildered moment of real clarity, the Oscar ceremonies were being processed for television so heartlessly, they may as well hand them out in the parking lot or through a drive up window.

Fortunately here were classier moments, Kurosawa was mentioned by Sidney Lumet and the great theme by Elmer Bernstein from The Magnificent Seven based on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai was encored by the orchestra. Million Dollar Baby winner Clint Eastwood owes his early Fistfull of Dollars to Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

As an English speaker, if you’d like to experience numerous Lost In Translation laughs, check out the DVD of Kurosawa’s 1948 Drunken Angel. The ailing derelict gangster, played by K’s fave Tishiro Mifune, ends up in a delirious knife fight while falling and flailing around in spilled paint. There is an overall impression of polluted souls, and the outstandingly bad English translations makes the corrupted effect even better.