It was inevitable, given the sheer ubiquitousness, that .sex is under consideration for use by ICANN for domains.

“You can almost guarantee the most highly sought-after one will, unfortunately, probably be dot-sex,” said Bryan Glick of Computing Magazine.

“All the meaningful words and meaningful names in the English language have been bought up already,” Glick said.

True. While some companies have been clever in branding their organizations with a quirky name so they can have a unique domain, it’s become a little difficult to identify a company with it’s product or service because of its deliberately misspelled or derivative name (Google being the glaring exception, obviously).

As the article states, it will create a new gold rush for prime Internet real estate for anyone with the time and money to scoop up as many words as possible… quickly.

I suspect that most of the best words will be gone in the blink of an eye and be worth a fortune. Still, with even a little imagination, there’s a lot o’ words in the dictionary.

Some comedians have made a living with one-liners, some make fun of their lame sex lives and some just milked their one-note routine for a while and went away (see ya, Diceman).

The best comedians have always been astute observers of absurdity in an ordinary day; their material was about the stuff we saw all around but we didn’t see how funny — or stupid — it could be. Taking something overt and repackaging it so you have a completely different perspective on it is an art. And today, we lost an artist.

George Carlin died of heart failure at age 71. Read the rest of this entry »

For anyone who hasn’t been following the Fake Steve Jobs blog, it’s a scream. You don’t necessarily have to be a fanboy to really appreciate the way life for the tech billionaires is played out like a high school dramedy. The big players from Microsoft, Google, Dell and, of course, Apple are portrayed like a bunch of narcissistic adolescents who happen to basically control everything digital that touches your life.

Here’s a little taste:

You should have seen the faces in the crowd. For a moment they were all just sitting there with this glazed, worshipful, vaguely confused look on their faces. It was the same look Joan Baez had on her face the first time she slept with me, right after I finished — just this curious look like, Who are you? What planet do you come from? Why do I hear angels singing? How did you do that to my lady parts, you strange intense monkey man?

Hot diggety damn — I do love blowing people’s minds

And, talking about the keynote address:

I’m not going to go into details but imagine you’re tripping on peyote and a team of people in white uniforms ties you up, straps you to a stretcher, flies you in a helicopter to some laboratory, then starts shoving hoses up your ass and flushing you out. I thought I’d been abducted by aliens… Annalisa, my colorist and couture consultant, was brought in and she has managed to create a kind of slim-fit Depends that she swears will not be visible through my jeans, as long as we go up one size to a 28-inch waist and add a relaxed-fit cut….Oh, one more thing: Don’t stand behind me.

Confession: I’m wearing Depends today

Having watched Forrest Gump a few times over the years, I’ve started to see beyond the well-made tale of a simple man who seems unaffected by his (fictional) catalytic role in history. He is like the feather that appears at the beginning and end of the film: just going wherever the wind may take him, settling for a little, just doing what he does and seemingly unfazed .

I came across a site that offered a few interpretations of the messages in films and I thought the analysis of the message in Forrest Gump was something worth considering. From filmwad.com:

“…Forrest Gump never really does anything of his own free will. He listens to his momma, Jenny, Lieutenant Dan, and Bubba, but (apart from the scene where he runs back to find and rescue Bubba) he never actually shows any initiative or decision-making capabilities of his own. Jenny tells him to run, so he runs. The government tells him to fight, so he fights. Forrest is a pure, wonderful soul, but were it not for his supernatural speed and ability to play ping pong, he’d have gotten killed or screwed over roughly a hundred times over throughout the course of his life.”

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The best monster movies have always been reflections of the fears of the day. Aliens, giant insects, vampires and indestructible serial killers have been the fare at times when people were uptight about sex, worried about radiation, on Communist witch-hunts or afraid of disease; each fear could be embodied by a Hollywood monster.

But the best movies didn’t rely on how realistic the presentation was; it was more about a sympathetic hero and the terrifying opposition they must try and defeat to stay alive, rescue a loved one, save the world, etc. The typical formula is to get the audience to develop some kind of identification with the protagonist, although sometimes the monster can be portrayed as a tragic character and the audience, while understanding that he/she/it must be destroyed for the greater good, can feel compassion for its suffering, however necessary it might be so that the hero can go on.

JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield, while hyped as redefining the monster-movie genre by introducing a completely “new and unique” beast that America can call its own, the movie is more like a long YouTube video with a bigger budget.
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When I was about 17, I bought a cheap electric guitar and a small amp, and began trying to emulate the music I listened to. I wanted to play loud rock and since it was my angry-young-man phase (which, now that I think about it, lasted far longer than it probably should have), playing guitar loudly was part of the persona, I thought.

I met a jazz guitarist who told me that if I wanted to play most rock songs, I’d have to start with the blues. I really wasn’t interested in what sounded like scratchy recordings and simple, repetitive lyrics but over to Tower Records in Greenwich Village I went, searching for some blues records and an education.

I didn’t really know many blues artists by name, but I did, however, recognize some songs by people like Muddy Waters, Elmore James and Robert Johnson who, for me, was particularly intriguing since there was this mysterious legend surrounding his life and death. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past 20 years (give or take), the word “Zen” has been used liberally in association with some personal, commercial or business concept to suggest that the concept in question can be “mastered”, usually through a “formula” that someone “discovered”. Typically, though, this mental elixir is alluded to in a self-help book (or eBook), DVD or seminar — which, of course, will cost you some money to acquire.

Typing in “the zen of” (with quotes) in Google alone results in over 742,000 sites out there talking about the Zen of something. So if the true ideas about Zen as a distinct school of Buddhism are distilled to loosely — if at all — apply to anything from MP3 players to how to close a business deal “better”, it would only make sense that “meditation” would become the next logical buzzword that would be touted as a let’s-get-happy meme. Read the rest of this entry »