To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Although I am not a highly-paid marketing professional (I am merely a highly-paid technology professional who works for a marketing company), I’d like to proffer the following tip that might seem like a good idea, if not the obvious:
Never, ever name your product so that, if it’s placed side by side with its equivalent product from your competitor, it sounds as though you’ve just lost a tightly-contested ballgame.
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I bought this book from a garage sale in my eBay days for a quarter. As you know, gentle reader, I don’t shy away from novelizations of movies (see also The Enforcer and Desperately Seeking Susan). So I read this book even though I haven’t yet seen the movie.
As you might know, it’s based on a screenplay by William Gibson based on a short story by William Gibson. Instapundit once repeated a question from Stuart Buck:
STUART BUCK on the novelization of the Narnia movie: “If you make a movie out of a classic and beloved children’s book that has sold millions of copies, why on earth would you want to have someone write a book based on the movie?”
Duh! Because if the original novel sold more copies, the movie studios wouldn’t get a cut. But with the synergy of rewriting the source material and releasing it as new, preferably by one of the parent company’s subsidiaries, you get an alternate source of revenue for the property. Heck’s pecs, I haven’t even been to Hollywood and I grok that.
But I digress. This book details the story of a courier with a flash drive (or the 1995 predicted equivalent) wired into his head. A pair of scientists hire the courier to carry a large secret to Newark, but as the upload completes, organized criminals burst in and put the courier on the run. Also, the courier has overextended himself; the scientists uploaded 320 gigabytes (not megabytes), so the overload is beginning to to impair him. He races to Newark looking for his contact, but the organized crime figures are on his tail, driving the courier underground with the Lotek gang and an enhanced but attractive young woman.
It’s a quick little cyberpunk book which preceded the mainstreamization of the cyberpunk genre. It’s also interesting to read about Johnny Mnemonic, portrayed by Keanu Reeves in the movie, as jacking into the matrix–several years before Reeves jacked into the film that revitalized his career. Many people see this story as a precursor for The Matrix, but that stretches reality a little bit–there’s no paranoia fiction aspect to it at all.
A quick read, worth the quarter.
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Excellent opportunity in the mail yesterday:
Brian,
I’d like to talk to you concerning a full or part time management opportunity with my company. Please call me at 636-xxx-xxxx.
Thank you,
Len De Clue
Come on, if you’re looking for suckers, don’t insult their intelligence on the first contact. Although, in retrospect, this is probably a good mechanism for vetting leads. If they want you, Len de Clue, they’re ripe for the harvest.
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Neither will anyone else, which makes one wonder what the point is:
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for this story: Republicans say they have fixed economy if the legislature or government had been in the hands of Democrats?
Oh, yeah, it would be stacked with numbers and facts about how the economy had improved, instead of merely quotes from Republicans claiming the economy had improved.
But numbers are hard, and aspersively parroting is easy.
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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s headline identifies whose side it comes down on: Casino’s parking is hijacked:
How much is too much to pay to park a car in downtown St. Louis?
At the very least, it’s a bit less than $25, according to the President Casino on the Admiral.
In an apparent power play over control of the much-disputed “Cherrick” parking lot, its owner has jacked up more than tenfold the price the President pays for customers to use the lot.
So it’s the owner hijacking its own property. Well, sort of. As I read the article, the owner wants to squeeze the government-subsidized entertainment venue (the President Casino) into buying the parking garage before the new government-subsidized entertainment venue (the new casino and go-kart track) seizes the property for a “fair” price. Somewhere in there I got confused about the blighted area infighting for the same profitable resource and stopped paying attention.
Which is probably just what they wanted. All the better to rule me.
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You thought eminient domain was bad:
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Pete Townshend Warns IPod Users:
Guitarist Pete Townshend has warned iPod users that they could end up with hearing problems as bad as his own if they don’t turn down the volume of the music they are listening to on earphones.
Surely, it was the headphones, not playing guitar in front of large stacks of amps and monitors for decades.
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After a post last night (take that, you Johnny-come-latelies like Instapundit and Ace–what am I, chopped liver?), Jack Abramoff dresses differently.
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Rest assured: somewhere, somehow, a crack team of expert conspiracy theorists tonight are finding a way to blame Ariel Sharon’s stroke on the Jews.
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Jack Abramoff makes the black trenchcoat and fedora look bad.
Note to self: Continue belt cinched around expanding belly abstinence. Also, don’t bribe congressional representatives.
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Writers, take note:
And don’t blow up Cleveland. Somebody’s going to need that later on.
The power of the pen is mightier than the neutron bomb.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister Norma published this book after Ms. Millay died, so its works contain a gamut of the good to the filler material selected from the poet’s incomplete or unpublished work. Oddly, the linked Amazon listing says that the first edition is 1949; however, the stated first edition I have has a 1954 copyright. Perhaps Norma was just planning ahead.
I paid $10 for this stated first edition at Hooked on Books in Springfield, and it’s a former library book. That said, perhaps it’s only worth ten bucks to me, but I’ve enjoyed Ms. Millay’s work since college. Actually, in college I read a great deal of her work and her biographies and whatnot. Early in our relationship, I gave Heather a collection of Millay’s sonnets. So let’s just establish that I am somewhat biased.
In this volume, Millay’s thoughts muse more on death than on love, partially accountable to her advancing age and partially accountable, I would expect, to her sister’s selection for poignancy. But Millay can still turn a phrase, and the poems within this volume which are not incisive nor insightful are tolerable, which puts her in an upper league on merely that account. A couple of memorable lines in decent poems scream for quotation, and I’ll reread the book in the future and will enjoy it then, too.
So it’s probably worth the ten dollars even though I never attended Albernathy High School nor used its library. It’s mine now.
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U.S. Toll for Year in Iraq Nears ’04 Mark:
Bombings and shootings killed at least 20 people across Iraq on the final day of the year Saturday, while U.S. troops shivered in the cold during a performance by an “American Idol” singer as part of New Year’s Eve celebrations. The U.S. military also reported the death of an American soldier from wounds, bringing its death toll in Iraq for 2005 near last year’s record level.
I would say, “Give me a break,” but Associated Press is not doing us any favors. Let’s recap the timeline:
2003: The United States invades in late March and faces an enemy that largely surrenders. US faces 9 months of combat and occupancy.
2004: The first full year of occupation, and the year which the “record” was set.
2005: The second full year of occupation, and the year in which the record is almost matched.
There you have it; a record of long-standing. Well, we Americans are told that we’re always hungering for the bigger and better things all the time, with baseball players chasing home run records every year and whatnot. I guess Associated Press is just trying to feed our interest in meeting or exceeding records every year, even if it has to manufacture those records out of whole cloth.
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In response to my thesis that bloggers are not a sickly lot, but are a fertile lot, Kelley of Suburban Blight announces.
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So when I was watching my traditional Christmas movies last week (Die Hard and Lethal Weapon), I noticed that both movies starred two different actors (or an actor and an actress) in small roles:
| Actor | Lethal Weapon | Die Hard |
|---|---|---|
| Mary Ellen Trainor | Dr. Stephanie Woods | Gail Wallens |
| Al Leong | Endo | Uli |
Tonight, we watched Coming to America, and we got a similar effect, and oddly enough it was Die Hard II:
| Actor | Coming to America | Die Hard 2 | Die Hard with a Vengeance |
|---|---|---|---|
| John Amos | Cleo McDowell | Major Grant | |
| Vondie Curtis-Hall | Basketball Game Vendor | Miller | |
| Samuel L. Jackson | Hold-Up Man | Zeus Carver |
Okay, Samuel L. Jackson is bonus credit, but isn’t it weird how the Die Hard series is the touchstone in this? Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? Insert Die Hard, and you immediately knock off two degrees.
I reckon it’s because producers and directors prefer to work with known quantities for their projects (Joel Silver, for example, was behind Lethal Weapon and Die Hard), but it’s still amusing and impressive to identify groups of actors who appear in several movies that are not sequels of each other.
Gentle reader, I invite you to do the same. Drop a couple of your own eureka moments in the comments, or post such on your Web site. Or, I guess, you can bother me with the list of the obvious when you see them. I mean, crikey, I know Clint Eastwood used a bunch of cowboy actors from his films in Every Which Way But Loose. Show some originality!
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I bought these books, paperbacks, from Hooked on Books for $2 and $3 respectively. So that’s a testament to how expensive books can be at Hooked on Books and also a testament to how much I like John D. MacDonald.
The Empty Trap details a revenge-based story told partially in flashback. A hotel manager finds himself working for a syndicate-connected hotel owner and discovers that he has no way out of the business. Unfortunately, the woman telling him this is the hard-but-soft songbird wife of said owner. The hotel manager figures the only way out is to absquatulate (meaning 1) with some of the mobster’s money and the mobster’s wife; the mobster thinks the hotel manager and the wife should indeed absquatulate (meaning 2). The goons leave the now-former hotel manager for dead in the Mexican desert, but in leaving him only mostly dead, they set the stage for revenge.
The Executioners reminded me a lot of the movie Cape Fear (or at least the promos I’d seen of the movie), and a quick glance at Amazon.com reveals why. The book was the source for the movie. Ah. As you might already know with that hint, a man and his family suffer the unwanted attention of a released felon against whom the father testified. The police and other locals provide little help, so the family goes on the run and finally has to make a stand.
Both books have plots that have become stock over the last fifty years, but I read them to see how John D. MacDonald did them. He did them well and rapidly; these books weigh in at fewer than 170 pages each and respresent the best of the immediately post-pulp era.
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Researcher: iPod earbuds could damage hearing:
The ever-popular earbuds used with many iPods and other MP3 players may be more stylish than the bigger and bulkier earmuff-type headphones, but they may also be more damaging to one’s hearing, according to a Northwestern professor.
“No one really knows for sure” the levels at which iPod users listen to music, but “what we do know is that young people like their music loud and seldom worry about any decline in hearing ability,” Dean Garstecki, chairman of Northwestern’s communication sciences and disorders department, told Reuters.
We don’t know, but we know it’s bad.
If only we had some metaphor by which we could grasp the danger so we could better clamor for government regulation, such as warning labels or a mandatory cap on the volume these things could produce.
The earbuds commonly used by iPod listeners are placed directly into the ear and can boost the audio signal by as many as nine decibels — comparable to the difference in sound intensity between an alarm clock and a lawn mower, Garstecki said.
Reuters and the researcher are partying like it’s 1979, though, because we’ve heard this particular chorus since the introduction of the Walkman, which replaced the practice of carrying a portable tape deck with the speaker pressed against one’s ear.
Or we would have heard the particular chorus, if we weren’t deaf. Instead, we’ve had to read it on the Internet.
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Mourn a moment with me for the recently departed poet: ‘Tiger’ creator Blake dead at 87
I was under the impression that WIlliam Blake had died a long time ago, but you know how colleges are these days, imparting the young with bad information. Let’s eligooglate the man with his most famous work:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
No, I didn’t click through the headline on CNN.com. Why do you ask?
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Like Ravenwood and 40% of the people who take the survey, I have discovered:
Which Red Dawn Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
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