Six days until the election, and everybody’s heard about the bird, about the word about the bird.
Mirror of Quicktime Movie. Via ven, that crazy baldie.
Author: Dan Dickinson
Lucky Magazine: What are your takes on lip-synching?
Ashlee Simpson: I’m totally against it and offended by it. I’m going out to let my real talent show, not to just stand there and dance around. Personally, I’d never lip-synch. It’s just not me.
Ashlee Simpson: I’m totally against it and offended by it. I’m going out to let my real talent show, not to just stand there and dance around. Personally, I’d never lip-synch. It’s just not me.
(Link goes to a local mirror of the 20MB DivX AVI of Ashlee Simpson’s performance on SNL. Faced with a dangerous lip sync track that she wasn’t expecting, she responded by…doing a jig. Then blamed it on the band.)
A lot of noise has been made over the past few weeks about “podcasting”, which is essentially automated downloading of audioblog posts via a syndicated feed. There are some that are trying to label it as the Next Big Thing in internet communication – and ignoring all my complaints about the process (not user friendly, lack of engaging content, not enough hours in the day to listen to all the streams, unnecessary bandwidth usage), I think there’s something else that’s becoming more engaging: ad-hoc peer to peer trading of media in nearly real-time.
Now, this is not completely new. Amusing videos of fuckups on television or other media have been traded online for ages. What’s matured are the methods and the quality. The time gap between the infamous Nipple Seen Round The World at the Super Bowl and when hi-resolution pictures and/or video were available online was roughly 5 minutes. Jon Stewart’s Crossfire appearance was downloaded – we’re talking just counted downloads – by more people than the number who actually watch Crossfire. To a smaller extent, similar swarming happened when President Bush claimed during the third debate to have never said he wasn’t concerned about Osama Bin Laden – before the debate had even ended, video proving he had said just that was making the rounds.
The above Ashlee Simpson clip has appeared online, and will spread virally, getting mirrored and having its quality increase as time progresses. (The clip I’m mirroring is actually the third version I saw.) NBC had to shut down their bulletin boards temporarily (and apparently edited the West Coast broadcast of SNL, which is only providing fodder for people to distribute it further); Simpson’s own boards have turned into a war zone.
What we’re beginning to see is effectively an online flash mob with a purpose other than just performance art. Here there is a targeted payload, a specific file or event that is being transmitted. Adding to the newness of this movement – and one thing that may boggle the minds of those who are brain-locked about what p2p is – is that everything is being doing with existing protocols. The actual movement of files is being done by BitTorrent, HTTP, FTP, or streaming media servers. The notification – letting people know it exists and why they should care – is handled by blogs, IRC, link farms such as del.icio.us, and message boards.
Because this is occurring with ordinary internet protocols, there is no barrier to entry. Anyone can spread the word (as I’m doing here). Anyone can mirror (again, natch) or provide their bandwidth for seeding a torrent.
Again, none of this is anything new – it’s been going on for years. But this dynamic, ad-hoc, viral peer-to-peer media distribution seems to be rapidly supplanting “traditional” peer-to-peer services like Limewire or Kazaa, at least for materials that can be shared via Fair Use.
With no single source of control or limiting factor, it’s the best sort of decentralized system: thousands and thousands of independent agents working together to achieve one goal. Even if that goal is laughing at talentless hacks like Ashlee Simpson or Tucker Carlson.
Categories
On The Existence Of Bagels
Since moving to NYC, one of the minor changes I’ve gone through is the change in bagel preference. Living in Ithaca, one gets very used to the Upstate-style bagel; thick, heavy, doughy, fairly chewy. New York City bagels, of course, are thinner, wider, lighter, and a little less doughy. Everyone sells bagels, and they are cheap and filling.
When we place a Fresh Direct order for groceries, we always tend to order a six-pack of bagels and some cream cheese, for the occasional time I want to eat breakfast. The ones that are delivered meet all of the above criteria for a NYC bagel, and also keep very well in the freezer. Strangely, though, it is impossible for me to prepare myself one without having a minor aneurism.
Why this intense pain in the head? On the packaging, the slogan and product name meld together one of the most mind-boggling sentences in human history since “If it weren’t for my horse, I never would have spent that extra year on college.”
The pitch reads:
BAGELS AREN’T BAGELS UNLESS THEY’RE JUST BAGELS.
Just Bagels, of course, is the name of the product. Still, even knowing this, I am forced to read this as: Instances of object X aren’t instance of object X unless they’re simply instances of object X.
Is this a blow against fancy things, maybe? Are they implying that were a bagel all spruced up with fancy seeds and flavorings, that it would stop being a bagel and turn into some other sort of bread foodstuff, such as a bialy? But they sell six varieties, including Just Bagels Everything. Surely that’s not just a bagel, as the combination of poppy and sesame and onion and garlic disqualifies one from saying it’s just a bagel.
Perhaps they’re speaking to the moral sense of the bagels – a sort of superhero bagel, upholding the standards and beliefs of our fair city. I would find this hard to believe, as they do not seem to have any superpowers to resist my desire to eat them, nor do I gain the ability to fly by eating them.
(At this point in the entry, I’m looking at the dictionary definitions for just in hopes of deciphering further. I would appreciate it if someone called for professional help.)
How about “by a narrow margin, barely”? That doesn’t speak well to the product, though, if it only squeaks by the qualification charts for what constitutes a bagel. Ignoring the disqualification of bagels conforming better to the specification, this throws us into even more mental anguish as we are judging the conformance of a bagel on whether or not it conforms to the state of the bagel.
One final possibility is that they are using “just” as a variant on joust. Perhaps these bagels ride into battle and try to knock each other over when…
…
Needless to say, this is why I often just go out to eat.