Category Archives: General

ZeFrank, Ernie Kovacs

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My in-law’s attorney, who used to dress up as a witch to introduce the TV midnight movie in Midland TX, wrote her senior thesis on Ernie Kovacs, a comedian who pioneered in the new medium of television in the early 1950s.

I’m too damn intellectually lazy to do a similar treatment comparing Kovacs to ZeFrank, the polymath who pioneered in the new medium of video blogs in the mid-aughts, but I’m appearantly first person in all of googlespace to think of drawing the parallel, so now intellectual integrity demands that anyone else who thinks of writing an academic paper must cite me.

I note that appearantly Ze has some Ernie Kovacs DVDs in his amazon wish list.

I Like

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It’s a bizarre accident that I even found this, but I really like the look of the home page of the New York State Council on the Arts. It reminds me of an faded and worn annual report that has been sitting in a drawer for decades.

New York State Council on the Arts

It’s designed by Flat. I like their other work too.

Standup Economist Yoram Bauman PhD

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Just this last weekend, we had an econ-related lecture I helped organize for the local Reed alumni chapter. I’d originally wanted to have Yoram Bauman PhD do some standup comedy before the lecture, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t figure out a good way to have stand-up comedy and a serious discussion about economics in a two hour period without compromising one or the other.

Now we may have lost our chance. Yoram was just linked from the widely read and influential blog of Jason Kotke, who pointed to a YouTube Video of Yoram doing one of his bits. I’m sure it will be mere weeks before Yoram is hanging out with Jon Stewart, Alan Greenspan, and Bono, and has no time for us little people.

Edelman, Looking out for Numero Uno

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Yesterday I mentioned that someone from Edelman, a big PR agency with a growing practice in internet media, had checked out my post on the way Microsoft cripped “the Social” which is the Zune’s main distinguishing feature.

That second mention brought visits from 5 more Edelman operatives, who did a much more thorough job checking out my site. The interesting thing is, they didn’t pay me a visit because I mentioned the Zune again. They visited because I mentioned Edelman.

This suggests that Edelman is roughly 5x more interested in their own image than that of Microsoft, who is presumably one of their clients. Not a surprise, really, especially after Edelman’s recent missteps.

I’ll be interested in seeing if this post generates the same scale of response, or if I’ve already made it into their kill file for being a crank without a large audience.