the 9/11 memorial

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

this post will probably piss off at least 13 of the 14 readers i have. but it’s what i think, and so be it.

i ran across this quote from the uk guardian on salon today. it’s from an older story about the terrorists bombings at the atocha train station in madrid, and how the spanish government chose to memorialize the victims:

“The Atocha memorial lacks any hint of artistic grandeur. Yet its very banality is also somehow appropriate — for this war will be won or lost not in some grand showdown but in a trillion tiny everyday encounters, like those of commuters pouring off a suburban train.”

as the salon article notes, “there’s a simple and discreet memorial to the bombing victims.”

i completely agree with this sentiment. every time i take the subway in the morning, it’s a thumb in the eye of both the terrorists who want me to be afraid to take it, and the u.s. government with their completely ineffective fearmongering “war on terror”.

so why then are we spending a billion dollars on a memorial to the 9/11 victims? or even $500 million, for that matter?

build a nice secure train station at the world trade center site, and put up a simple and discreet memorial in it.

and take the difference between the cost of that and the billion dollars, and do something constructive with it.

when the freedom tower is built and is full of occupants, that’ll be the most effective memorial anyone could wish for.

american idol? feh.

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’m getting bored with idol.

three or four weeks ago, it seemed that this was the best crop of talent ever. i was geniunely looking forward to the weeding out process.

but the song selection has sucked, for the most part. and not a single idol has progressed past the point where they started. each remaining idol sings just like they did when they started.

no growth.

and i haven’t been blown away by a single performance in weeks. when i say blown away, i’m talking at the level of fantasia singing “summertime”, which was for me the high water mark of idol performances. no one is even close to that this year.

hell, no one has even approached the level established by clay aiken when he sang “solitaire”. and that’s saying something, because i am not now nor have i ever been a claymate, and i laughed my ass off at his attempt to be a sincere neil sedaka. that performance though, in retrospect, seems toweringly godlike in comparison to what i’m suffering through now.

although i must admit i do find clay’s video chat escapades quite amusing.

so we are left with taylor, who i like quite a lot but needs to get serious and stop goofing around with crap like “play that funky music”. taylor, you need more tom waits and more ray charles, not more wild cherry.

and chris, who i have never liked. i like his voice but his phrasing drives me bonkers. and stylistically he just rips off so many people, and brings nothing original of his own to bear. it gripes me that no one calls him on this–so many of his performances have been rip-offs of lesser known versions of songs (red hot chili peppers, live, and the list goes on from there).

and catherine, who always sounds slightly off-key or pitchy to me, and is sometimes tolerable and once in a while pretty good. but then she stops singing and opens her mouth to talk and i just can’t stand her. i did like her second song on tuesday, though–the one with the drums.

and elliot, who please please please needs to stop looking at the camera in that amish-boy-just-off-the-farm way. he has zero charisma, or less than zero. if i close my eyes i love him. if i open them i’m aghast.

so i guess i’m left rooting for taylor, but only by default.

the final weeks? elliot goes next, then catherine, then taylor wins the taylor vs. chris showdown to be the next american idol.

but i have a feeling that people are really fickle this time, and a really crappy week or a brilliant week by anyone, but especially by taylor or chris, could dramatically change the balance.

oh by the way, here’s a great place to get caught up on your yiddish, if you don’t know what feh means.

apple adds ads

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

apple has started to advertise the mac.

it’s about time.

if you haven’t seen them yet, head on over to the link above. they are marvelously done, with the slight exception of the “better” ad, which is not my favorite.

the rest of them, though, have a perfect tone. there’s a geeky guy (john hodgman from the daily show) who plays the part of the pc, and a younger, hipper guy (justin long, from ed and dodgeball, among others) who plays the part of the mac.

the way they set these up is brilliant. past apple ads have been condescending toward pc users, the very people they are trying to attract. these ads are set up so that the pc guy admits his own (or, by proxy, his computer’s own) mistakes. and the mac guy is always cute, never threatening or insulting, yet gets relatively obscure geeky points across in a humorous way.

whoda thunk that viruses, or networking, or the horrors of constant restarting, could be explained in such a humorous and cute way?

i saw the ads on tv last night for the first time, during “american idol” and “house”. i’d watched them all online before that, though.

and i would have seen them during “24” on monday night and would have been completely surprised by them, which would have been really cool. but kirk the asshat had to keep jumping up and running to do things during the commercials on “24”, which meant that i paused the show on the pvr and then hit the live button, thus missing the commercials.

kirk isn’t really an asshat. but isn’t that a great word? i’ve seen it online a few places recently. great word. so i just wanted to use it, even though it wasn’t an appropriate use.

anyway, my favorite is “network”, followed by “viruses” and “ilife”.

go watch them.

and then go find out all about why and how to switch to a mac

and then switch, dammit. it’ll be the best thing you ever did.

by the way, assuming that i actually post regularly, i’m going to start putting the entire post on the front page, rather than putting a teaser on the front page and then making you click to read the rest.

let me know what you think.

2cv at spring and broadway

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2cv on spring and broadway
citroen 2cv on spring and broadway

the citroen 2cv (or “deux chevaux”) is my favorite car of all time, although i’ve never had the privilege of driving one. just looking at it is enough to make you smile. and, appropriately enough, i saw one last night in manhattan after a great cassoulet at jardin bistro.

and, though i did not know this until i googled for the link above, billy joel drove a deux chevaux in that famous crash into the side of a long island house.

great design and celebrity cachet. what else could you want in a car?

a brilliant widget

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

stuart at 36 degrees design, the designer of the template i used to make my widget for queerspace, has made a great new widget.

in his words, with capitals intact, “The widget has two sides, the first of which is an excel spreadsheet, filled with some meaningless data, and the back side is a word document, accessed by flipping the widget with the ‘i’ in the top right corner.”

now is that brilliant or what. perfect for nefarious work avoidance.

download it here.

my my mandisa

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

on the mandisa thing, which i blogged about earlier–here’s my quick take on why she was voted out when she was.

as i see it, mandisa had two sets of hardcore fans–the ultra-religious ones who got the hints and knew she was religious, and the gay fans who loved her diva-hood.

her gay fans stuck by her when she sang a gospel song the previous week, becuase gay people in general are hyper-sensitive to bigotry and wouldn’t avoid voting for her on that basis alone. and she sang the song well. i voted for her, because i love me some gospel and she kicked butt singing the song.

her gay fans would be hypersensitive to hypocrisy as well, though. so when it came out that she was openly supportive of a known, active homophobe, her gay fans (including me) abandoned her.

and she went home. simple as that.

you could say that she went home because it was country week, and she did an abysmal job at singing the song. which she did.

but she dropped too far, too fast for it to only be a country music thing.

mandisa, darling: it’s a gay thing too.

just ask donna summer. really though, mandisa, you should have asked her before you went down the same career-wrecking road she did.

bottom line? just about everybody will tolerate a different point of view.

and just about everybody gets annoyed with hypocrisy.

mandisa, say it ain’t so

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

is american idol’s mandisa homophobic?

kirk just sent me a link to a story on the advocate’s website that outlines mandisa’s overwhelming devotion to beth moore, an anti-gay “christian” writer whose website links to ex-gay groups.

i’m not linking to ms. moore, because i’m not boosting her google rank. google her if you want.

now maybe mandisa, who i’ve voted for every single week, is not homophobic. maybe she is unaware of ms. moore’s homophobic rants, and disagrees with them.

if so, mandisa needs to clarify her views on the subject, because there’s a lot of smoke, and i don’t know if there’s a fire.

absent a clarification, though, i’m not voting for her anymore, even if she is one of my favorites. i have a feeling that a big chunk of her fan base are gay men, and she’d better get out in front of this quickly.

a really catchy tune

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

here’s a fun link: worst web design of 2005. lots of links to sites with monumentally bad design.

and i thought my site had problems.

my favorite is this one: the association of international glaucoma societies. you can even download their “glaucoma hymn”, which has to be heard to be believed.

or don’t download it, because it’s one of those annoying sites that automatically plays music in the background when you go there, so you’ll hear it anyway if you click on the link.

the “glaucoma hymn” is definitely going onto my ipod.

screwed by gates?

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

bad, bad news on this front:

microsoft windows vista will not support efi booting (intel-based macs only support booting via efi)

the new intel macs use efi to boot, and expectations were that vista would support efi to facilitate dual-booting of windows and os x. microsoft has decided to stick to their old bios scheme with 32-bit versions of vista. they may support it on the 64-bit version of vista, though they haven’t confirmed it.

the way i read this, that means that users of the new intel macs (which have a 32-bit chip) won’t be able to easily boot vista any more than they are currently able to boot xp.
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