The Pillars of the Earth, a mini-series based on Ken Follett’s novel, starts in three weeks on Starz. I subscribed in anticipation, its benefits for me outweighing the embarrassment.
What’s to like?
Lavish $40 million production
Ridley Scott involvement
Matthew Macfadyen
Rufus Sewell
Middle Ages
A cathedral
Not to like? Well… it’s based on trash historical fiction. Ken Follett’s rep has slid from Eye of the Needle days. Pillars and its sequel no doubt took long labor and research, and they show a glimpse of the period that I like to hear about, even if I’m not sure it represents the period accurately. The books also pander to Gothic tastes, kind of a guy’s take on bodice ripping. Follett’s villains have all the subtlety of Snidley Whiplash. (Come to think of it, Ian McShane, who plays Waleran in the series, would make a great Snidley Whiplash.)
I’ll admit I’m not completely immune to the thrill of the Gothic in tiny infrequent doses, though I’m really embarrassed to recognize I like it. As for the mini-series, I figure if a story puts me in even a broken time machine to the 12th century, I’m in, ready to enjoy the good bits and slide the trashy bits over to (alright, over near) the periphery of my judgement.
I hadn’t been to Michael’s for years. I went yesterday for something specific but took some time to survey the state of crafts.
Scrapbook materials take up many aisles. It’s the rage. Scrapbooking appears to be a sort of assembly art, not that creative, it doesn’t seem to me. There are a lot of pre-made objects you can buy and then you assemble them, bringing your own taste or whimsy. I’m sure there must be a certain satisfaction in it. I’m also sure the craze couldn’t exist without products to buy.
Then as I wandered around, I noticed it’s not just scrapbooks. It seems like many—not saying most—crafts consist of buying things that somebody else made and putting them together. Can I buy a chain and a plastic teardrop crystal, put one on the other, and claim that I make jewelry?
I remember painting a preformed plaster cat at summer Bible school when I was about 8 and thinking “I didn’t make this.” But I think it’s getting worse. Is it part of the same trend as toys that entertain kids but don’t allow for much imagination or doing on the kid’s part?
The rubbery iPad case/folder is a little tippy for sitting the device upright, and you do want to take your iPad to bed to watch Netflix. I tried a beanbag pillow on my first day with my little prize a month ago, and darned if I’m not still using it.
One nice thing: you can rotate it to something other than a 90-degree angle. If you’re not a bed watcher or reader you won’t understand the sovereign importance of this feature.
Another discovery in the what-will-I-use-this-thing-for department: the iPad is perfect for reading long magazine articles online. I’ve found that I tend to abandon nice meaty stories if they go on for pages and pages; I’ve even been known to *gasp!* buy a print magazine if there’s a particular long article I want to luxuriate in. Not anymore.
That’s funny, and typical, and tells me something about myself, again. The socialist in Congress is the only commentator I’ve heard so far who tied the banks to the oil companies as I did this morning.
Nice how MSNBC now lets you clip a clip to show just the part you’re talking about. And nice how they expose their text promo in the embed code so you can strip it off if you can read plain HTML.
There is nothing new to us about this. Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?
BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
I flatter myself that I think I understand the way Barack Obama must think.
People want to hear big indignant statements from him about the Gulf oil gusher because we’re indignant about it and we want him to represent us. But it’s posturing; we know that and he knows it. If he’s like me, he rolls his eyes when he encounters posturing by other people and he would rather not do the thing he scorns.
What he will do, because he’s expected to, is rail against the delay and fret about the damage. A better approach would be what Dan Froomkin suggests: seize the moment to talk about regulation, but not just about oil. He could chance it and be brave, generalize it—tying in mining and the banks, maybe even the Citizens United case, not minding what opponents might say about bashing business. It’s been building to this point since the Reagan years and now big business has run fully amuck.
I wonder if I’m placing myself in contempt of terms by even saying this. Doesn’t matter. I’ll take down the ads; I haven’t had any for a long time and don’t need them to eat.
So I put an ad unit on my blog this morning, kept refreshing the page, looking at different posts and watched how it slowly learned what’s on my site. Probably cut-rate cr*** c*** and b**kr**y plans are shown regardless of the content because there are a lot of advertisers wanting to push that stuff out, but I had the added magnet of a long post about my experience with a particular company and another about f******** reform. Over the course of an hour they seemed to be acting as a beacon for more and more ads about youknowwhat even on unrelated single-post pages. Do you think that’s possible?
Now I’ve closed the posts. See if helps. I liked seeing the Washington Post banner on my blog. Why can’t more of the ads be like that? If they didn’t make you feel like such a slime merchant the ads would be even more used, don’t you think? Or don’t most small publishers care? I don’t know, but I care. See how long I can stand it. I’ll let you know.
Update: Credit-related ads are largely gone, a day later. Pleasant surprise. I’ll try reopening my February post about Capital One and see what happens.
When Dave Winer put out a call for ideas on suitable page layouts for a tweet-per-page site, I didn’t have any ideas. I still don’t have any ideas for a whole page layout, but this might be a neat background. I spied an index card sitting on top of my printer/scanner this morning and it asked me to scan it. Somebody must have thought of this because it seems just right in size, shape and sensibility for a single tweet.
Now I get why Salesforce wanted Steve Gillmor and why he wanted them. If you judge from the commentary on the company’s Cloudblog, some crazy bright people work there. The blog’s subtitle is “An industry view with altitude,” and some of that big picture thinking comes from knowing industry history, and some of that historical knowledge comes from the grey hairs you see in the contributor photos. As a fellow greyhair, I like that.
Currently playing on the blog: one Flash post after another. I’m an iPad owner with just a two-week tenure (waited for the 3G), so I’ve been following this whole Flash-Apple thing—dubious two months ago, warming up, surprised to be so persuaded by Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash, yet still worried about non-video Flash. The “Well, you have H.264” argument doesn’t answer a concern for a few important applications of Flash.
Worried about what non-video Flash? Most of it I couldn’t care less about: HBO’s new all-Flash site, car dealer sites, Flash banner ads, maybe even widget platforms and embedded audio plugins. I do wonder how quickly other methods can replace e-learning courses and demonstrations like the nice stuff The New York Times makes to illuminate its stories. But especially e-learning, a market expected to reach $50 billion by 2014, as big as the market for home improvement for energy savings, though you don’t hear much about it from web/tech luminaries, let alone in presidential speeches.
I’m not deep in the online training game, but have some connection to it. As far as I’ve been able to determine in my world, nobody’s planning to make courses any other way. There might be an opportunity here for a company to really clean up with some type of vector something or other. In HTML5 canvas? I haven’t looked into which technologies are out there poised to replace what Flash can do. I figure e-learning types could be watching casual gaming programmers and follow their lead, but I don’t think most of them are. Even if they did pick up on methods used in gaming, it seems like it would have to take another few years before content authoring tools for non-programmers could become available.
Salesforce itself must expect status quo at least for a while. As I was reading the second post on the current blog index I wondered if the company did any online training, so I nosed around the site and spotted a recruitment ad for curriculum developer for Force.com. Rapid deployment software experience desired: Articulate Studio, Captivate, Camtasia—all Flash-based.
We may be entering a rather painful interregnum and I have to say it’s all very interesting. God, I love change.
The Pillars of the Earth, a mini-series based on Ken Follett’s novel, starts in three weeks on Starz. I subscribed in anticipation, its benefits for me outweighing the embarrassment. 
