Culture

Sadly, Kwame lost, but it won’t hurt his career. Which is good — I think he’d have been a better hire than Bill, although I’m sure Bill will do a good job for The Donald. On the other hand, Bill certainly did a better job on the final task than Kwame. Kwame was stuck with Omarosa no matter what, but he should have at least tried to sideline her. Even given that he’d kept Omarosa, he might have had a chance to win if he’d defended himself in the boardroom. I’d have used the situation as an excuse to trot out the “I always hire people who are smarter than me” line, which has the advantage of being true. I’m pretty sure Kwame’s management style works better when he’s had the chance to build and/or mold his own team rather than inheriting a bunch of subpar workers. ...

The 2004 Hugo nominees are out. I have very little opinion. I do find it interesting to compare them to the Nebula nominees, insofar as the Nebula nominees include quite a few stories originally published online.

The rumor is that this is Owen Wilson. “My life is boring and not worth writing about, except for my knowledge of one thing. So this blog will focus on that thing. It is, for lack of a better word, celebrity. I stumbled onto it by a series of chance events. Suffice it to say, I can tell you what it’s like to see your picture on the magazine rack every now and again when you pay for groceries. And that’ll have to suffice. I’d like this to be the sort of account afforded only by anonymity. And it that happens, if my identity were revealed, I’d quickly be selling grapefruits — instead of paying $14 a pop to eat them — on Sunset Blvd.” ...

Excellent second to last episode of The Apprentice tonight. I’m already looking forward to the next season, when competitors will know the format better. There wasn’t a lot of metagaming in this season, and that’s got to be partially due to the lack of information about the full rules. Next year, contestants will know that they’ll see their fired peers again, and they’ll know that they can keep allies on their team safe even when it gets down to three people per team. More important, they’ll be more confident about the twists. ...

Things I know to be true: Kip Manley can write, and City of Roses looks like it might be a really good textual equivalent of the webcomic form. Which is to say we’re getting back to serial literature, a la Dickens, except that Kip’s madly promised to post an installement every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday so it’ll be a tad more frequent than Dickens. No standing on the docks waiting for the next installment for us. ...

Dave Winer on journalists: Journalists do all that they think bloggers do, with an extra added bonus of arrogance. There’s no accountability. No equivalent of the ABA or AMA. No malpractice suits to worry about. Well, no equivalent except the SPJ. And while it’s true that journalists don’t have to worry about malpractice suits, I hear libel suits are still in vogue. It’s such a silly question anyhow. Blogs are a medium, like television and newspapers. Journalists can blog; blogs are not inherently journalism.

Not that I am not all about the Luke Wilson, but I cannot help but think that 3001 ought to list C. M. Kornbluth in the credits somewhere. “Marching Morons” comes to mind. The IMDB boards are all a-twitter because the plot is stolen from Futurama. Which, I guess, is evidence of Kornbluth’s predictive skills.

That took a lot of the pleasure out of The Apprentice. (Gonna be spoilers here.) Long story short, Trump made two errors: 1. Complaining that Team Troy set the rental price too low at $35-40K. The Director of Sales for the building told them that it had been renting for around $40K; given the time they had to rent it, it made sense to nail down any offer in that range and hope that the other team would whiff, which they very nearly did. ...

Ever wanted a list of Shaw Brothers movies that got four or more stars from Kung Fu Cinema? Yeah, me too. So I made one.

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead has entered the public domain, which means anyone who likes can digitize the whole thing and stick it up online for you (yes you) to download. And I’m not about to spoil a set-up like that by skipping the punchline (original). No bittorrent yet.