|
Aggravating painted outdoor public device news
Hil had aggravating public outdoor device painting news this week. Late last year she was selected from a number of competing artists to paint traffic control boxes in her city, Canberra, in Australia. She did three beautiful designs. The duck is my fave. The computer bug also was very cool but they painted over it! Now it's all grey and plain again. Apparently they reserved the right to do it, but Hil's trying to find out how come they wanted to. Hil also has volunteered do an illustration for the OPML Editor 1.0 release site. But we're not going to photoshop over it. Hire us, we're cheaper The 50 million injuries that occurred in 2000 ultimately will cost $406 billion, according to a recent book released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Males account for approximately 70 percent of the total injury cost, because men have higher injury rates than women and their wages tend to be higher, CDC found. Uh-oh, this could be a problem for a lot of people Looks like the phrase "work from home" is in my employer's spam filter. I learned this when I got a reply back from an e-mail this morning to a colleague and saw this as the subject line: [Suspect spam] - Re: Home today - Found word(s) working from home in the Text body My organization doesn't tuck spam into a separate folder by default, but many spam systems do work that way, and if they do, bosses and co-workers won't know that somebody like me isn't coming into the office that day. The filters need to get smarter. Good Gillmor Gang Part one of three is up. It's about new ad models, at least this part is about that. Discussants include Syndicate keynoters Amanda Congdon, Jeff Jarvis, Doc Searls and Richard Edelman, plus Mike Arrington and Steve Gillmor. I almost always agree with Jarvis, not only on the debates in this show but pretty much all the time. Edelman? Nice that PR is getting the net, and the cooperative program he describes with Technorati sounds interesting, and I'm sure Dick is a good guy, but I'd watch the slippery PR agency gang I used to be a part of. There's a reason why so many real voices you hear on the internet are coming from people who used to work in PR. Now this is how bios ought to be written The life of Preston Sturges, film writer/director. Of course, it helps there was so much good raw material. The guy had quite a life. How do they handle anachronisms? I was thinking about Massive, the in-game advertising business I mentioned yesterday. Ads attached to objects in games is a lot like product placement in TV and movies, isn't it? How would that work in a game that doesn't take place in a contemporary setting? Like, how do you promote Dorritos nacho cheese flavored torilla chips in WoW or the Star Wars online game, I forget what it's called. Ever see the movie State and Main? David Mamut picture with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, how could that be bad, right? The movie is about making a movie, set 100 or more years ago. One of the dozens of money-versus-art conflicts in the story involves a producer who wants the cash that a placement for bazoomer.com would bring in. "No! No no no no no," says the director, played by William H. Macy, who's in a lot of Mamut's stuff. In the final scene, we notice they've snuck bazommer into the period piece in a not unharmonious way. When the citizenry rises up People are talking about energy. They're getting testy. Last year I remember reading an opinion that when the price per gallon of gasoline hovered around $4 as an average, that would be the tipping point when citizens moved from seriously thinking about changing their habits to actually changing their habits. Citizens aren't going to accept the whole burden, though. If they're making personal sacrifices, they're going to want to see some changes in things like renewing tax incentives for enormously profitable oil companies. Haves and have-nots Somewhere along the way working-class conservatives got snookered into buying the whole Republican package, platform and modus operandi even if parts of the package don't match up with their self-interest. That's what you get when a two-party system is perpetuated, don't you think?
Somehow, being conservative has come to mean she also has to be a fan of Republican fiscal and tax policies, and she's been persuaded that things like tax incentives for the wealthiest individuals and companies will bring jobs and prosperity to her town in Kentucky. In fact, she might even have integrated and internalized the platform so thoroughly that she honestly believes it would be unAmerican not to subscribe to the logic of the current tax cuts and tax incentives. There's an opportunity in the midterm elections and on through to 2008 to try to reach people like this in a respectful way. She's never going to visit a liberal blog because partisan blogs are almost by their nature polarizing. I've been thinking about trying to do something using my recently acquired questiontheanswer.com domain. It's still really sketchy, but I'm thinking of a blog that would quote daily campaign speeches and statements by candidates who mislead this group. Then, break down what they say, and provide background on what's really happening. For example, say a candidate in the Republican presidential primaries positions a continuation of a particular tax policy as beneficial thing for small businesses. I, or other volunteer editors on the site, might point to information that reveals the policy is actually 100 times better for huge businesses than it is for small businesses. A key part of it would be to keep it focused, and be mindful of not bringing in polarizing rhetoric. Leave the war and abortion right out of it (even though I personally believe those things are really important), and don't tell Bush-is-stupid jokes (even though I think he is). Could it work? Is it worth a shot? Take 3 minutes to understand net neutrality A video by Public Knowledge that explains why discrimination on the internet is a problem and will continue to be as long as net neutrality rules are not enforced. Great way to explain a concept that's a little complicated. Like a filmstrip, something I thought must be a long-gone relic, but my kids tell me they were in use in their elementary school eight years ago. |
 |
Dave's featuring pretty and plain 
For example, say you have a single mom living in a trailer in Kentucky. Let's say she's been brought up to be conservative and she's always voted Republican. She doesn't like liberals because she thinks they think she's trash. She might say she loves America and votes to "Support our Troops." Or maybe she says she couldn't vote for anyone who doesn't stand for good solid family values.
