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Get ready The last Sopranos episode ever will be on here in a half hour. I'm pretty excited. Better take a shower, maybe put on some lipstick. You don't want them to be in trouble at work I re-rented the first season of Numb3rs because I buzzed through it the first time, skipping most of the commentary tracks. I like Sabrina Lloyd who played Terry Lake for the first season only. You might remember her as Natalie in Sports Night. She was also in Sliders, but I've never seen that. She must not have been a hit with the producers because they rarely mention her and are lavish with praise of most of the other actors, writers and directors. My guesses: she was too solemn, which might explain why Diane Farr, the new profiler, is so smiley. Or she asked for a lot of money. Like Crispin Glover who made outrageous demands for the Back to the Future sequels and was openly ridiculed for it in the commentary on those DVDs. I adored the George McFly character. It makes me feel bad for them not to be stars in their workplaces, like people you like at work but your admiration of them is marred when they're in the management doghouse. I like most of the characters in the story -- Charlie's great. Don -- I've liked Rob Morrow since Northern Exposure and thought he was good as the Boston lawyer in Quiz Show. But Peter MacNichol's character is perfect. I just love him. Gates: 1 point for honesty, -1 for the strategy You gotta give him credit for being honest about it, but what's up with throwing away a joint chiefs chairman to avoid congressional scrutiny into the war? Or maybe he isn't being completely forthcoming. Could be it's like the tactic I used with my mom when I was a teenager, confessing to some unauthorized antic to divert attention from another one I'd get in worse trouble for. I still think Gates looks like Chris Matthews. Two sensible aspects of Mahalo In listening to Jason Calacanis talk to Loic LeMeur about his new search service, Mahalo, two bells rang for me: 1) Yes, bravo and and thank you, Jason, for calling on web site makers to reset and start optimizing for users, not bots. That's a noble mission, and something web users will value and appreciate if he can advance the notion in enough quarters. He's right; the web is polluted. He talks about this around minute 20 or so in the video.
2) It's nice to see startup capital used for a venture with a legitimate purpose for the money. Mahalo, with its focus on human editors, is labor-intensive, and it takes outside funding to make payroll for it. The output of these editors will create substance and value -- and result in a return for the investors. That's how it's supposed to work.
It has a better sense of balance, and it's a world apart from funding something that's mostly air. For instance, embeddable chat that I could make in my spare time one weekend from some 4-year-old off-the-shelf PHP script. Then spend another day dressing it up to look two-ohish and slapping the word "social" on it. Then spend the majority of the human effort going around hawking how cool it is. |
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