Google Voice was launched (or relaunched) today. Introduced as a solution to businesses and individuals seeking one number that pretty much does everything! Read the article here.
This article via The Washington Post written by Paul Farhi. I can’t say I’m surprised or disappointed.
Joe the Plumber (no longer a plumber; first name actually Samuel) popped into our town yesterday evening to sell his new book and to remind people that he’s still a plain and simple guy. Mission accomplished, on at least one of his missions.
About 11 people wandered into the rows of seats set up hopefully in the basement of a downtown Border’s bookstore to hear Joe speak. Joe addressed them from behind a lectern and with a microphone, but that seemed unnecessarily formal.
If you’ve already forgotten “Joe” Wurzelbacher, 35, of Toledo, Ohio, it just goes to show you how ephemeral the life of a plain-speaking, Republican Everyman is these days. Joe was the square-jawed guy briefly drafted by John McCain’s campaign to be its Voice of Regular Folks. Joe got a couple of news cycles’ worth of attention starting on Oct. 12 — he remembers the date clearly — when he was videotaped confronting Barack Obama about his small-business tax plans. He later called Obama’s plans “socialism.”
Now, only a few months later, he’s kind of like a vestigial tail, a leftover artifact from a forgotten time. He’s Clara Peller, Willie Horton or Gennifer Flowers — names that are the questions in a “Jeopardy!” category called “Presidential Campaign Distractions.” To his credit, Wurzelbacher is hip to the audacity of hype: “I get e-mails all the time from people asking me when my 15 minutes is going to expire,” he grinned after his talk. “Sometimes they just write, ‘15 . . . 14:59 . . . 14:58 . . .’ ”
It’s fair to say Joe’s appearance at Borders at 18th and L streets wasn’t eagerly anticipated. People just kind of shuffled over when Joe strode in with Thomas N. Tabback, the co-author of “Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream.” Annie Hickman, a young woman whom Wurzelbacher called “sweetie” during a brief Q&A, was browsing when the PA announced that Joe was in the house. “I’m missing pottery class for this,” she said.
Lawyer Alana Hecht was curious. “I was upstairs reading ‘Dreams From My Father,’ ” Obama’s memoir. “It’s just fate. Who could leave when this is happening?” She and Hickman laughed. Washington, such a weird town.
Joe had something to say about hard work and having good values; it’s probably in his book, but he said it bluntly and plainly. He has presence; he’s solidly built, with a shiny bullet head, and large, workingman’s hands. “I’m just your average guy,” he said several times.
He wore a gray long-sleeve undershirt and baggy jeans, and looked as if he just walked in from a construction site. Joe says he plans to work in construction (hello, stimulus package!) once his gig doing commentary for a conservative Web site runs out at the end of March. Plumbing? Not happening. “I show up on a plumbing job and the first thing someone’s going to say is ‘Joe the Plumber didn’t do the job right,’ ” he said. “The next thing you know, it’s on the national news. It would be naive to go back to it.”
Wurzelbacher says he’s still no fan of Obama, but confessed that he never liked McCain all that much, either. Nor has he cared for the politicians he’s met on Capitol Hill. “Liars and thieves,” he called them.
The only heat generated by Joe’s appearance last night came when a young man named Jabari Zakiya recounted great moments in American racism (slavery, annihilation of Native Americans, segregation, etc.) and asked Wurzelbacher if the “hegemony” of the white man in America is “doomed” now that five states and the District of Columbia have majority minority populations.
Joe replied that he believes “our American heritage is being torn apart” by flag burners, critics of the military, and those who mock Christian values. He expressed his admiration for patriotic immigrants, and said he dislikes terms like African American and Asian American (”We’re all Americans,” he said). For some reason, he concluded by saying, “America has always been a kick-butt, take-names kind of country.”
Wurzelbacher was scheduled to speak and sign books for three hours, but the Joe Show was over in 55 minutes. Total copies of “Joe the Plumber” sold: five.
I am including an episode I recorded a couple of years ago entitled “Se xrono rebetiko kai laiko”.
This radio show I narrated retraced the journey of the first “rebetes”, Greek musicians that fled Asia Minor in 1922 only to arrive as outcasts in their own country. The lyrics of the songs are often compared to the blues genre that emerged around the same time in the United States. The music however has Middle-Eastern influences. This series of radio shows were broadcast in various radio stations and have been shelved for several years.
If these shows generate interest, I will upload them periodically online for your listening pleasure. The language of the broadcasts are in Greek.
If you would like to read more about this genre, click here.
Enjoy!
Written by Vlassis Kokonis & Narrated by Photi SotiropoulosInteresting art project by Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley with Google’s street view.
On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…
Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.
An incredible cast of real-life characters contributed their time, energy and talents to creating pseudo-street life on Sampsonia Way. Please check out the scene breakdown, the participant page and the video documentation to learn more about the artists, groups and participants that made Street With A View possible.
In my opinion, one of the greatest masters of the film medium, Alfred Hitchcock in a 1964 interview with the Beeb.
Part 1
Part 2
Facebook Message
Facebook added a message on people’s profiles this morning letting them know that they will not alter their Terms of Use and rather stick with the previous version they had until a new agreement can be reached.
Originally the Agreement read, in part:
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
However, if users decided to remove their content from Facebook or delete the account, the site would also lose the right to use the information–as is described here:
You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
This last paragraph was completely removed by Facebook, which is what caused this huge stir in the online community.
Read more from the NYT here.
Last Sunday, The Simpsons premiered their new HD opening!