"Life's too short to watch French films"

As either my sister or brother in law put it, in American movies, people do things. In European movies, things happen to people, then at the end of the movie nothing has changed. One might as well watch grass grow, or paint peel.

It's like the difference between active and passive tense, and we all know what we were told to use in our school compositions, since one was boring and one was more exciting.


Teacher: When you watch an action film, you want to watch the hero doing things. You don't want to see things being done to the hero.

Student (to another): Braveheart

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The Apple Polishers - Explaining the press corps' crush on Steve Jobs and company.

"Apple manipulates several narratives to continue to make its products interesting fodder for journalists. One is the never-ending story of mad genius Steve Jobs, who would be great copy if he were only the night manager of a Domino's pizza joint. The next is Apple's perpetual role as scrappy underdog—reporters love cheerleading for the underdog without ever pausing to explore why it isn't the overdog. (This is why the Brooklyn Dodgers will always rate higher in the minds of writers than the superior New York Yankees.) Apple incites fanaticism about its products via ad campaigns and evangelist outreach programs designed to make its customers feel as though they're part of a privileged and enlightened elite. One unnamed loser at Slate says today's V-iPod news made her want to rush out and buy one, even though she already owns two iPods, one of which she bought three weeks ago...

If the press corps possessed any institutional memory, it would recall the introduction of the Apple III+, the Lisa, the Macintosh Portable, the Mac TV, the Newton, the Apple G4 Cube, and eWorld. All were greeted with great press fanfare before falling off the edge of the world. Hell, all the press corps really needs to put Apple products in perspective is a few short-term memory neurons focused on the fanfare visited upon recent, mediocre iPod releases. Only a year ago the company received excited press notices when it introduced the iPod Photo, now acknowledged to be a failed product. I searched Nexis to find a mention of the iPod Photo in the hundreds of V-iPod newspaper stories from today and found only one. Of the wildly heralded but totally average iPod Shuffle, released in January 2005, I found only two."


The reporter alleges that this is aimed only at press coverage, yet his criticisms of the press are equally applicable to Mac whores.

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I've done so many interviews and surveys on blogging that I've long ago lost count. I will probably be publishing an FAQ soon which I will send to all who request that I fill out an interview.

Though actually the majority of such requests so far have come from friends doing modules on blogging. Boo hoo.

Next year I should take one of these modules and interview myself.

Someone: "an excellent decision
at the start of the module just declare to the whole LT
'Hi I am agagooga. Approach me for interview and you will get slimed all over my blog.'"


Someone was talking about how, if you did badly in your midterm, you should be consistent in your work so you can do better for the final. I don't understand why consistency is supposed to be good, for you can be consistently bad in your work as well.