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February 2, 2007
Wow. So it looks like a few short weeks into the Nintendo Wii era, someone's already hacking their wild and wildly popular movement-based remote control, which is the killer feature of the new gaming system. (Does anyone know what Wii is even supposed to mean? I for one think the name is a wii bit stupid.)
Here's the coolest new use, unless someone can name another: a DJ mix controller called the dj Wiij. (The Web site helpfully explains the pronunciation: "dee-jay Wee-jay.") Ever since the dawn of excellent laptop DJ mixing software at consumer-level prices, turntable have been dying out a bit. Even turntables are now sometimes controlled remotely by laptops. (This is very cool; I've seen it.) Is the world ready for a DJ wielding a device made for kids? A DJ friend isn't sure: "Wonder if you would have any street cred after showing up to a gig with this." My tentative answer: no. But soon, Obi Wan...
By the way, bonus remark for this post: speaking of the Nintendo era, check this out.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:15 PM
February 2, 2007
According to Wired, in Japan there is a new Korean-manufactured video game that is becoming extremely popular:
In Boong-Ga Boong-Ga, known in English as "Spank 'em!" the player jabs a plastic finger into a jeans-covered bottom, which juts from the machine as if a person's head and torso were stuck inside.
Developed by a Korean company, Taff System, the game was received enthusiastically at the Tokyo Game Show last year.
The brochure explains that this "is a fun game of spanking the people who make your life miserable," since the characters in the game represent your ex, a "golddigger," etc.
The Wired article goes into a pretty deep dissection of the psycho-sexual implications, which I don't really care to discuss here. The closing line, though, is superb. A former Carnegie Mellon student, known only as Alison, has a Web site on which she broadcasts Web-cam pictures of the inside of her pants. (This has marginal relevance to Boong-Ga Boong-ga, I felt, but still interesting stuff.) Her quote ends the piece: "Pantscam is completely non-sexual, though people may infer sexual undertones, since the camera is in my pants."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:15 PM
February 2, 2007
I think Chris is absolutely right: perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Mooninite story -- hmm, sounds like Moonie -- is the clash of youth and middle-aged authority. Which side makes Boston look worse is open to debate, but I'm leaning toward authority. The Zebro Sketch Comedy YouTube video points out that after Turner Broadcasting claimed credit/blame, Boston higher-ups apparently didn't believe them at first -- "we're looking into a number of leads" -- which seems both dumbfounding and dumb.
On the other hand, I must say that the Zebro video is not even a little bit witty or entertaining or smart. The extensive use of profanity smacks of the middle-school kid who thinks that makes him cool. There's not one laugh there, except perhaps the graphical juxtaposition of the Mooninites with the Lite-Brite toys of my youth, which was an obvious idea to begin with.
Sorry to come down hard, Zebro boys, but if someone's going to represent Boston's Mooninite in-the-know gang -- always a tenuous moral position since it's easy to be smug -- let's keep looking.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:23 PM
February 2, 2007
It looks as if we have the makings of a new culture war here -- between certain ironic young media consumers, who find official Boston's reaction to the Mooninite stunt utterly absurd, and those who find the prank-cum-crime unbelievably thoughtless, in an era plagued with terrorism.
The Boston-based Zebro Sketch Comedy troupe (actually now they seem to be billing themselves as "Boston/NYC based") is solidly in the first camp. Its Jon Stewart-style fake news piece on the recent crisis, featured on the YouTube homepage, already has 230,000 views and is the "most discussed" video of the day.
Warning: It's also profanity-laced.
Like others here, I would put myself somewhere between the two camps, so don't take the link as an endorsement.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:00 PM
February 2, 2007
***
Here are a few of my favorite letters on the Mooninite incident.
I think it is DISGUSTING that you would think the people frightened by the viral marketing campaign were jealous of the terrorist attacks in New York City. What kind of twisted person thinks the Boston-New York rivalry extends to envy of such a monumental tragedy. That's just perverted. Retract your statement and apologize for your idiocy. -- Nicholas
Terrorist and Marketers have different goals when it comes to the visibility of the devices. If a terrorist wanted to plant a bomb all he would need to do is effectively disguise it as some of the trash that sits near the bridges that are part of our major highways. I think the Globe could do well to photograph just the trash. That is what they do in Iraq. Hide an IED in the trash. Boston has lots of it. -- Dave
I've been enjoying your Mooninite coverage, and I think your analysis of why city officials are so mad is right on -- they're embarrassed and need to take it out on someone else. And I love the GRL quote. One tiny correction: I don't think the "devices" can be called LED throwies: "throwy" is short for throwup, a type of simple tag that's done really quickly, i.e. just thrown up onto the wall. The LED throwy seems to be developed for doing that in lights. The kind of planning this thing took is a little too elaborate for that term. -- Jared
You are a real idiot. Everyone involved deserves heavy fines and jail time. Everyone cannot stay up until midnite to watch that foul-mouthed show. Placing a black box with a wired battery pack displaying middle finger is not just a prank. The police did NOT overreact. -- Al
READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:12 AM
February 2, 2007
The media coverage of the Mooninite affair is depressing today. We journalists are rushing to defend the actions and statements of police and city officials, we're demonizing the poor guys who were hired to install the Mooninite devices, and we're finding lame reasons to justify the fact that Boston is the only city that overreacted in this way. Is this what it was like in the days following Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" broadcast (also called a hoax, though it wasn't)?
Besides, I was out late last night with Globe, Boston.com, and Weekly Dig friends and colleagues, celebrating my last day on the job. So, I'm out of it... I'm going to post about something else, this morning.
A few days ago, I wrote a post about a fine new collection of artworks and illustrations by Jim Flora. I'm now informed by Irwin Chusid, the great WFMU radio personality and independent cultural archaeologist, that the Jim Flora website was overhauled and relaunched. Check it out!
A 1970 magazine cover by Flora
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:41 AM
February 1, 2007
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, there's a "quiet storm" brewing over the "ultimate disposition" -- elegant phrase, with a ring of euphemism -- of Jacques Derrida's papers. (By the way, I now relish the fact that I have a public forum to air my opinion that Derrida has the coolest name in all of academia. The rhythm of it smacks of SHOCK Rat-a-tat, or even SHOCK Derring-do. Both would apply.)
Many of Derrida's papers are held at the University of California at Irvine. Now U. Cal has sued the Derrida family in "the first public eruption of a bitter, behind-the-scenes battle." It's not entirely clear what is at issue -- it might be a pre-emptive strike against a rumored attempt to withdraw papers from the Irvine campus -- but it may concern the remainder of the literary theorist's papers, many of which are held at the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives, known by its French acronym IMEC, near the city of Caen, in northwestern France.
Perhaps what we are looking at here is really a battle over what nation owns Derrida and his legacy. He was French, bien sur, but at the time of his death taught at both the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in Paris, and at Irvine (where his salary can only be imagined). What is more, as the Chronicle piece notes, "Derrida was an intellectual superstar in the United States but a lesser light in the firmament of the country [France] where he began his career as a scholar." Is his stock on the French exchange rising only now? He'd probably laugh at the thought.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:53 PM
February 1, 2007
The mailbag is overflowing. I can't even begin to read all of the emails, let alone respond to them (though I am trying). But I've glanced at a couple dozen emails, and a pattern emerges.
On the one hand, plenty of Brainiac readers agree with me that Boston police and officials overreacted yesterday and today. For example:
How is it that our 'bomb squad' experts can't tell the difference between a bomb and a battery operated magnetic light? -- Wayne
I was beginning to think that I was the only person thinking that the state's blustering and threats of prosecution are completely out of proportion to what actually happened.... Thanks for reassuring me that someone in the media is looking at this from my point of view--I was sort of starting to feel like a sociopath for not being horrified and outraged like the rest of the Globe is telling me to be. -- Lyette
I have a feeling that over the next few days, the city of Boston is going to end up looking like the "bad guys" in this one. While Turner was wrong to put up the signs without permission, and while city officials have nothing to be ashamed of for reacting as they did and trying to protect the people of Boston, the subsequent lashing out at everyone involved is not likely to go over well. -- Dave
On the other hand, several readers agree with my other point, that in this day and age, a marketing stunt like this could easily go awry and cause a panic (remember -- I'm on the fence about this). For example:
What is to stop a terrorist from copying a harmless cartoon character and filling it with explosives then setting it off once people have decided it is an ad stunt and have let their guard down? I am sure there are a few ways that even smart people like you might be fooled. -- T
So everyone agrees with me, which is great -- just the way I like it. Thanks so much for writing, everyone. Now will someone please answer my question about why Boston was the only city in America where this happened? I want to know.
READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:48 PM
February 1, 2007
I had to step away from the computer for a little while because there was some sheet-cake and soda pop served in a Globe hallway in honor of my fast-approaching last day (tomorrow). I'm back now...
In a Brainiac post early this morning, I made a gratuitous and cruel joke about Malden, Mass. Responding to a line in the Globe about what a blogger from Malden had to say on the topic of the Mooninite catastrophe, I wrote, "When someone from Malden is less clueless than our city's police force and elected officials, it's time to get worried."
See, I was born and raised in Jamaica Plain, and if there's one thing we clannish Bostonians like to do, it's badmouth all the other neighborhoods, suburbs, and exurbs of Boston. My wife told me it was a mean thing to say, and some Globe colleagues from Malden complained, but I stood firm. Then I got an email from Brian, the infamous Malden blogger himself.
Here's what Brian had to say:
Just so you know, I'm actually originally from Connecticut. Good joke, though.
So you see? My mean-spirited comment has backfired. I owe the people of Malden an apology. Let's move forward.
READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:08 PM
February 1, 2007
Another cultural phenomenon the Mooninite story brings to mind: the awesome and slightly creepy experiment in the 1980s and '90s by Frank Shepard Fairey -- who was for part of the time a student at the Rhode Island School of Design -- that involved volunteers posting stickers nationwide that depicted the face and sometimes torso of the massive wrestler Andre the Giant. Some of these stickers included the slogan "Andre the Giant has a posse" (while others included the creepier "OBEY Giant"):
As this Wikipedia entry describes it, "The essential appeal of the campaign is its parody of propaganda, both political and corporate, that permeates modern American culture. The ubiquity and placement of the Andre the Giant/OBEY GIANT imagery resembles an advertising campaign, a campaign for a non-existent product. Fairey mocks the idea of branding by creating his own fake brand, subversively using advertising techniques to elevate Andre the Giant's image to iconic status."
Fairey, who's still in the news as a performance artist, described it all as an experiment in phenomenology, along the lines of "how widely can we propagate a nonsensical phrase and image?" There was something pure about it, since by intention it had no commercial intention, but it was also clearly a comment on what effect advertising can have on our minds. So it is with the Mooninites: their very nonsensical nature caused the whole Hub Hubbub.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:04 PM
February 1, 2007
A couple of updates.
1) Emails are pouring in about the Mooninite devices (a term I find more appealing than LED Throwy, actually). I will respond to them later today, if possible -- remember, this is my last week at the paper (though I'll still be writing for Brainiac) and I really should be wrapping things up, instead of blogging so frequently.
2) I want to give a shout-out to Adam Salsman and Alicia Conway, colleagues of mine at Boston.com. It was Adam who first alerted me that the blogosphere already had the answer to the question puzzling Boston. (NB: My original post seemed to say that the blogger Todd Vanderlin had posted earlier the same day about the true nature of the Mooninite devices; in fact, as a couple of Brainiac readers wrote, his blog post on that topic was written a couple of weeks ago.) Alicia, meanwhile, scrambled to fix a photo problem with Brainiac -- we had to get those Mooninite photos posted! Thanks to her, we did.
3) PHOTO BY SCOTT LAPIERRE WAS REMOVED
4) I asked readers to let me know about any commentaries out there on Boston's uniquely fearful attitude toward these Mooninite devices. The Weekly Dig's Joe Keohane -- his last week as editor is coming up; now that is scary -- heaped plenty of abuse on this city and its officials today, on its blog. For example, he said:
I suppose it was inevitable that someday the pop culture gap would result in an entire city being shut down and the "perps" being frog marched into some Homeland Security gulag, but I had always hoped it would be a second- or third-rate hee-haw flyover city, not Boston.
My sentiments exactly.
READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:01 PM
February 1, 2007
Both John and I felt the Mooninite ad campaign/carefully coordinated attack brought to mind a Drake Bennett Ideas article of last year about inventive and borderline offensive guerrilla marketing tactics. One relatively benign example around the time of the piece was that of lonelygirl15, who captivated audiences of 40,000 a day with her Web cam confessions on YouTube but turned out to be an actress hired by a film production company.
Perhaps more insidious and meaner was the stunt Drake discussed involving pretty girls who seemed to be flirting with passersby but were in fact selling cell-phone cameras and the like: "Isn't my Samsung DSC-412 fantastic??"
I could do a lot of hand-wringing here about the breakdown of social trust brought on by advertising's bending of truth and intimacy, and I believe that's real, as David Foster Wallace once pointed out in an essay mostly about television. But I just want to point out an interesting study Drake uncovered:
Walter Carl, a communications professor at Northeastern University, earlier this year published a study that looked at word-of-mouth advertising campaigns for a variety of products. In some of the interactions the people talking up a product (the agent) admitted that they were part of a coordinated advertising campaign, in others they didn't. What Carl found is that whether the person being talked up knew of the agent's ties or not made no difference in their overall impression of the product. In fact, finding out about those ties slightly increased the "pass-along rate" (the probability that the targeted person would in turn tell someone else about the product).
As Carl suggested, maybe we like to be targeted. The Boston Police sure don't.
Brainiac's coverage of the Mooninite attack: Mooninite aftermath | Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub
Keep checking back for more.
[Updated 1:20 p.m.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:51 PM
February 1, 2007
The mockery of Bostonians begins. Here's an image I saw on the popular blog Gizmodo just now.
Ouch! That hurts.
READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:35 PM
February 1, 2007
Make that Father of Mooninite: One of the aspects of this Mooninite scare that intrigues me is the origin and actual name of these infamous devices -- described awkwardly, by the Globe, the Times, and other news outlets as "small, lighted cartoon figures," "battery-powered lights," "electronic boards," "illuminated plastic figures," "signs," "magnetic devices," "the devices, which included circuit boards," "the devices, dotted with blue, purple, or white lights," and so forth. (Vanderlin, the blogger I mentioned last night, told the Globe: "It's not so threatening -- it's a Lite-Brite.") What exactly are they, anyway?
There was a clue embedded at the very end of the Mooninite-device-installation video created by the guerrilla marketers Interference Information Network: "Inspired by the brilliant creativity of the Graffiti Research Lab." Now, the GRL is an outfit that provides graffiti artists (not marketing outfits) with open-source technologies customized to help them do what graffiti artists do. GRL has posted a note on their website:
You may have heard about the most recent terror attacks in Boston. This is NOT the work of the Graffiti Research Lab.... It's Just more mindless corporate vandalism from a guerilla marketer who got busted. Interference Inc, welcome to the world of being misunderstood, scapegoated, demonized and wanted by the law. Still wanna be a graffiti artist?
How did GRL inspire Interference? By inventing and promoting the use of the "LED Throwy," a device composed of an LED, a battery, and a magnet. See this GRL video, for a primitive example. Another GRL video shows more advanced models. They certainly make beautiful displays.
Here are some instructions on making your own LED Throwies, and another how-to from Make magazine -- that's the "open-source" part. The LEDs can be purchased on eBay, it seems usually from sources in China.
So there you have it. Fellow journalists: It's not a "battery-powered contraption," it's an LED Throwy. Let's get our facts straight.
READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:00 PM
February 1, 2007
The Washington Post's witty television writer, Lisa de Moraes, notes that publicists for that medium have a long history of pranks intended to amuse -- that have quite other effects. Until now, TV writers have been the confused "victims."
However pop-culture-savvy you are, if you came back to to your hotel room and found that someone had broken in and scrawled "Redrum" across your mirror, would you instantly grasp it was a plug for a remake of "The Shining"?
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:09 AM
February 1, 2007
Following up on the lead provided them -- one can only assume -- by Brainiac, last night the Boston Globe interviewed Todd Vanderlin, the Bostonian blogger who first recognized the battery-powered contraptions that scared Bostonians yesterday for what they were: a marketing stunt.
Here's a funny line from today's Globe:
"Repeat after me, authorities. L-E-D. Not I-E-D. Get it?" one 29-year-old blogger from Malden wrote on his website, contrasting light emitting diodes with improvised explosive devices.
When someone from Malden is less clueless than our city's police force and elected officials, it's time to get worried.
I don't have anything to add to the debate over whether or not Turner Broadcasting System and the guerrilla marketing outfit Interference Inc. should have known that these devices might have alarmed people. On the one hand, Boston police and city officials demonstrated how ignorant they are about pop culture, guerrilla marketing, and technology, and then got embarrassed, which is why they're so angry now. On the other hand, if you watch the video of the marketing crew installing the Mooninite devices on the BU Bridge, the Charles MGH T stop, and elsewhere, it does feel kinda like you're watching a terrorist plot on an unsuspecting Boston, and you can see why the police should have reacted (but not overreacted). So I'm on the fence. I don't, for example, find the T-shirt all that funny. UPDATE: OK, I do like these T-shirts.
But one question remains: If these devices (as we've now heard) were installed in 10 other cities, including New York -- where a terrorist attack has actually happened -- as long as three weeks ago, why was Boston the only city to misinterpret their nature and freak out?
Perhaps the answer is that (a) Bostonians are far less sophisticated than urbanites in other parts of the country, including what we like to imagine is the backward Midwest, and, more controversially, (b) Bostonians remain, in some sick, twisted way, jealous of New York because terrorists deemed a NY landmark world-famous enough to be targeted for attack. Anyone who followed local news coverage in the days after 9/11 knows exactly what I'm talking about. But in analyzing the Mooninite affair, will any of our local pundits ever admit it?
Globe columnist Adrian Walker asked the right question today:
It is interesting that the same marketing campaign is underway in several other cities, including Chicago and San Francisco, without causing the mass freak-out it did here.
But he immediately backed off from the embarrassing truth:
Maybe people are less observant there, or perhaps the billboards were planted in less conspicuous locations. That isn't clear yet.
OK... So Bostonians are more observant than folks in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, and besides -- the guerrilla marketers in those cities didn't really want to get the message out, so they hid the ads?
Can't wait to see what other analysts have to say. Readers, email me if you come across any good essays or columns about this topic!
UPDATE: BID ON A MOONINITE DEVICE! Going for $5,000 on eBay. It's a certified Boston Mooninite, and the seller has offered to donate some of the proceeds to bail out Peter Berdovsky, the poor sap who was hired to install the devices. As someone who once spent a couple of days fly-postering around Boston and Hartford to make a fast buck from a marketing firm, I feel for Berdovsky -- he's being railroaded! Set him free!
UPDATE:
READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 06:42 AM
January 31, 2007
Back in September, Ideas took a look at the history of viral and guerrilla marketing, and the role these tactics will play in the future of advertising. We didn't quite predict anything like today's fiasco however. This Adult Swim/Aqua Teen Hunger Force stunt makes Smirnoff's Tea Partay look rather quaint by comparison.
A perhaps not unrelated story of note: On Monday, Nielsen finally started counting kids watching in their dorm rooms in its ratings. As the Times reported:
Adult Swim, a block of adult programming on the Cartoon Network that expects its 18- to 24-year-old audience to jump by 35 percent with the new ratings, is so excited about the change that it ran an ad telling viewers about it in mid-October.
...among other things?
Posted by John Swansburg at 06:01 PM
January 31, 2007
At degreetutor.com, apparently an aggregation of sites for online schools, there's a thoughtful article about the future of libraries, an important topic, called "Are Librarians Totally Obsolete?" Those with bibliophile tendencies (and perhaps even some Luddite sympathies) will be happy to know that the piece's answer is in the negative: "Despite their perceived obsoleteness [sic)] in the digital age both libraries -- and librarians -- are irreplaceable for many reasons. 33, in fact."
The number one reason, that "not everything is available on the Internet," is the best one of all. As I noted in an earlier post, Google's man in charge of Google Book Search argues that most of the world's knowledge -- that is, the stuff in books -- is undigitized.
Also pointed out is that a "2005 study of the Illinois School Libraries shows that students who frequently visit well-stocked and well-staffed school libraries end up with higher ACT scores and perform better on reading and writing exams." That makes sense, but it should be added that schools with better Internet access perform better, too, although both may simply reflect the overall quality and wealth of the schools.
The best thinking in the piece goes into reason number thirty-two:
[T]he alluring immediacy of the internet can lead to the false impression that only immediate, interactive and on-the-spot online discussion is of value. Dusty books on tall shelves then seem to represent stagnant knowledge, and their curators (librarians), behind the times. Books and reading easily gets regarded as elitist and inactive, while blogging becomes the here-and-now....
Preserving libraries to store knowledge and teach the limitations of technology can help prevent the hubris and narcissism of technological novelty.
Takes Brainiac down a notch, but I can only approve.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:28 PM
January 31, 2007
I once interviewed a homeland security consulant who claimed that ordinary citizens armed with wi-fi laptops, smart cellphones, and the like would be far more effective at responding to terrorist attacks than any governmental organization. Tonight I have seen the proof of that argument.
The top story on Boston.com and other local news sites and TV stations as I write this is a bomb scare that happened in Boston this morning. It seems that suspicious devices were spotted on bridges, overpasses, in subway stations and other public places. The devices -- described ominously as being "composed of electronic circuit boards with LED lights attached" -- were shaped like little glowing figures who seemed angry. The bomb squad was called in, and they detonated at least one of the devices and removed the others. Traffic was snarled for hours. What were the devices?
The answer to that burning question was available earlier today on blogs and social networking sites like Flickr, thanks to the sharp eyes of pop-culture-savvy young Bostonians. Todd Vanderlin, for example, spotted the devices and recognized right away what they were: a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Adult Swim TV show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." To be specific, the devices are a sophisticated advertisement -- Vanderlin even figured out who orchestrated the campaign -- depicting Mooninites.
UPDATE: Thanks, Boing Boing, for posting about this entry and updating us on the story.
HELP US PROMOTE BRAINIAC: DEL.ICIO.US | DIGG
READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2 | Zebro video | Red Sox vs. Mooninites | Danger Bomb Clock | Mooninite kudos | Mooninite Man sighted | Mooninite guru? |
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:21 PM
January 31, 2007
I have just started using Netflix, mostly because there's no good video store in my neighborhood. (Isn't this New York City?) What is particularly great about the service, beyond the deep selection, is that DVDs are shipped to you so fast. It's kind of unbelievable. Every time I send out a DVD, I get the email saying it has reached Netflix the following morning, and early. They send out my new one same day and it reaches me the next. Right now I'm watching the first two seasons of the US version of "The Office" virtually without delay!
I understand they have shipping centers near to just about everyone, and they use a bar code on the envelopes, but seriously, who has this much success with the US Postal Service? Anyone know the secret here? Perhaps this has something to do with it?
I see that there are blogs where users complain about Netflix shipping -- this college student (ouch) is "literally angry with rage!" -- but bloggers like to complain. There are also bloggers offering congrats. Count me one of those.
[Updated at 12:36 p.m.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:06 PM
January 31, 2007
Just wanted to bring some attention to the New York Times's prominent front-page story about the open-arms greeting of investors to the news that the former Philip Morris, the Altria Group, will spin off its less profitable Kraft division. Food? Dead weight compared to more addictive and harmful products!
Wall Street guru James Cramer was onto this story back on Jan. 3, when he named Altria his number one stock pick for 2007, based on the coming Kraft spinoff. As noted by the blog 24/7 Wall St., "He hates their products, but he said someone is going to make money and it might as well be you."
A charity industry blog also recently noted that Altria has cut back its corporate philanthropy to cultural organizations like New York's Whitney Museum. Sigh, more reason to cheer for the bottom line.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:46 AM
January 31, 2007
Quick announcement. As my colleagues already know, I've given notice at the Boston Globe. After four years here, during which time I wrote a column and edited copy for Ideas, briefly filled in as the Ombudsman, and (most recently) played a modest role in the effort to transform this great newspaper into a dynamic media company, I'm heading back to the life of a freelance writer, editor, multimedia producer, and consultant.
I will, however, continue to blog here at Brainiac. And I may begin to contribute more frequently to Ideas -- we'll see what happens!
By way of saying goodbye to the life of a newspaperman (though I was never a reporter), here's a couple of audio clips I published to Boston.com this morning. I was listening recently to the Lux Radio Theater's 1937 production of "The Front Page," starring Walter Winchell as newshound Hildy Johnson, and two scenes in particular cracked me up, for obvious reasons.
In the first clip, Johnson rhapsodizes about how great everything will be once he's quit the newspaper biz ("Boy, what a life!"). And in the second clip, Johnson tells his colleagues from other papers how despicable he thinks their profession is. Funny stuff... and funnier if you already know that Johnson will never actually quit his job. Because he loves it too much.
OK, that's it. Back to Brainiac. But first, an image from "His Girl Friday," the absolutely perfect 1940 film version of "The Front Page." That's Rosalind Russell as (the female) Hildy Johnson.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:23 AM
January 30, 2007
In the last line of today's item on pornography, Evan has a nice example of undernegation.
Acknowledging that it won't be stopped isn't reason to point out that it should be.
He means (as readers surely understood) that acknowledging the permanence of porn is no reason not to oppose it. But it's not unusual to find one too few negations, or one too many, in expressions like this -- not just in unedited blog posts or e-mails, but in cold print, too.
"Been quite a season for mold," observed the Globe Handyman last summer. "Who has not escaped?" (Meaning "Who has escaped?")
And a Times story last winter had this sentence: "Although the Party Ride is a crowd pleaser, it would be misleading to suggest that the experience is not without its bumps." (Meaning "it would be misleading to suggest that the experience is without bumps.)
And even the best publications use "still unpacked" to mean "still not unpacked" – "a duffel bag still unpacked from a recent trip," for instance. After Geoff Nunberg kicked off a discussion about "still unpacked" at Language Log in 2005, the construction turned out to be so common that some linguists doubted it could be called a mistake.
Most faulty negations float by unnoticed, of course. Like the editors who missed them in the first place, readers fill in the intended sense and move on. "I'll miss not seeing my friends," says the retiring colleague, and nobody bats an eye. Only "I could care less" reliably gets a rise out of the blue-pencil brigade. Could it be that what they really object to isn't the grammar, but the attitude?
Posted by Jan Freeman at 09:23 PM
January 30, 2007
Ezra Klein has entered into a little dust-up with Ross Douthat, who works at the Atlantic and writes a right-of-center blog called The American Scene. The debate concerns pornography, not a normal topic for either of them, but they range pretty widely on their blogs. At issue, mostly, is Klein's contention that the Girls Gone Wild franchise -- and it is a Hefneresque franchise, complete with merchandising, private planes and champagne to-dos -- is sexually and economically exploitative.
Douthat doesn't disagree, but replies with sarcasm:
Yes indeed -- thank God that regular, all-American porn doesn't have anything to do with rape or drugs or pressured consent or economic exploitation. It's a shame that bad apples like [Girls Gone Wild entrepreneur] Joe Francis have to go and ruin a perfectly unproblematic industry.
I'm not exactly sure where Douthat is going with that line of argument, since saying porn at large is an ugly enterprise hardly contradicts the claim that Girls Gone Wild is part of the problem. But they both have a point (the same one), since porn is so obviously a case of, at best, coerced consent, in which money is the most coercive factor, followed by drugs and/or alcohol. Acknowledging that it won't be stopped isn't reason to point out that it should be. [UPDATE: Last sentence is sic, given Jan's post above.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:26 PM
January 30, 2007
Five months after Jamews Fallows published an Atlantic cover story [sub. req.] called "We Win," Daniel Drezner notes that the debate about the efficacy of the war on Al Qaeda, and indeed the war on terror generally, has been newly stoked -- by, for example, Peter Beinart in The New Republic [$] and The Economist.
Beinart wonders why we haven't captured Osama Bin Laden, who turns fifty this year and who has often been portrayed as a sickly, weakened leader hiding in caves. At a conference Drezner attended on the status of the GWOT, Mia Bloom from the University of Georgia pointed out that the number of suicide terrorist attacks in 2006 was greater than the combined number of attacks in the previous four years. Sobering thought, probably not widely known.
It seems fair to give Bush some credit for the prevention of any attack on American soil in the last five-plus years. It also seems fair to say, pace Fallows and the US intelligence apparatus, that we don't really know where we stand when it comes to terror.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:34 PM
January 30, 2007
Like Josh, I am a great fan of Dalkey Archive Press, which is far less well known than it would be in a better world. Dalkey has heroically published such international greats as Carlos Fuentes, Dubravka Ugresic, Juan Goytisolo, Anne Carson, and Harry Mathews. I could tell you their nationalities but that would almost fly in the face of the insistent cosmopolitanism of the press. There are other, less prominent writers on their list that I'd like to discover, since I trust their taste. (Try Harry Mathews's roman a clef, "My Life in CIA.")
I also know and like Chad Post, who visited the New York Review of Books so often when I worked there that I confess I had no idea Dalkey was located in Illinois. Chad also had the enviable duty, sometimes, of traveling to foreign lands just to get the scoop on who was doing good work in, say, Norway, so the press could buy the US rights to his or her books. I wish him well.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:08 PM
January 30, 2007
Recently got an update from the folks at Dalkey Archive Press, the folks who've kept the great Irish novelist Flann O'Brien in print on these shores, among many others, and who've -- just as importantly -- translated and published new works from around the world, by the likes of (the former) Yugoslavia's Dubravka Ugresic, despite America's indifference to literature in translation.
Here's the news, or the parts that interest me: On January 1, Dalkey Archive Press relocated -- from the campus of Illinois State University, in Normal, Ill., to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Meanwhile, alas, the indefatigable (and shockingly young) Dalkey Archive marketing director, Chad Post, has left the Press to pursue other interests. (I once interviewed Post for Ideas about why O'Brien's novel "The Third Policeman" had appeared in an episode of "Lost"; he's one of the good ones.)
The last review copy that Post sent me was "Joyce's Voices," a reprint of literary critic Hugh Kenner's 1978 monograph on James Joyce's "Ulysses." It officially hits bookstores today. Having recently (finally) almost finished "Ulysses," Kenner's excellent little book -- with its keen insights about Joyce's double narrator, one of whom has a vast repertory of impersonations -- made me want to go back and start "Ulysses" at the beginning.
Thanks, Chad! Keep in touch, willya?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:00 AM
January 29, 2007
In a new survey in the UK, Reuters reports, respondents indicated that twenty-first century technology had helped them lie through their digital teeth.
The British survey found:
"techno-treachery" was widespread with nearly 75 percent of people saying gadgets like Blackberrys made it easier to fib.
Just over half of respondents said using gadgets made them feel less guilty when telling a lie than doing it face to face....
Perhaps the line between virtual and real will blur, such that tech users will feel less guilty about face to face lies and more guilty about digital ones. Either way, the era of lies across the wires is here.
One might think we already knew this from the Jayson Blair scandal, in which Blair was famously described as follows in the Times, after an internal investigation into the scandal: "His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer -- which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts -- as well as round-the-clock access to databases of news articles from which he stole."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:49 AM
January 29, 2007
You may have followed the news -- or at least you heard it -- that English soccer supernova David Beckham is coming to America, in a huge, endorsement-rich contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy of the perennially struggling US pro soccer league, Major League Soccer.
Bekham and his wife, Posh Spice of the Spice Girls, reportedly liked the idea of a move partly because they can't handle the media attention in Britain. Hm, okay.
To prepare for his entry into the US sports scene, sports geeks may want to read this article in Mechanical Engineering about How Beckham Bends It. As David Shenk writes, in his blog The Genius in All of Us,
The physics are impressive, but nothing compared to the computations taking place inside Beckham's brain in the instant leading up to the kick. "[Soccer players'] brains must be computing some very detailed trajectory calculations in a few seconds purely from instinct and practice," says University of Sheffield's Matt Carre. "Our computers take a few hours to do the same thing."
Those more impatient or less scientifically oriented will be content to watch an extraordinary video compilation of Beckham's best goals. I always thought if I could be incredibly gifted at any sport, it would be baseball. Now I'm not so sure.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 09:02 AM
January 29, 2007
One of the better recurring features in what I seemed to be forced to call the blogosphere is from the impressively named Defective Yeti. The feature highlights the best pans by film critics nationwide -- or really the best lines from bad reviews. When you're done chuckling or full-throat laughing at the zingers, you can link right to the review. For the next installment, by the way, I nominate A.O. Scott's review from Friday of the gorefest "Smokin' Aces,"
a Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others. Watching it is like being smacked in the face for a hundred minutes with a raw sirloin steak.
Some selections from Defective Yeti's Bad Review Revue, including a couple gems by the Globe's Ty Burr:
The Covenant: "Movies like this are why we have eyelids." -- Colin Covert, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE
Little Man: "One joke short of being a one-joke film." -- Randy Cordova, ARIZONA REPUBLIC
Goal!: "Suffers from a script so outrageously generic you could buy it at Costco." -- Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBE
Basic Instinct 2: "The accidental comedy sensation of the year!" -- Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBE
Posted by Evan Hughes at 07:45 AM
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