"Is Frost out of copyright?" his nibs asked.

"Could be, I suppose," I answered. "All depends on whether his heirs and assigns renewed during that period when copyrights needed to be renewed."

"Well, look at this. I'll send you a link."

The link was to Creativity, whose links self-destruct soon after they're posted.

Here's another link. Ford and the Road Not Taken.

Labels: advertising, media, poetry

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:05 PM|| |

You're not the boss of me!

Update: Steele to Rush: I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership. Sorry!

Labels: media, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:36 PM|| |

FORA.tv - Videos Covering Today's Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues

FORA.tv is advertising for unpaid interns on CraigsList.

Toddled off to see what's up with that. I'd seen a stack of FORA.tv lit over at the Commonwealth Club offices on Saturday.

Long Now talks. Aspen Institute talks. Commonwealth Club talks. ...

Here's a Roger Rosenblatt interview with Amy Tan at the Chautauqua Institution on July 10, 2008. The interview is broken out in sections. If you only want to hear Tan speak on "Writer's Memory" you can click straight to the spot.

E.L. Doctorow on the Problematic Nature of Writing Novels

The indexing is superb. You can select one of the broad subject ranges and then one of the sub-sections. You can search for subjects. You can find all videos from the Hoover Institution.

Brilliant stuff.

Labels: culture, media, politics, video, web2.0, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:09 PM|| |

[via the brilliant collection of advertisements at I believe in advertising]

Labels: blog, culture, media, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:30 PM|| |

Gavin Newsom chatted with Dave Morey and his wacky gang at KFOG's Morning Show yesterday morning.

I missed the show live but downloaded KFOG's podcast/mp3 of the show and listened to the yack-yack this afternoon.

Why read other people telling you what Newsom said when you can take a direct listen?

Labels: media, podcast, politics, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:10 PM|| |

First heard about Smashing Telly over at Sour Grapes, where SG offered up a link to Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville.

Man, what a resource Smashing Telly is.

Everything from Jean-Luc Godard to this forty-one minute interview with Buckminster Fuller ("Everything I Know") to over an hour with George Carlin to Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten to interviews with Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio for The Making of Koyaanisqatsi.

David Galbraith explains: Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. Not 30 second clips of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but full length programs. Smashing Telly, not Gimmick Telly.

Many of the items that I'll be putting up on a regular basis are documentaries, since that's what tends to be out there at the moment.

Labels: film, media, URL, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:16 AM|| |

CBS announced today that it has entered into a strategic partnership with The Electric Sheep Company as part of its plans to increase its presence on Second Life and other online virtual worlds.

Electric Sheep is a New York-based creator of virtual-world content and has worked with CBS (nyse: CBS - news - people ) to launch Second Life communities for Showtime's The L Word and for Star Trek, which is owned by CBS Paramount. The company also created a TV ad for the CBS sitcom Two And A Half Men that ran during the Super Bowl earlier this month. Electric Sheep's other clients include Viacom's (nyse: VIA - news - people ) MTV Networks, Time Warner's (nyse: TWX - news - people ) AOL and Major League Baseball.


continues

Labels: app, media, SecondLife

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:33 AM|| |

midomi

Oh, my. Whither next, Web 2.0?

"Our mission is to build the most comprehensive database of searchable music. You can contribute to the database by singing in midomi's online recording studio in any language or genre. The next time anyone searches for that song, your performance might be the top result!"

Oh, my.

[a nod, I suppose, is due the Tech Chronicles at sfgate.com.]

Thanks a lot, guys.

Really!

Labels: media, music, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:26 PM|| |

Senses of Cinema: an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema.

Articles, festival reports, DVD reviews, book reviews, links, lists.

The great directors archive is stashed full of information, as is the annotations for films screening at the Melbourne Cinémathèque.

e.g.

Comments on David Lynch's Eraserhead by Catherine S. Cox.

Alfred Hitchcock by Ken Mogg
Hitchcockian articles in Senses



[found while I was looking for something Hitchcockian ...]

Labels: film, media, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:09 PM|| |

We had some discussion about mash-ups a while back.

Came across a good example today: Jefferson Airplane mashed with Star Trek.

Feed your head.


[repurposed from a post earlier today at sfist]

Labels: media, music

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:19 PM|| |

For those who aren't living under a rock (hey, even I know about this and I haven't had the TV on since ... oh, about October), there's a brou going on over at Celebrity Big Brother (over 38K protests already logged) about the interactions between some of the other contestants and Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood movie star.

The long time sponsor, Carphone Warehouse, has canceled their sponsorship. Tempers run high, and so do the viewer stats.

I finally clicked over to YouTube this morning to check out some clips of what's been happening.

The Economist has what I think is probably the right take on the situation.

The crap these people are throwing at Shilpa Shetty is less about racism (although the bullies do pick on Shetty's Indian face and clothes and cooking and what-all because they think that's where she's vulnerable) and more about the fact that Shetty is beautiful, poised, well-spoken, well-off and in all ways a success, a celebrity in her own right.

The contrast between her circumstances and those of her bulliers is striking.

They're jealous. They're eaten up with envy. They are showing the world less what is wrong with Shetty and her Indian background and more about what is inherently wrong with them. The more they beat up on Shetty and the more grace she shows, the less she breaks down because of the verbal battering, the more infuriated they become.

What a bunch of jerks.

Shetty is grace under pressure, a lot of pressure. She'll come out of this with her halo intact, nay even polished. Perhaps her grace is a form of passive aggression, perhaps she's classy because she knows it drives them nuts.

Maybe so, but the others? They simply come across as jealous lusers. Bullies. Cretins. Crap.

My take.

Or is it all just theater? The Age comes through with a different slant.

As feminist Germaine Greer, who appeared in a previous Big Brother, argued in The Guardian, Shetty is "a very good actress". "Everything about (Shetty) is infuriating," Greer said. "Everyone hates her because she wants them to. The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the arse Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her."

Some papers are calling Greer's commentary a defense of Shetty.

You think? I don't. I don't think Germaine Greer much likes Shetty either.

Hm.

We now return you to things that matter.

Labels: life, media, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:46 AM|| |