July 2009
9 posts
Herald Tribune - 100 years ago today →
1909 Situation in Spain Is Serious MADRID At the request of the Cabinet King Alfonso has signed a decree suspending the Constitutional guarantees for the whole of Spain. The situation in Barcelona remains serious and the rioting continues. In a collision between the police and the population eleven were killed and fifty wounded. The soldiers refused to fire at the mob, which cheered them, crying...
2 tags
Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New... →
Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny. Other than news aggregators such as Google News—which link to articles from publications that still derive most of their revenue from print—the most successful news sites are oriented to specialized audiences. No...
Flow (psychology) - Wikipedia, the free... →
About the Mr Spamalots →
They monitored three spam campaigns, in which more than 469 million e-mails were sent. Of the 350 million messages pitching pharmaceuticals, 10,522 users visited the advertised site, but only 28 people tried to make a purchase, a response rate of .0000081 percent. Still, that rate is high enough to potentially generate up to US$3.5 million in annual revenue, they concluded.
“Think about how stupid the average person is; now realize half of them are...”
– George Carlin
reading about writing
We are so deeply limited by language, and so ennobled by it. Songs are the attempt to convey what is under and behind language, and so it is counter-productive, if not counter-intuitive, to clutch at exactitudes of circumstance that retreat further in meaning the more desperate we become to quantify them.
My friend Joe Henry says that songwriting is not about self-expression (ewwww), but about...