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Articles from Wonderful Thoughts

Geneviene Bell complicates the mobile phone 2007-08-25 06:58:35 Genevieve Bell, a legendary anthropologist who works with Intel, is presenting at the same conference I’m speaking at this week, and it’s a rare treat to share a panel with her earlier today. She gives an abbreviated version of a talk she usually titles, “Real Men Do SMS”. The talk is designed to challenge ideas and notions of what we consider to be ICT, information and communication technology. She mentions that “ICT” isn’t a term she favors - she might suggest “information, communication and entertainment technologies”, pointing to the ways in which people are using phones in countries like Japan and South Korea. “How do we interpret an Internet based on paper?” She talks about the way in which an illiterate woman uses the Internet, dictating letters to a local youth who writes the text on paper, brings it to the local cybercafe and sends it to her daughter abroad. “It still collapses time and sitance, and it&rsq ...

Part II: Sitting Guard at the Gate - Looking at the Jewish Theory of History to Understand Events 2007-08-25 05:27:19 Ma’aléh Levoná, Samaria, Israel 10 Elul, 5767 Looking at the fearful picture around me In Part I of this series, I examined how the country is losing its way. The experts I consult, when looking at all this, these bewildering events around us, do not seem to understand what is going on. They repeat that there will be [...] ... History

Music Review: Sly And The Family Stone - Greatest Hits (Original Recording Remastered) 2007-08-25 05:27:09 Earlier this year, Epic Legacy began the long overdue task of restoring Sly And The Family Stone's original catalog, and reissuing the albums in newly remastered deluxe editions. These came complete with newly discovered tracks, exhaustive liner notes, and all the usual bells and whistles that accompany such projects. This process culminated with the release [...] ...

The Shanghai Diaries - Setting Up Our New Home 2007-08-25 05:26:59 My wife teaches English and French at a private international school owned by a large international corporation. Initially the school was only open to children of workers at the corporation, but they recently opened it up to anybody. Due to the international nature of both the school and corporation, the company has created what they [...] ...

Music Review: Rilo Kiley - Under the Blacklight 2007-08-25 05:26:46 I got an advance of "The Moneymaker," the first single from Rilo Kiley's new album Under the Blacklight a couple weeks ago and it did nothing for me. I was disappointed. I love The Execution of All Things, wasn't impressed by More Adventurous, and was not able to get my head around frontwoman Jenny Lewis' [...] ...

One Track Mind: Monte Montgomery “When Will I” 2007-08-25 05:26:40 The fertile music grounds of Austin, Texas has brought the world such uniquely talented guitar big shots as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson. But the list doesn’t stop there; among many other specialists of the six string from that locale is a dude who stands out a little more than the others. I’m talking [...] ...

People Are More Important than Animals 2007-08-25 05:26:30 Let’s say your next door neighbor becomes angry at his dog. To punish the animal, he puts him in an oven and cooks him for five minutes at 200 degrees. The dog lives but will bear physical scars of the incident for the rest of his life. The next day this same neighbor is arrested [...] ...

The Mutiny Of The Marionettes 2007-08-25 05:26:11 Ever since the Chinese recently expressed - in simple and plain language that even a barbed-wire barricaded, trash-talking Texas trailer troglodyte could understand - their ability to topple the US economy (even though they also stated in “equally clear” banker’s lingo that China would be “a responsible investor in the international financial market”), only in [...] ...

Satire: The Rove Ultimatum 2007-08-25 05:25:38 Background Note: Karl Rove was adopted by his stepfather Louis Rove at a very early age. There appears to be no public record of the former deputy chief of staff’s birth name. Many have speculated on the effect the events of Karl Rove’s family life may have had on him. [...] ...

Music Review: The New Pornographers - Challengers 2007-08-25 05:25:29 Before its release this past Tuesday, the buzz on Challengers, the fourth album by The New Pornographers, was that this was their most mature album. "Mature" is, of course, the term rock critics use when an artist gains a new perspective on life after getting married, their first child is born, or a loved [...] ...

Music Review: Curtis Stigers - Real Emotional 2007-08-25 05:25:03 Although his teen years were spent in rock music and blues, Curtis Stigers seems to have found a home in jazz, judging from the string of albums he's put together during his career. The latest, Real Emotional, newly released on the Concord label, continues a trend that over the last decade and a half has [...] ...

Taking a Look at My Times 2007-08-25 03:31:14 The New York Times launched a Netvibes/My Yahoo style Ajax start page on their site called My Times a few days back.  These start pages allow users to create a custom home page that features only the information they are interested in.  In the case of My Times, users can select from a bevy of Times-related [...] ...

Finally, a reason to wait by the mailbox again: 0-60 debuts 2007-08-25 03:29:05 About two weeks ago, I did something that many of my colleagues (and likely some of you) have done over the past few years: I tossed out over a decade’s worth of buff books. There were plenty of reasons for the mass trashing of countless copies of random car mags - namely an apartment redesign [...] ...

VIDEO: Designing the Ford Verve concept car 2007-08-25 03:28:24 Click image for photo gallery One of yesterday’s biggest stories was, of course, the introduction of the Ford Verve concept car that will be presented by the automaker at next month’s Frankfurt Motor Show. The B-class show car forecasts the “Kinetic Design”-influenced next-generation Fiesta, and now you can hear from the team that created the plucky [...] ...

So Bad It’s Good Movie Contest Winner 2007-08-24 16:14:00 Out of the list of horrible movies I watched over the last two weeks, a few were standouts: Plan 9 From Outer Space, Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, Do Or Die, and Reform School Girls. Each is horrid in its own particular way, but for the purposes of this contest I declare the winner to [...] ...