friday, september 14
menwholooklikekennyrogers.com needs little by way of introduction, save, perhaps, this exclamation: 'eeeeesh!'.
2:10 PM

wednesday, september 12
respond to yesterday's tragedy by donating cash to the Red Cross online.
1:21 PM

monday, september 10
most people regard IKEA as a furniture store, and not a destination restaurant.
which is unfortunate: open a hole-in-the-wall in SF, serve Stouffer's frozen meatballs and -- by adding a dash of kitchen noise, a 'wacky' 1-word name (e.g., 'Sven', 'Smorgasbord'), plus some ECM-ish music -- you'll be booked nonstop, til the Next New Restaurant comes along. (my idea for that: 'The Maple Leaf', serving Vegetarian Canadian-Cajun Fusion Cuisine).
meanwhiles, i'll take the airplane-food flatware and non-threatening nordic style of the real thing, which is why i insist you find an IKEA near you, and order the manager's special: meatballs, potato, soup-or-salad, and lingonberrylicious sodadrink. yum!
3:52 PM

thursday, september 6
the steve-ballmer-monkeyboy meme is metastasizing...
2:15 PM

wednesday, september 5
hey, these poems are pretty good.
5:35 PM

sony just announced the 3rd-generation Aibo puppy. now, i wouldn't buy one for the MSRP of $850, but might be tempted to buy one for, say, fifty bucks. that's a possible price 4 iterations from now, if you extrapolate sony's prices over time, though 300 bucks seems likelier (entertainment consumer electronics always circle that price point).
sony tends to iterate until they get things working really well -- and i can only imagine what the 7th generation Aibo might be able to do, technically speaking. (emotionally speaking, i shudder to think that people would wish to substitute a live pet.)
3:04 PM

tuesday, september 4
it was this fallows@large dialogue with author Alex Kerr that convinced me to buy 'Dogs and Demons' (NYTimes review, Amazon.com reviews), a treatise examining those aspects of Japanese society that don't seem to be working too well at the moment. kerr's observations on Japan's cramped living conditions, the complete aesthetic disconnect between old & new (and it's all new, now), and massive concretization echoed my initial impressions of tokyo and kyoto.
i subsequently burned through kerr's previous work, 'Lost Japan' (Lonely Planet press) in a phoenix motel room. Lost Japan is a more readable work, and it's the book i'm telling friends to read.
12:29 PM

friday, august 24
had i access to enormicom 3 years ago, i would be a millionaire today. (note: enormicom.com is a joke. but i'm not entirely sure my statement above is.)
12:13 PM

'find the palimpsest!' continues unabated, that 'game' wherein the rarely-sighted palimpsest is tracked, hunted, and displayed as a trophy, for no purpose beyond that of 'sport'. thankfully, the fertile grounds of the Amazon have now been declared off-limits to palimpsest hunters, lest the sport become so trivial and destructive as was hunting the fabled DoDo bird...
12:04 PM