You know, for the past twenty-five years, I’ve always had a sense that American management was composed mostly of those from our parents’ generation, but it now seems that today American management is composed of those from Gen-X. How was it possible, that we, the baby boom generation, the largest generation in American history, were cut loose from our fair share of controlling destiny?
The joy of Mission To Mars is to think that some reviewers actually found anything to praise in the movie. I had a sense that the chief scriptwriter was a 7 year-old kid locked up in his room with a space rocket and a tape recorder for ten days. The highlight of the movie was the escape from the doomed lander as it headed wildly toward a flaming entry into the Martian atmosphere, seeing the astronauts file out in a weightless conga line, only to turn their heads to watch the craft disappear far below into a flaming meteorite.
Stephenson has played with each of his parallel stories and has developed so many interesting plot thread that when he must necessarily converge the stories, they don’t quite splice nicely, leaving unconnected threads sparking annoying voltage. The splice becomes a 3 inch long ugly weld bubbling melted iron and copper on what could have been a wonderful fiber optic cable.
Last night, I went, invited by the coolest young couple I know in San Diego,
to one of the city’s most notorious dive clubs, The Casbah, to hear Steve Poltz
(a.k.a., The Rugburns, co-writer of the hit that launched Jewel’s career, the
undisputed king of the 40 second answering machine song, and, well, Steve Poltz)
do his solo, heavy Cathoholic drinking routine.
Like all genuine science fiction, the film The Matrix is, at bottom, not about some horrifying possible future in which machines rule the world but an allegory of the present in which mere mortals much like ourselves do.
As I sit down to write this, the Office of President of the United States of America seems to dangle from the fingertips of the unelected members of the Florida State Supreme Court. You, reading this presumably after their decision, know much more than I. But what, really, do you know from your future vantage…
Technology has killed the "killer copyright."
In technologically sophisticated markets around the world, music CD sales have plummeted, as kids raised on computers turn to Napster and its more untraceable successors to stock their music libraries.
I don’t give a damn about football, and neither does anyone else who appears in this video.
A low-grade tribute to the classic films of Vittorio De Sica–may we once again develop a taste for realities we can live and represent to each other–this was shot, without planning, on Superbowl Sunday 1998 in Pacific Beach, California, while the "big media event" was going down a few miles across town at newly christened Qualcomm Stadium.