BoingBoing lauds a new book called “Go the Fuck to Sleep,” by Adam Mansbach, with illustrations by Ricardo Cortés.

I’ve been thinking for the past couple of months about seeing if someone wanted to do illustrations for a similar project I posted under a CC license in 2004: “Now Go to Damn Sleep: A Children’s Book for Parents. ” Now it would be a tad redundant.

I trust that Adam has done a better job with the topic than I did. I was never very happy with my mastery of meter.

1 Comment »

At the risk of becoming just slightly obsessed with the awfulness of Airport 1975, here’s the honest-to-grid trailer for it, indistinguishable from parodies of it:

Simply for purposes of comparison (SPOILER: better cast, better acting, even funnier):

1 Comment »

A couple of days ago while waiting my turn in the shower, I snapped on CNN, quickly got fed up with what can only be called drivel, and spun the dial. I landed on what I at first thought was Airplane! but,which after a cognitive twitch came into focus as that upon which the parody was based: Airport 1975.

This morning I went through the same drill, but this time I landed at the final fifteen minutes of Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado about Nothing.

Fortune has, I believed, paired up for me two movies that meet the rigorous formal requirements for the relationship Could Not Be More Different Than.

Airplane 1975 is the one with Linda Blair faithfully waiting for a kidney, lying next to Helen Reddy who is an honest-to-jeebus singing nun. It’s the one where Karen Black accepts the garland for Worst Performance Ever by playing the stewardess-behind-the-wheel with such passivity that you want Sister Helen to come into the cockpit and slap her once, real hard. It’s the one where Charlton Heston descends from a helicopter through the hole in the airplane to save the incompetent female, and then tells her to calm the passengers with the eternal bard-llke phrase: “Go, do your thing,”

On the other hand, in the fifteen minutes of Much Ado, I laughed hard, cried harder, and hugged my wife at the end.

I’m sure there are other pairings, and I’m curious what they might be, but none can surpass the More-Different-Than-ness of Airport 1975 and Much Ado about Nothing.

1 Comment »

I’ve posted a Kindle version of my kids’ novel, My 100 Million Dollar Secret, at Amazon. You get download it for $0.99 here. (I make $0.35.) It’s about a kid who wins the lottery, but is unable to tell his parents, and who refuses to lie to them…which puts some serious constraints on how he can spend it. It’s also about him working through the moral obligations of the advantaged.

You can also read it in a browser, download it for the iPad, or download a pdf or Word doc, all for free. Or — my favorite — you can buy a print copy at LuLu.

2 Comments »

I’ve got an ever-growing list of books that I intend to write reviews of because they’re so damn interesting. In fact, it’s because they deserve full reviews that I’m not writing any reviews. So, with the knowingly-false intention of coming back to write a longer review, here’s a brief report on one book on my list.

John Sundman (Disclosure: John is a friend from a mailing list) is a geek, and Cheap Complex Devices is a geeky novel. It not only assumes familiarity with some technical concepts (some but not all of which it explains along the way), it’s got a slashdotty sense of humor. But it shares its deep recursiveness — I can’t tell if it ever actually comes to ground — not only with Stanislaw Lem and Douglas Hostadter, but also with Borges, and contains passages that are reminiscent of (deep praise ahead) Nabokov.

Since much of the fun is in figuring out what’s going on in this very brief work, I don’t want to give away too much. But I feel safe in disclosing the premise: This book is supposedly the winning entry in a contest for computer-generated narratives. But there may or may not be a floating point error in the computer. Thematically, I take the book as a playful meditation on the emergent properties of loosely connected systems, the way a hive emerges from bees, the Shakers are (or, perhaps, are not) more than their individual members, narratives are more than their words, and consciousness is more than a bunch of neurons (or bits). It’s a narrative that seems to be at war with itself, struggling to be whole, but not sure that it wants to be.

Yeah, I’m being obscure. In part that’s to keep the book a surprise for you. In part it’s because I haven’t figured out how all the pieces work together. This is not a normal book. But it’s fascinating, and written with a very sure hand. As Julianne Chatelain says in her review, it “contains sentences of terrible beauty that are also terribly funny.” As soon as I finished it, I began reading it again.

John details the mechanics and economics of flogging self-published books in his report on DefCon.

4 Comments »

I’m fairly good at associating the U.S. presidents of my lifetime with the decades in which they were in office. But, I find myself unhinged in time when it comes to the late night talkshow hosts. I am constantly surprised upon hearing, say, how long Leno has been on.

You too? Let’s find out. Here’s a quiz. (All answers authenticated by the experts at Wikipedia.)

Year Steve Allen started The Tonight Show. 1954

Year Jack Paar took over. 1957

Start and end years of Johnny Carson’s hosting of The Tonight Show. 1962-1992

When did Carson move the show from NY to Hollywood?. 1972

What year did the Tomorrow Show (which came on after the Tonight Show) start? 1973.

During what years did the Dick Cavett Show run on ABC as a late night show?Decemver 29 1969-Jan 1 1975, so we’ll accept 1970-1974 as accurate.

What year did Late Night with Letterman start?1982

Whom did Letterman replace? That is, who had been the host of the Tomorrow Show? Tom Snyder.

Who was host of The Tonight Show during most of the years that The Arsenio Hall Show was on? Carson. The Arenio show ran 1989-1994. Woo-woo!

Who was President during the year that Jay Leno first took over The Tonight Show? Clinton’s first year was 1993

When did Conan O’Brien take over Letterman’s Late Night? 1993

What year did Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show begin? 2003

Extra Credit

What road served as a bizarre euphemism for “penis,” expressing a ritualized fear of castration, on Carson’s Tonight Show ? Slauson. Carson would give directions that included the line “Go to the Slauson Cutoff ,” followed by the audience co-recitation of “Cut off your slauson.” Hilarious.

What object did Ed Ames accidentally turn into a surrogate penis, resulting in the longest laugh in Tonight Show history? In 1965, he threw a hatchet that hit a target in the shape of man, landing in the man’s crotch. Hilarious.

Do we sense a disturbingly Freudian pattern here? Do trains enter tunnels?

Who played the non-endearing but frequent guest on the Tonight Show who went by the name “Aunt Blabby”? Carson. She was old, hard of hearing, possibly senile, nasty, and not funny.

What game show host had a late night talk show on a major network for a season? Pat “Wheel of Fortune” Sajak, on CBS, 1989-1990

What did Merv Griffin create that is probably known by the most people?The Jeopardy “waiting for an answer” theme music

Name the funniest sidekick on any late night talk show? Andy Richter

Have you ever seen a complete episode of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show? No.

3 Comments »

As a diploma project, David Arenou has prototyped an augment reality game that turns your living room into a scene in a first person shooter. Here’s his description:

Before beginning, the user has to set action markers and hiding places with personal furniture. It can be a chair, an armchair, an overturned coffee table: whatever wanted. After calibration, the player sits behind one of his hideouts and the game can start. The position of the body will have a direct impact on the avatar that it embodies.

When the player hides, he becomes invisible for his virtual enemies. When he uncovers himself, he can attack but becomes vulnerable to enemy bullets. Following a shooting phase, the game forces the player to change hiding place or to touch one of the markers, in order to get to a new sequence…

On his site you can see a video of the actual prototype in which he places the computer-readable markers, and crouches behind his furniture in between firing off shots at his television. Here’s his concept video:

The future of gaming, the innocent-sounding origins of the apocalypse, or both?

2 Comments »

As Gianluca Baccanico (who pointed me to this) says: What do you get when you mashup Google Maps, GPS, and PacMan?

From the SourceForge page on the project:

PacMap as a location based game for Android devices. To play the game you need a GPS signal and a working internet connection. There also have to be some streets nearby. Your goal is to eat all the dots. For each dot you will get a point. But beware!

What next: Google Theft Auto?

Be the first to comment »

Scott Porad from the Cheezburger Network, a network of humor and entertainment Web sites, including I can Has Cheezburger. Memebase, The Daily What, and Failblog.

It’s mainly user-moderated. As an example, Scott takes us through the steps for the Cheezburger site.

First, the home tab where you can submit content. The LOL builder makes it easy for users to add captions to images. They get 300,000-500,000 submissions to their network every month, but they only publish 1-2 percent. How do they cull? There’s no secret sauce, no magic algorithms. It’s a four-step human process.

Step 1: All submissions are screened by an editor, looking for image quality (not taken on a cellphone at night, etc.), appropriateness (no nudity, violence, racism), germaneness (a dog photo submitted to the cat site?), and keeping photos of humans out. Most of what gets submitted is junk, and gets screened out.

Step 2: Using the second tab, users vote or add a submission to their favorites. They also look at which content has been shared on social networks.

Step 3: User screening for offensiveness and copyright violations.

Step 4: Editorial curation.

They tried outsourcing it, but there’s too much specific to our culture, and requires too much editorial judgment.

Scott shows us his the favorite photos in his own account profile. ([Some very funny ones.]

Be the first to comment »