lovehatethings

I hesitate to create a lovehate about the state of ideas in Hollywood, as the concept of derivative plot lines and characters has, it itself, become derivative. I'm sure as far back as silent film, people have been talking about the overabundant repetition and hackneyed ideas. When the legendary silent film "The Great Train Robbery" was such a success in 1903, it didn't take long for the "Little Train Robbery" (1905) to be made with a bunch of exploited children.

So I do understand the irony in the fact that whining about lost creativity is an artistic constant and hardly news-worthy. I only bring it up at this time because, in looking over the next few months of films that will likely challenge records at the box office, there's precious little originality that isn't a sequel, reworking, or retelling of an existing franchise or historical success. And I guess what really bothers me is the hundreds of millions being spent on precious few derivative blockbusters while anything independent or original has to scrape by with a few hundred thousand. The yearly Oscar for best original screenplay is being reduced to precious few to choose from.

Starting with Wolverine on May 1st, while I certainly don't begrudge the makers extending the Marvel brand a bit further with what is likely the most popular character of the X-men franchise. The fact that this film will capture the Comicon crowd is not lost on me, yet does take the place of at least a few original screenplays and character sets that should see the light of day.

I've always loved Star Trek, and I'm sure I will like the May 8th release, but was it really necessary to rework the original characters? The history established by the past television series and films cannot help but paint this story into a corner. We know which characters cannot die because they are around decades later. Where's the original Sci-Fi these days?

And then let's run the summer blockbuster list:

Angels and Demons - Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code prequel which is two years too late in terms of maintaining the wave of the series original popularity, but not like we'll look for a new alternative to film or anything.

Terminator Salvation - Yet another sequel with Christian Bale playing a dark and brooding anti-hero. Suffers, again, from the same plot issues as Star Trek, being stuck into an existing mythology.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian - Ben Stiller + sequel = banal.

Land of the Lost - While I know I'm deriding remakes, I really looked forward to this one until I heard Will Ferrell was attached. Now it becomes a de facto sequel of every other movie Will Ferrell has ever made.

The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 - Again, LOVED the original. Isn't there another screenwriter out there who can write a train heist film? You couldn't do much worse than Money Train.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen -  Is this the one where Jar Jar and Michael Caine fight a robot shark from a future dystopian world? I suppose to ask for another writer to come up with an original story about trucks that turn into intelligent robots would be too infringing... how 'bout next time we go with Voltron instead?

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - In a genre where originality should be most abundant, we have to sit through yet another Ice Age... when does it all melt? All I can do is thank Pixar for UP at the end of May. I don't have much idea what it's about - and that's a very good thing.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - Hasn't Harry got a nice job as a clerk in a central London office by now? Aren't the characters on crack benders somewhere? I think we should conscript Jon Lithgow and create a Harry Potter and the Hendersons combined sequel.

All these along with new iterations of G.I. Joe, Final Destination (not so final was it?) and Halloween makes me wish for a time like the 70s when, for all of the historical nostalgia about a "golden era" of directors and films, at least we had some original stories. But I guess that's when this 30 year-old funk that we're in now started.

I know that some of these films will be great, but it reminds me of the ominous parallels to the literary criticism of T.S. Eliot's canon. Essentially, there will be films that are part of the canon and those that aren't and those that are there were always desitined to be there and those not should not have expected more. How many of the sequels and remakes we watch over the next year will serve more as cannon fodder than find a place in the canon?

A brief podcast concerning the following questions:
 
Are blogs art, and should bloggers be able to receive art's funding?
Is there any simpler way to change the channel on my TV than a casual press of my thumb?
And, as much as we complain about abbreviations and acronyms... have things really changed all that much over the past 60 years?

I was lucky enough to get in on an offer of a free Pro Upgrade Version of BumpTop last night. Thanks to @mikevardy for spotting the giveaway via an @mashable tweet.

After installation and playing around with it for a bit my initial reaction was more positive than your might think: "It doesn't suck."

Now I know that doesn't sound like a stirring endorsement, but quite frankly I expect all desktop environment mods to suck. I've tried a bunch of them and, without fail, dumped them within 24 hours after wondering why anyone actually liked them. The app runs under 100mb of RAM on my system which had more resources devoted to the new version of Tweetdeck which runs at about 120.

I'm not going to go into long descriptions of the features, as the video below can take care of that, but I will say that the interface looks promising. I will say that perhaps the one piece of empirical evidence I have that this is better than past desktop mods is that this is first one where I felt the mouse felt inadequate. I wanted to reach out and pull an MS surface on my screen.

I will also say that the sort function is awesome if not a bit too efficient. When sorting files by type into stacks on the desktop, I had not come to grips in my mind with how the results would end up. In other words, I don't know that the new stacks are automatically intuitive to someone like me who leaves way too much on the desktop, but, if I'd tidied up a bit first, things would probably be a lot easier.

Although not calling BumpTop the bee's knees (mostly because I don't call anything the bee's knees) it is still installed and I plan on playing with it some more. I think I may like it even more on my laptop (but that's another test case). Check out the video... it works pretty much like they say, and, just for a real world example, I've included two pics of my desktop below the video.

The first pic shows my actual XP desktop without BumpTop running, and the second pic is BumpTop after the "stacking" feature has been activate through a simple click option. Looks neater anyway... just wish I could do the same thing to the real desktop my gear sits on.

Before BumpTop...

After BumpTop...

For years, it has been incumbent on "forward-thinking" governments to sponsor the arts and the artists around their countries through endowments, grants, and special project funding. Many of these artists believe that they have the right to make a living as artists, and further believe that the government should be paying them to do it.

While I agree that the arts are important to a culture, I have always had a hard time believing that anyone had the "right" to make a living from taxpayer funds. I've been a musician since I was five and have, not once, ever thought that anyone owed me the ability to make a living while honing my craft. My pursuit of art (and craft for that matter) comes from passion and willingness to pursue it. 

Part of my criticism of government funding for the arts comes from the bodies that oversee it. I've always held the notion (romantic though it may be) that art should exist unencumbered for its own sake and not beholden to anything. The structures and preconceptions that often come part and parcel with arts funding preclude this freedom. To apply for a Canada Council grant in the arts one must automatically pigeon-hole their idea into limited parameters and variables to satisfy the board making the decision. That board, by its nature becomes a gatekeeper to "art" and, by my view anyway, severely impedes artistic integrity.

I do however appreciate the idea that many great artists use funding to hone their craft where they might otherwise have to spend their days working a non-related occupation. That said, is the chosen artist really chosen on merit by the board, or how well they can fill out a grant application?

And all this to lead to the title question: Are Blogs Art?

I would automatically answer "no" under the definitions I hold true for the term, but when I put some blog writing up side by side against short stories or poetry, I have to reconsider. Aside from the basic tenets of communication and education and information, how different is the blog writer from the poet. I would like to say that the poet hones their craft and the resulting artistic products, while rife with meaning were only true to their own outcomes and not the expectations of readers. But I know poets who write for a purpose. They have an endgame in mind when trying to promote a message. This tends to be what bloggers do all the time: have a message, convey it through words and ideas. Does it make sense that the poet gets funded and blogger does not?

Does one hold a higher moral obligation than the other? Sure, a poet can be cryptic and hide meaning without being blunt and overbearing, but some of the best poetry hits you right over the head like a sledgehammer. I've read blogs both cryptic and blunt, both flowery and caustic. While one would rarely mistake a blog for poetry or the other way around, I would never claim that the intent, talent and skill required to write for one form was any greater or less than the other. I have read crappy blogs and crappy poetry and brilliant examples of both. The level of craft on both is high, and I cannot figure out how any Council or board could figure out the difference.

So in my best McLaughlin Report method of answering the question, are blogs art? YOU'RE ALL WRONG! The real answer is, I don't know. What I do know is that I'm certainly not comfortable saying one should have funding and the other not. For all of the defenses that could attributed to the importance of art can also be attributed to new media. And all of the people who write incoherent poetry are more than matched by those who write inconsequential blogs.

And I should know... I've written both many times.

I'm sure some of you may have seen or used this site before, but Multicolr Search Lab (not a misspelling) is such a simple and cool use of the Flickr API, that I had to share it.

By clicking on a color swatch you see 50 matching Flickr pics. Great for building your own photomosaic. Even cooler is the fact that it modifies the link string so that you can bookmark your color combinations and come back to them later. With nine gradient shades of each color, the combinations a numerous.

Hope you dig messing around with this as much as I do.

Here's 40% Cyan, 60% Yellow and 80% Green:

Turning an Impromptu Podcast into an open letter to the idiot that I had to contend with on the road home from Ottawa yesterday.

The more that things change, the more they stay the same... and yet somehow I find myself in Quebec, but that's another story.

I've been guilty at decrying the over use of prefixes and suffixes as they relate to technology. After all, we've all suffered through "i" this and "e" that and something "x". And in as much as these prefixes and suffixes are problematic, their muddling of the English language pales in comparison to the acronyms and abbreviations that clutter up our linguistic sensibilities.

While strolling through a couple of bookstores in The Glebe (which is an Ottawa neighborhood) I stumbled upon Cecily C. Matthews "A Dictionary of Abbreviations" published by George Routledge & Sons in 1947 London. The book's forward begins: "The middle twentieth century, more perhaps than any previous period since writing began, is an age of abbreviations: new ones are being forged everyday." 62 years later and quite simply, this book could not exist as it would be horribly outdated by the time the compilation went to print. Abbreviations and acronyms have become an intrinsic part of our language that we are all at once loathsome of and thankful for.

With this said, I would like to present what I believe are some of the most interesting abbreviations from the book. It's funny to see how the concept making the words fit the acronym had no place in reduction of words, rather it was all about shortening text:

AFHTWTA - Amalgamated Felt Hat Trimmers' and Wool Trimmers' Association (Screw you non-felties!)
BPOWBGF - British Prisoners of War Books and Games Fund (Next they'll want cable.)
CPOHFC - Crossley and Porter Orphan Home for Fathlerless Children (
DSCAEF - Deputy Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force
FCKMU - Fife, Clackmannan and Kinross Miners' Union (This abbr. just looks obscene)
HMHMH - His Majesty's Household Master of the Horse (Is Horse Master like Beast Master?)
ICTRF - Ice Cream and Temperance Refreshment Federation (I so want to join this one.)
PLFIFL - Poetry Lovers' Fellowship and International Fellowship of Literature (I like Dead Poets' Society better.)
RSSPCA - Royal School Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
RSSPCC - Royal School Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
SVBEEQV - Si vales, bene est: ego quoque valeo ("I hope you're well; I am." - I think UOK?IOK works better.)
ZCRGSMWS - Zinc and Copper Roofers and General Sheet Metal Workers' Society (Try and make a cool sounding word out of this.)