Food for Thought, or Why You Might Skip That Steak
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Anders Thomas Jensen's film about the cannibal business is neither high flying enough for the art house nor low down enough for the cult-video shelf.
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Hey, somebody in Times Square put my Pakistani chicken meat patty on a miniature bagel. And, if that's a turnoff, then try it on a hot-dog bun. Mmmm, not bad for a buck, buck-fifty.
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Mostly, these lists give me an excuse to remind readers of good and great films that they may have missed.  But in some respects, the actual list is the least of it.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??
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Analysis Fragmentation and US indifference
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A British study suggests that avoiding certain fish entirely if you are pregnant may not be the best advice.
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Why Robert Kiyosaki's advice may be worth passing up.
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Tycho:  The memories of those who came of age in the eighties have become a kind of ghastly rummage sale, a tilled up cemetery where icons lay tilted over bones draped in ancient finery.  Pork caught a preview of Transformers on Monday, and he claims that it is not, in fact, heresy - but I don't know how calibrated our respective tastes are.  I was going to make a statement about how any constantly shifting image could entertain him, enthrall him, command him, until I realized that this viewing was late at night, in the twilight period we call Pork After Hours, when his medication wanes and his blood is frenzied by some dark moon.  For him to have focused on anything at any time after nine o'clock is actually high praise.
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What we avoid in Hidden Gems and why we avoid it.
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An analyst's buy-sell-hold recommendation is more -- and less -- than what you think.
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The Bull makes some good points -- but not good enough.
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I just figured something out, and it's the kind of thing that's best said publicly, even though it's likely to: 1. Be misunderstood and 2. Upset some people. But since it's all about this blog it really is best to air it here. First what triggered the epiphany. I was over at Loic Le Meur's house in San Francisco yesterday having lunch with his family and friends. We were all drinking wine (very good wine of course), enjoying the view, and talking about this and that, when the subject turned to Mike Arrington. Loic said that Mike told him that we used to be best friends. I couldn't figure out what that meant, because our friendship was the business kind of friendship not the personal kind. What does it mean to best friends in that way? And how does that relate to having a blog? It never occurred to me that friendship meant that (here's the epiphany) that I would only say positive things about Mike's business. It didn't occur to me until I heard Loic's side of a blog-fight that I saw happen from a distance, with Sam Sethi, Mike and Loic.  Complicated? You bet. Too complicated. An unspoken deal that I never agreed to. When Mike was starting TechCrunch, I pointed to his blog all the time, with glowing phrases. Because I was truly impressed with what he was doing and because I wanted to encourage other people to do it too. I wanted people to write about technology products based on how they used them, not based on alliances, investment, posturing of execs, the crappy stuff that means almost nothing to users, and imho is just a substitute for actually understanding the technology. Mike was approaching products the way I felt they should be approached. Hence the praise. Fact is, my opinion of Mike, as a person, hasn't changed much in the last couple of years. He has a personal charm and charisma that not everyone finds appealing, but I do. I like hanging out with the guy. However, that doesn't mean that if my opinion of TechCrunch, his business, isn't uniformly positive (and of course these days it is actually fairly negative) that I will withhold it. But it's also part of Mike's way of dealing with people that he sees criticism as betrayal. I just don't see it that way. I've had the shit kicked out of me so many times, and as a programmer I understand that criticism is necessary to perfect a user interface, even to get the damned thing working, that even when it hurts, I have to push the hurt aside and listen to what people are saying, and try to respond to it. Professionalism demands it.  Anyway, one of the reasons I want to write this now is that I've written about Loic's business here a couple of times in very positive terms. I don't want anyone, esp Loic, to assume that this will always be so. If they get in the way of other creative people, or otherwise act as a poor example of entrepreneurship in technology, of course I will write about it, and will say what I think. I would expect Loic and people at his company to take what I write to heart, and consider it. My feelings won't be hurt if they don't do what I say.  Same as when I said Facebook sucks. Or when I criticize Techmeme. This isn't in any way meant to reflect on the quality of the people at Facebook (some of whom I know to be outstanding people of high principle) or Gabe Rivera who I know to be a very smart and competent and honorable person. It's possible to critcize someone's work and still admire the person. My epiphany is that a lot of people who thought were my friends, didn't understand this very basic thing about me.
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Go ahead, be contrarian -- just make sure you're right.
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I return at last to the creationism-intelligent design debate. After all my rather coy gambits on this topic over recent months, the conclusion may come as something of an anticlimax. It really is for me too: I'm tired of wrestling with it.
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The steakhouse seems to have lost its sizzle.
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One Fool has seller's remorse over Outback Steakhouse.
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Comment is free: Madeleine Bunting: It's pointless to cut out meat and cars while having lots of children.