Canuckflack

For a dozen years or more, David Letterman coveted one job: the host of the Tonight Show slot at NBC. We all know who held that spot: Johnny Carson.

David cooled his heels, kept his time slot and stretched the boundaries of what network censors would allow with his Late Show. (Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler, anyone?)

Then, Johnny retired. And Jay Leno got the time slot, and a nice production deal working for NBC.

In 1993, Dave, in what seemed at the time as a tremendous fit of pique as well as a risky gambit, struck his own production deal with CBS. Dave was taking home a huge paycheck - but owned his own show.

In the years since, Dave’s proven that two variety shows can co-exist at that time slot. AND he’s brought Craig Ferguson into the fold.

This week, his independent streak paid off. Dave’s production company, WorldWide Pants, struck a deal with the striking Writer’s Guild of America. As a result, he will be back next week - with his full writing team.

The deal breaker? Letterman’s company will pay his writers the new residual payments for the rebroadcast of the show on the Internet - until CBS and the other networks arrive at a larger agreement with the union.

In the short term, Letterman will get an opportunity to out-perform Leno and his other competitors, and will have an opportunity to book Screen Actors Guild members.

In the long term, I hope this early move to settle the strike is a sign that WorldWide Pants understands that online and distributed content will be the key to profit and success - not the old-fashioned and short-term focus on weekly eyeball numbers?

It looks like a fun snow tubing park, with a webcam, but Chicopee Tube Park has one of those easy-to-misread URLs: www.chicopeetube.com.

I think that’s an episode of Chico and the Man that I missed.

I realize that Canadians are buffered from breaking U.S. trends in casual dining, but a 90 minute wait to get into a Cheesecake Factory?

“…The average wait at a Cheesecake Factory restaurant is 1 1/2 hours, said Alethea Rowe, director of restaurant marketing for the Cheesecake Factory Inc. Once the doors open and the restaurant fills up, then the waiting line forms. …

The lines, however, are a positive sign to restaurant management. “I think this is the biggest compliment our guests can give us,” Rowe said. “It tells us that they think the Cheesecake Factory is someplace special.”(Hartford Courant)

Yeah, that’s what the investors in Planet Hollywood thought as well.

Didja hear? The traditional enclosed mall is in decline. Apparently, someone told The Economist, because they’ve run a long piece on the original enclosed mall, Southdale Mall in Minnesota.

In Rise and Fall Of the Shopping Mall, we get the magazine’s well-written and comprehensive look at mall culture - especially as it developed under the imagination of Victor Gruen, Southdale’s architect.

“Gruen got an extraordinary number of things right first time. He built a sloping road around the perimeter of the mall, so that half of the shoppers entered on the ground floor and half on the first floor—something that became a standard feature of malls.

Southdale’s balconies were low, so that shoppers could see the shops on the floor above or below them. The car park had animal signs to help shoppers remember the way back to their vehicles.

It was as though Orville and Wilbur Wright had not just discovered powered flight but had built a plane with tray tables and a duty-free service.“

I thought that analogy was worth a mention, but there has been much more written about Gruen and his impact on the culture of North America. Ten years ago, the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages wrote about the “Gruen effect” and the “mauling of America.”
In a 1957 interview with the New Yorker, Gruen recognized that urban populations need common spaces (the precursor to the “third place”?) - and also fingered merchants as the guiding force in the development of North American culture.

… Mr. Gruen grumbled that “planning” has become a dirty word in this country. “Almost as bad as if Lenin had invented it,” he said. “The fact is no city was ever planned enough. Planned and replanned. Here in New York, we’re like a big family that’s all dressed up with no place to go. Wherever we turn, it’s jostle and bustle and frayed nerves and bad tempers.

In Detroit, six or seven thousand people make their way to Northland on Sunday afternoons. The stores are closed, so what are they doing there? Looking for open space. They window-shop and stroll through the gardens and sit on benches and soak up the sun and enjoy the fountains and sculpture.

What Northland teaches us is this—that it’s the merchants who will save our urban civilization. ‘Planning’ isn’t a dirty word to them; good planning means good business. Besides, any improvements they make are tax-deductible. Sometimes self-interest has remarkable spiritual consequences. As art patrons, merchants can be to our time what the Church and the nobility were to the Middle Ages.”

Well, fifty years on I would be willing to debate the value and quality that a merchant-based culture has brought to our society. I guess that’s what being po-po-mo is all about.

Ten years ago, the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages touched on the “Gruen effect” and the “mauling of America.”

In practical terms, it seems that quite a few cities commissioned Gruen to design new urban centres, but only cherry-picked his designs for pedestrian malls for actual construction:

“…Kalamazoo, however, adopted only the pedestrian mall from all the recommendations of the plan, as many other cities would do with their Gruen plans. Fresno, California would build a downtown pedestrian mall in 1964, based on a 1958 Gruen plan; Honolulu, Hawaii would also convert two blocks into a pedestrian mall in 1969, three years after commissioning a Gruen plan.”

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Gruen three years ago (which I blogged about).
There’s also a book about the man, and how about an academic analysis of his work: “Victor Gruen and the Construction of Cold War Utopias“?

Technorati Tags: Victor Gruen, Southdale Mall, suburbia, pedestrian mall, retail, mall

I admit it. Scientists and communicators often don’t mix well. They certainly don’t share a love for numbers, or even for precision. After all, it is hard to communicate science to the public.

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, has provided his colleagues with something of a guidebook to making your way as a scientist.*

As reviewed in Harvard Magazine, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science does dwell on his past as a Harvard professor and wunderkind, but also identifies some basic traits to help battle it out in academia and the world of science:

• Manners Needed for Important Science
• Manners Required for Academic Civility
• Manners Deployed for Academic Zing
• Manners Maintained When Reluctantly Leaving Harvard
• Science works better when the winners don’t take all
• Share valuable research tools
• Never be the brightest person in the room
• Science is highly social

As the review points out, Watson often broke these rules or didn’t demonstrate these traits. As communicators, however, we know that highly social systems are effective at creating “weak links” and helping transmit information and understanding.
*Watson isn’t without his oversize controversies, either.

It’s two days until New Year’s, and I thought you might appreciate an instructional case in “putting the moves on.”

Well, not really luxury. More like the perks you used to expect when traveling by air. This is from a recent New York Times article about US Airways:

“…Another employee wondered in October 2006: “Why can we not get better quality snack items for our coach customers? One customer recently compared the generic pretzel nubs we serve to the fish food you buy in a .25 gumball machine at any zoo or park.”

Actually, fish food would appear to be too costly. “We’ve worked with our purchasing team,” management explained, “to bring in many companies to compete on our main cabin tidbit item (pretzels). To date, no one has been able to match our current cost, about 3 cents per package.” (NY Times)

h/t to Nan.

All I wanted for Christmas was a taste of 1982:

Enjoy this clip from the BBC Micro program, explaining how to access email in 1982.

Look at your kids (or your neighbour’s kids, or your brother). Are they planted on a sofa, playing a MMOG? Imagine what generations after generations of lethargic kids might look like. What effects would their health suffer?

Participaction, the Canadian health promotion campaign aimed at kids, has the answer:

Oh - and what’s the car in the promo? A Chevy Citation? An Acadian?

Technorati Tags: Participaction, health promotion, gamers, youth, Citation, Acadian

Well, with the oldest-living Queen launching a YouTube channel* in time for her Christmas Message, I’m feeling more than a little flummoxed. This sure isn’t the tradition I remember from my childhood - which was more along the lines of “What do you mean, she’s on all FOUR channels!!!”

Over at Crying All The Way to the Chip Shop, Lee spent some time earlier this month discussing why Britain doesn’t have the same great tradition of “road songs” as the United States. There are obvious geographic limitations - what with Britain being tiny and all - but he argues that there is also a cultural and spiritual chasm between the two countries as well:

“…The truth is, we (Brits, that is) don’t look at life and see endless bright horizons and dream big dreams, we’re a gloomy, glass-half-empty kind of people and who find idealistic American positivity a little embarrassing and phony. Americans, bless their hearts, do still say things like “you can be anything you want to be” and believe it (despite evidence to the contrary) because they’re happily unburdened by history while we’ve had way too much of it and frankly can’t work up the enthusiasm for anything anymore as a result. We built an empire and won a bunch of wars and now we just want to put our feet up and enjoy England’s plucky failures …

These days the stubborn refusal to “have a nice day” feels like a defiant poke in the eye of today’s noisy, amped-up consumer culture (created by America, of course) which bangs you over the head with its global franchises, useless gadgets, trashy television, and blinged-up celebrities. In the face of that, being miserable old bastards may be the last thing we have to hold on to that’s truly ours”.

Here in Canada, we have the worst of both worlds: a faint tie to British history and past glories, a tremendously long and expansive horizon, and very little history of our own.

That means we measure our voyages in hours (”How far?” “About four and a half hours.”) and our travelogues tend to be overladen with descriptions of the scenery (”Trees. Loads and loads of trees. Oh, and an iron mine.”).

Unless you’re driving through Saskatchewan, which is three hours of flat. And a uranium mine.

We’re really into that whole consumerism thing, though. And the franchises. A mall or a neighbourhood can’t really be considered to have “made it” until it’s overburdened with American franchises.

*or ,as The Register notes, “One would like to wish you a Happy 2.0 Christmas”

Technorati Tags: England, Half English, nostalgia, Empire, Queen, consumerism

• A Google Maps guide to driving between Santa Claus, Indiana and Christmas, Florida.
• AKQA’s neon hamster wheel (which apparently isn’t sh*t)
• Frank Best’s greeting card for failed cold calls (you want to read this)
• IStudio’s Do Not Want ads.
• McKinney’s SnowGlobe Boy (staffer lived in an inflatable globe in the lobby)
• Dave mentioned the greeting from Twist Image
• Kate has built a comprehensive list of online Christmas cards (here, here, and here)

Merry Christmas to you all!

Technorati Tags: Christmas cards, advertising agency

What happens when you misdial 1-800 Santa Claus? You get 1-800 Santa Barbara - a website promoting attractions in Santa Barbara. California. Which, for one week in December, becomes Accidental Santa.

John Dickson, the site owner, discovered this last year. Instead of hanging up on the kids calling for the fat guy, he spoke to them. This year, a hundred volunteers are helping out, answering questions and taking orders (and sometimes managing expectations, like the little boy who wanted a real Dinosaur).

“… A list of pointers has guided the novices: Be patient. Mention Rudolph. For safety’s sake, ask only the child’s first name. Steer any offered donations to charity. Be prepared for misdialed calls to a similar number for Enterprise car rentals. (Calls to the actual 1-800-SANTACLAUS keep ringing, unanswered.) (LA Times)

A simple dialling error which could be easily dismissed. Or provide an opportunity to spread some Christmas cheer among the innocents who, somehow, understand 1-800 taxonomy.

You may have seen this. The Singapore Media Authority commissioned - and participated in - a corporate rap.

You have to admire their gumption and their verve: Singapore is making a play to be one of the top players worldwide in telecom and technology, and it’s obvious that senior management is willing to take a risk.

Technorati Tags: corporate rap, Singapore

• Oh lord. Parma Ham and Pesto toasties. mmmmmmm!
• Russell’s widgety goodness (1, 2, 3, 4). I’m professionally partial to part three.
• Tobias Wong, interviewed by Rob Walker,

(Wong) … Before, corporations commissioned work with parameters—they wanted specific things. It seems that they’re taking bigger chances now. That’s what I’m seeing.

(Walker) Yeah, that’s true. I just read about Thurston Moore doing some compilation CD for Starbucks. Frankly, these big companies doing stuff like that kind of bums me out.

(Wong) Well, they’re desperate. But there’s got to be a way to make it work for us.”

Technorati Tags: industrial design, consumerism, tasty sandwiches

Christmas Eve. Last minute shopping. Malls full of desperate shoppers. And it’s going to be parking hell. The Raleigh News & Observer describes some of the rude and desperate behaviour to be found at local mall parking lots, and provides some anthropological rough work on the types of drivers you’ll come across:

THE STALKER: This driver looks for a shopper loaded down with bags and follows behind like a vulture hungry for carrion.

THE ILLEGAL IDLER: This person parks in a fire lane, or a handicapped spot, and sits there with the engine running while a spouse ducks inside. If an idler is especially daring, he or she will use this time to change a baby’s diaper.

THE STAKEOUT ARTIST: Most hated of all, this person sees a pair of brake lights go red and stops, knowing that a fellow shopper is soon to leave. The worst stakeout artists will sit there for 10 minutes if necessary, blocking traffic for 20 other cars, while the fellow shopper loads 10 bags, a stroller and a grandmother into the car.

It’s the grandmothers that’ll kill ya. Often, you can’t see them lurking behind the shopping cart.

Technorati Tags: holiday, parking, mall

This gem from the Boston Phoenix’s review of the catch phrases of the year:

“…a colleague on the West Coast reports seeing a pair of homeless men holding a handmade sign: “2 bums 1 cup.” In viral-marketing terms, that’s a bull’s-eye: once you reach the indigent layer, you’re made.”

Other phrases covered by James Parker include:

• Don’t tase me, bro
• It’s Britney, bitch!
• Why don’t you shut up?

Technorati Tags: 2girls1cup, viral marketing, word of mouth

Melanie Villines was hired by Kraft to write an in-house history of innovation at the food giant. “The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Cheese” was the result - but it’s not available publicly.

The Chicago Reader, however, offers us a few details to snack on. Like this nugget:

“There were about 200 people who said they invented Miracle Whip.”

After all, victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, especially in the world of food product differentiation.

Oooh. All that creamy edible oil goodness. Lathered on brown bread and topped with lettuce, tomato and a nice crisp piece of bacon.

Or, if you’re Belgian, squirted out on chips.

No, those aren’t jazz hands.

KQED and WNET are filming the San Francisco Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker this week, and the SF Chronicle discusses how you translate a highly technical performance into language easily understood by a skilled television crew shooting the whole thing in hi definition.

““Snake arms,” Kraus said as the Arabian dancer in Act 2 began her sinuous ascent from a giant genie lamp. “Four,” called [director] Diamond, popping his thumb. Dozens of shots later, Kraus readied the crew for the Chinese dancer who “enters upright, cartwheels left,” then does “four jumps in place, kung fu leg up.“

… The challenge, said Kraus, who’s married to the director, “is to translate the movement into quick images that they can understand. The most important thing the camera people need to know is where the arms and legs are and where they’re moving, because we don’t like to cut off arms and feet.”

Technorati Tags: simple language, ballet, pro sports, television

There will be pretty pictures. There will be enigmatic pictures. There will be badly composed pictures. But the idea is fantastic. Two minds quite capable of making the leap between diverse subjects, disciplines and concepts have cooked up a competition to identify the World’s Best Urban Places and Spaces.

In typical fashion, Russell Davies and Dan Hill have taken a largely critical idea (the World’s Worst Urban Places and Spaces) and shined it up.

I like the idea because it is so loosely defined. Sifting through my memories of my favourite places, I can sort memories and images according to the effect of space, weather, feelings elicited by crowds, an absence of others, or my reaction to a conscious attempt by some smarty-pants architect or artist to define the place.

Here’s Russell’s description of the project:

“We’ll leave you to interpret ‘best’ ‘urban’ ’space’ and ‘place’ as you like. Could be anywhere or anything; bus shelters, buildings, bombsites or benches. Rather than wait until we’ve got enough for a book (which, of course, may never happen) we’re planning instead on doing a series of pamphlets. We’re going to try and persuade some top designers to do them for us. There’ll be a free one as a pdf online and lovely specially printed ones for everyone who contributes and/or who’d like to buy them.

Obviously we’ve not really worked out all the details on that yet, but will let you know when we have.

Does that sound interesting? I think it might be. Pile in, if you’d like to.”

You can find the Flickr pool they’ve set up, either to contribute or simply to gawk. Consider the submissions according to your own criteria, or to explode in Photoshop looking for naked ladies and other privacy violations.

Technorati Tags:   World’s Best Urban Places, urbanism, place

The new Ford “Built Ford Tough” videos manage to rip off two separate concepts, but do it well:

There aren’t any crackheads trying to evade arrest, and there are no Burt Reynolds hairpieces. But still, it’s funny.

The concept is that there are ten rules that Ford truck owners must follow - and these rules identify what could be best defined as “fancy” behaviour.

Here’s an incredibly personal and limited comment, which will likely only be understood by a group of friends I hung out with in the mid-80s.

Chuck Thompson, the author of Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer, was asked what music he would choose for a road mix to accompany specific chapters in his book. This is his note for one chapter:

“… “Headstart for Happiness” — The Style Council (video)

With a certain age group of British men, it’s possible to start a fight simply by walking into a London pub and declaring that The Style Council was in fact a better band than The Jam. (True, by the way.) [Author Thompson’s] life in Japan fired [his] suicidal imagination like no other place and there were dark weekends there when only [his] discovery of Paul Weller’s new and improved incarnation pulled me through.”

I think that our small group could still spend several hours debating the merits of post-punk Paul versus synth-pop Paul.

And part of that debate would centre around the proposition that Mick Talbot was Paul Weller’s Yoko Ono. Discuss.

h/t again to LHB

Technorati Tags: Style Council, Jam, Paul Weller, mod, Lisgar Collegiate Institute

Now, I know that team-building exercises can take on all sorts of shapes and sizes. They can be amusing, challenging, thought-provoking, or stultifyingly boring.

And, at their worst, they can include the participation of clowns and mimes.

But I am really, really curious what Graeme Douglas at Planning for fun was doing milking cows

“…in the name of being a better planner…

Technorati Tags: advertising planner

Broken Social Scene and Feist are local, quirky, imaginative and “independent.” Of course you remember independent music? Long tail before it got a cool name?

Perez Hilton is grasping, global, an aggregator but derivative and highly dependent on the craziness of others. (But still highly popular and influential)

Chart Attack has an interview with Feist, who, of course, broke through into the mainstream after her infectious song 1-2-3-4 was featured in an iPod commercial.

If I base my comments on a scant 100-odd words, it seems that Feist is well aware of the influence of celebrity bloggers - and their fickle nature.

Perez Hilton has certainly been kind to you this year.

Yeah! When will that dime turn? You know Dragonette? I was having drinks with them in London, which is where they live now. And Dan Kurtz actually produced my very first record in ‘98. So we’re old, old friends. So I went out for a drink with him and Martina [Sorbara] and they had some friend there and we’re all just hanging out. And after about an hour I said to the friend, “Hey, what do you do?” And he said, “Oh, well, I have this blog, this gossip blog.” And he asks me what I do and I say, “I’m a singer, I’ve got some records out.”

I didn’t know who he was from a hole in the ground. I’d never heard his name before and he had never heard mine. But the next day, I heard from about 70,000 people going “Oh my God!” and all of a sudden I understood the context of who this guy with green hair was. And that was Perez Hilton, of course.

The next day, he did a blast saying “Check out this girl’s video,” and that was six months ago. I’m bemused and grateful that stuff is on some people’s radar. It’s certainly not on mine. But I can understand it means something to someone.

If I’m reading that last line accurately, that’s the “long tail” telling us that the “wider tail” doesn’t really play a large part in her daily life.

Independent is as independent does … and her decisions aren’t confined by the frames defined by a larger and more “popular” voice.
h/t to Large Hearted Boy

Technorati Tags: Feist, gossip blogs, long tail

As we approach Christmas, we can harken back to when towns had local or regional department stores, each decorated in a particular style for the holidays. As the comments on a photo retrospective at Labelscar note, the retail landscape has now been Macyated.

As Canadians do more and more shopping at outlet malls in U.S. border cities, we’re increasingly leaving all but our underpants behind as we head home.

As we all debate climate change and the United States faces $4 a gallon gas, the Canadian Centre for Architecture presents 1973: Sorry out of gas. (Exhibition site, News Release)

Metropolis on the philosophy behind Rudy’s Barber Shop and Ace Hotels:

“…When I tell them it’s the handiwork of a Rudy’s stylist, neither one asks if I like the cut. Instead, they want to know if I enjoyed the experience, if I talked to other customers, if the vibe was good.

It’s obvious that what led Calderwood and Weigel into the business wasn’t an interest in hair. Rather, it was the idea of injecting new life into ritualized social interactions that intrigued them. “Wade used to fly back and forth from London and would see these barbers in Camden Market and Notting Hill where they’d just set up in the middle of the market and cut hair for the day,” Calderwood says. “And I used to live near Sig’s Barbershop downtown, this tiny old shop that’s never changed. I’d walk by it and think, ‘God, how cool would it be to buy that and get younger hairstylists to work there.’”

Need evidence that they’ve succeeded in creating an experience? Check out these Yelp comments about the original Rudy’s in Seattle.

James Surowiecki on how the web has affected how we shop:

“…the wealth of online product reviews and commentary has made the cues that stores use to shape shoppers’ perception of quality and value far less effective. This doesn’t mean that consumers are impervious to retailers’ tricks, and plenty of us shop the way Homer Simpson orders wine: buy the second-least-expensive thing on the list. …” (New Yorker)

Technorati Tags: mall, holiday decoration, Homer Simpson, Rudy’s Barber Shop, retail experience, outlet shopping

We’ve all had jobs that presented a perfect chance to indulge our all-consuming passions and were thrilling — at the time. But, in retrospect, that job could be the source of light-hearted derision.

Like Peter Buck’s job at Wuxtry Records in Athens, Georgia.

I know, I know. Very High Fidelity, very original hipster, very alt-rock origins.

Unless you are featured in the local paper holding up edition #1 of Howard the Duck.

via WUXTRY Records MySpace and Cable and Tweed.

As I’ve mentioned, I spent four years of my childhood in Hong Kong.

A good part of my weekends was spent exploring the hillside behind our apartment building. There were a great number of spooky ruins in the forest, including Pinewood Battery.

I always knew it was a relic from the Second World War, one of the big gun emplacements meant to protect the colony of Hong Kong in the case of an attack from the sea.

While Pinewood Battery did not play a pivotal role in the defense of the island, these weekend jaunts were one of my few direct and personal contacts with a violent and relatively recent period in the history of the British Empire.

Today, we should pause to think of the Canadian troops who died protecting that Empire - and the freedom of countries and communities across Europe and Asia.

December 18, 1941 was the day Japanese troops, who had been working their way through the mainland portion of the colony, crossed the channel and attacked Allied troops on the island.

It was a violent and personal battle, with close fighting across the rocky and mountainous terrain of the Island. And it was all over by Christmas Day, 1941.

Canada had a substantial garrison of Winnipeg Grenadiers and Royal Rifles on the island: of the nearly 2000 Canadian soldiers in the garrison, over a thousand died or were injured during the battle or during their four-year detention as prisoners of war.

The CBC’s digital archive has a radio retrospective on the Battle of Hong Kong, with interviews with surviving members of the Canadian forces that fought in Hong Kong.

Histori.ca has a recreation of the events that led up to the death of Sergeant-Major John Osborne, and his posthumous awarding of the Victoria Cross.

A little late in the game, but here’s a guy who dressed up as a YouTube video for Halloween. And only rated himself 1.5 stars.

via this recording.

I’m lookin’ at you. Enjoy your clamshell packaging and seasonal wrapping, fella. ‘Cause Annie Leonard makes it clear that our consumer culture is heading us straight down the path to resource exhaustion and trash triumph.

The Story of Stuff is a 20 minute animation with on-screen narration by Leonard, explaining how weaknesses and manipulation at each step in the chain of production are producing toxic effects for the environment, workers, regions and customers.

Yeah, yeah. This sort of stuff is viewed with suspicion and animosity by most consumers in western economies. I certainly watched it with a jaundiced eye, what with all my economics training.

But my daughter was spellbound. Because her life does not depend upon an innate trust in the goals and motivations of a corporations. She does not feel the same sense of fear or unease at challenging the assumptions about corporate power and economic authority that underly popular understanding of our economic system.

So you should watch it as well. It has a good message, it’s a plain and clear piece of communication, it has a good beat and you can dance to it.

Oh - and try not to think of Steve Jobs, Apple and their six month product cycle when you watch the film.

Technorati Tags: Story of Stuff, sustainable, equitable, consumer culture, consumerism, planned obsolescence

It struck me, listening to the abysmal music available on the radio today, that a lot of artists are affected by seasonal affective disorder. Not their music - their availability on radio channels. Take AOR stalwarts John Denver or Anne Murray: you rarely hear their songs at the height of summer.

Hall & Oates, on the other hand, are played all the time and no matter the weather.

I present for your enjoyment, an attempt to divide up the music spectrum according to seasons. In other words, in which temperature range will you likely hear specific genres or bands?

For example: Emo or Michael Buble are more likely to be heard (or received well) during the Fall. So is the soundtrack to When Harry Met Sally, but that dates me. A lot.

Technorati Tags: seasonal affective disorder, music genre, seasons, morrissey

• Who would have thought there would be gangs of moped riders? (Is it riders, or is it drivers? After all, mopeds involve a whole lot of coasting and a fair amount of blind faith in the machine) (via SF Weekly)

• What sort of employment career leads to life as a Tony Manero impersonator?

“…a D.J. at Planet Hollywood; a guide on one of those seven-rider party bikes that used to swarm about Times Square; a multiple-time reality show contestant; a stand-in for Joaquin Phoenix on two movies; a telegram singer who shows up in everything from an Elvis costume to a chicken suit; and the head alien at Mars 2112, a theme restaurant in Midtown.” (NYTimes)

• Interesting South videos available online (via Gavin, Russell and Katie). Pique your interest and provoke your mind!

• The Women’s Health program from the Department of Health and Human Services has a Twitter feed. An interesting use of technology to pump out (relatively canned) public health messages.

Technorati Tags: mopeds, Tony Manero, Saturday Night Fever, impersonator