Everything goes better with Water

I’ve eaten at a few Olive Garden restaurants and been generally satisfied, although the service can leave you a little nonplussed. But, like all businesses, the managers there attempt to maximize revenues and profits. When people order soft drinks instead of tap water, the tab is higher, so the good folks at Coca Cola stepped in to help Olive Garden sell more soda. They came up with a plan called H2NO and an incentive contest called “Just Say No to H2O.” I suppose the simple fact that water is healthier for us to drink doesn’t really matter to them.

Lance Armstrong for President

What? Winning the Tour De France three times in a row in dominating fashion–the third and fourth fastest times in the 88 year history of the race the past two years–isn’t enough qualification? George W. drank his way through his 20s and 30s and look at him go now. The NY Times says Armstrong Joins the Gods of Cycling. God, president, it’s all good.

Yesterday’s book: A Painted House

Imagine a novel by John Grisham. It’s set somewhere in the South (with a capital S), has a young (possibly 30-ish) struggling lawyer as our hero, and eventually Our Hero beats the bad/corupt/murderous lawyers or judges. Every single one of them, 11in all, have been bestsellers. And with nothing left to prove but that he has real talent and not just commercial skills, Grisham reared back, typed hard, and pulled this sweet, sensitive story out of his back pocket. Or maybe the pocket of his Cardinals jacket–baseball references are certainly valid with this semi-autobiographical book. While I liked this book, others disagree, silly them.

Best film of a Grisham novel is still the first one, The Firm with Tom Cruise. If you’re a really big fan of this author, check out the John Grisham Room on the campus of Mississippi State University, which contains papers and materials donated by the Mississippi State University alumnus.

Big shout out to the infamous Choadmaster for loaning me the book.

Hey the pandering worked!

Well, the Talking Moose came through– he even titled the page “Begging for Links.” Things like this make life fun. This is something I think the Moose knows. This is what I originally said to him.

Today’s movie: America’s Sweethearts

Basically, I will see any movie with John Cusack in it and almost any movie with Julia Roberts. Billy Crystal, who wrote and produced this film, if he’s being funny. So it was only a matter of time (six days actually) until I saw America’s Sweethearts, a sweet, funny movie. Christopher Walken makes a short but potent appearance at the end as the director of the movie-within-a-movie that is the point of America’s Sweethearts and he turns everything upside down.

This film had a bigger opening weekend (that is, had a higher take at the box office) than any of Cusack’s previous films, even Con Air but this is probably due more to Robert’s pull. It is apparently the second biggest opening for her.

Proposal to rebirth American news

Poll after poll for the last 20 years has shown that Americans are losing faith in the mainstream news media. Robert Parry, editor of the Consortium News, has proposed a Superstation Democracy to win back the public trust by putting aside “today’s sneering punditry and vacuous journalism” and celebrating “what’s great about America: the democratic ideals, the environment, its diverse people, its rich history, its grassroots culture.” Consortium News, to be sure, is a proponent of the modern Left, an analysis made clear by simple examination of the current table of contents. Which doesn’t mean Parry is wrong either.

Suicidal poet haiku

A study led by James Pennebaker and reported in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine claims that analysis of the poetry of writers who committed suicide gives clues about their eventual fate. Were their poems like this haiku?

When his necked snapped

Falling down from a great height

He sighed with relief

Is that too obvious? Well, that fanciful UK paper The Register weighs in on the research.

Bill is not above pandering

There is a cool new blog running around out there called Talking Moose for the past few weeks and is gathering reams of attention. While the blog is self-attributed to “the WatchMoose of the Internet, living in a mud bog in Wyoming”, the real author prefers to remain anonymous and this is only adding to the mystique. Since TM appears willing to link to anyone who links to him, I sent the following email yesterday in a blatant attempt to get some TM coolness for BillSaysThis:

From: “Bill Lazar”

To:

Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 10:27 PM

Subject: linking

> Mr. Cool Moose,

>

> Dave has never linked to my blog:

> http://www.billsaysthis.com/blog/blogger.phtml

>

> Do you think it’s because I user Blogger? LOL

>

> Keep up the cool stuff and I’ll keep reading.

>

> Bill

Notice I was not quite so blatant as to ask for a link directly. It didn’t work, or at least not yet as I haven’t been mentioned. Boo hoo.

This is what high speed web access is for

We are talking about a very high cool quotient here: xdude’s The Dough and BMW’s 5 Major Shorts. If you have DSL or a cable modem, check these out. And on BMWFilms, download the custom viewer.

And while this isn’t strictly a bandwidth hogger, check out The Road to Springfield, a fan site using voting to determine the best supporting character and to be eligible, the character must have appeared in at least two episodes.

New new thing turns into new youth thing

Michael Lewis, who wrote the really cool Liars Poker about the trip money masters of the mid-80s and about Netscape/Healtheon/myCFO meister Jim Clark in The New New Thing, spent the last year meeting teens using the Internet in ways those of us over 35 just wouldn’t imagine for his latest book, The Future Just Happened, and he talks about it to The Independent. Most of us know of Shawn Fanning, who gave us Napster, but how about 15 year olds lawyer Marcus Arnold or stock manipulator Jonathon Lebed?

Who knew? My username means something interesting

blazar is my username on many systems (the standard first initial plus last name) but other than a misspelling, I never gave it much thought. I never thought to ask What is a blazar? Turns out that a blazar is an astronomical object, a newly uncovered class of active galaxy. Oooh, a whole kind of galaxy named after me!

I found this info after checking out a new clustering engine named Vivisimo, which does not search/crawl the web itself but organizes the outputs of other search engines. The marketing dweebs at Vivismo use the term clustering engine instead of metasearch engine because its core technology is the automatic organization of documents into meaningful groups. The company is a spinout from the Computer Science labs of Carnegie Mellon University, where I spent my somewhat happy freshman year of college.

Yesterday’s book: Exodus

Just like I can’t explain my fervor for American athletes in international competition, the same goes for being pro-Israel. Sure, I’m Jewish, but that doesn’t mean I should always love books like Exodus by Leon Uris. This novelization of the founding of the State of Israel is touching in parts and stilted in others but certainly filled with historical info. Worth reading and now I need to see the film version with Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint as the star-crossed lovers.

Ponzi scheme: What does that mean?

Many times you may have read or heard the phrase Ponzi scheme in connection with an investment and wondered where the name originated. Well, thanks to Mark Knutson, you can read all about it on the Charles K. Ponzi Website. In short, Ponzi was an Italian immigrant who, in Boston in the 1920s, promised investors outrageous returns on their money in a very short time. What he really did was use money put in by later investors to pay back early investors, of course taking a cut for himself, until the scheme collapsed under its own weight (that is, there were too many ‘later’ investors and not enough money to pay them their reward). Further, the local authorities couldn’t understand where his investment gains were coming from and, auditing him, uncovered the truth. Another name for this is the pyramid scheme and, more recently, multi-level marketing. [a few hours later…] Came across another interesting article about MLM

Thanks to the Captain of the USS Clueless for the referral.

Pompei: a contrarian view

Given my recent visit, I was definitely interested when I saw a link to Mary Beard’s article What Might Have Happened Upstairs in the London Review of Books. The article uses a book review as the launching pad for a discussion of current academic thinking on Pompei, though Beard also comments favorably on the book. The view is very different from what you get at Pompei itself, which I suppose isn’t too surprising given the touristy, money making environment.

Instead, this article makes the major point that Vesuvius had been smoking and bubbling for several weeks prior to exploding and so most of the folks with half a brain or more had left by the time of the big bang. The other point not mentioned on site, but in this article, is that from the time the lava cooled until the official beginning, 250 years ago, of the area’s excavation it was constantly being searched by looters for goods they could haul off and sell. One can imagine how little was left for the excavators to find.

I do not look like this

For those of you wise/foolish enough to search in, say, Google for me and happen across an article about Silicon Valley College, this picture is NOT ME! It’s another Bill Lazar who lives in Sunnyvale. I have never lived in Sunnyvale, I do not have a receeding hairline (at least not yet), and I am not completely, or even largely, gray.

Nor am I the (now deceased) former president of the Luxor Cab Company of San Francisco.

Nor am I associated with the Lazar Foundation of Portland, OR, although its mission is one I would favor: to support environmental groups and research in the Pacific Northwest. In 1999 (latest year available), the foundation made 91 grants totalling $835,005. The Lazar Foundation was founded in 1959. Cool!

I am, however, the co-author of CA-Visual Objects Developer’s Guide with Gary Stark and Carl Ganz. However, this book was published in 1995 and is waaaaay out of date, so don’t buy it even if you can find a copy.

Sports and patriotism: why?

Lance Armstrong is a great racing cyclist, having won the previous two Tour de France races and now leading his third. But I’m not much of a cycling fan, I’ve only ever seen highlights on ESPN, and the times I’ve been interested are when Armstrong or Greg Lemond (four times at the top: 1986, 1989, 1990, and 1991) have won. Otherwise, I could really care less. I’m not really jingoistic but there’s just something about an American athlete or team winning an international event that revvs me up.

Once again, porn is driving new technology

Remember the first VCRs? What types of tapes were most likely to be found playing in them? Porn. For what type of Internet content are the most people will to pay? If you said porn again, you’d be correct. So is it surprising that with the most recent generation of PDAs, devices that support video on color screens, porn is once again pioneering the economic model? The LA Times reports all this and more in Private Screening in Public Places. Me? I never look at the stuff!

Today’s movie: Requiem for a Dream

Director Darren Aronofsky knows weird. I mean strange. Plus, he knows Brooklyn or he found someone who told him the way to Coney Island and back. So, if you want to see a really cool film that is only superficially about the evils of drugs but is really about the evils of addictions of all types, check out this film. Jared Leto, Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans (yes, the same guy who made you puke in Scary Movie) give great performance–only Connelly gives head (although you don’t actually see this onscreen)–and Aronofsky and editor Jay Rabinowitz take their performances to an entirely different plane with shot selection, pacing, and sound effects. Definitely cool but you need to have an open mind to enjoy.