Chicagoans, meet Guy Maddin for free

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Chicagoans - want to meet Guy Maddin for free? You know, the celebrated experimental filmmakers whose last movie was the critically-acclaimed The Saddest Music in the World? The University of Chicago will be showing this movie for free this Wednesday, in fact, with a Q&A session with the director afterwards. The next evening, then, Mr. Maddin is delivering a free lecture at 5 pm as well, entitled "Goat Glands, Carpet Underlay, and Cinema Sat Backwards." All events are at the Max Palevsky Cinema in Ida Noyes Hall; needless to say, seating is limited, and I imagine there's going to be quite a fight just to get the few that actually exist at that little campus movie theatre. (Thanks to Chicagoist.com for pointing this out.)

A whole pile of new stuff for Palm Treo

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Okay, so PalmAddicts puts out like 60 damn updates a day, and runs a large-memory photo with each one too, making sometimes for a very frustrating RSS experience (especially while reading on a mobile device, like I do). But man, just look at all the cool things one can discover on a random day: A Treo news and link site designed specifically for the "Blazer" mobile browser; a great weather website, also designed specifically for mobile browsers; a new free IM client (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc) specifically for the Treo; a new eBook reader for Palm with changable skins; oh, the list just goes on and on! And meanwhile, MyTreo.net had news this week about a new stand-alone application from Handango, that lets Treo owners connect with the site without the need of a browser, and download software straight from the site to their device without the need of a ZIP deflator. What a great week to be a Treo owner!

Michael Moore establishes 'rebel' scholarship

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Go, Michael Moore! The eternal troublemaker announced this week the establishment of the "Michael Moore Freedom of Speech Scholarship" at California State University, San Marcos - a total of $5,000 will be given out each year to students "who have done the most to fight for issues of student rights by standing up to the administration." CSU-SM, for those who might not remember, was the school which abruptly revoked Moore's invitation to speak last year, because of pressure from school-related conservative groups. Moore ended up holding a rally off-campus, attended by over 10,000 people, and announced then the upcoming creation of a "hellraiser" scholarship; the news this week is simply Moore following through on the promise.

LBC gets yet more press

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My friends at the Lit Blog Co-op have scored yet another article in the mainstream media, this time at The Book Standard. I'm still trying to figure out whether they've got some amazingly effective secret PR person in their midst, or if this is simply a case of Victor Hugo's quote coming true - that "nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come."

a (m)uch-nEEded/praise:of e[e] cummings

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Slate has a well-deserved critical examination of poet e.e. cummings up this week, a writer I believe more relevant right now than ever before, given the experimental, online days in which we live. Poor e.e. cummings - once revered as a Modernist giant, his reputation recently has become one of "that dude high-school students like because his lines look all funny and shit." There's a lot, lot more to cummings' work than simply funny-looking lines, and I especially encourage bloggers, hyperfiction authors and other online writers to check out the ways the man manipulated language for the benefit of his readers, and blurred the lines between the artistic and the scientific that in some ways are still ahead of their time.

Order photos online, pick 'em up at Target

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Pretty smart: Physical retailer Target has announced a partnership with Yahoo Photos. Basically, you can now have your local Target print any photo found in your Yahoo Photos account for 19 cents apiece (as well as specialized gifts as mugs, bags, calendars and mousepads), then simply stop by your local Target later that day to pick them up. The genius, of course, is that it requires no extra work on the part of any current Yahoo Photos user, stlil gives all the same online benefits it was before (sharing photos, slideshows, etc), but adds a whole new benefit as well (basically, letting any other visitor, like a grandmother or a sibling, order physical prints of the photos as well, and to pick it up at their own local Target). Click here to get started yourself. (Thanks to "Online Marketing Blog" for pointing this out.)

Stamp out slacktivism - sign this online petition!

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The UK's Times coined an interesting phrase last week - 'slacktivism,' or (from the article), "the counter-intuitive idea that you can somehow change the world and topple its complacent political classes without even rising from your chair." Liberals, of course, are long familiar with slacktivism already; think of the dozen online petitions you receive from your well-meaning friends on a weekly basis, urging you to sign and to help release this third-world prisoner, and to protest that right-wing leader, and to support the erasing of debt of that other emerging nation.

Let's face the ugly facts - it was slacktivism that was directly responsible for Howard Dean losing the nomination during the 2004 presidential campaign, and slacktivism that directly led to Bush getting re-elected later that same year. Getting press and publicity are fine things, and definitely should be used during any activist campaign; but when an issue is ultimately decided by people pulling a lever in a polling booth, unfortunately you have to actually get people to the polling booth to make a difference. Many of us were shocked in early 2004, when Dean's supposedly insurmountable lead in the Democratic race suddenly dissolved like a paper kite in a rainstorm, when it came time for the first actual primary out in New Hampshire; once many of us learned the cause (that the thousands of young people out there screaming on the internet for Dean didn't bother to actually vote), it was the start of the long, depressing farce known as the 2004 Presidential Election. A little advice for all those would-be slacktivists out there, who actually are interested in making a difference - put down that online petition, shut your screaming mouth, get off your ass and actually do something. Republicans, censors and anti-choice nuts seem to understand this lesson just fine; why can't you? (Thanks to "The Artful Manager" for pointing this out.)

Publishers get blogs, publishers don't get blogs

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The good news? The mainstream publishing industry seems to finally be noticing bloggers a little more, and are starting to publish a series of books by them. The problem? As Scott Esposito points out, most of the bloggers being picked suck, and the majority of the books being published are not much more than paper-based versions of old blog entries. And man, I can barely stand most blogs as they are, even when they're being delivered to me one tiny piece a day; why I would pay money to read a bunch of these blog entries at once in paper form is simply beyond me.

For what it's worth, I myself have been approached a total of four times over the years by various mainstream publishing companies, about doing a book version of my personal blog. Like I said, I can't see much of a point in publishing a paper version of something as naval-gazing and uninteresting as a personal journal, so have always suggested to these people that perhaps they might print one of my books that are meant to be read as books - one of my novels, perhaps, or one of my travel books. In all four cases, though, the truth quickly came out: none of these people actually considered me a good writer, or at least good enough to publish one of my books meant to be a book, but had simply heard that I have a big audience at my personal journal and wanted to find a way to quickly cash in on that notoriety. Writers who think a "blog book" will lead to more deals and opportunities in the publishing industry should be warned - it won't. At least in my experiences, editors at publishing houses are merely looking at bloggers right now as yet another disposable form of quick income, not as writers unto themselves worth publishing and reading.

"Those f***ing Germans"

The recent elevation of Cardinal Ratzinger of Munich to the office of Pope has been having a lot of people in the media talking about Germany - its history, its culture, and the complicated way Germans fit both within the fabric of the EU and among themselves in a once-fractured, now-uneasily-unified society. (As a sampler, here's one from the International Herald-Tribune, and here's another from the Moscow-based ex-patriate publication eXile.ru [which is where my own entry gets its title].) As regular readers know, the complexity of the modern German is an obsessive subject of study for me as well, so I have naturally been enjoying reading such a larger amount of articles on the subject than one usually sees in the international press.

This is as good a time as any, I guess, to mention that my latest travelogue concerning Germany, Ach Du Heilige Scheisse!, will be published in electronic form in a mere two weeks, and ready for your online readership and/or eBook purchase. The site where the book will be found is already up, for those who would like to go ahead and look through the several hundred photos I took while there last autumn.

Citizen journalism grows, unsurprisingly gets more complicated

Well, the "citizen journalism" movement seems to be catching on, a little bit at a time at some various places around the web. (In a nutshell, it's a movement to combine the ethics and professionalism of traditional journalism with the excitement and power of amateur blogs.) Unsurprisingly, those who are first embracing the idea are already starting to run into problems.

First, a frustrating article from Wired: How Wikinews.org is finding it much harder to exist than they expected. The problem? Who knew that such things as confirming sources and maintaining authorial neutrality would be so difficult to achieve? Yes, I know, it's hard to believe, but journalists actually learn a few things while in journalism school, that people not in journalism school don't know!

And second, an encouraging article from Chris Nolan at the media watchdog site Pressthink: How the web is encouraging the creation of stand-alone journalists. Stand-alone journalists, Nolan is quick to point out, are not bloggers; they are instead people who are simply using the power of blogging tools to deliver traditional journalism (and all that comes with that - confirmed multiple sources, an objective voice, etc), directly to their audience, without the need of a media organization to actually distribute this journalism. He argues that these will be the real saviors of citizen journalism; the freelancers, the self-employed, the unemployed, and all those other formally-trained journalists who will bring a sense of ethics and professionalism to all those amateur citizens who wish to be reporting "the news." Anyway, both articles are fascinating; anyone with a fellow interest in citizen journalism should check them both out.

Commandment Number One: "Don't talk about Fight Club!"

My friend Greg Gillam of the literary website Fengi.com has a pretty hilarious entry up at his personal journal right now, reimagining the Ten Commandments as if written by conservative Catholics. My favorite is Number Seven: "If whitey's so bad, why he in charge?"

Leonard Cohen for the Nobel Prize?

Paul Kennedy, a radio DJ with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is campaigning for singer/poet/novelist Leonard Cohen to be the recipient of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Unsurprisingly, the Brits are all over this as well - both the BBC and the Guardian wrote up articles on it this week, and not just a little blatantly reiterarted what a good idea they think it is. Should be interesting to see what comes of it... (Thanks as always to Bookslut for pointing this out.)

New web-based RSS reader - but will it work for mobile devices?

Steve Rubel pointed me today to Rojo, a brand-new web-based RSS aggregator and reader. So far, though, I haven't been able to get it to work on my mobile device's browser ("Blazer" for the Palm Treo), which in my opinion kind of defeats the entire point of having a web-based RSS aggregator. More updates as they become available.

Ugh - I've turned into my simpering hippie parents

Over the the UK newspaper The Guardian, Zoe Williams has an essay up about the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, and the growing realization that it is her own generation (i.e. mine as well) that has turned into those annoying a**holes who are constantly regurgitating nostalgia for the sake of turning a profit:

"Naturally, realising that you're suddenly the nostalgia generation is strange and unpleasant - you get used to being too young for culture to take your nostalgia needs seriously, and then suddenly you get Hitchhiker's, Doctor Who and Live Aid, all aimed directly at your heart. If you're old enough for your formative years to be the focus of all cultural retro-thrusts, then the chances are that you're the ones in charge, and it's your fault, not your parents' at all, that everything's going wrong."

Reminds me of the reaction I have every time one of those car commercials comes on featuring the Clash song "Should I Stay or Should I Go" - "What insufferable money-monger sold out my generation this time?" When I was younger, it was easy to blame the generation before me, and to detest the way they crammed "classic rock" down our throats in an attempt to prove that their generation's music was better than ours; now, though, I unfortunately have no one else to blame but people my own age. It's disquieting, to say the least. (Thanks to Jessa Crispin over at Bookslut.com for pointing this out.)

Access RSS, Google Maps, through TiVo

Two cool apps for TiVo owners to check out: one that will deliver your Bloglines RSS feeds to your television screen (thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing it out); and one that will deliver Google Maps (both line-art and satellite-image) to your television screen (and thanks to Gizmodo this time for pointing it out). Man, they really make me wish I had a TiVo, just to try them out.

Hack Google Local results onto CTA maps

Chicagoans, check out this cool hack from Adrian Holovaty: Use Google Local as usual, but have it display results on a CTA transit map. You'll need to be on the Firefox browser to use it, and to follow some simple instructions first; other than that, though, go nuts. (Thanks to Gapers Block for pointing this out.)

An overview of mobile search sites

SearchEngineWatch.com has an excellent overview up right now of the various search engines available in special mobile form (besides Google's, that is, whose recent popularity inspired the article). Of special interest to owners of Palms and PocketPCs should be Maporama, which delivers some of the best and most readable mobile maps I've ever seen. (Thanks to Threadwatch for pointing this out.)

Sorry for the delay; and I'm still seeking 360 friends

Sorry you haven't heard from me in awhile; I was one of the those people getting affected this week by Blogger.com's continual brown-out problems. Anyway, the simultaneous good and bad news is that I've still been archiving interesting things to point out this week, even with the blog being down; I'll be trying to get all 25 or so items up by the end of the weekend.

By the way, I'm actively seeking fellow members of Yahoo 360 who wish to be listed as friends at my own account; I'm interested in trying out the social-networking tools there more, especially since I can access them through my mobile device. I have plenty of invitations to give away still, for those who don't yet have accounts; just drop me a line at ilikejason at hotmail dot com and I'll send you one.