Must… buy… iPad 2
March 11, 2011
After years of being annoyed by Apple, I find myself at the online store, with an iPad 2 and a smart cover in my shopping cart. Since you ask: 16GB with Wi-Fi, black, engraved; orange.
You might also be asking what I’ve found annoying about Apple. There are three main things: smug, overpriced, closed. The first of those is still there, and is unlikely to go away any time soon.
As for overpriced, $500 doesn’t seem like a lot to pay for such a cool tablet. And there’s free shipping! And free engraving! (At least, right now there is.) And think of the hundreds of dollars I’d be saving by getting the Wi-Fi version, which doesn’t involve a contract with a phone company!
So why haven’t I ordered the thing already? Partly because $500 is still a lot of money, and I can’t claim that I really need an iPad.
Then there’s the closed thing. That’s troubling enough to deserve its own post – or at least, to cause some more soul-searching before I finally rationalize my decision to actually place the order.
Changing Year: The Music Edition
February 14, 2011
Arcade Fire won the Grammy for album of the year (via HuffPo and lots of other places). Are they indie? Sort of. Did they deserve it? Well, it’s a very good album, and to criticize an album called The Suburbs for sprawling is perhaps to miss the point.
That said, I think that my album of the year was Laura Veirs’ July Flame. It was among my top 5 of the first 6 months of 2010, and overtook the midpoint front-runner by lasting particularly well. My favorite album released in the second half of the year was Lisbon, from The Walkmen.
Although there was no one release that told me in no uncertain terms that it was my album of the year, 2010 was a pretty good year in music. But it was, according to NPR and other sources, a very bad year for trying to sell music.
Which brings us to 2011, to Radiohead, and to their latest attempt to sell recorded music. I, and many others, will be downloading The King of Limbs in less than a week. The download, which costs $9, is one of two formats in which KoL will initially be available. The other is very analog, with two 10″ vinyl records, and lots of pieces of artwork. It also includes a digital download – and even a CD, to appease those stuck between the analog and download eras, and those who think that for $48 they should get a CD as well.
My album of 2011 so far is Bright Eyes’The People’s Key, which will be released tomorrow. So today is the last day on which it can be streamed on NPR.
Super Bowl Wins Super Bowl in Super Bowl Shock
February 8, 2011
This was one of those rare years when the Super Bowl game outshone the Super Bowl ads, declared CMO.com. The declaring was actually done by my friend Constantine von Hoffman.
Kid care took me away from the TV, and hence the Super Bowl, at the end of the first half. That means I missed what seems to have been an excellent second half. On the bright side, it means that I was spared the BEP’s halftime show.
As for the ads, consensus seems to be that they came in second place, behind the game and ahead of the BEP. I’d seen the Darth Vader VW ad before the game, thought it was great, and even enjoyed seeing it again.
Then there was that other ad that got a strong reaction: the Tibetan Groupon ad. It struck me as clumsy more than anything else. I think that reasonable people (e.g., Marshall at RWW) may differ on this.
For the most part, the ads simply weren’t interesting. I’m glad that the game was.
Parenting: Battles and Other Stories
January 12, 2011
You may have heard of Amy Chau, and her new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. If so, that’s probably due to the excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago. The headline was “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Here’s a quote.
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.
My wife, who is Chinese, drew my attention to the WSJ piece. It upset her. Her views on parenting differ from the views presented in the excerpt. So do my views.
In the car today, I had the radio tuned to NPR (WAMU, to be specific), as I usually do. Amy Chau was on the Diane Rehm show. That spot shows that the book is to a large extent about how Amy Chau rethought her parenting style.
This is a story about media, as well as about parenting. Here are some headlines I could have used for this story/post.
- WSJ shows only one side of a story.
- WSJ and NPR show different sides of the same story.
- Guardian writer lazily mistakes WSJ excerpt for book.
The trouble with the above headlines is that none of them is surprising. I wish that the last one was surprising. But there is an article in today’s Guardian that seems to mistake the WSJ excerpt for the book, and even for the author herself. The Guardian article is open for reader comments, and many of them based on the assumption that it’s fine to insult an author based on a Guardian account of a WSJ article.
Confession time. I haven’t read the book either. I did think unkindly of Amy Chau on the basis of an excerpt in the WSJ, which appeared under a headline almost certainly provided by a WSJ staffer, rather than by the author of the words selected to appear under the headline.
Perhaps, as we move from January 1 to Chinese new year (of the rabbit, not of the tiger, by the way), a resolution to cut back on jumping to conclusions about people might be in order.
2011 and Other Cubs
January 1, 2011
Happy new year!
I took the kids to the National Zoo today. We hoped to see the lion cubs, and all seven of them did indeed venture outside (although only three of them, plus the two mothers, are in this photo). They are 3+ months old now, and immensely cute and playful.
I hope that 2011, young as it is, has already started to be a good year for you.
We don’t need no stinking cable
December 2, 2010
I can’t cut the cable. I just can’t drop my subscription to cable TV! Why not? Because I’ve never had one. Neither have I ever had satellite TV.
So when I read something about cutting the cable (e.g., a recent post at RWW), I like it, but as a defensive measure against my family deciding that we need cable. And actually, adding TV to our Verizon phone/FiOS service wouldn’t be ruinous.
Right now, I expect to be able to get through my life without ever having subscribed to cable TV. We don’t even have a TV. I expect we’ll get one soon, but I don’t think we’ll need cable to get good content for it.
Wired Prescribes the End of Music Piracy
November 30, 2010
Is it time to stop pirating music? According to Paul Boutin in Wired (via reddit), yes.
It’s time for everybody to go legit. The reason: We won. And all you audiophiles and copyfighters, you know who fixed our problems? The record labels and online stores we loved to hate.
Paul lines up arguments in favor of pirating, and then attacks each argument in turn. DRM? Gone. Resolution? Improved to the point at which most ears couldn’t hear an improvement in quality. Catalog? Expanded, in fact wider than Paul claims, since you can now find the Beatles in iTunes. And so on.
I’d take issue with Paul on one point (besides the quibble about the Beatles). “The age of stealing music via the Internet is officially over.” But his arguments are that it should be over. In other words, they are prescriptive arguments.
I haven’t seen a strong descriptive case that music piracy is ceasing. That would require data showing that people aren’t taking music for which they payed, and which was not given to them. As the discussion on Reddit shows, there are people who intend to obtain music without paying for it. That raises questions such as: How many of them are there? How responsible is the music industry for their existence? But I won’t go into that here.
I will read with interest Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. I didn’t steal it, I borrowed it from the library. I hope author Steve Knopper doesn’t mind. Perhaps the music industry has become less self-destructive since the book was published.
Thanks, Food, etc.
November 25, 2010
I started my first Thanksgiving as a citizen of the USA by reaching inside a turkey. Mercifully for all involved, the turkey wasn’t alive at the time.
I am thankful for many things. Food: I’ll eat a lot today. Family: it’s good to be with my family here, and I’ll call my family back in England. Opportunity to tell yet again the joke that Brits do celebrate Thanksgiving – on the 4th of July.
Back to food. One of the things I cook most often is pasta with what we call b-sauce. We call it that because it’s like bolognese sauce, but isn’t authentic. Today’s Guardian carries the reassuring news that “there is no definitive recipe for a bolognese meat sauce.” It provides several recipes, varying with respect to meat, vegetables, wine, whether there’s a dairy ingredient, etc.
My own recipe comprises, in order of appearance in the saucepan: onions, carrots, ground pork, mushrooms, tomatoes (crushed, canned), wine, salt, pepper, oregano. Talking of wine, I’m surprised that most of the recipes in the Guardian article call for white wine. I prefer to use red, have sometimes used white, but often have to resort to water.
All this reminds me of a recent (well, earlier this month) WordPress.com announcement: FoodPress. The site looks interesting, but could use a more prominent search box.
Wherever you are, I hope you also have much to be thankful for.
Isn’t it a little early for best of the year lists?
November 18, 2010
Best music of 2010? Isn’t it too early too tell, given that there are another 6 weeks of the year, and we could use a little time with music before picking winners? There are already so many lists that the Largehearted Boy list of best of lists is under way, with 9 lists being added today. LHB does a similar list of lists for books.
NPR’s All Songs Considered is in on the best of the year bandwagon. But so far, it’s only gone as far as a nomination-soliciting post on the show’s blog.
My own lists have been qualified with “so far” following “year.” I really can’t pick a front runner from the 9 albums currently on my list. Yes I, like NPR, and old-fashioned enough to think in terms of albums.
