Monday, December 11, 2006
Articles Cinco
In lieu of an actual post, here's five articles that caught my attention recently.
Velvet Undergound Acetate on ebay.
At about 8:30 tonight, the eBay auction of an early, ultra-rare acetate record by the Velvet Underground rock band will conclude, and Isaacson, owner of Mississippi Records in Portland and the selling agent for the record, will know for sure how high the bidding reached. Its price tag of $151,000 at midday Thursday looked, shall we say, promising.
The object of so much online auction desire is unprepossessing. The record has little more than the band's name, the name N. Dolph and a few numbers written on it -- in addition to the date, 4-25-66. - Oregon Live (The final selling price was $155,401.)
A Christmas Story house opens in Cleveland.
Though originally panned by critics as a dark depiction of the holidays, "A Christmas Story" has earned status as a movie classic, rivaling long-time seasonal favorites like "It's a Wonderful Life." Now fans from as far away as Los Angeles and Phoenix are flocking to a gritty Cleveland street overlooking a steel factory to visit the Parker family house restored to its movie glory.
A San Diego entrepreneur, Brian Jones, bought the house sight unseen on e-Bay for $150,000 in December 2004. He grew up watching "A Christmas Story" every year with his family. After Mr. Jones failed the vision test required to become a Navy pilot, his father tried cheering him up by building him a lamp with a woman's leg as the base, similar to the one that enchanted Ralphie's father in the movie. - NY Times
An Interesting Article on Walt Disney.
The weather was kind to Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955. So kind, in fact, that the heels of women's shoes got stuck in the warm asphalt. Anything other than sunshine would have been an insult to the opening of America's latest Shangri-La: Disneyland, or, as its creator called it, "the happiest place on Earth." On that day, if you believe one estimate, as many as twenty-eight thousand people poured through the gates, with seventy million more, about half the population of the country, watching the event on television. Walt Disney had already conquered TV through "Disneyland," which was broadcast every week on ABC, and that day the Mouseketeers, Disney's troupe of performing children, danced live for the public, wearing their black skullcaps with rounded ears - the most recognizable corporate headgear after that of the Playboy Bunnies. The broadcast was hosted by three celebrities, who, just to double the delirium, played hopscotch through the crowds around the park. One of them was the movie star Ronald Reagan. - New Yorker
Again from the New Yorker, an interesting comparison of the BBC version of The Office and the hideous NBC version.
If Samuel Beckett were still around, his plays might begin on the late shift. "An office. An unattended PC glows under strong fluorescent light. Front left, a copying machine. Front right, a document shredder. Back, in near-darkness, a lounge with a disorderly refrigerator. A head peeps over a cubicle wall." - New Yorker
Finally, a history of MySpace from Valleywag.
On July 11th, 2006, Hitwise reported that MySpace had "surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users." Clearly, MySpace has become almost ubiquitous--everyone and their mom have a profile up, from the fourteen-year old girl next door to Madonna. Tom Anderson himself--one of the site's founders and every MySpace user's number one "friend"--has over 109 million pals with profiles, and that's just today; by next week that number could easily have increased by millions. What's interesting is that most users don't know that Tom Anderson is more of a PR scheme than anything else--the mascot designed to give a friendlier feel to a site created by a marketing company known for viral entertainment websites, pop-up advertising, spam, spyware, and adware.
Most users believe that MySpace started as some kind of fluke--a happy accident that began in Anderson's bedroom or garage--and many still don't wonder, know, or care about the site's real business history and model. Heralded as a haven of DIY self-expression, MySpace was actually created by executives whose backgrounds are anchored in spam and mass marketing, and who are tied to investment scandals. With his almost alternateen good looks, Tom Anderson has served as an exceptionally convincing distraction. The PR campaign is one of MySpace's two strokes of genius, brilliant, but not groundbreaking. - Valleywag
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