To provide value on the internet, you must piss someone off.

A clever idea. But I don’t know who Flickr and LiveJournal pissed off.

Rather than relying on the assumption that WalMart would censor their rental list to appease the Red States, I looked up a few items from my GreenCine queue to see what they carried.

• Tokyo Story: nope, sorry Jonathon.
• Evangelion: yes, no surprise as Anime’s the next big thing.
• The Sticky Fingers of Time: yes, a surprise.
• Cronos: nope, but they stock Bob Silverberg’s novel of the same name.

Better than I had thought, but I’ll keep my GreenCine subscription, thanks.

I’ll withhold comment on the markup, but hey, we have feeds.

I’ve avoided the problem by running a 90% mix of ‘non-serious’ to ‘serious’ in my GreenCine queue. Of course, now I think all problems can be solved by the application of giant robots.

I don’t know who Mandy Moore is. I’d never heard of her until John mentioned her cover of Joan Armatrading’s Drop the Pilot. So I fire up iTMS and look up her album Coverage.

She sings Senses Working Overtime. Holy Cow! She knows XTC. And that’s a good thing in my book.

Update after a Google search: Oh, she’s one of those squeeky clean pop idols. Thus 99.9% of people coming to this weblog entry will get here on a Google search for Moore. Therefore it is my duty as your elder to tell you to put down your copies of Dirty, Pop Star in a Bottle, etc, and point you at two important albums from when your parents were courting one another:

• English Settlement, and
• Black Sea.

The song, Senses Working Overtime, was originally recording by the English band XTC on the album English Settlement.

XTC is one of the most important bands you never heard of. Many critics have lamented that if they had more exposure in the US, they could had been as big as the Beatles. Unfortunately, they only toured the US backing up The Police in 1980-81.

Do you like Blur, or Oasis? Compare Blur’s classic Parklife with XTC. I think Blur’s a great band, but they owe a lot to XTC.

Now pass me my walker. Kids these days, no sense of history.

Related: Phil’s comments on appropriate use of instant messaging, &etc. are worth reading.

Congrats, and good luck guys!

And if there’s anything Google knows how to do, it’s build applications which scale to the size of the Web. And that’s going to help Blogger and Blogspot.

So why should anyone give them $30 a year? Heck, for only $10 a year, I promise to give absolutely no money to David Horowitz or Camille Paglia. That’s a savings of TWO THIRDS!

In other news, some 350 million Americans did not march in opposition to abortion rights today.

Abusive managers, Kelly Zellars says, make subordinates less likely to go the extra mile. The underlings won’t speak well of the organization to outsiders, will be less likely to help co-workers, and more likely to kvetch over trivialities, not to mention more likely to find another berth, I mean job.