A Star-Studded Tech Podcast

Those of you who don't follow my Twitter feed—and you absolutely SHOULD, because every tweet reads like it was spun from pure gold—probably don't know about the little podcast that I co-host for PCMag.com called PCMag After Hours. My co-host Brian Heater and I chat about technology with tech-industry luminaries and PCMag's own experts.

Basically, every week Brian and I sit in my office and make a list of people we really want to talk to; we've had guests ranging from an editor of The Onion to Trent Reznor to a tech-industry venture capitalist.

This week, everyone on our list inexplicably agreed to participate in the show! Our friend Natali Del Conte from CNET is our in-studio guest, talking about her new video project for CBS, and we also talk to Gary Vaynerchuck (of Wine Library TV), Xeni Jardin (of BoingBoing), and comedian Marc Maron (of Air America).

Listen/watch here, or you can subscribe to the PCMag podcast feed on iTunes.

LEGO My Bible!

This is amazing: The Brick Testament is the entire Bible acted out in LEGO scenes. Beautiful, inspiring, and hilarious (much like the Bible itself). The image above is of David taking out Goliath's sword to decapitate him with it.

[Via a comment on By Common Consent]

A Double Standard I Can Live With

The issue is this: I absolutely give Michael Jackson a pass on his personal morality and character (I just wrote him a eulogy!), while I think Mark Sanford should step down from office and never be heard from again.

Why do I turn a blind eye to MJ's alleged messing around with kids and whatever else he did, while condemning the politician whose misconduct is arguable less hurtful?

It's not because Sanford is a politician. There's a debate raging on a friend's Facebook wall (and on Twitter, and everywhere else) about whether personal infidelity disqualifies a man for office. I don't think it does, nor do I think it's particularly relevant during a campaign.

But there are justifiable exceptions. The first is, unfortunately, Republicans. Sorry guys, Democrats can cheat on their wives. You can't. You've spent too much time talking up family values in order to justify anti-gay rhetoric (let's call a spade a spade here). If you're going to base your argument against gays getting married on the idea that marriage is holy, or moral, or good for society, you better WALK THE EFFING WALK, my friend. You do much more to devalue marriage in our society than a two-groom wedding ceremony ever could.

To talk up the sanctity of marriage and then run off to see your Argentinian girlfriend or schtupp some other dude in an airport bathroom should be grounds for resignation, yeah. Because you're voting according to your phony rhetoric, and your vote is actually affecting other peoples' lives. And because the people who voted for you might actually believe in those values you ran on, they probably don't want you to represent them anymore anyway.

Sorry Republican philanderers, but at least it's fair. Also, John Edwards, you're in this group too. People were only voting for you because of your wife anyway.

The second exception is when the affair results in abuse of power. New Jersey Governor McGreevey can have all the homosexual affairs he wants, but when he tries to put his boyfriend on the state payroll as New Jersey Homeland Security Chief, it's time to go. And don't blame the gay sex, because that had nothing to do with it. You should be in jail.

Anyway, here's some good analysis by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post on the subject, and some ridiculously shallow analysis by The Associated Press.

Don't Tell Me Michael Jackson's Death Doesn't Matter

I know our culture and our media make too much of celebrity deaths. But when a true genius dies, that's a big deal, whether he/she is famous or not. And MJ was indisputably a musical genius.

I've played and studied (and tried to write) music my whole life, and one thing I've noticed is that the absolute hardest thing to do in music is to write a catchy melody. There is nothing harder. I don't say that based on my own experience of trying and failing at it—the evidence is on the radio right at this moment. Every songwriter in the world has spent the last year trying to write 2009's "summer song"--this year's "I Kissed a Girl" or "Umbrella." So far, I haven't heard a single melody that stands out as being catchy enough to fill that role. (Kelly Clarkson and Lady Gaga have come the closest, I think, though both of those albums have been out for a few months.)

We think of these giant songwriting factories churning out bubble-gum pop music for Britney and Justin and Rihanna, but the truth is, writing earworm pop hits is HARD, even if they're formulaic. If it wasn't, everyone would be able to do it and our Top 40 charts wouldn't be so full of crap melodies.

So, writing a brilliant melody is extremely difficult. Pairing that melody with decent lyrics is even harder. Creating a winning combination of melody and lyric over and over is a feat only a few people on earth can do. And though he hasn't done it in a while, Michael Jackson was among the best of those people.

His incredible list of songwriting credits is here, if you'd like to see which songs he actually wrote himself. The list includes Bad, Beat It, Billy Jean, Don't Stop Til You Get Enough, Smooth Criminal, The Way You Make Me Feel, and others. (That link goes to a list of highlights, click the All Songs tab and sort by Artist to see the full list.)

Now then, even if he hadn't been a performer, even if he'd spent his life in his basement writing songs for other musicians, I would have considered him a genius. But he was a superb vocalist. I wasn't a fan of the vocal hiccups and stutters he overused in a lot of his songs, but go listen to some Jackson 5 records, or Thriller, or Bad, or that Free Willy song, or his Say Say Say duet in which he sings circles around Paul McCartney.

And yet, that STILL wasn't the extent of his genius. He was arguably the best pop dancer/performer in history. Usher and Chris Brown are "good dancers" because they can imitate the moves he was doing almost 30 years ago.

Yes, he was a freak. Maybe he was a child-abusing sicko, I'm not sure. But even if you can't mourn the death of the man, perhaps you can mourn the death of the genius, especially coming the way it did; after a long period of decline into craziness and irrelevance. A brilliant and creative mind like his deserved a better exit.

The Overwhelming Suckitude of June 2009

June sucks. Can I just go to sleep and have it be July when I wake up? It's rained like every day this month. Two of our closest friends in the city, the lynch pins of our entire social circle, are moving at the end of the month—to L.A., no less! (What, a Laker championship isn't enough, you greedy, greedy town?) And I just found out this week that some of my closest work buddies are leaving the company.

June sucks.

I'm blaming the economy. It cost my wife her great job back in the early days of it, it's driven my friends away from the city to cheaper parts of the country, and it's resulted in an incredible amount of job loss among friends of mine at work and in the media and tech industries.

I keep waiting for it to start feeling like The Grapes of Wrath or Cinderella Man or something—will it ever? There's been a slight behavioral shift in spending habits and so on, and everyone's a bit more pessimistic now, but at what point do we start internalizing the attitudes of the era, like our grandparents did with the Great Depression? Are we going to be a generation that comes out of hard times forever altered? Or does this particular point in history even qualify as a "hard time"? (After all, unemployed people lined up today outside the Apple Store to plunk down credit cards for a new iPhones; our grandparents would have boxed their ears for such extravagance).

Anyway, I now have first-hand knowledge of urban flight. Almost all my Wall Street friends and acquaintances have left (luckily, they all still read my blog), as have quite a few other young professionals that were supposed to be the future of this city.

So, didn't mean to get all weird about it, just wanted to share my informed opinion that June sucks, and especially June 2009. If any of you can think of any redeeming qualities for June, please share. But know that if you tell me it's sunny and nice where you are, I will respond with vitriol.

Blogging is Scary!

It's always scary when I write an article for a new outlet, and such was especially the case with my first post on By Common Consent post (it posted yesterday).

For those of you who don't know about it, BCC is a...hmmm...I'd call it an intellectual Mormon blog, but they might chafe at the term "intellectual." Who knows. It's a place where smart mormons talk about smart mormon things, and it has an incredibly engaged and vocal audience of readers and commenters. If you say something dumb on there, they'll nicely let you know (and back it up with chapter and verse, or sociological studies, or Kierkegaard or something). Anyway, I've been a fan and off-and-on reader of the site for a few years now, so it was a thrill and a horror to see my own ideas discussed by people much more intelligent than me--I learned a lot yesterday about the topic I wrote about.

The post is online here, if you're interested. Not interested in the mormon stuff? I wrote a much less scary first post for a friend's site called TheNYCityDish here, on my hunt for the best horchata in Manhattan. (it's on the Upper East Side--bummer)

The Plot Killers

Warning: I tried not to put any spoilers in here about Star Trek or Lost, but if you're a spoiler stickler, might not want to read this post

This free tip goes out to all the writers of the world: hey guys, time travel doesn't make your stories better. It makes them suck more. When characters start time traveling, you're being LAZY. You aren't smart enough to deal intelligently with all the paradoxes inherent in time travel. Butterflies changing how they flap their wings in 1977 affecting hurricane patterns two years later and all that. The Philosophy 101 paradox about what would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandpa.

That stuff makes plots dumber. It doesn't make sense, you aren't smart enough to deal with it, we aren't smart enough to understand it, and you're going to end up spending lots of precious air time with obligatory explanations about "destiny" and whether you can/can't affect things and alternate universes and what happens when you meet yourself anyway?? Pretty soon we the viewer/reader are having to learn complicated sets of rules for your stupid little parallel universe.

It seems like we're being subjected to the crap over and over. Lost and Star Trek are fun despite the time travel, but I'm sure they're a lot more fun in the parallel dimension in which J.J. Abrams is interested in, say, entomology instead of time travel.

The Heroes writers botch time-traveling storylines so badly that they ended up basically pretending the second season never existed. The writer's strike was a big relief for those poor lazy writers.

The one exception I'll allow is for stories that are actually built around time travel, instead of using it as a plot contrivance. You go into a movie like Terminator or Back to the Future with full knowledge that it won't address its own paradoxes and absurdities.

And one franchise that made GREAT use of time travel was the Enders series of books by Orson Scott Card. Want to "live" for hundreds of years? Jump in a spaceship traveling the speed of light! (Though you can only jump forward in relativistic time, not backward). Card used this to great effect, and actually delved into the emotional ups and downs of lightspeed travel and leaving loved ones behind in both space and time.

Overall though, adding time travel to a story is really cheating your audience, because what's the point of getting invested in this imaginary world if everything can change by one character going back in time and doing something differently? If the H-bomb in Lost goes off and undoes everything that happened on the Island--the crash, the relationships, the death, the struggles--what does that say to the viewer? "Guess what, chump? Even in this imaginary world you've invested yourself so heavily in, none of that stuff really happened after all. Thanks for watching!"

The sadness you felt when Charlie died, the confusion over The Others and the smoke monster, the anger when Mr. Ecko was killed off--none of it matters, because none of it happened. Ima be pissed if it comes to that.

Anyway, time travel is Plot Killer No. 1. For Plot Killer No. 2, we'll turn to the old contrivance of characters who can change shape to look like other characters. This has screwed over many a show, from Star Trek to X-Files to Heroes to Lost to X-men to Mission Impossible and on and on and on.

"Anybody could be anybody!" Well, writers, that isn't especially exciting for us viewers, sorry. You're basically telling us not to get too involved in what your characters are doing, because their identities are fungible in your stupid little story.

"Wait, why is Agent Scully choking that man to dea...oh, wait, THAT'S NOT SCULLY!" And then there's the inevitable moment in which the two lookalikes are fighting! only one of them is evil! and the onlooker with the gun doesn't know who to shoot! Oh, the suspense!

Maybe you lazy writers should stop reverting to cheap tricks to tell your stories. Or maybe I just need to stop watching science fiction stuff.