New MacBooks

New MacBooks are up on the Apple site. I may be incredibly late with this one, but it interests me because I used to work at a Mac Store and stuff like this was pretty much all we talked about. Now I could kinda care less, but it still looks pretty spiffy. It's also good to know the one I currently have isn't completely trash-and-burn obsolete, since they are still selling them at a nominally discounted price.

Hello, I will turn you into a new person

Other than the larger track pad and the solid aluminium casing, it seems like the only major upgrades are 2 gigs of RAM in the base model and a slight hard drive bump.

Oh, and apparently it's the "Greenest" MacBook yet. I'm not sure if that means you can bury it in your compost heap once its screen goes out or if it's using signicantly less power, but it kinda makes me gag when every product from Tampons to Televisions claim to be "greener than ever".

Stoked for this one...

Beatles Rock Band game

So this is why Ringo won't sign his fan mail anymore: he's too busy weighing in to Harmonix on how to properly code his drum fills!

The Death Rattle of Old Media

So, in case you haven't heard, newspapers and magazines are dying. Most of this has to do with the internet (I'd like to think my blog may have had some small part in dismantling these titans), and some of it has to do with the managers of these institutions not quite catching up with this phenomenon and failing to harness its power and innovate enough. There are a few survivors of the news apocalypse, of course, like the Wall Street Journal, and maybe the AARP gazette, but for the most part if you're young and hip, information is about the last thing you can imagine shelling out money for and anyone that reports news you care about is not able to put food on its table because of that.

With budgetary and editorial slashes galore, the biggest fear circulating around is that the quality of good investigative journalism will take a depressing nose-dive, and the information that floats the internet will be nothing more than an unbridled clusterfuck of rumors and slander. The NY Times, also one of the big-boys claiming to be running on fumes, has a pretty okay article on the current state of print media here.

I think this is partially true and partially perpetuated by the same people who don't quite have a grasp on where we are headed with all of this. My roommate once put it very well when he said "I trust Google more than Government", a kind of nice alliterative axiom that sums up a lot of things. While I don't totally believe in the power of a search engine over expert opinion, its pretty clear the ability to verify information has become easier than ever. Unfortunately, with this ease of validation comes the fact the everybody on the internet may be citing the same faulty source; but, if you look at certain stats on the speed that a Wikipedia page gets scrubbed when something erroneous is reported, or the lightning quickness of the backwards B story being debunked, it gives you a certain pride in the power of peoples curiosity and desire for truth.

While I have a certain faith in this invisible hand, it is only to a certain extent. It seems to only work with pop culture and other certain ephemera, which doesn't cover things that truly matter like corruption, fraud, and political fuckery. These are the things investigative reporters thrived on and tenaciously pursued; partly out of the desire to uncover the truth and partly out of the idea that they would make a name for themselves and become the next Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. With the elimination of the resources for this type of reporting, it gives me the howling fantods that the 4th estate isn't watching the other three, and we may be in for a lot of unreported and unknown shady dealings in the future. Criminals will always adapt to societies shortcomings, and this is a huge one.

Anyway, if you want to get more depressed, watch The Wire creator David Simon interviewed on Charlie Rose and read his article he wrote on his days working at the Sun. It offers a fascinatingly grim assessment of how we got here and where we may go. Then, if you think you can still take it, watch Tom Wolfe explain what he thinks here.

Merry Pranksters to get the Van Sant Treatment

Okay, I know I update this thing about as frequently as I cook a dinner for myself where the primary ingredients aren't cheese and pasta, but I thought this was noteworthy (I'm putting a ban on the word blogworthy for now, and I hope everyone else will do the same).

It looks like Gus Van Sant has signed on to adapt Tom Wolfe's novel The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, which is something I'm very curious to see take shape. For those not hip to the Portland scene, it's little wonder Van Sant took this on; Wolfe's novel follows the exploits of local OSU alum and outsider Ken Kesey and his posse of goggy drugsters across America, and if there is anything Van Sant is drawn to, it's tales of woebegone misfits and the Oregon region.

For me, Van Sant has been hit or miss, with the hit category mostly comprised of well-accepted, uncontroversial entries: hated Drug Store Cowboy, loved Finding Forrester and Goodwill Hunting, hated Elephant, and kinda turned off on what I heard about Gerry, Last Days, and Paranoid Park (I'm not a fan of "wandering around" movies, movies that really try to subvert the biopic trope, and movies that think using an entire cast of non-actors is a good idea). Fortunately, the material is pretty insane and its about a period of history that I always romanticize as being one of the most exciting times to live in (even more exciting than the internet age, can you believe?)

Speaking of Gus Van Sant, his new flick Milk is coming out soon (or has already come out in various markets), which makes me want to track down the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which was recommended to me by a criminology professor at WWU mainly for the end (spoiler!) where the assassin of Milk claims what is now famously referred to as the "Twinkie Defense", or that the amount of sugar in his blood-stream was responsible for his violent act.

Finally, as a cap to this, you can check out Rolling Stone's pretty informative piece on the last days of David Foster Wallace, an incredibly talented writer who hanged himself recently. It gives a pretty good idea of what made him tick, and delves into his personal life and history a little more in depth than most other eulogies have done. Even if you haven't heard or read him, or if you have and have been inundated with enough retrospectives to fill a book with, give it a look.