Sunshocked

A rash of informative but irrelevant signs have gone up in my neighborhood lately, reminding me of the perennial flaw of activism in today’s accelerated and alienated world.

Near the end of the trailer for “Epic Movie”, opening soon, someone (who is not Sacha Baron Cohen) dressed in Borat’s green super-thong looks at the camera and says, “Niiice.” What he means by this is, in fact, “This movie is a new milestone in anti-artistic, self-referential garbage.”

There needs to be a better word to describe companies that embrace community, clarity, and agility as a business model. Though they have nothing to do with Ruby on Rails, AJAX, or tag clouds, there’s something decidedly “Web 2.0″ about Nintendo lately.

US automakers gave themselves a big pat on the back this week at the LA Auto Show. Mostly, they were just making promises to catch up with technologies that we’ve been getting from Asian automakers for years now. Meanwhile, Toyota has an operational new plant manufacturing their Tundra and it’s in Texas. So what does “buying American” mean these days?

I should be happy about people adapting their buying habits to incorporate solutions to the world’s problems. If you’re going to buy an iPod Nano, why shouldn’t you get the red one for the same price and help fight AIDS in Africa, right? Still, the whole thing puts a really bad taste in my mouth.

This Friday the 13th, my website went down. But just like Jason, it’s back from the dead stronger than ever and ready to cause some damage thanks to the fine folks over at DreamHost.

You may have already heard of Snakes on a Plane, a movie coming out today about one plane and more than one snake. It’s prevalence in the blogosphere has been oft noted by mainstream media. But why? What has caused blogs everywhere to embrace it knowing literally no more than the title and the star?