Words of Waldman

'Even the cars look they've spent the morning in the beauty salon'

Barbra Ellen interviews Alicia Silverstone about Miss Match, which frankly is sugary nonsense compared to Sex In the City (they're both created by Darren Star), and seems set to be removed from the TiVo 'season pass' list very soon.
Also riding high in the 'I can't believe I'm watching this' stakes is Nip/ Tuck, an every day story of Plastic Surgeon folk in Miami.
Most recent episode: teenage son caught in threesome (then all three sets of parents and children sit down to discuss: which causes heartbreak for the lesbian of the bunch); man seeks breast reduction to go to top notch swinging party (he gets the op, but finds he has hepatitis C); wife of one surgeon first has crush on a young medical student/ personal trainer; then ends up kissing the other surgeon (her husband's best friend - there's lots of history there, as you'd expect); meanwhile her husband is falling in love with a recently divorced chiropracter with a double mastectomy. Oh, and there's obviously a bit of girl-on-girl action at the swinging party.
Well, it might be gratuitous rubbish, but it's well worth supporting just to spite the puritanical Parent's Television Council who have run a campaign to stop companies advertising in the show (complete with wonderfully prurient summary of all the shocking bits at the bottom of that page).
Needless to say, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons is also outraged.

Belle has a book deal

As spotted by LinkmachineGo in yesterday's Times

Belle de Jour, the internet’s most talked-about web diary, has a book deal. According to Publisher’s Marketplace, the London call girl, who may or may not be a literary name masquerading as a high-class hooker, has inked a deal with Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Orion to turn her anonymous tales of love-for-money into a manuscript due for delivery in August. The film rights are also being frantically contested. Which begs the question: what happens when her parents find out?

eBay: even the anarchists' online marketplace

A brief glimpse to another world today, when someone showed me Anarchy Online a massive multi-player game. Completely not my thing (frankly, my gaming stopped with Street Fighter 2). The game itself is of no interest to me...but what's fascinating is the fact that people now buy and sell the credits you earn from playing the game (and which allow you to buy weapons and armour, and take months of playing to build up) for real cash on eBay. A quite spectacular collision of real and virtual worlds. Apparently you get booted off if you get caught trading. Anarchy by name....free market by nature, it seems.

I find it peculiar...

That the world and his wife stand up to slag off Sex Lives of the Potato Men, and say it's shocking that it should have been given £900K from the lottery; while hardly anyone outside local media is kicking up a sustained fuss about the £34m of lottery money spent on the Clissold Leisure centre: which has now closed after being open for little more than a year, and probably won't re-open for another 18 months.

Devotion to a dying art..

Albumize (vb int) spend hours putting photos into albums - either physical or digital.
Most of the weekend has been spent in a mad whirl of old school albumization (ie putting real prints into real albums). Part indexing-hell, part pure nostalgia. It's not such a problem when the pics are quite recent and all one size (preferably 6 x 4's), but it's hell when they're a few years old, in a mix of APS formats and you can't remember when you went where.
Still, it's all worth it when it's over: with all the crappy snaps removed my past has never seemed so attractive.
One day, all this might be made redundant by portable digital albums, but I sense that's quite a while away in our household.

The life and death of a cockle picker

Excellent piece of reporting about Yh Hui, one of those who died in Morcambe bay.

Software idol...

Piece in today's Online about a piece of software called Vocaloid which is one of those. Basically it's a singing synthesiser: you type the words, give it the notes and it sings for you in one of a number of 'vocal fonts'. Price is a shockingly cheap - by professional standards - £200 a font. The samples sound pretty good: ok, it's not like you've suddenly got Aretha Franklin in your laptop, and they do sound a little weedy and vocoder-ish. But frankly, we've all heard much worse real voices (and not just in the Pop Idol auditions).
It's really meant so composers can hear their music in loads of different ways, but we should expect uproar from the backing vocalist's union as the software improves. And frankly, if you buy four male vocal fonts, then you too can have your own boy band: without any pesky boys to blow all the profits on drugs and fast cars.
Covered previously in the New York Times and Popular Science

World Spy: a recent convert writes..

Late as ever to catch anything...I stumble across the brilliant collection of neologisms that is The Word Spy after kottke reveals it's been turned into a book.
Particularly like: mucus trooper (MYOO.kus troo.pur) n. An employee with a cold or the flu who insists on showing up for work.

Now there's a headline you don't see every day...

. Actually, he's talking about Billy Bragg's ingenious plan for Lords Reform: which do seem shockingly simple, obvious and fair compared to many of the others floated. Next, Phil Collins' plans for solving our rail crisis; and David Aaronovitch: 'I owe it all to Paul Weller'.

CNet: iPod mini is wonderful, but.....

They say: "Apple comes through again with a near-perfect MP3 player".
.
Loads of 'For's', but the 'Against's' are equally compelling, and Apple need to look at them. Namely: "No FM radio or recording capabilities; nonreplaceable battery".
John Naughton was pretty good on the iPod's failings - especially the battery life this weekend:

Apple's approach to the iPod battery is emblematic of the company's attitude to design generally.... It was evident, for example, in the first version of the Macintosh... which Jobs insisted should have no expansion slots.. Jobs was implementing his vision that computers were consumer products - like, say, food processors or TVs - not engineering test-beds. The Mac should have, as it were, 'no user serviceable parts'. It was perfect just as it was.
This might be a sensible policy for food processors and games consoles, but for a general-purpose machine like a computer it was daft, and Apple nearly died as a result. Jobs was pushed out, and replaced by men in suits who drove the company into the ground.... the iPod has been the crowning glory of the new strategy - a consumer electronics device that has taken the world by storm... But implicit in it is Jobs's old hostility to consumer tinkering.

I know hardware can't always be all things to all people. But if Apple want to keep hold of their revolution, they need to sort out the battery thing, the radio thing and the recording thing: before someone else does. (well, before someone else does it in as attractive a package...iriver isn't quite there yet)