Sleeping with a partner can save your life. From the author, Dr. Paul C. Rosenblatt,”It surprised me how many people thought they were alive today because they shared a bed”.
Did I mention that _I_ am a lifeguard?
The Other Beating – Los Angeles Times
The Other Beating is a Los Angeles Times story about the fate of George Holliday. Fifteen years after his video of Rodney King was broadcast to the world, he looks back on how that night has affected his life.
George Holliday was the Rodney King videographer. Awakened by sirens just after midnight on March 3, 1991—15 years ago next month—he grabbed his Sony Handycam, stepped out onto the balcony of his Lake View Terrace apartment and captured King’s beating by four LAPD officers. The video triggered a media sensation and, after the acquittal of the officers, helped ignite the riots that led to 54 deaths, 2,383 injuries, hundreds of destroyed buildings and more than 12,000 arrests.
Back then, George was married and a manager at a big plumbing and rooting company. Now he’s twice divorced, self-employed and scraping by. He might have been better off had he stayed in bed that night.
Disney-Pixar Merger Op-Ed Piece in the New York Times
I came across this great editorial in the New York Times about the Disney-Pixar deal. One thing I’ve learned recently about the deal is that the company is purging itself of most of the middle management that isn’t directly involved in creating the artwork. What they are doing is recreating the old Disney studio from the 1930s when Walt was in charge and story was king.
In the end, Disney is doing something that perhaps no other corporation of this size has ever done: actively de-corporatizing itself. It is reassigning authority from the bureaucracy to a small group of creative individuals. It is, in short, trying to resurrect Walt Disney and his early hands-on management style. Running the company out of his own head was a difficult enough task for Walt Disney himself. Whether the new crew can pull it off is anyone’s guess. But if they do, it will reverse the dynamics of the entire entertainment industry by empowering the putative visionaries over the suits.
Times Article – When You Wish Upon a Merger.
Wall Street Journal Article Published Tomorrow
The article in the Wall Street Journal about backmasking that I was interviewed for is going to be published tomorrow. I’m pretty excited to see it. I had my photo taken by Bob Cooney (he’s in charge of media relations at the University of Lethbridge) and he is pretty excited for me. He wants to do a story for the Legend (the official University paper), and figures that the Lethbridge Herald and the Medicine Hat news will each also want to do stories.
He described getting into the Wall Street Journal as being like the Oscars of getting into the news. He was also pretty excited to be getting a photo credit for the photo he was taking. It will be interesting to monitor the stats on my site tomorrow and see if there is a big influx of visitors.
From the teaser exerpt of the article (it’s already online):
Playing songs backwards — a popular pastime from the days of turntables — went out of fashion when CDs arrived. But now it’s enjoying a new cult following thanks to Web sites and software that do the trick.
In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, check out my backmasking page.
Update: Here is the Wall Street Journal’s archive of the story.
Wired Magazine on Click Fraud
Wired has an intriguing article on the state of online advertising and the use of click spam to defraud advertisers.
Pay-per-click is the fastest-growing segment of all advertising, reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Last year, Yahoo! alone ran more than 250 million individual listings, according to Michael Egan, the company’s search-marketing director of content strategy. Yahoo! doesn’t break out PPC earnings separately in its financial statements, but Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto believes that keyword advertising accounted for about half of the company’s estimated $3.7 billion in revenue for 2005. PPC is even more lucrative for Google. According to Noto, Google will end 2005 with $6.1 billion in revenue. About 99 percent of that revenue comes from keyword ads (over 56 percent from AdWords, according to the company’s most recent quarterly financial statement, and 43 percent from AdSense), making Google a bigger recipient of ad dollars than any television network or newspaper chain. All of which is to say that little blue text links, a type of advertising that barely existed five years ago, are poised to become the single most important form of marketing in the US — unless click fraud ruins it.
My Salt Lake Tribune Interview
Yay! Today The Salt Lake Tribune published the article about backmasking in which I was interviewed.
Enter “backmasking” into the Google search engine and nearly 9,000 sites pop up. One of them is “Stairway to Heaven: Backwards” (https://jeffmilner.com/backmasking.htm ), a site established by Jeff Milner, a 25-year-old student, part-time lifeguard and bed salesman.
“As a kid, a cousin of mine told me he took his ‘Stairway to Heaven’ record and played it backwards hearing some kind of satanic message,” Milner says. “I never had a chance to hear it myself… Then when the technology came along to do it on the computer, I jumped at the chance.”
He copied the song from the 1971 Led Zeppelin album onto his hard drive, then used the Windows Sound Recorder application to reverse it. He found what sounded like lines about the devil.
Update: I’ve posted the complete contents of the Salt Lake Tribune backmasking article in the comments.
Cuba? It Was Great, Say Boys Freed From Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp
The prevailing opinion of Guantanamo Bay among human rights groups and this particular blogger is that it is an American jail on foreign soil designed to deny prisoners “many of their most basic rights”. What other reason could there be to have an American prison in Cuba?
Now the way the prisoners are actually being treated can’t be concluded one way or another at this time, but for a few young Afghans, imprisonment in Cuba was like the dream of a lifetime.
Cross-Border Church Visit Costs Man $10,000
A resident of a remote northern Maine outpost along the Quebec border says he is being fined $10,000 U.S. for doing something he has done most of his life: going to church.
Behind the Scenes at Google
Via Slashdot:
Fortune Magazine published a fairly long but tremendously interesting article about Google.
“Instead of the usual exultation over PageRank algorithm and Larry-and-Sergey biographies, we get a different message – is Google growing up, and is trouble brewing at Google? Here’s Fortune’s description of the pre-IPO days: ‘Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL’s cowboy salesmen during the bubble. It has grown so fast that employees and business partners are often confused about who does what. A rise of stock- and option-stoked greed is creating rifts within the company. Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways.”
What’s really undermining the sanctity of marriage?
From MeFi:
Dahlia Lithwick has an interesting article on Slate commenting on the real threats to marriage in light of Massachusetts Supreme Court’s declaration that same-sex marriage is protected by the Constitution. Lithwick lists:
- Divorce (~43-50% of all US marriages end in divorce)
- Frivolous marriages (i.e. it is easier to get married than it is to drive a car, buy a gun, buy alcohol, etc.)
- Birth control (is marriage “only for procreation”?)
- The various challenges to our time and attention that take away from quality time with our spouses.