August 2009
20 posts
“Rocking it, Frat-party style!” A short story geared to college students, written by a 30 -something author Link
In the 1980s, some entrepreneurs in Ghana would travel from town to town to show Hollywood movies on video to the public. In each town, the promoters would hire a local to paint a poster to advertise it – based on some very sketchy information about the film Link
A very interesting discussion between Errol Morris and Ricky Jay on the topic of lying Link
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Hottest stations on the Tube, mapped
The Light Bar, the threatened with demolition Shoreditch pub, has been saved from the developer thanks to a revised plan. More likely, the market for developments has changed a mite. (I wrote about the Light Bar last year when they made an attempt to escape from London planning authority by claiming their patch of land was still part of a medieval jurisdiction, the Liberty of Norton Folgate.)
Urban Outfitters on Oxford street selling deadstock of Polaroid cameras today
I believe that it’s not newspapers that are in trouble, it’s paid newspapers. If it wasn’t for a terrible economy muddying the waters, I think that we would see that free newspapers have been taking up the slack. On the other hand, Rupert Murdoch’s News International may be shuttering thelondonpaper, the biggest and glossiest of the free dailies.
CoverItLive, which is the live group blog programme of choice for Only, has a new minority investor. It’s a great system. And free.
Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs slideslow of 100 amazing photos.
New site, The Footnotes of MadMen, gives the details of the verisimilitude.
Wonder what’s up with The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (the Japanese painting with the woman and the octopus) or London Fog advertising? No doubt, in the future, we will see a VH1 brand extension to Pop-Up Madmen.
Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff (Detroit edition)
Greyhound has arrived in London and Brits can ride the dog to Portsmouth starting in September. The individual American and Canadian Greyhound Bus Lines were purchased by Aberdeen-based transit company First Group a few years back.
On Mad Men in Canada and broadcasting via iTunes
This story (thanks @cameronreed) ) claims that iTunes has made a score in grabbing Mad Men from Canadian broadcasters. My view is that this merely demonstrates how there is no such thing as Canadian broadcasting, only a sort of legal piracy.
Canadian broadcasters buy US programming at a sharp discount to its production cost. They then broadcast it at the same time as the US broadcaster....
Bill Wyman has written a 9,000 word magnum opus on how the mainstream newspapers have blown it. It’s an excellent read but his summation deserves to be highlighted. 1) Go hyper local; devote all resources, from reporting to front-page space, to local news. No one cares what the Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch has to say about Iraq. 2) Redesign the websites to present users with a single coherent stream...
The Smoking Gun reveals the amazing story of Pranknet, a Windsor, Ontario-led group that would phone fast-food restaurants, convince the staff that they were about to be burned by an invisible gas and must strip naked and urinate on each other to neutralise it.
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Catwalk Queen, Kiss and Make Up, Bag Lady, Shoewawa, Crafty Crafty, Dollymix, Trashionista, Shiny Gloss, Star Trip and Nollie, the fashion blogs of now-in-administration Shiny Media, have been snapped up by Shiny’s orginal backers, Bright Station
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It’s not easy running a film mag in Iran when your stories are censored and the movies themselves are restricted from distribution.
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Before He Became a Film Legend, John Hughes Was an Adman
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