Oh, The Dem Unity!
- Fri Jun 27 2008
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There was no Two Minutes Snark yesterday because nothing important happened yesterday. (Note: there is a “to me” implicit whenever I say that, i.e., “nothing important happened to me yesterday.”)
You may have heard something about the comedy duo of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton teaming up for a “unity” event today in — wait for it! — Unity, New Hampshire! HA HA!
There’s a guy running for President who knows who Jay-Z is. So what is on Obama’s iPod?
Zimbabwe update: Mugabe’s youth militias are stocked with young men who are as scared of the regime as the people they’re beating to death.
And let’s all take a moment and reflect on a world where the following graf makes sense: “One of Mr. Tsvangirai’s most senior aides, Tendai Biti, was freed Thursday on bail of a trillion Zimbabwean dollars, or about $90. He was arrested two weeks ago on treason charges, which carry a potential death penalty.”
There are some interestingly similar shots in the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men and Raising Arizona. And interesting to note: No Country was released last year but is set in the late 1980s. Raising Arizona was made in the late 1980s.
Pixar’s Wall-E in a nutshell: lazy, self-absorbed human race saved from the evil clutches of Wal-Mart when a lonely robot walks up to it, waves, and says “[Hello, my name is ]WAAALLL-EEEEEEE[!]” a few times. Whether you think Wall-E is better than Ratatouille is likely correlated with how much you love Kubrick and robots. (I love Kubrick and robots, but I also love Paris, food and Ratatouille. I am on the fence.) Also: Wall-E made me cry. Verdict: Four out of four spare robot eyeballs.
Today was Bill Gates’s last (regular) day at Microsoft. He’s staying on as chairman, but will no longer be involved in the day-to-day business of the company. Gates stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO years ago and was replaced by this man.
Web designers are, first and foremost, professional communicators and crafters of interactions. Andy Rutledge on the skill set required by any employable web designer. There’s a degree of ‘job description creep’ here; the job Rutledge calls “web designer” I would call “art director” or “web design lead,” and I think he sets the bar for ‘employability’ a bit high unless you’re talking solely about senior folks and not junior- or entry-level designers. But I absolutely agree that good web design has absolutely nothing to do with yr mad Photoshop skillz.
Related from Rutledge (and far more useful to people on the lower rungs): Pre-Bid Discussions and Calculating Hours: The Client Factors, both about how to deal with reconciling your youthful Pollyannaism with the harsh reality that People Is Suck Sometimes. Note that Rutledge is also the dude who, when Veerle Pieters posted about how deadlines kill inspiration, spent a few hundred words telling you to suck it up and quit whining.
In case you weren’t aware, Adult Swim has been posting each weekend’s new episode of The Venture Bros. — TV’s third best comedy series — as a free web stream on Friday mornings. This week, Dr. Venture opens a day camp for boy adventurers.