Welcome to Wired News’ 2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards program. You, the readers, have sent us your picks for the lamest quotes from or about the world of technology during this eventful year. We have selected the “best” of those and present them to you now.
Category: Culture
Surfer Survives Two Shark Attacks
Royce Fraley has surfed the unforgiving, storm-swelled waves of Northern California for three decades, and also — by chance — explored the hunting habits and appetites of great white sharks.
But this holiday season he’s spending time ashore in Guerneville with his wife and their two young children. He hasn’t been surfing since his latest brush with fate. Two weeks ago, he became one of the world’s few surfers to have survived two separate shark attacks — the latest incident involving a shark that pulled him at least 15 feet below the surface.
“I’m not chomping at the bit to get back into the water,” Fraley, 43, told The Chronicle. “I had an offer to go surfing with a buddy last Sunday, and I declined. I’m definitely taking a break and enjoying my family. … If my feet were dangling down, I might not even have a leg or be here today. It’s made me more respectful of my life and my family.”
B-Side Records Best of the year 2006
While recently entering my favorite five new albums released in 2006 for the KEXP Top 90.3 countdown, I realized that the B-Side Records annual four-page best-of list extravaganza was likely out and on the shop’s counter. Indeed, Madison’s most jam-packed end-of-the-year list — its sixteenth edition — was ready for reading.
The State Street record store’s formula is relatively simple; every current employee and as many past employees as possible are solicited to submit their best-of-2006 list. There are no constricting guidelines, as the lists can be as short as nine albums to nearly as long as one hundred, not counting the supplementary songs and live shows that can listed as well. Then there’s always a guest, one person who is invited by B-Side to submit their favorites too. In the end, everything gets tallied up, and the four-page thicket of lists is condensed to their collected “favorite things,” with any album receiving three or more picks featured and framed.
Mobile Mansions Book
Douglas Kiester takes a fabulous look at Legacy RV’s.
Silicon Valley Math: Interesting Look at Yahoo’s Potential Deal with Facebook
Rumors about the possible acquisition of Facebook, usually with Yahoo as buyer, have been around for most of this year. Not that Yahoo or Facebook have asked for this attention, but the media is getting antsy. Robert Young put it best last week when he asked – Yahoo & Facebook: Deal or No Deal?. That is certainly the question of the fiscal quarter.
We know that Facebook has been pursued almost since the beginning of its existence. They narrowly avoided a $10 million acquisition by Friendster in mid 2004, just months before they took their first round of financing from Accel Partners. Former Friendster execs say that the deal was close to closing, but last minute negoations over control ultimately disrupted the deal. Since then, Facebook has certainly been approached by every major Internet company.
Gibson on Writing a Book
I think it may actually get worse, each time! But I also suspect that that may be a paradoxical indicator of relative emotional health. If you’ve ever met anyone who’s writing a book that he or she is convinced is *very* good indeed, you’ll know what I mean. (Swift reading to his servants may be the perfect case in point.)
By the time I’m three-quarters through the writing of a novel, I’ve necessarily lost anything like perspective, and must rely on feedback from trusted daily readers to know whether or not I’ve completely driven the thing off the road. I suspect that the biggest part of the labor of writing, for me, has always consisted of bludgeoning the editorial super-ego into relative passivity, though no matter how thoroughly I’ve managed to stun it, it still manages to send messages to the effect that the work is really deeply pathetic, hideously flawed, and should be abandoned immediately. I tend to imagine that this is what writer’s block is really about, though in my case it’s remained only partionally symptomatic. I manage to ignore those messages, as painful as I still find them.
Congressional Staff Size & Salary Database
Imogen Heap’s Playlist Suggestions
THE British synth-pop singer-songwriter Imogen Heap is a devotee of found sounds. Her do-it-yourself music uses the noises of trains, thumping metal gates and cardboard carpet tubes as well as orchestral spirals of harps and trumpets. Though a pianist at heart, she embraces the blips of electronica and computer-programmed, multitracked vocals. Ms. Heap, who contributed silky, metallic vocals when she was part of the alt-pop duo Frou Frou, has done well with her second solo album, “Speak for Yourself” (Megaphonic/RCA Victor), which appeared last year. Songs from it continue to pop up on film and television soundtracks (most recently “The Last Kiss,” “The O.C.,” “The Chronicles of Narnia,” “CSI” and “Six Feet Under”). Ms. Heap, 29, is touring the United States through December. She recently spoke by telephone with Winter Miller about what she’s listening to now.
Wal-Mart Culture/Marketing Clash
Two interesting articles on the identity conflict underway (perhaps being resolved?) at Wal-Mart:
- Michael Barbaro & Stuart Elliott:
Yesterday, in a surprising rebuke, Wal-Mart overturned Ms. Roehm’s choice to replace the company’s longtime advertising agencies — a decision that puts $580 million worth of marketing up for grabs again, two months after the original search process ended.
Her departure has roiled Madison Avenue and sent several major agencies scrambling to dust off their marketing plans for the nation’s largest retailer.
At the heart of the controversy, everyone agreed, is a culture clash. Ms. Roehm, a 35-year-old rising star who won acclaim in advertising circles for her work in the automobile industry, was never at home within the painstakingly modest by-the-books culture of Wal-Mart.
- Michael Barbaro & Stuart Elliott:
t was the kind of bold advertising campaign that Wal-Mart executives agreed was needed to attract style-hungry consumers: a series of commercials featuring two sisters — one a regular Wal-Mart shopper, the other not — trying to redecorate their homes.
In commercials set to run throughout this holiday season, the sisters were to discover that Wal-Mart offers a lot more than low prices.
But in July, as gasoline prices spiked, senior executives abruptly scrapped plans for the so-called sisters campaign, sending a marketing team led by Julie Roehm scrambling to create a replacement, according to people involved in the process. The reason was that the ads did not focus enough on low prices.
A New Goofy Short: “How to Install Your Home Theater”
It is not surprising that Mr. Lasseter is using short films to train and test the artists: he and his fellow Pixar animators spent almost 10 years making shorts, learning how to use computer graphics effectively before they made “Toy Story” and the string of hits that followed. Pixar continues to produce a cartoon short every year, and has won Oscars for the shorts “Tin Toy,” “Geri’s Game” and “For the Birds.”
Four new shorts are in development at Disney: “The Ballad of Nessie,” a stylized account of the origin of the Loch Ness monster; “Golgo’s Guest,” about a meeting between a Russian frontier guard and an extraterrestrial; “Prep and Landing,” in which two inept elves ready a house for Santa’s visit; and “How to Install Your Home Theater,” the return of Goofy’s popular “How to” shorts of the ’40s and ’50s, in which a deadpan narrator explains how to play a sport or execute a task, while Goofy attempts to demonstrate — with disastrous results. The new Goofy short is slated to go into production early next year.
I’ve long enjoyed short films. Clusty has more.