Great Seminar For Parents

I just heard that my good friend Leslie has launched a great new business: together with two of her long-time colleagues, she created a seminar about all things baby and kids modeling. Parents will learn everything about the in's and out's of the modeling industry and learn and how they can help their children to have a healthy and successful modeling career.

I think this is a great idea and will help to fill the gap for insightful and reliable information about the world of kids and baby modeling. Check out their website if you're interested about this great kids modeling seminar in Los Angeles!

The Spice Girls love L.A.

Oh crikey. The Spice Girls were in town, and apparently the Staples center was sold out. Do we care, really? No. I am only concerned about David Beckham. Apparently his wife Victoria said: "My husband, when he married me, married all the Spice Girls, and he has to look after us all." I almost can't hold back my tears.

Great blog: Cozyland

A shout-out to Leslie Patson! She created a great blog with a great idea a couple of months ago. It's called Cozyland, and naturally the topic is "All things cozy", which I think is a fabulous idea. Whether if it's about making your home cozy, creating a yummy, cozy dinner, having a cozy, stylish evening with other book lovers or spending a marvellous, cozy vacaction in beautiful Tuscany - she covers it!

If you haven't discovered her blog yet, you should definitely check it out!

Superstar Cities

Joel Kotkin, the great author of "The City - A Global History", wrote a very interesting column about the 'myth of superstar cities'. Of course L.A. is also part of this elite club:

What as much as anything distinguishes elite places — what Wharton real-estate professor Joe Gyourko calls "the superstar cities" — are their absurdly high real-estate prices. New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles have long been more expensive than, say, Dallas, Houston or Phoenix — but in recent years the difference in price, he calculates, has increased beyond all reason. San Francisco prices since 1950, for example, have grown at twice the national rate for the 50 largest metropolitan areas.

Now I also understand why finding work has always been challenging:

The non-superstar cities have become the nation's most prodigious centers for job creation. Between 1990 and 2006, job growth in Las Vegas averaged over 6% annually; Phoenix and Riverside well over 3%; Houston, Atlanta, Dallas and Charlotte right around 2%. New York City, L.A., Boston, Chicago and San Francisco all remained well less than 1%.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories Debunked

The BBC investigated how much truth are really behind all the conspiracy theories around the terrible terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And their conclusions is: none. Check out their report.

Merry Christmas!

What a great time I had at John & Vinnie's! Check out the pics.

Happy Thanksgiving

From the New York Times:

The day after Thanksgiving traditionally kicks off the Christmas shopping season. With that in mind, Kiplinger’s points out that 46 percent of American householders carried a credit card balance in 2004. The average balance: $12,338.
Elsewhere the magazine writes: “In a worldwide survey, 22 percent of U.S. consumers said they have no money left after paying basic living expenses. Only Portugal had more cash-poor respondents with 23 percent.” Conceivably, the situation could be worse.

No further comment necessary. Happy Thanksgiving!

America turns Blue

The mid-term elections were a real sweep for the Democrats. This excellent map by one of my favorite political blogs, Daily Kos, shows the gains by the Dems state by state. Pretty impressing!

Mid-term Elections

Sweet victory! In order not to sound too enthusiastic - this is a step into the right direction. We'll see what 2007 will bring. More election results here and here. (Click on the map to enlarge it!)

iPod Breathalyzer hits the market

There are a lot of strange iPod accessories around these parts but this one is kind of neat. The iBreathe (apparently the iBooze trademark was already spoken for) is a portable alcohol breathalyzer that is powered by your iPod's dock connector. The device, as you might expect, has a tube that you exhale into for a full five seconds and then calculates your breath alcohol concentration level to an accuracy of ±0.01 percent.

How to remember your dreams

Great tips for remembering your dreams the morning after on the theme site (a.k.a. "lens") of the information sharing site Squidoo:
1. Maintain good, consistent sleep habits. Not getting enough sleep or going to bed 'dog-tired' can dramatically reduce natural dreaming activity.
2. When you go to bed tell yourself that you will remember your dreams. Repeat "I will remember my dreams" to yourself several times as you drift off to sleep. It sounds odd, but this tip has been shown again and again to be one of the most helpful.
3. Try to wake up slowly to remain within the 'mood' of your last dream. Buy an alarm clock with a gentle wake setting (sometimes called a progressive wake). Here is one idea: iHome iPod Alarm Clock Radio - Great if you are an iPod devotee.
4. Awake at least once during the night, many times this will occur around an REM sleep cycle. Set an alarm or drink a lot of water prior to bed to ensure you have to wake up at least once.
5. Think about (but do not dwell upon) your mood/emotions as you drift off to sleep.

Shopzilla cover story

The founder of my of my current employer, Scripps owned Shopzilla Inc., is on the cover of the "Electronic Retailer" magazine. The lead says:

With 130-percent growth, Shopzilla aims to devour the competition. Founder and Chief Products Officer Farhad Mohit talks about the company's early beginnings, achieving rapid growth and selling the business to E.W. Scripps.

Pretty cool!

50 coolest websites

Time magazine just published the list with the 50 coolest websites. Check it out!

Beautiful day on the beach

Do I have to say more?

The Hype Machine

An interesting website! I just checked out the Hype Machine, a site where you can search music blogs and upcoming concerts. The song listings are automatically gathered from music blogs all over the internet. Cool!

Create your own magazine cover

That's really a fun tool. On Big Huge Labs you can create your own magazine cover - with your own picture and all the headlines you want.

Newsvine - pioneer for future news

The future of online news will be a hybrid of personalised, professional content and user contributions, according to the founders of Newsvine, a new Seattle-based news site that launched fully last week.

Girls' night!

Wow! Girl's night at Weldon! (Almost: the person behind the camera is from Mars..) Yummie food! And lots of fun.... More pics coming up... Plus: Here is the famous rapper video with Natalie Portman we laughed so hard about...

Oscar watchers buzzed by blog blitz

More blogs than ever cover this year's Oscars Award Show, writes Variety.
Here are a couple of them:
Variety Award Central
And the Oscar Goes To
Carpetbagger (New York Times)
The Envelope (L.A. Times)
Hollywood Elsewhere
The Hot Button
Movie City News
Oscar Watch

Like most spectator sports, the fun part of the Oscar race is watching the game unfold in all its minutiae, from strategies and statistics to proud proclamations and thwarted prognostications. Can't wait!

$10 Million for Sundance movie

According Huffington Post, Fox Searchlight acquired worldwide rights Saturday to "Little Miss Sunshine" at the Sundance Film Festival, the audacious comedy debut from husband-and-wife rookie filmmakers Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton. Sources placed the deal at north of $10 million, the record set by Miramax Films' purchase of "Happy, Texas" in 1999.

Planet of Slums

Not brand new, but still worth mentioning. Mike Davis, author of such bestselling looks at urbanism as "City of Quartz", "Ecology of Fear," "Magical Urbanism" and "Dead Cities", is coming out with a book this year that takes a decidedly bleak view of our urban future. It is called "Planet of Slums" and examines the "future history" of megacities. An excerpt from Planet of Slums appears in the latest issue of New Left Review. An excerpt http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26001.shtml from Planet of Slums appears in the latest issue of New Left Review

"The earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report, Limits of Growth. In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550. 1 Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million
babies and migrants each week.2 The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. The global country side, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population (3.2 billion) and will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account for all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050."

The Third Man

One on the best movies of all time was just on TV: "The Third Man". There is even a Wiki dedicated to it.

Most literate U.S. cities

Seattle is America's most literate city.
Study author John Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, focused both on how and what people read, which is why he looked at the percentage of a city’s population that reads newspapers, books or goes to the library. Southern Californian cities didn't do that well. Poor Stockton came in dead last, Anaheim fourth from last; Los Angeles and Long Beach were ranked Nos. 60 and 61, respectively - out of 69.

Baudrillard speaks

One of the greatest contemporary philosphers, Jean Baudrillard, talks with the New York Times about the continental rift and the riots in France. Since I am big fan, I republish most of the interview:

Q: As one of France's most celebrated philosophers, can you give us any insight into the civil discontent that is pitting a generation of young people against the rest of the country?
A: It will get worse and worse and worse. For a long time, it was a relatively friendly coexistence or cohabitation, but the French haven't done much to integrate the Muslims, and there is a split now. Our organic sense of identity as a country has been split.

Perhaps that was inevitable. Many of us here were surprised last year when the French government banned hijabs, head scarves, and other religious emblems from public schools.
Yes, in America there is more of a history of immigration. America is constituted by ethnic communities, and though they may compete with one another, America is still America. Even if there were no Americans living in the United States, there would still be America. France is just a country; America is a concept.

Are you saying that America represents the ideal of democracy?
No, the simulation of power.

At 76, you are still pushing your famous theory about "simulation" and the "simulacrum," which maintains that media images have become more convincing and real than reality.
All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It's a simulation of freedom.

So you don't think that the U.S. invaded Iraq to spread freedom?
What we want is to put the rest of the world on the same level of masquerade and parody that we are on, to put the rest of the world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we are all-powerful. It's a game.

When you say "we," who are you talking about? In your new book, "The Conspiracy of Art", you are pretty hard on this country.
France is a byproduct of American culture. We are all in this; we are globalized. When Jacques Chirac says, "No!" to Bush about the Iraq war, it's a delusion. It's to insist on the French as an exception, but there is no French exception.

Hardly. France chose not to send soldiers to Iraq, which has real meaning for countless individual soldiers, for their families and for the state.
Ah, yes. We are "against" the war because it is not our war. But in Algeria, it was the same. America didn't send soldiers when we fought the Algerian war. France and America are on the same side. There is only one side.

Isn't that kind of simplistic reasoning why people get so tired of French intellectuals?
There are no more French intellectuals. What you call French intellectuals have been destroyed by the media. They talk on television, they talk to the press and they are no longer talking among themselves.

Do you think there are intellectuals in America?
For us, there was Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky. But that is French chauvinism. We count ourselves. We don't pay attention to what comes from outside. We accept only what we invented.

Were you a friend of Susan Sontag?
We saw each other from time to time, but the last time, it was terrible. She came to a conference in Toronto and blasted me for having denied that reality exists.

Do you read the work of any American writers?
I read many, many American novelists. Updike, Philip Roth, Truman Capote. I prefer American fiction to French fiction.

Perhaps French literature fell prey to French theory?
Unfortunately, French literature starved itself. It didn't need French theory to die. It died by itself.

Some here feel that the study of the humanities at our universities has been damaged by the incursion of deconstruction and other French theories.
That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.

Plus: This is a great list of links to works about and by the master.

Goddammo!

Interesting! If you're marriage breakes up and you still wanna have a 'souvenir', then you should go to Goddammo!. They transform your wedding band into a bullet. From the website:

We have processed bullets made from wedding bands and other jewelery made of gold, silver, or platinum. Keep in mind that the bullets have no gunpowder. As of now, you have a choice of two caliber bullets: .223 and 9 mm.

Organized or intuitive

Right or left brain? An interesting test.

Wrong place

"One of the greatest gifts is to recognize when you're in the wrong place, or doing the wrong things, then find the courage to stop whatever that is and make a change without guilt or regret." - Adrian Savage's The Coyote Within, 'Quitting Time" (via Crossroads Dispatches)

More Deal details

A guy does the numbers on the AOL-WeblogsInc. deal. Plus Steve Rubels del.icio.us links.

AOL acquires WeblogsInc.

Darnet. I wish Jason Calacanis' company - according to him the largest blog publisher in the world - would have stayed under the radar a little bit longer. But now Jeannie is out of the bottle and another "hot" internet company went corporate. For the better or for the worse - we'll see. The great news site Paidcontent had the scoop. Founder Rafat Ali (who I interview for the Swiss business weekly Cash) writes:

Among the other companies Weblogs Inc talked to included the usual suspects: News Corp, Yahoo and MSN...
This is a very quick exit: the company was founded about two years ago, and took some money from Mark Cuban a year down the line. For Calacanis, this is his second company being sold in a space of about two years...his original company Rising Tide Studios was first sold to Wicks Business Information, which in itself was bought out by Dow Jones.
The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog, BloggingBaby, and others. In total, the company has about 130 bloggers, with about 15 full time employees, from what I know.
AOL intends to keep the company/blogs separate from its site, much in the vein of what is happening with other blog and Web 2.0 companies being bought. But this is perhaps the first pure content-related company being bought out in the blog/ Web 2.0 space...or at least of this scale.
For AOL, this is head first into the blog media revolution, so to speak. Calacanis, who was at the We Media conference today where I was, refused comment; I did spot him with an AOL tote bag.
Staci adds: How much will Weblogs Inc. cost AOL? One estimate I heard today was roughly $20 million as an earn-out -- to get it all, Weblogs Inc. would have to meet certain goals. But I've also heard talk of Flickr-like numbers, which would make it closer to $30-35 million range. Certainly to Weblogs' execs advantage to have people thinking towards the higher end. Weblogs Inc. revenues are running at $1 million-plus annually from Google AdSense alone, according to numbers jubilantly released by Calacanis on his own blog; during a panel last week he said the company was bringing in $2 million a year. With that in mind, either of those numbers would be a generous multiple.

More about this story:
Technorati.
Memeorandum.
Reuters.

Consumer tune into blogs

From Frank Barnako's Internet Daily:
Technology is making it easier to ignore mainstream media advertising. Instead, consumers are using Web logs, mobile messaging, comparison shopping Web sites, and word-of-mouth to make buying decisions, according to Forrester Research Inc. Date released Tuesday by the firm reported 10% of consumers read blogs at least once a week, compared with 5% a year ago. Really Simple Syndication feeds (RSS) are used by 6%, compared to 2% in 2004.
"Technology has given consumers an option to tune businesses out, and tune each other in," said Chris Charron, a Forrester (FORR) vice president, in a statement. "On the flip side, technology has given businesses an opportunity to gain greater customer insights at a lower cost," by monitoring blogs and Web sites and message boards "to uncover consumer insight and accelerate the innovation of products, services, and design," he said.