Anderson Cooper is the best!

I don't have cable anymore, really, and I miss CNN terribly. More to the point, I miss my nightly date with Anderson Cooper on 360.

Which is why YouTube is still in business.

Borrowing from Auto-Win

I am attending a technical rehearsal of a dance show. Right now that means I sit in my office and read things on-line. That's not ALWAYS the case, but currently my services are not needed in the theatre, yet I can't really go away until everyone is done. So I thought I'd get back to this blogging thing I've abandoned some months back.

Couple of weeks back my friend SB and I were quite taken by the idea of having a central repository of ideas, if you will, on-line that your friends can access. I suppose if you blog regularly, you can use your blog for that, but most people I know don't blog. Yet we would all like to share fun pictures, ideas, articles and news you find on-line, maybe some music, videoclips etc.

Now, if you subscribe to RSS feeds on Google, you can definitely share the media you find interesting with other people who subscribe to GReader. As you can see, that also has some obvious limitations.

Another way would be Facebook/MySpace - but do you really want your 65 Facebook friends to watch a Durex sex-toy ad? Or this one?

No, what we were desiring is an on-line notebook, if you will, that your friends can look into, where you stash those LOL cats, movie reviews, restaurant notes, viral videos, interesting news items etc. etc. - things that now are shared chiefly through randomized e-mail that can get a) lost, and b) annoying.

Seeing how I've got absolutely ZERO internet programming knowledge, obvs I won't be creating such a service any time soon. I mean, I compared Blogger with the Firefly Phone last week (it's only got 5 buttons) and I can't even bring myself to figure out how to migrate to another, not-quite-as-boring-layout-and-more-user-friendly blogging service...

But I will steal an idea from Auto-Win and post some links I got from reading the New York Times...

Americans are un-intellectual, and people write books about that.

They also choose not to wear perfume any more.

And some of them are insanely lucky to overcome the bureaucracy and score an insanely cheap (albeit tiny) corner of Manhattan.

Now, I don't live in NYC (and often, while reading the NYTimes, I think there really IS no other world outside Manhattan) but this real estate market story makes me think of Communism. You know why? Because there was so little available real estate in the former Eastern Bloc, you HAD to get married and move in together as soon as possible to enjoy any privacy at all. And then if you broke up or got divorced, there were very few rentals available, so you moved back in with your parents. Just like some of the people in the two stories above.

Zemfira (again)

Zemfira is currently (and probs since 2002) my favourite musician. It helps that she is

a) hot;
b) writes good poetry and good music to set it to;
c) quite possibly very gay (though never officially confirmed); and
d) only 6 months younger than me (I can't really explain right now why that matters, but it does, ok? It's easier to relate to famous people that way.)

It took me a few months to be able to hear Zemfira's new album "Thank you" - it's become a lot more difficult to get media from Russia over the last few years - now I can't even purchase music or DVDs from the Russian version of Amazon, which I totally could do even last year, so this sucks. Anyway, I have insomnia (again...) and I've spent the entire night listening to this album, so I have to share this song - I know none of you speak Russian, so I am posting the translation.

This is YouTube (I haven't figured out how to link properly) video for the song.

Pay no attention to the "prologue" in the video - it's a pretty standard Russian music video technique of "setting the scene" and is rather poorly done in case, I feel.

Zemfira – We crash/We are divided/We are shattered*

We scatter about on business,
Earth is divided/shattered in two.

Erase me, erase me,
Look into me, stay here.
Forgive me for my weakness,
And for loving you so strangely and desperately.

A sigh of regret escapes the lips...
We are hung up in all the wrong cities.
Moonlit phone calls...
Through provisional borders, I am with you.

Erase me,
Look into me, stay here.
Forgive me for my weakness,
And for loving you so strangely and desperately.

We scatter about on business,
Earth is divided/shattered in two.
A sigh of regret escapes the lips...
We are hung up in all the wrong cities.
Moonlit phone calls...
Through provisional borders, I am with you.

We scatter about on business,
Earth is divided/shattered in two.
We scatter about…
Earth is shattered…
We are shattered…

*as you can see, I haven't settled on one translation of the title...Russian is much more complex of a language than this here Ye-Olde-Anglo-something-something...