At HitFlix.com, Drew McWeeny, aka Moriarty of AICN, assails older movie critics for criticizing the audience’s lack of taste. But of course a headline like “Why do older movie critics suddenly want everyone off their lawn?” unfairly attacks the arguments of critics like Ebert and Scott on the grounds of age. It’s reasonable to argue that McWeeny is returning ageism for ageism, in the case of Scott’s essay, but answering a bad argument with a bad argument of your own isn’t much of a response.

The real issue isn’t age either. Movie critics for generations have lambasted public taste as lacking. The criticisms that A.O. Scott or Robert Ebert offer are variations of timeless attacks by critics in general on the public. It’s the business of movie critics to demand higher standards and the business of the public to run for the sugary treats. Scott is not wrong about the infantilization of America. Ebert isn’t wrong that younger audiences care much less about critic credibility. McWeeny though is correct that they’re overstating the case and that pop culture skews young, but his own blatantly ageist headline is a great example of what happens when you pander too much to a youth demographic.

When it comes to entertainment, the young have more disposable time to spend on it, place a higher priority on the mass consumption of it, and set the trends. But are revivals of Transformers, a toy whose biggest boom period was among kids who are today just under 30, or GI Joe, ditto, really about appealing to the youngest possible demo? Hollywood isn’t plowing a 150 million dollar budgets into making a Yu Gi Oh movie. They did that for Speed Racer though, a series whose young fans are middle aged today. And even the Twilight movies, despite the huge payoffs, are treated as third class citizens. Meanwhile Star Trek gets another reboot. Terminator keeps churning out sequels. And Battlestar Galactica will be getting a movie. It isn’t really about appealing to the kids, as much as it is about Gen X and a few younger Baby Boomer executives pushing their own pop culture to the front of the line, while dumbing it down in the process.

If Iran’s election protests demonstrated the utility of Twitter and Facebook, the Russian DDOS attack on Twitter, Livejournal and Facebook in order to take down one single user, demonstrated how vulnerable these social networking services really are. Where the Iranian government worked to create a firewall that would cut Facebook and Twitter access at home, Russia went after Twitter and Facebook itself, which might be overkill but also shows would be Georgian activists that they can’t hope to rely on Twitter or Facebook in case of an invasion.

The Russian intelligence services have already reliably mastered social networking, as they demonstrated during the original invasion of Georgia. And they haven’t gotten lazy since then. A Cnet news story on the Twitter DDOS attacks has a series of comments, each of them repeating the same thing, that Russia had nothing to do with it, that the KGB doesn’t exist anymore (technically true, if besides the point, since the KGB has been renamed to the FSB, whoohoo three different letters), and that the user would have been dead if the KGB was really after him.

Twitter is still being hammered by the Russian Fail Whale, but the larger story is that activists abroad have become a little too reliant on American internet tools to maintain their organization and communications. Such tools are vulnerable to being subverted or blocked, as Iran did, or to being whacked completely, as Russia has done. While it’s idealistic to talk about the transformative powers of global communications, they remain a two way street. And while activists can harness the tools of the internet, so can the secret services who have more resources and more ruthlessness at their disposal.

My television has been silent for a while now, and so has my radio. Today going shopping I made the mistake of unplugging myself from my MP3 player long enough to be treated to a radio host going on about Michael Jackson being in dreamland, or something equally absurd, before launching into an all Michael Jackson set. My earphones quickly went back in. If there’s any advantage of modern technology, it’s that it capably insulates from the things you want to avoid.

That’s where Ray Bradbury got it both right and wrong in Fahrenheit 451, and some of his stories which correctly postulated a media saturated future, but failed to predict that it would also give us the ability to tune it out. 15 years ago, there would have been no escape from Michael Jackson’s death and the media frenzy over it. Today I can mostly avoid it. Not completely. I still get funeral soundbites inflicted on me, photos in webmail, and scraps slipping between the cracks. But it only reaffirms my decision to unplug from the news and the rest of the media madness. The rest of the country might want to immerse themselves in a Michael Jackson nostalgia trip 24/7. I don’t. Increasingly flexible technologies let those of us who don’t want to live in an idiocracy get our escape hatch from the madness.

I’m almost reminded of the ending of Brazil. “He’s escaped us at last.”

What is the internet anyway? Good or evil? Behind that question is the idea that a medium is either wholeheartedly good and pro-utopian, or it’s destroying everything around us. I came across the latest example of this all or none approach at Kathryn Cramer’s blog where she writes that,

A few years ago, I viewed the Internet as a vehicle for spreading compassion, spreading empathy, allowing the possibility that someone like me from her dining room could spontaneously arrive at ways to help individual people on the other side of the world

Lately, I have come to view the Internet as a vehicle for rapid re-socialization, much of it for the worse. I see a sudden Internet-induced lack of empathy, compassion, and even basic sympathy, in what I regard as a population of normal (by which I mean not sociopathic) people. I see mean-girl behavior in adult women that would get them sent to the Vice Principal’s office under no-bullying policies if they were sixth grade girls at my son’s school; I see violent ideation expressed publicly; I see demonization (sometimes literally); and I see this passing by without opposition from the communities within which these are expressed.

I find this very worrisome. None of the theories we have about how people behave in large numbers can adequately account for behavior on the Internet because the Internet is too new. A few years ago, I thought of the Internet as a potential solution to many things, and as a tool for spreading compassion across international and cultural boundaries. Now I begin to see it as the opposite: a tool used by others for the mass elimination of empathy, and as a problem rather than a solution.

Now this kind of “I thought the internet was good, but now I realize it’s a bad and scary place that makes people behave badly“, isn’t an uncommon approach. We’ve all seen things on the internet that make us think that maybe Vincent Cerf should have focused on designing birdhouses instead. Birdhouses don’t hurt anyone, except birds with vision problems.

But the internet is still a tool. It is a human tool, and a powerful one. Powerful tools allow people to do greater good and greater evil, which is as close as I’ll go to that inescapable Spider-Man quote. The internet is not one thing and not another, it is a tool and how people use it, is only a matter of scaling up their usual behavior by the ratio of the power they now have.

Cramer uses the term re-socialization to describe what is going on, on the internet, even comparing it to what went on in Nazi Germany. I would question the use of the term in both examples, but in the case of the internet, people are not adapting, so much as they’re using. Moving to Pakistan requires re-socialization. Using the internet is a matter of learning to use a particular tool. The internet we deal with on a daily basis is filled with people very much like us. It’s not a new environment. It’s our environment viewed through the filter of a digital toolset.

Nothing that people do on the internet is new, whether it’s helping people around the world or hurting people around the world. The internet has not changed human nature, only give it more range. The internet reflects the good and bad qualities of human nature. It projects as much empathy as antipathy. There is no single state for the internet, because there is no single state for us.

Sure morality mobs, Anonymous, sexting, twitter, terrorist instruction videos can be pretty horrifying. And the next generation always seems to have no more morals or sense of right and wrong. But hasn’t it always been that way? People have always been freaked out by the next generation and their hangouts and manners and attitudes. Everyone’s Greatest Generations was always someone else’s bunch of no good punks who need to get a good whuppin from their parents.

So like every tool humans ever invented, the internet is a bunch of problems and solutions wrapped in one. Think about cars, planes, computers, fire, dynamite, sharp blades, television and the printing press. It’s always been this way. It always will be this way. And if we ever get around to nanotech, FTL, genetically engineering humans and holodecks, they’ll be that way too. That’s always been a basic theme in Science Fiction, but Science Fiction cliches are a lot easier to deal with, until it actually happens, and the world gets very strange, and people begin putting the technology to all sorts of unexpected uses, that we really should have expected if we had been paying more attention to human nature.

If sequelmania rules the box office and studios are scrambling to remake just about every classic movie ever made while digging up property after property to recycle, right down to classic cartoons (witness the Speed Racer, Scooby Doo, GI Joe, He Man, Thundercats and Transformers movies in just a few years alone), the news is little better from the gaming world as Electronic Arts solidifies its grip on gaming and churns out games based on classic movies like From Russia with Love with Sean Connery or Reservoir Dogs or Godfather, you can’t help but shudder to think of EA picking up Take Two and having them churn out a video game of Waiting for Mr. Goodbar where you stalk women in bars.

Are we really out of ideas or are we just out of executives and producers willing to risk an original idea? The real problem is that at some point executives turned to outright content mining losing any interest in developing new properties and turned the bulk of their attention to churning out sequels, remakes and developments of anything with brand recognition. And the worst part is that the box office has repaid them with billions of dollars. Any movie with brand name recognition tends to do better than it would without it. Even Underdog had a decent opening before it imploded. The two Scooby Doo movies alone would have justified this insanity in purely cash terms.

In gaming, sequels still don’t have the power that they do in marketing movies. While there are plenty of franchises out there, it’s a minor issue compared to what’s going on in the movie industry. And with the added cost of licensing, most game studios are not as eager to dive into the costs of churning out a movie game adaptation willy nilly. And generally speaking those adaptations don’t build franchises or sell well enough to justify the risk.

It never fails, whenever the media seems to be short of a big story, we naturally get some sort of hysteria over an all encompassing crisis that’s certain to convince the average couch dweller that the end of civilization is nigh. Right now it’s Swine Flu, the killer epidemic that has already claimed the lives of millions if not billions, and will shortly own its own firm of Washington D.C. lobbyists. Swine Flu has come to America before, which resulted in the death of every single America between the years 1967 and 1972. Luckily new more efficiently made Americans were imported from Sweden and Japan, thus saving America.

So far a single baby from Mexico has died in America of Swine Flu. And apparently a minister who met with Obama. This hasn’t stopped the media from building up the same panic that they did for Avian Bird Flu, that killed every single American between 1992 and 2007, or the Y2K virus that caused nuclear weapons to launch prematurely and blow up the entire planet. So now the media is in full on shriek mode. The Vice Idiot in Chief has warned all Americans to stay out of planes, subways and crowded areas, because apparently he’s old enough to remember the Influenza epidemic. The media of course is only too happy to splash his hysterical nonsense right next to their own hysterical nonsense, sandwiched between photos of people in Mexico wearing generally useless surgical masks.

I can’t help but think that we’d have a much better behaved press if every business that lost revenue because of some media shrillfest could actually sue them for damages. It might breed less reports on THAI FLU VIRUS OF DOOM or WENGER’S TROJAN HORSE WILL EAT YOUR COMPUTER ON FEBRUARY 30 that the press seems positively addicted to. I know responsible journalism went extinct with the dodo and the honest election, but since the American public can’t collectively bitch slap CNN, except in the ratings, maybe it’s time to hold news organizations accountable for baseless hysteria.

Oh by the way Swine Flu killed every single American between 2009 and 2012. Luckily more efficient and weirder were quickly imported from the 8th Dimension.

It wasn’t until I heard the slogan “Information Wants to be Free” repeated for the umpteenth time by some Neo wannabe who imagines that the real world is something out of a William Gibson novel, or worse yet a Cory Doctorow blog, that I realized just how thoroughly stupid it is. Yes I’ll plead guilty to using the slogan “Information Wants to be Free” on occasion. My only defense is that as a member of a species that often confuses catchy slogans with reality, it took a while for me to build up an immunity to repeating stupid but catchy things that other people had thought of as a way to avoid using theirs brains.

Information obviously does not want to be free. Information is agnostic, or a series of symbols only accessible to qualified human beings, who are the ones who want or don’t want things. It is their motivations that determine whether the information gets to be free or not. If you doubt that, let me know when you find out who D.B. Cooper really was, or how much of ancient myth was actual history, like Troy, or just mouth gargle. Slogans such as these are often repeated by teenagers who are happy enough to accept the entire infrastructure of conspiracy theories from UFO’s to JFK’s assassination to 9/11 truthism, all of which are premised on a simmering stewpot of competing ideas, none of which come with any definitive corroborating fact.

The idea that information wants to be free is a very seductive idea in a time when I can send the entire contents of an encyclopedia around the world with a click of a button or stick it on a thumb drive and carry it with me feeling just like a very boring James Bond. But so what? Subtract the humans from the equation and that USB drive is nothing more than a small piece of plastic with some flash memory inside, readable only by other devices wrapped in plastic. Sure aliens might do something with it, but they were too busy killing JFK on the grassy knoll. If information really wanted to be free, there would be no dictatorships, no doubts and no mysteries. But information doesn’t really want to be free. It only wants to be free as much as we want it to be.

And by games I don’t mean tie in licensed games, which are almost invariably terrible but a separate issue, instead I mean movies and TV shows trying to figure out how to promote themselves on the internet by offering small online interactive games. Recently we have two poor examples of this from The Spirit’s online henchman game to Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles’ Ambush.

The basic problems are pretty straightforward. Doing a small scale decent combat game on a website is pretty tough and not even worth trying unless you have a pretty clear idea of how to make it work. Also with the abundance of free online flash games and open source downloadable games, it’s doubtful that adding a crude game to your website is really gonna pack them in. It’s mostly pointless, unless you genuinely come up with something clever and implement in a way that really encourages replayability.

Even if your IP is unique, and the sort of thing that really appeals to people, wrapping it around an annoying little game will only diminish it. Sure the Family Guy vs American Idol characters fighting game was good for a few laughs but after about 5 minutes or so, it was pointless because of the poor design. The more serious games such as The Spirit henchman game which seems to want to be a fighting game by way of Spore or TTSCC’s Ambush which was just outright terrible, can’t even count on the laughs. It’s entirely possible to make addictive and entertaining games, but it’s hard and it helps to keep it simple and look at what works. Space Invaders and Tetris are both simple classics that never get old and are easily ripped off. Avoid character fighting games unless you can actually design an enjoyable replayable game. And be sure to take a look at WTF, it was done by people in their spare time for no money. Hint, hire them.

Between Twilight and True Blood, vampires seem to be around, and plenty of news stories are analyzing what the whole thing means culturally. A reasonable answer disappointing to the media studies crowd may be that it means nothing at all. We burned through a bunch of zombie movies and now we’re getting some vampires. Not that long ago it was slashers chasing after virginal teenage girls. Monsters, like most trends come and go, based on how they’re used and abused. A movie or a book can jumpstart a trend, and with Hollywood’s copycatting skills, the trend quickly becomes legion. These days it’s the lack of cultural originality that’s responsible for cultural trends more than anything else. Naturally the people who overanalyze things to death can’t wait to sink their teeth, yes pun intended, into what the whole vampire trend means. What it really means is that people are sick of zombies, zombie movies and things involving zombies. And vampires are like zombies with brains who can actually do more than lurch toward you with slack jaws. Of course with Left 4 Dead a hit, I wouldn’t count the zombie out yet either. Analyze that.

1. Harry Knowles Aint It Cool News review of Blade II. If you haven’t ever read it consider yourself very lucky and don’t go looking for it. Unless you’re tired of living.

2. Any movie made by Uwe Boll. This also extends to anyone making fun of movies by Uwe Boll. Broad side of a barn. Target.

3. Taking LSD at a Thomas Kinkade exhibition. Visions of hell would be a vast improvement.

4. Waking up to Ward Churchill on WBAI. Second worst way to wake up never, not involving a penguin.

5. Anime fans talking about anything involving Anime.

6. Battlestar Galactica montages set to mournful music. Why can’t the Cylons just kill them all already.

7. Riker shaving his beard in a tub

8. Any TV show involving a fat slob married to a former model

9. Brits complaining about the US TV reworking of The Office. Did we complain about Coupling? Shut up. Besides you’ll find there are people on Planet Earth who expect more from a TV show than 13 episodes in 2 years. They’re called Americans. They make most of the TV you watch. The preceding is the reason for it.

10. Lexx. Enough said.

If you’ve got anything to add to the list, sing out with it or remain forever in shut the hell up land.

It’s no secret that the mall, that hallowed American institution has been in trouble for a while. The internet may be the nail in the mall’s coffin with retailers crushed under the weight of online competition, often tax free, but it’s been a long time coming. Chain stores provided valuable tenant space to the mall but the Walmartization of America made malls increasingly superfluous and the position of smaller retailers unworkable. From the old to the young, as a social gathering point the mall has also been assailed by the internet. Now with the second largest mall operator in America facing bankruptcy and retail chains crumbling in the face of an economic downturn, it looks like the American mall is closer than ever to becoming a LaBrea tar pits dinosaur, an aging beast closed down for business, a temple of commerce that serves no one anymore. That may be a little too dramatic but even in a time of out of control consumerism, the mall has stopped being relevant some time ago.

Even though it’s still technically summer, Wall Street’s long winter is already well under way. The failures of banks and brokerages can be directly tied to sloppy practices that no one looked too hard at because the money was coming in. Half the reason we seem to have bubbles in the first place is that when the money is flowing no one actually troubles themselves to take a long hard look at the real stability of what’s being traded, used as collateral and the stocks that are being launched. Only when times get tougher, belts are tightened and debts are called in, the whole things crumbles, the mirrors break and the emperor turns out to be wearing a wet paper bag and going stark naked underneath. While both Obama and McCain are making a good show of protesting the bailouts, we know damn well that whoever wins the election will keep on with the same policies and turn a blind eye to what financial institutions are doing. That’s not just because Wall Street is good for a lot of campaign cash in the coffers, though that is a factor, but because no one likes to kill the golden goose until it’s laid its final hollow egg.

The housing bubble hadn’t hit more upscale housing in cities as badly because a good deal of it involved bad loans made to people experimenting with owning multiple homes they couldn’t afford. Nevertheless the latest figures show that real estate prices in New York City’s highest end borough, Manhattan are dropping.

Recently released city records indicate that apartments in prime Manhattan neighborhoods are selling for less than their purchase prices — a phenomenon that until now was virtually unheard of in the seemingly invincible New York City real estate market.

A good deal of New York’s gentrification was driven by investment ethos or at the very least the premise that real estate prices would continue to rise. Only that could have justified high end six figure investments in condos in the first place. After all you have to be very rich to spend that much money on something that won’t go up in value, which is what appears to be happening now.

New York’s real estate has been ridiculously overpriced for a while and investment has driven gentrification with people buying up brownstones in Harlem or East New York or warehouses in Williamsburg to turn them around for a quick buck or simply own property in the next hot neighborhood. However if real estate values begin falling, the bottom falls out of that whole plan.

Gentrification is driven by an overregulated housing market that squeezes out the middle in favor of the top and the bottom, high end and low income housing, the latter government regulated, the former forced by regulations that make it a dead end for landlords to target anything but low income or go for the people who can really afford it. This creates a constant squeeze for affordable middle class housing, which drives people to new neighborhoods, which drives gentrification. The artists head out to squat some warehouses, the students follow except they begin paying some rent, 20 somethings with trendy jobs follow and begin paying more rent, landlords begin fixing up old homes and evicting their lower income tenants, then developers buy up the area and turn it into condos, pricing it out of everyone’s range except those who bought in early and the process continues.

If the process is shifting now, it’s because there’s too many six figure condos out there and New York is no longer as hot as it was a few years ago and buying a six figure condo in a weak housing market no longer seems that great of a deal.

Managing complexity is key to achieving efficiency. Complexity leads to redundancy, redundancy leads to duplication, duplication leads to croft, croft leads to waste, waste leads to disorder, disorder leads to chaos, therefore complexity = chaos. When you increase complexity you proportionally also increase chaos, efficiency means the management of complex tasks with simple structures with each proportional increase in complexity, there is a proportional increase in inefficiency.

Order is achieved by balancing efficiency against complexity. The fractal point order of any base structure is relative to its proportional order of complexity through managing complexity, efficiency can be achieved, so long as output remains maximal chaos and complexity are paired in outcome, to reduce complexity without reducing effectiveness is to achieve efficiency.

While many mistakenly believe that complexity is the royal road to efficiency, effectiveness and order, complexity is actually the enemy of all three. All complex structures show an increasing tendency toward waste and chaos. Whether through centralization or decentralization, managing order requires favoring simple structures over complex structures, by favoring efficiency in design, distribution and definition. To embrace simplicity is to embrace that higher order which can only be recognized and achieved through the singular commitment to a focused definition of each part of a higher structure which when working in harmony toward achieving an efficiency end can abolish complexity in favor of functionality.

After the failure of Congestion Pricing, Bloomberg has continued to push an anti-car agenda with the expansion of bike lanes across the city. Now I support biking in theory, but the practice of it is more complicated. The obvious pro side for bikes is the reduction of pollution, less space consumed and smaller footprint. The negatives though involve accidents, unsafe driving and larger issues that call into question the whole premise of pushing a pro-bike and anti-car policy.

First of all most people are not about to switch to bikes, anymore than they’re about to buy IT personal transporters. That means bikes will continue to exist in a space between pedestrians and cars. Bike rights are about boosting their rights at the expense of pedestrians and drivers. The problem with bike rights is the lack of bike responsibilities. A large number of accidents involving bicycles are caused by the failure of bike riders to follow any real rules of the road. Going the wrong way on streets is practically mandatory for most bike riders, going up on the sidewalk, rushing past pedestrians at the last second, assuming cars know where they are, assuming that they can always zoom through that red light at the last second. A lot of that is part of the fun of being a rider in a big city, playing the rebel with two wheels, I’ve done it in my time too. But expecting rights, means accepting responsibilities and few riders are willing to do that.

While bikes make a positive contribution by not polluting, they make a negative one as far as safety goes. But even putting that aside, expanding bike lanes at the expense of cars can lead to traffic jams or at least slower traffic. Which of course produces pollution. More pollution than those bikes can possibly compensate for, because traffic jams are cumulative. A slowdown in one place can create multiple slowdowns across the grid.

Finally bikes are not a practical form of family transportation and while catering to the twenty and thirty something peter pans of Critical Mass may be hip, they’re not the fabric of the city. Families are. Cars are the basic form of family transportation. Public transportation comes a distant and uncomfortable second. Advantaging bikes at the expense of cars disadvantages families which is not thinking of a city’s future.

We live in a street grid inherited from the horse and carriage days in which people walked on the side and carriages took the road. We’ve polished things up since then and introduced gadgets into the equation such as streetlights, but it’s basically the same system. People and vehicles. Bikes don’t fit well into this equation falling somewhere in the middle. But then bikes were meant for rural areas in the first place. To make bikes fit into the street grid takes more than adding some bike lanes, it requires radically rethinking the grid, and I have no idea how to even make that happen.

New York City basically does one kind of museum well, the cultural museum. The Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim, the Frick, the Met, some paintings, some rocks and bones and a sculpture or too. Ancient or modern, it doesn’t really matter. The art’s the thing.

That hasn’t stopped various museum ventures, from the Museum of the American Indian and the Sports Museum of America at Bowling Green in the man with the hat and the tan island, are particular examples of pointless ventures that no one visits. After all who goes to New York to see sports memorabilia or Indian exhibits. Museums are geared mostly to the tourist trade with a sideline of people genuinely interested in the subject. The former aren’t visiting the city expecting to see Indian and Sports museums, the paying odds are that they’ve got better sports and Native American artifact and culture museums back in the Midwest. And New York isn’t about to produce a museum impressive enough for people genuinely interested in sports or Native American culture.

Which makes the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame museum annex in New York City twice as pointless. Something like that is obviously meant to cash in on the tourist trade, just like Madame Tussaud’s, but it takes a pretty bored or aimless tourist to wander in to something as off the mark as that. I’m sure Madame Tussaud gets its traffic, but at least it has a certain wacky uniqueness that blends into New York. The Rock and Hall of Fame annex may try to focus on Springsteen for the Bridge and Tunnel crowd, but they’ve got the Stone Pony already and they aren’t coming into the city for that. The thing is that New York’s rock and roll legacy is too much a part of a whole other era, one that doesn’t fit nearly into the museum’s agenda, it’s a New York music legacy that flows out of Jazz and after it into its aftermath.

Particularly in the wake of 9/11 questions about public photography continue to arise. On the one hand we live in more of a surveillance society than ever with pervasive closed circuit cameras all over the place and now even the so-called see through cameras at airports. On the other hand individual photography is more restricted than ever, even as cheap digital cameras and cameras in cell phones and the rise of sites like Flickr and Photobucket, not to mention YouTube for videos, makes it the norm for people to walk around everywhere casually snapping shots as they go.

Either way both are symptoms of the ubiquitous loss of privacy that is a very real issue but they also raise the question of who is empowered to violate that privacy, only the authorities over a given area or everyone. It’s a troubling issue that goes right back to the universal glass bowl envisioned by Isaac Asimov’s The Dead Past, one of the earliest and clearest SF visions of a Surveilance society.

I’m not much for photography myself but I understand the documentary impulse and I can see both sides to the Thomas Hawk MOMA story that’s all over Boing Boing and everywhere else, but it’s also a collection of multiple narratives. Was Hawk kicked out for simply photographing in the atrium or was he kicked out on suspicion of shooting down a young girl’s blouse, as some supposed eyewitnesses have alleged. Was he kicked out because Blint lacked the grounding in photography to distinguish one kind of camera from another, and then there’s the McDonalds theory.

I’m all for civil liberties myself, but I have to ask whether photographers should have an unlimited right to shoot anywhere. The photos Hawk showed don’t violate anyone’s privacy, but at the same time taking photos of crowds from above is rife with potential for such violations. Is there a difference between photographing objects and turning people into subjects? I think that there is.

At a time when airlines are cutting back, charging passengers every fee possible and charging even for pillows and water, they’re also unveiling WiFi. Of course the overlap is that WiFi allows airlines to charge fees for that addictive internet browsing and offering paid entertainment options is a relatively simple way to promote the airline’s comfort features while sneakily charging you more for everything. As airplanes become flying vending machines, electronic entertainment options, like plane phone calls, are a convenient way to make money, allowing airlines to charge a month’s fee for a few hours of use, it’s a win win situation for an industry constantly looking to reduce the perception of prices while increasing the actual cost by nickel and diming you to death. The airline industry trying to run things on the auto sales model though is no real solution. There’s a reason that people find buying a car so stressful in the first place and with air travel already stressful enough thanks to terrorism and extensive searches that do all but strip you naked while taking away your bottled water, the last thing the airline industry needs is to make air travel even less appealing to fliers.

I’ve never really understood the obsessive need some people have to try and stick as many bumper stickers as possible on their cars in the first place. I mean does anyone seriously think that putting an Obama or McCain bumper stick on your car will convince anyone to vote for them? Does putting a message about Jesus or nuclear weapons on the bumper sticker of your Honda Accord really stand a chance of converting anyone to your beliefs? The reality is it doesn’t. Bumper stickers masquerade as advertising, but they’re really more a way for people to express their own identity in the mechanical parade of cheap cars gridlocked on the interstate. So the study that says people with bumper stickers are more likely to give in to road rage is unsurprising. After all bumper stickers are little more than an egocentric display in the first place, LOOK AT ME I MATTER, they cry for attention. I’M AN INDIVIDUAL. I’M DIFFERENT. It’s a short honk and middle finger from there to road rage.

It seems to be the latest movie and TV cliche to have characters demonstrate for us how much they don’t matter by googling themselves and finding nothing. Now while that’s a nice bit of digi existentialist crisis and all, it’s also silly. I remember back when movies routinely got the internet and computers wrong, there was at least an excuse, because the only people making movies and familiar with computers were on the technical or business end of things. That’s no longer the case and at some point in the production of a movie made in 2008, it should have been easy enough for someone to step forward and say that Google searches for common names will always come up with results, unless you get specific and use quotation marks.