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You might have heard of that story about a stray dog being starved to death in the name of art. The artist, Guillermo Vargas, is accused of having captured a stray dog, tied it by a rope in his exhibition under the name of the exhibition written with dog food. Whether the dog died or escaped is not clear… Anyway, this is art in our century! Another exhibition presents seven German artists, who are playing with the idea of ‘hosts and guests’, hosting lice in their hair for a period of three weeks while they are themselves guests in the museum. I don’t know what you think about it, but that type of art leaves me cold…
It’s wednesday April 20th 2008, so I think it’s important that we keep it light, interesting and still add a bit of tech stuff in todays post. First off lets go here: Here’s how much of a snooze fest was American Idol was last night, I started watching the Pittsburgh Penguins versus the New York Rangers hockey game! How can they have the contestants singing songs we haven’t heard… ever? Or better yet, songs our parents barely remember? And they wonder why the ratings are starting to slip. Perhaps we’ll look back on Neil Diamond night as the night the show “jumped the shark”. For the uninitiated, the term jump the shark refers to when a tv show tops out in popularity and starts to fade in to Bolivian-as Mike Tyson once said.. The origin of the term comes from an old episode of Happy Days, where Fonzie decides to try and jump over a shark on a pair of water skis…nuff said. On Monday night I caught the intro to Deal or No Deal where they had Storm Troopers as brief case holders, Darth Vader as the banker and Chewy as a cheerleader…Can you say JUMP The Shark? This just in: If you’re young and have zero cash, then you probably use Yahoo more, and if you are rich and older, then you use Google! Say what? According to Hitwise the stats bear this out, check the matrix. According to Uptrends, there are some social networks out there that need to get their act together. This is in reference to the amount of time certain social networks were down, as in “Page not found”. Not a good idea to be anti-social when your business model is..ah hem a SOCIAL NETWORK. Two of the biggest offenders were BlackPLanet.com and Reunion.com. BlackPlanet was down for a total of almost 21 hours in the past 30 days and Reunion.com, almost 13 hours. Uptrends, is one of the leading remote website and server monitoring companies that tracks uptime of some of the most popular social networks. My plan for optimizing some terms for the sake of SEO, specifically the term, direct response marketing, seems to have worked rather well. I’m not shouting it to the rooftops, just merely giving myself some props for having a plan, sticking to the plan and watching it work. Right On, Me! It was not an easy term, but it wasn’t like it was mortgage lenders either, but the results have been favorable. On a sports note, The Spurs are still the champs until someone knocks them off, though the Lakers are really looking good. The Chris Paul gang out of New Orleans is a really good story this year, and I’m glad the Rockets are not laying down. Are the Mavs ready for an overhaul? The New York Times thinks so. Looks like the J kidd trade might not have worked out. But do you fire the coaches? Same holds true for the Suns and Shaq? It’s been fun to watch snippets of the games each and every night. Looks like we might see the Pistons advance as well as the Cavs. Am I the only that thinks the Wizards are turning into a bunch of punks? Don’t think I’m right? read this post by One last thing, the TNT announcers on all of these games have been fabulous! Major shout out to them.
I just found this article on new discoveries about colossal squid, and was astonished. I’ve always been interested in the sort of things lurking in the depths of the ocean - the Kraken, which we now think is a giant squid, the sperm whale, mondo-big sea lilies - all that stuff. Anyone who reads dragon books has to love the dragons of the deep. But it was perhaps this love that led me slightly astray in the past - for some reason I’d thought that giant squid and sperm whales were natural enemies, slamming and ramming one into the other. It turns out that it’s more likely for the sperm whales to eat squid of various types, and that we get quite a bit of our information on deep sea squid from their remains in the bellies of whales. Back to the article - before today, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as colossal squid, as opposed to the giant variety. From what little we know of the species, we think it is larger and denser than the giant squid, making it the largest invertebrate in the world. Why had I never heard of it before now, then? Perhaps it hasn’t been getting as much press because of the fewer documented cases of its existence. The earliest reported finding of a full body was in 2003, though earlier parts (tentacles and beaks) had been found as early as 1925. Despite this lack of complete specimens, the colossal is different enough to be granted its own singular genus. I may not know much about Linnaeus (besides that he was a racist), but I gather that this means something is importantly different about this species. More information can be found at this comparative site, and at the Te Papa museum. If colossals can have such a different morphology than the giants, and if we still do not know the full extent of these squid’s habits and habitats, it could again be a case of writing more than we know. Who’s to say that colossals and sperm whales aren’t natural enemies? Who’s to say that icebergs can’t travel south and then north again without flipping? Who’s to say that the Vikings didn’t intermarry and merge with northern Native American tribes? (This is all in one of those possibly-real-life youth adventure books, but I’ve been unable to think of the title. Sorry.)
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04/30/2008 
