Bruner Blog

Wow. This is really sad news to wake up to. I loved these guys in high school.

Just got back from three nights in Portland visiting my beloved wife, who has been there a month and will remain another two weeks studying digital film editing at Avid Film Camp. The camp has them training on the Avid digital film editing software program and actually cutting an independent film, Yorick [official site | IMDB], a prequel to Hamlet based on the life of the court jester to Hamlet Sr. (whose skull Hamlet famously contemplates in the graveyard). The writer and director is the charming Jonny Stranger, who hosted a fun little party at his place for the editing students the night of my arrival.

Portland is a lovely city, blanketed in mountain mist, a tranquil, hippie-dippy, Northwest burg of half a million. Quite liveable, I imagine. Though not for us, Adi assures me. Decent public transit. We got around easily enough without a car on light rail and buses, though they don’t run frequently enough in the evenings. Too bad for a town that bills itself as the Green capital of the U.S. (metaphorically; I’m unaware of any literal campaign to that effect, but I wouldn’t be surprised). Here are various impressions:

• Adi is amused by the fact that the downtown shopping district includes a handful of “high fashion” stores, including Saks Fifth Avenue (almost appropriately enough on SW 5th Avenue), featuring all sorts of elegent clothes, yet everyone in town dresses in fleece, jeans and hiking boots, and thus not surprisingly the department stores are almost empty.
• While we were standing in line for Michael Moore’s liberal polemic “Bowling for Columbine,” a guy in his 50s or 60s exits the showing ahead of us with a ying-yang earring. Old school!
• On the light rail (which is what they call it instead of my preference, “tram”), the disembodied recorded voice of the announcer says at each station stop “Doors will open to my left” (or right). But how do we know which way she’s facing?
• I bought my Halloween costume from the Spoonman (who has the enviable web domain Spoonman.com) from his stall at the Portland Saturday Market (whose slogan is apparently “And Sundays Too!”). No, I didn’t get the kitchen knife (he has a wide collection of headwear). You’ll just have to show up at Dana’s party to see it. Very convenient costume, tho. Requires nothing else. The guy is quite creative, also has jewelry, eyewear, wind chimes and other clever gifts.
  
• Hippie jazz pianist at the Saturday Market (an outdoor craft fair, basically) had a sign on his dilapidated upright piano with this poem I quite liked:

  Yesterday is history
  Tomorrow is a mystery
  Today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.

• Had brunch with my old Montana college roommate Rayce, who looks as boyish as ever, owing in large part, no doubt, to his lovely wife of many years, Ronda.
• Visited the Japanese gardens, which are quite beautiful. In a freaky moment, not an hour after Rayce dropped us off at the gardens, I run into Hans, another guy from the same big gang of friends I hung out with in college. Hans, who like Rayce I haven’t seen in more than 15 years, now works as a ranger at Mt. St. Helens in Washington state. He and his family just happened to be visiting at the same time.
  

That’s about the highlights. Also saw a couple of movies, but more thoughts on those shortly. Just thought I should check in, as it’s been a while.

Remember this song from Sesame Street? (RealAudio file):

Mahna mahna
(ba dee bedebe)
mahna mahna
(ba debe dee)
mahna mahna
(ba dee bedebe badebe badebe dee dee de-de de-de-de)

Dedicated to Sue and Little Ricky. Thanks to Filboid Studge for tracking it down. More details on the song here and here.

Also available on the CD “Muppet Show: Music Mayhem & More - 25th Anniv Collection” via Amazon.

UPDATE:
The above RealAudio file is not the actual Muppet version. Filboid (aka my step-brother Jay Niemann, the smartest guy about pop music in the world, who also happens to be selling parts of his massive record collection) writes:

It’s the Dave Pell Singers. On Liberty Records, home of the Chipmunks and late-period Julie London. For a fascinating look at the liberty records discography (I’m not kidding) consult your local library for [this book]. Get it from the library. Dave Pell is not worth that kind of money.
Save your money to buy things from DustyGroove.com (a local Chicago record store with an amazing selection of funk, Brazilian,jazz, and soul records) and AquariusRecords.org (San Franscisco store with the weirdest collection of stuff for sale and the best commentary of any record store ever. I’ve ordered from them before and they are extremly nice and personable).

The recording is by my guess early 60’s (’63-65). The author is listed as Piero Umillani. How much “authorship” is evident in that godamn song anyway.

Here’s a short .au file clip of what the Sesame Street version sounded like.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE:
Filboid continues to enable my Mahna-Mahna jones, with the best web site yet on the background of the song and its composer:

Forget all that. Go to this website. Then go to Cdnow.com and order the three song remix CD single of Mahna-Mahna by British electronica duo Mucho Macho. It should sate your lust for this song.

Will blog more soon. Meanwhile, life has dragged me out of my Harlem basement too often in the past few days for me to catch up with any details, interesting or otherwise. Today, for example, holds in store jury duty. Love the whole civic responsibility thing, but am hell-bent on getting exempted, as I’m a struggling freelancer and have a plane ticket for Friday to see Adi in Oregon for the weekend (yay!). More to come as soon as possible.

Funny article from The Register for blog junkies about Beth Goza, a marketing manager at Microsoft who created a sincere, sappy blog “to wrestle with her conscience over whether it was OK to cheat at XBox games.” The result?

Now a satire of Beth’s blog is raging like a contagion on the web, and this could have all the makings of the Ellen Feiss cult. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, Ellen Feiss is the Xanaxed-out Apple switcher who has spawned a host of tribute sites.

Ha, ha. Microsoft just can’t catch a break.This whole Switch thing is really getting under their skin.

Iron Blogger is the most inspired new idea I’ve seen in the blogosphere in a quite a while: pitting bloggers into a week of open debates (the rules) on a topic of their readers’ choosing (the revenue model). Brilliant! This will be a must-read site. An idea born, appropriately enough, out of a drunken orgy.

I’d pay $5 to read Elizabeth debate Nick about Iraq.

Sadly, looking at it all more carefully, I fear it may never amount to anything more than a wild night’s folly. The present homepage does not exactly bespeak the idea’s real potential. I do hope they follow through and bring it to fruition, as I’d definitely be a regular reader.

Rereading the rules, I’d offer two additional suggestions (bearing in mind I’ve never seen an episode of Iron Chef myself):

• Only readers who have paid the fee (of, I would recommend, a minium of $1-2) would be eligible to vote on the winner of the debate (perhaps that’s what you had in mind, tho it’s not entirely clear).
• Let readers suggest debates they’d like to see, but to do so, they’d have to pay a higher fee, say $20. If not enough people get behind the proposal to raise the pot to something worth fighting over, then the person would get their money back. I.e., not much risk, but enough to filter out too many proposals yet at the same time enable readers to control the entire process, if they are willing to put their money where their mouth is. One of the debaters could also thus challenge another, urging his posse of readers to come pledge enough money to tantalize the other party.

The whole idea makes a blogger’s reader loyalty that much more engaged. You’d have to have a separate open peanut gallery where all the readers could attack each other with running meta commentary about who was winning the debate, etc., but separate it from the main debate thread (to avoid the signal:noise problem perfectly illustrated by Iron Blogger’s historic first drunken attempt at debate).

It’s a crazy idea, you kids, but it just might work!

A friend once said to me that he wanted to use me as a barometer for the next big cool trend of our generation, after my luck being part of Generation Expat in Budapest in the early ’90s followed by San Francisco for the second half of that decade on board the dot-com wave. Well, Erik, I’m pretty sure I’m living it again: the NYC Blogosphere.

After last weekend’s excitement, I laid low last night, but you can’t get away from the frenzied beat of the party that just continues to drive this town wild. Elizabeth mentioned something yesterday (Friday) about a hangover (in the context of explaining why it wouldn’t hinder her from planning to hit the Bulgarian club last night regardless) owing to some impromtu blogger party, but I didn’t ask questions. Then I came across the link on her site about the rules of Iron Blogging, which took me to Jim’s Objectionable Content, where he lays out the details for this excellent new concept (see post above). What really caught my eye, however, was the last paragraph:

I had to leave just as the tequila shots and girl-on-girl licking were getting into full swing…

Hmmm. Then, back to Elizabeth’s site, where I see this:

And This One Goes Out To: Megan, Jim, Tim, Asparagirl, but most of all–Amy Langfield

Jose Cuervo
You are friend of mine
I like to drink you with
A little salt and lime
Did I kiss all the cowboys
Did I shoot out the lights
Did I dance on the bar
Did I start any fights

[”Jose Cuervo” Shelly West]

“…[B]ut most of all–Amy Langfield”? There is a great story here not being fully told. Amy downplays the whole thing on her blog. (Come to think of it, Jim keeps referring to her as “Evil Amy Langfield.”) AspraGirl briefly notes the night, but offers no other interesting details. The other participants are mum. I’ll probably get the story out of Elizabeth off the record.

I’m telling you, NYC is a fun place to be right now. But if you can’t afford the rent, at least you can read about it and imagine the rest.

Just stumbled on the Everlasting Blort, with the great domain Blort.Meepzorp.com. Very good use of pics. Which in turn lead me to RateMyKitten.com.

UPDATE: I didn’t notice the Meepzorp Network Operation Center last night. Meepzorp’s Yooha News is also quite amusing. Also, the MetaFilter paroday AnusFilter (motto: “squeeze through this“). Anyone passing by my window just now would think I’m totally insane, howling with laughter staring at the computer in an otherwise silent, dimly lit room.

Nice to know Canadians can be jackasses, too. Like this guy, who ran out onto the ice naked during
an NHL game in Calgary, only to fall, knocking himself unconscious and leaving himself splayed on the ice belly
up to the bleachers. You rock, dude.

Turn it into a suppository. I’d love to see the High Times centerfold on that one.

Le Monde reports on the full-body copier. I’m hoping something was lost in translation here, as I can’t possibly understand the point of this. (Via bOing bOing.)

Mark writes, “Who said women were the gentler sex?” (Reuters story.) Yeah. She sounds like a real man-eater.

The mainstream media really sucks. One thing that struck me at the dawn of 2000 was how lame the retrospectives were in most media outlets on looking back at the accomplishments and history of the past millennium. I mean, how often do the media get to reflect on the millennium just past? What I remember, instead, was a bunch of reflections on the past decade, a few (very few) looks back on the past century, and virtually no truly big picture stuff making sense of the past 1,000 years.

Another way the media has totally let us down has been coming up with something to call this decade. I remember lots of idle speculation about whether it would be called Os or the Aughts or the Naughts or the Naughties or whatever. I had friends in San Francisco who set up an online poll to let “the people” decide NameThatDecade.com, instead of leaving it to the media. Predictably, the site is now defunct. But the media hasn’t picked up the slack.

Here we are almost three years into this decade, and as far as I’ve noticed, people don’t refer to it as anything. We still talk of the ’90s, the ’80s, etc., but I simply don’t hear people in conversations or in the media refer to this decade by any nickname. Is it just me? Do the rest of you actually know what to call it and you’re just not telling me?

UPDATE:
Olivier writes: “Well, it’s simple, we call it… the ’00s (mwahahah)”

Yeah, I know, I saw your post with that, which is what set me off on this (it doesn’t take much). I’m just wondering how to pronounce that.

You know any story with “Geraldo” and “Hooters” in it has got to be good.

Reuters reports:

Two zookeepers in a small northwest German town have been suspended and put under police investigation for allegedly eating the zoo’s animals, according to police.