sovay: (Default)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2011-11-28 12:29 pm

You need to know, you're your personal alchemist

Short things:

1. I'd never even heard of Cyber Monday until this year. What is it? I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

2. R.I.P., Ken Russell. I should find somewhere to start with him that isn't The Lair of the White Worm (1988). The Devils (1971) is only coming out on Region 2.

3. I wonder why Roddy McDowall was not also cast in the film version of No Time for Sergeants. (Those are some of the dorkiest glasses in stage history.) The other two principals were: it made Andy Griffith a star. It's not exactly as though he was an unknown property.

4. I'm not sure I see the point of having a book on Derek Jarman reviewed by someone who clearly didn't like his films very much. I'm glad Bray finds his paintings important, because I know very little about Jarman's non-cinematic art, and I hope someday to visit his garden at Dungeness, ideally with [livejournal.com profile] rushthatspeaks, but seriously: difficult? Hard to sit through? Sententious gesture politics? Well-intentioned? I have to wonder if we saw the same movies—I am never sure what to do with criticism when that happens. (Did he miss how much of Wittgenstein (1993) is funny?) Personally, I'm looking forward to Sebastiane (1976); I have been since I knew it existed. Brian Eno did the music and it's in Latin.

5. Aphorisms by Kafka, which I hadn't even known existed. Commentary by Michael Cisco, who probably does.

I must catch a bus.

[identity profile] movingfinger.livejournal.com 2011-11-28 05:48 pm (UTC)(link)
Cyber Monday: After the long Thanksgiving weekend, everyone goes back to work, fires up a web browser, and hits the shopping websites hard. I believe Amazon may have been an early noticer/adopter.

It creates a measurable, very large spike in traffic, and it was (and still is) more notable in areas where people do not have high-speed internet and computers at home.

[identity profile] movingfinger.livejournal.com 2011-11-29 05:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Technology Review has a squib on it today, noting that quotation marks are no longer used to refer to it; the piece links to/cites a New York Times headline from 2005, but I think it may be earlier than that. NYT piece here. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/technology/30iht-cyber.html)

I'm wondering how long the 22-year-old Wall Street legal secretary in the article who was quoted as having spent most of her 8-hour workday shopping online and sending links as "hints" to friends and family remained employed.