Moving my digital brain [evernote]

After I heard that google was no longer supporting google notebook, I was a bit saddened by the news. While I've been testing out evernote, web clippings were a lot easier via google.

However, all is not lost, Evernote now allows you to import your google notebook into one place. What also gives me confidence that evernote is going to be around is the latest round of funding they received--$4.5 million.

Jeet Kune Do Ping Pong [Nokida Ad]

Bruce Lee shows us his nunchuck skills in a completely new way:

Nokia N96 - Bruce Lee Ping Pong from Ramalho Blog on Vimeo.

lady slumdog vengeance? [movie rumors]

In an interview with Empire, Danny Boyle (director of the recent Slumdog Millionaire) has recently been offered the opportunity to remake Chan-Wook Park's Lady Vengeance.

Lady Vengeance is the third and final part of Chan-Wook Park's vengeance trilogy. If you haven't seen them, you should Chan-Wook explores three different takes on vengeance.

Scent of a Burger [BK Advertising]

With the help of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Burger King has been making inroads with its viral marketing tactics. A huge part of their success has been their unconventional marketing tactics to create and bolster the brand image.

In early November, a friend of mine found a wallet on a busy Chicago street. Accompany a clean dollar bill was a faux driver’s license of the King and a BK Crown card. The wallets are part of their reverse pick-pocket campaign.

Not be beaten by Britney Spears or Alan Cumming (Nightcrawler in X2, Piers in Spice World, Boris Grishenko in Goldeneye), the King joins the "celebrity" fragrance bonanza. You can get a whiff of “flame-broiled meat” thanks Flame, by BK. Meghan Daum explores the primal relationship between man and meat, but notes that the l’eau pour homme can only be bought in unique spots:

You have to buy it at a Ricky's drugstore in New York, which has an exclusive deal, or on Burger King's "Fire Meets Desire" website, which features its king mascot reclining by a fire and clothed in nothing but an animal fur. Make that, you had to buy it at those places. By Monday, it was sold out at both and going for $73 and up on EBay.

Cross-posted from BizKG

[Movie Reviews]

Movie Reviews:
Son of Rambow: [4 of 5]

boys watch rambo film

make believe epic movie

boys find family

Planet B-Boy: [3.5 of 5]

break dancing indie

kinetic, motion, street art

doc, great story arc

Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: [3 of 5]

old Indy, back again

same bits, even a son!

but somehow, bit stale

I was really looking forward to this film. Having grown up with the films in this franchise, I expected the action from my younger days. To be fair, I think it's a straight-line production of the traditional Indie series. But in the modern context, it lacks the kinetic energy as the series did before. I gave it a rating for ole time's sake.

Unfulfilled Darkness After... [After Dark book review]

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

My Haiku of the book:

one lone Tokyo night

lives tied together by chance

stock murakami

I'm still on the fence on this one. I first found Murakami in 1999 when I picked up a copy of an elephant vanishes while teaching English in Taiwan.

His books tend to explore the same themes, such as: loneliness, how random threads are tied together, and what lurks metaphysical darkness lurks behind reality.

After Dark is written like a neo-noir film, taking place in diners, love hotels, and empty convenience stores. The book takes place over seven hours of a Tokyo night. The chapters track the passing of time as we are are voyeurs in three stories strung together by bizarre coincidences.

As Michael Dirda describes:

At times, the novel recalls those unsettling films of Jean-Luc Godard or Michelangelo Antonioni where something dire seems always about to happen, even as attractive young people, full of anomie and confusion, meander aimlessly through an ominous urban landscape.

Murakami's literary spiderwebs remind us that, though we may not be aware of it, something profoundly disturbing sits behind the mask of reality, that we are being stalked from its other side and that we are connected to our past the same way the ground under our feet is connected to the depths of the earth, through wells and tunnels.

Overall, for someone who has read most of Murakami's work, I wasn't particularly thrilled. I have already read mirror images of the content in his other work. However, I've always enjoyed reading his books again and usually find more meaning from a second read. For the time being, I'll have to give After Dark and average rating.

Rating: (2.4/5)

Haiku (俳句) [Haiku Reviews]

I was rereading a lot of my reviews and realized that I'm one wordy kid. While I am moved to write about a book or a movie, I want to find a succinct way of getting my way across. I've settled on writing a Haiku (俳句).

According to Wikipedia, Haiku is:

a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 Japanese on (a phonetic unit identical to the mora), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively, and typically containing a kigo, or seasonal reference. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to equate to the Japanese haiku's three metrical phrases.

I was telling K, yesterday, about this great new idea. However, after a quick search, the law of the Internets prevailed. The one that says that any idea that you may have is already in the Internets. You can find how unoriginal my idea is here, here, and here.

A Slum O'Kay Rags to Raj-ah Tale [Slumdog Millionaire Review]

There's been a lot of buzz about the film. However, this is no typically bollywood film. Slumdog is a heart-warming crossover directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and the underrated Sunshine).

Typical bollywood films have the following characteristics and themes:

• Love and betrayal (on a scale of 1 to 10 in melodrama, they're typically as high as south korean soaps
• Exploration of family dynamics
  
• And always always always... a dance sequence

To be honest, I liked the film, but didn't love the film. You can see Danny's hand through the entire film. Maybe I walked in with expectations too high, but I found the film a little predictable.

However, maybe the best films are predictable. K loves watching Love Actually around this time of year. There is something clever about how the film is constructed and warm about how the main character's (Jamal) journey to be with his destined that will make this a repeat film watched on a movie night between a couple.

[3 of 5]

I want to try something new, i wrote a haiku for the movie:

boyle in bollywood

boy seeks girl melodrama

rags to raj-ah tale

Don't Count Your Seats Until You've Sat Down [United Suites]

On my return trip from visiting Egypt and Jordan, I spent many miles to upgrade myself to business class.

United Airlines has been slowly rolling out "the next generation" of business class seats. Shown below, they're like miniaturized first-class cockpits.
These seats have all sorts of bells and whistles:

• Ability to lie flat. True 180-degree seats
  
• On-Demand TV
• Menu designed by Charlie Trotter
• Output for your laptop
• Ipod Dock (you need to buy the converter)

After visiting UA's promotional website and reading blog posts about the new business class chairs, imagine my surprise when I stepped into the plane to find... just seats, no cockpits. I quickly realized that I had been bamboozled. Luckily, I was one of the first to board the plane and got to see everybody's reaction as they piled onto the plane. It was fun.

It was a look of utter surprise and disappointment. Some people looked side to side and probably wondered, is this the right plane? Am I flying back to Chicago? In our section of the cabin, the one and only thing people talked about was on the (lack of) the inquiring how they were expecting something different.

These new cockpit suites are only available on a couple routes (LHR to ORD, for example) and on select planes (21 of 91 planes have been converted).

Business class on a 7 hour flight is a lot better than economy class. But we all felt that we got the short end of the stick. My "single serving friend" had read UA's press release, visited the website, changed his route to fly through Heathrow instead of Frankfurtused a TON of miles to upgrade himself, and double checked that the plane had the new suites, just to try it out. It's an adult version of taking candy from a baby.

Too bad, so sad. I guess I'm telling you this story because I find it fascinating how important it is to manage expectations. We would've been fine with our tattered beige business class seats that couldn't even go "angled flat."

Who knows when I'll be able to fly on an international flight again, but I'll be going in with managed expectations.

This post is a bit of promotion [Gallery 400 Exhibit]

On Wednesday, I will be attending the opening of Gallery 400. This will be K's first professionally curated show and from what I hear, it's going to be a doozy. There's been a lot of buzz around it and I hear the emerging artists are hot hot hot.  The likes include: Karl Erickson, Andrew Falkowski, Matt Hanner, Shana Lutker, Debora Warner, and Jordan Wolfson.

From the press release:

This Shadow is a Bit of Ideology, gathers a group of artists working against the darkness cast by a long, drawn-out war, a rancorous spirit in politics, a social landscape obscured by rampant information retrieval, and a crumbling economy. The artists in the exhibition do not turn their backs on current socio-political issues, but neither do they embrace propaganda. Rather, they harness anxieties—political, economic, personal—as productive generators for form. Introspection, reflective criticism, oblique commentary and cohabitation of past with present are just a few of the tactics by which these artists navigate progressively through the twilight.

With my sister is visiting from San Diego; and since she's a foodie, we have reservations after the opening to grab dinner at Alinea.

It's going to be night of multi-sensory exuberance. First sight and sound, and then taste and sight. All with 2 of 3 of my most fave women in the world.

i'm a momma's boy after all...

Research Shows... [Data validity]

We've entered a linked information world. The emphasis for information distribution isn't focused on creation but the aggregation and filtering of information. The splicing, rebroadcasting, linking, editing, aggregation becomes one lengthy game of information telephone. We'll often take it for face value and begin quoting it for our own use. For example, given the current testimonials for the auto industry, the 1 in 10 US jobs tied to the industry has been given a lot of press. However, with some casual searching you'll find this on Economix, a NY Times blog.

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, writes in Times Higher Education about the assumptions, and sketchy data the term: "research shows"

As someone devoted to academic research, I feel increasingly embarrassed when I encounter the words "research shows" in a newspaper article...Last month a study by John Alford of Rice University proved that right-wing Americans are likely to be far more nervous than left-wing counterparts. Liberal readers will be delighted to learn that they are typically relaxed.

We know this is cutting-edge research because he interviewed as many as 46 people.

Image Source: Wessex Archaeology