Saturday, December 13, 2008

Charlie Brown Ad Agency

I found this fun little video that puts a new spin on "It's a Charlie Brown Christmas". Very well done!

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Coffeehouses circa 1969

Came across this facinating film from 1969 that shows various coffeehouses created by churches etc. to entertain and educate the young folks at the time. I like it that you can smoke in church.
One kid even got his parents to give him their entire basement to put on a coffee house. Now that's teen spirit!

http://www.archive.org/details/CoffeeHo1969

(Had to remove the player since it kept autoplaying whenever you hit the site. Got to be real annoying, really fast!)

Disturbing Deaths In the Literary World

Being a writer getting you down? Take some tips from these writers who managed to find interesting ways to end it all.

Inspiration for the following list of dead literary figures came from Charles Bukowski’s poem, "Beasts bounding through time," specifically the lines "sylvia [plath] with her head in the oven like a baked potato . . . Shakespeare a plagiarist . . . the impossibility of being human." Some may call it morbid, some may call it truth - either way I don’t give a damn.

  • Euripides [480-406 B.C.] Greek Playwright - Mauled by a pack of wild dogs owned by Archelaus, the King of Macedonia.
  • Dante Alighieri [1256-1321] Italian Poet - Fell ill and died about an hour after completing The Divine Comedy.
  • Francis Villon [1431-1464?] French Poet - May have been attacked by a mob of bandits or hanged by authorities after a brief prison stay for murdering a priest. Take your pick. Left France at the age of 32 and was never heard from again. "Where are the snows of yesteryear?"
See the full list here:

http://www.alternativereel.com/includes/articles/display_article.php?id=00011

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Don't Forget About m.twitter.com

I've been trying to figure out how to get my Twitter updates away from a computer, without having them come to me as annoying and continuous text messages.
I already figured out that you can send a text message directly to Twitter by typing 21212 in the "To:" field, which is cool on it's own, but might not work for people who pay for text messaging.
Then I thought, maybe I can access the Twitter home page from my smart phone's browser, and Bob's your uncle, there it was. There is a standard view and a mobile view, and i find that the latter much faster and more compact for my Palm Treo.

By the way, if you use FireFox I found a neat little extension called TwitterBar, which lets you comment and post to Twitter right from Firefox's address bar. Pretty cool!