Media Without Borders

It looks like Borders Books & Music plans to become just Borders Books as they will either greatly reduce their CD & DVD inventory or possibly eliminate it.

Some stores already have "Clearance Sale for CD's and DVD's" signs with CDs and DVDs at 30% off (not new releases)

Is it that the book business is better? (That goes against what we hear in the news) Or is it hat CDs and DVDs are also becoming dying forms of media?

No official word online. Maybe the way to sell music & movies IS online...

Call the Rejection Line

This is probably only new to me.

I have to admit that in my youth I never found the need to give someone a fake phone number. (I was pleased someone actually wanted my phone number.)

On Seinfeld, Elaine gave a fake number regularly, but ended up meeting up with the people who had been getting all her fake calls.

Someone showed me this site which supplies a phone number for you (it's a New York number) that is the "official New York Rejection Line."

They have a "rejection line team" that provides premium rejection services completely free of charge. They recommend you use it at bars, clubs, bathroom walls, in your cell phone as your "private line" as a mysterious voicemail, for creditors, telemarketers, and religious zealots.

What is their business model? Has anyone used this? I am afraid to call.

Lost Generation

This runs less than 2 minutes and it's worth the watching. There's a great twist to it.




It was created for the AARP U@50 video contest. It's a kind of "reaction" to an Argentinian political ad titled "The Truth" that used the same technique.

Oh Crap, There's Goes The Environment

Americans love the soft life. We love ultra-soft toilet paper. We don't think about it, but according to this recent New York Times article, fluffiness comes at a high environmental price.

The price is the destruction of millions of trees in North America, including rare old-growth forests. And it's not just trees...

"Turning a tree to paper requires more water than turning paper back into fiber, and many brands that use tree pulp use polluting chlorine-based bleach for greater whiteness. In addition, tissue made from recycled paper produces less waste tonnage - almost equaling its weight - that would otherwise go to a landfill."

Yeah, but what choice do we have? We want toilet paper. Don't we need to cut down trees to get the paper? Nope. There's post-consumer recycled tissue products.

You can get guides from Greenpeace and the NRDC to the environmental soundness of tissue brands.

Updike and Cheever

Dick Cavett writes a blog for The New York Times. He blogged about when he had interviewed John Updike and John Cheever on the same show and that has led them to offer the complete version of that show from 1981.

Here is a link to the video

Psychedelica Fish

A brightly-colored fish which moves oddly along the seabed using hand-like fins and puffing out water from its gills has been hailed as a new species by scientists and has been dubbed psychedelica.

The fish was spotted by scuba divers off the island of Ambon in eastern Indonesia. It's hard to believe in our information age of computer databases, but the species was actually first discovered almost 20 years ago. Turns out that it sat on a shelf - wrongly labeled until it came to light when the divers were unable to identify the fish from photographs.

It belongs to the frogfish family and is completely covered in swirling concentric stripes - white and blue on a peach background - radiating out from its aqua-colored eyes. It has a broad flat face, thick fleshy cheeks and chin, and eyes that look forward like a human or other predator (rather than the sideways eyes of most prey).