farlane.blog

In Heaven, they play your favorite song all night long. In my version of Heaven, however, there’s a bit more going on. I think that the Talking Heads might be playing the New Year’s party this year.

While this is probably my favorite song by the Talking Heads, I loved this video from the BBC.

Happy New Year to all of you.

Over at Michigan in Pictures I did kind of a Christmas card with my own photo.

I thought I should also leave something under the tree for the people who still read this blog despite the fact that I don’t pay nearly enough attention to it (hint: this is the place where I focus most of my online attention these days). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not mothballing this blog - I need to have a place to put everything that I can’t somehow associate with Michigan - I just wanted to make you aware that I wasn’t off eating bon-bons or something (well, not tooo many bon-bons!).

So, that present.  If you enjoy photography, check out Detroit Bike Blog (and his pics on Flickr). Mac has a great eye for the interesting and the slightly offbeat and I think you’ll enjoy spending some time with him.

Here’s the story of this little project. I haven’t told the Detroit Cobras yet that I used their song. I’m a little scared of them.

I’ve always been of the opinion that Forbes was a relatively staid (and useless) magazine that was primarily concerned with two things: the Making of Money and the Making of More Money. When a game company newsletter alerted me to an interview with their founder at Forbes, I was stunned by the immensity of what I found.

Forbes Special Report on Games is staggering … it’s as if Malcom Forbes himself looked down from whatever high perch he occupies and said LET THERE BE GAMES. And lo, there were games. Everything from Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card talking about morality in video games (I’m sure there’s a cheat code to unlock that) to Civilization author Sid Meier on learning from games (I learned “Uninstall that damn game from the office computer”) to deeper pieces like the one that explores how social networking sites are turning into games (hey, you can now buy fake friends on MySpace!)

Photo is Seven about to happen three different ways by fd. Hey Flickr geeks, this fd is THAT fd, the fd of fd’s Flickrtoys.

As I was wandering the tangled tubes of the internet this morning, I stopped at Capital Viewpoint, a blog about one of my passions, Michigan politics. I recently re-stumbled upon StumbleUpon, so I dutifully hit the “I like it” button in my toolbar.

It struck me that this simple and almost reflexive act was like giving a lost visitor directions, planting a tree, picking up a piece of trash or any of the 10,000 other things one does to enhance a community they love. Every day the web sprawls larger. Much of it is meaningless information created to look like meaningful information - piles of copies that obscure what is good. It seems to me that it’s a good thing whenever/however all of us can take a moment where we can to make a mark, pay a compliment or call out something to others.

This photo is titled “Jumping the sun on the salt flats” and was taken on the saltflats of Uyunu, Bolivia. Wikipedia says that the Salar de Uyuni are the largest salt flats in the world - 25 times bigger than Bonneville. The photographer, Lars Kristian Schjønhaug, is from Trondheim (about which I now know 100% more). To my encyclopedic knowledge that Trondheim is a city the Vikings in Civilization will build, I can now add the fact that fall is beautiful there as well.

PS: There was some pretty cool stuff on Salar de Uyuni including a note that Internet phenomenon “Where the Hell is Matt?” danced there. He does, it’s the first one. He also was sent a pretty cool video, included below.