Take a look at these photos taken after last night’s presidential debate. What’s up with McCain and his tongue? Dry cough? Hairballs? The next step in his public metamorphosis into Grampa Simpson?
Photos courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Millvina Dean, last living survivor of the Titanic.
Millvina Dean, age 96, hopes to raise 3,000 pounds to help cover the costs of living in a nursing home. She’s doing this by selling her mementoes from the aftermath of the Titanic, which include a hundred-year-old suitcase full of clothes given to her family after they arrived in New York. Her family took the Titanic to emigrate from the U.K. to Kansas; her mother and brother also survived, but her father did not.
The folks who said that Sarah Palin’s performance at last Thursday’s vice presidential debate didn’t leave Tina Fey any material were wrong — she killed in the opening skit, turning Palin’s perky but content-free non-answers into pure comedy gold. If you missed Saturday Night Live this weekend, you can enjoy the skit by clicking on the image below:
Click the picture to see the video.
If I were to ask you which newspapers and magazines you read — and yes, their online versions count — would you be able to name at least one? Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin that question and hilarity ensued — she hemmed and hawed like the kid presenting a book report on the book she hadn’t yet read: “Treasure Island is a book about an island. With treasure on it.”
Here’s the transcript:
Katie Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read, before you were tapped for this, to stay informed and to understand the world?
Sarah Palin: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press for the media, I mean…
Couric: Like what ones specifically? I’m curious that you…
Palin: Um, all of ’em, any of ’em that um have been in front of me over all these years, um…
Couric: Can you name any of them?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country where it’s kind of suggested it seems like, wow how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, DC may be thinking and doing, when you live up there in Alaska. Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.
She didn’t even have the presence of mind to throw out the name of any newspaper or magazine she’s heard of: the New York Times or Washington Post? Nope. Time or Newsweek? Uh-uh. Not even Alaskan newspapers such as the Anchorage Daily News, the Juneau Empire. She didn’t even come up with the name of her hometown paper, Wasilla’s Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, where she once worked!
If that weren’t bad enough, you have to remember that in university, she majored in journalism.
In case you were wondering, here are the newspapers and magazines I regularly read, either in dead-tree or online form. For the sake of sticking to the spirit of Katie Couric’s question, I’m not including online-only magazines.
Daily:
At least once a week:
What are your favourites?
Actor, director, car racing enthusiast, humanitarian, creator of a pretty good salad dressing, beer aficionado and master of the steely blue-eyed stare Paul Newman died yesterday at the age of 83 after a long battle with lung cancer.
What you may not know is that when artist Gil Kane was re-designing the superhero character Green Lantern in the late 1950s, he used Paul Newman as his template:
Requiescat in pace, Mr. Newman.
Life in a startup is full of adventures with its fair share of ups and downs. Budgets shrink and grow, teams shrink and grow and strategies constantly evolve. During these challenging economic times, it’s the companies who maintain their focus while controlling their spending discipline that will survive.
b5media lives and dies by these same rules, and those of us in the ad-driven internet business expect no less. In this current market environment, it is the mandate of a responsible business to look at ways to stretch their dollar and cut their costs.
My role at b5media as Nerd Wrangler, a.k.a. Technical Project Manager, overlaps too closely with the Director of Technology, and there just isn’t enough work to go between the two of us. The Powers That Be at b5 had to make a tough call, but they made the right one for the company: they had to let me go. My final day at the company will be Friday, October 3rd.
I’d like to thank Jeremy Wright and the rest of b5media for taking me on and for the experience at b5 over the past seven months.
And to the rest of you: this gun’s for hire!
(Here’s 
.)
My career has been shaped by what I like to call “hobbies that have spiralled out of control”. The first was computer programming, which I took up in the eighties. Accordion playing came in the nineties. In the “naughties”, after submitting suggestion after suggestion to Cory Doctorow to post in Boing Boing, he said “Joey, why don’t you start your own blog?”
I opened an account at Blogger and, when prompted for a name, I went with the stupidest thing I could think of — The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. “I’ll give it a real name later,” I thought.
Nearly seven years later, this blog has become my third hobby to spiral out of control. It’s paid off in ways I would never have imagined, and it’s gained a readership I wouldn’t have imagined either. StatCounter says that this year alone, it’s amassed 1.98 million pageviews. At the current rate, I’ll hit 2 million sometime next week:
While nowhere near as popular as Accordion Guy, my tech blog, Global Nerdy, isn’t doing too badly either. It should hit half a million pageviews by the end of the year:
I’d like to say “thank you!” to all of you readers, whether you’re a long-time reader or if this is your first visit either of these blogs. These numbers don’t happen without you.
I’d also like to say “watch these blogs!” because things look like they’re going to get really interesting.