Archive for January, 2007

Happy National Gorilla Suit Day

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

Three gorilla grunts for Don Martin!

Yes, it’s National Gorilla Suit Day — next to Festivus, perhaps the brightest holiday on the calendar. Enjoy! And take a moment to savor the official theme song.

The Verdict On Wikipedia: Respectable

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s taken its share of abuse, from Stephen Colbert to The Onion. But as the New York Times reported yesterday, it’s not all about dissing the online encyclopedia: Courts are starting to reference Wikipedia in their verdicts.

National Get Organized Month

Monday, January 29th, 2007

Quick! Straighten up! There's still a coupla days left!

January is National Get Organized Month. Had I been better organized, I might have let you know about it sooner than this. But if you believe this piece by Bill Geist on yesterday’s CBS Sunday Morning, a little clutter might be a good thing.

Nerds 2.0

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

Nerds: A Musical Software Satire

I’m not a theater reviewer, and I didn’t even sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night (isn’t that great advertising, by the way, for exactly that reason?). Still, I have to report that Nerds: A Musical Software Satire was a lot of fun, especially if you have any kind of working knowledge of the history of Apple and Microsoft. Here’s a Playbill article that has more production details and a few performance photos.

Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiner are the writers (lately of Robot Chicken) who provide such theater lunacies as the Homebrew Computer Club in song and dance … Bill Gates and Paul Allen rapping (and breakdancing!) about Windows … an actor running up the center aisle wielding a hammer in a recreation of Apple’s 1984 ad … Steve Jobs singing about spiritual rebirth in a song called “Think Different” (the lyrics of which smartly reference many personalities featured in Apple’s well-known print campaign, such as Albert Einstein, Muhammad Ali and John Lennon) … Gates throwing money at the audience during the song-and-dance version of the antitrust trial … and, well, that should give you a general idea of the proceedings.

The play runs through February 27 at the Philadelphia Theater Company, and who knows what’ll happen to it after that. I think someone in the show should torrent a video of the entire production, or at least make a DVD available online. Then build off the inevitable blog buzz, head out to the San Francisco area and open the week of MacWorld 2008. In the heart of Silicon Valley, it’d probably run for years.

Nerds

Saturday, January 27th, 2007

PC and Mac? Yep: It's Gates and Jobs

A musical about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? Why not! Nerds: A Musical Software Satire is currently in previews in Philadelphia. I’m headed there tonight to check it out with my daughter, and will let you know tomorrow what it’s like at the intersection of operating systems and musical theater. Meanwhile, the Nerds blog has links to a bunch of clips like this one that promo the show by playing off Apple’s PC/Mac commercials. Good stuff.