April 28, 2005

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

5:58 p.m. Thursday (Blogroll)

i am 8-bit video game art show. Fort 90 blogs the opening of a show in Los Angeles (at Gallery 1988 and its next-door neighbor, Acme Game Store) based on the art of pre-1995, 8-bit video games (think Pac Man, Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, Salad Shooter and Fairy Godmother) with lots of fun photos.

The images on the right are the work of Michael Slack and Gary Baseman, respectively. Duck hunter Hunter Thompson, a cartoon now, is by Tim Tomkinson.

I miss the jump-run-and-shoot side scrollers, and it's good to see them as inspirations.

IGN Game Cube reviews the opening and offers a gallery of images -- more professional but without quite the energy of Fort 90's single, packed page.

i am 8-bit has a Web site, and the Gallery, while not complete, has the best quality photos.

The Most Expensive Zip Codes 2005, according to Fortune. Sorting by ZIP code puts New York (10XXX) and southern New England (02XXX) on top, and makes clear that no Rhode Island areas are in the top 150. Only six Massachusetts ZIPs are there, including one each on Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. (The others are Dover, Waban, Weston and Wellesley Hills.)

Tops is Atherton, Calif., near Stanford, where the median home-sale price in 2004 was $2,496,553.

13 reasons on "why Kelly Clarkson is not only the New Dylan, but the only Dylan most will ever need":

American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson is playing at PPAC tonight. When she played in Detroit April 6, so did Bob Dylan (but not in the same venue).

Faced with this cosmic coincidence, Serene Dominic of the alt-weekly Metro Times begins,

I know you haters expect another hatchet piece on America’s Sweetheart of Song Gone Electric, and as much as every bilious globule left in me hates American Idol for awarding record contracts to singers that couldn’t get the emotional gist of a milk commercial right, I’ve got to fess up that Kelly Clarkson could conquer the world and it wouldn’t raise a hackle on me. I like her, not only for her head-pinching vocal range but her potential to obliterate the whole Joe Simpson franchise — she’s both Jessica and Ashlee rolled into one....

But if you're not going to go there, here how it ends: "Reasons No. 8 through 13: She aches, takes, bakes, makes and fakes just like a woman."

Backyard bonanza: The Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle Tribune reports that men planting trees in a friend's back yard in Methuen dug up a wooden chest containing cookie tins stuffed with old money:

...Some of the older money have quirks such as a $1 bill from 1899 that reads "One Silver Dollar," or the $5 bill with a Roman V in the corner rather than a 5. They also had some rare "replacement money" that have red serial numbers and a red star.

Using the Internet, a couple of currency books and the preliminary estimate from the shop in Plaistow, the men estimate the haul could be worth $40,000 to $60,000. Dozens of bills with local banks printed in the center of the bill are not listed in any currency book or on the Internet.

During the period from 1863 to 1929 the federal government permitted thousands of banks to issue their own paper currency. These were called National Bank Notes. In 1914 the Federal Reserve banks began issuing notes, the only currency still being manufactured today by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

(Pictured at right are two bills from the find: A five dollar bill dated 1905 with the city of Lawrence printed on it (top) and a five dated 1925 marked Methuen.)

Methuen historian Dan Gagnon said the money was probably buried by immigrants who built shacks and planted gardens in the area around the area in the early 1900s. The families lived in tenements near the mills in Lawrence and Methuen where they worked, but traveled to the area, which was mainly countryside, on the weekend, Gagnon said....

Nokia's N91 targets iPod: PC Magazine reports,

(Yesterday) at an event in Amsterdam Nokia unveiled the "N-series," its new line of music and photo phones. With the announcement of the N91—the company's first 4-GB, Wi-Fi, Microsoft Media Player phone—Nokia jumped on the hard-drive-phone bandwagon. In addition, two other multimedia handsets were announced. And these devices just might be coming to a store near you by the end of the year.

Without a doubt, the star of the show was the N91 music phone, which has a 4-GB hard drive, Wi-Fi, and Microsoft Media Player 10, making it the first fruit of the Nokia-Microsoft alliance. You can download songs onto the phone via Wi-Fi, USB 2.0, or EDGE cellular networks; the N91 appears on your desktop as a hard drive and also syncs to your desktop Windows Media Player.

The N91 has so many new features they're hard to count. For instance, there's line-in, stereo recording—you can jack in a mike and use it to record lectures or concerts. Play music through standard headphones or a wireless stereo Bluetooth headset; generate playlists on your PC or on the device. The N91 is also a Symbian Series 60 smartphone, so you can hook up a keyboard and use Office applications. And somehow, with all these features, it'll still get 7 days of standby battery life.

Could the N91 be an iPod-killer? We're skeptical; a phone with these specs will likely cost well over $600, which would put it out of competition with dedicated music players. But the N91 looks like an awesome multimedia smartphone ...

There's also a N90, emphasizing photos rather than music, and the N70, a basic smartphone.

Colours on the road: Truck Painting in Pakistan! Exhibition of photography of Asia House Essen.

These'll put your puny flames to shame.

Dyeing with Kool-Aid. In the microwave, even, if it's small.

Both these links come via J-Walk.

Podcasting Killed the Radio Star: Wired reports on a move by Infinity Broadcasting, the radio division of Viacom, to convert San Francisco AM radio station KYCY to KYOUradio — and to broadcast an all-podcast format of audio files created by ... anyone....

(Podcasts are MP3s recorded by individuals and distributed by subscription to their RSS feeds. Here's Wikipedia's explanation.) These won't be downloadable, though, because KYOU will pick up the cost of music royalties for those who use popular songs in the podcasts it accepts.

Old radio guy Doc Searls weighs in:

It's a cool thing for broadcasting. I'm not sure it's a cool thing for podcasting. Though I am sure it was inevitable. I didn't say that yesterday because I wanted to think about it. And I'm not going to say much more about it today, because I have to fly home from Boston, and I want to walk a little more around Harvard Square first.

But I'll leave you with this in the meantime: KYOU may be about "you"; but it's not about free speech, for the simple reason that speech on radio is highly regulated.

Speech on podcasting isn't regulated. Yet

Multiple bonus linkage, as well as the longest post on the matter, from Jeff Jarvis.

Jeff, typically, wants to change the pronoun:

This is still a big company handing over its time and using the second-person plural: YOURadio.

We'll know we've arrived when the people take over that station for real and change the name to OURadio....

Jeff is President of Advance.Net, which owns a whole lot of newspapers and Web sites which have not yet been similarly taken over.

Camilla in pizza: There are no limits to what can happen what artists make pizza. From the English blog Shiny Shiny:

Pizza Express is celebrating its 40th birthday and since it shares its birthday with the Queen (21st April apparently, so I'm a bit late with this one), the Pizza people have commissioned a series of portraits of the doughy royals. Nice to see Camilla getting a pizza

via BoingBoing