The Airport Jewelry Kiosk Interview Show

Odd.

February 28, 2014 at 8:56PM
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

I was vaguely aware you could call a phone number and get movie information, but why would I do that when the listings are in the paper? Things changed; now I think why would I check the listings in the paper when I have Fandango? Sometimes it's a race between myself and my wife; she checks the paper, I whip out the app, and we see who can get the information first. She usually wins because the print version of the newspaper does not display a holographic 3D trailer of a movie and require her to search for the NO THANKS button.

Which brings us to Moviefone. AOL bought it for $400 mil back in 2001. Brilliant. This week they announced they'd drop the "fone" part and move the service to app-only, where it will compete with everything else. Does this NYT story resonate with you?

Never used it. Never called. Well, let's go to YouTube . . . Nope. Can't find it. But I did find a clip, where the Voice of Moviefone - Russ LEATHERMAN - is interviewed on . . . this show.

(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

There's a whole series. You wish it was bad enough to be one of those discoveries that suddenly get famous after someone on Reddit plucks it from obscurity, but it's not.

DIG IN Friday may be half-over, but I believe this is the most memorable sentence of the day:

"Curiosity piqued, I headed over to the site, which explains how it plans to cultivate edible meat from cloned celebrity tissue samples."

More here. The company says they're quiteserious about selling dried, aged, cured and spiced lab-grown celebrity meat.

Inconceivable. You don't know where to start figuring out how much you cannot understand the dimensions at work here. Anyway, that's a story about a black hole that "Blasts Galaxy-Sized Gaps in Space," but that's last month's news. This month has this: "Monster Black Holes Can Kill Galactic Star Formation." That's if you're unlucky enough to have a supermassive enormo-gigantic ultra-honking black hole in the center of your galaxy. If you do there probably isn't a you in the first place. Point is, the headline accurately sums up the story. This isn't how you get hits these days. Let's look around the rest of the page and see if it's possible to recast good science news in Upworthy-BuzzFeedy headlines.

That's okay, but the exclamation point makes it look like you're trying too hard. The ideal formation would be NASA pointed its telescope at the wrong place and no one guessed what they'd see next" or some such drivel.

Much better. But let me show you how it's really done. This popped up on a page the other day.

(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

That's how you do it. Macro photography of some hideous beastle that may be living inside of you. Who could resist?

TECH How do we preserve old games? It's possible, thanks to emulation and dedicated hobbyists, but it also requires enough time, money, and people. This article discusses the problems facing the preservation effort, but it doesn't address an ephemeral aspect of gaming: the experience. You can save the game, but no one who plays it in 2050 will understand how it felt to play it in 1996, for example. Just as it's hard today to understand how movie audiences in 1921 experienced a new type of FX. I played a little "Hexen" the other day, and it was claustrophic, jerky, blocky, and flat. Almost unplayable, and hard to enjoy. At the time? Cutting-edge and addictive.

(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

NEWS Finally: this. A simple account that gives you an idea of what they want in Ukraine. Besides the Russian boot, of course. It's short, and worth a read.

That's it for this week; thanks for the patronage. See you on Monday.

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about the writer

jameslileks

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