Obama's Record
Posted 6:19 AM

"Economy near collapse? Less than a month after taking office, President Obama signed a record $787 billion stimulus package. Comprehensive health-care reform? Obama succeeded, after a grueling year-long legislative process, where predecessors going back decades had failed. Credit-card reform? Check. Student loan reform? Done. Financial regulatory reform? Close." (CSM, 7/13/10)
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Free Legal Forms
Posted 5:15 PM

The web is filling up with spam and search engines are failing to keep up.

For example: in a search for "free legal forms", you'll find almost nothing of value on either Yahoo, Bing or Google. Or "apartment lease form", or any other legal form search... you'll get expensive paid subscriptions and sites filled with popup ads that have absolutely nothing of real value.

In "real life" you can go to a library, photocopy a few, and leave... for free and for real. I could host free legal forms for pennies a month, and make money from innocuous ads... and I'm sure someone (perhaps a nonprofit) just done that. But they are impossible to find... because there's too much money to gain by spamming search engines and suppressing more generous competitors.

The more generous the site, the less money they have to spend on promotion.... so you can't find them.

The problem is search engines. They are being "gamed". (And the problem with the engines is that they should, by now, be using a distributed trust network...)

The best site I've found so far is www.ilrg.com. If anyone knows a better one, let me know.
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Airbender's Clumsy Vibe is its Charm
Posted 12:40 PM

After the film, over Sushi, I glanced at "MLB.com" on the big-screen TV and commented to my son, "too many highlights". My mom replied, "Yeah, everything's overproduced." That's something Airbender got right.

"The Last Airbender" is *not* a slick Hollywood movie. Not only that, it completely failed to capture either the campy-humor of the show, or the kung-fu fast-pased vibe of a proper anime-to-big screen remake.

So why, five minutes after the film, were we calling each other "sushi benders" and having so much fun? It was precisely because of the "old school" fantasy-flick vibe that we enjoyed it. The dialogue was stilted, good performances from Patel, Peltz, and Toub were wildly overshadowed by very, very bad performances and miscastings of the from minor characters. The "northern army" looked like a high-school marching band....

And yet, we all had a good time. It was a light, simple film ...with the production quality closer to a reality show than a blockbuster.... but I won't miss the next one.

Warning to M. Shyamalan. Don't do that again. Spend a nickel or 2 on a writer to help you with dialogue, better extras and minor characters, get some top coreogrpahy on the fight scenes, etc. Millions of cult-anime fans are willing to put up with a cute-but-clumsy first movie, but not a second.
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