• JewTube.com
  Online video sharing site for (supposedly) Jewish content. Umm, Borat?
• Yideoz The Premiere Jewish Video Upload Community
  Their tagline is “Oy!”

• GSN’s Without Prejudice game show reframes spectator-sport racism as education and societal improvement
  Contestants judge people by their appearance, and oh, the hilarious things they’ll say. But we reward the open-minded with cash, after thrilling to the ignorance of others. Tee-hee, ka-ching.
• NAACP Joins GSN Project Based On New Series ‘Without Prejudice?’
  “This is an opportunity for the NAACP to more fully engage in a discussion of prejudice and bigotry and to explain to a wider audience the bases for these ills and how we can rid society of them,” said NAACP National Board of Directors Chairman Julian Bond
• Should racism be used as entertainment?
  “I don’t like him on the fact that he’s black,” a Polynesian panelists says of a black man. “There was a lot of them turned up wanting to put across their views,” said executive producer David Young. “These are views that don’t get heard. He has a right to be heard on the show.”

• Lenco-PMC in Waverly, Nebraska is the last US mfr of cassette tape shells
  Make about 22 million/yr., music market is dead but spoken word/audiobooks (esp for the blind) and religious/missionary are popular as well as blank tape. Format’s durability, inexpensiveness, and portability – it remembers its spot when moved to another device.
• Thai police plan to shame renegade officers by making them wear pink “Hello Kitty” armbands.
  “(Hello) Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps,” Anyone who litters, arrives late or parks illegally will be punished this way. They will also be prohibited from discussing the armband.

• Shouts & Murmurs: Hey, Look (humor from the New Yorker)
  What I imagined people were saying about me when I was…(Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen)

David Denby deconstructs Knocked Up and the entire sub-genre he calls slacker-striver romance. He considers American culture over the decades and how relationships between the sexes were depicted on screen during those different periods.

Apatow has a genius for candor that goes way beyond dirty talk-that’s why “Knocked Up” is a cultural event. But I wonder if Apatow, like his fumy youths, shouldn’t move on. It seems strange to complain of repetition when a director does something particularly well, and Apatow does the infantilism of the male bond better than anyone, but I’d be quite happy if I never saw another bong-gurgling slacker or male pack again. The society that produced the Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard movies has vanished; manners, in the sense of elegance, have disappeared. But manners as spiritual style are more important than ever, and Apatow has demonstrated that he knows this as well as anyone. So how can he not know that the key to making a great romantic comedy is to create heroines equal in wit to men? They don’t have to dress for dinner, but they should challenge the men intellectually and spiritually, rather than simply offering their bodies as a way of dragging the clods out of their adolescent stupor.

• Match.com goes mobile, CEO utters meaningless “listening to customers” PR-scripted BS
  Another in a series: “When we listened to customers, they told us they saw the distinction between the Web and mobile as somewhat artificial,” said Match.com CEO Thomas Enraght-Moony.

I’ve blogged here and here about good and bad implementations of wipes in grocery stores.

I found another one in Coupeville, WA, the other day.

Despite the rather industrial graphics, there’s a few improvements. It’s very clearly for cleaning the cart, not your hands (as Safeway suggested).. It’s right next to the carts, so when you take a cart, you use it (rather than located near the exit, at Safeway). And should the Red Apple employees fail to maintain the display, there’s at least an encouraging reminder to the customer that they should ask to have it replenished.

This is no iPhone, it’s not a radical innovation, but it’s a definite response to a need, and tracking how it is and isn’t being dealt with is enlightening. First, one has to understand the need. Then one has to develop a solution. Then the solution must be implemented. Properly. Effectively. And throw in iteration, for fun. The fact that something as simple as this fails around solution/implementation at a major chain like Safeway tells you something about the organizational barriers to even the most mild of innovations.

The New York Times looks at Ludlum and other dead authors who continue to (sorta) release books. This isn’t new; in recent years we’ve seen post-Frank Herbert Dune and other Asimov/Robots books. John Gardner and others have been writing James Bond books for a while now. But as media continues to talk about “brands” and (ugh) “franchises” then I guess this is what we’re in for. It’s easier to sell (and buy) something that is already known that break through with something new. Movies into games. Games into movies. Sequels. Prequels. Remakes. The book people may just be getting started.

Whether it is fair to readers to publish the Ludlum books posthumously – in the form of spruced-up old manuscripts or new novels written by others – is not a serious concern to the estate or to Grand Central Publishing, the former Warner Books, where the rights to all new novels moved from St. Martin’s Press.

“I don’t think anyone objects as long as you maintain the quality of the book,” Mr. Morrison said. “The Sherlock Holmes novels have been a business since ‘The Seven-Percent Solution,’ and some have been better than others. It’s the characters that interest people.”

• The Bedroom Project – an ethno study of young people and digital media
  Link to video at end of post; as one would expect it only shows the topics explored and no conclusions. What did they learn? Oh, and what kind of model release are they using to get permission to post subject videos online?

• Idaho Spud candy on Flickr
  Yum? Chocolate potato-shaped thingy.
• Idaho Candy Products
  The popular Idaho Spud Bar is a wonderful combination of a light cocoa flavored marshmallow center drenched with a dark chocolate coating and then sprinkled with coconut (Sorry, no potato!)