David, the soup peddler, had a second-night-of-pesach dinner last night, at which I was present. A very new-agey type of affair. Following are some ideas that cropped up during conversation:

1. It used to be that Americans of any political stripe could make fun of the French and feel good about it. Since GW2, the right wing has co-opted this practice. Yet another reason to be anti-war: I resent the fact that I can’t feel good about ridiculing those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys anymore.
2. Jewish holidays are a downer: “this is the day God didn’t kill the firstborn male child of each household”; “this is the day of atonement.” Jesus! The Christians did a much better job of co-opting the fun aspects of pagan holidays. Why don’t Jews have days for collecting brightly-colored eggs, decorating indoor trees, etc?

Best use of smilie icons yet.

Sometimes two icons in my Mac’s dock will be juxtaposed in a funny way.

People like their Swiss Army knives. But in these troubled times, we can’t travel with them on airplanes. A simple solution: sell time-shares in knives. Set up offices at all the major airports; a traveller would pick up a knife after landing at his destination, returning it before going back home.

Heard on NPR: “Your potential inspires us to create the software to help you reach it.” Or something like that. Microsoft’s bloatware philosophy applies to advertising, too.

Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr is a local law firm with a name that sounds like a guy clearing his throat.

I picked up the tenth anniversary issue of Wired yesterday.

I remember when Wired came out (and still have a copy of issue 1.01 lying around somewhere). It was very exciting at the time. On a trip to San Francisco around then, I went to a party for Wired (which was headquartered in the same building as a friend of a friend). That was pretty cool. I subscribed. I enjoyed it, as did many people–I knew one couple that lived together but had two subscriptions so they wouldn’t fight over who got to read it first.

As the dot-com bubble expanded, Wired changed from a fairly experimental, counter-cultural, brash magazine to a neo-establishment, business-oriented, smug one. It was as if the vertiginous success of the way-new economy had validated all its earlier futurism, and so it redefined itself as the establishment. The graphic design became a lot calmer (probably for the best, on balance). With a few brilliant exceptions, the stories it ran interested me less and less. I stopped reading it.

I haven’t looked at it much since the dot-bomb, but decided to pick up this issue for old-time’s sake. Perhaps only for this issue, they’re back to the wild graphic design.

Wired seems as if it should be the first in line to be superceded by Net-based media. It speaks to, well, the wired population that can get all its news online. And after all, sites like Gizmodo do a better job of reporting gadget news than Wired ever could, personal blogs often have insightful and informed commentary on the world at large, and the Web offers more fertile ground for visual experimentation than print, right?

Well, yes and no. The fact remains that online journalism still isn’t really a going concern. A print magazine can still send reporters on assignments that bloggers would not be able to cover. And although there are some websites that are amazing design experiments, the fact is, most of the ones I peruse (to the extent I bother to leave my RSS reader) are using plain, quick-loading designs. Print still looks a hell of a lot better. And is much more portable.

“Without a W, there’d be no War”

Everquest is coming to the Mac. So the rest of us can throw our lives away.

A new site, Raging Cow (which I will not link to lest I boost their googlejuice, but you’re smart, you can probably find it if you want) takes the concept of astroturf marketing and applies it to blogs. The site purports to be a blog, but is really a marketing tool concocted by project blogger, which exists solely for the purpose of creating faux-blogs (flogs? faugs?), apparently. All the little site badges link to other faux-blogs.

And I though the Barbie Blog was bad.