Now batting for New Orleans: Cuba

First there was the Bill Delahunt/Hugo Chavez Massachusetts heating oil orgy. Now the Fidel Castro "Let's play nine for N'awlins" campaign. We got socialists keeping our poor from turning into icicles, and commies throwing sliders to raise money for Katrina relief, and even if it is just a very clever ploy to get past the U.S. embargo and play in the World Baseball Classic, you gotta wonder how many more clever ways the Bush administration's foes are gonna find to embarrass them. What's next: Chinese citizenship for Valerie Plame?

But There's Portable Nut ...

Seeing this ad ("It's like a nut you can play outside") for Sony's PSP filled me with the kind of awe I've only experienced once or twice over a televised signal — the last time being some 5 or 6 years ago when I first saw MTV's too-good-for-its-own-good Sifl & Olly. It's a sort of "This is so screwed up, and I love it, and I can't believe there's someone who finds this as funny as I do" kind of feeling. Saw it for the first time with my friend Pat — we were just hanging out on the couch half-watching TV — and we were both stopped cold when it aired. (We were also hanging when I first saw S&O.) Found it online and sent it to my favorite squirrel fanatic McKenna who had it up on his blog in a matter of seconds. Reaction in the gaming world to the spot was typically mixed. The accompanying "Carpet you can watch outside" ad done by the same folks was amusing, but slightly less so.

Totally my favorite thing this year

Not even sure if I disovered this this year. I actually saw it in the November 2004 issue of Arthur Magazine, which I'm fairly positive I didn't come into possession of until sometime in the oh five. It's by a guy named Tom Gauld, and you can find it in his new book, Robots, Monsters, Etc. Of all the goofy nods and winks in this, I love "The Floating Skull" most of all.

I Didn't Do It For You

It's not so odd that I picked up Michela Wrong's I Didn't Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. What's odd is that I finished it. I'm all about starting books. Not so big on finishing them. But when I picked up Ms. Wrong's (gotta love the name) journalistic account of Eritrea's struggle from independence from Ethiopia, I honestly couldn't stop coming back to it. First off, Eritrea's a country that as of a few years ago, I (a map and geography junkie as a kid) didn't even know existed. Second, Wrong's just a flat-out amazing writer. Her opening descriptions of Eritrea's blast-furnace climate, craggy topography and time-warp Italian architecture hooked me (made me want to visit, truth be told); her accounting of the country's heroic, ascetic, supported-by-nobody secession movement was romantic; and her dissection of the newly independent country's fall into despotic bickering tragic. When I discovered that The Economist named it one of the year's best books, I felt kind of validated. I can't recommend it enough.

the digital music wars will be ugly. literally ugly.

Can't but read this story about how Bill Gates and MTV are teaming up to take on iTunes and cringe a little bit. Sure, apple and its proprietary m4u technology is irksome, and yeah, yeah, yeah, competition is "good" or whatever. i instinctively fear (because it is in my nature to root for li'l underdogs that are preordained to be bloodied by roaring mechanisms) that iTunes will go the way of Netscape, bludgeoned out of extistence by the sheer we're-already-on-your-system ubiquity of Microsoft products. In fact, as Top Tech News' Elizabeth Millard cheerily, unflinchingly and unironically reports of the looming "next iteration" of the only slightly-less-clumsy-than-it-used-to-be Windows Media Player:

Mainly, its technology already is on the majority of home and business computers, and when the Windows Media Player arrives in its next iteration, the inclusion of Urge means users will not have to download additional software.

Urge, natch, is what the unholy Gates/MTV tag-team will call their new service. And correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Microsoft get into a little hot water with the whole bundling thing back with the whole IEv.5 v. Netscape jawn?

Whatever.

The thing that sets me atrembling most is that however Urge ends up functionality-wise, you just know it's gonna be butt fugg. I mean, look at what's come before. This has never been an attractive program, and even the doofuses who design "skins" (ew) for it are aesthetic imbeciles. this is why we can't have nice things. cuz nice things get muscled out of the market.