A rather newish magazine called eDesign has been out for a few months. The full-feature book features articles and stories about designing for the Web and for new technologies like handhelds and cell phones. Sounds good, no?
But I have to wonder why they charge $29.00 for a “charter” subscription when other (albeit non-design) magazines, like Fast Company or Wired, cost sooo little (as low as $8.00 per year) for new subscribers. Other design magazines, like Step, are also expensive. Again, not sure why. And I’m not really up for complaining about publication pricing. What is bothersome about eDesign is that, it being new, and me being interested, shouldn’t a little deal be cut to see if the two of us tango?

Few people know that on this day, 63 years ago, the Germans invaded Poland and tore the country from limb to limb. On that same day, September 1, 1939. the Wizard of Oz was released in American movie theaters.
I always found this confluence of imagery fascinating and horrendous, humbling and hellacious. While the Poles were watching their country being burned and bombed by tanks and trucks and armed soldiers, Americans everywhere were watching black and white characters become brightly colored, flying monkeys cascaded through the air, and the wonderful Wizard of Oz was pulling cords and pulleys and ropes in the hope of delivering a new nation. On this day, 63 years ago, the East fell and the North won. On this day, Dorothy Gale left Kansas and the Nazis left Berlin. This day marks a winfall of semi-precious cultural artifacts, a surfeit of meaning, as they say, and it’s hard to know what to do with it all.

I had the small honor of watching an unusually interesting kids movie that didn’t pander to adults – Spy Kids. More importantly, the film, which is much better than the first Harry Potter spectacle as far as pre-teen sci-fi goes, is fundamentally a Hispanic film. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, the man who brought us the very funny (and now very old) El Mariachi (1992), Spy Kids shows a decidedly Hispanic family going about their daily spy lives in a Spanish-speaking city (in Chile) and using some of the coolest gadgets around. This may well be the first movie that depicts a non-black, non-white Western family in a mainstream Hollywood movie.