I’ve thought a little about the upcoming release of The Matrix 2.0 and why it’s attracting such a wide range of *believers,* who are fans squared, an admixture of science fiction pessimists, middle-aged children, and otherwise disenfranchised youth. A cab passed me yesterday and on top it read “This Cab Is Not Real” and it was an ad for the new movie.
My personal theory is that the social and political apparatus (the actual machinery of democracy, the activity of voting, the fact that men and women (sometimes) sit together and make policy, the planned distance between metropolitan areas and their state capitals) is so divorced from our everyday lives that it is just possible the world is run by sophisticated robots.
Wait a sec: doesn’t Hugo Weaving look a bit like George Pataki?

I found this to be an absolutely fascinating tool that will ostensibly test your hidden bias or biases. Essentially, the test, which takes about five minutes to go through, will look at how you perceive those different than you with regard to race, sexual orientation, age, or gender. I found the results surprising in that what they reveal about my biases is completely unpleasant.

My wife just finished reading the brand new, out-of-the-box Meghan Daum book, The Quality of Life Report. (I really enjoyed her previous book, My Misspent Youth, but that was then, when I was younger.) Here is here what she had to say about the new book, which is to be released on May 8, 2003.
“Meghan Daum’s The Quality of Life Report will resonate for anyone who lives in New York City and dreams of greener pastures. Lucinda Trout, a 29-year-old lifestyles televison reporter with an egomanical boss, is fed up with eating tri-colored take-out pasta and living in a closet-sized studio apartment. She seizes an opportunity to move to Prairie City, a town located in an unidentified Midwestern state, imagining that life will be more relaxed and simpler, and where she will be able to broadcast her The Quality of Life Report to New York audiences. The denizens of the town are as diverse as they are down-to-earth and Lucinda quickly adapts, albeit with a New Yorker’s sense of slight superiority. In spite of her warm welcome, however, she learns very quickly that she has not solved her problems but only exchanged them for a set of more complex ones, involving Mason, the boyfriend with a serious addiction and three children by different mothers, the coldest winter the area has seen in twenty years, a freezing farmhouse that is more isolated than idyllic, and a dwindling savings account. Although the circumstances are dire, Daum doesn’t make us feel sorry for Lucinda. We like Lucinda because she meets her obstacles not so much with pluck, but with a self-deprecation and cynicism that ultimately result in an emerging self-awareness. She wins out in the end, but not without a cost. There is a lot of humor in the writing, particularly in the portrayals of the local characters whom Daum gently pokes fun at, but doesn’t satirize. The novel is highly readable, and despite the rambling ending, its ruminations on life’s changes and challenges are as thought-provoking as they are witty.”

There is a lot (a tremendous lot) of talk about the “roadmap” (is this a new diplomatic turn of phrase?) to peace in the Middle East, but I wanted to see the real thing, which is surprisingly small, clearly written, and comprehensive. It’s written by the Quartet (another new term?) of the US, EU, UN, and Russia (when will they just be called RU?). I wonder (out loud) if this is a real case of form over content or the real thing.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m a part of this.

In case you haven’t heard, let me glady announce the arrival of Apple’s iTunes Music Store, which launched today. It’s kind of amazing, that finally a reasonable company has focused on a way to download music for a fee in an interface that is friendly, elegant, and, mostly smart (see the new iTunes 4).
Now, I doubt that this is going to hurt most people trading MP3s, but for me, who finds trading in MP3s boring, unoriginal, and wholesomely illegal, this is a perfect service. I’m not pro-recording industry, who pay most of their artists a pittance; however, this seems to be a start of something very beautiful.

What with a lot of work, SARS scaring the heck out of me, and nothing of real interest to communicate, I have not been a good correpondent. I will now smack the knuckles of my left hand with a wooden rule (very gently).
In other news, I seemed to have run out of office space. Well, not exactly office space, per se, but paper space. I no longer have room for the papers, books, magazines (see previous post), pantone guides, business cards, correspondence, bills, contracts, invoices, files, folders, and brochures that I have been provided over the past many years. What to do? I honestly do not know.

These are not winning New York Lottery numbers, but they are the ones that the computer picked for me yesterday in a bid for fortune. It should be noted that I came closer yesterday to winning than I have in quite a while, as the numbers 38 and 40 were winning numbers and if I had only had the computer pick 2, 10, 18, or 25, I’d have won a dollar.

Now that bitmapped fonts (or fonts that use tiny little square dots to make up the typeface) are starting to really gain their mass appeal on Flash sites and other funkier sites, out comes the.. awkWerd Type Concern .., which has produced some really interesting, largish bitmapped fonts, like Lucky, Fignuts, and Galore!. These fonts are a fascinating combination of 1970s kitsch, 1990s cool, and 2003 groove (which is just a combination of 1970s kitsch and 1990s cool, anyway).

Although I haven’t read this piece through yet, everyone seems to be talking of late about Seth Godin’s forthcoming book Purple Cow, which is excerpted here at Fast Company. It’s an inexpensive read for what it purports (to ask you to create something outstanding and exemplary and completely unique) and one that I’m very much looking forward to having on my desk come May 8.