Okay, I don’t know if this qualifies as a whole new phenomenon, but a new little online movement has begun in which people read books, leave them behind, and then find posts from around the world about the book left behind.
The idea is to “free” books from their owners. It’s a bit like sharing MP3s in the real world, no?
I know, I know. Judge for yourself. I may give it a whirl with a new book I’m reading (more later): BookCrossing.com

I strongly believe that Apple should be giving away its update to OS X, which is version 10.2 (yes, 10.2, not XI) and is “code-named” Jaguar. But if you want to buy it, Amazon’s offering a deal that beats all the other deals I’ve seen.
Mazel tov.

This is a sweet plug for Born Magazine, which uses a truly innovative little interface to show artists and writers collaborating or merely talking to one another in some way or another. I’ve been paying attention to it for some time and it is beautiful, beautiful.
Antithetical to Born Magazine is this over-hyped, ugly and egregiously silly Web site http://www.savekaryn.com/, which purports to pare down Karyn’s SoHo debt through your contributions. This is my contribution. G-d help her.

Okay, I’m totally ripping off my pal, Bluejake. But this Flash piece is a great use of the medium. It’s a parodic but true history of the typeface, Cooper Black.
Very freaking nice and somehow, apropros, as I was just looking at my Cooper Black fonts yesterday. The Beach Boys are even credited for the typeface’s revival.
Mastication Is Normal: Behind the Typeface

The baby does not want to sleep in the afternoon. We’re not sure why this is, but as a Rabbi said to us yesterday, “There’s so much to do and learn, why sleep?” And, well, why do we sleep if there’s so much to do? If you watch a child trying to fall asleep, it can look fairly violent — lots of squrming, crying, rubbing of the eyes and nose, and physical disjuncture generally. It’s like a train-wreck in a crib.
Adults with insomnia go through the same thing. Andre Breton, the great author of fiction and theory (and the father) of Surrealism, wrote “I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams.”
This is a very difficult passage to accept but it’s possible, perhaps even probable, that we live to sleep, that our waking moments are precursors to our dreamlives, that our daily activities are only preparations for sleep, which is what living truly is. If falling asleep is difficult and fitful, perhaps it’s because sleep is so arresting that it is dangerous for us. I don’t know if babies can tell us whether or not Breton is right.

Not only are large corporations implementing or considering implementing blogs for all their employees, but now even those “old” dot-coms are offering Web log technology to the “masses.”
Very cool on Salon’s part to do this. Salon Blogs are powered by Radio Userland, which by all accounts is simple to set up for the beginner.
There are increasingly few reasons NOT to have a Web log. Here are, however, some:
1. Privacy (all your posts are archived, somewhere)
2. Work (it’s not always easy finding something interesting to say every day or so)
3. Privacy (see number 1)

I’m proud of myself for once. After much screaming and shouting, I’ve finallly organized my hundreds and hundreds of fonts on my computer thanks to the good folks at Extensis, the makers of Suitcase. I was on the phone with them three times in the past 48 hours and their customer service was excellent — patient, solid, knowledgeable.
Not world peace but it could be called head peace, which is a lot to have these days. If you want the skinny on what you should REALLY do with all your old fonts when you upgrade to OS X, please write me. It’s straightforward but deadly dull for a Web log like this one. My apologies to the rest of you.

Napster, Kurt, and Monica
I’ve noticed something kind of interesting about the major media lately. When things are relatively stable (e.g. the stock market is going up-up-up, no war, &c, as in 1990 to 1998), the media is incredibly prolific and interesting. Napster was on the front page every day, music was endlessly varied, and the tabloid loved to feature fun-pix of interns. Now that we are living in a major state of flux (e.g. economic fiascos, war and terror here and abroad, democracy turned upside down), the media seems to have become, well, dull.
Here’s a sampling of links from today’s New York Times. Do they really have nothing to say about the philosophical or political or cultural implications of where we at present are? No guidance, no analysis of the gloom and doom, no prescription for hope?
National
Prescription Drugs
International
Britain Names Liberal as Archbishop
Op-ed
Piece by Paul Krugman, going “What, Me Worry?”

A little bit (okay, a lot) of self-congratulatory hype. I see that Deckchairs made the oh-so-talked-about London Guardian list of World Weblogs. I’m happy. Cheerio!
Guardian Unlimited | Weblog | Worldwide weblogs

A friend asked me many months ago, why I was such a big fan of A.I., the movie by Mr. Spielberg. I’m not 100% sure of my response, but this is what I wrote to him on Sunday:
Okay, AI. I think what I love about AI, though I must see it again, is that it is a Hollywood vision, a CandyTown venture, wrapped around a very dark, sad, and utterly morose center. What Spellberg is proposing is that the earth is in itself a miracle, a spiritual metaphor and not a place in and of itself. He’s suggesting that our lives are completely hollow, that we are simply organisims on a spinning planet in a fated universe, that death is nothing and life is even less. It’s very, very, very gloomy stuff. But it’s contained, packaged even, in this little boy’s Alice in Wonderland adventure through the world. In other words, the world is a cold hard stone that we walk upon but that we gather warmth wherever we can from that stone, warming our hands on whatever vestige of certainty and hope we can. It’s not unlike a Zoroastrian philosophy — that G-d was once here, dwelling amongst us, and that he left us, for good, to be alone, perhaps forever. Very strange — I can’t wait to see Minority Report. I wonder if it’s more of the same – it sounds like no.