“It would be in the desert sands,” said Mike Luckman of Luckman Van Pier, a consultant company to large entertainment firms. “Laser beams would shoot out of it… Michael’s looked at the sketches and likes them.” Laser beams. Wowie. Cool. Super!
50 feet is tall. Come to really think of it, it’s a horrifying thought-as if MJ’s face weren’t horrific enough, they in Vegas will now have this abominable creature meandering through their desert sands?
And now, the ramifications: what if Ozzy Osbourne were to get inspired…?
Well, Jackson probably wanted something as large as his ego, and the android should do the trick for him. We promise we’ll post the picture in this space as soon as it’s constructed and ready to fire its laser beams.
You.Suck.Exe
If you watch TV-or if you don’t-you’ve heard about the half-Indian Sanjaya Malakar, who for a mess of reasons was propelled to somewhere near the top on American Idol. Many fans of the show were outraged, the extreme being a MySpace blogger known only as “J”. She went on a hunger strike just because Malakar sings so horribly (opinions may vary), vowing to continue it until Malakar was off the show. Malakar outlasted her fast: 16 hungry days later, J dug into her fridge.
If you have not heard about Malakar, the idea is, he’s goofy. (Check out YouTube for some videos.) His singing is goofy, his hairdos are goofy, his mannerisms are goofy. (Again, opinions may vary.) And all this is putting people off American Idol. They’re crying foul-even as Indians are trying to convince their great-aunts and brothers-in-law to vote for the bugger.
What we’re reporting here is the “Sanjaya War Dialer,” a piece of software that made it easy to vote over and over for Malakar. (All you need is a modem.) The idea was quite obvious: “Make Sanjaya win and help us ruin American Idol,” according to the creator of the Dialer. In fact, there’s a lot of “Will Sanjaya kill American Idol?” on the Web.
17th April, Malakar was voted off the show. The dialler happens to be still there at www.kingofallnerds.com/sanjaya. Turns out you can use the dialler for voting for anyone-nifty.
Here’s the last post we saw there: “It was a fun ride. We were all part of something great. Life won’t be the same without Sanjaya. I think we’ve learned that no technology in the world can overcome that level of suck.”
“Level of suck.” Well-coined. Has a nice ring to it.
“Never Been Phished”
Vinton Cerf-the primary Founding Father of the Internet, that’s why his name sounds the same as “surf”-recently visited the University of South Carolina to meet up with students and tell them about the challenges in the future of computing. He revealed what a lot of us were dying to know: what does he do on the Internet? Mostly checking the weather and news sites, he said. And when he’s travelling, he checks exchange rates. No sites specified.
Cerf uses his BlackBerry to settle dinner disputes, such as what grapes are in the wine his companions are drinking, and to check if certain Hollywood actors have died or are still living. He also happens to be a wine connoisseur: his home is reasonably wired, so he receives e-mail warnings if the temperature of his cellar goes above 18 degrees C.
Here’s one about Berners-Lee, Sir Tim, the inventor of the WWW.
One day he spent with reporters a while ago saw him more than a little miffed: he couldn’t really defend how his pet Semantic Web could be prevented from being bogged down by search engine spam the way Google is. At some point towards the close of the session, he happened to mention that he’d never been phished.
So the Greatest Living Briton has never been phished. Good. That’s all we wanted to tell you. Get back to what you were doing…