Monthly Archives: May 2006

Reviews

Rhapsody in Blue (1945)

Rhapsody in BlueJust saw “Rhapsody in Blue” (1945) tonight, and what a great movie! It’s a movie biography of George Gershwin. Some of the plot was fictional, but that’s okay. The talent in the movie more than made up for that. What’s amazing to me is that the people who knew him and were his friends while he was alive were in the movie: Oscar Levant, Al Jolson, George White, Hazel Scott, Paul Whiteman.

There were three great pianists in this movie, whose dexterity amazed me. Oscar Levant, of course, then Hazel Scott, who must be noted. Robert Alda left me speechless with his rendition of “Rhapsody in Blue”. His dexterity on the piano was natural. Robert Alda, of course, is the father of Alan Alda of M*A*S*H fame.

How talented the actors were back then! They could sing, dance and act. Nowadays, we’re lucky if they can act…

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Reviews

The latest Mac ads from Apple

I love the latest ads from Apple. They feature two guys posing as a PC and a Mac. Of course, the PC guy is staid-looking, with a dated hairdo and a business suit, and the Mac guy is casual, somewhat cool. They star in a series of ads highlighting the various benefits of a Mac, with titles such as Viruses, Restarting, Better, iLife, Network, and of course, Walt Mossberg’s flattering iMac review in the WSJ.

I like the one called Network. The two are holding hands and calling it a Network. 🙂 The tension of that wary network is pretty thick until the latest Japanese camera joins it. Then things get more relaxed… for the Mac.

Great stuff!

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Thoughts

Google Translation is fantastic!

The Google Research blog has a great post about their latest development: Arabic translation. From what I understand, it’s hard to translate back and forth between English and Arabic because of the different sentence structures, but they’ve done it!

Google TranslationThanks to Google Translation and the power of the Internet, now you can read my site in eight languages other than English: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Arabic is coming soon.

Let me know how it reads in your language! 🙂 Just look for the Translate section in the site’s sidebar footer.

Updated 9/28/07: Arabic was added several months ago.

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Events

Yesterday in 2003, iTunes Music Store passed 1 million download mark

Chris Seibold of Apple Matters has a great series of posts going on at his site — to which one can subscribe — called “This Day in Apple History”. For May 5, he had a post about the iTunes Music Store, which on 5/5/03, less than one week after its launch, announced it had passed the 1 million download mark for songs. I hadn’t known about this, and the information shocked me. If something bespeaks of popularity through sheer numbers, THAT does. I say this because when it launched, the Music Store was only for Apple computers, and its collection was approximately 200,000 songs – a mere fraction of today’s collection.

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Thoughts

David Blaine, the human fishbowl

Just found out about this, and I gotta wonder, what’s wrong with this fellow? He’s clearly obsessed with what he’s doing, but to a sane person, the stuff he gets into is odd at best.

Now he’s in an eight-foot acrylic sphere at New York’s Lincoln Center, and he wants to stay fully submerged in the water for up to a week. He’s planning to break out on Monday, after beating the world record on holding one’s breath underwater, all while tied up with 150 lbs. of chains and handcuffs. One might say he’s asking for trouble. He’s also reported having problems with his skin because of the continued submersion.

You can’t help rooting for the guy, though. With so much stacked against him, he’s an underdog, and everyone loves an underdog, yours truly included. CNET has more photos and details. Photo courtesy of CNET. Hope he gets out alive!

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