DVD For Sale
At long last, here it is.
A live DVD/CD super combo package, now available to you, the general public. It’s currently in pre-sales but discs will ship May 15th, and if you buy now you can download the mp3s immediately.
Science FAIL
If you’ve been listening to me on the Twitter this morning then you’ll be tired of this, but here’s the thing. I made a dumb joke referencing an aphorism I have heard: “all animals can swim.” Then I started wondering if that was true. A lot of people replied saying that great apes can’t swim, in particular chimpanzees. That didn’t sound right to me, or at least it sounded like one of those things that everybody says that nobody really knows if it’s true or not (kind of like “all animals can swim”).
So I asked again on the Twitter: for reals? Great apes can’t swim? A lot of people responded “yes they can” or “no they can’t” which wasn’t helpful. And a lot of links came in, a lot of conflicting information. This site says they have too little animal fat and so they sink. This person says they can outswim an olympic swimmer (human, presumably) and tantalizingly links to a video called “seemychimpswim” that no longer exists. According to The Big Zoo they can only swim “if extremely excited” (?). And here’s a story about a swimming orangutan. From what I can tell, it’s kind of “some chimps can swim but mostly they hate it and are not good at it.”
Or worse, it’s still an open question, which is a terrible thought. What the hell scientists? What are we doing here? Can we please start throwing some monkeys into pools and taking notes? IT IS 2009, SERIOUSLY!
Also, giraffes.
Invisible Post
Which is what this will be for many of you today – traffic on the First of May is always a little heavy for some reason, but my poor server is doing its best to keep up. I wish you all a happy Spring, even if you don’t know it.
This song is free even when it is not this day of the year, but it is especially free today (if you know what I mean):
First of May (<--Not At All Safe For Work)
Friends, Fans and Followers
Scott Kirsner is a writer who, inexplicably, interviewed me once. I was somewhere in the earlier parts of Thing a Week, and I was just seeing the hint of the glimmer of the possibility of some kind of semi-success. He was hoping to pitch me as a feature article to a certain important magazine about technology, but that feature never materialized, I think probably because Scott was ahead of the curve. He already knew what the world did not: that I was destined to become a big, fat, shining superstar.
So now he’s put me in his book, which is also very nice of him. I mention it not just because I’m in it, but because Scott is a very smart and well-spoken fellow who ran an excellent panel with me and some other folks at SXSWi, and this book looks kind of awesome. It’s about this new kwazy internet thing we’re all trying to figure out, where suddenly everyone has the tools to create and publish, and so reaching your audience is simultaneously very easy and very hard. He interviews a bunch of artists of various types about how they deal with this paradox, how they launched and built their creative enterprises. If you’re wondering how you might turn your creative thing into a money-pooping cow, it’s really helpful to read about how lots of other people did it. Like I always say: 1) find the good ideas and then 2) steal them.
It’s called Friends, Fans and Followers, and you can preview it here, and buy it here.
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