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Reminds me of my old Made With VI badge I used to put on web sites I created.

An even better question is: do we really need copyright?

Fair question, but I think the short answer is yes. But the point of copyright protection was once to protect creators from abuses by big business. In the time of Goethe, for instance, if he did not have family money and wealthy patrons, his writing would not have supported him. When he finished a book, it would get one good printing, and then all the feeder-level publishers would buy one copy each, and make copies themselves. All works would immediately become commodities.

A little more recently, you can look to artists like Little Richard, whose songs were used in Disney films, commercials, TV shows, over and over and over, without any payment to him, because ASCAP wasn't there to enforce copyright protections.

Metallica aside, most artists aren't worried about individuals pirating their music. Hell, I'd be thrilled if someone decided that my old band's music was awesome and it hit number one on the torrents. That would mean that my art touched people. But if Roy Disney decided that one of my songs was great for his multi-billion-dollar film and didn't want to pay me a dime, that would be unacceptable.

My feeling is that copyright is necessary, but it's being abused, and the abusers are working hard to limit--even destroy--any "fair use" cases that we've taken for granted.

The badge I used to put on all my sites...

Funny thing is that it got listed on some questionable websites which are still referring hits to the site, even though I took the cam and archive down years ago. Now all those missing hits go to my haiku movie review.

phenomenon web
all your base are belong to us
want must shake your zig

And then when Uma Thurman spanks the young Crazy 88 kid and sends him away, it was pretty funny. But the rest of that set was waaaaay to self-consciously "cool" (with the quotes).

Reservoir Dogs: awesome.

Pulp Fiction: classic.

The episode of ER he directed: great.

The writing in True Romance: excellent.

Sigh. Maybe I just got my hopes up too high. What do I know? I write haiku about movies I like and limericks about movies I don't.

While it's not 5-7-5, it's got more of a feel of a haiku than most I've seen and many I've written. If you go to the link and click on the "user" reviews, you're published! Tell your friends!

Tell all your friends you've been published at Dimspace!

Just what do you think Lucas was thinking
as he imagined the script he was inking?
I hope the rumors are true
that in Star Wars part two
That there's no more God damn Jar-Jar Binking

Apparently, I found number two so appalling that I didn't even write a limerick. I'll take any suggestions...

My hopes aren't high for this new one.

I swear, they're just doing something right with Spiderman. Even X-Men was just OK, I thought. Even the off-beat comics-to-movies (Ghost World, American Splendor) really only have appeal to total afficianados.

I'm certainly looking forward to Sin City, tho. Maybe there'll be an adaptation of some of the more oddball comics, like Mr. Natural or the Freak Brothers.

Ah, memories of my misspent youth...

I swear, they're just doing something right with Spiderman. Even X-Men was just OK, I thought. Even the off-beat comics-to-movies (Ghost World, American Splendor) really only have appeal to total afficianados.

I'm certainly looking forward to Sin City, tho. Maybe there'll be an adaptation of some of the more oddball comics, like Mr. Natural or the Freak Brothers.

Ah, memories of my misspent youth...

I've been to Japan twice now, with only the Japanese language skills I learned from a Berlitz book/CD, Shogun and a great book called Japanese Street Slang. I didn't use anything from the last book, but the other two were enough for me to get around without relying heavily on using English.

Even in the northern provinces, where far fewer people speak English, my broken Japanese and lots of hand gestures made it possible to get by. I've been a lot of places, and a difficult language barrier is far easier to deal with than unsafe or unsanitary conditions. Remember, this is a culture where it's considered rude to count your change, because doing things honorably is a way of life there.

Another myth about Japan is that it's expensive to travel in. If you want a vacation that feels like you're in America, it is. Big hotel rooms are expensive. So is imported fresh fruit. Want a cantaloupe? $30.00 please. But if you're willing to go somewhat local--get a small hotel room with a futon on tatame instead of a king sized four poster, eat local foods--it's not much more than staying in any place in the states. It's not South America, but you can indeed get a nice hotel room in Tokyo for $40.00 a night.

Anyway, my point is, you don't need a PDA or any high tech stuff to get around Japan. You need an openness to a different culture. You need to be willing to try. You need to be willing to do things in an unfamiliar way. And you need to do a little research before going to make sure that you don't miss some of the subtle, wonderful differences.

Lastly, as an American, I recommend that every American with a conscience visit Nagasaki, visit Epicenter Park and the Atom Bomb Museum. It's a beautiful city, and a humbling experience. It's not easy to get to, but well worth the trip. So go out, pick up your copy of Lonely Planet and go!

Oh, and one more thing. If you're going to go, make sure to buy a JR pass. You can get full access to one of Japan's main rail systems for 1, 2 or 4 weeks. If you want to take one trip out of Tokyo, the pass pays for itself. Hope all this info helps!

I've been to Japan twice now, with only the Japanese language skills I learned from a Berlitz book/CD, Shogun and a great book called Japanese Street Slang. I didn't use anything from the last book, but the other two were enough for me to get around without relying heavily on using English.

Even in the northern provinces, where far fewer people speak English, my broken Japanese and lots of hand gestures made it possible to get by. I've been a lot of places, and a difficult language barrier is far easier to deal with than unsafe or unsanitary conditions. Remember, this is a culture where it's considered rude to count your change, because doing things honorably is a way of life there.

Another myth about Japan is that it's expensive to travel in. If you want a vacation that feels like you're in America, it is. Big hotel rooms are expensive. So is imported fresh fruit. Want a cantaloupe? $30.00 please. But if you're willing to go somewhat local--get a small hotel room with a futon on tatame instead of a king sized four poster, eat local foods--it's not much more than staying in any place in the states. It's not South America, but you can indeed get a nice hotel room in Tokyo for $40.00 a night.

Anyway, my point is, you don't need a PDA or any high tech stuff to get around Japan. You need an openness to a different culture. You need to be willing to try. You need to be willing to do things in an unfamiliar way. And you need to do a little research before going to make sure that you don't miss some of the subtle, wonderful differences.

Lastly, as an American, I recommend that every American with a conscience visit Nagasaki, visit Epicenter Park and the Atom Bomb Museum. It's a beautiful city, and a humbling experience. It's not easy to get to, but well worth the trip. So go out, pick up your copy of Lonely Planet and go!

Oh, and one more thing. If you're going to go, make sure to buy a JR pass. You can get full access to one of Japan's main rail systems for 1, 2 or 4 weeks. If you want to take one trip out of Tokyo, the pass pays for itself. Hope all this info helps!

I've been to Japan twice now, with only the Japanese language skills I learned from a Berlitz book/CD, Shogun and a great book called Japanese Street Slang. I didn't use anything from the last book, but the other two were enough for me to get around without relying heavily on using English.

Even in the northern provinces, where far fewer people speak English, my broken Japanese and lots of hand gestures made it possible to get by. I've been a lot of places, and a difficult language barrier is far easier to deal with than unsafe or unsanitary conditions. Remember, this is a culture where it's considered rude to count your change, because doing things honorably is a way of life there.

Another myth about Japan is that it's expensive to travel in. If you want a vacation that feels like you're in America, it is. Big hotel rooms are expensive. So is imported fresh fruit. Want a cantaloupe? $30.00 please. But if you're willing to go somewhat local--get a small hotel room with a futon on tatame instead of a king sized four poster, eat local foods--it's not much more than staying in any place in the states. It's not South America, but you can indeed get a nice hotel room in Tokyo for $40.00 a night.

Anyway, my point is, you don't need a PDA or any high tech stuff to get around Japan. You need an openness to a different culture. You need to be willing to try. You need to be willing to do things in an unfamiliar way. And you need to do a little research before going to make sure that you don't miss some of the subtle, wonderful differences.

Lastly, as an American, I recommend that every American with a conscience visit Nagasaki, visit Epicenter Park and the Atom Bomb Museum. It's a beautiful city, and a humbling experience. It's not easy to get to, but well worth the trip. So go out, pick up your copy of Lonely Planet and go!

Oh, and one more thing. If you're going to go, make sure to buy a JR pass. You can get full access to one of Japan's main rail systems for 1, 2 or 4 weeks. If you want to take one trip out of Tokyo, the pass pays for itself. Hope all this info helps!

If you want to see the original of the Nixon Elvis photo, do a google image search on "Nixon meeting Elvis". And the original I got our faces from (gawd, this brings back memories) is here.

If you want to see the original of the Nixon Elvis photo, do a google image search on "Nixon meeting Elvis". And the original I got our faces from (gawd, this brings back memories) is here.

I bought a pack of Marlboros in Copacabana, Bolivia (on beautiful Lake Titicaca) back when I was smoking a year ago, and it cost me about 3 bolivianos, which came out to something like $0.40 US at the time. A month later I was in London, and a half pack (10 nails) cost something like 4 pounds sterling, which was about $10 US. It was (almost) enough to make me quit.

I finally quit when I decided it just wasn't cool anymore.

Once I changed the default system font so that my menu bar and file names and everything showed up in "sand", but that quicly lost its fun. I have my background images cycle through my vacation photos, but other than that, I don't waste my time modifying the environment.

Sigh... if only.

Everything which has
a beginning has an end,
believe it or not.

I'll prob'ly revise it when I can think of something better. One of my best haiku was for Kill Bill:

Fallen flower drifts
down river red with rivals'
freely flowing blood.

S.S.L.I

I recently went traveling in Bolivia and Peru, and I stayed in a few places where power was not readily available at all times. However, even in the smallest towns, I could get myself a couple of AA batteries to keep me going for a while.

Those pictures were all taken with a Sony, though, which I bought partially because of its cool battery set-up. It had an option which would let me put in a proprietary info-lithium battery which had a nice long life, and an adaptor so that two AA batteries would fit in the same compartment. This way I can use the info-lithium 99% of the time, I have a back-up if I don't want to wait for the camera to charge back up. That, in my mind, is the best solution.

The pilots of the reed boats they use to taxi between the floating Uros islands seem to use a similar technique.

The pilots of the reed boats they use to taxi between the floating Uros islands seem to use a similar technique.

That I took my iPod to London.

Here's a post I put up on MacSlash a minute ago...

If someone else has posted a similar opinion already, I apologize. I didn't see it.

My thinking is that iPod is not bad on two counts:

One, I was thinking of buying an in-dash CD player with MP3 capabilities for my car, which would have run nearly as much and would have required me to carry around 10 CDs full of MP3s to hold this many songs. Now, I'm thinking I can just get one of these with a car adapter, and on long drives to Los Angeles or Tahoe (from Berkeley), I don't have to mess with a thing. And with a 10 hour battery, I don't even need to use a car battery adapter.

Second, I think Apple is using this as a "sneaky" device to sneak large capacity hard drives into our pockets. Basically, once we're used to carrying around something like this, they can build on it. Add the PalmOS or OSX/CE (OK, bad joke, but you get the idea) and you have a PDA with more massive storage than any other. Add a firewire connection to some optics and you have a video camera with 10 hours of battery life, smaller and easier to conceal than Sony's smallest.

The thing I like about the video camera idea is that with tapeless storage, editing is much, much faster, and with the disk unit in your pocket, the camera can be really tiny and lightweight and still have a lot of features. Basically, once they up the drive capacity to 20GB (maybe 3-6 months?), that's enough for 90 minutes of broadcast quality digital video, enough for almost any common event!

Think about it. This is just an iSeed iPod. Many other things can and probably will grow out of it.

By the way, I've made a banner ad campaign for this product, which you can see in rotation at my haiku movie review site. There are several banners up, but if you cycle through a few of the movie reviews, you'll see the banner.

--Benno

All opinions are my own, and you can't have them!