MAY FLOWERS

choose your weapon

Hua passed this along, a NY Times story about how a Japanese company decided between two auction houses through a game of rock, paper, scissors. The best part of the story concerns how two 11 year olds were consulted by Christie's as part of their strategizing for which choice to make. Says one of them, Alice, "Everybody knows you always start with scissors. Rock is way too obvious, and scissors beats paper."

Trill.

Welcome to the next level of online dating. According to a new story in Wired, the company HighJoy doesn't just offer online dating services like hundreds of other sites, but their special feature is an interactive, um, "toy" that cyberchatters can control on one another. The term used in the story - and this is just so rich - is "teledildonics." (I'll give you all a moment to stop guffawing). So not only can you use the internet to get hot and steamy with that special cyber-someone (vs., you know, actual physical interaction) but you can literally push each other's buttons now.

And you thought typing with one hand was hard enough.

Then again, maybe cybersex can help people meet the requirements outlined by the new new Abstinence-Only movement.

It could be worse though. At least you're not a Japanese housewife, sneaking to the love hotel with a sex volunteer.

Speaking of computing stuff, true Macintosh Nerds™ probably already know about Konfabulator but if you didn't it - it does the exact same thing that the new Dashboard feature in Tiger does, but works with older versions of OSX and more importantly, already has 1,000 widgets set up for it, compared to Dashboard's 100 (expect that to change - rapidly).

The SF Chronicle published an incredibly long story about the life and death of author Iris Chang who committed suicide last fall.

What happens when people have a good concept and gobs of time on their hands: N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton, the "explicit only" version (i.e. it's nothing BUT profanity now).

And I should have done this a week ago but in case you haven't already seen this noted on a zillion other blogs: Reginald Dennis' tell-all about his days at The Source is some of the best drama I've read in ages. Movie rights anyone?

You'd think Mark Cuban would have his hands full, you know, running the Mavericks and all, but he still takes the time out to blog about the death of the CD.

--O.W.