Not Much Momentum for Jacko's New CD

Michael Jackson has consistently been in BlogPulse's top 20 key people (today he's no. 8) since his child molestation trial in California, but it's what bloggers haven't been talking about that's interesting -- his new CD. About 8,000 people have bought The Essential Michael Jackson since it dropped this week, reports the UK's Sun, a disheartening tally for an artist whose 1982 record Thriller sold 40 million copies. We gauged a fair measure of support for the guy last time he did something prominent, but the dearth of buzz about this new record does not portend well for the expatriate kaiser (calif?) of pop. After a spike in buzz after his trial, Jacko has been more or less flatlining, as seen here:

Posted by Philip Ewing at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category: Celebs

A Modern Woman

We had hoped this BBC story about a lifelike Japanese android would quietly disappear after awhile, but, instead it's become today's top link. The reason we hoped it would fade away is that many bloggers keep talking about having sex with it. The robot, not the BBC story. Perhaps there are ways to dance what they're saying on the blogosphere, but why mince words? Many bloggers seem to be interested in having sex with this robot. (Shades of Blade Runner.) "...(T)echnically it aint adultery," writes biowalker, though, according to this blogger, it's evidence of humanity's ingenuity: "Dude. We have an android in the works. I don't care what anyone says, that's so cool." That isn't the popular consensus, though. That would be sentiments like those expressed by Nate: "I know exactly what you're all thinkin'... cause I'm thinkin' the same thing..." These are the people who're going to replace the mainstream media?

Posted by Philip Ewing at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Category: The Gadget Scene

Concurrent Strikes, Constant Escalation: Perpetual War

Steve Jobs and his fanatical followers apparently escaped just in time before Bill Gates' destructo-beam vaporized their headquarters, and through proxies on the web they've struck back through bloggers and this old video, in which the "inventor" of Ctr+Alt+Del credits Gates for "making it famous." But Gates' counterassault already is making its way around the web: The Register, which broke the news of the Cupertino deletion, now reports that Fortress Redmond has been augmented to taunt the vanquished. We have tried to bring you consistent updates since the onset of open hostilities, and here's a graphical way to follow the exchange:

Posted by Philip Ewing at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Category:

Exasperated Music Fans Break Into Transcendent Air-Guitar Solo

"That's what I've been trying to tell you!" tens of millions of Internet users screamed at their monitors today when they saw this BBC story that says people who use file-sharing services are more likely to buy music legally. Though most monitors just whirred quietly in response, undaunted computer users began mentioning the story on their blogs, making it BlogPulse's no. 16 link. The music industry already has run into some credibility problems this week, and news of this study will probably not endear Sony BMG, Universal or other companies to many people. Jurgen certainly feels that way: "I hesitate to use the words 'paradigm shift,' but something akin to that needs to happen to the music industry. The little guys get it, by and large. It’s the big ones that are still trying to un-invent technology." D4D is guardedly optimistic: "Hallelujah, for the tide may be about to turn," he writes. We'll be keeping half an eye on the blogosphere to see if the Recording Industry Association of America, struck by sudden pangs of guilt, drops all its lawsuits against our nation's adolescents. Yep. We'll keep watchin'...

Posted by Philip Ewing at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (178)

Category: The Soundscape

Anakin! The Front Is A Lemon Avenue Flying Straightly!

If George Lucas ever makes good on his pledge to do three more Star Wars sequels -- over the years he has said he originally envisioned a nine-movie cycle, then denied it -- he can help his screenplay by having a team translate it to Chinese and then back to English. That's what they did in this version of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, BlogPulse's undeniably hilarious no. 33 link. It's a series of screenshots from Episode III with the English subtitles of the Chinese version of the movie and it sounds like the classic Japanese stereo instructions we all remember from the '80s: At one point Obi-Wan turns to Yoda and says "He the my brothers in elephant is similar." If you've seen the movie, you know this Lewis Carrol free-form dialogue is infinitely better than what Lucas originally wrote. (Remember this? "Nooooooo!"). Bloggers agree, or at least are amused. "I do love [the] Chinese subs! Everything makes much more sense!" writes a poster on ladykarasu's blog. "Hysterical," writes this one. As for Lucas, he might quote the Chinese version of Anakin: "Ratio tile, the wish power are together with you."

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (112)

Category: The vast electric lunchroom

How Must All This Make J-Lo Feel?

During the weeks it played interminably on our nation's radios, Jennifer Lopez's "I'm real" epitomized everything wrong with pop music in the 21st century. Dumb and unoriginal, it included a guest appearance by the Cookie Monster-voiced party rapper Ja Rule and tortured anyone unlucky enough to be hearing it while trapped in a waiting room or college cafeteria. "How," wondered Americans, "does this stuff get on the air?" Only they didn't say "stuff." Well, several years after the fact, BlogPulse's no. 22 link tells us. Sony Music paid DJs to spin songs by J-Lo and others, showing, among other things, why the record industry has precious little credibility when it files enormous lawsuits against 15 year-old boys trading a few Slipknot songs over the Internet. Nobody seems surprised. "...[J]ust in case you think a song gets on the radio because it's good, then you really need to stop sniffing marker pens," writes dub dot dash. "Anyone who's heard Jennifer Lopez 'sing' is shocked that she even has a recording contract," sneered thirdworldcounty. Still, many people might've been fooled over the years by the rocks that she got.

Posted by Philip Ewing at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (31)

Category: The Soundscape

Gates Deploys Evapo-Ray With Devastating Results

We warned you that hostilities had been escalated irreversibly last week, and today we bring you a gruesome report from the blogobattlefield. Dispatching a fleet of fearsome, death ray-armed tripods from Fortress Redmond, Bill Gates wiped Apple Computer off the face of the Earth in today's no. 22 link. Or, wait, maybe the world's third-most innovative corporation just doesn't have up-to-date information for its much-hyped challenge to Google Earth, explains its web apologist Richard Scoble. (Information so old it still includes the World Trade Center, which has made them uneasy over at LifeHacker: "Eek.") Matazone says it proves that despite its bluster Microsoft still can't quite connect on most things: "Let’s face it, we ‘Google’ for things, we don’t ‘MSN’ for them, and there’s a good reason for that." As the slugfest continues, other bloggers are just enjoying the show. "You gotta love geek fights," writes MyopicZeal. "Man, that’s funny."

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Category: The Gadget Scene

Time Lord Triumphant

You'd think only a few Britons -- or an exceptionally rare sort of Yank geekoid --could truly appreciate the significance of this BBC story about the new season of Dr. Who, airing in the U.K. But this link is no. 14 in BlogPulse today, indicating that enough people on the web know about The Doctor, the T.A.R.D.I.S., etc. that this announcement is getting plenty of attention. The Doctor is a time-traveler from the planet Gallifrey who, because he can "regenerate" after serious injury or illness (or after the men who play him want more money), has been portrayed by at least 10 actors since the show debuted in the early 1960s. Comely young girls fall into his orbit and travel with him in chaste devotion, and he has encountered just about every permutation possible of TV monsters made from garbage cans, pudding, old shoes, plastic bags, little balls of light, etc. And he is beloved, as a glance at a few blogs will demonstrate: "Could this be the final proof that God exists and that he is in fact commissioning editor at the Beeb?" writes Third Avenue, while this blogger, who's seen which actors will be on the show, writes "Oh dear God. I think I'm purring already."

Posted by Philip Ewing at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (59)

Category: On The Telly

Shipwrecked On The Island or Instant Karma's Gonna Get You!

Explosions-and-gunplay auteur Michael "Hubris" Bay may have been right on the proverbial money when he complained to the LA Times about the problems he was encountering in making his recent flick The Island (BlogPulse's no 38 link today). Or he may be the victim of cosmic reciprocity for telling that newspaper that he'd "never had a flop." Well, he has one now. The movie cost some $124 million to make, and in its opening weekend brought in $12.1 million. The moviesphere blames its, ah, terribleness. "I mourn the good ideas wasted on this summer vehicle," wrote arctic1976. "The theatre was incredibly empty, and judging by estimated box office returns, the theatre I went to was not alone in this respect," quipped Spakkadi. Bloggers have said The Island is based on a movie that a long time ago was skewered on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 -- perhaps Bay's mistake was stealing that idea, and not, say, this one.

Posted by Philip Ewing at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

Category: Moving Pictures

The Battle of Evermore

We all knew this day would come. From the north -- where Bill Gates' burning, lidless eye sees all from Redmond -- to the south -- where Steve Jobs and his hearty band of rogues are staging sorties from their camp at Cupertino -- the winds of all-out geekoid war are unmistakably blowing. Microsoft announced on Friday (in BlogPule's no 6. link) that its secret weapon, once known as Longhorn, actually will be called Windows Vista. Jobs' Jackals wasted no time skewering the name and Microsoft's long delays in finally rolling out Vista, which is supposed to be the next-generation competitor to Apple's Tiger operating system. The uberblogger and Microsoft executive Richard Scoble unleashed this broadside in response, today's no. 2 blog post. Fathers are pit against sons. Brothers against brothers. Chippa: "I ♥'d the name Longhorn." Mr. Dew: "I hope this version of Windows will make me more confident of my computer." Tom Coates: "Screenshots of the new Windows operating system do little to excite, I'm afraid." Davisson: "In my opinion, [the] Windows desktop might finally be on par with the long loved Mac OS." For how long can this war continue to rage?

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

Category: The Gadget Scene

The (Virtual) Seamy Underside

Bloggers seem to be appreciating the old-fashioned journalistic enterprise shown over at GameSpot, where editors undertook the rough work of playing a video game in hopes of discovering hot sex scenes. Since New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton brought national attention to the "adult material" in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, game author Rockstar has been on the defensive, claiming the sex scenes were the work of autonomous hackers hoping to make them look bad. (So bad that rating authorities changed San Andreas to an "adults only" game, in today's No. 40 link) But it wasn't hackers, says GameSpot, whose editors say they've proved the game code already contained the sex scenes, and that no malicious outsiders were responsible. This gamer isn't happy Rockstar did it -- the rest of the industry will suffer, he says -- and this one says it shows the programmers must've been pretty lonely. Just the same, DiscW wonders if the politicians' reactions aren't misplaced: "This is a game where you could stalk prostitutes, slit their throat, maim them with chainsaws, then go steal a stranger's car, run him over, go back over to the prostitute's body, and peel out on her corpse. Then get out, take her money, drive away, and run over a few cops for good measure." And people are upset over a little hey-hey?

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (148)

Category: The Gadget Scene

A Behemoth Unleashed

Let's leave aside, for a moment, the stuffy, stick-in-the-mud things it's tempting to say about this page of photos, BlogPulse's no. 21 link today. You can just hear them, too: "He has way too much time on his hands," say the sarcastic tearers-down of human ingenuity. Fie! Have you ever seen a gummy bear that size? That thing could choke a horse! Everybody knows the properties of bear-shaped gum are difficult to control -- what child hasn't squeezed one as hard as she can, with no success in deforming the happy little bear? The BlogPulse fluid dynamics engineering department tells us that understanding and controlling the bear-gum viscosity must've taken thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Actually, the page says it was "a day and a half of work." Ah well) "Creative, disgusting and fascinating all at once."

Posted by Philip Ewing at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Category:

Serenity Now! Serenity Now!

In what could be a display of the power of dedicated, web-connected geekoids -- or alternately, a display of the entertainment industry's ability to reverse itself when it discovers dough-rey-me it hasn't yet snatched up -- the long-subcutaneous excitement over the coming movie Serenity has at last appeared in BlogPulse. Today's no. 7 link is for the movie trailer. "Eeek!!!" writes mistress_lupins, one of the legions of sci-fi devotees who never tire of praising creator Joss Whedon and the show "Firefly," from which "Serenity" is spun off. Which brings us to link no. 28, a newspaper column endorsing Whedon and "Firefly," which will soon be rebroadcast on the Sci-Fi channel. From reading its fans' devotions, the show seems to rank as a creative achievement just under the invention of moveable type and far above such things as the interstate highway system or most of the contents of the Louvre.

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Category: Moving Pictures

Looks Like Chief O'Brien Has To Do All The Beaming Now

The blogosphere has erupted in mourning at the death of actor James Doohan, beloved former chief engineer of the USS Enterprise and the man up to whom many characters ordered beamed. He dominates BlogPulse's top links today and is today's burstiest person. What is there to say about Scotty now that the communicator of destiny has been flipped open and the order was given to "energize?" He always squeezed every last drop of juice out of the dilithium crystals, and though he often admonished Capt. Kirk that she canna take much mooore, the engines always held on in the end, and, even though the poor guy was caught in a transporter loop around a Dyson's Sphere and kept alive in stasis for decades, he always came through with a smile. And, as we learned in Star Trek II, he's never gone as long as he lives on in our memories. As such, says this blogger, "Long live Scotty."

Posted by Philip Ewing at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Category:

What's The Buzz On Book Street?

Much to the chagrin of Sony, Apple, Microsoft and others, America's kids seem to have rediscovered the original portable data assistant -- books -- with the recent release of Potter VI and movie adaptations of other novels. But just because they're using a low-tech information delivery system doesn't mean they escape our insatiable thirst for metrics profiling and buzz calculation here at BlogPulse. No, we wondered who of the recently prominent old scribblers was enjoying the most chatter in the vast electric lunchroom out there, and ran the numbers for Potter potentate JK Rowling, Willy Wonka creator Roald Dahl, Narnia chronicler C.S. Lewis and War of the Worlds author H.G. Wells. As this graph demonstrates, one author has risen above the others to command most of the blogosphere's buzz.

Posted by Philip Ewing at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Category: The Dead-Tree Scene

A Vital Service

Web utopianists have praised Wikipedia for being the ultimate leveler in gathering and sharing information, and in BlogPulse's no 39 link today the site reaffirms why it has that reputation. It has compiled a list of the movies that contain the most uses of a certain word -- a word you might hesitate before using in front of your mother, let's say -- and if such terms offend you, don't click this link. Containing movies that use the word more than 100 times, it's a useful list, topped by a British film but followed closely by a Scorsese picture, and then, of course, at no. 3 is Martin Lawrence. (But it's not Black Knight, thank God.) Fosfor was surprised more movies didn't use the word more than 100 times, and clickery says the list is a good reason for the web to have been invented. True, but don't forget about things like this. (No. 12)

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category: Moving Pictures

Hipster Nation, Shocked, Drops Its Bottle of P.B.R. Onto Its Pumas

Hey, dude, yeah, thanks for comin' to our show, man -- our new CD should be comin' out soon, if Larry's brother will let us use his computer, but you should totally check out our website! It's on MySpace, y'know, where America's bands, and, like, everbody else, has their own webpage? Yeah, it's so hip and indie Rupert Muroch just bought it. Yeah, for, like, $580 million. Coupla people've been talkin' about it, I guess, but they're all, sayin' stuff about how Fox prolly paid too much, and how MySpace won't be cool anymore and whatnot, I dunno. And I guess crusading New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer totally, like, sued them in April because they were surreptitiously installing spyware on members' computers, but they kept evading those accusations. But wot-ever. You heard about any parties after this?

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Category:

The Geeks Have Spoken And They Will Not Be Denied

Bloggers, geekoids and techies have been drooling the past few days over the Optimus Keyboard, which promises to revolutionize computing peripherals by costing hundreds of dollars for an accessory that now can be had for under $30. Each key on the board is its own LED display, y'see, meaning it can be adapted to have unique keys for each application or OS -- you could plug the thing into your Dell and have a Windows start button key, then move it to your iMac and have Apple command keys instead. Everybody thought it was just a concept, but, as BlogPulse link no. 20 tells us, they're building it. Steve Jobs wishes he could get this buzz so long before he rolls out a new product: "I want it so bad," writes ksilebo. "...[T]his thing is going to be the best addition to a computer since the monitor," gushes right-thoughts. Not as much excitement, however, about the keyboard's companion, the cursor-shaped mouse. Maybe if they made it wireless?

Posted by Philip Ewing at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Category: The Gadget Scene

The Aftermath: Potter Triumphant

We wondered Friday which beloved children's icon would emerge most successfully from the weekend and now we know: wizard Mr. H. Potter, Esq. has handily bested candyman Mr. W. Wonka, J.D. A deconstruction and analysis of Potter's exploits is BlogPulse's no. 1 link today (beware spoilers, as we say here on the web) and, bottom line, Potter just made so much money. (Wonka brought in about $55 million to Potter's $100 million.) Potter also dominated chatter on the information superhighway, as illustrated here:

Posted by Philip Ewing at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Category: The Dead-Tree Scene

Potter v. Wonka: This Time It's Personal

Two beloved children's icons go head-to-head this weekend to see who can brutally dominate being sweet and nice. In the chartreuse corner is William Wonka, confectioner, into whose wildly whimsical empire of wild whimsy admission will first be granted today. In the purple corner is Harold Potter, mage, who's making the circuit because he's got a new book coming out tomorrow. Both are seasoned show-biz veterans. Both, in their time, have had a stranglehold on the hearts of the young. Who will emerge the victor? Well, say bloggers, both: "I cannot wait until Friday. Willy Wonka, Johnny Depp, and Harry Potter all in one night. There is a squee just building up inside me and as soon as I have that book in my hand, it will escape..." writes ladykerradine. "Sounds enchanting, does it not?" says blogger Josh of the coming weekend. Why, maybe this won't turn into such a dust-up, after all.

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category: Moving Pictures

Given His Nickname, How Much Credibility Does This Guy Have Here?

Well, now, things were quiet down in Hazzard County for awhile, but then darn ol' Warner Bro's pitchers hadda green light a feature film based on the place, and you know some folks were fine with it, but darn ole Cooter, why, he plumb got more worked up than a highway patrolman who'd spilled coffee on his radar gun. Seems actor and former Congressman Ben Jones, which is what city-fied folks call him, don't particularly like the new movie, and darn ifin' he ain't a-telling people not to see it. Well, now, you know when they get a-hold a somethin' like that over in Blog County, darn if they just don't let 'er go before everybody's had their two cents about 'er: Fella called Wallow idn't worried about the movie: "Most movie “remakes” of TV shows the past few years have been far less interested in being like the original and more about making a something of a parody of the culture and mores of the time. I can’t be surprised there." An' Miss Gawker mighta been bein' a mite sarcastic when she wrote "Cooter, of course, has always been our arbiter of good taste."

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category:

Now J.K. Rowling Knows How Salmon Rushdie Felt

The Pottersphere thought it had been slighted when the LA Times ran a column making fun of Harry's grown-up devotees, but that was before it passed around today's BlogPulse's no 2 link. It's a report that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who now is the pontifex maximus, said in 2003 that he opposed Harry Potter. He sent a letter of encouragement to the author of a Catholic book that warned the Potter books "corrupt the hearts of the young, preventing them from developing a properly ordered sense of good and evil, thus harming their relationship with God..." Huh. What say the bloggers? Uzzman: "Interesting article, but come on...is there not something more insidious to worry about?" Andy: "... [I]f the downfall of the Catholic faith is going to be children's fantasy literature, that says more about the weakness of the church than about the overwhelming evil that is Harry Potter." And the Minister of Perfidy: "The Holy Father may not approve of the Harry Potter books. But I am eagerly awaiting the arrival by parcel post on Saturday of my copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." And look for it in bookstores July 16, folks!

Posted by Philip Ewing at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Category: The Dead-Tree Scene

If You Tilt Them Over, Do Their Eyes Close?

BlogPulse is dedicated to observing what bloggers like and dislike, what they're thinking and what they're writing. But the blogosphere is so vast -- at last count we'd identified more than 13.7 million blogs -- that every so often something like this comes along, today's no. 12 link. One tries to be charitable in assessing it and bloggers' reactions, but the necessary conclusion is that it's really weird, man. "I feel like I have to take a shower after viewing it," writes beanshadow. "People who subjugate their children to this are creepy," writes isol8d. Nonetheless, Flyswatter secretly wants her picture taken like this, "to see how I turn out." Never fear, though. There are many other links today, like no. 25, that can take your mind off such things.

adopt your own virtual pet!

Posted by Philip Ewing at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Category:

Somewhere, Zack Morris Is Staring Down An Empty Bottle

Eagle-eyed BlogPulse watchers doubtless went straight to link no. 39 today to see the details of actress Tiffani Thiessen's marriage to Brady Smith, who, as far as our research indicates, did not graduate with her from Bayside High. It was Thiessen's pretend high school days for which many remember her; she played the American Everygirl named Kelly and was more than a match for Mark-Paul Gosselaar's slacker Zack on "Saved By the Bell." (Though once, in a hilarious phone mix-up, Zack accidentally told Kelly's little sister he loved her, and boy, did things get confusing...Zack had set up some kind of "teen line"... ah, but we digress.) Not surprisingly, the mood among male bloggers of a certain age range is bleak: "NO!," writes liberaleric. "She was supposed to marry me!" Yeah, right. Get in line.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Category: Celebs

TomKat Update

We would be remiss if we did not bring to your attention recent developments in the romance between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes (who, together, are known by the blog shorthand TomKat). Cruise is BlogPulse's no. 5 key name today -- pushed downward by other newsmakers involved in a slightly juicier story -- and his fiance is no. 21. What many bloggers are talking about is this disturbing report from W magazine, in which Holmes appears to robotically answer questions about Cruise as if she's been... you know. (Brainwashed!) She apparently has had a Scientology minder with her for all her recent public appearances, who, in the W piece, reminds Holmes she "adores" Cruise when she struggles for words. And her future spouse turned icy not too long ago in an interview with Australian TV, apparently having seen or heard some of the recent talk about him. Tense times. What does it all mean? Perhaps L. Ron or Xenu can offer some clues.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 01:20 PM | Permalink

Category: Celebs

A Muggle Draws Blood

Perhaps when Leonard Nimoy penned his book "I Am Not Spock," in which he distanced himself from Star Trek and ridiculed the show's legion of fans, he might've gotten a more intense geekoid backlash than Joel Stein, whose LA Times jeremiad this weekend took no prisoners in skewering devotees of BlogPulse's perennial top man, Harry Potter. (Then again, George Lucas has been known to provoke some pretty acrid, frothing reactions from the world's nerds.) Mostly Stein points out that whereas Harry's exploits might make fine bedtime material for children, he can't quite agree they're worth the praise and time adults seem to lavish on them. "I'm sure the Potter books are fun. I bet a night of Fun Dip, piñatas and Sit N Spin would be great too," he writes. Predictably, the Pottersphere (as the blogosphere sometimes ought to be known) has never been so insulted: "All of this, of course, just goes to show that Joel Stein doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. The Harry Potter books are, in the guise of children’s literature, serious examinations of character, morality, politics, and culture," writes Alex Knapp. Elise the Insane thinks it's unfair to single out the Potterheads for such scorn: "Is it rather stupid for a 32 year-old woman to be looking forward to sitting in line for six hours for a children's book? Maybe. That is one way of putting it; but that stupid tag can be applied to nearly every single pop culture event. NASCAR fans having massive orgasms while watching people make left turns all day - seems pretty stupid to me." What about children flying around on brooms playing a made-up game nobody understands?

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:43 AM | Permalink

Category: The Dead-Tree Scene

From The Rubble, And The Web, Resolve

Frivolity on the web was rightly eclipsed by the terror attacks in London -- Ben and Jen and Tom and Katie will get a break while bloggers chew over what comes next for Britishers and their bruised metropolis. The msm was quick to credit bloggers for providing eyewitness accounts and images of the attacks. You can see a single, enormous trans-Atlantic discussion in the thousands of posts that have appeared yesterday; some bloggers are furious, some are thoughtful and some are just glad it wasn't worse. Sites to watch for developments from London Towne include the Flickr 7/7 photos page, BlogPulse's no. 11 link today, London's metroblogs, no. 23, and The Guardian, no. 24. And be sure to read the London News Review's response to the terrorists. It summarizes nicely what we're all thinking.

Posted by Philip Ewing at 12:21 PM | Permalink

Category:

A Cruise Backlash

Evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, would seem to indicate that few bloggers were as good as their word in calling for a Tom Cruise boycott. After all, how could they resist a summertime blockbuster helmed by Steven Spielberg? But even though 77.6 million bucks' worth of people saw the War of the Worlds, at BlogPulse our instruments tell us of a lingering disatisfaction with one Thomas Cruise Mapother IV. To wit: "Tom Cruise is nuts" is our no. 8 bursty phrase today. Not coincidentally, that also is the name of a website to which a lot of bloggers have been linking lately. So the sentiment out there is clear. Blogger darksidhe sums it up: "You know, he's not that bad of an actor, I do enjoy most of his movies, but him? Like, him as a person, turns me right off his movies." But not enough, apparantly, to skip them.

Posted by Philip Ewing at 12:15 PM | Permalink

Category: Celebs

The Crumbs From Your Table

At the intersection of politics, humanitarianism, celebrity and rock was Live 8 last weekend, the summit for pop music's elder statesmen and women to lobby everyone in the world to help debt- disease- and famine-stricken Africa. Organizers used the web to gather signitures and broadcast the concerts, and naturally bloggers joined in the discussion -- Live 8's website is BlogPulse's no. 3 link today. But it's not all peaches and cream, as Lloyd Banks once said, and he ain't Sara Lee. Crowds booed Celine Dion when she performed her Live 8 set via satellite from her Las Vegas headquarters; people complained Africa was underrepresented in the concerts, despite their intentions; and then there were all the other critics, who either said Live 8 wasn't enough -- like blogger shmeen -- or that it was all a bit much, like Mark Steyn, BlogPulse's no. 25 link. Whew. So that's all that. Jezebelee saw some of the shows, though, and she resists cynicsm: "There are many cynical editorials online regarding Live 8," she writes. "Maybe they are all right, that a mega concert is not going to affect the slightest change in politics, but it has in the very least given faces to the ongoing senseless suffering in Africa." Yes it has.

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:11 AM | Permalink

Category: The Soundscape

The Gambler Loses

Baseball is a really difficult game. Players sometimes get mad. Texas Rangers pitcher Kenny Rogers, for example, got frustrated earlier this month and punched a cooler in the dugout, breaking a bone in the pinky of his pitching hand. But that's not why he's BlogPulse's no. 24 bursty person today. No, that would be because he went crazy on a couple of TV cameramen who had the temerity to point their cameras at him, a professional athlete, as he stepped onto the playing field. The sport-blog scene has been almost unanimous in its condemnations: Surviving Grady offers some theories for why it went down: "...[h]e went and gave the videocamera a couple good kicks, because it's a video camera, and it's got to pay for its sins. Plus, it may have been in cahoots with those Gatorade coolers that The K Man had to 'straighten out' a couple days ago." (The ones that attacked him and broke his pinky.) Blogger Dylan laments that Rogers has been one of the best hurlers the Rangers have ever had, but that he'll only be remembered now for being a hothead. But perhaps the most apt commentary on the Rogers flareup is the headline for this piece, which says what we were all thinking.

Posted by Philip Ewing at 01:18 PM | Permalink

Category: Sport Spectator

Blogpulse Friday Celeb Roundup

Man oh man the celebs are out in force today. Brooke Shields isn't taking lightly all those things that Tom Cruise has been saying about her lately; Steven Spielberg is starting what might be his most controversial movie; Brad, Angelina and Jen are all over the place; Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner are not only married, but reports are that their union has been blessed with issue! Yowza! Can the blogosphere handle such a glut of sensational star-filled stories? Well, sure. Defamer is right on top of Bennifer Deux; Lawren Mills says she's not convinced by the Brad + Angelina fambly pix. And it's not only carbon-based celebs who're making news today -- Engadget reports that the world's most advanced humanoid robot has a new gig. Still, not everybody's excited. JimmyAkin asks: "Why is this country so shallow that we must entertain ourselves through voyeuristic peeks into the private lives of people who are paid outrageous sums of money to pretend to be other people for a living?" Oh. Because they're so much prettier than the rest of us?

Posted by Philip Ewing at 11:16 AM | Permalink

Category: Celebs