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I’m just too good to be true.
Can’t take my eyes off me.
I’d be like Heaven to touch.
I wanna hold me so much.
At long last love has arrived
And I thank God I’m alive.
I’m just too good to be true.
Can’t take my eyes off of me.
I like to play a little game called “Songs For Egoists.” The rules of the game are as follows: take a popular song, change the title and chorus to the first person, then sing a few bars (some players have observed how beverages can enhance the pleasure of this game). Cheesy songs are improved immensely — “I Light Up My Life,” ”Can’t Help Falling In Love With Me,” and my personal favorite above, Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of Me.”
We’ve all Googled ourselves, checking out the clout of our personal graphs and those of our namesakes. I even registered with Google Alerts to monitor Lloyd-O’s web activities and see if anyone mentions my name. Setting up Google Alerts is simple — see my friend Christopher’s blog post on getting started — and you can choose how often you’d like to receive email alerts (daily, weekly, monthly or even “as it happens”). Imagine my surprise when, after months of bubkis, the mother lode appeared in my inbox:
Welcome to Lloyd Scott Music. Enjoy browsing the newly developed site. Make sure to check out our site again for. updates,photos,merchandise and more! …
lloydscottmusic.com/
As my 5-year-old would say, “so much awesome!” Dig that great band name, VH1 Behind The Music-ready bio, logo that screams volume turned way up to 11, and influences ranging from Zeppelin to Paganini! You gotta admit, the violin does add a new dimension to a rock’n'roll sound. So much awesome, indeed.
From Zeppelin to Paganini
I love me, baby,
And if it’s quite alright,
I need me, baby,
To warm a lonely night.
I love me, baby.
Trust in me when I say:
Oh, pretty baby,
Don’t bring me down, I pray.
Oh, pretty baby, now that I found me, stay…
I’m not really sure how or why lead singer Michael Lloyd added “Scott” to the band name, but we mere mortals sometimes just don’t understand pure genius. I eagerly await the “Lloyd Does Floyd” tour (performing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon), debut PHAZE I album in August and fan friendly swag. You can’t stop the impending Lloyd Scott invasion — you can only hope to contain it.
I want to thank my Legos
Now that the thrilling 6 weeks of NBA playoffs are over, with the victorious Lakers vanquishing Satan’s team and restoring the natural order of things, it’s safe to resume suspended activities… like Lego-ing. Any excuse I had for ignoring the pleas of my five-year-old (“Hey, we can’t play with Legos — those green ones look like Celtic colors!”) are over. He was done with the endless replays of Ron Artest copiously thanking his psychiatrist in post-game interviews.
When I was my son’s age, every Lego package came with suggestion booklets for what you could make, but there were no painted on faces or kits telling you where bricks “had to go.” As Michael Chabon observes in his fabulous essay, “To The Legoland Station,” they were “abstract, minimal, ‘pure’ in form and design, they echoed the dominant midcentury aesthetic, with its emphasis on utility and perfectibility.”* Lego constructions didn’t look like reproductions of people, places or things, but rather Lego-idealized versions of them. “Where Lego-building had once been open-ended and exploratory, it now had more in common with puzzle-solving, a process of moving incrementally toward an ideal, pre-established, and above all, a provided solution.”
RIP: V-119 Torrent — We hardly knew ya
Like Chabon, I resented this change. I REALLY resented that it took mere seconds to demolish the 471 piece Star Wars V-119 Torrent that my son demanded I buy for him, the one that I had spent 3 arthritic-inducing nights assembling (suitable for ages 8-12… and not a year older). After finishing the V-119, I had declared it could only be looked at, but NEVER touched again. We could admire it, from afar, on a shelf — “The Force,” I explained, said it must be this way. Needless to say, ‘”The Force” was not with me.
The irritation I felt at the destruction of my back-breaking Lego opus turned to joy as we played with the rubble of the V-119. The familiar tactile pleasures and purity of abstract play and imagination came over me. As we carefully and lovingly combined blues and yellows (ignoring the greens) to construct a Laker Repeat Championship Trophy, I realized how much Lego had changed over the years.
Just 4 years earlier, the company completely restructured the product development process with a dual focus placed on innovation and profitability, reversing a long slump. New product development time was aggressively decreased from 26 to 12 months. The Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry, He Lied*
CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized this week to Facebook users in a Washington Post editorial, conceding “we move quickly to serve that community with new ways to connect with the social Web and each other. Sometimes we move too fast.” That’s quite an apology — saying sorry for not going more slowly while betraying user trust. As the Wall Street Journal’s John Paczkowski observes: “By saying ‘we move too fast,’ Zuckerberg isn’t admitting that Facebook was headed in the wrong direction with respect to user privacy; he’s saying Facebook was headed in [the] right direction all along, just a bit too quickly — for those of us with reasonable expectations of privacy, anyway.”
In “Facebook Privacy? Who Cares?,” Mark Cuban positions this as merely a media issue: “Facebook privacy is very simple at its core. You joined because you wanted to give up some of your privacy in exchange for the benefits that Facebook offers. If you think it’s a problem, de-activate your account. If you think it’s a problem, but really want to be on FB, RTFM (Read the Frickin’ Manual). The functionality is there.”
Harumph. When I signed up, I did give up some of my privacy in exchange for the benefits of the sharing Facebook offers. And, though I was annoyed with each change that Read the rest of this entry »
The Onion calls out Foursquare
Often imitated, but seldom surpassed.
New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It
People Peephole
Bingo!
Three weeks ago, Facebook implemented their ironically titled “Open Graph,” reneging on their original privacy promises, converting what you originally thought was your private profile (your name, the city you live in, names of your friends, photos and causes you believe in) into public by default. Remember when Facebook positioned themselves as the private social network in response to Myspace’s sex predator controversy, where family and friends could share their authentic profiles and real information? Those days are so… 2 years ago. In search of the mother-Zucker of all business models, Facebook would like to extend what is now the largest data base of connections (500 million strong) into a data base of what we like and share, because there’s even more money to be made if the advertiser can better target us.
I have to confess I didn’t join Facebook to share. I joined because I was addicted to another open graph, Scrabulous, the now extinct and legendary black market version of Scrabble. Scrabulous was like the classic board game, only the online version was better. I could play multiple games simultaneously, play fast or slow, with friends around the world. And then, one day, it was all taken away from me… until it reappeared again as a Facebook-only game. Any hesitation I had about joining this social network was assuaged by their promise of privacy (and the promise of more “bingos!”). So I signed up, and played on. Then Scrabble-maker Hasbro sued — Facebook pulled Scrabulous and replaced Read the rest of this entry »
It’s Not You Foursquare, It’s Me
I never got that douchebag badge
I’ve tried… I’ve really tried to engage with you Foursquare, making a commitment to “check-in” as much as possible. And, while it was fun (for a little while) to enter the “WABAC machine” and compete against my network of friends for badges and Mayoral status from my favorite places, this “game” didn’t have the same immediacy as the schoolyard version. Of course, I was 8 or 9 back in those days and nothing was more important than winning a game of four square or dodge ball… except taunting my friends about the win.
I’m now somewhere north of 9 years old… far north… like the North Poll. Millennials may be finding real world satisfaction in their digital accomplishments, but I don’t have time for that stuff. For me, rubbing my friends’ faces in my ascension to Mayor of the Center for the Digital Future can be satisfying, but the stakes are too low. While Foursquare and merit badges seem to be one of the hottest social media trends — even The Huffington Post has recently gotten into the “game” (readers can earn badges by frequently commenting on posts) — the “game mechanics” of using virtual rewards to reach out to loyal customers doesn’t resonate for me like a real reward (see my previous post on Foursquare).
I often forget to “check-in” or just don’t want my network to find out where I am — what if I am enjoying a “Double Down” from KFC? CNET’s CarolineMcCarthy points out the obvious: “The badges all mean, for the most part, literally nothing, though Foursquare is attempting to build a business model out of tying real-world rewards to in-app achievements.” Read the rest of this entry »
Praise the Lard!
For my friend Adi in Israel, in celebration of the iPad’s new “kosher” status. Reading that the most chosen of all products (at least, by me) has received a “heksher,” led me to ruminate on my second most coveted product.
Hint: it’s sow sow good.
Tough to argue with Dahlia Rideout’s meaty logic, “bacon is the great equalizer in American cuisine. It brings lofty dishes down to earth and elevates the mundane to new heights.”
Let this tasty flow chart, courtesy of It’s All About the Bacon, guide you: Read the rest of this entry »
Game Boy
This New Yorker cartoon seemed to perfectly capture the world I’m living in right now — an overwhelming bombardment of real-time information and ubiquitous social network connectivity. Sadly, it also sums up the early performance of my fantasy baseball team, The Mar Vista Droppers, who combine a devastating pitching staff with anemic hitting.
I read cartoonist James Sturm’s excellent Slate piece, “Life Without the Web,” detailing his experiment in “disconnectivity” with a Kübler-Ross-esque hallucination of the stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Why would anyone willingly refuse to use the greatest invention since bacon? My stage 1 state of denial was interrupted by the incessant pleas of my 5-year-old addict: ”Daddy, can I used your iPhone to play Labyrinth?” The auto reply was “no.” I was now (stage 2) angrily pondering what kind of lunatic mind would give up the Internet when I realized things had gone too quiet around the house. I found the kid swiping away — playing Labyrinth on his newly constructed Lego iPod Touch. Even a 5-year-old had figured out how to get his methadone… the thing even had a built-in reserve battery pack (I hope you’re listening Steve Jobs).
In Lego We Trust
Reading Sturm’s article, I found myself bargaining, pointing out inconsistencies like a film geek searching for continuity errors in Jurassic Park — doesn’t using the car GPS to find a conference or having his wife add things to his Netflix queue violate the spirit of the experiment?
Then I read about similar experiments in The New York Times, with teenagers giving up social media for 2 days. Without the distractions of texting, IMs and Facebook, the teenagers got their homework done quicker Read the rest of this entry »
Flash Fried? Savor Every Byte
After reading the Los Angeles Times take on how hardcore foodies and bloggers are the new paparazzi, I decided to do an analysis of my daily habits in search of my true “foodiness:”
However, time spent eating doesn’t accurately reflect time spent preparing to eat — reading food blogs and pondering my next culinary adventure. The general bucket of “Doing stuff” takes up way too much space. Perhaps a graph indicating how much time I devote to thinking about things would more accurately reflect my true “foodiness:”
As the second graph illuminates, at 34%, I spend a lot of time eating, snacking, noshing and thinking about my next meal… usually mid-bite. Since we all have to eat, why settle for something mediocre, right?
The LA Times describes how the food paparazzi’s incessant flash photography and tape recording of daily specials (though I’ve never seen this anywhere) can annoy other patrons and slow down customer turnover, but these potential influencers have real marketing value for restaurant owners and chefs, particularly during a down economy. People are viewing their night out dining as their theater/dining entertainment. When Andrew Knowlton, the restaurant editor for Bon Appetit magazine decries “what happened to the enjoyment of just eating the food,” that’s exactly what we are doing. Now that we’re all
