Monday, May 26, 2003

It may not be a leading economic indicator, but the number of unsolicited emails in my mailbox about technologies and companies I don’t cover seems to be creeping up. Nothing like the bubble days, of course, when dozens of useless press releases -- the spam of a bygone era -- found me each day, and phone calls from script-reading young flacks made it hard to get any work done, but perhaps a hopeful sign.   When I wrote a column about the profusion of clueless flacks during the bubble, I called it the Jennifer Problem. Sam Whitmore wrote at his Media Survey site that this was vaguely sexist. I didn’t think so. A majority of the press-release posse was female, and Jennifer was the most common name for girls born in the US during the 1970s, and a high percentage of the perky PR pushers in the late ‘90s were named Jennifer. I would routinely have 500 deleted emails from people I'd never met named Jennifer.   Jennifer, come back, all is forgiven. 12:33:24 PM

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OK, one more one more thought on Matrix Reloaded, from Abstract Dynamics: “(T)he untold story about the Matrix franchise is that its the biggest piece of leftist agitprop to hit the western mediasphere in years.” (via Doc Searls) 12:19:14 PM

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One more thought on Matrix Reloaded – Elijah and I think that in the third movie the “real” world might turn out to be just another artificial construct, as hinted at when Neo’s powers work on the attacking machines at the end of the movie, and by the rogue agent’s ability to enter the “real” world. If so, then Adam Gopnik’s complaints were of even more limited usefulness than previously noted. 9:37:25 AM

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Last year on Memorial Day I wrote about vestigial Southern intransigence over “Dead Yankee Day.” This year it’s hard to imagine such disrespect for the US military – but that’s probably been true at other moments in the past, and those moments have passed.   Since kids in North Carolina do get the holiday these days, we’re in beautiful Nelson County, VA, where the waterfalls along the Old Appalachian Trail are flowing at maximum capacity with the help of this spring’s Noachic rains.   I'll probably work in some discussion of what we're memorializing today as we tromp through the woods, personalizing it by mentioning the death of Captain Frank Cone in a Japanese POW camp, maybe mixing in stories of other family members who served the United States (or the Confederacy). 9:29:27 AM

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© Copyright 2003 Ed Cone.