Pumzi (Trailer)- A Kenyan sci-fi short film

Set in a post-apocalyptic world in which water scarcity has extinguished life above ground, the short follows one scientist’s quest to investigate the possibility of germinating seeds beyond the confines of her repressive subterranean Nairobi culture.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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Noah & The Whale - 2 Atoms In A Molecule

The Tampa Bay Rays have no fans

The link is to an ESPN article about how despite the team’s success, fans don’t come out.

Here’s a local newspaper article about the Rays saying history suggests they won’t move anywhere before their lease ends in 2027. But I don’t buy that. Of course, I’m a Toronto Blue Jays fan and I would be surprised if they lasted in that city another 20 years either. SkyDome won’t be gleaming forever…though I could see political will to keep them there and there won’t be any dearth of deep pockets like Montreal.

Just move the Rays to New Jersey already and change their horrendous name. The NYC market is gargantuan, and why keep the team in a market that despite it’s media market size has a hard time putting butts in the seats. The Marlins already held up their taxpayers for a new stadium, so we know they’re not going anywhere. 

They can share a stadium with another team. Not so much CitiField with the Mets, but perhaps Citizens Bank Park with the Phillies, since Philadelphia is the largest baseball market with only one team in it. Boston would be great, given how much Fenway is sold out, but only if they could be moved to the NL.

The Trop is an awful place to watch a baseball game and came before the stadium boom or else it’d look a lot better. Bottom line is, there’s no reason for the team to draw as poorly as it does with all of those stars on it and if it were in a better baseball market, they’d be doing a lot better. 

Couple that with the ownership group’s ties to NYC and I feel like if Washington D.C. could get a team, a deal could be worked out eventually for a 3rd team in NYC, but not under the regime of Selig, it’ll take a new Commissioner with some vision to orchestrate that. Just put them on SNY or YES and the Yankees and Mets will get over it. 

seaninsound: Clearly, the once bright dead star that is the Murdoch-owned MySpace may seem the most obvious parallel for a music-centred community but a lot of the functionality, of presenting personal charts and sharing your loves, has been done incredibly well by Last.fm. A lot of the feed functionality also looks a lot like the somewhat clunky, flog-it-to-your-friends pyramid scheme-ish mFlow and quite blatantly like Facebook, which doesn’t limit your sharing and loves to “just” music. These “social” bells and whistles, feels a bit like Apple awkwardly following the class of ‘06, rather than boldly leading the way. I guess the main problem (for people like me, which I accept isn’t their core target market) is that this wasn’t iTunes launching a Netflix for music. This wasn’t “buy an iPod, pay a tenner a month and fill yer boots!”  Pretty much what I was thinking about it. Except, the only downside to subscription music is when the subscription runs out and for some folks, that can be difficult to go from having music in your possession to renting it. One of the things I will say has eroded my music allegiances is the fact that I have so much access to a bevy of bands. But the flip side is, I’ve been introduce to a ton of bands I’d never have loved as much as I do, if it weren’t for the ability to pick ‘n mix whatever I want to hear whenever rather than being constrained by buying only whatever I could afford. I don’t have the budget for say, 10 albums a month. But an album a month for access to everything? That’s a deal that usually works and indeed the wave of some kind of future. I’ve seen more concerts in the past five years as a result of this than I had prior to that, when I was mostly a consumer of physical music products. I haven’t opted into Ping yet and while I’m curious to see how it works, I don’t really want another service that takes information that’s already somewhere else and shares it with g-d knows who, in the interest of “sharing.”

seaninsound:

Clearly, the once bright dead star that is the Murdoch-owned MySpace may seem the most obvious parallel for a music-centred community but a lot of the functionality, of presenting personal charts and sharing your loves, has been done incredibly well by Last.fm. A lot of the feed functionality also looks a lot like the somewhat clunky, flog-it-to-your-friends pyramid scheme-ish mFlow and quite blatantly like Facebook, which doesn’t limit your sharing and loves to “just” music. These “social” bells and whistles, feels a bit like Apple awkwardly following the class of ‘06, rather than boldly leading the way.

I guess the main problem (for people like me, which I accept isn’t their core target market) is that this wasn’t iTunes launching a Netflix for music. This wasn’t “buy an iPod, pay a tenner a month and fill yer boots!” 

Pretty much what I was thinking about it. Except, the only downside to subscription music is when the subscription runs out and for some folks, that can be difficult to go from having music in your possession to renting it. One of the things I will say has eroded my music allegiances is the fact that I have so much access to a bevy of bands. But the flip side is, I’ve been introduce to a ton of bands I’d never have loved as much as I do, if it weren’t for the ability to pick ‘n mix whatever I want to hear whenever rather than being constrained by buying only whatever I could afford.

I don’t have the budget for say, 10 albums a month. But an album a month for access to everything? That’s a deal that usually works and indeed the wave of some kind of future. I’ve seen more concerts in the past five years as a result of this than I had prior to that, when I was mostly a consumer of physical music products.

I haven’t opted into Ping yet and while I’m curious to see how it works, I don’t really want another service that takes information that’s already somewhere else and shares it with g-d knows who, in the interest of “sharing.”

still cracks me up.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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Four Non Blondes - What’s Up

25 years and my life is still
trying to get up that great big hill of hope
for a destination

Now this is one of those songs you hear and it immediately reminds you of the 90s. I used to wonder what my generation’s oldies would sound like and well…this one has to be on the short list.

BYU goes independent

After bantering about this earlier today on a college football blog, I thought I ought to chime in about this here.

One of the first football games I went to at the University of Wyoming was against Brigham Young University. The taunts hurled in their direction from the student section are not quite fit for a family publication.

In any case, the Cougars of BYU are leaving the friendly confines of the Mountain West Conference after this season, choosing instead to strike it on their own as an independent, opting instead for the West Coast Conference for all sports besides football.

This move is huge for the fledging WCC, which is made up of private religious schools that are similar in size. Having recently opted not to expand as recently as June, the conference changed its tune quickly when the possibility of BYU joining fell into their lap after the collapse of the Western Athletic Conference.

Most of the fallout seems to be that it doesn’t make any competitive sense for BYU to do this. Except, none of the realignment moves that have happened this year have absolutely anything to do with competitiveness. They have everything to do with money. College sports fans desperately want to believe in the purity of the game, because it makes them feel better when contrasted against the backdrop of holdouts, lockouts and performance enhancing drugs of the pro ranks.

This move makes a ton of sense for BYU in the short term. It’s unlikely the BCS Board of Directors will give BYU much in the way of concessions related to access to BCS bowl games beyond the standard “finish in the Top 14” that they had while in the Mountain West. But the school can schedule whoever it wants. They’ll have help, partnering with ESPN to broadcast their BYU-TV games and that will help tons to create some marquee matchups. Still, the BYU name doesn’t have the same cache as Notre Dame (even if BYU has been a lot better over the past decade) and it’ll be difficult to convert eyeballs west of the Mississippi.

Still, the Mountain West’s horrible TV deal was the sticking point here. It was hampering BYU’s own goals with marketing itself. Worst case scenario, the two parties kiss and make up within a decade in some kind of new conference realignment. Best case? BYU has great success and manages to position itself beyond what it could’ve done as a member of fledging leagues.

I’ve been hypercritical of the Mountain West leadership for being conservative during the quiet period. Boise State should’ve been invited years ago and they would have been smart to position that league well before Utah had a chance to bolt. But their missteps are coming back to haunt them now. The league will be a 10-team league next year, which is still one team more than they’ll have this season. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they found a way to expand to 12 teams before the dust settles.

No matter what, the league they’re inheriting isn’t as good as the one they are leaving behind. Meanwhile, the WAC will need a hail mary to ensure it’s own survival. I suspect UT-San Antonio will join the league and at least one other Texas school to prevent the defection of Louisiana Tech, but if Hawai’i decides it’s easier to be an independent too, they might have a difficult time scrambling to convince half a dozen FCS schools to move up in a few years, since many of them will need to add sports to qualify at that classification.

To really illustrate BYU’s quibble, the MWC television network (The Mtn.) is only available on extended packages via cable and DirectTV sports package. Meanwhile, BYU-TV is available on the basic tier of DirectTV, meaning I could conceivable follow BYU football anywhere, whereas the Mtn. would be an added expense.

I think this move is smart, proactive and low-risk because people aren’t looking at it with the right lenses. It’s all about the dollars and cents and long-term, it makes a lot of sense and cents for BYU to make this move.

We’ll see how it goes, I guess.