Seinfeld has gone full-blown sitcom in his second Microsoft commercial with Bill Gates. Is this working, or have these guys worn out their welcome with the public as well as their “host family”?
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Follow-up, 18Sept: Microsoft has announced they’re pulling the ads.
I’ve watched the new Microsoft commercial a couple of times, and to me it falls flat. I fail to see the entertainment value of one of the world’s richest men talking about shoes with a rich comedian who’s been given $10 million to be in the commercial.
Aren’t both Gates and Seinfeld essentially retired anyway? In that context, I guess having them pal around like a couple of old men makes sense — they’ve got nothing better to do.
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What really gets me is that somehow the subtext of the commercial is supposed to be Windows Vista as a cool alternative to Mac OS X. Well, it isn’t. Click here for one reason why. Thanks to tastewar for the tip. This article explains why it’s a waste having more than 3GB of memory installed for Windows XP and Vista.
Everybody’s been wondering about Steve Jobs’ health, but does Bill Gates look all right to you in that commercial? He doesn’t look well to me. Oh, by the way, what do Gates, Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Worldwide Web) — and myself — all have in common? Well, we’re all in the computer biz, but I’m not rich and famous. We were born in 1955. Unfortunately, so were Mark David Chapman and John Hinkley, Jr.
Scott McCloud, creator of the independent comic book series ZOT! and author of the book Understanding Comics, has created an online comic book for Google, explaining the new Chrome browser.
Chrome sounds interesting, mostly because of its independent tabs, but I’ll wait a bit before jumping on it. Computerworld’s review of Chrome is very good. Ever have a page in one tab lock up, resulting in a crash of the whole browser, or forcing you to crash it? Sure you have, so if you have at least a gig of memory you will like independent tabs.
McCloud, who grew up in Massachusetts, changed the spelling of his name from McLeod when he started working in comics. I know this because his mother’s apartment happens to be around the corner from my mother-in-law, in the retirement community where they live. I assume Scott wanted to avoid confusion with comic book artist Bob McLeod, who was already established in the business at the time McCloud came on the scene.
It was two years ago today that I started blogging. DogRat presently has 1234 posts and averages over 100,000 hits/month from over 5,000 different addresses. In the past year I have realized a 100% increase in blogging years. Next year at this time there will have been only a 50% increase compared to now. So it goes.
Petula Clark always sounds a bit amused that the French called her “sexy Pet.” But, then, what do the French know about what’s sexy?
If you’ve never heard of Alizée, you might be in for a bit of shock, because this is what passes for family entertainment in France. But I’ve never watched So You Think You Can Dance, so what do I know? Maybe it would be considered mainstream in America too.
Here is French superstar Alizée, five years ago, age eighteen. Computer gamer types will recognize this from the World of Warcraft. It was the basis for the Night Elf Dance.
There is precious little about humorist Jackson Paine available on the Internet. In fact, there’s nothing at all. Everything that I know about him is on the back of his 1961 LP, “The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine: Humor in its Newest Form.”
My dad got this record when he bought a stereo in 1963, a big GE tabletop console. The turntable had an automatic changer that swung down on a hinge, and it included stereo FM, which was quite new at the time. In fact, my father first brought home a GE stereo radio without a record player, but exchanged it. A wise move.
“The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine” is one part comedy record, one part sound effects record, and one part stereo demonstration record. I have very fond memories of listening to it when I was a kid, along with the Audio Fidelity Stereo Spectacular record that I featured over a year ago.
I think a lot of the humor holds up pretty well. It’s a real artifact of its time, created by a New York ad man working in the JFK era, as depicted in Mad Men. Each side is about ten minutes long.
Side 1
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Jan/JacksonPaine1.mp3|titles=The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine: Side 1]
Side 2
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Jan/JacksonPaine2.mp3|titles=The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine: Side 2]
