Search – I am Pablo

Flabby Hoffman?

Flipping channels last night I ended up on Chicago Access Network Television (CANTV) channel 19. What caught my attention was the bowling scene from the Big Lebowski. It was pretty grainy and the cutting of the swear words was a bit… amateur. As I watching, it suddenly cut to some other movie. This continued for almost 30 minutes, and I couldn’t stop watching. It was a bizarre selection of movies, news bits, cartoons and TV shows. Some of them hilarious, many bizzare, and some outright spooky. At about the time they showed Angela Landsbury’s incredible scene in the Manchurian Candidate (a movie I have yet to see, but somehow recognized it immediately) I wondered about the legality of showing so many movie/tv/media clips. The juxtaposition of the Simpson’s Planet of the Apes musical bit with the actual movie was quite entertaining! Katty had no idea why I kept on watching it – but was just as fascinated as myself! Has anybody seen The Loved One?! (this was the scene we saw last night – gotta love google)

Shortly thereafter, color bars filled the screen and only the audio could be heard. This was just the icing on the cake! Was it a broadcast signal intrusion? I had first heard about this while talking to somebody about Max Headroom and finding out about an incident in 1987 on Chicago’s WGN and WTTW stations. The hijackers were never found – could this be a new incident?? I immediately checked CANTV’s Thursday listings to find out that Flabby Hoffman was scheduled to air. Googling got me to Flabby Hoffman’s home page

Flabby Hoffman uses his unique powers of hyper-sensitivity, super cognizance and fanatical devotion to an objective truth to help those in need of an empowering spiritual enema.

…not quite what I expected, but almost equally bizarre. The two don’t really match up. There was also a link to a local bar Uncommon Ground – where, apparently, Flabby Hoffman used to perform. This whole thing seemed so surreal to me. So, I just e-mailed CANTV to see what they have to say about the color bars last night. Most likely its all just a coincidence… but I had to ask!

I just noticed that Flabby has MP3s on his website! I’m afraid to listen!

(This got me thinking about Wesley Willis all over again)

Google Zeitgeist 2007

Its that time of year again! Google releases its Zeitgeist.

Zeitgeist describes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era. In German, the word has more layers of meaning than the English translation, including the fact that Zeitgeist can only be observed for past events.

See how the iPhone fares vs. Don Imus, if more people ask “what is love” or “what is bluetooth”, and if more people want to know how to flirt than how to dance! Always a fascinating perspective on the past year’s events!

Google Maps now with Street View!

Google Maps now has a “Street View” mode where you can actually see a picture from street level! Only a few cities (New York, Denver etc… no Chicago yet) have street views right now – but more to come! Awesome stuff! (try using your keyboard arrow keys to actually move around the “virtual city” – WOW!)

IamPablo brrreeeport ing for Scobleizer’s social experiment

In my never ending quest to figure out the nuts and bolt of the Blogosphere I have decided to join in a social experiment that Scobleizer has presented to us. He made up a word and asked us all to post it in our blogs to see how quickly it would permeate through the search engines. It is also an interesting way to check to see how each search engine handles the new data. It is already one of the top searches on Technorati! I decided to throw my blog at it to see how it fits into the grand scheme of things!