It's Not Your Great-Great Grandfather's Popular Science
Posted on January 17, 2006
It Is Not Your Great-Great Grandfather’s Popular Science
Nope, this is not your father’s Popular Science. Nor is it you grandfather’s, your great grandfathers or your great-great grandfather’s. Born in 1872, Popular Science is as old as Darwin, but as fresh in the digital age as it was when it documented the invention of the telephone, the phonograph and the lightbulb. We did a radio show from the Lunch @ Piero’s media event during CES in Las Vegas where we talked with Suzanne Kantra Kirshner, the magazine’s Chief Technology Editor, about matters ranging from bizarre Victorian inventions to pocket-sized HDTV cameras, what’s hot at CES and some of the technologies and products Pop Science has judged the “Best of What’s New”.
LISTEN - MP3
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Las Vegas and CES: Whither the Cannonballs
Posted on January 17, 2006
Buccaneeresses at TI (Treasure Island) AARGH!
Las Vegas & CES: Whither the Cannonballs
Captain, I dare say we have two parallel but equal universes here. On the Las Vegas Strip we have TI (in another time warp it was called Treasure Island), now more appropriately labeled TA: scantily-clad buccaneeresses pole dance around the masts of a pirate ship teasing the throngs with their thongs, beckoning them to “come on in”. Over at the Las Vegas Hilton, Bill Gates opens the huge Consumer Electronics Show struttin’ his not-quite-yet Windows Vista operating system. Generating excitement about that is a task equal to getting an artichoke to strip dance. Gates was accompanied by “hearthrob” Justin Timberlake hawking MTV’s new digital download service called URGE…yet another way for us to buy music and other media online.
I hear the throbbing snores of the masses.
Nothing revolutionary with either institution this year: Las Vegas or CES.
Oh, you might say that the Wynn hotel is new. I paid a visit and found it…well…very big, very corporate and not very imaginative. Can’t say anything about its restaurants, as I didn’t eat there. I do like Steve Wynn’s old creation the Bellagio, though. Still a creamy dollop of Camembert on a strip that otherwise ranges in consistancy from Monterey Jack to Cheez Whiz.
A few years ago, Las Vegas switched its target market from families to voyeurs and not much new has happened since the makeover. Knowing Las Vegas and evidenced by the fact that the city is pitted with more craters than the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that won’t last forever. Blowing up buildings is spectator sport here and as one building collapses, new towers of temptation rise. Next to impode with be the old 1950s vintage Stardust, to make way in 2010 for another themed megacomplex.
Not to say that you should not visit Las Vegas. If you haven’t been there in the past five years you are in for a treat. Las Vegas is its own shape-shifting reality that is virtually unrecognizable to anyone who hasn’t been there in the past decade. But I still love the Old Las Vegas I first saw in the 70s when my car broke down there on a cross country trip.. My favorite hotel, outside of the Bellagio, is the somewhat tatty Tropicana, built by Bugsy Segal, the boss of Las Vegas in the days before the goodfellas went corporate. It has penguins in the courtyard, quite natty. But there there have been rumors of Tropicana’s demise as well. And for traditional dining in an old Las Vegas hangout, nothing beats Piero’s on Convention Center Boulevard. I treated myself to a New York steak there the other night. Forget about Vegas’ chain steak houses, this is as good as it gets. Justin Timberlake and his squeeze Cameron Diaz sat two tables away from us watched over by two bodyguards, one shaped like a beetle.
Organizers of the Consumer Electronics Show say about 130 thousand people turned up to see the latest gizmos and gadgets. A highlight is usually Bill Gates’ annual assessment of the future of our “digital lifestyle”, a frightening term that surely does not encompass gardening or any form of Zen. What he was mostly excited about was how he and MTV are going to capture our eardrums and eyeballs and assault our credit cards with audio, video and videogames, something everybody including Apple, Ma Bell, your cellphone company, your cable company, your power company and everyone else with a hard drive filled with MP3s wants to do. Everyone was waiting for Google’s to make an earth-quaking announcement, which was, are you ready? Another media download service.
How much Justin Timberlake do we want? How many slices of this media pie, how many empty calories, can we support or will some genius, as George W. would say, “make the pie higher.”
There were a few innovations displayed at CES, however. Our favorites: a pocket HDTV camcorder from Sanyo for under 800 bucks, a pocket-sized internet radio receiver from Aussie company Torian that has presets on it, like a car radio, that you can use anywhere there is a WiFi connection. We liked the DualCor cellphone that is a real computer, not just a dumbed-down smartphone, a bunch of different Skype phones that can eliminate long distance charges and a scheme from a guy at MIT ’s Media Lab for cellphones that swarm with other phones to create their own independent network. Get enough of these things out there and by 2010 and we pack Ma Bell off to the Buttonhook Home for Retired Technologies. We did a radio show from there and you will post interviews with the MIT guy, Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, the chief Technology editor of Popular Science, Chuck Tannert, Automotive Editor of Cargo Magazine and inventor John Boucard, who invented the modern, digital version of the secret decoder ring for none other than Spiderman Creator Stan Lee.
As for Treasure Island, I liked the old show better. Pirates snarled “aargh”,shot cannonballs at each other and sunk a galleon several times a night. Dancing girls you can see naked on cable every night. Las Vegas disappointed me a bit this year, but I will be back in 2007 to see what has been blown up and if anything new, interesting, hinky or kinky has risen from the neon shards.
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Old Las Vegas
Posted on January 10, 2006
The Flamingo Hotel (c) Russell Johnson
Old Las Vegas
I just returned from Las Vegas where I hosted a talk show during the International Consumer Electronics Show. You can find podcasts of it at www.lunchat.com/blog, the site of Lunch @ Piero’s, a yearly get together of technology innovators and the media. I’ll be posting a few interviews of interest to travelers and the technically-curious here over the next few days. Piero’s Restaurant is standing icon of old Las Vegas, before the goodfellas went corporate. It pours martinis the size of Lake Mead and still serves the stars. I dined there the other night and Justin Timberlake and his squeeze Cameron Diaz were two tables away (guarded one guy the size of Hermann Munster and another shaped like a giant beetle). We interviewed Las Vegas “original” and Piero’s owner Fred Glusman about the “good old days”:
LISTEN MP3
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Banff & Lake Louise - Audio Podcast, Video
Posted on December 8, 2005
Banff-Lake Louise
The Rockies in Rutting Season
Story by Russell Johnson
Audio - MP3
Video: First Snow
1MIN Windows Media
HDTV (41mb) Standard Web Video
”Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow” Frank Zappa
God tipped over the snowglobe and fresh flakes fall, frosting the castle and the Canadian Rockies.
On the banks of the Bow we sit, sprinkled with new snow, un-sullied by foot and tire prints, un-yellowed by cats and dogs. It is the first snow of the season. Holiday decorations go up, fireplaces blaze with bonhomie, while politicians in Ottawa punch each other out over a kickback scandal. Did you hear about it in the US, eh? The government of our neighbor to the north brought down and the US media ignored it.
It is a myth, by the way, that Eskimos have 200 words for snow. MORE
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Looking for Santa in New York City
Posted on November 30, 2005
Looking for Santa in NYC
This is the night of the annual Christmas tree lighting ritual at
Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. This year the subject of our
attraction is a colossal 74 foot connifer harvested
in New Jersey, but nowhere near Tony Soprano’s neighborhood. My wife
and I literally cried in our beer last night about not making our
annual New York pilgrimage during the holidays. Maybe we have seen
“Miracle on 34th Street” just too many times. We might, on
impluse, still buy a ticket on Jet Blue and take off for a couple of
days, but we will miss tonight’s big affair. Not that we would even get
close to it, as we found out last time we went there “In Search of
Santa”.
» Filed Under New York, Audio, Holiday | Leave a Comment
Thanksgiving in Paris - City of Lights Video
Posted on November 25, 2005
Photo © 2004 Russell Johnson
City of Lights: A Paris Minute
Windows Media Video
HDTV (39MB) - STANDARD VIDEO
An American in Paris: Thanksgiving 2004
by Russell Johnson
The Story in Audio
MP3
The French are getting fat, so say reports, consuming and consumed by le fast food. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their scrawny turkeys. Dindon rings with onomonopoea. This time last year my wife and eschewed dindon and enjoyed a Thanksgiving rack of lamb with expat friends before roaming about the City of Lights. The audio story is from last year but we just got around to editing a minute of video from our nighttime stroll. READ MORE
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Thanksgiving Cold Turkey - Heidelberg
Posted on November 23, 2005
Heidelberg Castle ©Russell Johnson
Thanksgiving: Cold Turkey
Brrrrr
Audio MP
5:20
I’m sure, if you are over 18 you have spent some holiday season away from home. A few years ago I flew to Frankfurt, Germany the day before US Thanksgiving for a 1/2 hour business meeting. The meeting was a bust and alone, in a terrible mood, on a bone-chilling afternoon I boarded a train for Heidelberg, where the Student Prince was alive and quite drunk.
» Filed Under Germany, Audio, Holiday | Leave a Comment
The Most Un-China Place in China
Posted on November 10, 2005
Bai Wedding - Dali, China
The lanky groom greeted me at the door to a courtyard, handing me a cigarette. In fact he greeted every male guest with cigarette. I don’t smoke and every time the groom saw me not smoking he gave me a new cigarette, which I promptly stuffed into my jacket pocket. Once he figured out my game, he snuck up behind me and stuffed cigarettes behind my ears. He even tried to jam one in my mouth. I ended up with
a pocket full of loose tobacco and rolling paper.
I was, quite unexpectedly, invited to a wedding in Yunnan Province, probably the most un-Chinese place in China. READ MORE
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Photo of the Week - Batik Paints, Bali, Indonesia
Posted on October 27, 2005
Photo of the Week: Batik Paints, Bali, Indonesia
©2005 Russell Johnson
Poor Bali, a tourism destination that culturally refused to become a tourist
trap. Yes you do have the big resorts in Nusa Dusa which could be
anywhere and the sometimes rowdy beach scene at Kuta, but the island
has refused to cheapen its culture. In fact, their laws prohibit them
to do so. I met a man, on the road, a few years ago and he invited me
to the wedding of a prince. I attended, met the family, and spent the
whole day in celebration. Once I got a notice in my hotel room that I
was invited to the blessing of the establishment’s new clothes washer.
That’s Bali. Unfortunately, through no fault of its own, Bali has gone
global, sharing with the rest of the world manifestations of terrorism
and intolerence. Still, I would go there tomorrow, if given the excuse.
I would just do what I would do anyway, stay away from the bar scene.
Not my cup of sweet Balinese lotus and ginger tea anyhow.
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Review: The Handspring Treo 650
Posted on October 26, 2005
The Treo 650
Reviewed by Pat Meier-Johnson
Audio MP3
I stared at the Blackberry and the Treo 650, and back again. I hefted one
and then the other, felt my fingernails skid off the rounded keys of
the Treo. While the light weight and flat keys of the Blackberry seemed
practical, the Treo won my heart. READ MORE
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