interesting things
Hooking up online is cheaper than hitting the bar.
In a tough economy, people are heading to Match.com, where $35 a month looks like a bargain compared to a boozy night on the town.
The site, part of Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, posted a 53 percent jump in revenue…
via NY Post: Business http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/iac_internet_hookups_vfclYHLOaxSKMf7VbSsZaL?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Business
A fascinating interview with Vince Gilligan, showrunner of Breaking Bad. The questions are as excellent as the answers.
This points to that quality of improvisation with the work you’re doing. In a traditional crime show, like “CSI,” if it were a big band, it’s a big band working off charts. The arrangements are very tightly controlled. And what I sense with “Breaking Bad” is a sense of, I don’t know, “John Coltrane on acid.” You have this sense of improvisation where you go with things you know, where you tell the story the length it needs to be told. You’re inspired collectively by a moment and you decide to go deeper into that moment. You’re in essence leading a parallel life with your characters and letting those characters take you where they want to go — not necessarily where the dictates of commercial convention say they have to go.
Meanwhile, Alan Sepinwall asks actors Bryan Cranston (2) and Aaron Paul about some of their most iconic moments on the show.
Other highlights:
It finally dawned on me that TV is about stasis, and it is about life, whereas our lives are about change. We get older with every passing moment. We change in our lives, we change our hairstyles. We change our outlooks on life, our political views sometimes. TV by design has to have a certain amount of stasis to it, because the goal in television is to have a TV show that lasts for many decades. But it’s hard to have characters on your TV show change when you are trying to provide a safe haven for the viewers, a familiar place for the viewers to come back to week in and week out. And, to that end, when you have a cop show, and a cop shoots a perp, that rule of stasis, that self-imposed stricture of stasis, dictates that a particular act of violence doesn’t resonate too strongly with the character, certainly within the body of the episode. The cop sits around with his boss, after the shooting, and the boss says, “You did what you had to do.” We’ve all seen that scene. But the next episode, it’s like it never happened.
and:
I hope I get through my whole life and am able to honestly say this: “I have never Googled myself. And I’ve never Googled ‘Breaking Bad.'” I don’t do it, not because I’m not interested, but because the opposite is true. I am desperately interested, but I know that I will disappear down some rabbit hole if I were to do that. And so while we have this amazing opportunity to listen in to these Twitter feeds and get this instant reaction, it would become a very dangerous sort of an echo chamber.
and:
Kubrick’s one of my all-time favorites. The other great quote, that I use all the time from him, was somebody asked him, “What about the space station, and using the Blue Danube throughout that sequence? Just genius! Why did you do it that way?” And Kubrick thought about it, and said, “Showmanship.” It was my favorite answer of all time.
@moorehn: Wasn’t this a Disney movie? RT @WSJ: Russian spy ring planned to recruit children to become agents: http://t.co/MWUAvd9i
@Gizmodo: How Roku could win media streaming: http://t.co/sYhVedSk
@pkafka: Harder to market Roku as a cord-cutting device when its new investors are Pay TV giants. Good @ryanlawler take. http://t.co/5OLarFKm
@palafo: Ann Romney’s horse. RT @mlcalderone: US Olympic Committee has “prohibited the news media from even seeing the horse.” http://t.co/BupsSrQP
@wikileaks: Sea Shepherd founder fears extradition to Japan, flees Germany | The Age http://t.co/aSEjOnbY
http://t.co/7DrARXEO
There will be no two-state solution. The world must accept that we won’t budge, and learn to live with the status quo.
via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/israels-settlers-are-here-to-stay.html
The Senate passed a bill to extend tax cuts for the middle class. The Republican-controlled House will undoubtedly kill it because it does not benefit the wealthy.
via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/who-deserves-a-tax-break.html
The Associated Press looks into Mitt Romney’s association with Bain Capital after he left to run the Winter Olympics in 1999, and adds one small tidbit to the story:
Several associates now say Romney made repeated trips between Salt Lake City and Boston, where he met at times with his former partners, mostly to discuss his severance from the firm. The Boston Globe reported last week that Romney also met with his Bain partners at a 15th anniversary celebration in Palm Beach, Fla., in early 1999.
“Some were group conversations. Some were one on one,” said a legal expert familiar with Romney’s discussions with his Bain partners. This person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential business dealings, said that Romney did not relinquish his Bain ownership after taking the Olympics role but that Romney took care to avoid the day-to-day role of a corporate manager.
This is pretty much the same thing Ed Conard told Chris Hayes a week ago, and since Conard can’t reasonably be described as a “legal expert,” this appears to be independent confirmation of what he said. For the time being, then, it appears that the best evidence supports Romney’s story that (a) he held onto his titles in order to maintain leverage during his severance negotiations, and (b) was involved very little with the operation of Bain after he left. He probably wasn’t completely disengaged (the AP story says his meetings were “mostly” about severance), but it does sound as though he had only minimal operational contact.
Whether he should be held morally accountable for Bain’s actions as long as he held the CEO title is a whole different question. But substantively, probably not.
via Kevin Drum Feed | Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/another-source-says-mitt-romney-had-very-little-contact-bain-after-he-left