Mike's Minutiae

Bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger portions at the local fast food joint. In America, the guiding maxim is to think big. Really big.

An Ithaca College dean is encouraging students to instead think small. And she's offering a $5,000 prize to do it.

The school has invited high school and college students across America to submit a 30-second movie shot entirely with a cell phone.

Vincent Schiavelli, the droopy-eyed character actor who appeared in scores of movies, including "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Ghost," died Monday at his home in Sicily. He was 57.

He died of lung cancer, said Salvatore Glorioso, mayor of Polizzi Generosa, the Sicilian village where Schiavelli resided.

A Spanish radio station apologized Friday for a hoax in which its comedian pretending to be Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero phoned Bolivia's newly elected president and congratulated him on his victory.

[...]

In the recording, comedian David Miner congratulated Bolivian president-elect Evo Morales for his victory in Sunday's election and invited him to visit Madrid. He also praised Morales for joining "the new order" and an "axis" including Cuba and Venezuela.

[...]

Morales responded by thanking "the Spanish prime minister" for the call.

The cereal aisle at your local supermarket may soon resemble the Las Vegas strip. Electronics maker Siemens is readying a paper-thin electronic-display technology so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging, from milk cartons to boxes of Cheerios.

In less than two years, Siemens says, the technology could transform consumer-goods packaging from the fixed, ink-printed images of today to a digital medium of flashing graphics and text that displays prices, special offers or alluring photos, all blinking on miniature flat screens.

[...]

"When you go in a supermarket today, you might see but hardly notice 15 different cereal boxes," said Gerlt. "But (in the future) you will notice when some of them will be flashing."

Things are so tough that Rob Roth, owner of the Vintage Vinyl music store in Fords, N.J., says that being able to simply keep pace with last year's sales puts him among the lucky few. His new motto: "Flat is the new up."

The controversy has left some fans baffled. "They don't know which CDs are Sony -- they just heard that CDs ruin their computers," says Rob Roth, owner of Vintage Vinyl in Fords, New Jersey. "It hurts sales."

In market after market, the sign-on scenario followed a predictable path: intense media coverage, an uproar from the religious right, petitions, boycotts, even death threats – all driving cume into the radio station.

Channel 4 is blasting a group of adventurers, ordinary members of the public, off into space to spend five days orbiting the earth. It's thrilling, it's exciting, and it's totally bogus.

In fact, the cadets will be on a disused military base in Suffolk.

Our group of thrill seekers will experience two weeks of intensive astronaut training believing they are in Star City, near Moscow, and labouring under the illusion that they are part of a real space mission.

TV networks are turning to product placements to fight back against ad-skipping technologies like TiVo, but now some writers are putting up a fight, demanding more pay in exchange for scripting product plugs into their shows.

[...]

The use of product placements has increased 84 percent on television in the last year, according to the WGA's call for regulations. "There is no clear line separating a TV show from an advertisement anymore," said Carrie McLaren, editor of Stay Free magazine.

In a recent episode of the NBC series Medium, writers had to work the movie Memoirs of a Geisha into the dialogue three times because of a deal the network made with Sony earlier in the season. They even had the characters go on a date to an early screening of the movie and bump into friends who had just viewed Geisha to tell them how good it was.

The FCC, which requires all broadcasters to disclose their sponsors, could be brought in to do a federal investigation on TV product placements.

While the WGA hasn't filed a FCC petition, they have drawn up a list of demands. These demands include a full disclosure of all advertisers, strict limits on products placed in children's programming and a collective voice for writers on how products can be incorporated into story lines.

You need to have creative or technical credit on a minimum of six tracks (or their equivalent) in at least one voting discipline and the album must have been commercially released in the United States. Qualifying tracks can be on one album or a combination of albums.

It turns out you only need a few recording credits to be eligible to vote. Sure, some A&R folks and executives at the labels had enough credits to be eligible, but that's certainly not enough to sway the process.... So what did these companies (and pretty much every company) do? They pulled their employees from the office for a few hours and recorded bogus holiday CD's. I present to you the Zomba Choir.

Richard Pryor, whose blunt, blue and brilliant comedic confrontations confidently tackled what many stand-up comic's before him deemed too shocking—and thus off-limits—to broach, died this morning. He was 65 .Pryor suffered a heart attack at his home in San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles early Saturday morning. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

• The Exorcist
  
• Mohammed Ali

Cartons of whole milk would be considered junk food, but baked Cheetos would not, under new rules proposed Friday by Illinois education officials.

• Rainbo (a.k.a. Sissy Spacek), "John, You Went Too Far This Time" (single, 1968)
  
• Blossom Dearie, "Hey John" (That's Just the Way I Want to Be, 1970)
  
• Tom Paxton, "Crazy John" (Tom Paxton 6, 1970)
  
• Neil Sedaka, "The Immigrant" (Sedaka's Back, 1975)

• George Harrison, "All Those Years Ago" (Somewhere in England, 1981)
  
• Paul McCartney, "Here Today" (Tug of War, 1982)
  
• Elton John, "Empty Garden (Hey, Hey Johnny)" (Jump Up!, 1982)
  
• Queen, "Life is Real (Song for Lennon)" (Hot Space, 1982)
  
• The Chameleons, "Here Today" (Script of the Bridge, 1983)
  
• Christine Lavin, "The Dakota" (Future Fossils, 1984)
  
• Loudon Wainwright III, "Not John" (I'm Alright, 1984)
  
• The Outfield, "John Lennon" (Diamond Days, 1991)
  
• Ellis Paul, "Who Killed John Lennon" (Stories, 1994)
  
• The Cranberries, "I Just Shot John Lennon" (To the Faithful Departed, 1996)

• Paul Simon, "The Late Great Johnny Ace"
  
• Ian Hunter, "Old Records Never Die"
  
• Julian Lennon, "Too Late for Goodbyes"
  
• Hamell on Trial, "John Lennon"
  
• Tom Paxton, "And Lovin' You"
  
• Paul Thorn, "Where Was I"

History will forever record Elizabeth Brooks' bat mitzvah as "Mitzvahpalooza."

For his daughter's coming-of-age celebration last weekend, multimillionaire Long Island defense contractor David H. Brooks booked two floors of the Rainbow Room, hauled in concert-ready equipment, built a stage, installed special carpeting, outfitted the space with Jumbotrons and arranged command performances by everyone from 50 Cent to Tom Petty to Aerosmith.

Podzinger and blinkx scour audio content for keywords by translating the audio into text and creating an index for quick searching. It's a significant step above traditional search engines that identify only keywords in a podcast's metadata, such as the headline and introductory notes describing the audio file's general content.

"I deplore it as a consumer; I admire it as a marketing professional."

--Peter Sealey,
marketing professor at the
University of California
at Berkeley