The Police @ The Staples Center - 6/20/07

After a twenty four year hiatus, the gentlemen of The Police brought forth their inimitably singular sound, serenading a record-breaking crowd at the Staples Center last night with over 20,000 people in attendance.

Sting, looking like a buff and affable Malcolm Mcdowell, was not the egomaniac many expected to see on stage. Rather, he was vital and focused and seemed at ease. Andy, transfixed and charmingly intent, didn't smile at all, but Stewie, with his gloves and jingly chimes, beamed from ear to shining ear.

Their performance was nothing like the comedy of errors Copeland described on his blog. Minus a few minor timing issues, the boys sounded like...boys. Not like old men. Not like a cruise ship flashback act. They sounded like The Police. There were a few moments that bordered on jammy, but largely they played true to form. A brilliant concert....well done......

...this is a picture of Jennifer Aniston taking a picture. I know, major excitement.

SETLIST / The Police @ The Staples Center - 6/20/07
Message In A Bottle
Synchronicity II
Walking on the Moon
Voices Inside My Head
Don't Stand So Close
Driven to Tears
The Bed Is Too Big
Truth Hits Everybody
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
Wrapped Around Your Finger
De Do Do Do De Da Da Da
Invisible Sun
Walking In Your Footsteps
Can't Stand Losing You
Roxanne
King of Pain
So Lonely
Every Breath You Take
Next To You

Photos by Lisa Brenner

free espresso for life

Congratulations, dude!

Seriously, could there have been a better person to win the first Grand Tour of the year? And without a radio, either! I'll bet you a biscotti that all the people at Bianchi are absolutely kicking themselves right now. He also nabbed the ProTour lead and has a nice fifty point buffer between him and Rebellin.

What a badass.

Soho Square, London - Timewarp

And so over to Soho Square, home of New Media, the Football Association and a strange garden shed. 1927 and 2007.

From this angle, looking eastward, alterations to the square appear minimal. Only the buildings to the extreme left and right have changed. The two plane trees in the foreground have grown, but retain their mutually repulsed angles. The clearest mark of 'progress', aside from the vehicles, is the presence of Centrepoint, almost obscured by trees.

Soho Square was built in the 1680s on land owned by the Earl of St Albans. Most of the surrounding buildings have changed several times, but the gardens are little altered since Victorian times. The famous tool shed at the centre appeared in the 1870s, replacing a statue of Charles II.

Images taken from the Wonderful London Flickr group.

Sacha Baron Cohen moments on MTV awards

5:41 - Sacha Baron Cohen (looking handsome as ever) berates Will Ferrelll for not calling him after their tender on-set moment in Talladega Nights. He pulls Will Ferrell in for a long, shameless lip-lock that leaves them both rolling on the floor like fictional teenagers in a fictional meadow.

6:07 - Sacha Baron Cohen announces that unfortunately Borat couldn't be here because the pressures of being a celebrity have taken a toll on him and he's entered rehab. "He crashed his car into Jewtown," SBC explains. "He was caught driving drunk on fermented horse urine. Also, he had more than the legal limit of roofies in his car. And he actually went on a chat show and made pro-Jewish remarks." SBC thanks the crowd and finishes his speech with, "I can still taste Will on my lips!"

Bloomberg On JFK Plot: "Stop Worrying, Get A Life"

Ethan Korngold says: "Finally, a politician with a reasonable view of the true risk of terrorism relative to all of the other risks in the world. Refreshing, indeed."

"On Monday, Bloomberg finally weighed in, but his response was not what some would have expected.

"There are lots of threats to you in the world. There's the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can't sit there and worry about everything. Get a life," he said.

That "What, me worry?" attitude pretty much sums up Bloomberg's advice to New Yorkers on the terror plot. As far as he was concerned, the professionals were on it, so New Yorkers shouldn't let it tax their brains.

"You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist," he added."

Link

The Best Current Music Artists

My tastes in music are varied. Tastes vary from Dance/Techno to Rock to Classical. The genre of particular interest these days contains artists usually dropped in the "alternative" category (whatever that means). Strangely, these artists are currently all receiving a lot of air-time and chart success.

Here are my favourite 'alternative' artists (alphabetical):
The All-American Rejects
Black Eyed Peas
Blink-182
Bowling for Soup
Coldplay
The Dandy Warhols
Death Cab for Cutie
Duncan Sheik
Fall Out Boy
Foo Fighters
Goo Goo Dolls
Green Day
I-94
Jesse McCartney
Keane
The Killers
Lilly Allen
My Chemical Romance
Relient k
Rihanna
Robbie Williams
Ryan Cabrera
Sean Paul
Semisonic
Snow Patrol
Sugarcult
The Vines
Yellowcard
The Idan Raichel Project

Bests and Worsts of the Giro d'Italia

As Ghisallo notes below, this year's Giro was a smash hit in Italy. I'm guessing a few of us here would agree as well. So while it may take some work to figure out what didn't go over well, the only challenge to listing the good parts is not forgetting anything.

Let's start small:

Five Things to Love About the 90th Giro d'Italia

1. The sprints. There was just about everything you could ask for in the sprinter's program. We were treated to Alessandro Petacchi's emotional comeback, and yet rarely were the sprints as dull as that previous sentence might have implied. Petacchi won five stages, but between his wins were some crazy finales, including the spectacular curves of stage 5 (won by Förster), the crashes on stages 2 and 11, and so forth. Other stages featured great straight-up competition, including Danilo Napolitano's two-day burst of speed which saw him win in Petacchi's hometown. And artful touches, like stage 7's finish on the F-1 track at Mugello, and stage 8's conclusion at the legendary Ferrari test track.

2. The Scenery. The early and transitional stages are usually a chance to tune out the long race for a day or so, but there were few such chances this year. The start in Sardinia was upstaged only slightly by the turn around the Amalfi Coast, a site beautiful enough to make the UNESCO list. Warm-up climbs to Montevergine and Santuario Nostra Signora Della Guardia were beautiful as well. And of course, the Alps and Dolomite stages were postcard-ready too, as usual.

3. An impeccably balanced parcours. From day 1 possession of the maglia rosa was contested. OK, there were a few days off around stage 6-9, but the opening team time trial got things started, and the absolutely brilliant Montevergine stage succeeded in drawing out the competition on day 4. And while everyone knew where the biggest challenges lay, the Tre Cime and Zoncolan stages did NOT overshadow the latter half of the race: stages 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17 and 20 all mattered.

4. The maglia blanca. Often a grand tour will showcase an up-and-coming young talent, but rarely are we treated to talents as young and impressive as Andy Schleck and Riccardo Riccò. Schleck was nearly impervious to the pressure and the demands of either the attention, the competition, and the course. He showed great form on the climbs and time trials alike. Riccò, for his part, could use some ITT practice, but his transition from Classics ace to grand tour climbing stud thrilled the home crowd. Schleck may be bound for France in future years, but Riccò looks like a future maglia rosa for sure.

5. The Winner. Much will be written about Danilo DiLuca's brilliant Giro, but for me, nothing is more significant than this:

Di Luca, from the region of Abruzzo, became the first of the Giro's 64 Italian winners come from south of Tuscany.

The first rider south of Tuscany? There are a lot of Italians south of Tuscany, not to mention some 70% of the land mass, and it took 90 years for one of them to win. This is big.

Thanks Podium Cafe

Tour de France Wild Card Drama

Well, it is now official. Unibet, the Claytons ProTour squad (that’s the ProTour licence you pay for when you are not really getting a ProTour licence), will be sitting out this year’s Tour de France.

It is the announcement that nearly every cycling observer has expected and the one that the Unibet Cycling Team has feared most.

On their official race website, Tour organiser ASO have announced that the 18 ProTour teams pre-selected in December for July’s race, will be joined by three wild cards, of which Unibet is not one.

The invitations have gone to the Swiss registered, very Kazak Astana team, the French registered and very French Agritubel team and the British registered, South African sponsored, but very Italian team, Barloworld.

The 21 teams will each field 9 riders, giving a total of 189 cyclists making their historic lap of London in the prologue time trial on July 7.

Riis and Giro

The past few weeks have seemed like the movie Sparticus with some riders. Instead of everyone saying “I’m Sparticus” we have all the former Telekom riders saying “I’m a doper”. The two confessions that were the biggest surprise because of their current roles are Zabel and Riis. Zabel because he is still racing and there might be pressure to leave him off races like the Tour de France and Worlds. For Riis it is not a surprise that he used drugs I would put his ride in the ’97 Tour as equal to VDB’s Liege win in ’99 or the Gewiss team in the ’94 Fleche Wallone (along with some other ’94 races) as performances that were always the most obvious ones to wonder about. The surprise was that he did not confess. He owns and runs the CSC team so it is not like he could be fired, but he risks loosing and not getting new sponsors. He also risks having his team excluded from the big races as well. Never mind that there is no obvious link between the current CSC team and doping, but they could punish them for Riis’s past.

For current racing the Giro has continued to be the best race since the ’05 Giro. Di Luca has been the only consistent in the race, but we have been treated to lots of other good rides. Garzelli, Ricco, Piepoli have all put in exciting rides. Di Luca chasing down Mazzoleni to limit his loses was great racing. So far the only disappointing stage was the Oropa time trial that only confirmed the strength of Di Luca.

I love the finish that the Giro does in Briancon. Up the narrow streets always brings exciting racing. Whenever the Tour de France goes to this city they go the easier way avoiding the narrower roads. Maybe only the walled city of Avila at the Vuelta is a better finishing city.

Satan Starbucks

I know I shouldn't laugh, but Charles Clover's piece in today's paper regarding the evil Starbucks put a smile on my face.

Too much guilt: are we really what we buy?

Not that I don't agree with him, but it put me in mind of another more notorious critic of the coffee chain: the Reverend Billy, pastor of the Church of Stop Shopping, pictured here being arrested earlier in the year at a Starbucks by the New York Police Department.

The Rev. Billy believes Starbucks to be so evil, he regularly goes about performing 'exorcisms' in them, trying to cleanse those who run and frequent them (well, he is as much performance artist as activist).

A friend of a friend who experienced one such exorcism at a south London Starbucks - complete with a rip-roaring performance by the holy-roller 'Stop Shopping Choir', said it was one of the most extraordinary and wonderful things she had ever seen.

(By the way the Rev Billy will also perform the same service for you on your credit card if you desire).

Anything that makes you laugh and think at the same time can't be bad, but joking apart I wonder whether having to worry about everything from where your morning coffee comes from to the diamond in your engagement ring isn't going to backfire at some point.

How much guilt can one person experience before they tie themselves in knots and give up?

It all used to be so straightforward in my youth: no products from South Africa or Chile and no student at university ever joined Barclay's Bank. Now there are so many things to potentially feel guilty over - the logical conclusion would seem to become a Jainist (the religious people you see in India walking with a cloth over their mouth, lest an insect should fly in and be inadvertently killed).

I am not one given to eco-guilt, but since looking into the details of coffee production, it is something that I think about every morning when I go for caffeine re-fueling after my morning bike ride at the local Starbucks.

Yes, it probably used to be the local baker's shop and is now a big chain, but this coffee shop has also become the hub of our area.

Teenagers can go and meet with friends there, hordes of mums who stay at home looking after their children go for a treat and a chat with mates, to set them up for a day of household duties. Local writers pitch up with lap-tops and at the weekends you'll see plenty of dads taking the kids out, giving mum a well-deserved lie-in.

This isn't to eulogise Starbucks, it's just to say that people are so bombarded with ethical questions these days that I wonder if it isn't all going to become a turn-off, or, whether big businesses will just pay lip service to the demands of consumers by putting labels and certifications on products that have not been thoroughly checked out by independent sources in order to keep people quiet.

I don't feel 'eco-guilt' because I try to do what I can and I also feel that a lot of policy change needs to come from government and big business (although that is not to say there isn't room for improvement by me).

But there is also the wider question of what it actually means to live an 'ethical life', which has nothing to do with responsible consumerism.

My parents passed on to me (and I try to instill the same in my own children) the philosophy of 'do no harm'.

You can try to do no harm to the environment but there is still the question that we are social beings: Are we good neighbours, do we offer to help older people around us? Do we help our family with good grace when they ask? Would our workmates say that we are a generous colleague or team player? Do we give back anything to the community we live in by finding time for even the smallest bit of 'one-off ' voluntary work?

Those are the wider ethical questions I occasionally ask of myself when I'm swigging my 'unethical' coffee.

How Google Gears Will Change Your Life

The announcement of Google's latest development, Google Gears, was met with a lot of excitement over the last few days -- understandably so. The ability of web applications to work even when off-line is a huge step forward for web software, and even if there aren't a lot of apps that can take advantage of this yet, the beta release of Gears signals big changes in coming months.

But how will Google Gears change your online life? In more ways than you might think.

Let me first issue a disclaimer: there's a lot of work that needs to be done on Google Gears, and it will be awhile before enough web apps adopt this feature. It's not going to change the world, but it's a start in a new direction.

How will Gears change things? Here are just a few ways:

• Office domination. For the first time, Microsoft's domination over office suite software will be challenged. Google Apps (currently consisting of word processing, spreadsheets, email and calendar) has been out for awhile but hasn't gone anywhere in terms of widespread adoption. The biggest reason: you can't work when you're off-line. With Gears, this changes. Now, Google Docs and Spreadsheets still won't measure up to Word and Excel, but the appeal of being able to access and work on documents from anywhere is a big plus, and Gmail and Gcal are considered by many to be better at what they do than the Microsoft equivalents. It'll be awhile before there's real competition in this field, but Google took a major step toward being a competitor with the release of Gears.


• Everything online. For the last few decades, computer users have been reliant on an operating system and hard drive storage on their computer. But with online apps getting better and better, and now with the release of Gears, a user is no longer tied to any operating system or hard drive. You can work on your documents anywhere you have an Internet connection -- and soon, the Internet connection won't be necessary. All you'll need is a browser. Even files can be stored online instead of on your hard drive. Of course, you'll still need an operating system and hard drive, but which one you're using won't matter a bit.


• Offline work. This is the obvious one. Those who use online email apps such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail, or any online apps, can currently pretty much only do work while connected to the Internet. But soon you'll be able to do work at any time -- while in the bathroom (assuming you have a laptop), on an airplane, in the remotest areas of the world. This will liberate you from Internet access. Do a load of work somewhere off-line, then go back home or to the office and connect and upload your work.


• Down time won't matter. Another obvious one, but this will make a big difference. Many areas have bad Internet connections, with major down time or up-and-down time. That kind of unreliable connection is a major deterrent for people to use online apps, but now it won't matter. Internet's down -- just work off-line until it's back up. Connect, update, and disconnect. This brings serious online computing to a much wider group of people, worldwide.


• Disconnected offices. A side effect of the growth of online apps will be an acceleration toward an office-less office. Laptops will become king, as you can do work from anywhere, Internet connection or not, an workers will become liberated from the office. Why do I need to be at my desk, as long as I get my work done? In fact, the lack of an office greatly reduces the cost of running a small business, and those businesses who learn that decentralized, disconnected offices are most efficient will have a competitive edge.


• Distraction-free work. This is my personal favorite. Currently, if you use online software such as Google Docs or Gmail to do your work, you have to be connected to the Internet -- which just happens to be the greatest time-waster ever invented. So as you do your work, you've got the constant pull of other Internet sites (beyond the ones needed for productivity), the Siren's call beckoning you at every turn. Eventually, you cave in, and there goes your productivity. With off-line work, you can disconnect from the Internet, only have the apps you need be available off-line, and work without distraction for an hour before connecting and caving in for a little while. Disconnect again for more distraction-free work. Productivity soars, you work less, and soon you're sipping Margaritas on a deserted beach in Baha, work a distant memory.