Streaming a bunch of full albums
Okay, folks, let's start with this: including the new best-of from frank black, which selection I blatantly ripped off from my old buddy whitney, whose meetup last week i missed while getting soaked in the rain listening to two songs of richard thompson's sadly aborted performance in prospect park. that was fun. no, really! but anyway the site is pretty great. it even shows you the lyrics as each song is playing. it also has the new rihanna album, whose "breakin' dishes" is totally my new favorite song. i'm'a fight a man tonight, too! that sounds fun. okay. moving on...
saturday we went to the mermaid parade, which i was not as jazzed on this year, probably because i wasn't in costume. it was a zoo on the nathan's side of the street, and so we camped out on the sunny side, where my shoulders rapidly began to burn (as stupidly planned). despite the awesome costumes, i began to grow weary of the parade, so we took our little group up on the boardwalk, where there were approximately one meellion other little groups, making for a crazily crowded boardwalk. not fun. luckily carl felt the same way and we got the hell out of coney island as soon as socially possible. later on we met up with paul stuart and sylvia to celebrate paul's birthday with a nice dinner at applewood, yelped of course. but if you think i'm yelp-crazy, check out carl's yelp page: 50 reviews he's written! in like a day. he's gone loco.
what else...sunday we met up with matt and tamar and matt's mom at miriam for brunch, then caught a ride (oh sweet, sweet ride) with tricia to williamsburg for the mccarren pool party featuring oakley hall (yay!) and old-school indie rockers superchunk (or, as marty markowitz introduced them, supachunk). it was fun but again, the sun was beating down with alarming intensity. next time i will bring a blankie and lots of sunscreen and work on my pale.
I mean, being an engineer in the web industry, I’m sure it has some of the standard features that make a social bookmarking portal interesting and relevant, but seriously, who were the branding and advertising geniuses that came up with this one? I mean sure, it’s based in Germany, which is practically a whole world away. Maybe people aren’t as sensitive to political correctness as they are here in North America. But seriously, one of their web badges has the slogan “ping pong, king kong, Mister Wong.” Which I, of course, interpret as “ching chong, Mister Wong” and get INCREDIBLY FUCKING ANGRY. It’s like the Ask Jeeves butler and Uncle Ben had a illegitimate Asian coolie son.
I mean his face is on soccer jerseys. SOCCER JERSEYS.
And just when you think I couldn’t get anymore WTF’ed - Mister Wong has a Chinese version of their site. Seriously. Now, I’ll fully admit to being the naive American here - maybe my cultural American bias is slanted and that people from mainland Chinese won’t be completely horrified to see a caricature of someone their ethnicity touting the virtues of the social web. Hell, you have Wang Lan of the Chinese support team on the front page. “It’s okay to use this page,” she seems to beckon. “I’m Chinese too, you see?”
Since I don’t speak German and there is just an intro English page, maybe there’s a story on how the site came up with its name and branding and someone can help out. Mister Wong had better been based on a real person and saved twenty burning orphanages in Stuttgart, because otherwise, I’m calling foul.