Black-market Furbies

THUMBNAIL REVIEW: Saw Vince Gill's Christmas show at the Kiel Center last night. He was still recovering from the flu or a cold, but even with a little tickle in his throat, his kick-ass tenor voice wrapped around "I'll Be Home for Christmas" put me in a holiday mood, snow or no snow. (You can read my full review—minus the phrase "kick-ass tenor"—in Saturday's Post-Dispatch.)

Tonight: Neil Diamond, also at the Kiel. (Review appears Sunday.)

@%!@*?!-begone: The TV Guardian, a device that reads the close-caption encoding from TV shows and automatically bleeps "naughty" words (from a list of about 100), apparently still has some kinks in it:

When they ran the program through an old sitcom, "Dick Van Dyke" came out "Jerk Van Gay." "We laughed about it for days," Bray said. The way around it was to program the box to search for certain watch words preceding the questionable language - words such as "a," "those" and "of." It's the same way the box screens out "Oh my God" while leaving "God in heaven" untouched. [Post-Dispatch Wires]

But THIS I want! AppleInsider (nee Macintosh News Network's Reality) has a nice capsule about the fabled Macintosh "Consumer Portable." I hate the name, but LOVE the form factor. It's basically a pumped up MessagePad with a keyboard and an iMac motherboard. No confirm or deny from Cupertino, but I'll be quick on line to test drive anything that's close to this. [AppleInsider]

Where Are They Now? Speaking of Apple insiders, back when I was PEEKing and POKEing around with my Apple ][, I would anxiously await each issue of InCider magazine. The name is such a great pun on "Apple," it's a shame there's no Mac mag or e-zine taking advantage of it. Incider.com exists, but only as an empty directory. Notions, anyone?

Cache-ing up on my reading: Someday, I hope to again have the time to read the newspaper on the very day that it's published. As it is, there's a minimum three-day lag in my consumption of the "dead-trees dailies." Herewith, three gems from last Sunday's New York Times (free registration required):

Sondheim's 'Follies': The Uncut Version: I've waited a long time for this CD, and my personal assessment jibes with Holden's. It's nice to have a seminal recording of this remarkable show, but for pure verve, I prefer my expurgated Follies in Concert album.
Where There's Life After 'the End': A look at how end credits ended up at the end after "The End" of modern movies.
Tailoring the Music to Fit Each Late Show Guest: I've been playing this game for a long time with Paul Shaffer, seeing if I could "name that tune" as guests made their way to Dave's side. Alas, I can't stay up late enough to see Max Weinberg's chops.

Furby mutilation is running rampant on the 'net: Exhibit A, the Furby Autopsy. And Exhibit B, FUBAR Furby, a Shockwave travesty. (Now, watch me start getting tons of hits and then hate mail from folks seeking black-market Furbies — Furbii? — with search keywords. Ack!)

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