Brian Alvey

Two days after Live8, there are a few songs I can’t get out of my head. Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor”, Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and The Black Eyed Peas covering “Get Up, Stand Up” with a couple special guests. When they announced who was joining them, I missed the woman’s name and only heard them say Stephen Marley (son of Bob) was joining them. The performance was fantastic and is still ringing in my ears.

Today when I was looking over some of the coverage of Live8 Philly, I found out that the woman was Rita Marley, Bob Marley’s wife. Wow. She converted to Rastafari before he did and was a backup singer in The Wailers. She was also shot in the head in the famous pre-election attack on their home that kept them from playing a free concert to support the Jamaican prime minister. I wish I had heard them more clearly two days ago. What an incredible person to have join you on stage for a Bob Marley song!

This post originally appeared on Weblogs, Inc.’s Live8 Insider blog.

When we were walking back to our camp from the back of the library, we spied Don Cheadle heading to the back of the stage. Maybe he’s announcing some artist or making a short speech.

As I was getting my picture taken with him, I told him that my wife gets tired of hearing me talk about how talented I think he is. “Hey, that movie has Don Cheadle. He’s such a great actor. Have you ever seen a better performance on television than Don Cheadle on ER? Hey, this other movie has Don Cheadle. He’s amazing. Let’s go see that one too. Have I told you what a great actor Don Cheadle is?”

Somebody owes me big time for taking this picture on the worst possible resolution. I could draw a better picture of Don and me. I might have to track him down again…

This post originally appeared on Weblogs, Inc.’s Live8 Insider blog.

I was lucky enough to see them do Survivor in Denver at the NBA all-star game and this was even more amazing. They did Survivor today. Then they did Say My Name and during that song the big screen behind them was showing the names of all of the people who signed up for Live8’s online petition. They closed with Girl from 2004’s Destiny Fulfilled.

This post originally appeared on Weblogs, Inc.’s Live8 Insider blog.

Over on Engadget Spanish, I noticed that our bloggers were letting their audience know that we’re still in beta and we’re working out some language-related kinks. Specifically, I’m making some changes to the platform so characters with accents don’t get eaten in title fields. One quick fix I made for the Spanish team broke the form for the Chinese team. Fun stuff.

One of our commenters thought that we were using some kind of automated translation software instead of humans — primarily because of the missing accented characters. So I thought I’d ask Altavista’s Babel Fish Translation to tell me what our Spanish blogger wrote:

Without tildes nor enies?
Before nothing, thousand excuses by that so horrible title. But indeed that is what we want to clarify… Why the titles of the new Engadget in Spanish do not have tíldes nor eñes? Then good, as they can see, this is the beta version of Engadget, so we are working hard to obtain a final version next. Our thousands of programmers (thousands, hehe) is adapting software so that it has supported other languages to the 100%, but that taking time. Other whatever still exist “bugs” in the system, and also many thousands translations that are not of manjares, but the equipment of Engadget in Spanish is working strongly so that our site is of the same quality that the original Engadget. We appreciated its commentaries and suggestions, so they do not let write to us.

Niki and Jack just got home from some children’s event at the library. Jack walked to the top of the basement stairs and pointed at my computer (with his thumb, his pointing finger of choice these days) and said something that took me a few seconds to make out.

“Foo Fighters, Daddy.”

Wow. Best Of You was playing on my laptop:

“Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?”

Jack remembered that song from the video we saw weeks ago on MTV2’s 24 Hours of Foo. The lyrics were easy enough for a two-and-a-half year-old kid to pick up and sing along with. When the song ended just now he asked for “Foo Fighters again.”

This must be why people have kids. What a great day!

Nice article in MIT’s Technology Review magazine. It takes a look at the Weblogs, Inc. Network (WIN) as well as some of the Brian and Jason history leading up to it.

The only facts that aren’t 100% accurate are that we started recruiting bloggers in early 2004 (it was September or October) and that we created Silicon Alley Reporter together. It just seems like we did because we did CyberSurfer together before SAR, I was Jason’s SAR art director twice and later I was his CTO for a few years.

My enthusiam for Smallville dipped when I found out they were having an episode that featured Clark Kent’s dog, Krypto. Niki’s tripled.

The other day I mentioned that Batman had a crime-fighting dog, but I didn’t know what breed it was and I couldn’t recall its name. Named Ace, he was originally a German Shepherd and later on has been portrayed as a Great Dane.

This has brought back memories that I thought were gone forever. There was a super-horse (Comet), Beppo (a Kryptonian monkey who stowed away in Kal-El’s rocket unnoticed) and Supergirl’s pet, Streaky the Supercat.

The highlight of this trip down repressed memory lane was discovering a narrative titled Postmodernism and the Batman Phenomenon, which explores the evolution of the Batman mythos and how it has been a reflection of the general culture or American society. It shows how the four Batman movies of varying quality had their parallels in the decades of Batman lore that came before them and how McCarthyism and Dr. Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent attacked the comic industry and drove the plot lines over the edge:

He felt that three men (Batman, Robin, and their butler, Alfred) living alone in a beautiful manor where fresh flowers were placed daily in vases was the dream home of homosexuals. Batman writers had purposefully stayed away from romantic or sexual adventures or innuendoes to keep the comic kid friendly, but had inadvertently left themselves open to this attack. The editorial staff at the time attempted to combat this by requiring the addition of more bat-characters (Batwoman and Batgirl) to add a feeling of “family” instead of the isolation of the Dynamic Duo. They also made the authors kill off Alfred in favor of a housekeeper named Aunt Harriet. They even went so far as creating a bat-hound, the perfect bat-family crime fighting dog.

Same Bat-time. Same Bat-kennel.

I was picking up my dinner two nights ago and instead of taking the long way around the block and parking on the side street, I spied a meter space on the corner and pulled in. Dinner wasn’t ready yet, so I had some hot tea and waited for them to finish up. Returning to my car, I saw a big man doing something strange to my car and my first guess was that he was putting a flyer on my windshield. As I got closer, I saw that he was probably ticketing me.

“Are you giving me a ticket?”

He looked up at me startled and backed onto the curb mumbling. I couldn’t make out his answer, so I asked him again. He said he was giving me a ticket, but he was clearly surprised to see me there and must have thought that I was going to flip out and attack him.

I asked him how late the meters ran here. He said 8. It was 7:30, but it was darker than most midnights. I told him that it was so dark, I didn’t even think about it. I was just going to stand there while he ticketed me, but he motioned for me to get in my car and started giving the car in front of mine a ticket.

I rolled down my passenger window and thanked him on my way by. I’m really pretty calm about tickets. You only get them when you deserve them. There’s a rule. You broke it. You get a ticket.

It’s other drivers that make me go nuts, not meter attendants.

Smallville fans, check this one out. It’s our new site Luxist and the logo has a Superman symbol in the middle.

Luxist is sort of a spin-off of The Brian Alvey Weblog. They’ll be taking some of the strain off of me by constantly posting about luxury items so I don’t have to.

Awesome!