Buzz The Bridge: Weblogs

October 02, 2008

Buzzing The Bridge

No idea where the initial name came from. Pretty sure it came up in a conversation with Ken and Lunchito back in the day about the social outing website we were highly motivated to never actually build. I definitely recall that once the name came up I loved it due to the image of a fighter buzzing not the control tower a la Top Gun, but instead blowing past the bridge of a freighter in Boston harbor.

Back before deciding to go all personal crap and leave the marketing discussion elsewhere, the clear marketing tie-in was to "buzz generation". Also known as "word of mouth" or "WOM" advertising, the idea was and to some degree continues to be a bleeding-edge focus for current marketers, with WOM specialists like BzzAgent apparently continuing to do good business.

Anyway, this was all of course an excuse to dream of someone I'll likely never meet but possessing an amazing degree of artistry, Flash development skills, free time, and willing to do me favors making an intro page for the site which showed an F-14 and the Millennium Falcon flying intertwined paths down the Charles River before heading out into the harbor and shattering the wheelhouse windows of an entering supertanker as the title came up Superman-intro-style. Much like my recent dream of redoing the MacGyver intro using myself, a pool, and the Westerly, RI local airport, the BTB Flash movie will never get made... but a man can still dream.

Anyway, this long ramble was all kicked off by stumbling across this photo today, which is surprisingly not too far off from the original idea I was going for:

Posted at 04:06 PM in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 01, 2008

Buzz The Buzz

Could there be anything more self-centered than someone starting a second blog?

Since I -- much like Q -- strive to ever exceed even my own standards of self-preoccupation, I went ahead and took Gallagher's long-ago advice to not muddle marketing thoughts with personal issues, and thus moved all marketing content into a new blog hosted on this domain naturally titled "Buzz The Buzz".

Nobody's gonna read it, but whatever, nobody has to -- it's still gonna blow up big.

Posted at 01:35 PM in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 01, 2006

First Post

Okay. So now I have a blog up and running. I'm a blogger. And a marketer. I'm a marketing blogger. I'm a bloggeter. Whee.

So... what am I doing here? Why do I have a blog? Why would I presume anyone outside the people who humour me would have the slightest interest in my ramblings?

No idea.

Maybe it's because deep down inside I'm convinced that maybe with enough immersion into Web 2.0 that I too can be cool.

Maybe it's the vague hope that writing what I care about will make my writing better.

Or maybe it's that I'm hoping that by making my private interests, thoughts, and deeds public I'll be forced to look a little deeper at who I am, and begin to reshape myself via a perspective I haven't been able to see before.

I had this teacher once in high school, Mr. Rodgers, who, as chaplain and college advisor, was responsible for helping me get into a college good enough for me to not hate myself, drop out and get addicted to smack. The 16-year-old me was bitching to him about some rejection I'd just received, whining about how if they knew the "real" me, the "inside" me, everything would be different. My advisor's retort was that what was inside was irrlevant, no one really gives a rat's ass about that shit, and frankly no one ever will.

Shitty chaplain, but good college advisor.

Point I'm trying to make is that I guess I'm just hoping that by some magic of perspective, writing about the inanity of my life will somehow make living it a little more interesting.

Plus, everyone's got a blog these days.

Posted at 07:39 PM in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Currently Reading

Dennis Lehane: The Given Day: A Novel
Usually Lehane's books are just very entertaining detective stories, though a few -- Shutter Island in particular -- stand out as more. This one so far seems like it's clearly going to fall in the "more" category, with a tale that looks like it's going big places. Chubby, happy, stupid Babe Ruth just joined and then failed to prevent the ruin of a negro baseball game while killing time waiting for the train, and that was just the prologue. (****)
Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Took a surprisingly short amount of time to get into this one and cranked through it once into it. Which is surprising given that I don't relate wholly to a massively pudgy, socially outcast, fatally romantic Dominican kid named Oscar Wao. But damn if the book's narrator didn't suck you into the world of Oscar, his family and the weight of the Dominican curse (fuku) that he carried on his back. Not to mention that the narrator was easily as much of a geek as Oscar, and loaded the pages with references to Final Fantasy, Starblazers, Warcraft, and all that other great gags that only true nerds would catch onto. I'm sure I missed dozens. What kicked this one up to five stars, though, was simply the writing of the last third of the novel. By the time he was most of the way through his story -- particularly the crushing tale of Oscar's grandfather's family -- Junot Díaz's typing was on fire, and the last chapter's flash-forward rush was just devastating. (*****)
Chuck Palahniuk: Choke: A Novel
The story of a man addicted to sex whose dying mother thinks he's everyone but himself and who earns his keep by faking choking in a restaurant for purposes of getting saved by people who then spend their lives looking out for his well-being. Brilliantly funny yet subtly sad, looking forward now to checking out more Palaniuk. (***)
Scott Smith: A Simple Plan
Much like his newer book The Ruins -- though containing actual chapters -- Smith's "A Simple Plan" just never stops getting worse, yet stays highly entertaining. Ostensibly it's the story of the narrator, his slower brother, and his brother's buddy who together happen across a downed plane containing a dead pilot and $4.4 million in cash out in the forest, and decide on the simple plan: take the money and hide it for six months, and if no one comes looking for it, keep it and disappear. The plan turns out not be so simple, and circumstances go from there. One of the best thrillers I've read. (****)
Yann Martel: Life of Pi
Finally got around to finishing something, thank god. Reading five books at the same time when you have very little time to read essentially means you finish nothing for ages, then finish a bunch all at once, but after getting halfway through this I couldn't stop until it was over. "Life of Pi" is at the outset the story of a confused Indian lad named Piscine (after a local pool), though nicknamed Pi for short. Pi's the son of a local zookeeper and a highly confused individual when it comes to religion. With the greatest of intentions he takes up Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism all at once, much to the consternation of his parents and local Christian, Islamic, and Hindu priests. Approximately 30% through the tale Pi's father decides to sell of much of the zoo's livestock to take the remaining animals along with his family to Canada via a freighter -- a freighter which then proceeds to rapidly sink halfway across the Pacific, stranding Pi in a lifeboat alone with an injured zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and... a fully grown Bengal tiger named Richard Jenkins. The rest of the story concerns Pi's survival asea with this group, and goes some pretty damn surprising places -- places that I've never seen described before, some wonderfully funny, some darker than "The Terror" (the other book I'm taking for-freaking-ever to finish). I'm sucker for killer endings, and damn if the last thirty pages are so aren't the definition of a fast read. The last page -- and especially Pi's final words -- are simply heartbreaking, though undoubtedly truer than anything I've read in ages. Here's to the world in which there lives a Richard Jenkins. (*****)
Dan Simmons: The Terror: A Novel
Just started it, so far there are two ships in the 1800's locked into ice while trying to cross the northwest passage through the artic. And something's out there. Not bad so far. (****)
Dennis Lehane: Darkness, Take My Hand
Having started with A Prayer For Rain, actually the fifth in the series, I'd gone back to the first Kenzie/Gennaro novel set in modern Boston, then moved on to this one. Like the others, the book focuses on a wisecracking Boston private eye raised in Dorchester who, along with his hot but equally intelligent partner Angie and unstoppable juggernaut of a buddy Bubba, jumps into cases that are way over their head. Unlike the cliche this setup sounds like, however, this Lehane series inevitably ends up being far darker than its setup would have you believe, with an ending involving dual serial killers that's pretty much unbelievable in its violence. Like the movie Gone, Baby, Gone (which I needn't read, as I believe the movie did a good enough job), and Lehane's own Mystic River, people are frequently more than they seem, but usually for the worse. While I can't say any of the series will leave you walking away with a smile on your face, damn if they aren't pageturners. Looking forward to the third one, which is allegedly on the more comedic side. (***)
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (audio)
Not sure if you can really call this a novel, more a novella, On Chesil Beach is the second Ian McEwan book I've read, after the terrific Saturday. The story is straightforward and pretty damn simple: two kids in England in the 60's from different backgrounds find themselves in a room in a hotel on the English shore on the first night of their honeymoon, wondering how the hell to get it on. He's really into the idea, she... not so much. From there the book covers only the next two hours or so (or more, maybe), as well as the events in their lives leading up to that night, but it's McEwan's wording and painting of what's going on inside both of their heads that makes the book so killer. You get to know both of these two people -- we all know people in many ways like these two -- and it's how the drama of the night plays out in the big and evn more little ways that sucks you in. This isn't the most action-packed thing you'll ever read -- hell, it'd probably even make a shitty dramatic movie -- but somehow the thing gets into you with its mood, laying you out with an ending you somehow knew was coming from the first line. (*****)
David Anthony Durham: Acacia: Book One: The War With the Mein (Acacia)
Been awhile since I found the time or geek factor to read a good fantasy novel, probably not since reading the LOTR trilogy in '97 and not really even enjoying it that much. Loved books like the Dragonlance serieses back in high school, though, so when EW recommended this as a terrific start to a trilogy, figured I'd give it a shot. Acadia is the island capital of a massive empire on a world much like ours, an empire which has ruled the Known World for a thousand years. Like many empires, however, (I'm guessing here), its foundation is rotten, built on a tithe of slaves send to a faraway unknown people in return for an addictive heroin/weed-like powder known as "Mist". Without getting too much into the politics of it all, the king of the world is assassinated early on, his four children are scattered to the four corners of the world, his kingdom conquered by cursed Norseish conquerors, and the book focuses mainly on who the heirs grow up to become and how the family is reunited. Actually pretty damn riveting stuff, Durham describes clearly how each of the children is molded by the new lives they're thrown into in a nature/nurture argument that -- much like most of the characters and their choices in the book -- never becomes a picture painted in clear black or white. Not a perfect book -- I never got a sense of the countryside or the people of the lands outside of the royal main characters, and a few more small, comic details would have been welcome -- it was still a great read, with a damn strong ending that makes April '09 still too far away. (***)
Benjamin Black: Christine Falls: A Novel
Apparently the first in a noir-ish series set in 1950's Ireland about a big, bitter city coroner named Quirke, Christine Falls tells the story of a man coming to terms with the life he made slip by him and is now watching from the sidelines. What wakes him up one day is stumbling down to his office drunk from a Christmas party and finding his stepbrother Mal tampering with the death certificate on the title character's corpse in his office. When the next day the woman's body is gone, Quirke begins slowly to investigate, and the story goes from there -- through dark pubs in Dublin, along his family history and finally over the ocean to Boston. While the story could easily have verged into the obvious, boring, or self-satisfied, what made it such a gripping read was primarily how flawed yet likable the main character is written. If Quirke's not heroic, he's at least somehow sympathetic -- even if just in the "there but for the grace of God go I" sense of identifying a stranger. "Black's" confident writing also manages to pull you along just with the sadness of the setting and Quirke's reluctant determination. As the story builds -- and it's tough to talk about this book without ruining the small surprises -- more faces are introduced, separate threads are connected, and the mystery to date becomes more clear while the situation around it all becomes even more vague. Had it had a stronger ending it would have gotten a full five stars, but as it's allegedly the start to a series I guess Quirke's got a way to go. (****)

Photo Albums