Journeys of Jack Tripper

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Apple has announced two separate battery recalls in the past week, one for G4 iBook and Powerbooks, and one for Macbook pros. Interestingly, my Macbook battery died yesterday -- and it's not covered in either recall. So it's off to the Apple Store at International Plaza today to consult with the Genius Bar and use my AppleCare account for the first time. The worst part about the battery being dead is that the 1.8GHz Intel Core Duo slows down to 1.0GHz when the battery's not working -- this is, apparently, by design.

Things have been interesting here at the Weakly. Not only is traffic up by a measure of 10x, we've had an interesting episode on local radio, where an email sent to WDAE PM Drive sports talk host Steve Duemig regarding the FCC and ESPN was reported as "I've just received an email from someone at Entertainment Weekly..." after which he read the email. If I'd been driving, I would have crashed into something, I was laughing so hard.

Finally, we'd be remiss to not report on today's blogospheric coverage of the Lonelygirl15 hoax/conspiracy/controversy/fakery/fake/etc phenomenon. First and foremost, the Grande Dame herself, the New York Times, in its print edition today pushed readers toward Virginia Heffernan's blog to read about Lonelygirl15. Heffernan's been printing excerpts of emails she's received from Bree, and also reveals an interesting post in her comments where she claims not to be a Christian.

So the plot thickens a bit.

Our (Albanian? Really?) friend Milowent informed us of a new post by Daniel in which he very clumsily admits he's headed to Bree's play -- but not to videotape it. It makes a man wonder what kind of play Thelemans put on. I have to imagine it's something like Sweeney Todd.

Fred draws an interesting comparison to William H. Gibson's book Pattern Recognition. The growth of YouTube makes Gibson's plot almost seem... well, Gibsonian.

Even branding guru Jack Yan has gotten in on the act. His take?

It’s sophisticated marketing, and an example of how we do not expect monolithic, portal-like brands on the modern World Wide Web. Not everything needs to be at a Yahoo! domain—the prevalence of Gmail accounts, even for businesses, is an example. We now expect certain (even a lot) things to be “outsourced” to external domains—hence, there is no sin for a large company to have a blog on Blogger, or a network to put videos on YouTube itself. If anything, this shows a connection to the public, a shift toward the One model that my friend Stefan Engeseth writes of in his book.
So far, Lonelygirl15 has played this marketing game according to this new book—I shall be interested to see what emerges from this point. Whether she is promoting something else, or herself, you have to admit this has a massive audience.

It's growing. And when the mystery's finally revealed -- or exposed -- it's gonna rock us all like a hurricane.