Linked List: September 27, 2013

Friday, 27 September 2013

Mariano Rivera Leaves the Mound at Yankee Stadium 

It’s been rough year for the Yankees, but they know how to do things like this right. What a great send-off.

Comedy Gold 

Samsung touts their long history of gold-colored phones. “We were making gold phones before anyone wanted one” isn’t a good argument for anything.

‘Room 237’: Gruber and Kottke vs. Sandwich 

Yours truly, on Twitter a few nights ago:

Broke down and watched “Room 237”. It was bad. Really bad. Boring bad. Crazy people.

Just watch “The Shining” again instead.

(Sidenote: I’m thinking “single-tweet movie reviews” is an interesting idea.)

Jason Kottke:

I agree. I watched it earlier this year and disliked the film so much, I didn’t even finish it, which is rare for me. As I hinted at on Twitter, I’m exposed to enough anti-vaccine, anti-evolution, anti-anthropogenic climate change, anti-science, and religious fundamentalist “theories” in my day-to-day reading that are genuinely harmful to humanity that an examination of how the minds of conspiracy theory crackpots take the smallest little details and weave them into fantastical stories that make no sense is not how I want to spend my time.

On the other side, Adam Lisagor:

Now, what I suspect has happened here is that both he and our friend John Gruber, whose tweet spurred Jason’s post, sort of missed the point. Which is that the film’s ambition was not to cast light on the conspiracy theories around their beloved Kubrick film (“The Shining”, in case you’re coming to this late), it was not to document further context around the film or to disclose any of its master filmmaker’s process or intentions, but rather to paint an artful picture — a media collage if you will-of obsession, and mania.

But “Room 237” isn’t about “The Shining” or about Kubrick, it’s about a small assortment of unrelated film scholars(?) who have selected “The Shining” as their thing. It’s about the degree of their obsessions, the intricacies of their fixations.

(Second sidenote: Whole front page of Kottke.org today is a nice birthday tribute to Jason.)

Apple Analysts and the Great Nine-Million iPhone Kerfuffle 

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

Apple on Monday announced first weekend sales of the iPhone 5S and 5C. They “topped” 9 million. Wall Street was expecting 5 to 6 million. Big surprise, egg on faces. Estimates revised. Price points raised.

Then the second-guessing began. How solid, some analysts asked, were those 9 million sales?

These analysts remind me of the Apple rumor sites — when they publish something that turns out way wrong, the explanation is never that they were wrong, but that something changed after they ran the rumor.

This downplaying of the 9 million iPhones sold is just ludicrous, because it’s the same accounting Apple has used in all previous years.

If the iPhone Were a Standalone Business 

Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic:

Eric Chemi, head of research for Bloomberg Businessweek, pulls an amazing stat. iPhone sales in the last year exceed all revenue to Microsoft, Amazon, Comcast, or Google. The iPhone alone outsells Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, perhaps the world’s two most famous brands, combined.