This weeks weekly round-up can only begin in one place, and that is with the death of John Hughes who died on Wednesday at age 59. The bizarre thing was he was on my mind, and it was because of a profound quote that Jen of JenX67 had on her blog that very morning.
And like Jen posted yesterday, when she talked about not really knowing how much of an influence/impact that Michael Jackson had had on her life until his disappearance (as the French term it), the same is true for John Hughes. It had been years since I had thought of him, but I had seen every single one of his movies, and every single one had an impact.
Of all his work, Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful were my favorites (I can’t even pick one of the four). As a girl who was never in the in-clique I embraced the fact that I did not have to be to be cool to have an identity or to have cool things happen to me.
And of course I latched on to the character of Andie in Pretty in Pink, I had never encountered another Andi in my life up until that point! When I bought y first DVD player, Pretty in Pink was the very first DVD that I purchased.
59 is too young to leave this world, and his absence will be missed greatly by my generation. There is more that could be said, but I do not think I could give it justice.
So Euna Lee and Laura Ling are home, for that I am happy, but I must ask at what cost? Certainly Bill Clinton went as a private citizen using a private citizen’s plane, but he met with the dictator of a country we are currently at odds with. It is clear that the reporters did cross the border. They did this eyes open, aware of the consequences. So what did Clinton use to bargain with? And what will the impact be on our relations with North Korea?
So for the 31% of the population who do know what Twitter is (69% don’t) you no doubt did not miss the outage that took place on Thursday due to a denial of service attack. It effected Facebook as well although it was not taken completely down like Facebook. It while it was mildly annoying, as one user put it: “When Twitter is down, address all complaints to the Dept of Things U Don’t Pay 4, U Entitled Crybaby”…it is not a paid service, so for the tens of millions of users, it just sucked.
But in a news story from CNET it appears that this was a coordinated attack by the Russian government to thwart a pro-Georgian blogger who used Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and YouTube to get his plea out. This is crazy! Isn’t that like hijacking or something? Shouldn’t we be getting out troops together to go kick some Russian ass? [Hey, we have gone to war over oil, I mean weapons of mass destruction, why not for hacking our site?] Don’t mess with our Twitter!
And as bad news continues for Twitter, earlier in the week the U.S. Marine Corps has banned the use (although I think they are still denying an official ban) of Twitter, Facebook, etc. Will be interesting to see if the Army follows as they have been recently heavily involved in social media.
In addition to the Marines, several NFL teams have also banned Twitter much to the dismay of fans. There is nothing better than actual in the action tweets from the athletes such as those that Shaquille O’Neal tweets out during games. But I guess the coaches and owners don’t agree and are starting to ban its use.
Continuing on the social media front, one of my favorite ladies, Liz Strauss, had blogged last week another one of her 25-Words projects in which she asks other bloggers to send in 25 words on a particular topic. This time it was 25-words on social media wisdom. Liz has compiled on the results into a video, check it out. I was happy to participate, you can see the post where she lists all the participants and the video is embedded there as well.
Lastly, last year blogger, Marta Kagan did a great presentation called “What the F**k is Social Media”. She has just followed up with a new presentation called…
That’s it for this week!
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Can you believe how much happens in one week? It is mind boggling! Life happens with or without us!
"Pretty in Pink was the first DVD I bought…" Well, that pretty much says it all Andi. And, you share your name with her. How cool. Andie was my favorite character. I loved BC, but Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the one I watch the most. I cry everytime he's on the train after he tells Steve Martin his wife died.
Speaking of crying, I cried when Euna hugged her daughter.
Great information in that presenation. I never knew about namechk. Thanks for posting this.
Jen – I cried too!