A short review of the Hotel Gansevoort in Chelsea, Manhattan, New York. I've stayed at this hotel several times when most of my business was downtown. The rooms are the usual fare for this type of boutique hotel and the service is just as cold as the décor. Views from the rooms over the river are very beautiful and there is something to be said for the location (if you need to be in the meatpacking district). There is a fabulous japanese restaurant in the lobby. Biggest drawback of the hotel : the rooftop bar. This bar seems to be a trendy draw for the 18-25 crowd but having the lobby and elevators bursting to the seems from thursday night thru sunday is definitely not my idea of a zen hotel to stay in. Considering that room rates average 450 $ / night, I definitely do not recommend this hotel.

To conclude: for me, the Porsche Boxster is what the MG B probably was to guys in the sixties : the ultimate roadster !!!

"One thing is clear, is relations between America and Russia are good, and they're important that they be good."—Strelna, Russia, July 15, 2006

It seems like I could use the illustration of the previous article again ;-)

The next new thing: Crowdsourcing. Wired, in a typically excellent article, defines it as “The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D ». These spare cycles are even less expensive than the low cost corporations of India or China since what's being sold is something that had no exploited value before. This is again a new way in which the web monetizes society. Welcome to more of Web 2.0 !

Jeff Howe, the author of the Wired article, has devoted a blog to this subject : crowdsourcing.com.

- Rabbit with ears : "I have a sore butt !"
- Other Rabbit : "What ??"

I'll ask you all to be forgiving this once. I mean, look at the time of this post. It might help you understand ;-)

A short search on google delivers the following definition for Pulp fiction: "Novels written for the mass market, intended to be "a good read,"--often exciting, titillating, thrilling. Historically they have been very popular but critically sneered at as being of sub-literary quality. The earliest ones were the dime novels of the nineteenth century, printed on newsprint (hence "pulp" fiction) and sold for ten cents. Westerns, stories of adventure, even the Horatio Alger novels, all were forms of pulp fiction." This definition is also true for the average Pulp movie as they tend to be B-level films at best (although so much fun).

Last night I saw on TV a prime example of this: a 1994 movie starring Alec Baldwin called The Shadow. It really had all the ingredients of a good Pulp story. I had never heard of The Shadow. After a bit of research, I found out that he was in fact a signature hero of the Pulp period who, all cloaked in black, fought mobsters, evil scientists, crazed old men and foreign invaders with two blazing automatics and a laugh that chilled the hearts of evil. He did this from the spring of 1931 until the summer of 1949. There were magazines, radio shows, serials and movies devoted to the character so he must have been quite popular. I really enjoyed the movie though. It had it all : the locales (Warlord China, fabulous Art Deco Jazz age New York, the Archaelogy museum), an evil descendant of Gengis Khan, the requisite beautiful blonde whose father is a distracted scientist , a cool hero.

The Shadow is a really fun B-movie that I watched with a big wide grin !