Is Ralph Nader the anti-Ayn Rand?

If Ayn Rand's life thesis is Atlas Shrugged, I think I just found its antithesis in this week's New Yorker. Raffi Khatchadourian writes that Ralph Nader "has been secretly working on his first novel":

...The book, called "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!," is seven hundred and thirty-six pages long, and it contains dozens of characters, many of them real people... who act out Nader's political fantasies. By the last page, most of the reforms that Nader has been arguing for all these years end up being enacted. Corporations are neutered. Third parties win. America is reborn."

So where Rand argued that only the super-rich can save us by following selfish aims, championing the dollar and driving the bloodsucking government into the ground, Nader will argue that only the super-rich can save us by thinking of the greater good, enacting wise regulation and driving corporate greed into the ground. How's that for a philosophical grudge match?

It sounds like Nader's even aiming for a Rand-sized tome, though he's got a few hundred pages to go if he wants to match Atlas Shrugged. That shouldn't be too hard if he follows Rand's formula: just have his protagonist outline his philosophical worldview in a climactic courtroom scene or rogue takeover of the nation's media. No problem! Rand's digressions are always cut and paste; they could be in any book, anywhere. Maybe Nader could just make his final chapter be In Pursuit of Justice — just drop that puppy right in there, and he'd satisfy the perfect Ayn Rand template. What a masterstroke of poli-sci-fi agit-prop that could be.

I'm intrigued to read Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, if only to see it go eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth with Atlas Shrugged. That pairing of fictional ambitions is definitely unsafe at any speed.

Daniel Libeskind: Van Halen homage?

Check out this new development south of the Staples Center in LA: apparently it was designed by Daniel Libeskind, best known for his World Trade Center redux. One might describe the architecture as "early Van Halen," with a fretboard and headstock rising gracefully from a laser-striped solid-body. I'd call it homage. Or is it infringement? I believe Eddie copyrighted the mad laser-striping look, if his action against Nike is any indication.

Either way, I'm sure they'll call it something preposterous like The Residencies at LA Live, but considering China's CCTV building is known as "big pants," I'm gonna say Libeskind's latest will be more affectionately known as the "Hot for Teacher" building.

The perils of frames: hey, toolbar

Earlier today, I experienced my first toolbar-upon-toolbar, when LinkedIn's ActionBar doubled down on Alltop's toolbar. So I did the only logical thing and submitted it to StumbleUpon to see if I could get three times my toolbar pleasure. Su.pr! It worked. Then I got all ahead of myself and submitted it to Digg, to see if I could get the Digg Toolbar all up ins for a four-plex of barspam, but every time it went to load, it looked like StumbleUpon's toolbar canceled out Digg's toolbar. Which seems uncool, considering.

Finally I tried to see if I could get Facebook's frame to party down, but I discovered that Facebook's frame doesn't seem to pop up anymore. I checked a bunch of my friends' links to see if any prompted the Facebook frame, and it still wouldn't come out to play. Which got me wondering: has Facebook become the moral leader in the toolbar frame space?

I challenge the Internets to a reach a non-Photoshopped toolbar sextacular (no, as in, six toolbars): game the system to throw on a Digg toolbar, maybe a Twig AdBar, and any other third-party framers on top of the three above. I got you halfway there; the emotional investment is too much for me to take it to the next level. The second half of the challenge would be X'ing out all the frames and successfully navigating back to the original article, which, ironically, is about good social media design.

RockMelt logo looks like evil dotMac

There's only so much you can do with drawing lines around a globe to represent how the Internet connects us. Marc Andreessen's new RockMelt project takes that logo meme to the hyperbolic superlative: apparently, this browser will liquefy the earth with its blazing innovation. Literally making the world a smaller place.

I guess I can get on board with that, though I still have this nagging feeling that RockMelt's designers just looked at Apple's old .Mac logo and said, "Let's corrupt that." Like they took the .Mac sphere, with it's hopeful points of light, and said, "Let's turn those into lacerations, where evil spirits are escaping the bowels of hell." You can actually count about four exact paths they've ripped off from the .Mac logo, all to build the hype that RockMelt will destroy the geophysics we rely on to hold the planet together.

Fair enough. If once we complained about an Internet Explorer monopoly, we've now got Firefox, Safari, Flock, Opera, Chrome and others. Segmentation seems to be the theme for advanced commercial civilization, and we all know competition is good for a rational marketplace. So if IE is still Rome, maybe RockMelt will destroy the empire in a way we can all get behind.

But we'll know their designers were probably using Safari.

Read more: Mashable | New York Times | TechCrunch

O; snap! Tron Legacy Trailer

Good lord, there's something about indiglo that makes me whole. How awesome that Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner are part of this — let's hope Disney takes care of the details. We've only waited 25 years for a sequel. Srsly, the Tron franchise makes Star Trek look like Small Wonder.

And if you really want the scoop on this premiere, you'll need to watch this too:

State of the MJ funeral

In addition to being a cultural moment for the world, Michael Jackson's funeral is like a status update for the tech and media landscape. We see Hulu teamed up with Fox, CNN with Facebook, USTREAM partnered with CBS and Twitter, and MySpace rolling solo. And I must say, MySpace has the clearest and largest picture, the cleanest sound, and the freshest stream. Could be because they're based out of LA, or because their stream isn't tied to a media dinosaur, but they're really cleaning up on their own turf. It's nice to see MySpace own it where they should be — music and pop culture.

It's also a reminder of what basic Internet service is now capable of: I've got four live video streams coming through my cable connection, hardly any of them hitching. MySpace has crystal clear picture and real bass. I'm watching live tweets and status updates and texting another friend about the service.

And as my friend texting points out, you really can't help but notice that no other entertainer compared to Michael. He was like the Secretariat of entertainers — no one even came close.

30 Rock: a nod to two generations of gamers

For those that missed it, 30 Rock subtly covered two decades of gaming in a scene last week — Tina Fey's character went from imitating Mario in Donkey Kong to drawing a life lesson from The Sims about 30 seconds later. She starts by admonishing Alec Baldwin for being too Irish:

Be Italian for like one second: "I'm-a Jack, I don't know who-a my father is, I'm-a so emotional I'm going to smash-a these barrels..."

And then seconds later she shares what she knows about fatherhood:

Look Jack, I don't have a lot of personal life experience, but if I have learned anything from my Sims family... when a child doesn't see his father enough, he starts to jump up and down. And then his mood level will drop... until he pees himself.

Seriously, who on the 30 Rock staff is playing The Sims? I honestly can't name one person who's played it, but apparently it's the best-selling video game franchise of all time with over 100 million copies sold (I'm guessing mostly in Japan). I'll confess I was addicted to Sim City 2000 in high school, but only because I was a master of civic orchestration. And because you could raises taxes to 20%, and then cut it to 19%, and they would cheer. Every time. Heh heh, stupid Sims.

Btw, if you haven't seen The King of Kong, I highly recommend it. Now there's a story of heroes and villains...

For the tweetiest in the tri-state area: www.twitter.com/getzsch

LinkedIn turns 6 today, reaches 40 million members. "How I did it" by Reid Hoffman in Inc Mag: http://is.gd/wZTH

Rega P1, yum. Loving vinyl time after three years without a turntable: http://www.rega.co.uk/