ZeroDivide

Health care and the Internet are on a headlong rush to each other at 4G speed. The big question is whether the point of impact will be a gentle caress or a "blunt impact trauma"  (the medical term for the situation where your face hits the tarmac at a couple of hundred miles an hour...but I digress...).   

Would you go online to buy a virtual daikon radish? 

If your answer to this question is "Yes," then you're in good company; nearly 500,000 people spent between $5 and $40 each to buy limited edition daikon radish crops last year on internet gaming company Zynga's popular "FarmVille" franchise. 

Of course, as in all things in life (well, almost all things...Kim Kardashian and Jersey Shore are exceptions...but I digress), proper context makes even the most seemingly bizarre and odd concepts understandable. 

While the rest of the world spent much of today debating the validity/importance of the list of new innovations incorporated into the iPhone 4S (8 megapixel camera! 1080p HD video!  Siri! Sprint!), I have to confess that I was captivated by the release of a different list of sorts.

Phuc.

Or at least, a vast majority of Zagat's (the restaurant review company) online readers do.   In Zagat's annual "Worst Restaurant Name" poll, the Phat Phuc Noodle Bar in London won that dubious moniker by a small landslide, beating out stiff (probably poor wordchoice...but I digress) competition: "Crapitto's," "Aselina," "9021Pho."

"Okay, enough with the grade school potty humor," you say. Although it DID get your attention, now, didn't it?  Come on...admit it.  You giggled.  And then you cringed.

Don't bemoan a failure when you should be celebrating a success.

Last Saturday, August 27th, I had the privilege of watching the frontier of digital storytelling being made. No, I wasn't at Google's YouTube office. I was in downtown Berkeley at the Pacific Film Archive, where diverse youth presented their film projects to a captivated audience.