Matt Hobbs

In an effort to find the source of this weekend’s crazy headaches I went to the dentist today to get my teeth checked out – on the basis that the headaches seem to extend all the way into my back teeth. After half an hour of prodding, poking and x-raying (which apparently did not give me super powers) the general consensus was that there was nothing wrong with the tooth that was aching.. however they did find another tooth that’s now needing to get pulled. D’oh!

Having had his way with me, the dentist passed me over to the hygienist who proceeded to demonstrate that I’ve not been flossing enough by sticking a large spiky implement into my gum causing pain and bleeding. Youch. This was followed by half an hour of intense, mechanised grinding of teeth with some manual clean up afterwards… normally my hygienists have always just stuck with the manual tool so this was a rude awakening to say the least. The plus side is, now that my gums have recovered, my teeth are now shiny and white again – yay! On the downside my teeth are still killing me – boo!

So kids, learn from your Uncle Matt.. floss regularly every day or expect severe mouth pain on a somewhat-annual basis!

Hello! This weekend we lined up twice to go see the new Borat movie at one of the few cinemas it was on in New York. Yep, twice. Once to get tickets for a showing five hours later, and then half an hour before the performance to get a reasonable seat (we were still halfway down the line). Luckily it was worth it. I’m not a great fan of Ali G, but Borat is pure genius as he travels from his home town in Kazakhstan to the west coast, via New York and all stops in between.

Be prepared to cringe and laugh out loud simultaneously as Sacha Baron Cohen continues to push the boundaries of ‘reality’ comedy: trying to welcome people with a kiss people on the streets of New York, singing a bizarre version of the US National Anthem at a rodeo after thanking the crowd for their ‘war of terror’ and bringing a prostitute to a etiquette dinner party. Oh, and the naked wrestling… The pace never lets up and you can’t quite tell where reality stops and the acting starts. Borat is an amazing character that simultaneously allows Cohen to skewer well meaning liberals and right wingers, the latter reacting strongly to his ‘terrorist’ facial hair and the first getting thrown by his open misogyny and hatred of Jews. The sequence where he accidentally ends up staying at a bed and breakfast run by this sweet old Jewish couple is amazing. Go see it – I don’t want to give anything away but you will have #1 sexy time with Borat.

Ps, Somewhat unsurprisingly, yet also surprisingly, Borat ended up being number one in the US and A box office this weekend. Is nice!

Last week I attended the TRAFFIC conference in Miami, a jam packed few days for people who own domain names to make money and those who offer services around that. You’re all seen the type of website.. you type in something random, put ‘.com’ on the end and a site full of adverts come up. Click on some of those ads and the site owner makes some money. This is also known as direct navigation, as opposed to search navigation where you search for a term and click on the results. Another variant of this is typos – misspellings of popular domain names or common words such as ‘consult‘.

The basic idea is simple, a domain name is similar to property in that it can offer great exposure to your target audience. If you own 5th Avenue property you can expect it to be worth more than the deepest darkest depths of Long Island, and the same is true of domains. The trouble is in many cases you can’t work out why a domain is so popular, in others it’s obvious – for example domain auction, where Cameras.com was sold for $1.5 million. In fact I almost accidentally became the proud owner of Sailboat.com when, as a result of the previous night’s ‘networking’ I yawned and stretched at the wrong time… my $130,000 check – the amount I almost bid – might have bounced though.

Of course if someone is prepared to offer me $1 million for MattHobbs.com then maybe I could afford it. Go on… you know you want it!

Much thanks to Andy for his lunchtime suggestion of the Margon Restaurant – just off and north of Times Square. It’s a tiny little hole in the wall place on W 46th between 6th/7th Ave that serves cuban cuisine from a small but intensely good selection. Today’s ‘healthy’ choice was roast pork – which made up for last night’s post Halloween parade healthy tofu.

On which note: the New York Halloween parade was, as usual, wonderful – as was Donna’s party. Didn’t take too many pictures myself – but here’s one someone took of me out on the street in my highly original James Bond costume.

The answer is, as revealed by Ridley Scott in this excellent Blade Runner documentary, yes. Which means I was right. Huzah!

Not sure what I mean by that paragraph? Well go read ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, by the wonderfully amazing Philip K Dick. Then go watch Blade Runner, one of my all time favourite films. Then you’ll know what question has been definitively answered.

My favourite moment in the document though was hearing that, upon watching an early show reel of the special effects of this future world, Philip K Dick turned to the special effects guy and said ‘How did you know what was in my mind?’. Beautiful.

First Steve Irwin, and now some guy in America, have been victims of stingray barbs to the heart. Once would seem unlikely but twice? Is anyone else thinking that stingrays are about to rise up and take over the world? How many ‘freak accidents’ amount to sudden world domination?

OK. No more sugary coffee for me today.

For some reason I’m aching like an achy thing today. That’ll learn me to do exercise. Maybe I should have used running machines like Ok, Go! Still the only obvious reason why Google bought youTube… and consistently smile out loud funny.

Dove have been extending their ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ with this short video showing how an average looking person is transformed into a billboard beauty model through a combination of lighting, make-up, styling and, finally, excessive PhotoShop tweaking. Scary. No wonder girls have such distorted views of their own beauty these days. One idea I had a while back about this was that beauty adverts should all have health warnings on them akin to cigarettes, explaining that these images are not real people and explaining what’s been done to them. [Thanks to metafilter]

A small plane just crashed into the side of an Upper East Side buidings… What the f*ck!

So, according to the passport they conveniently found on the road below, the plane was being flown by Cory Lidle of the New York Yankees. They found his passport? After the plane caught fire when it hit and fell down? Bizarre.

Personally I hope this means a ban on small aircraft from near New York – how hard would it be for a terrorist to load up a plane with something and fly into another building? I mean they’d have to be famous apparently to get past any kind of air security, but that can’t be too hard. Rich people on the way to the Hamptons can get the Jitney like everyone else.