During his stay in Austrailia, Bill spent most of his time in his hotel room, suffering from the terrible pain in his side.  After returning to New York City, he went to see his physician, and he did not receive good news for him.  It was Pancreatic Cancer, and, though it was treatable, it would be tough to beat.  After the meeting with his doctor, Bill famously broke his nine-month boycott of cigarettes, asking for one as soon as he was in the car.

"You're wrong, I'm right!"

            With his mortality in sight, Bill kicked into high gear, recording more albums than he ever had, writing two books, and even began developing a TV series for British television in which he and the co-creator would expose those who were dragging down “our collective unconscious, and making us pay a higher psychic price for it.”  The BBC was planning on giving it the go-ahead

            With months left to go in his life (and only a handful of people in the know), Bill was booked on the first month of the new Letterman show on CBS.  Bill came on for the 12^th time, performing the usual dumbed-down, self-edited material that was necessary to be on network TV, but this time Bill felt his set was the closest it could be to his actual comedy club performances.  This made it all the more confusing to him when the Letterman people called him that night to tell him his set would not be making to air.

            Instead of out rightly bitching about it, he let the controversy come to him, doing interviews with people like Howard Stern and Len Belzer.  The ultimately tragic thing about this is that while riding this train, his cancer (which had been getting better) started to get worse.  Everyone wanted a piece of Bill, and he had barely anything left to give.  So he spent the last weeks of his professional career touring, and, in an effort to prove that Standards and Practices had grossly over-estimated the taste of mainstream America, he would open with his Letterman set to see how the real America reacted to it. 

            He recorded his last show (1 of 7 seen here) and went to spend his last days in his family home in Little Rock.  He often spoke of the pitiable way that terminally ill patients spent their last days in a hospital, surrounded by strangers, and obviously wanted to avoid that, considering how he spent his last day weeks with family (playing for them the music that had profoundly affected his life) and people he loved.

            Bill Hicks died on February 26, 1994 and was buried in Leakesville, Mississippi.  Less than a week later, the most tragic thing possible (besides his death) happened.  He lost the American Comedy Award to “Carrot Top”.

            I’d like to say to you, the audience, if you’ve never heard of Bill Hicks, but think Carrot Top and/or Gallager are hilarious, than you need to grow up a bit before you move onto Carlin or Hicks.  If you think Dennis Leary is funny, and you think his “No Cure For Cancer” Showtime show was great, than guess what, you are a Bill Hicks fan.  Why?  Because Dennis Leary stole a lot of Bill Hicks’ material for that show.  Do you want to hear a great joke (that I didn’t come up with Dennis, you lucky bastard)?  “Why is Leary popular and Hicks dead?  Because there’s ‘No Cure For Cancer.”

God love you Bill Hicks

 The days of the “E3 Media and Business Summit” are over; long live E3!

            The scaled back E3 is dead, and good riddance to it.  I felt as though the industry didn’t take the “Media and Business Summit” as seriously as they did E3,

and saved some of the good stuff for interviews (like Miyamoto muttering “Pikmin 3” under his breath last year so we would all shut the hell up about the Press Conference) and other gaming shows (the DSi at the Tokyo Game Show).  Microsoft had an alright show last year, but that was about it.

           This year has been promised as a return to form, but I’m not sure that the majority of us will notice.  I would imagine that the differences between this year and last year are like night and day if you actually attended, but I did not and still thought there was plenty of material to cover.  I saw a lot of awesome live demos last year (some of them for games that still aren’t out), and I expect we will see more of the same.

            The whole reason I guess I am excited about the resurrection of the old E3 has a little to do with nostalgia, but mostly it’s how E3 is as big and magical as it used to be.  That sets the bar high for developers and their Press Conferences, and that’s what it’s all about…Juicy Juicy Press Conferences…

Happy E3,

Luigi

So this has nothing to do with video games.  Ok…

On Friday, January 30^th, David Letterman tried to make up for a 15-year-old mistake by finally showing the first stand-up routine to be completely cut on the his show; the Oct. 1^st 1993 set from the social comic genius, Bill Hicks.  The Late Show said that his material was too controversial for the public, and canned the set. 

The funny thing is myself and other Bill Hicks enthusiasts knew what he said that night, because for the next three months after it was censored, he performed the set for audiences in comedy clubs around America trying to prove that the “America” the CBS marketing people saw was completely out of touch with the majority of Americans.  Then, in January of 1994, with his star on the rise (if you get censored by a late night show during it’s first few months on a new network, you’ll get a lot of attention), he kind of “retired” to spend the last two months of his life with his parents and family, dying from a cancer of the pancreas that fewer than a handful of people even knew about.  Bill Hicks, dead at 32, was the biggest loss to comedy since Kaufman and Bruce.

            Okay, I’m a bit biased.  I love Bill Hicks, but I also grew up a mere few blocks from where Letterman grew up.  I’ve always thought Dave was funny, but when I first read about the aforementioned censorship in Bill Hicks’ biography (American Scream, a great example of what a comedian’s biography can be), I had lost some respect for him.  But this isn’t about that.  It’s about how this incident finally made the American public notice this man.

            In 1990, after over a decade of professional American stand-up and multiple spots on The Late Show w/ David Letterman after Johnny Carson, he finally started to get recognition from his performance on HBO, and his infamous Montreal Comedy Festival appearance (which he won Best Comedian at the festival).  He toured Great Britain, instantly becoming a star, just like his hero, Jimi Hendrix, before Jimi became famous in America (and, in Bill’s words, before the mothership came back for him).  That kind of spotlight would not find him until Letterman cut his set, and by then (hindsight is 20/20) it was too late.

            Hicks toured Great Britain twice, famously missing the L.A. Riots (he left the day it started, arriving in Heathrow Airport and seeing the newspaper headline, “L.A. Burns To Ground.”  “Did I leave a cigarette burning?”) and the loss of Pres. H.W. Bush to Clinton (Bush saying, “We still live in a dangerous world”, and Bill replying, “Thanks to you!”).  He even went to Australia in early 1993, where he missed the final assault on the Waco Compound (though he and Kevin Booth did a report from within the ATF perimeter five weeks before the siege ended).  Everywhere he went outside of America, he was treated like the comic genius that he was. 

He was so prominent during those years that Rolling Stone named him “Hot Comic of the Year”, which was a title Bill himself laughed at “because I’ve been out of the country nearly the whole year.  So, maybe I should disappear completely and see if I become a huge star.”  It was during this time in Australia that Bill began to feel the pain that was beginning in his pancreas.

Cheap and outdated buy

Owning a Palm device in 2008 is a lot like owning an iMac in 1998.  Back in those days, Apple was in big trouble.  For one thing their OS (Mac OS 8.1) was far behind it’s competitors in terms of memory management, multitasking, and overall ‘bling’.  Software publishers were jumping ship left and right and the competition (PC’s) offered a better value.  Then came the iMac.  Though it hasn’t aged well, the iMac’s attractive case and low-profile form-factor SAVED the company.  So how does all of this relate to the Palm Centro?

Similarities

Palm is in big trouble.  They are over $400 million dollars in debt and took out their last loan at the beginning of the ‘great credit crunch’.  Investors are not pleased with Palm’s share price, and they are bleeding money.  Then comes the Centro.  An attractive little smartphone that, depending on your carrier, can come in black, white, blue, green, and pink.  This phone has been a huge success for Palm though it hasn’t given them the financial reform they are looking for.  Why?

The OS

Palm OS debuted in 1996 on the original US Robotics Palm Pilot 1000 and 5000, and from a usability standpoint has remained largely unchanged.  Of Course now we have faster processors and high-resolution color screens that allow us to do more, but the OS still seems to function the same way.  Personally I love the Palm OS.  I have only been using it for 3 weeks now, but I must say it is solid.  There are many basic functions this OS can handle that can’t be done, on say, an iPhone.  For instance, Copy, Cut and Paste, all from the qwerty keyboard.  Regardless of how functional the OS remains, it is in need of a complete overhaul.  Palm needs a Mac OS X.

The Centro itself

This phone is brilliant, I can’t say it enough.  Treo functionality at iPod size.  Many have said in their reviews that the keys are too small but I find them very comfortable to type on whether it be an email in Versamail, or a simple text message.  The SMS software is a life saver.  Before I used to have a standard flip handset that I didn’t enjoy.  Now I have a full QWERTY keypad that I don’t even have to type on!  Whenever my wife sends and SMS from her pink Centro, I can usually respond with pre-defined answers that I saved in the Messaging app.  The device fits comfortably in my pocket, which is important because I am not the type to clip it to my side.  The supplied USB cable is incredible because it allows me to charge the phone (slowly) from my laptop, Wii or Xbox 360.  Lastly, it is attractive and I find myself toying with it just for the sake of touching it.

Connectivity

Connecting to my laptop was painless.  I use Ubuntu Linux so I can only tell you what a simple process it was.  It just worked.  I set up my conduits and now I can sync my contact data and so forth with Gnome’s PIM software Evolution.  Installing a new application in simple.  Drag the application to the Gnome-pilot icon in your system tray, hit the hotsync button and wait.  Thats it.  My only complaint is that when there is a micro-SD card installed it doesn’t automatically mount when the phone is plugged in.  I’m sure this is the case for all OS’s.  Now, onto multimedia…

Multimedia

This is certainly a strong point for the Centro as well.  It comes bundled with pTunes for playlists and Kinoma player (hidden) for watching youtube and playing WMV’s and MP4’s.  pTunes has great sound quality, but all in all it is not efficient and actually quite cumbersome to use if you want to connect it  to your car or even take a walk.  I installed TCPMP for playing videos.  It takes anything I throw at it.  Also I can transcode DVD’s down to an average 275 mb file size optimized for the Centro’s 320×320 display.  TCPMP however, will kick your battery’s ass.

Games

Little John Palm.  ‘Nuff said.  If you like like playing NES, SMS, SNES, Genesis and so forth (and you like RPG’s), you need this.  The Palm has a comfy D-pad surrounding the ‘Palm’ button and all other needed buttons can be mapped accordingly per machine.  Emulation is not that great on SNES and Genesis but I’m told that is a memory issue and that there is a ware I can buy that will solve this.  In addition to all that, Palm has a considerable back catalog of games from the last 12 years, and they should all work!

In closing, all I can say is this phone rocks.