“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.” Obama

U2 fans, get your boots on. The first song from the band’s first album in five years is ready for you to hear.
U2 began broadcasting the up-tempo single Get On Your Boots Monday — first on RTE, Ireland’s state broadcasters, then for free on the group’s website.

It’s the Dublin-bred band’s long-standing practice to give hometown fans the first listen of each album. Giving an advance taste on the Internet to the rest of the world is new.

U2′s official website lists all 11 title tracks for the new album, No Line on the Horizon, which will be released Feb. 27 in Ireland and March 3 worldwide. It is the band’s 12th studio album and the first since 2004′s Grammy-winning How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

The politics of science, which has been storm-tossed for the past eight years, heads for uncharted waters with the inauguration of Barack Obama.

The Bush administration has fought a long battle with the nation’s scientific community over funding and philosophy, and great divides have formed over such issues as global warming and stem cell research. Scientists are hopeful that

Obama, who has called for increased research spending, will bring a new dawn. But how realistic are their hopes? And can the nation afford to make them a reality?

“My administration will value science. We will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that facts demand bold action,” Obama said at the nomination of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, a climate-change technology advocate, as the next secretary of Energy.

Says environmental scientist Donald Kennedy, Stanford University’s president-emeritus: “I think we are seeing some really good first steps, appointment of people that the science community takes seriously, people who value science.”

Let’s see what happens…I am no tree hugger but I think we must start to do something now!

As the first president-elect with a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, Barack Obama is poised to use the Internet to communicate directly with Americans in a way unknown to previous presidents.

Judging by Obama’s savvy use of social-networking sites during his campaign and the interactive nature of his transition team’s Web site, Americans can expect a president who bypasses the traditional media’s filters while reaching out to citizens for input, observers say.

“The rebooting of our democracy has begun,” said Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and the techPresident blog. ” Obama has the potential to transform the relationship between the American public and their democracy.”

During the presidential race, Obama’s campaign won praise for its innovative use of social-networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and MyBarackObama.com, to announce events, rally volunteers and raise money. Facebook has more than 150 million active users, and the average user has 100 friends on the site, according to the company.

Obama has more than 1 million MySpace “friends” and more than 3.7 million “supporters” on his official Facebook page — some 700,000 more than when he was elected in November. His campaign also has a database of almost 13 million supporters and their e-mail addresses.

Transition officials hope to transform Obama’s vast Web operation and electronic list of supporters into a 21st-century tool to help accomplish his goals as president. They even have a name for this ambitious effort: Obama 2.0.

“Obama has invented an alternative media model,” said CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider. “In the old model, the president talks to the people on television [and] the people talk back in polls. In the new model, communication is online, and two-way.”

Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter didn’t exist when George W. Bush took office eight years ago. But since last November’s election, Obama has wasted no time embracing these online communication portals. In recent weeks he has taped weekly video addresses and posted them to YouTube, where most have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Obama’s staffers also have stopped posting information to social-networking sites since the election, preferring to reach out to constituents through YouTube and Change.gov, the official site of the president-elect’s transition team. Visitors to Change.gov can read a frequently updated blog, post their ideas on issues facing the country, and rate others’ ideas. Top-rated ideas will be gathered into a briefing book and given to Obama after he takes office.

“They want information going not just from them to the voters, but from the voters back to them,” Democratic strategist Steve McMahon said Wednesday on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “Thirteen million people pushing a button, sending an e-mail to their elected representatives, making a phone call, taking action, is a powerful, powerful lobbying tool.”

“It’s a very smart use of the Internet, to get people to offer ideas,” said David All, a Republican Internet strategist. All hopes that Obama and his staff take a similar approach to WhiteHouse.gov, the president’s official Web site. The current WhiteHouse.gov site, operated by the Bush administration, contains few interactive features.

A statement on the president-elect’s transition site says that Obama hopes to “use cutting-edge technologies to create a new level of transparency, accountability, and participation for America’s citizens.”

It’s fitting, then, that Obama’s inauguration next week could be one of the most watched video events in Internet history. Rasiej expects that hordes of users will be watching online when Obama takes the oath of office, visiting WhiteHouse.gov and refreshing their browsers to capture the moment the site switches to proclaim Obama, not George W. Bush, as president.

As president, Obama will likely not just rely on WhiteHouse.gov but use multiple Internet sites and technological tools to build grass-roots support for his agenda, observers say.

Obama is using the tools that are available to him today. The next president will be using some of the same tools, and also some tools that haven’t been invented yet.

Andrew Wyeth, arguably America’s most famous, most popular and most critically panned living artist, died in his sleep early Friday morning at his home outside Philadelphia. He was 91.

My dad painted a bit like Wyeth that is why I feel a bit sad about his passing.

Wyeth, the master of “magic-realist” painting, had been famous from his youth, portraying mostly the people and places he knew best in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine. Most notable was Christina’s World (1948), “one of the four or five indelible American paintings, hugely famous,” according to Wyeth biographer Richard Meryman, author of the admiring Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, who knew the artist and his indispensable wife Betsy from an interview in 1963.

Then Wyeth’s renown turned to notoriety with the Helga pictures, 246 sketches, drawings, studies and paintings featuring one of his neighbors. The collection made headlines and magazine covers around the world when the artist suddenly decided to reveal its existence in 1986 after keeping the works hidden for years.

“One of the very exciting things for him (was) secrecy — everything is in secret, not just the Helga paintings,” says Meryman.

Sometimes, the littlest things can fortify a brand in the customer’s mind. Take this card, which arrives with J. Crew mail orders this year.

It polishes away a little of the corporate stigma and lends the personal touch. Granted, the card is printed, not handwritten, but it’s thoughtful just the same. And smart marketing. All for pennies on the dollar.

What’s keeping you from sending a note like this to your customers? If you want to connect with the female consumer, this is the kind of no-brainer marketing you need to be thinking about. Anyone can do it – why not you?

It’s rare that you find a movie that sticks with you long after you’ve seen it for the first time. “Lost in Translation” was like that for me, for some reason. Maybe it stems from a time in my life where I was living and working in Tokyo and spent many days and nights at the very Park Hyatt this was filmed. Usually meeting with Western colleagues to de-cipher and untangle the day’s events and interchanges with my Japanese colleagues.

It had great appeal to me, despite the nature of being very much on my own there. I could relate to Murray’s character and the Japanese scenarios were almost too realistic making me cringe at points.

Perhaps that’s why “Lost in Translation” had the impact it did. Bill Murray, who plays Bob Harris, is in a strange country and cannot sleep, and he meets Charlotte, played wonderfully by Scarlett Johansson, who is also in the same situation, but almost totally alone as her new husband has other things to do.

They connect with each other out of their need to be with something familiar. Being in Japan with no English spoken, these two naturally relate and spend a lot of time together over the next few days, trying to hold onto this amazing thing they’ve found amidst their loneliness.

The movie did a superb job of bringing the audience into the emotions going on inside these two. You actually can almost feel what they are going through and how they long to just “be “ with each other.

And that brings us to the end of the movie. Bob has to leave, the filming is done on his TV commercial, and it’s time to go home and that means leaving Charlotte behind. But that’s the end really, they had no future, they were both married and their time was up. You felt their pain in ending the short relationship, but what other choice was there?

So Bob gets into his limo and is taken away, while Charlotte heads out onto the streets, back to wandering aimlessly like she did before, alone and out of place in this strange country.

But Bob stops, goes back and finds her walking.

They look at each other for a moment, and then they just hold each other. He whispers something to her, which makes her cry, makes her smile. They kiss, and she continues walking down the sidewalk, tears flowing, but a new look of happiness on her face. Bob gets into the limo and is gone.

I loved the movie, and I loved the final song in it so much that I now own the “Jesus and Mary Chain” album Psychocandy that it came from.

So the big mystery for all that saw it was this: What did he say to her?

Some wise words of comfort from an older man that allowed her to move on? That he’d see her again? That he loved her?

Well, we now know. Someone took the scene and digitally enhanced the sentence that Bill Murray whispers to Charlotte and posted the video on YouTube. Sorry the link is no longer on YouTube.

It was hard to hear, but I think they got it right.

Now, not everyone wants to know. The way it ended was perfect in my opinion, leaving it up to us to decide what he said to her. It was fitting and obviously kept people thinking about it afterwards.

So if you don’t want to know, don’t watch the video or read on after this point. But if you do, check it out below.

Here is the final line from him again, if you didn’t watch it or want to see it again:

Bob: “I have to be leaving…but I wont let that come between us, okay?”

Charlotte: “Okay.” *gasp*

This exchange seems totally fitting to me. But the real meaning behind it will always remain a mystery. Did that mean he was coming back to her? Or was he just leaving her with hope. That in having this hope, she wouldn’t be completely miserable and lonely. Her gasp at the end was like a breath of relief escaping her, so the words he said were the right ones.

I don’t know what it means. I don’t think we ever will. They are both married, so the real guy inside me wants to think that they just return to their lives, but another part of me hopes they end up together.

What do you think? Does it make a difference knowing what he said? Am I the only one who really enjoyed this film?

American Idol kicked off Season 8 Tuesday night with new contestants and new executive producers. But the real star of the Phoenix auditions was the new judge, songwriter Kara DioGuardi. Other than that I was not impressed. Hopefully there will be some great talent somewhere!

DioGuardi encountered a 16-year-old superfan and a back-talking babe in a bikini. (The fan went home; the babe went to Hollywood — much to DioGuardi’s chagrin.)

Looks like a seemingly endless supply of clueless singers determined to torture their songs into submission, a couple of sentimental stories with sweet voices attached. Of course, there’s also the occasional surprise, like Simon Cowell passing through Brianna Quijada after putting her through the wringer for her version of Killing Me Softly With His Song. But if any serious contenders came from Phoenix, they’ll have to do some serious convincing of fans and judges alike.

The season opener pulled in 30 million viewers, the lowest for an Idol premiere since 2004.

The new TOMY xiao™ TIP-521 Digital Camera with Built-in Printer is a full-featured 5 Megapixel digital camera with a built-in full color ZINK™ printer.

The xiao™ is a first of its kind integrated digital camera and printer that allows consumers to capture, view, and immediately print their digital images without ink, anywhere. Photos can now be viewed and shared right away – anywhere and all from one device. The xiao™ produces borderless, full-color, 2×3″ (5×7,6 cm) prints in less than 60 seconds.

The xiao™ features a “retro” design and innovative built-in software to enable a variety of entertaining printing options from templates to borders. It also features an IrDA receiver so that you can print images sent to the xiao™ wirelessly from other IrDA devices.

Poor Polaroid was asleep at the wheel.