It's so much more efficient to watch the Oscars after the fact on tape. Total time spent soaking in Hollywood's alternate reality Monday: 2 hours instead of the 4 it would have taken Sunday night.

Michael Caine was classy. Billy Crystal was plenty amusing. Robin Williams did okay.

I finally saw American Beauty a few weeks ago. I thought Lester/Spacey's lines were all fabulous, and the drive-up window scene almost made me hurt myself laughing. A very good film to be sure, but honestly -- if you stand back and look at it -- what a bizarre film to single out as the best of the year...

• Memorable quotes from the Oscars [Salon]
  "I wish I possessed a tail. I could wag to be here." -- Roberto Benigni

It strikes me, as I'm developing this niche web app that I'll eventually talk about, that the screens look funny to me; not just because I'm worrying more about functionality at the moment than design, and not just because other people have real designers behind their sites and I've just got me, but because there are no ads on the screen...

Most other web-based applications (particularly web-based mail) and a majority of the non-weblog sites I visit have ads. Sure, this isn't news, but it strikes me as worthy of note that now I'm instinctively expecting ads to be all over my screen in prominent places, and it seems funny when they're not there instead of vice versa.

Ugh.

The revenue model for this particular web app is that ______s will pay us a setup cost and a yearly fee to use it. Ads don't enter into it, because it's a purely workflow-efficency-oriented thing. We don't need eyeballs, we need customers. And without ads, the screen seems so bare...

Seen several places, this is also worth calling attention to here...apparently Tom Peters' knee-jerk reaction to tales of blatant sexism toward women car buyers was that they were BS. Where's he been?

• Women Rule! [TomPeters.com]
  a woman of about 40 approached ... fancy job title ... definite six-figure salary ... who told me she had gone into ... (yup, yet again) a car dealership with her seven-year-old son and ... the dealer talked to the son! Said, literally, "What kind of car does mommy want?"

This guy sums up my recent feelings about voice interfaces pretty well. Hey Seth, what do you think?

• Brave New Work: Forget 2001. HAL Will Never Get What You're Talking About [Fortune, seen at faisal.com]
  The idea that the ability to talk to our cars or our computers or our microwave ovens will significantly improve either our convenience at home or our productivity at work is to ignore the awkward reality of language as an interface.
  
  Let's never, ever forget that language has evolved as much as a medium for ambiguity and misdirection as a vehicle for clarity and explicitness.

A fine Carol Lay strip I didn't catch the first time:

• Secret Stories [Salon]