The most influential work by Spelling

Here it goes, you are now able to vote for the most influential work by Aaron Spelling. We'll focus on tv here and the aim is to find out, which of Spellings tv-series have had the most impact on the youth of the world. And by youth I mean all postwar kids with tv-access. The voting starts now, yer all entitled to vote, all votes count, vote for Pedro, uncle Sam needs you, don't ask what your country can do for you... and so on. Vote, now!

Which of these Spelling-series has had the strongest impact on you as a kid?
	Love Boat
	Starsky & Hutch
	Dynasty
	Charlie’s Angels
	Hart to Hart
	Beverly Hills 90210
	T. J. Hooker
	Melrose Place
	Twin Peaks
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Thank you, Aaron Spelling!

Mid-Summer weekend, or ‘Juhannus’ in Finnish, is big party in Finland with some very particular things about it. A large part of population retreat to their summer cottages to barbeque some sausages, sit in a hot sauna and to swim in a lake, build and burn a huge bonfire and of course to drink more or less heavily. Consequently many people always lose their lives during the festivities, which is a truly sad thing. This year seven people drowned and at least four others died for different reasons.

However, let’s forget about those people for a moment and pay our respects one very special guy who passed away during the weekend. A man, who has given all of us so much mind-numbing entertainment and fun during last thirty years or so; The Über-TV-Producer, King of Soap Operas, Mr. Aaron Spelling.

Aaron Spelling passed away at the ripe age of 83 years in his home in Beverly Hills (90210, where else?) on Friday 23rd of June. Mr. Spelling has produced all the TV-series we have watched and loved: Love Boat, Starsky & Hutch, Dynasty, Charlie’s Angels, Hart to Hart, T. J. Hooker, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Twin Peaks, Charmed, Summerland and countless others during his long career. And of course he gave us his lovely, albeit rather surgically enchanced, daughter Tori Spelling too.

Watching those series, like I did watch BH 90210, Melrose Place and Twin Peaks (The Best TV-series of all time!), really must have had some kind of an effect on me when I was teenager, or at least on the image of American society that was forming in my mind. You just can't forget that classic episode where Brandon goes to Alcoholics Anonymoys after crashing his car while drunk driving, ...after drinking 2 beers.

Anyway, according to Guinness Book of World Records he is the most ‘productive’ TV-producer of all times as he has created more than 5000 hours of top quality soap operas for TV as well 300 hours of TV-films and about a dozen of movies for silver screen. Of course he made a lot money too, Forbes Magazine estimates that Spelling’s fortune is worth more than 300 million dollars.

And finally, Aaron Spelling’s life was also a real American Dream come true. He was born in a poor Jewish immigrant family in Texas in 1923 with Russian father and polish mother. First he tried to make it as an actor, without much success, but turned quickly into a producing - and the rest is history.

R.I.P Aaron Spelling

No more Cristal for Jay-Z

We all know how since mid-1990s all rappers all over the world loved to (or would have loved to if only they were rich enough) buy cases and cases of Louis Roederer Cristal Brut Champagne, drink it straight out of the bottle, pour it all over their hoes and peeps in da club and all that. We saw it in all the videos and hear about it in all the songs.

For those of you unfamiliar with this lovely drink, it is a really prestigious and rather expensive (at about 200 US dollars a bottle) brand of Champagne with long tradition. The company, Louis Roederer was founded in 1776 and is still family-owned etc.

Now, the new Managing Director of Louis Roederer Monsieur Frédéric Rouzaud has recently declared, in the best/worst manner only the real French bourgeois people are capable of, that they would have been much happier without all the free-commercial-time their product has been receiving during last few years. Apparently rappers pouring Cristal down their throats and all over all the booty in the vicinity was not the kind of advertisement Mr. Rouzaud has been planning to include on their subtle marketing.

When Rouzaud was asked if the association between Cristal and the "bling lifestyle" could be detrimental, he said: "That's a good question, but what can we do? We can't forbid people from buying it. I'm sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business."

Jay-Z, one of the biggest endorsers the mentioned golden drink, has been really upset about this and as a consequence he has called everybody to boycott the-drink-that-shall-now-remain-nameless and he has also called Rouzaud’s comments as racist.

Jay-Z’s boycott means that his night clubs are not selling Cristal anymore, there will be no more mentions of it on the records his label produces and so on. It remains to be seen whether the nasty C-word will be beeped out from all re-released rap-records from here on out?

Apple and 50 Cent producing Ghetto Apple AKA G-Apple!

Here’s more Apple-related facinating news stolen off the AppleInsider.com:

According to Forbes Magazine, Fitty Cent is negotiating a branding deal with Steve Jobs and Apple. Well, so what?
Here’s what: Fiddy wants to endorse a Apple-produced a line of affordable home computers for inner-city residents (ie. the ghetto, da hood). Apparently he wants to help in getting affordable computers in the hands of the less wealthy and so on. That’s great, of course.

But to think about it, 50 Cent plus Apple Computers equals to what? Lots of blingbling, lots of (many would argue 100% fake) street credibility and nicely designed computers produced very cheaply and sometimes maybe even in rather questionable working conditions somewhere in China. So, basically what they are working on would be perfect ‘Ghetto Laptop’, or even better, ‘Ghetto Apple’.

If I was better with Photoshop, I could try to produce a vision of what it could look like so here’s an assingnment to all yo’all budding graphic designers out there reading this.

Here’s what Fitty himself is saying: "I'm creating a foundation that will be around for a long time, because fame can come and go or get lost in the lifestyle and the splurging, I never got into it for the music. I got into it for the business."

I won’t say anything about his last sentence above. Yo, everybody knows that Major League Hip hop is not about the music, it’s always about da biznezz, like on the way paved by Puffy and Jay-Z and everyone after them. Whatever.

Also we all should know that ‘50 Cent ranks amongst the world's richest celebrities, raking in over $67 million in 2005 from record sales and branding deals that include a line of sneakers, a video game and his G-Unit clothing line.’

iPod City. The Dark Side of Apple?

Since us Kriton boys (myself included) have our iPods and Apple laptops, I though I need to bring this news to everybody’s attention:

The British newspaper Mail On Sunday claimed in their recent report that Foxxconn Electronics, a huge Taiwanese industrial electronics contract manufacturing corporation based in Longhua in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in southern China, which manufactures, among many other gadgets and cool things, iPods for Apple, pays their workers as little as $50 dollars per month for working 15 hours a day. The workers, and the company employs over 160 000 of them, working in what Mail on Sunday calls ‘iPod City’, and in sweatshop –type environment.

Here are some quotes from the article:
“When they're not on the assembly lines, they live in secluded dormitories that each house 100 people and prohibit visitors from the outside world. The workers are allowed "a few possessions" and a "bucket to wash their clothes." "We have to work too hard and I am always tired. It's like being in the army," Zang Lan, one of the workers at Longhua, told the Mail. "They make us stand still for hours. If we move we are punished by being made to stand still for longer. The boys are made to do pushups."

“According to the report, iPod Nano is made in a five-story factory called "E3" that is secured by armed police officers. Another factory in near Shanghai manufacturers iPod shuffles and is completely surrounded by barbed wire. At this facility, 50,000 workers are housed outside the plant and earn about $99 per month. However, they must pay out of pocket for their accommodations and food, "which takes up half their salaries." One security guard told the Mail that the iPod shuffle production lines are staffed by women workers because ‘they are more honest than male workers.’"

Foxxconn Electronics of course “sternly denies” these claims as false and calls them a "vicious attack". Foxxxonn also claims that its "employment practices are completely in accordance with the requirements of Shenzhen labor supervision departments." And apparently they have been actively making improvements to workers' living conditions, providing safe and well-equipped dormitories complete with free laundry service, sports facilities, libraries, and other facilities.

Apple Corp. of course has responded to this by issuing a statement saying it is looking into the report. "Apple is committed to ensuring that working conditions in our supply chain are safe, workers are treated with respect and dignity, and manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible," the statement said, according to Macworld UK. Apple also claim that "it does not tolerate any violations of its supplier code of conduct."

K-Biz officially down!

K-Biz officially down!
Originally uploaded by fiilinc.

That's right. Already for a couple of days, www.kriton.biz has been down, and will be until we purchase sum mo' bandwidth. Or whatever we decide to to...

For this, I blame you America, though.. The server people gave us some statistics of our recent traffic, and the results were thoroughly confusing. It shows that on june 9th and 10th, we've had over 1500 visitors mostly from the US of A who used over 2 gb of our not-so limited bandwidth. Thank you, b****s. Without you bastards we would have bee just okay for the rest of the year really. Or then again, our server company can also be screwing us. Who knows.

But, because of that, for now the official Kriton information centres remain our hot little MySpace site (www.myspace.com/kritonhigh) and this blog that you are reading.

At the moment Kriton Music stays active with a couple of new tracks. KHSB has a new grimy rocker called "Scared Money" all ready for mastering, and Spazz Out has been finishing their first release, the baile-tastic anthem named "Coca Cola". People have also been hearin a brand new balearic-style hiphop-rock-gospel sound around the Alppitech studio. Just Blaze meets Primal Scream? Happy Mondays goes Baltimore? You will hear from this!!

Keep on loving!
Big Alppila n da K-boys

ps. Oooooooh, Diplo & A-Trak tonight at Nosturi, Helsinki. That's where it's at kids!!

Mosquitos are-a-cumming

When people get older they lose their ability to hear high pitch tones. This is a fact that some evil minds have now turned into an innovation called "The Mosquito". The Mosquito is marketed as "an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz buzzer designed to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected." Huh.. quite orwellian and 1984-ish, aint't that?

However some kids have found a way to use this innovation for the kids not against them - as ring tones that can't be heard by older people. Check the article.

I tested the tone, and I must say it is pretty painful. Although I am well over 21, so maybe this one ain't working as well as the actual Mosquito? However I tested this (of course!) at the office and the results were quite clear: peep over 35 and sumthing reacted slightly on didn't react at all. And peeps in their 20's could hear this tone from another room and reported the noise to be "extemely painful" and "really annoying" ... I guess I'll be making many friends here...

Is this a new phase of the "control state"? I could think of many possible uses for such a tone. Think of mass concerts / demonstrations gone wild - a few speakers on top of the gestapo-policecar could send all kids home crying. This is evil. Truely, madly and deeply.

New School vs. Old School

A few posts ago jzZi aka "Mr Singapore Sling" showed us a pic of his famous Blueberry-Jopo. And surprisingly a combination of keywords "Jopo" and "Helsinki" brought some new visitors to our blog from Google, so thank you Sergey Brin and Larry Page for generating that traffic for us :-)

In his post Jzzi argued strongly that the old school Jopo is the only preferable choice, but I there have to disagree. The new Jopos might lack some of the style of the old ones (I specially like the main part of the old frame that has this box-like form and sharp edges, unlike the new round tube) but I think the new ones are pretty cool still. Like Tyler Brule had to say:

"Just as BMW has done much with the Mini, Helkama is sitting on a 1960s design icon called the Jopo that could become the urban runabout of choice everywhere from Nice to Nagoya."

Actually I think they're so cool that I had to get one for myself for urban commuting (mainly for that 5 min. ride to the office). I could have bought a classic Jopo just as well, but after a few months of serious e-baying (or huuto.netting here in Finland) I realized that it is a seller's market now for second hand Jopos here, they prices they were asking were insane. And they had this new down-to-earth-army-green color to match my needs, and I was sold.

I now dare you readers of this blog to vote: new school or old school, which is better? Your comments don't have to regard Jopos, we could widen this debate to ather areas of interest: cars, music, underwear, comic books, arts or what eva. I'd go for new school when it comes to bikes, consumer electronics, cars and such and to old school when it comes to skateboards, tv-series or music formats.

Smash My iPod Up!

This link should keep you laughing for a minute or two. These guys have found a way to finance their strange hobby of smashing stuff, in this case ipods. This is what they have to say and they've got videos to prove it:

"After we collect $400 in donations, we will take that money to a local Apple Store. We will purchase the iPod, open it right inside the store, and destroy it right on the spot. The whole thing will be shot on film, and displayed on this site. This is only a social experiment, for the entertainment of the donors, and visitors of this site. "

Ipods are probably really over hyped, they've obviously lost their "glamour" as they've become so popular, but I think they're still pretty darn cool devices. I luv technology that is designed for the end user, not the engineer. And they're proven to be a true goldmine for Apple. Ipods have helped to create a Halo Effect to boost the sales of the whole Apple product line. Or have you seen an Apple computer ad in mass media lately? Nope, but ipod's are well represented all over.

Well I don't have an ipod myself, I have the other one. Which one is it? I could give you a hint: it's the second best selling mobile media player, with a market share of approximately 5 %. (I guess mobile phones are not counted in these statistics). Ok, try this link to find out what gagdet I'm carrying.