The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
Photo by Olivier Jules.

Click the photo to see the accompanying L.A. Times story.

Click the graphic to try out the interactive map.
From the New York Times, found thanks to chiamattt.

Found via The War on Folly

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

An overhead view of the Westfields Marriott Hotel in Chantilly, VA, where the Bilderberg Group met this weekend.
Photos courtesy of cryptome.org.
Click the photo to see more.

I generally take articles published at Prison Planet with a grain of salt, but they do make a point in their piece titled Castrated U.S. Media Remains Obediently Silent On Bilderberg.

If about 150 celebrities gathered in a secluded location for a weekend event with an exclusive guest list and Illuminati-grade security (say, some pop diva’s wedding or birthday party), how much time would the mainstream media devote to it? At least the weekend’s news cycle, plus some follow-up the week after.

However, when an equally-sized group of influential businesspeople and politicians have a similar meeting — The Bilderberg Group — it goes almost unreported. Odd, considering that what goes on at the Bilderberg Group is more likely to affect you than what happens at any celebrity wedding or birthday party.

(Here’s a Google News search on the term “Bilderberg”. It’s all small news sites, wackos like Canada Free Press and the political blog Wonkette.)

If you want to find out more about this year’s Bilderberg Group gathering, cryptome.org — the site devoted to finding out secrets — has some good stuff, including photos taken at the site (all exterior shots, of course). My favourite shots are of the rent-a-cops watching the place, whose expression probably conveys the way the people inside feel about the people outside:

Photos courtesy of cryptome.org.
Click the photo to see more.

Also worth checking out is this round-up of Bilderberg happenings, which links to many things, including a report about a “secret” Obama-Clinton meeting and the fact that the guy in charge of picking Obama’s running mate is attending [wingnut alert: it’s a WorldNetDaily piece — have a grain of salt handy. Canada Free Press also covers it].

Here’s an Associated Press report on my favourite Sunday School teacher and figurehead of my 11:30 p.m. ritual, Stephen Colbert. The Colbert Report recently aired its 400th episode, and on June 16th, Colbert will be given a Peabody award, the highest honour for distinction and acheivement in American broadcast journalism — not bad for a “fake” news show whose stock in trade is mimicking Bill O’Reilly and other real fake-journalists.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the article: he feels more comfortable in a sweatshirt than a suit. “I just look like a suit,” he says, “which is the best part. The best part is, boy, do I look the part.”

It’s a shame that I have to say this in the 21st century, but maybe we need booths like this everywhere. What do you think?

Click the photo to see its context.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Update: Seth Christenfeld pointed out in a comment that the “Meet a Black Person” booth was an ImprovEverywhere project that took place at the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen a couple of years back.

b5media, the company for whom I am Nerd Wrangler, is one of the finalists for the Canadian New Media Awards’ “Most Promising Company of the Year”. The announcement was made at the nextMEDIA conference, which took place this weekend in Banff.

We’re up against the esteemed competition, FileMobile and Viigo. According to the Canadian New Media Awards site, the winners will be announced at their gala in October.

My congratulations to my coworkers! I knew that working at b5 was going to be special.

[This was also posted on Global Nerdy.]

Here are my photos from Woofstock, which I mentioned in the previous post, in slideshow form:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

You can also see the photos in this Flickr photoset.