Word: slackers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...right now, for Judd Apatow's slacker romantic comedy, it's beginning to smell a lot like Zeitgeist. (Which in this case has underodors of bong smoke and turd jokes.) Maureen Dowd, the New York Times' ageless arbiter of sexual politics, weighed in with a column on the movie. So did just about everyone who writes for The Huffington Post. Yesterday I received a promotion for a 1982 Eastern European art film that the publicist ID'd as "'Knocked Up,' Polish style." And there's the lawsuit from the author of a humorous memoir called Knocked Up: Confessions...
...First used some 20 years ago in the United States to describe low-paying, low-skill jobs that offered little prospect of advancement, the term McJob was popularized by the author Douglas Coupland in his 1991 slacker ode Generation X, which chronicled the efforts of a "lost" generation of twenty-somethings to escape their dead-end jobs in an attempt to find meaning in life...
...assessing what you like. Pandora refers to its database of more than 600,000 major-label songs--all of which have been categorized by musical attributes such as voice, tonality and chromatic harmony--then serves up similar-sounding tracks. That can get a little monotonous, so Slacker, which launched in March, uses professional DJs to dream up constantly changing playlists that give you more variety while still adhering to your basic tastes. If you ask for Gwen Stefani, for example, you'll also get the Cars, Talking Heads and Björk in addition to more obvious matches such as Blondie...
Making personalized radio portable could be the key to its long-term success. "The biggest problem with Internet radio is that it's stuck on the PC," says Slacker CEO Dennis Mudd. "What you really want is this device you can play in your living room, in your car or in the desert walking around." In addition to Sprint's move to put Pandora on phones, SanDisk recently demonstrated a prototype portable player that could run Pandora, and Slacker plans to sell a $150 iPod-like player this summer that can get wireless music downloads from its website...
Unlike iTunes, music from Slacker is free. "Most people don't want to pay for radio," says Mudd, who hopes to bring in revenue through audio advertising spots. That model is showing some promise. The overall Internet-radio market brought in more than $400 million in ad revenue last year, according to JPMorgan Chase. About half of that came from online ads on websites owned by conventional radio broadcasters like CBS Radio and Clear Channel. "Internet radio, when you tie it in with our business model, I think it works," says Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays, who is beefing...