Still, the news broke this summer that he is finishing up his autobiography. Already, before its release (of course, when else?), the book is a huge success.

Is it because JB has so many sensational memories to share? Of course not. It’s because everyone expects him to do amazing things in the future. Congrats, JB, you’re a rock’n roll expectity!

Just ask NBA superstar LeBron James. With more than 14 million google hits and a host of MVP:s on his belt, the former Cleveland Cavaliers player is arguably the biggest basketball star of the 2000’s.

But, as Josh Paglia alerted me to, the period of his career that really, really, made him a household name, was the week between July1-8 this summer. That’s when, during off season, he went a free agent, and speculations started running wild about what team he would be on next. There was seemingly no end to all the blogging, the headlines, the newscasts, about what would happen next. There were even columns and broadcasted debates about the frenzy itself. If he was ever popular while playing, that’s nothing compared to when he was not playing, when people hold their breath to see what would come next (just look at the google trends).

On July 8, he announced the name on his new team (Miami Heat) on a special broadcast on ESPN, a one-off show called “The Decision”, after which, as the google trends graph shows, he fell into relative oblivion…

It has all the ingredients I love, the food, Generation Boss, and nextopia:

1. Hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers.
2. You are the burger chef. YOU make your own burger, anyway you want. Online. You can pre-order it there, too.
3. YOUR burger becomes part of the menu. Anyone can buy it, in the restaurant, or pre-order it online.
4. Whenever someone orders YOUR burger, it races up the manu chart, and you get a kick-back. You can market it on any social media platform.
5. The restaurant doesn’t open ’til next Tuesday. And it’s already hyped mad.

The other week, I think I stumbled on the explanation: They text instead. Rather than risking embarrassing conversations or flirts, they log on to communities like flyertalk.com and browse the profiles of fellow travelers, to find out who’s AAL - Airbourne And Looking. People post their itineraries, or, if they’re really equipped, use their GPS:s to match with others looking for a great conversation, a shared cab, a dinner date, or more.

Flying’s never been so quiet. Or promising. Seems like everybody’s AAL nowadays…

Someone, if not everyone, will plagiarize. That seems to be the common notion in school today. Most schools seem to subscribe to one of the many tools available for scanning the web for identical texts. Any text on any subject is available online, off course students will cheat, that’s the conclusion.

Cheat. Makes me think of music. It’s been a truism for so long (even in the yestermillennium, that’s how old it is!) that any melody, and any chord progression, one can think of has already been played. That doesn’t stop people from putting them together in news shapes and ways. Or even sampling song bits. I’m old enough to remember that people thought of sampling in music as cheating, too, once upon not so long ago. Now we know better.

Does the fact that anyone can find a multitude of texts on any subject anywhere, and most likely will,  mean that the students of the new millennium are bound to cheat, that they are worse students because of it? Or does it mean that the yestermillennium way of writing an essay belongs (where every sentence had to be reinvented from scratch again, and again, and again) in the yestermillennium? Could it be that writing a yestermillennium essay is a skill as outdated as telegraphing, or short-typing?

And why shouldn’t it be? Governator Schwarzenegger of California is no longer the only one thinking about assigning textbooks to the trash bin. His recently far-reaching statement, basically concluding that textbooks seem both expensive and outdated in a world of any, where any information is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime (scroll back to my earlier post about that, if it sounds unfamiliar), seems much closer to home for most people now.

At least to everyone who owns an iPad. Remember my post about highlight books? Well, with iPad apps like Inkling, you can now get your own highlight textbooks, where you can highlight and comment on the passages that are worth reading and have confusing parts of the books explained before you’ve even read them.  

What a joy for us teachers, now the students can do their homework in five minutes instead of five hours. And we don’t need to explain anything! That means we can give them even more homework..?

Maybe they’re on to something in New York, where anyone can be the mayor, if only for a second or two, and people fight madly over the spot? How? By simply hanging around. By checking in frequently enough in a particular area via Forusquare, you can claim that the area is yours, with the log to prove it.  Simple as that.

Reminds me of the old guru mumbo, management by walking around – now it’s mayor by staying put?

His next movie is yet another example of the Control-your-darlings wave, which has previously allowed Generation Boss to choose Hil Clinton’s campaign song, master Radiohead’s recent single and route rock icons Kiss’s North American tour.

Rather than sit and wait, and see what the man behind Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, and other epic projects, will come up with next, you are invited to produce his next movie, working title “Lynch Three”. Just visit the website, pay 50 dollars and share your imagination.

The 50 dollars-a-pop is a smart, nextopian update of the control-your-darlings-twist, making sure the movie cashes in while it is at its very best and most valuable – before the actual release.

Kanye West is truly an Expectations society artist. His career is a magnificent next opera, keeping the world on its toes, anxious to find oput what he’ll do next. In the last few years, he has reinvented himself several times as an artist, jumping between musical genres, even leaving music altogether for a while and signing up for an internship with posh designer Marc Jacobs. Not to mention his highly public private life. I don’t need to tell you about it, he does it more than well enough himself. He has even employed ghost-tweeters to keep the next opera running…

Staying in sync with the Expectations society, he started hyping his forthcoming album, working title Good Ass Job, early this spring, announcing that the release was set to be in November. Next, he released a very early single, Power in May, upping speculations once more.

And now, he announced that he will release one new song each Friday until Christmas on his website www.kanyeuniversecity.com, upgrading the album itself into a next opera. Or rather, some of the songs will be on the album, others will be collaborations with hitherto secret artists (speculations are running wild). Need I say that the massive number of visitors has already crashed the website?   I guess we’ll all stay tuned to see what happens next…

Like 37-year old John Nakata. He is slowly dying from kidney failure. He has been on a  waiting list for a new kidney for the last four years, but the list has still not come up with a match, neither in his home state Pennsylvania nor anywhere else in the entire USA. John’s highly unusal O bloodtype  has made finding a match on the list seem like mission impossible.

With a projected match on the list in circa three years time from now, but an estimated two years maximum remaining time alive, John and his family recorded a plea and posted the video on youtube in July.

Since then, tens of thousands of people have witnessed the plea, and John has been contacted by about a hundred potential donors from all corners of the globe who all have a kidney to spare and share his unusal blood type.

I love the world of any.