randomwalks/dj

this is a house built by an English aesthete and bachelor, John Penn, on the grounds of Philadelphia zoo.


an exercise in self-indulgence, but one of the less, uh, anti-social manifestations of such? a young gentleman of privilege, trained in the colonial spirit at cambridge, could have wreaked much more havoc than building himself a house where he could be alone with his literary canon ...

As its name might imply, The Solitude was designed to ensure that Penn could carry on his life undisturbed, in as much privacy as he wished. The doors into the parlor and the library above it were upholstered in green baize (a heavy woolen fabric) to muffle the sound of their closing, and to keep out the noise and bustle of the servants.

... and his servants.

the bedroom:


a painting of the house. if you look closely you can see penn in one of the windows aiming a rifle at the bonnets of those lovelies:


i understand his single-minded pursuit of privacy and solitude. he didn't stay there long, returned to England, and all his stuff was sold. pennsylvania's antiqities are on show here.

everyone in the whole world should have a house of their own, on a slight incline in a fancy park, where they cook their own damn food and wash their own damn clothes, should they want one.

Originally posted by dr tibbles from lady upgrade project, on June 2, 2007 11:29 PM

Wired: Why Is DRM-Free Music Tagged With Name and E-Mail?.

I don’t know — maybe because it is the most effective, least invasive version of copy protection/DRM ever invented? No surprise to anybody who has bought a Pragmatic Programmers ebook.

Originally posted by kellan from Laughing Meme, on June 2, 2007 7:14 PM

Trek launches the 2008 Madones with a brochure site and lots of new technology, including their own bottom bracket, no headsets, seatmast, new carbon designations, and a fuselage approach. Responding to their competitors, like Specialized, Trek is coming out firing with a “we invented carbon bikes” approach and a frame that’s a half-pound lighter

By de-emphasizing specific materials and instead focusing the discussion on our OCLV Carbon process – a process we invented 16 years ago and have been refining ever since - Trek can leverage our manufacturing, engineering, and design expertise to underscore the unique nature of our carbon fiber frames: a difference we’re confident makes for the best carbon fiber frames on the planet.

Just last month, I glowingly reviewed the Specialized Tarmac SL, another bike emphasizing technology. I’ve ridden Madones for years, reviewed them positively, and they’re great, solid, racing bikes, but have relied on 16 year old tube and lugs technology.

Trek is changing the game again.

Originally posted by Byron from Bike Hugger, on June 2, 2007 12:34 PM

---

Am currently in Charlottesville, VA, attending an anniversary event for the college radio station WTJU, where I DJ'd for several years and enjoyed a couple of bracing years of administrative responsibility (as program director). 'TJU is much like WFMU in NY, a free form format with knowledgeable volunteers as jocks. When I was in school it was entirely student run and thus a creatively fertile chaos, but it has since hired a station manager who miraculously is not a micromanager and lets the volunteers continue to shape the content. Charlottesville is beautiful but barely recognizable from my student days for all the growth. It has been touted as a perfect city so of course everyone wants to move there.

Originally posted by tom moody from Tom Moody, on June 2, 2007 11:26 AM

Most of us face the problem of inertia in almost everything we do. We eat the same foods, watch the same television, take the same walks, go to the same parks, talk to the same people, day in and day out.

And in many ways this is good. But the sheer inertia of our habits can prevent us from realizing how much better things could be with just a little tweaking. Walk a slightly different route one day on the way home from work, and lo and behold, a secret urban garden (my gift to WWDC attendees and SF SoMa workers).

When it comes to computers, I consider myself especially sensitive to the frustrating ways that computers do what I don’t want them to, which is why it’s surprising that it’s taken me this long to install and embrace Service Scrubber, from Many Tricks. The software is free but donations are accepted. I donated, and you will too!

Service Scrubber does one thing well: it gives you power over the (quite likely) sprawling System Services menu on your Mac. Not only does it let you show or hide items, it also lets you remove or change keyboard shortcuts assigned to them. Nifty!

The problem with services is they’re installed passively when you install applications on your Mac. If you’re like me and tend to download and lazily keep around a bunch of applications, your menu will be booming with items you don’t really care about. When I first launched Service Scrubber, I got the unenjoyable spinning rainbow cursor, which was a symptom of it digging through my massive 125 long list of installed services. This was the only user-unfriendly experience I met, and it was quickly made up for. From then on I was in control of everything. And loving it. As I disabled services I would never use, I felt the usefulness of my Mac grow greater with each unchecked box.

Using Service Scrubber to clean up your menu is one thing, but even more significant is the ability to reclaim valuable keyboard shortcuts. As I browse the list of services that I am now disabling, I flash back to the dozens of times I’ve accidentally invoked them. “Grr! Why the heck is the JavaBrowser opening? I don’t even like Java!”

My only criticism of the application is a minor usability issue with the list of services. When an application has provided multiple services, they’re collected in a disclosure group named after the application. But when only one service is listed for a particular application, it shows up in the list by service name. It’s hard to tell at a glance which application these services belong to.

Few utilities scream “necessary” as loudly as Service Scrubber, which is why I’m ashamed it’s taken me this long to overcome my own inertia and to install it. Apple should buy Service Scrubber from Many Tricks and make this part of the standard user experience. Without it, Services are terribly broken.

Originally posted by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Blog, on June 2, 2007 9:23 AM

A NYTimes.com media feature on the fixed-gear phenomena, includes the King Kog shop, the Kissena Track, scenes from the streets, and how to make $500 a week riding your bike.

Originally posted by Byron from Bike Hugger, on June 2, 2007 9:17 AM

Essex Streets. Without the old buildings, said Ruth Abram, the museum president, “we risk losing conscience about what it is to be a stranger in the land.”"

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by stamen to nytimes tenement lowereastside gentrification - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by stamen from del.icio.us/stamen, on June 2, 2007 8:06 AM

"A rail worker in a coma since he was hit by a train in 1988 has woken up, the television channel Polsat reported as it ran an interview with him. A father of four at the time, he is now making the acquaintance of 11 grandchildren and adapting to a country where the Communists are no longer in power."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on June 2, 2007 7:49 AM

At Serious Eats we take doughnuts, well, seriously. So seriously we are dedicating the site to fresh, hot, and delicious doughnut content all day today, National Doughnut Day. That means original doughnut video; a doughnut glossary; doughnut blog posts, quotes, and photos; a doughnut honor roll that will become your essential guide to doughnuts in the U.S.; doughnut recipes from perhaps the nation's greatest pastry chef, Nancy Silverton; and more. It's all doughnuts, all day here at Serious Eats. So take a bite. The only thing we can't supply is a glass of milk or a cup of coffee for dunking.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats: Features, Videos and Required Eating, on June 1, 2007 7:15 PM

Examiner column for June 4.

    It was a typical Monday at Oakton.  I was asking myself:  where did the weekend go? Why do high school classes start at 7:20 a.m.? No one was answering because my colleagues and students were all asking those same questions themselves.

Then Daniela and Liz, two of my twelfth graders, arrived at my desk with smiles on their faces and a package in hand. “We went to see ‘Coriolanus’ this weekend, and it was great. And we brought you these magnets with Shakespearean insults on them!”

Thou smell of mountain goat.

    I read a few of the magnets, and recognized gems I had come across in my Shakespeare studies. But many of these barbs were new to me, and I knew I couldn’t confine them to my refrigerator. “This is the nicest present I’ve ever gotten!” I said as I thanked them. I was touched that they would think of me, and impressed they knew I loved Shakespeare’s wicked tongue.

You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!

    Falstaff, who spoke the above insult, often invented words, but even when we don’t know what his words mean there is a brilliant comic energy. I wonder how many of us are possessed of a “catastrophe”?

Thou art like a toad: ugly and venomous.

    I used to know teachers who Xeroxed a page of these insults and asked their ninth graders to stand and repeat them, in a loud voice, to one another. The whole class would be in stitches within the first few insults, and they got used to all those “thees” and “thous” in the process. The author of “Romeo and Juliet” ceased to be a dull, leaden icon. He had wit.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

    What made this gift special was the sly sense of humor the two girls exhibited in picking the magnets in the first place. We had not looked at language like this when we read “Hamlet,” and generally I am not a champion of insults. But Daniela and Liz saw that these were different.

Thine face is not worth sunburning.

    Why are our insults today so devoid of wit, so demeaning? Rather than poke fun at people, we dismiss them with a four-letter word or a hand gesture. Insults in Shakespeare are creative, charming, as much about the speaker as the intended target. Insults on the street or road are merely about venting.

Out of my sight! Thou dost infect my eyes.

    Daniela and Liz gave me a thoughtful gift, but more importantly reminded me that Shakespeare at his silliest and most outrageous can teach us something about the art of the insult. Next time someone cuts you off in traffic, shout at the top of your lungs:

Thou crusty batch of nature.

    The other driver may not hear you, but your scowl will turn to a smile and improve the rest of your trip.

Originally posted by Erica Jacobs from TeacherTalk, on June 1, 2007 6:11 PM

Video of women depicted in Western art morphing into one another. Belongs in the seamless mesmerization category of videos along with Noah Kalina's everyday and 787 Cliparts. (thx, robin) (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on June 1, 2007 2:44 PM

A few days before Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, The Onion ran one of the greatest satirical pieces of the decade: “Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that ‘our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.’”

I thought of that piece yesterday when reading about Rudy Giuliani’s latest attack on Hillary Clinton.

In a potential preview of next fall’s presidential contest, Mr. Giuliani, who is seen as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, directly attacked the leading Democratic candidate, Mrs. Clinton, over a speech she gave Tuesday in New Hampshire bemoaning the return of “robber barons” and promising to pursue “shared prosperity” by increasing taxes on Americans making more than $200,000 a year.

“This would be an astounding, staggering tax increase,” Mr. Giuliani told reporters yesterday after a visit to a restaurant on the edge of California’s Silicon Valley. “She wants to go back to the 1990s…. It would hurt our economy. It would hurt this area dramatically. That kind of tax increase would see a decline in your venture capital. It would see a decline in your ability to focus on new technology.”

First, most of the country would love to go back to the ’90s. Second, as Steve M. explained very well, telling a bunch of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley that a return to the ’90s would be awful demonstrates an almost comedic confusion: “The 1990s? Er, wasn’t that when everyone with a pulse over the age of 13 was a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, or the recipient of a Valley VC’s money? Is it even humanly possible to have had more high-tech entrepreneurial capitalism than we had in the 1990s?”

Originally posted by Steve Benen from Most Huffed News, on June 1, 2007 2:40 PM

To: everydamnbody@seriouseats.com
From: copydesk@seriouseats.com
Subject: Style Notes: "doughnut" vs. "donut"

Dear Serious Eats Team,

The difference between "doughnut" and "donut" is UGH. And you're gonna hear a lot of "UGH" if I continue to catch you spelling it "donut" under my watch.

Perhaps I have failed to mention, in my role as de facto copy chief of Serious Eats, that our official house dictionary is Merriam-Webster's 11th Edition.

Web lists "doughnut" as the first entry in its definition of this circular and singularly delicious treat. Although "donut" is the second entry, and therefore recognized as a legitimate spelling, it remains a bastardized variant in my eyes.

As John T. Edge says in his book Donuts [UGH!], "donut" appeared in the 1920s, when "the New York–based Doughnut Machine Corporation set its eyes upon foreign markets." To help foster proper pronunciation in different languages, the company introduced the marketing-friendly spelling.

Going forward, please avoid using "donut," "do-nut," "dough-nut" or anything that deviates from "doughnut."

I will add this to the style guide, posthaste.

Your resident curmudgeon,
Adam

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats: Features, Videos and Required Eating, on June 1, 2007 2:00 PM

Nation to Ken Griffey Jr.: We Wish It Were You Hitting 765 Home Runs. "They talked about his 1989 Upper Deck rookie card, and how, instead of going down in value with every hamstring injury, it should have skyrocketed in price with his 800th, maybe 900th home run." (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on June 1, 2007 1:49 PM

I'm happy for my friends at FeedBurner, who've finally announced their acquisition by the Big G. I do have to confess that this marks the point where I'm officially uncomfortable with the centralized gravitational attraction for brains going on at Google, but today's not the day for belaboring that.

More importantly, Google has done something with this acquisition that hasn't happened since its very first acquisition: They got a new verb.

The generic term for enhancing a feed through the use of a service is to "burn" it, thanks to the efforts of FeedBurner. They've always been straightforward about the term they use to describe the process, and its paid off by becoming the name of the concept. I even think it may have helped keep any other services from being able to entrench themselves in the space.

Google, for its part, has always been a little more circumspect about its status as a verb. There was even an a gentle admonishment from Google's legal team a while ago, asking people to please help the poor Googlers avoid the fate of other brands and products that "that fell victim to those products' very success and, as they became more and more popular, slipped from trademarked status into common usage." Oh no! Not common usage! For what it's worth, I know there was some consternation on the part of a number of Googlers about the silliness of the post, especially since Google itself repeatedly refers to its employees as, yes, Googlers.

But that's neither here nor there. Today, the milestone is that Google acquired a signature so distinctive it takes its place in elite company as part of the language. Congrats to Dick, Eric, Steve, Matt, Brent, and everyone else on the team.

p.s. Can someone else do whatever it is Dick does now, and just let him write for the Official Google Blog full-time? Thanks.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on June 1, 2007 1:41 PM

Inches Too Tall for Tunnel, Rig Plies It Anyway:

It was just six inches. That was what made the difference at 4:40 a.m. yesterday as Gilberto Cantu, a truck driver from Texas, approached the New Jersey entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel in his big rig, loaded with bathtubs, toilets and plumbing fixtures. The truck was 13 feet 6 inches high. The tunnel has a height limit of 13 feet. Six inches can make a big difference.

Venezuela's Counter-Revolution on YouTube

Ars Technica is running a story about RCTV, a Venezuelan television station whose broadcast license was refused renewal by the government. In response, the station turned to YouTube to get its message out. Says Ars, 'El Observador clips have been seen 175,000 times since May 28, and the channel is currently the most-subscribed channel of the week. While putting the station's shows on YouTube is an excellent idea, YouTube still lacks anything near the reach of over-the-air broadcasts. But the use of the site to avoid censorship is growing, and it's not hard to imagine a day in the near future when the site (or sites like it) becomes as essential as local TV stations.

The Buzzfeed Widget:

Via BuzzFeed

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on June 1, 2007 1:03 PM

Inches Too Tall for Tunnel, Rig Plies It Anyway:

It was just six inches. That was what made the difference at 4:40 a.m. yesterday as Gilberto Cantu, a truck driver from Texas, approached the New Jersey entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel in his big rig, loaded with bathtubs, toilets and plumbing fixtures. The truck was 13 feet 6 inches high. The tunnel has a height limit of 13 feet. Six inches can make a big difference.

Venezuela's Counter-Revolution on YouTube

Ars Technica is running a story about RCTV, a Venezuelan television station whose broadcast license was refused renewal by the government. In response, the station turned to YouTube to get its message out. Says Ars, 'El Observador clips have been seen 175,000 times since May 28, and the channel is currently the most-subscribed channel of the week. While putting the station's shows on YouTube is an excellent idea, YouTube still lacks anything near the reach of over-the-air broadcasts. But the use of the site to avoid censorship is growing, and it's not hard to imagine a day in the near future when the site (or sites like it) becomes as essential as local TV stations.

The Buzzfeed Widget:

Via BuzzFeed

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on June 1, 2007 1:03 PM

Google maps + donuts = this.

Originally posted by Harold Check from Serious Eats: Features, Videos and Required Eating, on June 1, 2007 1:00 PM

Geez, I wonder where this goes?
Originally uploaded by schickr.

Fri 01.06.2007 20.11 Image 217

Originally posted by charlie from Cognections, on June 1, 2007 12:30 PM

Today's Friday Apple links include an official Tangerine! 1.2 release, an update to Google Desktop, a rumor about IPTV on the Apple TV, YouTube converting its files to H.264, the hottest new programming technology on earth (ColdFusion... *cough*), and how businesses can use Apple's iWork.

Read More...

Originally posted by jacqui@arstechnica.com (Jacqui Cheng) from Infinite Loop, on June 1, 2007 12:21 PM

385 dph ("donuts per hour") is how fast the Belshaw Donut Robot 42 churns out donuts. Derrick bought one of these bad babies on eBay and documented the robotic donut making process for the rest of the world to behold.

This section is best described as the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, as long as 'D' stands for Doughnuts, like in 'Doughnut Day'. The doughnuts climb this ramp relentlessly, pulled along by the doughnut chains. Now, you could be the German defense forces preventing the doughnuts from making a beach head, but no matter how big your belly is, 6.5 donuts per minute are going to eventually overwhelm your defenses. The ones that come after the initial assault pile up in whatever doughnut collection device you have to collect them. I used my turkey roasting pan.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Features, Videos and Required Eating, on June 1, 2007 11:45 AM

We've seen Port Authority workers measure the heights of trucks to make sure they will fit in either the Holland or Lincoln Tunnel. But yesterday one driver refused to stop and proceeded to drive his 13' 6" truck through the Lincoln Tunnel's 13' high center tube. And what does a truck look like after doing that? Well, check out the photograph from the NY Times, which describes its roof as being peeled back "as if it were a tin can." We'd like to add "A tin can whose sides are also falling down." Truck driver Gilberto Cantu, whose driving four-year driving record has been "spotless," entered the Lincoln Tunnel early yesterday morning from the Weehawken, NJ side. Port Authority officials aren't sure why Cantu didn't stop when warned by "flashing signs and a loudspeaker," as he ripped off some of the inner tube's ceiling tiles (at least they are only decorative) during his 1.5 mile drive . No one was injured, and Cantu was issued a number of violations, "including reckless driving, failure to obey a traffic signal and failure to obey an officer’s command." U.S.A. Logistics' safety director told the Times, "This is going to cost us, and it’s going to cost him," with the possibility of him losing his job. And the Port Authority says that rarely do drivers of too-tall vehicles enter the tunnel and when they do, they usually stop and are backed out. And the Holland Tunnel's height is only 12'6".

Originally posted by jen from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on June 1, 2007 11:26 AM

Scott Elmegreen, a soon-to-be graduate of Princeton University, wrote two senior theses this year (I barely cranked out one!).  "Wrote" isn't exactly the right word.  One could also say that he "composed" his senior thesis.  But that's not quite right either.  Emlegreen, a music major with a certificate in creative writing, wrote and composed his senior theses, both of which explore the relation between music and the written word.  For his music thesis, Elmegreen wrote a story titled "Flowers Pick Themselves," which tells the tale of Spencer and Adie, two teenagers in love in a world that treats love like a disease.  It's sixteen pages long and includes a music file at the end of each page.  The audio track begins playing the moment the page loads and, with few exceptions, timed well with the pace of my reading (or, arguably, the music set my pace).  As I read and listened to this story, I was thinking about tone, which in literature usually refers to the "mood" that a text conveys.  But it makes sense to return aurality and music to literature.  I imagine that before writing, the modulations of a storyteller's voice, his or her pitch, volume, cadence and pace, set the "tones" of a work.  At a poetry reading, I'm always struck by the voice of a poet and how his or her reading of a work adds something that wasn't visible to me on the written page.  A shift in mood, sometimes.  But live readings also risk presenting a work in a way that destroys it for me.  I remember in high school reading Dorothy Parker's poem "Penelope" and falling in love with its melancholy, lonely mood/tone.  So I was horrified when my English teacher read the poem out loud as a sarcastic, humorous piece.  It was like the poem had split in two.  To this day, I hear echoes of her voice when I read the poem. 

For his second project, Elmegreen wrote a novel titled Reveille, which also features Spencer and Adie.  In this work, the thoughts of some of the protagonists sometimes appear as musical notes.  In the novel, music is visible, textual.  For someone like me, who has a very poor musical background, the musical notes wouldn't "say" anything to me, at least not initially.  That is, I wouldn't be able to read them and I certainly wouldn't be able to translate them into sounds.  This makes me think of a wonderful scene in Milos Forman's Amadeus in which Salieri glances at the unfinished score for the Requiem Mass and hears the music in his head.  When I see a note, I just see it, a dot anchored to space by a vertical line.  But at any rate, the presence or intrusion of a musical score in a novel would create a pause, a moment in which I have a choice as a reader to skip ahead or to try to dig in and try to imagine what is being conveyed by those lines and dots.  In "Flowers Pick Themselves" there is a clearer distinction between music and written language, quite simply because you can hear the music as you are reading.  But here the challenge for me was to listen to the music not as an accompaniment but as this other layer of language that was also very much a part of the text.  At the top of each page there is an image of a rose that fades as you read.  This flower seems to suggest that the visibility of text, on which our reading relies, is  itself tenuous, vulnerable, temporary  Imagine if your favorite story suddenly vanished one day.  Would you be able to recite it by heart?  Or does its existence rely entirely on being a word on a page?

I'm excited to see what Elmegreen does in the future with these and other works.  Another Princeton student, Josh Williams, also wrote a senior thesis that has been getting some buzz. Both Elmegreen and Williams were advised by Joyce Carol Oates, who worked with Jonathan Safran Foer on his creative writing thesis, which became the novel Everything is Illuminated. 

Originally posted by Adriana from Stingy Kids, on June 1, 2007 10:32 AM

There's a petition ALA members can sign to Create a Member Initiative Group within the American Library Association on “Virtual Communities and Libraries.”

This is cool, I think. I don't know almost anything about ALA, and I think it's my new goal this year, to join more library associations. Now that I won't have to spend so much on tuition (though huge thanks! to NYU, NYPL and DC37 for all the tuition reimbursement and scholarships through the years, for both of us-- it's made a tremendous difference), I figure I can attend more conferences & join associations.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from iPalimpsest, on June 1, 2007 10:27 AM

LOLTherorists.

in ur society, bein teh mysteerious 0thr! Also LOLFeeds, and LOLBots (aka robot finds kitten?)

Originally posted by kellan from Laughing Meme, on June 1, 2007 10:16 AM

it's refreshing to see this kind of blunt humility from an established rock star  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 1, 2007 10:15 AM

So the promise of offline-ing is getting me to try to switch to reader, again. I stuck with through the night this time, so this might be the switch. (Though in truth my favorite part is I’ve only got 14 feeds in the aggregator so far.)

Couple of quick questions:

• Am I missing the easy “subscribe to saved blog search” feature? Or do I really need to leave the app to set that up?

• And where is search? Of course I can search all my read items, right? Where is it?

• Share is neat. Anybody got a good Reader shared items to del.icio.us script around?

• And an observation. Seems like it takes significantly longer for new items to show up then in Bloglines (at least for popular feeds). Which is weird, but as I’m trying to let go to the fast-twitch feed reading dependency maybe this will help.

Originally posted by kellan from Laughing Meme, on June 1, 2007 10:12 AM

the first, and last, Lolcats-related link I'm ever posting  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 1, 2007 10:05 AM

I have a smoothie for breakfast every morning. I've been making them for years, and I've had a chance to hone the recipe to perfection over that time. I don't measure anything anymore, I just dump stuff into the blender. But I thought I should share my recipe titled My Smoothie Technique is Unstoppable. Here are the basics with approximate measurements:

• 1 cup frozen strawberries
• 3/4 cup orange juice
• 1 6 oz. vanilla yogurt
• 1 banana

Throw into a blender and blend. Of course the quality of the smoothie is completely dependent on the quality of the ingredients. Here are my choices for ingredients:

Stahlbush Island Farms Frozen Strawberries, a local Corvallis company, great strawberries. They're not certified organic, but they have a lot of text on the package about no pesticide residue. Frozen strawberries are expensive—especially in the winter—but you can't skimp on these if you want your smoothie to be unstoppable. If I'm having a strawberry emergency and I can't get to the Corvallis Co-op, I'll pick up Safeway Organics strawberries. (But I don't feel as good about it.)

Columbia Gorge Orange Juice, from another local company (Hood River, OR). I used Odwalla Orange Juice for several years until I tried this brighter, happier orange juice. Like Odwalla, this isn't cheap OJ. I buy the 1/2 gallon size at the co-op and it's even a bit more expensive than Odwalla. But remember the goal: unstoppable.

Tillamook Vanilla Bean Yogurt from Tillamook, OR. Yogurt is the real x-factor in this smoothie, and I've tried a bunch. This yogurt has sugar and corn syrup, so it's definitely not "pure" in the healthy, unrefined sugar sense. But it does have live cultures, so I get the beneficial bacteria. This isn't a creamy, European style yogurt—it has some heft to it. So if you don't have Tillamook where you are, you might look for a heftier yogurt to bulk things up. This yogurt also makes the smoothie insanely sweet, and I'm all for that.

Finally, organic bananas. I don't sweat the brand too much, I just pick up what I can find.

My blending technique is probably stoppable, but there is a knack to it. I have a Braun blender, I dump in everything in the order I've listed, and I start at 1. Once the strawberries are chopped up I crank up the speed. It's key that you don't stop the blending process until you're at the consistency you want. Stopping and starting will throw smoothie all over the sides of the blender, wasting precious expensive ingredients.

The quantities I've mentioned here fill up one of my glasses perfectly, sometimes with a little extra. But no bit of smoothie is wasted in my house. I stopped drinking all caffeinated beverages last February, and I find if I don't have this sugar jolt every morning I'll be dragging by ten o'clock, barely able to function. I also try to eat a piece of toast with peanut butter with my smoothie—the protein helps slow the absorption of this massive sugar hit into my blood. Anyway, this smoothie gives me pretty sustained energy in the morning.

In the end I get a smoothie that is the sum of its parts, no one ingredient overpowering the others. Probably more than you wanted to know about my breakfast habits, but I take my smoothies very seriously.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from onfocus.com, on June 1, 2007 9:47 AM

Have you ever wished that you could hug a doughnut without the fear of smearing glaze/sugar/oil on yourself? I never did until I set my eyes on the adorable plush doughnut that craftsters have created in an attempt to encapsulate the visual essence of doughnut in an emblem of donut-ness that—albeit inedible—leave no sticky residue.

Heidi Kenny of My Paper Crane, home of more adorable anthropomorphic plushes than you could ever imagine, makes five varieties of smiling plush donuts. They also come in handy collectible keychain form.

If you'd rather have a collection of huggable doughnuts that doesn't stare back at you, Sew Dorky makes fourteen types of doughnuts sans facial expressions.

It's also possible to make your own doughnuts if you know your way around a ball of yarn. Leave behind scarves and hats; knit a doknit or crochet a doughnut pincushion instead.

[photo via katbaro's flickr]

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Features, Videos and Required Eating, on June 1, 2007 9:15 AM

Apple is allegedly gearing up to make a major update to the MacBook Pro line very soon. LED backlights and Santa Rosa at WWDC, here we come? Maybe.

Read More...

Originally posted by jacqui@arstechnica.com (Jacqui Cheng) from Infinite Loop, on June 1, 2007 8:52 AM

Apple's "Special Deals" section has a new look, which finally makes it easier to sort through the available refurbs and score a good deal on some otherwise-pricey hardware.

Read More...

Originally posted by jeff.smykil@gmail.com (Jeff Smykil) from Infinite Loop, on June 1, 2007 8:32 AM

Decisions, Decisions: a nice looking hand-drawn flowchart poster. (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on June 1, 2007 8:16 AM

Steve Cuozzo's got some things to say about the Shake Shack in the New York Post, a handful of which I am going to respond to. Burger blogger Adam Kuban responds to the "shacklash" with some valid points. I still [heart] the Shack, but I never go at prime time and I never wait longer than half-an-hour in line. So that's probably why I still [heart] it so much.

comments are open

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on June 1, 2007 7:07 AM

iTunes is no longer allowing users to burn DRMed songs to mp3. Daring Fireball says: Apparently the problem only occurs when you try to rip to MP3 format, specifically – if you rip from CD back to plain (non-DRM) AAC, it still works just fine. This really sounds like a bug, not a deliberate limitation. We know that they are leaving username and email information in the AAC headers, so it makes perfect sense to me that this would be done intentionally. There's no way Apple let's a bug like this out the door. I like that grey blog, but sometimes Gruber swings way to far in giving Apple the benefit of the doubt.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on June 1, 2007 6:54 AM

iTunes is no longer allowing users to burn DRMed songs to mp3.
Daring Fireball says:

Apparently the problem only occurs when you try to rip to MP3 format, specifically – if you rip from CD back to plain (non-DRM) AAC, it still works just fine. This really sounds like a bug, not a deliberate limitation.

We know that they are leaving username and email information in the AAC headers, so it makes perfect sense to me that this would be done intentionally. There's no way Apple let's a bug like this out the door. I like that grey blog, but sometimes Gruber swings way to far in giving Apple the benefit of the doubt.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on June 1, 2007 6:54 AM

Sharon Stone is set to star as the fictional presidential candidate Patricia Hill, a "Hillary Clinton type", in 60-second mock political ad. "It's a farce," Stone's rep told Page Six. The actress is said to be getting a kick out of making fun of the 2008 race and “the manipulative strategies of political communication.”

Here's hoping Sharon spends most of the 60 seconds in a short white skirt, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

Originally posted by Tracy Pepey from Daily Blabber, on June 1, 2007 5:37 AM

The hardest thing--but perhaps more sought-after than a Lafite--is a list of good, interesting and affordable wines, for parties or for dinner Sunday to Thursday or even all week long. Here's my latest list, arranged not by preference, but by style, from lightest to fullest in white and red.

Originally posted by The Huffington Post News Editors from David Jacobs' Huffs, on June 1, 2007 5:00 AM

Two former aides hired to spearhead religious outreach for presidential candidate John McCain say that they were virtually ignored by the campaign and that McCain's top campaign strategists are intent on winning votes of religious voters without having to develop serious ties to faith communities. The aides, who were fired in early April after roughly three months on the job, said the campaign staff declined to return scores of their phone calls and E-mail messages, denied them access to leaders of the McCain campaign, and pressed them to collect church directories--a controversial tactic--as the centerpiece of a strategy to woo "values" voters. "In the end, you came away with the strong sense that they had contempt for the faith-based community," says Marlene Elwell, one of those fired staffers. Elwell, a prominent Christian-right activist, was hired by McCain in December 2005 to be national director of his "Americans of Faith" coalition. "The way