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"Shoot 'em Up" may be the best movie I've seen this year (yes, the movie's from 2007, but I only watched it tonight)!
From Ebert, who gave it 3 and 1/2 stars:
I don't need a lot of research to be confident in stating that never before have I seen a movie open with the hero delivering a baby during a gun battle, severing the umbilical cord with a gunshot, and then killing a villain by penetrating his brain with a raw carrot.
Totally ridiculous, and yet utterly wonderful.
The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN are now getting serious about picking up on the story of John McCain's robo-slime campaign, all weighing in with pieces that endeavor to demonstrate the true breadth and scope of McCain's under-the-radar smear effort.
The Times piece is here. WaPo's is here. And you can watch CNN's report on the video below.
The Times piece hits directly hits on two key points: First, the calls are "misleading," as the paper puts it, perhaps too delicately. And second, the calls show McCain yet again jettisoning a formerly claimed principle as he faces the increasingly likely prospect of defeat. As the paper notes, McCain high-mindedly denounced such tactics when he was the target of them in 2000, and again during the GOP primary this year, when he described the robo-slime being directed at him as "scurrilous stuff."
It's worth stepping back to ponder what's really going on here. While McCain and Sarah Palin try to persuade you that they're running a relatively clean campaign and don't question Obama's patriotism or love of country, they are running an enormous shadow campaign to smear Obama in the ugliest of ways, one that's designed to portray him as a friend of terrorists, as a vaguely sinister other, as not genuinely committed to defending our country, and as callously indifferent to the lives of newborn babies.
Thus, while Palin was sweetly claiming yesterday that she knows "Obama loves America," her and McCain's campaign were funding thousands upon thousands of calls telling battleground state voters that Obama put "Hollywood above America" during the crisis negotiations, that Obama and Dems merely "say" they want to keep you safe and "aren't who you think they are," and that Obama has "worked closely" with a "domestic terrorist" whose group "killed Americans."
There are two McCain campaigns operating simultaneously right now. There's the one that McCain and Palin are running in front of the cameras, and then there's the subterranean robo-slime campaign, which is bombarding thousands upon thousands of voters with multiple messages that McCain would never associate himself with in the glare of the klieg lights. That's the real story here.
Meanwhile, here's CNN's robo-slime report (with a much-appreciated plug for TPM)...
The Chicago Tribune endorses Barack Obama: "This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party's nominee for president." The comments on the Chicagoist post on the endorsement are worth a skim: "Really, if the four horsemen come tap-dancing down ashland ave. I will not be shocked now."
We told you how Jones Soda Co. made it possible to vote with soda, but Schlafly's brewery in St. Louis is offering you a beer ballot.
The St. Louis brewery is advertising its beers with campaign slogans; drinkers can choose from Baracktoberfest, McCain's Maverick APA Ale, Palin Ale, and Hefebiden Unfiltered Wheat Ale.
The company is also offering Baracktoberfest and Palin Ale T-shirts, all endorsed with the quipping "I'm Tom Schlafly, and I approve this beverage."
In a further attempt to gauge the election through food, the Schlafly website says of the Baracktoberfest shirts: "Due to overwhelming demand, we have sold out of our first run! We are currently restocking Baracktoberfest shirts." They are, however, "very low in stock" on Palin Ale shirts, indicating a tight race.
The correlation between the national polls and the Schlafly shirt order survey perhaps indicates that Americans vote as much with their bellies as with their wallets. In any event, be sure to follow the brewery's advice and "vote responsibly."
"Dad, I love my family. Do you know how much? Up to Pluto (even though it's not a planet anymore) and back down and on the way back around Venus, and back to Earth. That much one thousand billion and ten times - wearing my best dress that I don't want to get dirty. That much."
Shared by Bud
A way to load jQuery and other libraries via Google. Lots of performance benefits.
David recently linked to a Vanity Fair slideshow of what they judged were the top 25 news photos ever. Some of the photos were very familiar, such as the lone man standing up against the tanks in Tiananmen Square. But others I didn't remember seeing, including the opening shot, a horrific photo of a lynching in Indiana in 1930.
One of the most difficult photos to view was of Dorothy Counts, a 15-year-old girl who became one of four black students to attend the all-white Harding High School in Charlotte. The photo shows her walking into school on her first day, and seeing the faces of the kids in the photo is just chilling. I felt like I had to know what happened to this poor girl.
The bad news is that she only stayed at Harding High for four days before the harassment became too much. The good news is that it seems like she did well in the end, becoming Vice President for a group called Child Care Resources, which helps child care centers improve.
I found a fantastic article in Charlotte's News & Observer that found some of the boys in the photograph and interviewed them. (I think they used this second photo at the left to explain who was whom.) "We were mean," says one of them now. "Just mean boys. No other way to say it."
The Observer makes another great point in the article: Where are all the adults? No one - no police, who were on site, nor principal or teachers came out to help Counts (or, for that matter, Dr. Edwin Thompkins, the family friend escorting her in the photo, whose angry, anguished stare is just as heartbreaking).
The Charlotte Observer says that when expatriate James Baldwin saw this photo, he decided he had to move back to the U.S. Billy Graham and Steve Allen also offered support.
I don't know how you live through that and move on to live a positive life, but the Observer writes that "she has forgotten some of that day and forgiven most of the rest." They asked her what she sees when she looks at these photos now.
"All of these people are behind me," she said. "They did not have the courage to get up in my face."
Could Dorothy Counts have been given a more appropriate name?
I think...could be wrong, but sitting across her tiny table tonight as she ate dinner (first course was soup), she took a spoonful and pointed it to her right, looking off into space, saying, "no?" then ate the soup. She did this like 10 times, each time looking off to the right into space. I asked, "dare?" (who) but got no answer. Interesting...
George Packer at newyorker.com, reflecting on a town hall style meeting McCain held in January: "Back then he was witty, he was relaxed, he was appealingly combative, he was generous. For sheer talent at engaging with voters he had it all over both Obama and Clinton. The contrast now is so severe that it makes running for President seem like a personal disaster on the scale of a prolonged nervous breakdown leading to physical and psychological ruin."
(And the delta between the McCain profiled in David Foster Wallace's essay-turned-book McCain's Promise is even more stark...)
Shared by Jake DobkinA Facebook group brings together thirty-somethings who grew up in Brooklyn’s Park Slope.
there's a picture of me and josh from 1986 in this article-- check out the skateboarding skillz!
Shared by Jake Dobkin
how is graffiti illegal when this kind of visual pollution is endorsed by the state?
Apparently the ad-wrapped subway car experiment was enough of a hit for CBS Outdoor to start selling the advertising panels on the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and shuttle trains beginning in 2009, and there are more initiatives on the way: "Because the New York subway runs 24 hours a day, it is difficult to put ads on the far side of subway tracks. Consequently, CBS is considering projecting images across the track. They will be similar to ads that are projected onto station walls, which CBS began about two years ago." [NYT]
Can it be that John McCain hired the same outfit to robo-slime Barack Obama that hit McCain himself with the scurrilous robocall campaign in 2000 that he decried at the time as "hate calls"?
Yes, according to Christopher Schoff, an official with the Democratic Party in Minnesota, also known as the DFL.
Schoff tells me he got one of McCain's calls on Tuesday night, the one saying Obama put "Hollywood above America." Only in this case, the call wasn't robo; because such calls are illegal in Minnesota, the McCain call was a live person reading from a script.
Schoff says he cut off the person reading to him and asked the name of the company. He was told it was DF King, in Brooklyn, and was sent to a supervisor.
Schoff says the supervisor then told him that the company had been subcontracted for the calls by a larger company called FLS Connect that had been hired by McCain's campaign to do the calls. (Calls to FLS weren't immediately returned, and it may be tough to nail all the particulars of this down completely before FEC filings are available.)
And who is FLS Connect, you ask?
Well, it turns out FLS, which has offices in Phoenix and St. Paul, is basically the same outfit that George W. Bush hired to robo-slime McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary, something that McCain repeatedly denounced with great outrage.
In 2000, the Washington Post reported that the Bush team's phone operation was conducted by a firm called Feathers, Hodges, Larson and Synhorst. A press release in 2003 (via Nexis) indicates that this firm had by then become Feathers, Larson and Synhorst, or FLS for short.
On February 20, 2000, McCain thundered that the robocalls hitting him -- done by this outfit -- were "hate calls" that had "inundated" him. Now, if Schoff is right, McCain appears to have enlisted the same outfit for his robo-slime campaign.
How perfect! No one could have made this one up if they'd tried.
Lots more from HuffPo's Sam Stein, who got here first and has more details.
A small number of kids in NYC are going to what their parents call "unschool" (i.e. home schooling with an unstructured urban twist).
With Benny, Mr. Lewis went on to say, "we embraced a hybrid between home-schooling and unschooling. It's not structured, it's Benny-centric, we follow his interests and desires, and yet we are helping him to learn to read and do math." They read to him hours every day. "It's about trying to find things we both enjoy doing," Ms. Rendell said, "rather than making myself a martyr mom. The terror of home-schooling is you have to be super on all the time, finding crafty things to do."
Here's the Babble article on unschooling mentioned in the article.
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Coolest iPhone App Ever: Photoswap:Take a picture and it automatically sends it to a stranger, and you get one in return. There is a lot of crap pictures, but the good ones make it worth it. I was swapping with people in Japan last night!
See also: Flickr group for Photoswap (using the iPhone screenshot feature of pressing the power and main button quickly together)
Goodbye, Tumblr productivity for an hour.
The College Scholarships Foundation is offering a $10,000 blogging scholarship.
Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on. We're giving away $10,000 this year to a college student who blogs.
Here's the 2007 winner's blog (and the runner up). The application deadline is October 30. Get blogging!
(link)
Written by Brian
Paired with yesterday’s 24 Perfect Vectors, I wanted to list off some incredible Photoshop tutorials I’ve found on the web that will help you utilize those resources. I’ve done my best to select a wide variety of tutorials from web graphics, to photo enhancement, to just plain incredible.
Remember, its not about the destination, instead its all about the journey. Don’t neglect a tutorial because you aren’t interested in the final product. Instead, follow each one, step by step. I can personally attest that the knowledge you will gain about the various tools and functions that are available for you to use in Photoshop will be much more beneficial than the final image.
The following has been funded by Training Connection
Have you thought about getting professional Photoshop training on your next trip? Our Photoshop training Chicago classes are filling up quick, so be sure to signup for a package deal today!
A very interesting argument to Appalachian voters from Jim Webb on the trail in Virginia today on why they shouldn't view Barack Obama as an outsider or a vaguely sinister other:
"There's a lot of comments that have been made about certain ethnic issues in this campaign," Webb said. "I would like to say we know Barack Obama's father was born in Kenya. Barack Obama's mother was born in Kansas by way of Kentucky. We are going to see on Election Day the election of the fourteenth president of the United States whose ancestry, family line goes back to the mountains of this area."Barack Obama understands you -- the first place he visited after he was officially nominated -- he can here to southwest Virginia. This will be his seventh trip to southwest Virginia. And you can trust him -- I trust him."
Hadn't heard that thing about Kentucky before.
For decades, groups like Build for America have made a strong case that transportation spending has to increase. They have rightly warned that the U.S. transportation network is falling apart, with bridges failing and transit systems lagging behind international competitors. But wars, tax cuts and social priorities have stymied increased investment.
Now, as the country teeters on the edge of a dire recession, increased transportation spending is starting to look like a core building block in a federal stimulus package that would, ideally, bring about job creation, increased international competitiveness and improved environmental sustainability. Today, Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman helped make the case, using the kind of "fix it first" and pro-transit examples promoted by Build for America at Wednesday's press conference.
And this is also a good time to engage in some serious infrastructure spending, which the country badly needs in any case. The usual argument against public works as economic stimulus is that they take too long: by the time you get around to repairing that bridge and upgrading that rail line, the slump is over and the stimulus isn’t needed. Well, that argument has no force now, since the chances that this slump will be over anytime soon are virtually nil. So let’s get those projects rolling.Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
In lean times, men look for women who can work and in times of plenty, they want women who can reproduce.
The Environmental Security Hypothesis says that in tough times men will prefer women who are good at production, generally older, taller, heavier, less curvaceous women with less body fat. In good times, they will prefer women who are good at reproduction, generally younger, shorter, lighter, more curvaceous women.
A pair of social psychologists looked for signs of this in the pages of Playboy magazine.
(link)Consistent with Environmental Security Hypothesis predictions, when social and economic conditions were difficult, older, heavier, taller Playboy Playmates of the Year with larger waists, smaller eyes, larger waist-to-hip ratios, smaller bust-to-waist ratios, and smaller body mass index values were selected. These results suggest that environmental security may influence perceptions and preferences for women with certain body and facial features.
According to a recent survey from Rasmussen Reports, 19 percent of baseball fans believe Johan Santana should win the National League CY Young Award over Brandon Webb, Tim Lincecum and Ryan Dempster.
Additionally, fans believe Indians RHP Cliff Lee should win the AL CY Young Award, Cardinals OF Albert Pujols should win the NL MVP and Red Sox 2B Dustin Pedroia should win the AL MVP.
…even putting my obvious bias aside, santana should win the cy young…webb and lincecum had teriffic seasons, but neither pitched in as big of spots as santana did…other than C.C. Sabathia, santana was the most dominant pitcher during the second half of the season (8-0, 2.17 ERA, 3 CG) for a team that was in a pennant chase…and, if it weren’t for a poorly constructed and under performing bullpen, santana would have been a 20-game winner…
Lots of you are addicted to polls and the latest political news in these final weeks before the election. Not just the bumpy daily presidential tracking numbers, but all the house and senate and state presidential numbers from around the country.
Our TPM Daily Digest brings you all the polls and political coverage from the previous 24 hours delivered directly to your inbox every morning. In addition, we bring you the most popular TPM Media posts from the previous day, our editors' pick, the latest episode of TPMtv, a daybook of the political events of the day and much more.
Click here to sign up. It's free. And we won't ever sell, barter or give away your email address to anyone. Sign up today.
And in case you need your poll fix right now, see our new TPM Poll Tracker interactive map, which you can find every day on the front page of TPM Election Central ...
The success of eBay has long been a thorn in the side of user experience professionals, because it’s design is just so obviously flawed. I referenced this in a post a few years back, “One of the most annoying realities of a user experience professional’s life is eBay, because it seems to flout everything we stand for. The Web’s most popular ‘pure play’ sports a remarkably unwieldy and unattractive design. eBay is wary of changing it because, hey, we’re making money, right? Yet I wonder about the untold billions more eBay could reap if it tightened up its experience.”
So it was with some interest that I read an article in the New York Times last week on the e-commerce battle between Amazon and eBay, where Amazon’s star has ascended while eBay’s fell. This struck me as possible vindication for those of us obsessed with customer experience, because Amazon has made a relentless focus on satisfying customers as job one, as explained in an earlier NY Times piece, ““And the reason I’m so obsessed with these drivers of the customer experience is that I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by that customer experience. We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.””
Obviously, there are other factors at play, but I’d like to think this focus on experience has allowed Amazon to succeed where eBay seems to be failing.
[Image: Photo by Ryan Collerd for The New York Times].
Riding zip lines through the autumn tree canopies of rural Pennsylvania is something of a growth industry, it seems, exploring ski resorts during the off-season by speeding downhill at 50 mph in a roped-up harness.
From The New York Times:Some zip lines are basically thrill rides that follow the cut of ski slopes and at this time of year offer expansive views of the autumn blaze of colors, along with an adrenaline rush.
This kind of vertical immersion in an otherwise inaccessible overhead landscape is incredibly interesting, in and of itself – but 1) it also reminds me of a 2007 project by artists Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings in which they reimagined the city of San Francisco as a city of roller coasters, wildlife preserves, underground libraries and health clubs installed inside BART cars, and, of course, zip lines across the San Francisco Bay.
Other courses (like the one we were on) are marketed as canopy tours, designed with a challenging combination of swaying sky bridges, cable traverses and zip line pathways cut through the deep forest. Once we climbed a cargo net to reach our first tree platform, we were literally amid the autumn foliage, not quite in the canopy of fully grown oaks and poplars but close enough to squirrels to guess their sex as they scampered from limb to limb just above us.[Image: Riding zip lines to Oakland; by Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings].
And 2) the two of these together seem to imply a new kind of urban tourism, where you don't talk guided walks or buy tickets for double-decker buses: you ride zip lines above Notre-Dame cathedral and down Fifth Avenue, getting up close and personal with architectural ornament at a level of detail you would otherwise never have seen.
Sky Tours of Manhattan.
In the same way that you can take, for instance, Entourage-themed bus tours of Los Angeles, you could take Spiderman-themed zip line tours of New York.
You call up Canopy Tours and ask them to price-out the entirety of Chicago. Or Istanbul. (At the very least, they could map it).
Zip lines through the London financial district.
Zip lines through the sandstone arches of Utah.
Zip lines through Angkor Wat.
A Zip Line Olympiad across the domes and spires of central Europe.
Or don't use zip lines for humans at all; attach plants to them for the hanging zip line gardens of the 21st century. Flowering plants and ferns and oak trees go whizzing by in an aerial gardenry that defies belief.
And if zip lines could realistically open up a whole new world of spatial volume in the modern high-rise metropolis, what new architectures and city surfaces might result?
Just to make sure that the game of moral equivalence is played by fair rules, Steve Benen has a great post about G. Gordon Liddy, to remind folks how incredible it is that McCain has no issue with his relationship with Liddy ("I'm not in any was embarrassed to know Gordon Liddy") yet has spent the last two weeks vilifying a (non-existent) close relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers. The key bit:
That's an interesting response. Liddy is, of course, a convicted felon who has "acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in 'if necessary'; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a 'gangland figure' to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap 'leftist guerillas' at the 1972 Republican National Convention -- a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis." Liddy also once famously gave his supporters advice on how best to kill federal officials (he recommended shooting them in the head because they might be wearing flak jackets).Given that the McCain campaign is now pushing out robocalls in Ohio, New Mexico, Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Missouri with Obama/Ayers allegations (interestingly similar to the robocalls he felt were despicable when used against him in 2000), this seems a bit hypocritical. But given the GOP of the past month, I guess we're learning that that's to be expected.
Goodness blog asked a bunch of designers about books that they found helpful in their development as creative people, no graphic design books allowed.
(link)
I guess Palin's John Birch Society background shouldn't surprise us.
From the Post ...
Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the "pro-America" areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic.Also, wasn't her husband a member of a political party that calls for the dissolution of the United States government until Sarah entered statewide politics in 2002.
Emily Magazine: The kind of crazy you get from too much choice.
The truth [about living in New York City] is that we try to make it hard for ourselves by creating a lot of tasks and rules and very, very specific needs. The arcane evidence fills the shelves at every big Korean deli in Manhattan and every bodega in gentrified Brooklyn: we need almond butter and organic tempeh and unbleached cotton tampons. We might even need specific brands of these things. We need 24-hour access. We need to never be more than two blocks from an ATM. We need taxis and car services that know how to take us anywhere. We need free wifi and bottled unsweetened iced tea and perfectly decent sushi that costs less than $10. We need fresh lemongrass and thai basil and epazote and coconut milk and three different kinds of artisanal ginger beer and cane-juice-sweetened dark chocolate. We need $40 moisturizer from Kiehl's and perfect $10 bras from Target and Japanese bubble tea and two eggs and cheese on a toasted whole wheat bagel prepared in under a minute.An absolute truism of Manhattan residents is that we define our existence by our cravings. We sacrifice significant comforts of space and money in exchange for convenience and specificity.I can write a paragraph just like Emily's. My family lives in an utterly charming apartment, filled with light and two minutes from the subway, that also happens to consume an extraordinary percentage of our take-home pay and has no closet in the baby's bedroom. We have several boxes of Mighty Leaf tea (15 packets, $9) alongside the Lipton (48 bags, $4) in our cabinet. We bring our Chinese and Japanese food uptown from the Village because we haven't found restaurants on the Upper West Side that meet our tastes. I have over the years switched drycleaners no fewer than 11 times. My wife craves nice shoes like Sigerson Morrisons, of which she a pair, and also Sigerson Morrisons from Target, of which she also has a pair. Our stroller retails for nine hundred dollars and barely fits in the trunk of our car. That we even have a car is considered a luxury; that we share and street-park the car is considered cheap.
Yet this lifestyle is by choice, and it's one we are pleased to have made. We are in Riverside Park nearly every day with our son and our dog. We do have a 24-hour specialty grocer around the corner, and six places with baked goods within a five-minute walk, and we take full advantage. I ride my bicycle to work twice a week alongside the Hudson River. Our home is full of century-old detail that can only be found in an urban dwelling. We see award-winning theater on a whim, shop in fascinating locally owned stores, eat at world-class restaurants and walk home.
In some ways it is a peculiar living, but it is also a spectacular one. We made a conscious decision to stay in Manhattan, at least in the near term. And I, for one, don't regret it in the least.
Björk releases her brand new single “Nattura” through One Little Indian on October 20. The single will be initially available as an iTunes exclusive worldwide except Iceland where it is available from Nattura.info; then everywhere digitally on October 27. All proceeds from the track will go towards the Nattura Campaign (www.nattura.info).
The single was composed specifically to encourage active support for the Nattura campaign, which aims at collating and providing sustainable and eco-friendly options suitable for Iceland, and generating alternative ways to utilize it’s natural resources. People will be able to submit their ideas on the website for sustainable green workplaces for Icelanders. According to Björk, “It is now more important than ever before to emphasize a respect for nature…I believe that profits, technological advances and working together with nature can all go hand in hand. None need to be sacrificed at the expense of the others.”
The new single is written and produced by Björk and features Radiohead’s Thom Yorke on backing vocals, Brian Chippendale (Lighting Bolt) on drums, Matthew Herbert on synth/bass, and Mark Bell on additional electronic beats. Opening with a huge elemental swirl, “Nattura” then fires up an incendiary and fierce tribal rhythm. The song sees Björk firmly on the march in celebration of her homeland, in hopes that Icelanders harness its energy in a sustainable way.
For more information on the single and the Nattura Environmental Campaign please visit www.nattura.info or www.bjork.com.Further to this there will be a massive conference on sustainability in Reykjavik, hosted by nattura.info and the University of Reykjavik as can bee seen in this statement:
Working meeting on alternative ways to utilize natural and human resources in a self-sustainable ways
For some years, various attempts have been made all around the country to find ways to utilize natural and human resources other than those employed
by large scale industry. These innovatory attempts have increased our capacity for a greater variety of options and helped to increase
Icelanders' personal accountability for their own landscape. Yet, for various reasons little heed has been paid to these attempts and there
has rarely been sufficient follow-up to many of the ideas that have been forwarded. There has been a sharp division between promising plans and their entrepreneurial implementation on the one hand and between investments and the networks that serve to generate them on the other. In these difficult times, when people are desperately trying to find alternatives to the excesses of large-scale industry, then we must a way erect bridges between unlike areas of interest.
In cooperation with the University of Reykjavík and Klak, a research- and consulting institute for entrepreneurial implementation (seed-stage companies), Fræ, the institute of U.R. for public good, Björk Guðmundsdóttir has together with the organisers of the website nattura.info summoned a workshop where to gather for an open conversation with investers and métier designers, representatives from economic development associations, universities, and with those prolific individuals who work with ideas, establishments and other innovation in the field of self-sustainability and diversity. Ideas are being collected for further development and promotion, with companies of all kinds of researches, development and production, from woolens to state of the art inventions in the field of biotechnology.
The goal of the workshop, and other related events, is to connect experience, knowledge and inventiveness from different fields of society, to nourish the soil of seed-stage companies and their self sustainable developement; to open access to the motive power of financial- and executive power, and generate a creative dialog and researches. By building these bridges, the outcome will be an open interconnectivity and a clear work of development in the form of extensive business plans for the ideas of seed-stage companies of Iceland.
Following the workshop held in the University of Reykjavík, nattura.info is hosting seminars inviting foreign thinkers and generating workshops across the country. The new website nattura.info is about to open as a site for conversation about the resources of Iceland, the diverse possibilities of using them, and self sustainability. On the website is a think tank for other ways than heavy industry, and the funds from Björk's song, Náttúra, goes to the developement of prolific ideas.
Even though I was only 11, I can remember watching news reports (and possibly the actual debate) about that famous Lloyd Bentsen diss in the 1988 Vice-Presidential debate. You know the one: "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy: I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." Of course, it was all lost on a child at the time.As a kid, I didn't note/grasp the Quayle reaction. Now, it's quite interesting to see this back and forth after watching the insanely controlled debates of this year. Sure, McCain looks angry in the debates but he doesn't look as angry/traumatized/insulted/humiliated as Qualye in the following clip.
Bush/Quayle maintained their lead and we all know who won that election. It just goes to show that those who get the zingers in don't necessary win the prize.
"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again. Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic."
Who's that speaking? And
what's he talking about?
That's fired US Attorney David Iglesias talking about the news leaked today that the DOJ and FBI are opening a nationwide investigation into allegations that the community organization ACORN is somehow working to undermine the November election through fraud. For more from Iglesias and his fellow fired US Attorney Bud Cummins, don't miss TPMMuckraker's Zack Roth's interview post from earlier this evening.
Iglesias got fired not long after the 2006 midterm election because he wouldn't get off the dime and bring bogus vote fraud indictments against Democrats or time other indictments of Democrats to sway the 2006 election. In other words, he got canned for not doing what a number of his former colleagues at the DOJ are happily doing this very day.
Nor was Iglesias simpy a respected attorney with solid enough connections to swing a US Attorney appointment. He was a rising star in the New Mexico Republican party. Iglesias was the Republican nominee for Attorney General in 1998. (Not that it's immediately relevant to this question, but Iglesias was the Navy JAG lawyer on whom Tom Cruise's character in A Few Good Men was based.) This was that reassuring case where a political person's partisan attachments butted up against his integrity and the latter won the day hands down. This is someone who knows this scam from the inside and whose testimony -- literal and figurative -- comes not in line with partisan attachments but in spite of them. Everyone should listen.
I don't have anything to say beside printing the title to this blog post I just happened across: "McCain Loses Hastily Convened Fourth Presidential Debate With Lifesize Cardboard Obama."
Last night, Republican candidate John McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama met at New York's Hofstra University for the last 2008 U.S. presidential debate. CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer moderated the format of two-minute candidate answers followed by five minutes of discussion. This format gave Senators Obama and McCain more time to debate each individual issue — and gave viewers more time to search Google for information than they did for either for their previous debate or the vice presidential debate.
Searches also clustered around [abortion], a question Schieffer posed earlier. In fact, of all the search queries emerging during the debate, Roe v. Wade was the most popular. Senator McCain's state-based approach to the issue sent many searching for more information on federalism, and subsequent discussions of partial-birth and late-term abortion prompted queries too. The conversations around nominations to the Supreme Court inspired many to search for litmus test and Justice Breyer.
While the volatile global economy and high energy prices may dominate news headlines, viewers sought more information about the topic of the evening's last question: education. People dug deeper into the issue of charter schools and school vouchers; some searched explicitly for school vouchers vs. charter schools. Senator McCain raised the example of Washington, D.C., schools, prompting many to explore the issue further, searching for Michelle Rhee, who is D.C.'s Chancellor of Public Schools. Other education-related searches included No Child Left Behind, Troops to Teachers, Head Start, and Teach for America.A figure named "Joe" has been popular throughout the campaign: first there was Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden, and then we heard about Joe Sixpack from Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin. Now there's "Joe the plumber," who figured prominently throughout last night's debate. Viewers responded in kind, searching heavily for Joe the plumber. Some even found his real name: Joe Wurzelbacher. Other names that were dropped, discussed and then searched for large numbers: Bill Ayers and Congressman John Lewis.
And finally, here's a summary of sorts: these queries show the biggest overall spikes in search activity throughout the entire 90-minute debate.
Posted by Jeffrey Oldham, Software Engineer; Fred Leach, Customer Labs Analyst; and Jennie Johnson, Communications team
This blog is approaching 8 years old and after two years on a custom system I wrote myself, followed by four years on Movable Type, followed by two years on Wordpress, I've given up completely on hosted blog software and moved this blog to Typepad. I really like Typepad and though I'm giving up things like custom .htaccess redirects for old posts and my old permalink URLs, I'm gaining things like the easiest to use posting UI available and most importantly, I'll never need to update any software by hand ever again.
It's been a long, frustrating week with several days spent trying to move off Wordpress (I was tired of my weblog app chiding me for upgrades every two weeks) followed by several days trying to get MT to work followed by brief experiments with Textpattern followed by giving up and finishing here. There are so many things wrong with each and every blog app that I feel like developers really should revisit my anti-blog CMS screed from early this year.
A fake tilt-shift photo of Fenway Park in Boston makes the ballpark look like a scale model. I seemingly will never tire of this gimmick. (via let's go mets)
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As much as I'd like to be generous about this and say "But the homeless need a place too" I'd like to point out the difference in day to day quality of life which occcurred in Fort Greene as SOON as the previous residential hotel for homeless men opposite BAM (the parking lot adjacent to Mark Morris is there now) was closed and then demolished. Before - when there were hundreds of beds there - Fort Greene had our garbage cans stolen almost weekly, plants stolen, other petty crime, agressive squeegee guys and radios stolen. In a famous rant Garrison Keillor - who briefly broadcast from BAM back then - talked about walking up Flatbush Ave. to BAM and noting all of the "No Radio" signs in the windows of almost every car asked "When I'm recording a radio show, it kind of makes me wonder 'why bother?'." In those days I'd have my battery stolen then I'd walk down to Park Ave. to a place that sold re-habbed batteries and buy back the one they'd stolen the week before. As soon as the building was demolished and services moved elsewhere, this constant background of petty crime stopped. Given the current financial turmoil, I'd want homeless New Yorkers to be given the best treatment possible. I think they deserve Manhattan condos.
by Stonergut in Shelter Woes Spread From Crown Heights to Bed Stuy
A list of reasons that newspapers won't (can't?) reinvent news.
The culture of newspaper management is a dysfunctional relic of a low-bandwidth, monopoly era. It still hasn't adapted to the lessons of Web 2.0, it's generally beholden to a short-term stock price instead of a long-term re-investment strategy and it simply refuses to accept that you can't expect 20 profit margins in a competitive market. Instead of leading, it is a legacy anchor.
An overly harsh list, but good food for thought.
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Here's our daily composite of the five major national tracking polls. Going into last night's debate, Barack Obama's big lead over John McCain may have been narrowing a bit, though he was still solidly ahead:
• Gallup*: Obama 51%, McCain 45%, with a ±2% margin of error, compared to a 52%-44% Obama lead yesterday.
• Rasmussen: Obama 50%, McCain 46%, with a ±2% margin of error, compared to a 50%-45% Obama lead from yesterday.
• Hotline/Diageo: Obama 49%, McCain 41%, with a ±3.4% margin of error, unchanged from yesterday.
• Research 2000: Obama 52%, McCain 41%, with a ±3% margin of error, unchanged from yesterday.
• Zogby: Obama 49%, McCain 43%, with a ±2.9% margin of error, compared to a 48%-44% Obama lead yesterday.
Adding these polls together and weighting them by the square roots of their sample sizes, Obama is ahead 50.3%-43.7%, a lead of 6.6 points, compared to the 50.3%-43.3% Obama lead from yesterday. Two days ago, Obama's composite lead was 50.6%-43.1%.
Remember that this polling was all done before last night's debate, so it doesn't tell us about the post-debate environment. Instead, it gives us a baseline against which we can measure the changes in the coming days.
*ed. note: Gallup has begun offering two different sub-samples of likely voters, one using a traditional likely-voter model and the other using a modified likely-voter model for an expected higher turnout. For all our composites and Poll Tracker entries, we will be using that second model under the expectation that newly-registered voters and other factors will contribute to a higher turnout this cycle.
Andrew Sullivan's long form piece Why I Blog, posted today at theatlantic.com, gave me goose bumps.
A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.
This is probably the best long form piece on blogging I've ever read.
Jared Davidson from Garage Collective and Zoe Thompson-Moore, both from New Zealand, have just a cool video slideshow on art and activism they recently did. Check it out.
Following yesterday's Build for America launch and last night's presidential debate, the Regional Plan Association released a major report today recommending an array of public transportation improvements for New York City and northern New Jersey, adding its name to the ever-growing list of orgs and officials calling for federal investment to spur and sustain economic growth in the coming decades.
Over a dense 53 pages, "Tomorrow’s Transit: New Mobility for the Region’s Urban Core" [PDF] lays out dozens of projects, large and small, that would improve transit access and performance, with a focus on underserved and, in many cases, high poverty areas. The report, as breathtaking in scope as the $29 billion five-year capital plan unveiled by MTA head Lee Sander last March, also proposes augmentations to long-planned mega-projects like the Second Avenue Subway, and stresses links between modes to maximize coverage and efficiency.
Proposals are categorized by cost and level of need, as determined by existing transit service, income levels, and rates of auto ownership.
Follow the jump for highlights.
- Bronx: Extend the Second Avenue Subway to the Third Avenue corridor and Co-op City; provide added service on Metro-North at six Bronx station stops on the Harlem and Hudson River lines; offer peak express service on the Dyre Avenue line; and establish ferry service from Soundview.
- Brooklyn: Convert the Atlantic Branch of the LIRR to subway service and connect it to the Second Avenue Subway; build a Utica Avenue branch off the converted Atlantic Branch of the LIRR; extend the Nostrand Avenue 2 and 5 lines to Kings Highway; extend the Canarsie L line to Spring Creek Towers/Starrett City; and establish high speed ferry service from Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bay Ridge.
- Manhattan: Implement no-fare rides on the 34th Street, 42nd Street and 50th Street cross-town bus routes; extend the Second Avenue Subway west along 125th Street; construct a station entrance on the east end of the First Avenue L station; and establish a midtown Bus Rapid Transit or light rail route loop.
- Queens: Convert the LIRR Atlantic Branch to subway service; connect Queensboro Plaza and Queens Plaza and the E, F, G and V at Court Square; and begin Bus Rapid Transit on Queens Boulevard.
- Staten Island: Proceed with Hylan Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit; establish ferry service from southern Staten Island; and establish a bus lane along the full length of the Staten Island Expressway.
- New Jersey (Hudson County and Newark): Extend currently planned Bus Rapid Transit routes in Newark to include cross-town and Sumner/Mt. Prospect Avenue corridors; construct a new Hudson Bergen Light Rail Station at Grand Street and 17th Street in Hoboken; and extend the Hudson Bergen Light Rail to Route 440.
In addition, the RPA recommends a number of complementary measures, including parking and land use reforms, transit-oriented development, and congestion pricing.
"Tomorrow's Transit" was composed over the course of a year in conjunction with area transportation experts, NJ TRANSIT, the MTA and New York City DOT.
The Phillies will be in the World Series, thanks to their win over the Dodgers last night in Game 5 of the NLCS.
During last night’s telecast, FoxSports.com’s Ken Rosenthal relayed the following story…
In Game 2 of the NLDS against the Brewers, Shane Victorino hit a grand slam, after which he raised his finger in the air as he ran around the bases.
Prior to the next game, a picture of Victorino, running the bases, with his finger in the air, was taped to his locker by his teammates with ‘J. Reyes’ written above it.
…it’s hard to talk smack about a team like the Phillies, who has stuck it to the Mets two years in a row and is now on route to the World Series…nevertheless, this makes my blood boil…
If you love lamé maillots and sweatwear, you're in luck! Norma Kamali's PR department is looking for an intern.
Responsibilities:
1. Follow up with editors and stylists regarding samples
2. Maintain sample closet (steam, pack, unpack, label, love)
3. Scan and crop all press credits as well as add new press to press book
4. Assist with projects such as creating press kits or helping with lookbook shoots (steam, pack, unpack, label, swoon)
5. Regularly update editor / stylist contact list
E-mail resumes to Michelle [at] normakamalicollection.com, and we prefer our thank you's in turbans - thanks!
TED and the TED Prize are proud to unveil the three remarkable winners of the 2009 TED Prize: deep-ocean explorer Sylvia Earle, astronomer Jill Tarter, and Maestro José Antonio Abreu. Each of them is a leader in his/her chosen field of work, with an unconventional viewpoint and a vision to transform the world.
Their lives and their words are inspiring.
Sylvia Earle, called “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker and the New York Times, “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress, and “Hero for the Planet” by Time, is an oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer with a deep commitment to research through personal exploration.
“We've got to somehow stabilize our connection to nature so that in 50 years from now, 500 years, 5,000 years from now there will still be a wild system and respect for what it takes to sustain us."
Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research and holder of the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI. She has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere, and almost all aspects of this field have been affected by her work.
" 'Are we alone?' Humans have been asking [this question] forever. The probability of success is difficult to estimate but if we never search the chance of success is zero."
José Abreu, a retired economist, trained musician, and social reformer founded El Sistema (“the system”) in 1975 based on the conviction that what poor Venezuelan kids needed was classical music. After 30 years and 10 different political administrations, El Sistema is now a nationwide organization of 102 youth orchestras, 55 children’s orchestras and 270 music centers.
"Music has to be recognized as an ... agent of social development in the highest sense, because it transmits the highest values -- solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community and to express sublime feelings."
Learn more about them here.
Each wins $100,000 plus "One Wish to Change the World." Their wishes will be unveiled at TED2009 on February 5, 2009.
We can't wait!
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, MacBook
For machines that have only been in users' hands for 24 hours or so, the hits just keep on coming for the new unibody MacBooks. APC magazine has posted a "ten things you didn't know" review, covering some surprises and some well-we-thought-so's for the laptops.
Confirming our reporting from yesterday, APC spoke to an Apple representative in Australia who closed the door on any hope of Target Disk Mode availability via USB on the new MacBooks. Migration Assistant, which has been updated for these machines, will work over Ethernet or from a disk image of your source Mac, but not over TDM. The machines are running a new OS X build (figures); if you break the glass on the screen, you replace the whole screen (ouch!), swapping hard drives is much easier than on previous models (yay!) but if you lock your machine with a Kensington security cable, that will also block access to the bottom case (phew).
APC also notes a new internal feature on these laptops, and presumably on the MBPs as well, that MacMerc, HardMac and the Ars forums have pointed out: immersion sensors at various spots inside the case (previously seen on the iPhone). These adhesive dots change color when exposed to liquid, so the conversations at the Genius Bar where you insist "No, I'm sure that nothing was spilled on it!" just got quite a bit harder. AppleInsider has a diagram showing the locations of all eight sensors inside the machine, if you've got really really good aim with your spilled Dr. Pepper.
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According to a dozens of e-mails sent to me today, Mr. Met was seen working the crowd last night at the Presidential Debate at Hofstra University.
What’s more, he was seen on-air, in the crowd, holding a campaign sign, in back of the Fox News post-debate discussion, which was hosted by Greta Van Sustrand.
If you have this on video, and can capture as a digital file, please e-mail it to me – as I would love to post it on MetsBlog.com.
…Update…11:50 am…
Well, that is disappointing.
First of all, that is not the real Mr. Met.
Second, I can’t believe they made him take off his head. I mean, nobody wants to see that.
…thanks to Fred, and hat tip to Deadspin for the video…
…Update…12:02 pm…
Apparently, this is the Mr. Met from Late Night with Conan O’Brien, which makes this all the more hilarious.
The eyeballing game tests how good you are at lining things up. I got a 4.46 on my first try, but my hand slipped on one of them so I'm going to try again... Leave your best (or worst) score in the comments. (via core77)
Update: 4.34. I suck at parallelograms and triangle centers.
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Puma ads featuring golden-shoed Jamaican sprinter Usain "Lightning" Bolt, Beijing hero and the world's fastest man, are currently up all over New York City, above and below ground. But to place ads in subway stations these days is to place them in the playground of the fast-working poster remixer Poster Boy. Here, the artist has transformed the bombastic Bolt into an insane Ronald the clown. While McDonald's claims they don't have an official marketing relationship with the speedster, their brass must've pissed themselves when Bolt told reporters he ate McNuggets, and nothing but McNuggets, before his Olympic races. Nice work, Poster Boy. By the way, novice NYC marathon runners? Don't follow Bolt's lead in two weeks and eat Mickey D's pre-race, or you'll be shitting your shorts come around the 10-mile mark.
(Photo: Poster Boy)
In a timely talk, cultural critic Virginia Postrel muses on the powerful uses of glamour -- which she defines as any calculated, carefully polished image designed to impress and persuade. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, California. Duration: 16:15.)
Watch Virginia Postrel's talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 300+ TEDTalks -- including more talks about words.
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kottke.org now has a Facebook page. I don't know what this is good for exactly, but there it is. Become a fan! (kottke.org also has a Twitter account if you'd like to read the site that way.)
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The last page of a new mailer from the Virginia GOP appears to show a close-up of Barack Obama overlaid with the text:
AMERICA MUST LOOK EVIL IN THE EYE AND NEVER FLINCH
Late Update: With a reader's help, we think we may have found the picture the state party started with, and it's not an Obama photo but an Osama bin Laden photo. We'll have both pics here side by side in a moment so you can compare.
Later Update: The two images:
We used photoshop to align the eyes here. The pupils match up almost exactly:
Just a few points to make here. I grapple with whether it's paranoia at this stage to think that the GOP is conflating Obama and Osama visually -- as they have so often conflated them textually and rhetorically. But look at the pic closely. You've got the turban and beard photoshopped out or otherwise obscured. The flared bulb of the nose is gone, leaving only the narrower bridge. And the photo appears darkened to match Obama's complexion.
You be the judge. But in politics, as in advertising, images are rarely accidental.
The 17" MacBook Pro barely got any love at this week's Apple event, and there's a reason why. Supposedly, there were hardware issues that forced Apple to hold them back, and it may take longer then you may think for Apple to get them out the door.
In an interview with his home-town newspaper, the Crescent News, Jon Niese talks about his time in the minor leagues, and what he learned this season pitching for the Mets.
Niese, on moving beyond September:
“A lot of the New York media and the fans want to dwell on what happened the past two years with the team falling short, but the whole team is ready to move forward and put that behind us.”
In three starts for the Mets this season, the 21-year-old lefty was 1-1 with a 7.07 ERA, with 11 K and 8 BB in 14.0 IP.
He was 11-8 with a 3.13 ERA in 29 combined starts for Triple-A New Orleans and Double-A Binghamton.
I've discussed the joys of building sets on this blog many times before, but I feel that I haven't really been concise enough in my explanations to get across the concept of why exactly it is that I do what I do. I especially want Gellman to understand where I'm coming from, because he's a passionate collector who knows his stuff and doesn't get fooled by all the marketing bullshart that pervades the hobby.
Before I get into set building, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: There is no such thing as a 'real' collector. A real collector is someone who collects. These are all examples of real collectors:There are many, many others who are real collectors, not just set builders. This is a better way to put it: Purist old-school mystical disciples of Jefferson Burdick don't buy hand-collated sets of current year product. They rip packs, scrounge through common boxes and trade through the mail. The only qualification to being a real collector is to collect.
- The kid who buys packs of Topps at Target and keeps them in a shoebox
- The high roller who busts several cases of Exquisite, keeps one autographed card of Rudy Gay and flips the rest on eBay
- The set builder who buys box after box of Heritage trying to get a complete set
- The team collector who wants one of every Durham Bulls card in existence
- The guy who is trying to get his entire 1988 Score set autographed through the mail
- The girl with 3000 different cards of David Ortiz because she thinks big men are sexy
- The guy who rips a box of every new product lookin' for the MoJo
- Your aunt who has had a 1983 Topps SuperVet card of Bobby Murcer propped up on her bookshelf right next to her Joseph Campbell books for the past twenty years for absolutely no discernable reason
- The guy who only collects bubble gum cards from the thirties that have been written or drawn on in blue ink
- Your cousin who got a factory set every Christmas from Nana, and has kept them all in the closet ever since
- The girl who collects players whose name makes her laugh like Lerrin LaGrow
- The guy who has EVERY single card of Ellis Burks because he saw him hit a home run against Chicago in a game he went to with his dad
- The creepy guy who collects cards numbered 666 and props them up on an altar surrounded by black candles
- The guy who has enough cards to choke a whale completely disorganized all over the house
Ok, now that that is out of the way, I've been thinking about this for a while now and I think I have finally come up with a succinct explanation of why set collectors build sets:
The chase is better than the catch.
The joy isn't in the having but the getting. A complete set is a complete set, but completing that set is an accomplishment. Take this page with one card missing:To some that card number 3 is a gaping hole that spoils an otherwise nice page. To a set builder, it's a quest. A grand chase like Kasper Gutman hunting down the Maltese Falcon. Having to tangle with Sam Spade and Joel Cairo and Miss O'Shaughnessy while tracking it down is the fun part, metaphorically speaking. People spending hundreds of dollars at bars picking up chicks is not wasting money if they have fun doing it. Someone spending a ton of money and man hours renovating their house instead of just buying a new one is not a waste if they enjoy the renovation. Paying for extra courses at a community college for classes that are interesting but won't necessarily help to raise your tax bracket is not a waste if the person is ultimately enriched by the experience. Buying worthless* retail boxes is not a waste if you simply enjoy the hobby.
If that doesn't explain where I'm coming from, then some one else will have to do it. That's the best I can do. If you just don't buy it, or you just can't trust a guy who goes ga-ga over 1991 Bowman, I ask you to put that all aside and accept an endorsement of my argument from none other than Motörhead.
How can you not trust a face like Lemmy's?
*Note: ALL wax packs - hobby and retail - are worthless. It's overpriced. It's a scam. It's for suckers. That's not the point.
According to Ken Rosenthal, at FOXSports.com, teammates of RHP Derek Lowe say he has ‘little interest’ in playing for the Mets or Yankees, adding, “Some rival clubs believe that Lowe wants to stay on the west coast.”
In 34 starts with the Dodgers this season, Lowe, who has 85 career saves, was 14-11 with a 3.24 ERA.
…hmmm, no disrespect to rosenthal, but i wonder what lowe himself thinks about playing in new york…
I feel that kicked-in-the-stomach feeling. After everything we've been through this year, to come this far and have it end like this, it leaves a sour taste and it will be tough to let it go. It will take a little time until I'm able to stop looking back at this and start getting the itch to get back at it.
We just had a lack of execution. I'm guilty. I was not getting on base in front of Manny so he could drive me in. He hit something crazy like .538 but we didn't score enough runs. I have to get the job done a little better. I have to come back next year with the knowledge I've gained from this and be a better baseball player.
The writers have asked if I feel we were beaten by a better club. I don't, no way. I'm not shy in saying that. They definitely beat us, but we also beat ourselves a bit. You can look at Game 1 and Monday's game. If we don't make mistakes in those games, we just as easily could have won them. They executed better than we did, no doubt.
As for next year, we'll see if I'm here. You never know. I want to see what the off-season holds. We've got a lot of outfielders coming back.
As for this year, I want to thank the fans for their support, for showing up all year. It was a tough season with a lot of ups and downs. I appreciate your support and the encouraging words on and off the field and I hope to see everybody again in 2009.
Ladies and Gentleman, the comeback has begun! The polls were starting to narrow anyway, and John McCain gave the campaign a final boost by blowing Obama away in tonight’s debate. The media can say what they will, but everyone I talked to thought that Senator McCain won convincingly and turned in his best performance yet. Senator Obama, on the other hand, looked flustered by McCain’s spot-on criticisms. After the debate ended, Obama looked worn out while McCain was bouncing off the walls. I don’t care what any pundit says; both candidates on stage tonight clearly knew who won and who lost.
Now, the question becomes how to build on this momentum and continue climbing until Election Day. By most counts, Obama is up by between three and eight points. Some polls, particularly the Gallup Daily Tracker, have shown a wider lead. However, I refuse to put stock in the Gallup Poll as they have recently changed their definition of a “likely voter”. Luckily, Gallup is honest enough to report how their poll would have come out if the traditional definition of a “likely voter” was applied. In today’s poll, for instance, Obama enjoys a 7% lead among registered voters, and an 8% lead among “likely voters”. However, if the standard definition of a likely voter had been used rather than Gallup’s new expanded version, the very same poll would have shown Obama leading by only 3%! Hence, my personal feeling is that Obama’s actual lead going into the debate was somewhere in the 3-6% range. Based on McCain’s performance tonight, I would expect a 1-2% shift in his favor in the next few days, leaving the race in a statistical dead heat. This is where Sarah Palin once again enters the picture.
If you haven’t noticed yet, Gov. Palin has been granted MUCH more independence lately and has ramped up her end of the campaign. She’s doing well in her speeches, and more importantly she has been doing well in interviews. I listened to her on Rush Limbaugh yesterday and the Mike Gallagher Show this morning - she did beautifully in both. She’s also been getting a bit more positive coverage by doing things like stopping the Straight Talk Express at Wal-Mart to buy diapers for Trig (don’t laugh, it happened recently). Finally, if she does indeed appear on Saturday Night Live, she will likely generate a good deal of publicity and emphasize the difference between Tina Fey and the real Sarah Palin. These moves by Gov. Palin may be able to shift the polls another 1-2%.
I’ve already lined out the possibility for a 2-4% shift based solely on McCain and Palin’s actions. Taking into account other factors, it could easily be bigger. The stock market will gradually begin to stabilize, deflating the panic that has inflated Obama’s recent numbers. ACORN is becoming a major issue as more and more fraudulent voter registrations are found. I would not be surprised to see several more major ACORN busts, possibly accompanied by criminal charges. Finally, if there is any major international news, McCain is the natural beneficiary based on his foreign policy credentials.
The New Yorker on the Republican demonization of words:
Literary theorists used to say that their most abstruse prose was "writing the difficulty"--that the sentences were tortuous because there was no briskly commonsensical way of representing a complex issue. Sarah Palin, alas, talks the difficulty. She may claim, as she did in last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate, that "Americans are cravin' that straight talk," but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor--not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home...
How low does a presidential candidate have to go on Intrade before they get de-listed?
The consensus from initial reactions is that this was McCain's best of the three debates. And I'm not sure I disagree with that. One of the best sum-ups I saw was actually from Republican Mike Murphy, which we'll show you shortly. I think that in formal debating terms McCain definitely did better than in the two previous debates. Often, in formal terms, he had Obama on the defensive. But McCain was just surly and contemptuous through the whole 90 minutes. He looked angry. I mean, let's not kid ourselves: he was angry. That was obvious all the way through. I think that voters will not like that. And just as important it tends to confirm the current narrative of the campaign, which is that McCain is negative and angry.
Obama wasn't perfect. Maybe a bit off his game. But I don't think John McCain helped himself. His gambit in this debate was to say to voters that his anger and passion was theirs. But I don't think he sold that argument. John McCain is just angry. Mainly angry that it's his moment and this upstart named Barack Obama is taking it from him. That's about him, not anyone else.
By Chris Prather, from his recent blog entry
One of the things I’ve discovered recently, and wished I’d known years ago is you need to write all your Perl applications like you were gonna be posting them to CPAN, even if you have no intention of ever doing so.
At work we are starting to migrate from a legacy system that was written in the grandest of late 90s CGI (the code is clear, easy to read and for this era of script well documented, but lacks any architectural cohesion and has been patched and re-patched over the years to handle new use cases). This system is absolutely core to our daily business. You might even argue that it is our daily business.
One of my tasks was to add Validation on some of the input parameters. My boss wants to move to something testable so I created a Validation module that contained a bunch of validation functions for the various pieces of data, and when we could easily do so we wrapped CPAN validation modules (Regexp::Common we love you!). This however added a couple of new dependencies to our system. This is where writing it like a CPAN package comes in.
I added a Makefile.PL for the system. We have no intention of ever releasing this code, but the Makefile.PL uses Module::Install and lists the dependencies. The magic of this is that for recent versions of
cpanyou can just typecpan .and it will automatically install all the dependencies for the current directory. Failing that you can always runperl Makefile.PL && make && make testand it’ll install dependencies and run your test suite.By treating code we were never going to release to CPAN as if we were, we win the support of all of the CPAN toolchain. A toolchain that is getting better every day.
Chris has worked with Perl for 7 years in 3 time zones. He's responsible for Bender on irc.perl.org, and MooseX::POE. He is happy to be back in Florida where it is warm.
Learn how designer Michael Surtees finds good stuff on the web without having to use an RSS reader.
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This guy used to write term papers for money...and it partially financed his first house.
The term paper biz is managed by brokers who take financial risks by accepting credit card payments and psychological risks by actually talking to the clients. Most of the customers just aren't very bright. One of my brokers would even mark assignments with the code words DUMB CLIENT. That meant to use simple English; nothing's worse than a client calling back to ask a broker -- most of whom had no particular academic training -- what certain words in the paper meant. One time a client actually asked to talk to me personally and lamented that he just didn't "know a lot about Plah-toe." Distance learning meant that he'd never heard anyone say the name.
I'm curious...have you used term paper writing services in the past? I've whipped up a little poll: Have you ever bought a term paper? It's anonymous so please be honest. (via clusterflock)
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Shared by Jake Dobkin
remember four years ago, when yahoo seemed like a cool place to work?
We've been peeing on Yahoo all the way down, so we hope you won't take this as us talking our book (unfortunately, we've owned the stock forever) or blowing smoke up our employer's rear (we co-anchor TechTicker). But...
YAHOO'S VALUATION IS NOW RIDICULOUS
The stock just slipped below $12, which means the enterprise value is $14 billion (enterprise value is the value of the business itself, after you net out cash and debt). That's about 2X trailing revenue, even before assigning any value to the clobbered Asia assets that Yahoo could have sold at the top and didn't.
Yes, Yahoo should have taken Microsoft's $31 bid.
Yes, Yahoo's business is in disarray.
Yes, Yahoo's search share is headed asymptotically toward zero.
Yes, Yahoo is fat, fat, fat.
Yes, Jerry may have to go.
Yes, Yahoo shareholders have a whole hell of a lot to complain about (don't we know it).
Yes, the worst case scenario for Yahoo is disintegration into a dead-ringer imitation of AOL.But come on. That is a worst case scenario. And, unlike AOL, Yahoo doesn't have to throw its entire business model out the window.
When Yahoo was trading in the high $20s, we were against the idea of tossing out Jerry and the board in favor of, say, Carl Icahn's buddy Frank Biondi. But with Yahoo at $12, we are confident that just about anyone could blow into town and squeeze out a lot more value. (Including, we would venture to say, us).
Did we mention that Yahoo is obese? Fire a few thousand people, and you'll generate an incremental $1 billion of cash flow right there.
Sell off those Asia assets and that's another billion plus. Sell the company's third-party ad network business (emerging as a big strategic error), sell search to Microsoft or Google, focus the company on what it does really well, and you get a few more billion to work with. And that's before you get to basic blocking-and-tackling business ops and intelligent R&D spending.
Yahoo has a global audience of 500 million people. It is trading at well below replacement value (spend $15 billion, and you could not build a new Yahoo today--not one with this global reach and brand). Wringing compelling upside out of the stock at $12 is not rocket science. At this price, it's not even basic arithmetic.
So we say again: Yahoo at $12 is ridiculous.
See Also: Yahoos To Management: Please, Please Tell Us What's Going On
Vanity Fair has a list of the 25 best news photographs. Many are familar but I had never seen the photo of Roman Polanski sitting outside his house after his wife's murder.
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Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired Irish startup Polldaddy for an undisclosed sum. The purchase gives WordPress an infusion of polling technology and seems to be justified simply on the basis that bloggers love polls (we use PollDaddy here at TechCrunch for many of our posts).
There appears to be a plugin rollup strategy of sorts underway at the highly decentralized blogging startup, one that will result in the absorption of features into the WordPress codebase that are currently provided through extensions. Automattic recently purchased Intense Debate, a small TechStars startup working on an advanced commenting platform. Further back, it also acquired Buddy Press, a project for layering social networking features onto WordPress, in March and Gravatar, a universal avatar system, last Fall.
Like Intense Debate, Polldaddy doesn’t offer its technology to WordPress publishers alone - and it doesn’t plan to phase out its support for other platforms post-acquisition. But we can expect both companies’ efforts to be driven primarily towards improving WordPress - both the open source version offered at WordPress.org, but even more importantly the hosted version at WordPress.com (with which Automattic can actually make money). PollDaddy has already been baked into WordPress.com for its 4.4 million bloggers.
Given the economic concerns that many startups (domestic and global) have in these volatile times, I’m sure that both PollDaddy and Intense Debate are happy to have found a home within a larger and better funded startup. The fact that PollDaddy is based in Ireland shouldn’t have much impact on Automattic’s corporate structure. As CEO Toni Schneider explained at a recent Startup2Startup event, Automattic has no central office and all its employees work remotely from home, only to meet up a couple times per year as a company.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Poster design by Jonathan Hoefler.
The developer of a great Mac OS X video conversion utility, called VisualHub, closed up shop earlier this month. While future plans for the beloved app were initially up in the air, things fortunately changed for the better.
Our sister blog, code.flickr has launched their own string of 5 Questions:
“This is our version, asking questions of those that develop, hack and fiddle with Flickr in new and interesting ways. Of course we couldn’t start with anyone else but KrazyDad (aka Jim Bumgardner).
Jim founded the Flickr Hacks group back in the day, a great place to hang out and ask question if you want to learn how to bend Flickr to your will. In 2006 he also coauthored the Flickr Hacks book for O’Reilly and happily for us he hasn’t stopped tinkering with Flickr yet.
So, without any further ado, 5 Questions for Jim Bumgardner.”Photos from krazydad / jbum.
Updated 4:51 p.m. By Howard Kurtz At 4:01 Eastern Daylight Time today, CNN put Barack Obama over the top. According to the network's map, he now has 277 electoral votes. "A real stunner," Wolf Blitzer said. The "Breaking News" moment came about when correspondent John King turned Virginia blue on the color-coded map, moving it from the tossup category to an Obama state. The commonwealth hasn't gone Democratic in a presidential race since 1964. "As...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.
Jonathan Ive, Apple's Senior VP of Industrial Design, said he thinks the interior of the MacBook is hotter than the exterior. Before you start questioning either his man- or geek-hood, why not take a look for yourself?
This morning we were the first to bring you the news of John McCain nationwide robo-call campaign charging that Obama is putting "Hollywood Above America", whatever that means. As is so often the case, we got the original tip from a TPM Reader. And once we reported it, we heard from a host of you who'd already gotten the call in your own state.
So I wanted to take a moment again to remind you that we need your ears and eyes. We're fine if they remain on your face. We don't need you to send them in. But we rely on you to tip us off about robo-calls you get, mailers you receive in the mail, ads you see running on TV. If you hear or see something that seems out of the ordinary, don't assume we already know about it.
You can contact us at our tip and comment email address which is linked right up there at the upper right hand corner of the site. Those emails don't just fly off into the ether. I still read most of them. And for those I don't manage to get to (we get several hundred a day), I'm one of eleven full time staffers here at TPM who are reading them too. So they all get looked at. And they are very often the basis of our biggest exclusives.
And one more point. Now we're in the final three weeks of the campaign. This is when the really squirrelly stuff happens. In part that's because this is when both sides are throwing everything they have into the mix. But it's also close enough to the final day that campaigns figure (often rightly) that they won't get caught with whatever they're doing until after election day -- at which point they won't really care.
So keep your eyes out. And remember we rely on you, more directly and consistently than you likely imagine, to let us know where the story is, where we should be throwing our resources and what outrage or major development the bigs just aren't seeing.
Everybody's gaming out what McCain 'has to do' tonight. But we'll leave that nonsense to others. We're going to focus on the big questions: Like, will he make eye contact with Obama? And will he finally have the nerve to bring up Bill Ayers to Obama's face, as he's been doing all week on the stump, or flinch like last week? We take a look at the options in today's episode of TPMtv ...
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
Autumn is here - a time for transition. In the northern hemisphere this means cooler, shorter days, the appearance of colorful foliage, harvest time, and feasts and festivals. Collected here are 34 photos of the season, from around the world. (34 photos total)
The Millions has a brief report on a Haruki Murakami reading that took place recently in Berkeley, CA.
Writing a story for me is just like playing a video game. I start with a word or idea, then I stick out my hand to catch what's coming next. I'm a player, and at the same time, I'm a programmer. It's kind of like playing chess by yourself. When you're the white player, you don't think about the black player. It's possible, but it's hard. It's kind of schizophrenic.
Murakami sounds like a cool cat. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of my favorite novels, one of those books I read at exactly the right moment in my life, like I needed it.
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CBS's Bob Schieffer is the moderator for tonight's debate. And as you'll remember from this exchange with retired Gen. Wes Clark from late June, Schieffer is no stranger to the McCain Tire Swing ...
This fall i'm hitting the road for a two month tour with a full Justseeds print show, accompanying the Gadabout Traveling Film Festival, and the indie-punk band Halo Fauna. We left yesterday and will be traveling into december, going coast to coast with a show almost every night. I brought with me a piece or two by each Justseeds artist, as well as a handfull of my own. Everything is for sale and most things are affordably priced. Odds are we're coming to a town near you so come check us out. The films are totally amazing, the music is fantastic, and the prints look great!
Click below for a full write up and our tour dates!The Gadabout is a DIY touring film festival that screens a program of smart, funny, personal, political, and often absurd short films by extremely talented, independent filmmakers. Although focusing on shorter, humor based films, the selection is not limited to that. The films are thought provoking, fresh, funny, and beautiful to look at. These filmmakers love what they are doing, and their work shows it. Incorporating music and art to the festival, the Gadabout celebrates the diverse talents in the D.I.Y. (do it yourself) and independent arts communities. This year's tour with be joined by Halo Fauna, a three piece band from NY, who play thoughtful and sincere indie/punk rock. Their last full length was released on CD by Plan-It-X records, and vinyl by Salinas Records/Dead Broke.To contact the festival for interviews or more information, you can call eric at (518)207-5318, or email: eric(at)gadaboutfilmfest(dot)com.
or email me at kristinevirsis@gmail.comTOUR DATES
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Oct 15 - Bon Vivant | Buffalo, New York
Oct 16 - Oberlin College | Oberlin, Ohio
Oct 17 - The DAAC | Grand Rapids, Michigan
Oct 18 - Elastic Arts Foundation | chicago, Illinois
Oct 19 - Rock Iowa Sponsored | Des Moines, Iowa
Oct 20 - The Tin Ceiling | St.Louis, Missouri
Oct 21 - TBA | Kansas City, Missouri
Oct 22 - Monolith | Tulsa, Oklahoma
Oct 23 - 1919 Hemphill | ft. worth, Texas
Oct 24 - Monkey Wrench Books | austin, Texas
Oct 25 - Sedition Books | Houston, Texas
Oct 26 - Swampland Minicine | Shreveport, Louisiana
Oct 27 - Alabama Music Box | Mobile, Alabama
Oct 28 - TBA | Navarre, Florida (4PM)
Oct 28 - Sluggo’s | pensecola, Florida (9PM)
Oct 29 - The Beta Bar | tallahassee, Florida
Oct 30 - Transitions Skate Park | Tampa, Florida
Oct 31 - The Fest! Halloween Rules! | Gainesville, Florida
Nov 1 - The Fest. | Gainesville, Florida
Nov 2 - The Fest. | Gainesville, Florida
Nov 3 - Nabby’s Tavern | st. augustine, Florida
Nov 4 - the big farce and a day show for us. | savannah, Georgia (3PM)
Nov 4 - is SC a swing state? | charleston, South Carolina (8PM)
Nov 5 - The Hanger | Athens, Georgia
Nov 6 - Wonder Root | atlanta, Georgia
Nov 7 - Beth Town! | Chattanooga, Tennessee
Nov 8 - Skull Alley | Louisville, Kentucky
Nov 9 - RagTag | Columbia, Missouri
Nov 10 - Solidarity | Lawrence, Kansas
Nov 11 - John Elway’s basement | denver, Colorado
Nov 12 - The Boing! | Salt Lake City, Utah
Nov 13 - Missoula | Missoula, Montana
Nov 14 - the sky needle probably | seattle, Washington
Nov 15 - "back to olympiaaaaa" | olympia, Washington
Nov 16 - PDX | portland, Oregon
Nov 17 - Diversions | ashland, Oregon
Nov 18 - The Fire House | Arcata, California
Nov 19 - The Long Haul Infoshop | Berkely, California
Nov 20 - swamp donkey! | santa cruz, California
Nov 21 - The Biko Garage | Santa Barbara, California
Nov 22 - vegan chorizo at pokeez! | san diego, California
Nov 23 - The Trunk Space | phoenix, Arizona
Nov 24 - The Cottage | flagstaff, Arizona
Nov 25 - Basement Films | Albequerque, New Mexico
Nov 26 - Universe City | Norman, Oklahoma
Nov 27 - Radradrad House | Little Rock, Arkansas
Nov 28 - Little Hamilton | Nashville, Tennessee
Nov 29 - The Cinemat | bloomington, Indiana
Nov 30 - Chop Chop | columbus, Ohio
Dec 1 - ModernFormations | pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Dec 2 - Halo Fauna, Gadabout Film Fest, Kristine Virsis/Just Seeds art show tour ends! | brooklyn, New York -
By Kidane John Yohannes
For an artist, dialogue with the audience is a unique resource. Feedback can not only influence future work but also allows for the creator to engage directly with their audience. For many independent filmmakers this immediate and intimate dialogue is empowering, allowing them to easily communicate with those who are impacted by their work. One of the best ways to begin this connection is through a survey.
Unlike a test screening a survey allows the filmmaker to gage their audience before they go into production. Documentary filmmakers and social activist organizations may want to create a survey to test the potential interest in a subject, discover how people find out about screenings or get a better understanding about Independent Film in the US.
Filmmakers for Conservation, for example, are posting a green survey to find out how big our "footprints" actually are. And this organization, Arts Engine, Inc., is currently hosting a reader's survey to help them to create better websites and carry out their mission more effectively.
Smaller organizations and independent mediamakers do not necessarily need to achieve the typical, 1,000 sample size of a Gallop poll to provide an adequate cross-section. Consider the science behind how a survey works. Naturally not every one can be reached to complete a survey thus making sampling the science of choice.
According to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), "sampling is based on probability theory - in its broadest sense, if we can choose respondents randomly and appropriately from the larger population, the results from that random sample will be very close to what we would get by interviewing every member of the population." Filmmakers can still accurately gauge the larger audience's interests and needs even if their response rate is small.
Kenneth Frankes, production editor for Facts and Findings, a quarterly journal for legal assistants published by the National Association of Legal Assistants (NALA) agrees. "We are fortunate to get 50 responses (out of 6,000 subscribers), and yet I consider the small sampling extremely valuable."
The expensive and often time consuming methods of reader survey mailings and on-site focus groups are no longer a hindrance to today's filmmakers who have at their fingertips a plethora of web-based resources at their disposal.
Contacting directly the members of your Facebook group or fan page, or using online tools such as Twiigs, PollDaddy and the popular Surveymonkey can allow you to quickly and easily find out what your audience is thinking.
A survey is the perfect tool to strengthen your relationship with you audience and help you to gather the information needed to make better decisions. Not only is it important to create a survey it is also vital to take them. Participation allows you to think critically about the subject you are engaged in, influence the outcome of future projects and in one particular instance offer you the chance to win an awesome Flip Camera.
Further Resources
This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.
Oh, hey, folks: it's Blog Action Day. And I was resolved not to miss it this year, and what did I post about this morning? Shoes. sigh
This year's Blog Action Day topic is "poverty" -- and usually, when we think of poverty, we've been conditioned to think poverty is a problem Someplace Else, someplace far away, where we see news reports of barefoot children and people lined up with begging bowls.
But, of course, people are poor everywhere (some people in our own neighborhoods are poorer today than they've ever been). And so one of my favorite charities has always been the Greater Chicago Food Depository. It's hard to be hungry -- and harder still to be hungry in a country where there's fast food on every block, sugary drinks advertised on every billboard, and where an apple can cost more than a hamburger.
If you want to help your neighbors get enough to eat, please do consider making a donation to your local food bank or food pantry.
And (on a lighter note) if you want to help one of our vintage-pattern neighbors ...
Rita at Cemetarian is updating her site, and wants to know what you think of the recent changes. If you make a useful suggestion, she'll offer you a 20% off coupon! And then you can send your savings to the food bank, and everyone's happy!
Ben Smith has just posted a remarkable account offered by a Republican consultant who conducted a midwest focus group on an unreleased adver-sleazement created by an unnamed third party group.
Check out what one white male in his 50s who voted for Dole, Bush, and Kerry had to say about Obama:
"I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."And even better, check out what one woman who is in her late 50s and is a Clinton-loving Democrat had to say:
"Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."This is a person who actually believes that Obama was in a "terrorist group," and she's still backing Obama.
Relatedly, a remarkable finding in the new New York Times poll: While 64% said they'd heard a lot or some about William Ayers, only nine percent cited it as an association that bothers them.
Given these numbers, it's hard to imagine that McCain will hit Obama over it at the debate tonight. But McCain's in a box: If he doesn't, and if his campaign continues to play the Ayers card, he'll get hit over and over for not being willing to bring him up to Obama directly.
At Gizmodo, Jesus Diaz posits that Jobs is preparing to leave the company, “probably very soon”.
I’d say no. Having Tim Cook and Jony Ive on stage with him was certainly different, and it may well be part of grooming both of them to take bigger public roles. But it’s hardly unprecedented for Jobs to act more as MC than showman during an event. He played an even smaller role in the keynote at WWDC 2006 when Leopard was introduced; most of the demos were presented by Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall. Diaz writes:
[Jobs] was saying: “Hey, look, Apple is more than Steve. These are The Guys, the Goodfellas, the A-Team. They share the same vision I have. And they are going to push the company forward when I change my office chair for a hammock and caipirinhas on my private beach in Hawaii”.
I think he’s right that Jobs is proud of, and has tremendous faith in, Cook and Ive. If Jobs dies or gets really sick, Apple’s obviously going to have to replace him. But so long has he’s healthy, working at Apple is exactly the thing Jobs wants to do. He’s consumed by his work, and I think it’s only in the last two or three years that Apple has gotten to the point where Jobs feels he has a decent set of crayons at his disposal. In Jobs’s mind, the iPhone is only the beginning of what a truly flourishing Apple can produce. Why would he leave now? “A hammock and caipirinhas on a private beach” would be living hell for Steve Jobs.
The NY Times reports that a growing number of women are taking up parkour.
"There are certain disadvantages to doing parkour as a woman," Zanevsky said. "The most annoying is if you're training alone, as I do in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the unwelcome attention from guys. You get catcalls, because you're doing these weird movements.
And there's a video! (via fimoculous)
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A lot of times, some of the most satisfying things about using Movable Type are the little touches that make managing a site easier or more convenient. One of those great, unheralded features that's been around since MT4's release is a simple ability to reply to any comment directly from the Movable Type application.The feature is documented as part of our larger guide on Managing a Community with Movable Type, but since it's a handy shortcut, it's worth calling out on its own. Simply point at any published comment in a comment listing page in Movable Type, and you'll see a "Reply" link appear. (If you've set your display options for that listing page to "Expanded", you'll always see a Reply link next to the Edit link.)Click the Reply link, and a simple window will pop up with the full text of the comment you were replying to, along with a big space for you to type your reply.As soon as you click on "Submit", your comment will be published on the relevant entry or page. If you're using threaded comments on your site, Movable Type will automatically display your comment as a child comment of the one that inspired it.There are lots of other ways to make use of this convenient feature, but this one should be a winner if you live in the Movable Type administrative interface all day and prefer to respond to your community from that familiar environment.
Tonight's the big night: the season finale of Project Runway. Also, a presidential debate. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
- Pelosi: Transit Funding a 'Given' in Post-Election Stimulus Package (Time)
- Weiner Staying in Mayoral Race No Matter What (NYT)
- Report: NYC Construction Boom Nearing an End (NYT, News)
- MTA Hawks Bonds on the Radio, With Koch as Pitchman (NYT)
- Brooklyn CBs Endorse City Plan to Reduce Alternate-Side Parking to Once a Week (Bklyn Paper)
- Revitalized Columbus Park Sings With Street Life (Planetizen)
- City Planning OKs Garbage Truck Garage for West Soho (Curbed)
- FedEx Pays $10.7M/Year in NYC Parking Fines (City Room)
- Evaluating the Bike Commuter Benefit (Green Inc)
- SF Bike Coalition Organizes 'Gas-Free Fridays' (Car-Free USA)
We were fortunate to have renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan (director of the Emmy Award-winning "Yes We Can" video) offer to create a short film explaining the ideas behind Creative Commons. He interviewed CC board members Hal Abelson, James Boyle, Joi Ito, Michael Carroll, Lawrence Lessig, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Eric Saltzman, Jimmy Wales, and Laurie Racine and used the results as the basis for this terrific piece, entitled A Shared - Culture.Download
A Shared Culture is available in several formats:
License
Creative Commons License
A Shared Culture by Jesse Dylan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.
Today the NY Times ran my story about dashi, a look at how Western chefs across the country are now cooking with this essential stock of Japanese cuisine. As regular readers of the Report know, I'm intrigued by dashi. I thought to add a few more ideas about this remarkable broth to expand on the article.
The NYT piece included a dashi recipe graciously shared by chef Sono-san of the amazing restaurant Kyo Ya (which was just awarded a Michelin star, by the way -- congratulations, Sono-san!). It's for an all-purpose dashi, or niban dashi, meaning "second." Second? Kombu and katsuobushi dashi (kelp and dried bonito), Sono-san explained to me, is prepared in two stages: Ichiban dashi, "first" dashi and niban dashi. The first dashi is a stock meant for clear broths (suimono). Ichiban dashi is very delicate and meant to be consumed quickly, within ten minutes, he said. Here's how Sono-san prepares his, if I got it right:
- 2 liters of soft water (hard New York City water won't work - Sono-san has a water softer in the restaurant)
- 20 grams of kombu (see below)
- 80 grams of katsuobushi (see below)
In a saucepan, soak the kombu in water for 20 minutes then bring up to heat until it reaches 60 degrees Celsius. You'll see small bubbles appear along the sides and bottom of the saucepan. Remove the kombu. Turn off the heat (I think that's right, I'm going to double check). Add the katsuobushi and let it steep in the liquid until the flakes sink to the bottom. Strain through a cloth lined fine mesh sieve. Don't squeeze the flakes, which will cloud the liquid.
The result is a fragrant, super umami-rich stock. Add a pinch of salt or drops of usukuchi shoyu and the savory flavor just takes off for the cosmos. The last time I had dinner at Kyo Ya, Sono-san served me suimono with hamo (conger eel), matsutake mushrooms and yuzu rind. So simple but so unbelievably satisfying. Head to this restaurant if you can, and try it. A must.
Okay, back to planet earth and dashi. Niban dashi is an all purpose dashi for miso soup, infusions, any cooking technique that calls for dashi. You can prepare it with the ingredients from the ichiban dashi plus an extra boost of katsuobushi, or you can create niban dasih on its own, as I describe in the article recipe. Either way, this is a really versatile stock. When I tested Sono-san's recipe, I used the niban dashi for miso soup and ohitashi, and both were terrific.
Now, what about kombu and katsuobushi. Reporting the dashi story, I learned a new world about these ingredients (one of the reasons I love Japanese cuisine, so endlessly fascinating). First of all, kombu is not just kombu. Some ten varieties are harvested in the cold waters off Hokkaido, the finest being Ma-kombu, Rishiri-kombu and Rausu-kombu. Each has its own flavor profile, and chefs prefer different ones. For example, Sono-san likes to prepares his dashi for suimono with Rausu-kombu.
Now, on to katsuobushi. Sono-san used "honkarebushi chiai ri" dried, shaved bonito. This mouthful means the katsuobushi was dried with mold and has a strong blood line intact, two qualities which give it a particular flavor dimension. The process for making katsuobusi is complex and jaw-dropping. Check out A Dictionary of Japanese Food, page 200, for more details (a required book if you're interested in Japanese cooking). Also, here's a Japanese language link about kombu and katsuobushi, in case that's helpful.
Final thought: Sono-san mentioned that every Japanese chef has his or her own technique of preparing dashi. There's no "right" way. Yes, there's an underlying method of extraction (kombu) and infusion (katsuobushi), but every chef does with their own choice of base ingredients in the manner they think best. Fascinating.
Please leave me a comment if you have more to share about dashi. I'd love to know.
if you haven't, spend a little time reading about his methodology to understand how he's totally changed the game
My MacBook is already sad enough, thinking about its numerous scars & blemishes, like the colorful red/blue/brown/green stains on the white plastic from rubbing against a New Yorker in my bag, or the chip (well, the hole) in the plastic at the pressure point where I open the screen.
But now--now!--to add insult to injury, my MacBook has to see this?
It's just too much.
Hear ye! I'm trying something new on kottke.org. Sponsorships of kottke.org's RSS feed are now available on a weekly basis. Sponsorships are exclusive and begin next week. If you're interested, check out the sponsorship page for details and get in touch.
P.S. The feed sponsorship idea was borrowed from John Gruber's Daring Fireball. I'd urge you to head on over to check out his sponsorship opportunities, but the DF feed is fully booked through the end of the year. (!!)
P.S.2. Advertising on the site proper continues to be handled expertly by The Deck. If you'd like to advertise on the site, read up on your options there.
Hear ye! I'm trying something new on kottke.org. Sponsorships of kottke.org's RSS feed are now available on a weekly basis. Sponsorships are exclusive and begin next week. If you're interested, check out the sponsorship page for details and get in touch.
P.S. The feed sponsorship idea was borrowed from John Gruber's Daring Fireball. I'd urge you to head on over to check out his sponsorship opportunities, but the DF feed is fully booked through the end of the year. (!!)
P.S.2. Advertising on the site proper continues to be handled expertly by The Deck. If you'd like to advertise on the site, read up on your options there.
You know that millions of new voters have registered to vote in this election. And they're disproportionately Democrats. So Republicans across the country are pulling out every stop to disqualify as many of those voters as possible or gum up the works with procedural delays they're not eligible to vote on election day.
They just had a big victory in Ohio.
The court ruling applies to more than 600,000 new registrations in Ohio. And there's some question whether the new ruling can even be put into effect in time for the November election.
This article from last week provides more detail on the lawsuit in question.
In today's coverage of the new Yahoo! Search radio advertisements, Erick Schonfeld at TechCruch says:
So can an advertising campaign change any of that? Search is not like a soft drink. People use the search engine that they think can do the best job in helping them find things. Now, maybe Google has brainwashed all of us to believe that it does indeed produce more relevant results. And in a blind taste-test more people might choose Yahoo's results. But if that is the case, I'd rather take an interactive quiz that puts each search engine to the test and make my own decision. That would go much farther to convince me to switch than Yahoo's current creative.Funny he suggests that. I remember suggesting exactly that a few years back when I worked in the marketing group for Yahoo! Search. I suggested we do something inspired by Twingine but which hid the engine identity and let users judge for themselves.
Why didn't it happen? Because some of the same people who were convinced that Yahoo! Search was "just as good as" Google (and better in some cases, they said) were afraid that people would realize that this was not the case.
The cognitive dissonance was amusing, but it was also frustrating and stupid. "Either we believe we're better or we don't... Which is it?" is the sort of argument I tried to make.
I guess that question eventually answered itself.
Oh, well...
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Quote of the day comes from Steve Jobs, in the post event Q&A. When asked why the (delicious) new laptops don't support BluRay, Jobs replied with this bon mot, according to MacWorld...
"BluRay is a bag of hurt," Jobs says. "The licensing of the technology is so complex that we’re just waiting until things settle down and waiting until BluRay really takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the drives."
Oh, and seriously, those laptops look delicious, don't they?
If someone in your office ever sends out a mass email about a missing peanut butter and jelly sandwich, retaliate by making a "MISSING" flyer for the sandwich. In my friend's office, one of her coworkers responded to the cry for help by making a flyer for the lost sandwich, which another coworker followed up with by posting a fake newspaper article. The story has a happy ending; my friend informed me, "The sandwich was eventually found and left unbitten."
Related: Peanut Butter and Jelly: A Serious Eats Special Report
Many of you might not know that in addition to being a network of news blogs, TPM is a community with thousands of members. Anyone who wants to can sign in to have his or her own blog, comment on the posts of other readers or TPM staffers, or recommend favorite posts to others.
Today we're announcing myTPM, an upgrade to the current system and a new set of tools that allow you to customize your community experience and choose your favorite contributors to follow. I explain in today's TPMtv...
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
PS: A written explanation of the new tools is here.
"The initial version of the Campaign Finance API offers overall figures for presidential candidates, as well as state-by-state and ZIP code totals for specific candidates. In addition, the API supports a contributor name search using any of the following parameters: first name, last name and ZIP code." Um, yes.
Shared by alaina
Kottke gets political!Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama for President.
To summarize what little I learned from all this: A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia. But he or she cannot change the fact -- if it happens to be a fact -- that he or she is a pathological liar, or a dimwit, or a proud ignoramus. And even in the short run, this must and will tell.
To hammer home his point, Hitchens compares McCain to Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot's running mate in 1992. Oh yes, he went there.
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Now that he has a book coming out on the subject of genius and high achievement, the New Yorker finally lets Malcolm Gladwell write about David Galenson's work on age and innovation. (A previous effort was Gladwell's first article to be rejected by The New Yorker.) For an overview of Galenson's work, check out my post from August.
The most interesting bit of Gladwell's piece is his discussion of the economics of the two different types of artist. The conceptual artist's talent is noticed and rewarded immediately. But conceptual innovators need more help to reach their full potential.
Sharie was Ben's wife. But she was also-to borrow a term from long ago-his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career, or Picasso, whose talent was so blindingly obvious that an art dealer offered him a hundred-and-fifty-franc-a-month stipend the minute he got to Paris, at age twenty. If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.
Gladwell discusses the article in a podcast and will be answering reader questions about it later in the week.
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You could almost mistake Bacon Today for a regular news website, except that this one is focused on "Daily Updates on the World of Sweet, Sweet Bacon." In case our bacon coverage isn't enough, visit Bacon Today for the best in bacon news, recipes, reviews, and anything else that might be related to bacon, like this parody song about bacon or this quote about bacon. Too bad it doesn't smell like bacon.
Robert Downey, Jr. as Watson in Guy Ritchie's upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie. More photographs from Variety here.
We take a look at the features that distinguish the options in Apple's new notebook lineup to help curious readers decide what best suits their needs.
Album: Tical 2000: Judgement Day (Def Jam; 1998)
Songwriters: Samuel Barnes, D'Angelo, J.C. Olivier and Clifford Smith
R&B Peak Position: #29
"You and I/ Until the day we die..."
Though the late '90's reigned with Puff Daddy & Co.'s "shiny suit"-friendly, disco-sampling hip-pop, there remained a heavy hunger for rap's more rugged entities, most notably the anti-mainstream antics of the Wu-Tang Clan and it's many off-shoot solo acts. Focal member Method Man helped satisfy that hankering when he finally released 1998's apocalypse-obsessed Tical 2000: Judgement Day, the long-awaited follow-up to his highly-praised 1994 debut.
Unfortunately, in it's deviation from it's predecessor's well-appreciated insulated construction, the uneven 2000, with it's numerous guest performers and producers, overdose on skit interruptions and over-long heft, was met with a mixed response. At the center of the many complaints was that smack dab in the middle of the album Meth had provided the buttery D'Angelo collabo, "Make Ups 2 Break Ups", a blatant attempt to build off of his "I'll Be There For You/ You're All I Need" crossover success. "Make Ups" might have been an ill fit within the context of the street-centric full-length, but judged on it's own, the Trackmasters-helmed cut was a definite prize that only strengthened Mr. M.E.T.H.O.D.'s role as the Wu's biggest "star".
Sonically, "Break Ups" was a treat to the ears, aligning soothing Spanish guitar noodling with the smooth, barely-audible falsetto kisses of neo-soul prince D'Angelo. But with this being thug-R&B delivered Wu-style, Meth cuts through the radio sheen, polishing up a firearms, "bitch" and "slut"-filled lyrical arsenal as he damns an unscrupulous ex trying to do all she can to murk up his post-her existence.
The story opens with fond recollections of their romance's beginnings: Boy meets girl, Boy feels girl, Boy humps girl on mom's sofa. But as MM soon learns, big girls might not cry, but they "damn sure lie", and any hopes of a "happily ever after" are quickly demolished once he becomes aware that she's been cheating on him with several of his friends behind his back. After giving her the boot, he soon finds joy in the arms of another, but this doesn't sit well with his ex, who, while trapped in a new, abused relationship, proceeds to make Meth and his current boo's life a living hell with her constant meddling. From ex-girl's unsuccessful attempts of seduction to trying to jump new-girl at the mall with her "crusty ass crew" in tow, Meth's ire towards her only builds, but rather than resort to violence, he gets his retribution by simply noting how pathetic she is ("You ain't want me when you had me/ Now you on
your third baby daddy/ and you hate to see a nigga happy").
Yeah, it might have offered a different vibe than most heads preferred, but "Break Ups"'s silky production and engagingly hood-soaked soap opera storytelling form quietly affirmed it to be a classic one; it also perhaps rescued Meth from experiencing a major sophomore commercial slump, as without it's admittedly awkward album inclusion, Tical 2000 might not have even reached the million-plus in sales it eventually enjoyed.
DL: "Break Ups 2 Make Ups" (YFH)
Amazon.com Widgets
Matthew Cerrone, from MetsBlog: I think a lot of fans were excited when they heard Jerry Manuel in his press conference talking about going back to a hard nose, gritty kind of fundamentally-sound type of offense. I think Mets fans love those type of players, that is kind of what the history of the team is and they love that stuff.
However, Dave from Princeton asks, “How do you evaluate and identify a ‘gritty, clutch player?’ Is there a stat that you look at? Is it just reputation? How do you define gritty?”
Omar Minaya: Well, you identify it by seeing the player in the trenches. A lot of people think that some guys are ‘clutch players,’ but the reality is that they are not really ‘clutch,’ it’s just the perception. A lot of it has to do with perception. People want to perceive one guy to be one thing, but in reality you don’t know if these guys are good ‘team players’ or ‘selfish players’ internally, you don’t know these things. We know that a lot of people, at least I know a lot of players that are considered really ‘tough players’ and they’re not – they are basically ‘selfish players.’
Matthew Cerrone, from MetsBlog: Plus, you then have to apply that to New York. I imagine that brings a whole other level.
Omar Minaya: Yeah, I mean, it is all perception. The perception of how players are and the reality of how they are, a lot of times, they just don’t correlate.
Matthew Cerrone, from MetsBlog: Do you feel it out by asking other players who may have played with him? Like, is it word of mouth? Or, is it…
Omar Minaya: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is a combination of listening to all the players and listening to the other coaches and managers, listening to all of these things to make a true evaluation. I’ll tell you that we do have some guys here that are finding it out. Also, a lot of times, the fans don’t know which players are playing hurt either.
Matthew Cerrone, from MetsBlog: Right, like with Beltran, I would think. I know he spoke with reporters a lot this season, and played through a ton of injuries, and ran out there, and I don’t think he gets enough credit for that.
Omar Minaya: I mean, Beltran is one of the ‘toughest players,’ who grinds it out as much as he can and does it in a smooth fashion. But fans, because he is so smooth, fans don’t see that, you know… I mean, Carlos Beltran, the last few years down the stretch, has been banged up, but he went out and played outstanding, while being really, really hurt. That’s ‘tough.’
Question 5, which deals with the bullpen, will post at 1 pm.
To read a full transcript of this entire interview, click here.
Sarah Palin denounces the "unconscionable voter fraud" going on in Pennsylvania ...
Needless to say Palin's record leaves little doubt that she'd be canning the next round of US Attorneys who confirmed that the charges of voter fraud were bogus.
Fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the new MacBooks are manufactured.
Jacqui Cheng:
The trackpad also knows when you are holding onto something, like a window or a folder. For example, if you are dragging a file across the desktop with your pointer finger and your thumb is holding down the invisible button on the bottom, you can let go with your pointer finger and still be holding onto the file. Move things around all you want just like you would on a normal trackpad, and it’ll figure it out.
By Juliet Eilperin SCRANTON, Pa. -- GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is expanding her political base. At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn., she was all about the hockey moms. But this afternoon, as she made her way to the stage at Scranton's Riverfront Sports Complex, the Astroturf on the floor reminded her that she needed to deliver a shout-out to women whose children play other sports. "All you hockey moms, and soccer...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.
Fraser Speirs: “With some more experience under my belt, I realised that the crushing problem with wireless networking (whether EDGE or 3G) was latency, not bandwidth per se. Doing ‘one request at a time’, particularly for small objects like Flickr’s 75px thumbnails, means that you pay the high time-cost of latency once for every object you load.”
Mike Ash: “One of the longest ongoing controversies in the Cocoa community is how to write your init methods. More specifically, how to properly call your superclass’s initializer. In the hopes of putting this controversy to rest, I want to walk through the right way to write an initializer and exactly why this is the right way.”
Here it is:“Tonight Freedom Rings!”
Reverend Bernice A. King, the youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told the crowd on August 28, echoing her father’s epochal “I Have a Dream” speech given 45 years before. And now the flocks gathered at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High stadium would witness a giant step toward that dream’s realization in the historic nomination of Barack Obama. “This is one of the nation’s greatest defining moments,” she told the roaring audience.
The 85,000-plus people who gathered to hear Barack Obama accept his nomination as the Democratic Party’s first black presidential candidate were a rippling, multihued cloth of humanity—people of all faiths, colors, and generations in rapt anticipation, shedding tears of joy as the sun set over the snow- capped Rockies. But it was more than just a powerful, emotional gathering. It was the outline of a new American majority.
Backstage, as The Black Eyed Peas leader William “will.i.am” Adams prepared to step onstage to perform “Yes We Can” with John Legend and the Agape Choir—a song that, like the candidate it celebrated, seemed to emerge from nowhere to sound a note of idealism in a time of cynicism and strife—he was thinking about his old neighborhood.
In the projects where he was raised—the two-story Estrada Courts in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles—there’s a famous mural of Che Guevara pointing straight at you like Uncle Sam. The graffiti-style words next to Che read WE ARE NOT A MINORITY!! In Obama, Will saw a candidate who reflected his reality. “Obama is probably the first mirror of America,” he said. “The presidents we’ve had before, they’re still portraits that were painted a long time ago.”
People of color are now a majority in forerunner states like California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii. More than two in five Americans under the age of 18 are nonwhite. Census data project that the United States could become majority-minority by 2042, a full eight years earlier than previously expected.
Thanks to hip hop, American popular culture has been thoroughly, to coin a word, colorized. These are all signs that we may be in the middle of an era of expansive racial change. For some, these signs point to fear. For us, they point to hope.
Rewind back to the bitter cold of this past January, when Iowans under the age of 25 delivered Obama’s margin of victory in that first caucus, jump-starting his historic march to the Democratic nomination. In the 14 most competitive states, young people made up more than half of the 3 million new registered voters. Through the primary season, young voters turned out at almost twice the rate they did in 2000.
Young people, urbanites, progressives, and people of color have been the driving force behind Obama’s presidential run. “Barack Obama owes his nomination, in large part, to the strength of those voters,” says BET News analyst Keli Goff, author of Party Crashing: HowThe Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic, 2008), “and the strength of people underestimating those voters.”
Forty years have passed since Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy fell to bullets. In 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon and American Independent Party candidate George Wallace won 57 percent of the electorate by campaigning for the so- called “Silent Majority,” stirring a white backlash against “student radicals” and “angry negroes.” Since that time, racism and generational fear have been a dependable, winning electoral strategy.
Politicos parsed the “Silent Majority” into demographic slivers to more deeply exploit those fears, a process that continues in coded stereotypes like “hockey moms” and “hard- working Americans.” kind of politics that abandoned and contained inner-city youths. In 1992, Pat Buchanan gave the backlash a new name: “cultural war.” Right-wingers went after the hip hop genera- tion in everything from censorship to policing. Would Bill Clinton have won without his Sister Souljah moment? (Google it.)
Read in the right way, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style becomes an important reference for software development.
(link)5.21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat
Young writersInexperienced programmers will be draw at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of newvocabulariesabstractions, the exciting rhythms of special segments of theirsocietyindustry, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.
Read in the right way, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style becomes an important reference for software development.
(link)5.21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat
Young writersInexperienced programmers will be draw at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of newvocabulariesabstractions, the exciting rhythms of special segments of theirsocietyindustry, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.
This is an actual screenshot from the Wal-Mart Canada website:Talk about honesty in advertising... Between this and their listing for feminine spray, it's pretty clear that someone is having fun over at the Wal-Mart Canada website. EDIT: Wal-Mart has since fixed the picture. Now it's a lot less douchey. 
Amos Kennedy, Jr. is an amazing letterpress printer based in Alabama. I was introduced to his work while living in Chicago, show-card posters a la Hatch Show Prints, but often with a political edge, and biting racial commentary. Amos has a great piece about Rosa Parks in the Paper Politics show. He just got a big write-up in the Tuscaloosa News, and it's well worth a read.
It's time again to remember the backstory of the US Attorney Firing scandal. The firings were one thing. But the story behind the firings, what led to them, is key to understanding the current 'vote fraud' scam being played by the Republicans and the media outlets that are going along with the scam.
Remember, the US Attorneys in question were all either Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. In every case, they were appointed by George W. Bush. In most of the cases their firing was tied to 'vote fraud' claims stemming from the 2004 election.
The pattern was very consistent. During the final weeks of the 2004 campaign Republican partisans started pressing claims of widespread voter fraud. In many, though not all cases, the examples they pointed to were not even allegations of voter fraud, but allegations of voter registration fraud: examples of people being registered more than once, non-existent people being registered, etc.
The Republicans making these claims argued that these problems with registration cards were opening the coming election up to widespread vote fraud. Logically, this makes no sense. And, more importantly, all evidence shows this has never happened, certainly not in any widespread sense. Every person who claims otherwise is either ignorant or speaking in bad faith.
Nonetheless, CNN and other national news outlets and especially local media outlets, either out of ignorance or bad faith, ran hard with these stories -- just as CNN is doing now.
After the election, there was a lot of pressure from Republicans in states like Nevada, Washington, New Mexico, etc. (not surprisingly, all key swing states) to have local US Attorneys prosecute these cases. The word came down from Washington, DC, particularly the political office at the White House that this was a top priority. And the local US Attorneys launched into it.
But there was a problem. Most of these were ethical prosecutors. And when they looked into it there just wasn't anything there. Most of the stories weren't even true. And those that were, were obviously isolated and in most cases not done with malice. The number of people who could actually be prosecuted could be counted on one hand. Local Republicans got angry; Karl Rove got angry. And the US Attorneys got fired.
That's the real story of the US Attorney firing scandal. And what we're seeing today is textbook -- exactly the same as what we saw in 2004 and 2006. It's a scam. And the very recent history should be enough for news networks like CNN and others not to let themselves become complicit in this disgrace.
Christoph Niemann shares a series of his New York City cheatsheets, including tips for getting on and off the subway at the proper points, muffin poking (you know, for checking freshness), and a door opening maneuver called "The Northside Eagle".
Whenever I rode the subway with my two older boys, I tried to hold on to their hands at all times. In the process, I developed a special move. I think anyone who saw it must have been impressed.
I would hold the boys' hands as we briskly made our way out of the station, then, just as we reached the turnstiles, I would let go. We would pass through the turnstiles simultaneously, and so smoothly that the boys' hands would still be up in the air when we got to the other side, where I would grab their little fingers again in one fluid motion. (Requires practice.)
These are great fun.
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Matthew from MetsBlog.com was allowed into Shea Stadium Monday.
It must have felt a bit like going to the morgue to identify the body.
Nevertheless, he took a pile of amazing photos and has posted them here for your viewing.
I like this one on the left. You can almost see Loge13 from this angle. Man this is a creepy site.
Also, in case you missed it, The Home Run Apple - ya know, the one the Mets said was to fragile to move?
Well they moved it.
There are some photos floating around, both on SheaGoodbye and also SaveTheApple.com.
We had all been led to believe the Apple would stay where it was. The Mets had officially said Citi Field would have its own new Apple. Where the original one is now going is unknown at this point. Kinda like the partial season ticket holders.
The Apple guys surmise that maybe they are just moving the Apple so it doesn't get damaged by the upcoming deconstruction. Lets hope so.
Hey Apple guys - you did everything you could. Thanks for trying.
The Muji Chronotebook combines the flexibility of a plain paper notebook with the utility of a daily planner.
For each function or feature you add, you lose a purpose. A blank sheet that could've been used in a million different ways can now only be used for a few. Artists aren't going to buy a calendar if they're looking for something to sketch on. Writers aren't going to pick up to-do lists to use as a journal. This isn't a bad thing per se -- by narrowing down on a purpose, a blank sheet of paper can become more useful and relevant to certain people.
Each page of the Chronotebook has a analog clock in the middle, around which you can freely form appointments (just draw a line to the time for the meeting), sketch, make lists, or anything else the mostly blank page beckons you to do. Fantastic idea.
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It took more than a year of watching and waiting, but finally THIS PATTERN is mine:
And I bought it from Wonderful Wiki Contributor Birgit/Tarna's eBay store, which only makes it better. (She also has a Main Street Malls store.)
I love this dress so much. I think it's because (even though the model in the illustration is clearly an ingenue) this seems like a very attractive (okay, let's admit it: sexy) dress for a woman, not just a girl. Think a kind of lush, mid-career Elizabeth Taylor; before women past 35 were encouraged to inject their foreheads with toxins lest -- heaven forbid -- they showed a creased visage (or attempted to raise their eyebrows).
And is it wrong that I want to make this dress in every color (starting with orange)? Possibly best not to answer that.
If this pattern makes you long to buy some patterns yourself, you're in luck: Janet at Lanetz Living is running a sale (while she goes off to welcome her fourth grandchild into the world -- congratulations!). It's
25% off ... just use the code sale25 (make sure it is all one word) and it will be deducted for you. Sale will end at midnight CST on Nov 2nd. You might want to start your browsing with this one ...
You wouldn't think it, but President Bush has been busy with more than just saving the country from financial implosion - he's also had fashion on the brain.
Yesterday, he signed an anticounterfeiting bill that will make the consequences for knocking off a Fendi bag all the more serious and scary to those waiting in the shadows with a pencil and tracing paper. The bill includes that President Bush will appoint a sort of piracy and counterfeit czar who'll chair his or her own committee to fight knock-offs of all kinds (clothes, art, music, etc) in accordance with the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP) Act.
So, basically? The government has allocated lots of money ($25 million) to make a department that helps members of the FBI train state/local officials to seek out the producers of knock-offs, in addition to doubling the fines that intellectual property pirates face, making the job all the more unattractive.
So does this just mean more random public crackdowns on Canal? Or does all this new cash mean the giants (you know who) come tumbling down, too?
Lessons from an earlier credit crisis that led to bankruptcies and a crash on Wall Street, and how New York investment companies responded then.
Hey all, as mentioned last week, we’ll be in NYC for CMJ next week. If you’d like to say hello, please come visit us at Union Hall from 6-8pm Monday, October 20th. We’ll be there having a drink and maybe some food before seeing Fred Wilson’s new favorite band White Denim at the same venue later in the evening. Buy your ticket to the show here.
Wu, gots like come on thru. See you there.
ian
To put ourselves in position to win that late in the game and let it slip away is a feeling hard to explain. A perfect example of how we didn't come through was my at-bat in the eighth inning. They take the lead and Raffy leads off with a walk and I have an opportunity to deliver a big hit and a big RBI and I hit into a double-play. I came up in the sixth with runners on second and third and no outs and lined out. It's a classic case of not taking advantage of the opportunity and that summed up the game for us. We have to hold ourselves accountable.
Now there's nothing more we can do about this game. We have to be ready when the situation arises again Wednesday. We have to put this one out of our minds and figure a way to get it done. In that case, I didn't get it done.
Tomorrow we've got a day off. I'll have to try to find a way to relax and find something to take my mind off. But right now it's sinking in that if we play this way again, it will be a whole lot worse than this. We'll be packing up and going home and we'll know we gave a series away to a team that is not better than ours. Nobody in here wants that.
We receive a lot of email through our contact page, most of which we deal with behind the scenes. But every now and then, something so good comes in that we have to share it. Today, a humdinger of a culinary mystery.
Dear Serious Eats,
In the late 1980s I found a recipe in a magazine (Southern Living, I think). The only thing I remember was that it had to be cooked in an iron skillet. It was made with flour, sugar, and eggs, I think. It was thin, about 1/2 inch. After it was done, I put fresh strawberries on it. I have searched for years for this recipe. Please help.
—Helen------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Helen,
Wow. Have you ever watched Law & Order: Criminal Intent? In it, that crazy fidgety guy, Goren, pieces together the mystery with the barest of clues. This is sort of the food mystery equivalent. Unfortunately, none of us at Serious Eats HQ are in the same league as Detective Goren.But what we do have is a a whipsmart community of food lovers who can answer almost any food question, so I'm going to put this question to them.
Seriously,
Adam
------------------------------------------------------------So, serious eaters: Can you help Helen? Maybe one of you remembers a recipe like this from Southern Living?
Note: For questions like these, it's almost always best to just open it up to the supersmart SE community right off the bat. You can post your most stumpingest questions in our Talk section. It's quick, easy, and free.
Yesterday, I took a trip to Shea Stadium, and was allowed inside to take a few photographs.
Enjoy, if that’s even possible, since it’s quite sad to see Shea Stadium looking like a war zone…
There are no seats. They’ve all been removed.
The skyline has been removed from the top of
the scoreboard. Each number has been
taken down, as well.
The Apple is gone, as are the letters, but the
Top Hat remains in tact…for now.
The dugout is pretty much hollowed out.
I finally got a chance to pitch in Shea. Unfortunately
it was with a Wiffle Ball, and off a dismantled
mound, but, hey, whatever, I’ll take it.
To view all of my photos from my visit to Shea Stadium, in high resolution, click here.
I never thought I'd be posting anything, much less something I loved, from Mister Hitchins, other than to point up his nastiness -- speaking of which, have I mentioned these are interesting times?
(see also this Sunday's NYTimes column by Frank Rich).
via Slate:fighting words: A wartime lexicon.Vote for Obama
McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace.By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 13, 2008, at 10:44 AM ETI used to nod wisely when people said: "Let's discuss issues rather than personalities." It seemed so obvious that in politics an issue was an issue and a personality was a personality, and that the more one could separate the two, the more serious one was. After all, in a debate on serious issues, any mention of the opponent's personality would be ad hominem at best and at worst would stoop as low as ad feminam.
At my old English boarding school, we had a sporting saying that one should "tackle the ball and not the man." I carried on echoing this sort of unexamined nonsense for quite some time—in fact, until the New Hampshire primary of 1992, when it hit me very forcibly that the "personality" of one of the candidates was itself an "issue." In later years, I had little cause to revise my view that Bill Clinton's abysmal character was such as to be a "game changer" in itself, at least as important as his claim to be a "new Democrat." To summarize what little I learned from all this: A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia. But he or she cannot change the fact—if it happens to be a fact—that he or she is a pathological liar, or a dimwit, or a proud ignoramus. And even in the short run, this must and will tell.
On "the issues" in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their "debates" have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.
I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven't felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot's running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America's most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn't qualify him then and it doesn't qualify McCain now.
The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.
It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.
I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.
The Atlantic is getting a redesign. Changes are already afoot over at the web site and Pentagram's blog has an extensive look at the magazine's new look, designed by Michael Bierut, Luke Hayman, and their team. I love the proposed Helvetica cover. The inspiration for the throw-back logo came in part from an appearance of an old issue of the magazine on Mad Men (Bierut is a fan).
BTW, the new cover tells of an article on blogs -- Will Blogs Kill Writing? -- that you will likely be hearing about from all corners of the web when the issue is released next week.
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We're getting old! It's hard to believe, but yesterday was the fourth anniversary of Brownstoner. Here's what we wrote in our initial post, back when the site was hosted on Blogger.com:
Team Brownstoner is completely addicted to brownstones in Brooklyn. We just spent the past six months immersing ourselves in the market, finally buying one last month. We know, peak of the market, blah, blah, blah, but in the end the family needs a place to live. The cramped rental in over-priced Williamsburg just wasn't cutting it. So we wound up buying an old SRO in Clinton Hill and will now spend the next year or so renovating it. In this space, we'll continue to monitor new listings, articles, internet resources, etc. that pertain to buying and renovating historic brownstones in Brooklyn. We'll see how it goes.It goes almost without saying that the fact that the site is still around has as much to do with the enthusiasm and generosity of the Brownstoner readership as it does to our own obsessiveness. So it seems fitting that, completely by coincidence, a group of readers has already organized a get-together for later this week at Union Hall in Park Slope. (Granted it was planned as an end-of-the-world party, but we'll still wear our party hat.) Check out this post on The Forum for more details. We'll be there, along with the likes of Biff, Dave and Montrose.
Shake Shack UWS, 366 Columbus Ave., no phone yet
Initial Projection: October
Current Debut Projection: The latest from USHG, "Mid-October"
Odds, On Time Arrival: 2-1
Eater Projected Opening Date: 10/25/08Take a gander, if you will, at the soon-to-be-unveiled glory that is the Upper West Side Shake Shack. We took a little preview walk through today, as did Sir Danny Meyer and his fam, and we have to say she's looking pretty good. And the burgers: oh they traveled well. But let's start the tour at the beginning.
The entrance: According to managing partner Randy Garutti, the signage outside of the Shack, complete with LED lighting, can be seen from Central Park. Instead of an enclosed sidewalk seating area like they have, they originally planed to install garage doors (a la Barbuto), but the idea was reneged by the community due to some landmarks issues.
Main floor: As mentioned, we now have a C line, replacing the Mad Sq. Park B line, that is designated for anything cold, including milkshakes, concretes, custards, etc. Catering to the nabe, we've also got a stroller parking area and, natch, some little Shake Shack onsies on the merchandise wall. As for seating, we have the enclosed but somewhat open little "sidewalk cafe" with the downstairs dining room and Central Park providing the overflow seating.
Rec Room: Downstairs they have extra seating/a private party room where every kid on the UWS will throw their birthday parties. Garutti is also hoping for holiday parties, Super Bowl parties, business meetings (the TV is hooked up for Power Point) and the like.
The Kitchen: She's a big one. The milkshake station is over twice as big as the one downtown, since milkshake orders much to blame for the long lines. The griddle for the hot dogs is a new design for the Shack team (it rolls the dogs while cooking them, but not in a 7-Eleven way), and the new bun steamer arrived after Garutti took research trips to Chicago's best hot dog spots and discovered the secret to a great bun is a good old fashioned steamer.
The burgers: Along with the fries and the shakes, just like downtown. tktk.
Can you reverse her direction of rotation?
Cognitive Daily at ScienceBlogs took a reader poll and found that two-thirds saw the silhouetted woman rotating clockwise. About the same number were able to reverse her direction.
Those who initially saw the woman rotating counter-clockwise found it easier to reverse her direction -- much as the Necker cube's orientation can be reversed at will. How did you fare? (Check out more illusions in TEDTalks by Al Seckel and Dan Dennett.)
After Friday night, I can finally cross “See Prince Perform at a Teeny-Tiny Venue” off of my “Things I Must Do Before I Die” list. The concert, held in the penthouse of the Gansevoort Hotel, and sponsored by Inocente Tequila, was to benefit Love 4 One Another Charities and Urban Farming and tickets were going for $1,000. Don’t even ask how I got in –- it involved some seriously frantic phone calls and text messaging early Friday evening -– but somehow I did. The show, which began at midnight and didn't end till 4 a.m., was truly magical (and trust me, I don’t whip out the word magical that often). Prince was in great spirits (he was super smiley and cracked a couple jokes) and in tip-top form. The set list included classics like “Cream,” “Purple Rain,” “1999,” “7” (one of my favorite Prince songs) and a whole bunch of covers like “Come Together,” “Crimson and Clover,” and “Miss You.” Everyone was freaking out, drinking lots of tequila and generally just reveling in Prince’s Prince-iness. Famous types like Spike Lee, Anderson Cooper, Dennis Rodman and Tom Green were all in attendance, as was a very muscular-looking Dave Chappelle (he has been working out a lot, he told the audience), who got up on stage for an impromptu comedy set which involved a joke about being served by a Mexican man at a bar in Africa. All in all, good times. Photo from New York Times
Kevin Walsh's Forgotten_NY.com has put together a very comprehensive tribute to Shea Stadium.
From A - the home run Apple - to Z - the Zipper factory - Forgotten NY tries to touch all the bases on this one.
So if your Shea/Mets jones still needs scratching (and I know it does), carve out some time and check out the tribute.
Nice job Kevin.
On another note, I know some of y'all ordered Shea stuff from the MeiGray Group. Has anyone heard from them yet. It has only been 15 days since the last game so I suppose it's early yet. I just want to get those foul polls in the ground before the first frost.
Photo: Courtesy of NBCWhen we first heard that Sarah Palin might go on Saturday Night Live, we weren't sure if it would really happen because it seems like the gang that's been spoofing her so pricelessly this season (Tina Fey most of all) really actually loathes her. Well, as many of our commenters pointed out, even if they do hate her, Palin would be ratings gold. So Palin will go on this weekend and we will all find our own ways to laugh about it.
But today we learned two things — one, several political experts think that Fey's biting impressions of the Alaska governor probably took a very real political toll on the Republican ticket. And two, we learned that Tina Fey, as we suspected, totally does loathe Palin. "That lady is a media star. She is a fascinating person, she’s very likable. She’s fun to play," Fey told TV Guide. As for whether she'll keep playing the role, she might until November. "If she wins, I’m done. I can’t do that for four years," she said. "And by ‘I’m done,’ I mean I’m leaving Earth."
Wait, is there a spaceship leaving Earth in November? And will Tina Fey be the onboard entertainment?? Where do we get tickets?!
They may be going a bit too far with this one. [download]
The Sun is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle, the solar minumum - in fact, it has been unusually quiet this year - with over 200 days so far with no observed sunspots. The solar wind has also dropped to its lowest levels in 50 years. Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm, but are continually monitoring our closest star with an array of telescopes and satellites. Seen below are some recent images of the Sun in more active times. (21 photos total)A sweeping prominence, a huge cloud of relatively cool dense plasma is seen suspended in the Sun's hot, thin corona. At times, promineces can erupt, escaping the Sun's atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K (over 100,000 degrees F). Every feature in the image traces magnetic field structure. The hottest areas appear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate cooler temperatures. (Courtesy of SOHO/EIT consortium)
Slate writer Sara Dickerman's 4-year-old son won't eat his vegetables so she decided to try some molecular gastronomy to fool the kid into eating his broccoli in little spheres.
(link)The tomato water doesn't really transform into spheres so much as blobs with little tails of clear gelatin. And here my son begins to get really nervous; realizing that he will have to eat not only something tomato-flavored but something that in shape and overall texture most closely resembles a tadpole.
the best game I've played this year; coming to Steam and WiiWare later today
Last Friday, I talked by phone for roughly 15 minutes with Mets GM
Omar Minaya, using a variety of questions submitted to me for him by readers of MetsBlog.com.
I will post the audio and transcript of the interview on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, during which we talk about whether he would give another four-year deal to Luis Castillo, if he had to do it again; his plans for the bullpen; and how to be a win-now team in a weak free-agent market; among other things.
In the meantime, here is a quick excerpt…
Matthew Cerrone, from MetsBlog.com:
“Fans were very excited about Daniel Murphy…I am sure you guys are probably excited as well…
“Ed from Melville, NY, asked, “How do you envision Murphy in the line up? What position do you see him playing? And how excited are you about this guy?”
Minaya, on Murphy, speaking to MetsBlog.com:
“Well, first of all, we are very excited. We rarely see a young player having that kind of plate discipline…
“I am comfortable that he is going to play the outfield if we need him to play the outfield. We are also comfortable that he would be able to play first base – if someday Carlos Delgado is not with us. So we’re excited about him, and we envision him that way…
“He is going to play second base in the Fall League, but that was something that was decided a while back before he actually came to the Major Leagues.”
Last week on MetsBlog, I wrote, “I sense the organization sees
Murphy more as a potential solution at first base, not at second base, despite his time in the AFL.”
I’m glad to hear ‘first base,’ straight from Minaya’s mouth, because it puts Carlos Delgado’s future in play, as well as potential solutions for left-field.
The question is, though, if Delgado stays, and a left-fielder is acquired, what happens to Murphy.
That said, it’s always good to have options.
Wow. With the election and the collapse of the economy, I don't think I even realized we were about to hear this award announced. But Paul Krugman, Princeton professor and Times columnist, has won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
A hearty congrats from TPM.
An hour or two ago my 3 year old and I were walking down a dark and narrow road in Yosemite National Park at night under an almost full moon.
him: Dad?
me: Yes.
him: Is this a garden or a park or a forest?
me: It's a forest, but it's also a National Park.
(silence)
him: It took a very very long time to plant all these trees. The trees are big and old.
(silence)
him: Wow.
(silence)
him: When we sleep in the forest will bears come and try to eat us?
me: No.
him: If we see a bear will you hold me very very tight.
me: Yes.
(silence)
him: This is a very very big park. In Brooklyn the parks are very small.
me: Yes indeed.
him: And there are no bears in Brooklyn.
me: No. Not any more.
him: That's sad.
(silence)
him: Can I plant a tree when we go home? Maybe a lot of them?
me: Let's plant lots of them
Filed under:
Tags: bears, brooklyn, parks, trees, yosemite
We took care of business the way we needed to tonight. The reporters were asking if we made a statement tonight. No statement. It's just baseball. Now it's over and we come back tomorrow and try to even the series. What happened with the brushbacks, it's part of the game. It happened. I don't know if it was on purpose or not. Emotions can get out of whack when games are this important. Both teams did a good job not escalating it further.
Right now, we're in a totally different situation than we were when the day started. I won't say today was a must-win, but we've switched the momentum to our side. The two games in Philly, we didn't play our game. We weren't aggressive. Tonight we played our style of ball.
It was great to see the fans come out tonight and stay until the end. They had a lot of energy, they weren't down because of the two losses, they weren't distraught. They were behind us the whole game. I hope tomorrow they're behind us the same way.
We've got Derek pitching tomorrow. I wasn't aware of that until tonight. We're going with the three-man rotation and all three of them have been there for us all year. They've been so consistent. It's up to the offense to respond and put some runs on the board like we did tonight.
Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary . . .
Rowan Atkinson... defines humor as behaving in an unusual way, being in an unusual place or being the wrong size.- Susan Stewart in an article about Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in today's NY Times
Joey Chestnut, the reigning hot-dog-eating champ handily crossed over to pizza earlier today in Times Square, eating 45 slices in 10 minutes. That's roughly 1.7 pizzas a minute. According to the New York Daily News, "He folded the slices—very quickly—and shoved them into his mouth. He jumped around some, to help them go down the hatch, or knocked back water from paper cups. He never appeared to chew. The slices were the typical cheese and tomato sauce variety, dished from a 16-inch pie carved into eight wedges."
(via )
A rare 1612 map of Canada will be auctioned at Sotheby's next month. Is it the same map that went missing from Harvard University? Harvard discovered that its copy of Samuel de Champlain's map was missing in 2005, during an...
Newspapers, already facing a grim economic forecast, are digesting another piece of bad news.
Programmer font surveys show up every couple of months. This one is pretty complete. I had been using Dina for a while, and before that Inconsolata. Recently I installed Droid for no reason other than it came from Google and it was free.
In productivity talks Merlin Mann refers to things like this as fiddling with your work environment as a form procrastination and he's right. Any monospaced font would produce perfectly fine code, but did you see that Ti92Pluspc? So nice. Installing it now…
It’s Thanksgiving in Canada, which feels weird. Thanksgiving for me, since i’m a total plant, is in November. and it involves a full day of eating and football. it’s on a Thursday and the entire day on Friday is spent shopping until i drop. or at least until the husband takes away the credit card. but in Canada, things are a little different. i’ll still be eating turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and peas and sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie. mmmm…pumpkin pie….
but it’s Monday. Monday! and it’s OCTOBER! and there’s no black Friday (boo!). it feels weird, but it’s food. so, who am i to complain? i love food. i love eating it. and cooking it. and baking it. and serving it. and learning about it.
yes, it’s true. you read that right. learning about it.
and luckily for me, i get to learn about food this week. (like the segue there?) McDonalds Canada and The McDonald’s Moms Quality Correspondents have invited me to join their team. To be one of five mom correspondents. To take an unprecedented journey behind the scenes at both the McDonald’s Canada headquarters in Toronto and their global headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. To be there as McDonald’s gives moms across Canada a behind-the-scenes and behind-the-counters look. To be there for the truthiness. to dispel rumors. to answer questions - my questions AND yours.
I’ll be honest. i don’t really eat at McDonald’s…unless you count the occasional coffee. (but, truth be told, as Miss Vodkarella and i have discussed, the iced coffee? the cream? the CREAM! it’s all cream! that was a big mistake! This, of course, is something i want to talk to them about…) but i still want to know. and i’m super impressed that McDonald’s wants us to know.
i’ve been talking to people about this and they are all excited to get their questions asked…and to actually get an answer. They want to know whether or not there is any lard still used in the french fries. They want to know that when they order Chicken McNuggets that they are actually getting, well, chicken. They want to know what happened to the pizza?
they want to know what their healthier options are, if there are any. They want to know about the eggs in egg McMuffins. are they real? They want to know how the apples stay so darn fresh and keep from turning brown.
they want to know.
and i want to know.
and i’m going to get answers.
so, let’s have it! your best question to ask the McDonald’s bigwigs! What do YOU want to know??!?!?!
besides how it is that my son is so darn cute?
The big hubbub of the sports cards blog world this weekend has been Wax Heaven’s announcement that he’ll soon be getting free boxes from Upper Deck to bust, which he will, in turn, give away after opening in a raffle style contest.
So Mario gets: the joy of busting a box of cards, the cost of postage to mail out contents of said box
His readers get: a review of said box of cards, a chance to win the contents of the box for free
I think it’s clear that Mario’s not winning much here, but his readers are.
Now the big problem for some of Mario’s readers is that they think his review will be biased, either out of necessity (he needs to be nice to get more stuff) or simply because he’s getting free stuff. Now, I don’t know Mario. I’ve never emailed or chatted with him online. I’ve never even exchanged cards with the guy. I’ve left a couple comments on his blog, and I think I may have a couple from him in the past. So I’m not able to say Mario is this kind of guy or Mario doesn’t seem like that type.
For people who frequent Wax Heaven, though, it should be obvious that Mario loves card collecting, and those readers should have a pretty clear idea of what to expect from him as this undertaking unfolds. And if those reader’s ideals of Mario aren’t met with these breaks, well, they’ll leave comments saying as much. And if they still perceive a change, they’ll go find a different blog to fall in love with.
And if people think Mario is getting loaded boxes, they can watch for that, too. But I would hope everyone knows that just because some guy on the internet can pull a 1 of 1 of a retired legend and a 16 swatched autographed card of the top 10 home run hitters of all time from his box of Upper Deck Megaultrasupercool 5000, it doesn’t mean that all boxes of Megaultrasupercool are going to have those kinds of pulls. Anyone who’s opened a box of anything should realize that it’s all hit or miss.
And again, the ultimate winner of a stuffed box? Mario’s viewers, who will get a chance to win all the stuffing inside.
I’m not saying I don’t have concerns, but I’ll keep these in mind as I watch the breaks. First, how do you judge the value of a box if you don’t pay for it. Anytime I’ve gotten free things in the mail, I think, even if it sucks, ‘oh well, at least I didn’t pay for it.’ But without paying $50 for the box, how do you tell if that’s what it’s worth? You can certainly guess at it, but that won’t be the same, I don’t think, as laying down the cash first and going from there.
Second: There is a human tendency to want to like things that come from people you like, and it’s hard not to like people who send you free stuff. It’s why record companies call radio stations to set up a rapport. They want you to like their guy, and by extension, the product he has to offer. So you want his things to do well, because you want him to like you, too.
In the end, though, I can offer two bits of advice to Mario before he begins, assuming he reads this blog:
1) Make sure people know that Upper Deck sent the box for free. Make sure that people also know everything associated with this agreement (free ads, sponsorships, what have you). That way, no one can accuse you of trying to be sneaky or unethical.
2) Make sure every knows that the box you are about to break may not represent all boxes. This seems like an obvious thing to me, but now you’re making sure everyone knows that just because your box is filled with the complete Andrew Miller collection, it doesn’t mean that all boxes will be.
So good luck with the breaks Mario, and I hope it takes you where you want the blog to go.
In 2002, I wrote a lengthy response to Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on The Social Life of Paper. Gladwell was addressing a recent book at the time, The Myth of the Paperless Office, and coming to the conclusion, with them, that all this gee-whiz computer technology is not leading to a paperless office, and paper is great, and computers aren’t so great, and hey, you kids, get off my lawn.
Actually, he didn’t say, “hey, you kids, get off my lawn,” but I’ve just now added that because, at the time, I suspected that a significant factor for why we hadn’t seen a paperless office was generational. In my post, I discussed how Adaptive Path (a year old at the time) was highly electronic, particularly in its inner workings. We used paper for deliverables to clients, and contractual documents, and not much else. I finished my post with:
I think what needs to be studied are the differences in computer and paper use across generations. Because I think that the primacy of paper in knowledge work is not simply because of the technology’s affordances; I suspect that it’s largely because “it’s always been done that way.” For me, who begin typing on a word processor at age 12, and who has no trouble reading long stretches of text on a screen, I don’t find that paper necessarily supports my knowledge work any better than digital documents. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m not alone.(Yes, I know it’s obnoxious quoting myself. But it saves you the time for going back to read it.)
Anyway, the most recent issue of The Economist discusses the “return of the paperless office,” and contains such copy as:
“It’s a generational thing,” says Greg Gibson, in charge of North American office paper at International Paper (IP), the world’s largest paper-maker. Older people still prefer a hard copy of most things, but younger workers are increasingly comfortable reading on screens and storing and retrieving information on computers or online. As a result, IP has closed five uncoated-freesheet mills in America in the past decade, and the industry is consolidating. …As new generations of office workers leave university—where their class notes and syllabuses are online these days—they take their habits with them…
And, we get FURTHER proof that Gladwell, though a good storyteller, is terrible at trendspotting and theory-making.
One thing I’ve noticed at Adaptive Path is that, as we’ve grown, we’ve consumed more and more paper relative to our growth. This is because we started hiring more and more folks trained in design and fine arts, and physical materials are crucial for their work. If AP is any indicator, the future for paper is not in documentation, but in creativity. We sketch, draw, scribble, and design with paper all the time. We’ll go through reams of paper as we stream ideas from our fingertips. But we still rarely print deliverables or other documentation. Paper companies need to figure out how to cater to the creative use of paper in the workplace. I’d love to be a researcher in that study…
Shared by Jake DobkinRead full story for latest details.
did they have talking dog movies during the first great depression?
In a recent column, ESPN sports writer Bill Simmons shared his list of best sports pieces ever written. Max from The Millions took Simmons' list and found many of the articles were available online for your complementary reading pleasure. Authors include Gay Talese, Roger Angell, George Plimton, and David Foster Wallace.
(link)
So the baseball Hall of Fame now has an exhibit celebrating the 2008 season.
"Several artifacts, from relief pitcher Francisco Rodriguez's record-setting season for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim include the jersey No. 57 he wore from the Sept. 13 game against the Seattle Mariners when he notched his 58th save, breaking the previous mark held by Bobby Thigpen of the Chicago White Sox. The Hall also is showing off game balls from that game, as well as K-Rod's record-tying 57th save Sept. 11 against the Mariners.The No. 29 jersey worn by Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz on April 22 at Turner Field when he reached the 3,000-strikeout plateau against the Washington Nationals' Felipe Lopez is on display. Also on view is the batting helmet worn by Mariners right fielder Ichiro Suzuki on Sept. 17 at Kansas City, when he reached 200 hits for the eighth straight season, which tied the longtime record held by Wee Willie Keeler, a Hall of Famer since 1939."
The press release contains this little note about Shea:
"More 2008 artifacts arrived at the Hall and will soon join the display. They include items from the last game at Shea Stadium on Sept. 28 between the New York Mets and Florida Marlins; a cap and shirt worn by Brian Gorman, the first-base umpire that day. His father, the late Tom Gorman, worked the plate for the first game at Shea on April 17, 1964."An umpire's shirt? That's what the last day of Shea gets in the Hall of Fame? C'mon there's got to be we could send upstate.
How about a Mets bat? They hardly used any that day.
How about some shards from all the broken hearts of Mets fans? I hear they're still cleaning those up.
How about Scott Schoenweis? Just put him in a case and leave him up there for a year.
Two weeks later and Kingman is still bitter...
