randomwalks/dj

Disclaimer: Base cards may be depicted as Gold or Black bordered parallels. I just needed the image.

Pack 14

UH295 Aaron Miles
UH301 Tony Pena
UH115 Mike Lamb
UH267 Gregorio Petit

UH69 Chad Moeller
UH231 Chris Davis
UH97 Sean Gallagher
UH66 Robinson Cancel
UH234 Carl Pavano
RH-DJ David Justice Ring of Honor

If I hadn’t already promised this away, I know a Junkie who’d be pretty happy in a few days. Come to think of it, that guy seems pretty happy anyway. But this is part of the bounty for the huge haul of Allen and Ginter cards I got a week or so ago.

In fact, I’ve promised the next box’s Ring of Honor cards away, too. I know these cards are well liked by many, but I just don’t get the appeal. Maybe if they honored the 1990 Reds, or the ‘75 or ‘76 team then I’d be interested. But for now I’m happy to share the joy with others.

Pack 15

UH116 Odalis Perez
UH158 Chad Durbin
UH286 Aaron Cook All Star
UH137 Evan Longoria Highlight (Evan hit a walkoff)

I know the reason they did it (to get more Longoria cards in the set), but did we really need a highlight of Longoria’s walk off home run?  Was there something that special about it? What about Zimmerman’s walk off homer to christen the new Nationals stadium? Wouldn’t that have been a highlight to use?

UH316 Ben Sheets All Star
UH5 Chipper Jones All Star
UH25 Lance Berkman All Star
WBC14 Carlos Beltran World Baseball Classic

Did I mention how much I like both this set and the horizontal cards?

MRH-DJ Mets Ring of Honor Davey Johnson

To no one: “My God — a pigeon. That’s the last bird on my list.”
To the cameraman: “You’ll tell me when you’re going to take the picture, right?”

Bonus points for the reference.

The box so far:

Base: 135 out of 330 - 40%
All Star Stitches AS-JES Joe Saunders
Black Border parallel: 1 - UH300 CC Sabathia 26/57, damaged
Gold Border parallel: 2 - UH31 Marco Scutaro 0015/2008, UH78 Dallas Braden 1415/2008
Gold Foil Parallel:9
First Couples: 1 - FC40 Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton
Mets Ring of Honor: 2 - MRH-DJ Davey Johnson, MRH-GC Gary Carter
Mickey Mantle Story MMS68
Word Baseball Classic Preview: 4 - WBC12 Carlos Zambrano, WBC14 Carlos Beltran, WBC16 Paul Bell, WBC21 Carlos Lee
Year in Review: 2 - YR161 Marlon Byrd, YR169 Matt Holiday
Toppstown: 9, including one gold

      

Originally posted by handcollated from Hand Collated, on November 22, 2008 9:36 PM

Special thanks to TPM Reader JY for flagging this old video.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 22, 2008 9:09 PM

November 22, 2008 - 9:42 p.m. - Santa Monica, CA

We celebrated Genevieve and Silvio's birthday at the Ramada Inn in KoreaTown. Before you throw your head back and laugh, stop. This place has an insane dance floor. Go check it for yourself. It's party central. Stealth style. Happy Birthday troublemakers!

Originally posted by hustler of culture from hustler of culture, on November 22, 2008 7:42 PM

Today's Times has a lengthy piece on what got Citigroup into trouble. In general, the plot line is not surprising -- broad problems of corporate culture, lax internal oversight of potentially risky practices, a big, risky and ultimately disastrous move into mortgage-backed securities. There's a lot of criticism of Chuck Prince who inherited the CEO job from Sandy Weill in 2003.

But through all of it, woven into the tale, is the name Robert Rubin.

Rubin, of course, was President Clinton's second Treasury Secretary (1995-99) and his key economics advisor (perhaps even Secretary-in-waiting) as head of the National Economic Council during Clinton's first term. During the 1990s and into this decade Rubin was credited as the key architect of Clinton's economic turnaround and economic expansion.

The Times article notes that in the 1990s, Rubin played a key role helping "loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible by allowing banks to expand far beyond their traditional role as lenders and permitting them to profit from a variety of financial activities." That part we know. And it's fair to note that there was a broad, though very ill-judged and ill-fated, consensus in favor of these reforms at the time.

After leaving Treasury, Rubin signed on as a director and senior advisor at Citigroup, an entity he had helped to make possible by advocating the aforementioned deregulation. Rubin was also, along with Alan Greenspan, a staunch opponent of regulating derivatives.

The Times article notes, with less specificity than I'd like, that Citi's very size, not just its corporate culture, led it into such risky waters. But this passage in particular jumped out at me ...

For some time after Sanford I. Weill, an architect of the merger that created Citigroup a decade ago, took control of Citigroup, he toned down the bank's bond trading. But in late 2002, Mr. Prince, who had been Mr. Weill's longtime legal counsel, was put in charge of Citigroup's corporate and investment bank.

According to a former Citigroup executive, Mr. Prince started putting pressure on Mr. Maheras and others to increase earnings in the bank's trading operations, particularly in the creation of collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.'s -- securities that packaged mortgages and other forms of debt into bundles for resale to investors.

...

"Chuck Prince going down to the corporate investment bank in late 2002 was the start of that process," a former Citigroup executive said of the bank's big C.D.O. push. "Chuck was totally new to the job. He didn't know a C.D.O. from a grocery list, so he looked for someone for advice and support. That person was Rubin. And Rubin had always been an advocate of being more aggressive in the capital markets arena. He would say, 'You have to take more risk if you want to earn more.' "

As you probably know, Rubin has become a key economics advisor to President-elect Obama and is advising the transition, though he seems neither in line for nor interested in a formal appointment. But Rubin's hand does seem present at so many turns in Citigroup's undoing that I see no way of getting around asking what sort of advice he's giving.

Before going any further, I know this post has some of the feel of a gotcha. Some of the best or most successful reformers have been those who knew what needed fixing because they played a big part in creating the mess in the first place. And I've always thought there was something small-minded and immature about trying to strike this or that person from the realm of reasonable debate because they were "wrong" about, say, Iraq, whether the supposed error was in 1991 or 2003. But it's a record that's hard to ignore in present circumstances. And I'm curious whether anyone can point me to any recent (and in this context I'd say the last six months or so) statements or interviews with Rubin that shed light on his current thoughts on what led us to this point.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 22, 2008 6:36 PM

Q: You’ve been rapping for 15 years now. Have you given any thought what you’d want people to remember you for?

A: I want people to know that I was a real hip hop fan… I was a real hip hop cat… he went the way he’s supposed to go, he stayed being himself, he didn’t sell his soul to be someone who he isn’t. I want my kids to know their dad was mean with it. I want the fans to remember that I wear many medals, I’m a veteran in the game and that I made good music.

--Interview with Chef Raekwon

Originally posted by finn from Modcult, on November 22, 2008 5:03 PM

I'm not talking about this gum:

I'm talking about this gum:

Brand spankin' new right out of the first pack of Heritage High Series I opened.

Oligato House put out a warning about the gum in 2008 Heritage High Series. I couldn't believe that Topps gum would taste bad. Not that it ever tasted really good, but it was baseball card bubblegum flavor. This stuff ain't Bubble Yum, but it's passable gum. Topps originally printed up the cards in order to sell more gum in the first place. Gum is what Topps does. So I ripped open my serial numbered pack of gum and started chewing...

Oh. Dear. Lord. What fresh hell is this???

This is not Bazooka gum. I don't know what the heck it is, but it's not good 'ol Topps gum. this gum has a really weird sour taste to it. Not Sour Patch Kids sour, more like milk that was left in the fridge for two months sour. It has sort of a sauerkraut/fermented goat curds/hákarl combination of flavors to it. I chewed it for a couple minutes before having to spit it out and i still taste the nasty stuff. It's really rancid and I'm not talking about the good kind.

What is going on at Topps? Squirrell cards are silly but I can deal. Adding an unobatinable card 661 to the set is really freaking annoying but I will persevere. But fucking up the gum?? What... how... that's just beyond wrong. I don't know man, there's a sickness... there's a serious sickness in Duryea and I don't know if they're going to make it though this one. I sincerely hope they are just setting up a really elaborate punchline for that Sklar Brothers show, because otherwise it's a sad day in the card community.

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on November 22, 2008 1:16 PM

Obama's immediate challenge is to fill the leadership vacuum created by a lame-duck president with historically-low approval ratings who seems to have lost interest in his job (at this writing, he's out of the country) and who's disappeared from the media, and a Treasury chief who has all but punted on coming up with any workable solution to the crisis. But Obama doesn't become president until 12 noon eastern standard time on January 20 -- and the national economy is imploding right now.

How does Obama manage this feat? Two ways: (1) appointing a highly-capable economic team, and (2) telling the nation what he plans to do starting the afternoon of January 20. Specifically:

(1) The members of Obama's new economic team fit the bill. They're reported (I have no inside knowledge) to include Tim Geithner at Treasury, Peter Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget, Jack Lew and Jason Furman at the National Economic Council, and Austan Goolsbee at the Council of Economic Advisors. All have several things in common. They're relatively young, in their late 30s or 40s, representing a generational change and a fresh start. Despite their youth, they're also experienced; almost all were up-and-comers in the Clinton Treasury, NEC, and OMB.

All are pragmatists. Some media have dubbed them "centrists" or "center-right," but in truth they're remarkably free of ideological preconception. All have well-earned reputations as hard workers, well-versed in the technical details of public and private finance. They are not visible veterans of the old battles over supply-side economics or deficit reduction, nor are they well-known to the public. They are not visionaries but we don't need visionaries when the economic perils are clear and immediate. We need competence. Obama could not appoint a more competent group.

(2) The President-Elect has also signaled the country what he wants to do: enact an "Economic Recovery Plan" that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011. In his words (from Saturday's radio address) a plan "big enough to meet the challenges we face ... a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy." Again, I have no inside knowledge, but I'd expect it to be about $600 to $700 billion.

Its focus will be on infrastructure of a sort that will not only put people to work but also improve the productivity of the economy. His words: "We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels; fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead."

In short, Obama's job-stimulus plan will be a down-payment on his larger plan to increase the nation's public investment. "These aren’t just steps to pull ourselves out of this immediate crisis," he says, "these are the long-term investments in our economic future that have been ignored for far too long. And they represent an early down payment on the type of reform my Administration will bring to Washington." He could not be more specific, at least while still President-Elect.

At a time when aggregate demand is shriveling because consumers aren't spending and investors have stopped investing, and exports are shrinking, Obama recognizes that government must be the spender of last resort. He will combine old-fashioned Kaynesian economics with newly-fashioned public investments to pull the economy out of its slump.

By putting his economic team in place barely three weeks after he was elected, and telling the nation what he plans to do immediately after he takes office, the President-Elect is asserting leadership at a time when the the Bush administration has all but abdicated.

Originally posted by Robert Reich from Robert Reich's Blog, on November 22, 2008 11:28 AM

Just a few weeks after our rendez-vous with the Colonel, we were back in New York. This time we drove back and forth through Upstate, but, unfortunately, we didn't really have the time to stop. We were heading to the Big Apple, and we only had about 48 hours to play with.

fig. a: fakin' the A Train

fig. b: Canarsie-bound

We were a little rusty when it came to riding the Metropolitan Transit Authority's subway system, so we paid a visit to the MTA's Transit Museum to get a little practice on some vintage subway cars before moving on to the real thing--you know, with movement, crowds, graffiti, debris, etc. As you can tell, it didn't take us long to get back in the swing of things.

fig. c: oysterettes!

fig. d: yes! it's...

fig. e: strictly vegetable

What we hadn't anticipated was that the Transit Museum is a fantastic repository for vintage advertisements, including plenty of food ads. We especially liked the ones for Oysterettes and for Schmulka Bernstein's kosher cold cuts. Too bad we couldn't find one for Bernstein's kosher Chinese.

fig. f: trains, trains

It's also a great place to take kids. Every kid we saw was having a blast.

fig. g: A & A

Now that we had our NYC legs, it was time to make use of them. One of our very first stops was A & A Bake & Doubles Shop in Bed-Stuy. We'd heard raves about A & A's chick pea doubles with hot sauce, and doubles are quite simply one of our favorite delicacies. A & A's doubles were rather different than the ones we're accustomed to up here (Mister Spicee), but we loved them just the same. Their fried dough was thin but tasty, and their chickpeas were heavenly--sweeter and more fragrant than we'd ever had, with lots of herbs and spices (allspice, nutmeg, etc.). Great hot sauce and tamarind sauce too. A & A is take-out only, but those doubles barely lasted the trip out the door.

fig. h: "it melts in your mouth"

I bought Michelle this Sahadi's halwah tin years ago thinking that we had been there together on one of our visits to New York and that she loved Sahadi's as much as I do. Turns out Michelle had never been there and that she didn't know Sahadi's from Bebe Rebozo. Oops.

fig. i: Sahadi's dried fruit

Well, I finally took her there this time around. Michelle was looking for dried fruit for this year's batches of fruitcake, and though Sahadi's prices could barely compete with the brand spanking new Trader Joe's that's opened across the street, their selection was still pretty hard to beat. She walked out with two pounds' worth of dried citron (and, no, that's not French for "lemon").

fig. j: at the Brooklyn Flea Market

One of the major highlights of our New York trip (actually, it was barely long enough to be a trip--it was more like a fling) was our Sunday morning trip to the Brooklyn Flea Market. There we found tons of great stuff to be had--clothes, furniture, knick-knacks, art, clock faces, etc.--but what left the deepest impression on us was the small but stunning array of food stands.

fig. k: fresh beef taco

Stop #1 was to the rather prosaically named Martinez Food Vendors From Red Hook, seasoned veterans (no pun intended) of the legendary "soccer tacos" scene. We could barely wait to get our hands on a couple of freshly prepared tacos with "the works" for our Sunday brunch, so we marched right over and got busy. Perfect timing, too. They had just finished cooking down another batch of carnitas just as we arrived. Topped with all manner of fixings, plus a couple of lethal hot sauces, these were the best tacos we've had since Frisco.

fig. l: truckin' good

Just as impressive, and even more original, was the Pizza Moto stand.

fig. m: Pizza Moto's oven

Here, Mr. Moto (a.k.a. Dave Sclarow, seen on left) serves freshly baked pizzas from a brick oven built on the bed of a trailer. Good pizzas. Very good pizzas.

fig. n: Pizza Moto's pizza

Sure, they looked a little funny, but they made up for it with a chewy crust, a wonderfully assertive tomato sauce, and some rather tasty blistering. This was pizza #1. #2 was even better. It was also better looking, but I was too busy eating it to snap a shot. Talk about the little oven that could.

When we got back to Montreal I checked to see if our friend Adam "Slice" Kuban had paid a visit yet. Not yet, apparently, but it turns out Mr. Sclarow just recently got some well-deserved coverage in the New York Times. According to the NYT, there's a reason Pizza Moto's pies have so much character: Sclarow honed his skills at Franny's and picked up some additional inspiration backpacking through Italy.

Oh, yeah: and don't miss the stand selling open-faced sandwiches with smoked ricotta and hand-carved prosciutto di Parma on semolina-sesame bread. Among other reasons, they not only use Brooklyn's own Salvatore ricotta, with its unparalleled creaminess, they sell it retail too.

fig. o: gimme!

The very best coffee of the weekend, by a long shot (again, no pun intended), was the macchiato I had at Gimme! My expectations were big, but Gimme! delivered. And then some. After that jolt, it was more like Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!

fig. p: menu, table, upholstery

But the most magical hour out of the 48 we spent in New York, was probably the hour we spent at Café Sabarsky. Michelle had made Café Sabarsky her #1 priority for the weekend after hearing P. wax poetic about chef Kurt Gutenbrunner's meticulous Mitteleuropean pastries. She insisted that we pop in on our way out of town, and god bless her for having been insistent.

Café Sabarsky is located inside the Neue Galerie, specializing in Austrian and German modernist art, and is named after Serge Sabarsky, the Vienna-born art collector to whom the gallery is dedicated. It's got an absolutely note-perfect Central European café feel to it, from the professional service right down to the upholstery.

fig. q: apple strudel

And the pastries? My apple strudel was among the very best either of us had ever had, a perfect marriage of tangy sliced apple filling, the flakiest of strudel doughs, and plenty of ground walnuts,

fig. r: strudel + sachertorte + kaffee = bliss

while Michelle's sachertorte was simply fantastic, leagues better than anything we'd ever experienced. It was light as a feather and had the most exquisite chocolate flavor, yes, but really it was that homemade apricot preserve that made all the difference. Truly outstanding. And that whipped cream!

So there you have it.

MTA's Transit Museum, Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn Heights, (718) 694-1600

A & A Bake & Doubles Shop, 481 Nostrand Ave., Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

Brooklyn Flea Market, Lexington and Vanderbilt, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Sundays

Gimme!, 228 Mott St., (212) 226-4011

Café Sabarsky @ the Neue Galerie, 1048 5th Ave., Manhattan, (212) 628-6200

aj

fig. s: the occasion

[Thanks to H. for the hospitality. Thanks to R. & M. for providing us with the occasion.]

Originally posted by aj kinik from ...an endless banquet, on November 22, 2008 4:25 AM

On August 20th, 2008, I took these pictures of Citi Field. The construction crew had knocked off for the day, leaving the new stadium's sign in limbo. They eventually did finish the sign the next day bu given Citigroup's status, the ballpark may look like this again soon.

Citigroup closed Friday at $3.77 a share. ATM there are all kinds of unseemly rumors out there about what might happen to the namesake of the Mets new home. Normally, this would be a good time to mock CitiField and the decision that went into tearing down Shea...but these are not normal times. Things are rough out there and I hope everyone is hanging in there, still employed and not checking their 401K too often.

Thanks to everyone who sent e-mails and  comments. No I did not shut down Loge13.com.  After we got the letters about partial season ticket plans, I decided to take a few days off from Loge13. That turned into a few weeks and my longest stint away.

I have to admit, I also could no longer look at photos or watch videos of Shea Stadium coming down. I had grand designs to go to Shea each weekend and maybe pick through the rubble. Ultimately, this felt way too macabre and depressing. So in the words of some former Shea Stadium residents, I chose to Let It Be.

Also, there was this little thing called the financial meltdown. As a business journalist, the past few months have been like covering the invasion of Normandy in terms of historical magnitude. However, D-Day only happened on one day; this current thing just keeps going and going and - unlike that other war - we still don't know who the enemy is. The point is, you didn't see alot of war correspondents updating their blogs around June 6, 1944, did you? That's what I thought.

So I'll be slowly cranking up Loge13 again. Between Willets Point, new stadium details, the Shea memorabilia fiascos and the hundreds of e-mails y'all have sent me, there's lots to catch up on. Plus there all those fantastic moves the Mets have made to make the 2009 version even better than the 2008 team!!!!

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on November 22, 2008 4:04 AM

Part one of this trade was posted on the 13th. Yes, I'm way behind in everything. Let's knock out the second package from David in that video mailer, shall we? It's actually better than the first one.

2008 Topps Shea Stadium

I don't know what this is from, but it rules. There's no card number on the back so I'm honestly stumped. Paging JayBee... You are wanted at the white courtesy phone...

2007 Turkey Red John Smoltz jersey

Dang, these cards are sweeeeet. I have no idea when the Braves ever wore black jerseys, but it's best not to think too hard about such things. Card collecting is more fun when you maintain the suspension of disbelief.

A Mess O' Mickey Mantles

Four of 'em from the Turkey Red Set. I think one of them is even a short print, but I'm too lazy to check.

2008 Moments & Milestones Greg Maddux

I still like this set. I'm glad it's dying a horrible death in 2009, but it was fun while it lasted.

2007 Topps Frenchy McLowOPS

Ok internet detectives!!! Game. In Turner Field. 2006 most likely, maybe 2005. Francoeur in Right Field. Braves scored 1 in the fifth, opponent scored at least 1 in the 7th. WHAT GAME IS THIS PHOTO FROM???

2008 Chipper Jones 50th Anniversary Star Rookie

I'm looking forward to seeing this design again in 2008 Heritage.

2006 Opening Day Chipper Jones Funny Photos

I didn't know this card even existed... My Chipper collection just went up by 1.

The rest:

2008 Topps Bobby Cox
2007 Turkey Red Chipper Jones
2008 Artifacts Jeff Francoeur
2008 Spectrum John Smoltz
2008 UD First Edition Kevin Millwood
2008 UD First Edition Greg Maddux
2008 UD First Edition Tom Glavine

Excellent stuff, David... let's trade again sometime.

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on November 22, 2008 2:40 AM

I love some of these photos, all off David's reblog.

Here's about the cutest 'roo I've ever seen. (Photo from here.)

 

The contradictions of Dubai (photo from here):

 

The parrots of Brooklyn (from here):

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on November 21, 2008 9:22 PM

Your Life Work Series (1947)

Just discovered this wonderful little gem from a post on TYPO-L (ATypI). It’s from a series of films produced by Holmes (Burton) Films, Inc. Enjoy!

Thus press work is particularly fitted for young men who like to work with machines…. Work conditions are generally satisfactory, as are housing, hygiene, and hours.

Fancy a change of career?

Printing — your life work series (1947) — Vimeo.

Via archive.org

click for a random post from iLT

Originally posted by johno from i love typography, the typography and fonts blog, on November 21, 2008 2:07 PM

Ben Smith points out that the statement from Hillary's spokesperson, which says today's reports are "premature," is nonetheless basically confirmation that she and Obama will reach a deal and she'll be his Secretary of State.

In truth, it's hard to read it any other way. Here's the statement from Hillary spokesperson Philippe Reines again:

"We're still in discussions, which are very much on track. Any reports beyond that are premature."

To my knowledge this is the first public statement from Reines or Hillary that directly addresses the actual possibility that she'd take the gig. That makes it significant. And that statement confirms that the talks are "very much on track."

Sure, maybe it's premature to say that they've reached a final deal. But still, consider how far out there the Clintons are on this. Bill's post-presidency has been thoroughly and publicly vetted. Hillary's camp has leaked info about her private deliberations. Her confidants are leaking that she's made a final decision. And now, Hillary's spokesperson has confirmed the advanced nature of the discussions.

It's impossible to imagine that this isn't basically a done deal for both sides and that they're just hashing out the particulars. The reality is that barring something truly seismic, she'll be President Obama's Secretary of State.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 21, 2008 12:04 PM

For the first time since the birth of our son, Jules, last night Stacy and I went out on a date to see a movie, handing the kid into the very capable hands of a babysitter friend. Given the rarity of this occasion, I scanned Metacritic to make the most of this choice. I dismissed our initial impulses towards safe, fun, and likely forgettable (Quantum of Solace) and we instead saw something that has polarized critics, Synecdoche, New York. Charlie Kaufman is not a slam dunk for me (I loved Eternal Sunshine, and deplored Adaptation), but I know that this movie would incite passionate response.

Well, this morning I woke up still thinking about the movie, which I take as a sign of remarkable success. Though I cannot say that I loved Synecdoche, it has captivated me, and I find myself turning characterizations and story points over in my mind.

Other reviews acknowledge how this film shares many similar themes with Kaufman’s other work (memory, neurosis, love, melancholy) though one crucial quality they neglect to point out is silliness. Whether it’s the New Jersey Turnpike in Being John Malkovich, the stoned techs in Eternal Sunshine, or in this movie, Tom Noonan’s initial appearances, or the house on fire, Kaufman revels in the silly. It’s probably worth remembering that Kaufman got his start in TV sitcoms, and he can still make an audience laugh. I don’t mean to suggest that silliness implies a lack of depth — in Kaufman’s world, it becomes a tool or irony or absurdity, the humor forcing us to reconsider just what it is that we’re seeing.

What most surprised me about this film, compared to Kaufman’s earlier work, is how he engages with the body. From the moment of Olive’s bright green poo, to the Caden’s head trauma, pustules, bloody urine, the therapist’s feet, tattoos, flab, thinning hair, and more, this Cronenberg-ian in it’s bodily obsessions.

The other filmmaker that came to my mind was David Lynch, in terms of the matter-of-fact surrealism that abounds. Perhaps Bunuel would be a more apt reference. This will be the single quality that most frustrates most viewers, because today’s audiences can’t handle the truly fantastic. Explanations are required. So, for example, *why* is Hazel’s house on fire? *Why* is there a divorced man living in its basement? The answer is, “Because.” I found that it felt right, and went with its flow.

The construction of the film made me think of Joseph Cornell’s assemblages. It’s remarkably taut, precise, and eclectic.

For the bulk of the film, I found the narrative to be so cerebral that while I was intrigued by what I was seeing, I wasn’t emotionally invested. That began to shift in the last quarter or so, where the heart-tugging actually worked. The performances in the film are solid throughout, but Dianne Wiest, who comes in around that last quarter, is amazing, and takes the movie to a whole new emotional depth.

(I must say I also love seeing Tom Noonan get a meaty role. His screen presence is so compelling, and pretty much always rewarding.)

Anyway, if you care about cinema, and are dismayed at how few filmmakers are trying to do anything interesting with the form or medium, I recommend viewing Synecdoche. You might not like it, but you won’t help but have a strong reaction.

Originally posted by peterme from peterme.com, on November 21, 2008 11:27 AM

From TPM Reader JB, a former GOP Hill staffer who's moved on to greener pastures ...

How many Congressional Republicans had political identities distinct from that of President Bush, while Bush was still popular among Republican voters?

The answer to this question -- awfully damned few -- is a big reason why the Republican setbacks in the 2006 election cycle were followed by more setbacks in 2008. For years, GOP Congressmen and Senators did what the White House told them to do and said what the White House told them to say; even Republican legislators who had been in Congress long before George Bush was elected President tied themselves tightly to him, avoiding public disagreement on any of the salient issues, particularly Bush's tax cuts, Iraq and terrorism policy and initiatives sponsored by the Vice President.

Obviously 9/11 and the spike in public support for Bush afterward was a big part of this. But the nationalization of American politics, and the vastly greater ability campaign professionals now have to target likely supporters in everything from Congressional redistricting to Election Day turnout activities also contributed -- because most Republican legislators were elected in districts that would support Republicans unless something unusual happened, something that made being a Republican an electoral liability.

Bush took care of the rest himself. When his great popularity among Republicans turned into modest popularity only among Republicans, the GOP legislators who had identified themselves with him and his White House/campaign organization had no where to go. A final factor in 2008 was the fact that many Republican legislators still had safe seats, even while the GOP brand nationally was in free fall. These legislators were hearing from their constituents what they had since 2001 -- support the President -- and they did.

Well, what happened, happened for the Republican Party, and the question Republicans now have to ask themselves is what they are for now that they cannot any longer just be for Bush. It's a question that could take years to answer if Barack Obama turns out to be a bad President. If he turns out to be an effective President, it could take a generation or more.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 21, 2008 11:08 AM

Can we make it a condition that Richardson can only become Commerce Secretary if he agrees to grow back his beard?

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 21, 2008 10:52 AM

Hillary spokesperson Philippe Reines says the reports that Hillary has decided to accept the Secretary of State gig are "premature."

Asked for comment on the stories, Reines emails me this:

"We're still in discussions, which are very much on track. Any reports beyond that are premature."

It's still possible that it's true that she's told confidants that she'll accept the gig and that this statement refers to the question of whether she and Obama have shaken hands on it. But perhaps a bit of caution is in order.

Late Update: Jake Tapper reports that after deciding against taking the gig...

On Thursday, many people in Obama's world reached out to Clinton and convinced her to take the job.

By Thursday night, she had conveyed to President-elect Obama that she was interested in the job. In other words, she essentially accepted his offer.

Details are still being worked out, but everything is on track for Clinton's nomination for the job to be announced after Thanksgiving, along with other members of the Obama national security team.

That would square with the statement from Hillary's spokesperson, as well as the Obama camp's claim that the deal is "on track." She's decided to take the gig, but she and Obama haven't shaken hands on the particulars.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 21, 2008 10:42 AM

A few Friday afternoon leaks big enough to make a splash:

Hillary will accept Secretary of State offer.

Timothy Geithner will be Obama's pick for Treasury Secretary.

Bill Richardson is a serious contender for Commerce Secretary.

With all the usual off-the-record and thinly sourced caveats, of course.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on November 21, 2008 10:05 AM

I can't decide if this is bad timing or good timing. I think it's the latter: MOCA's exhibition archive is now available online. Funded by the Getty, this new site features almost every MOCA exhibition from 1983 to 2004, complete with background information and installation shots. It's quite a walk down memory lane. (You can find shows from 2004 to the present here.)

Now picture LA's cultural scene over the last 25 years without MOCA.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Modern Art Notes, on November 21, 2008 9:57 AM

Steven Heller interviews Sol Sender, the designer of the Obama campaign’s “O” logo.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on November 21, 2008 9:56 AM

The noted typographer muses on the deep past and uncertain future of screen typography’s atomic unit. “It’s likely that the pixel’s final and most enduring role will be a shabby one, serving as an out-of-touch visual cliché to connote ‘the digital age.’”

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Subtraction.com, on November 21, 2008 9:52 AM

In celebration of its semisesquicentennial¹, Esquire magazine shares the seven greatest stories ever told in the pages of their magazine and has published them online in their entirety. (See also Esquire's 70 greatest sentences.) Get a load of these initial paragraphs.

The School by C.J. Chivers:

Kazbek Misikov stared at the bomb hanging above his family. It was a simple device, a plastic bucket packed with explosive paste, nails, and small metal balls. It weighed perhaps eight pounds. The existence of this bomb had become a central focus of his life. If it exploded, Kazbek knew, it would blast shrapnel into the heads of his wife and two sons, and into him as well, killing them all.

The Falling Man by Tom Junod:

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? by Richard Ben Cramer:

Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There's a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says to a Boston writer: "Ain't no one in heaven or earth ever knew more about fishing."

"Sure there is," says the scribe.

"Oh, yeah? Who?"

"Well, God made the fish."

"Yeah, awright," Ted says. "But you have to go pretty far back."

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese:

Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

M by John Sack:

One, two, three at the most weeks and they would give M company its orders -- they being those dim Olympian entities who reputedly threw cards into an IBM machine or into a hat to determine where each soldier in M would go next, which ones to stay there in the United States, which to live softly in Europe, and which to fight and to die in Vietnam.

The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes! by Tom Wolfe:

Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering north Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!

Superman Comes to the Supermarket by Norman Mailer:

For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one's life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

[1] That's seventy five years, yo. Quattuordecennial is the anniversarial name for fourteen years. Others. ↩

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 21, 2008 9:07 AM

The Register is reporting the Reuters Second Life bureau has closed, and adds about the embedded reporter there:

Reports of a marketing evac team swooping in a virtual huey to snatch Eric Reuters from the firm's Sadville bureau - while harried by squadrons of flying penises and pursued by crazed locals bent on acts of bestial sexual brutality - could not be confirmed.

I can add details: For a year and a half, I reported under the byline "Eric Reuters" in Second Life, before settling in at my new home here at SAI.

So what happened? Is Second Life dying? No, but the buzz is gone. For all the sound and fury over recent price hikes and layoffs at Linden Lab, Second Life has a community of fanatically loyal users. Since Linden Lab derives its revenue from user fees, not advertisements, Second Life is much more likely to survive the Web 2.0 shakeout than most other startups.

It's hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my "beat," I'd get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I'd right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.

But here's how Linden Lab can make Second Life more fun and a better business:

1. Build good newbie-oriented content. Linden has always taken the position they're in the 3D platform business, and can't be expected to build anything with their own tools or even know what others are doing in Second Life. That argument didn't fly when the gambling scandal broke and it doesn't work now. Second Life has a monster learning curve, and Linden Lab needs to hold new users' hands through every step of their first five or six hours. A big content push isn't even that expensive: the company has proven it can pay Second Lifers $10/hr to do these things and have skilled content creators begging for the job.
2. Acknowledge that Second Life's reputation is now a liability. This isn't the worst thing in the world, but it does mean Second Life can't sit back and hope word-of-mouth brings in hordes of new users like it did back in 2006. Second Life needs to advertise, and the ads need to be hip. New CEO Mark Kingdon has an ad background and should have the right r sum to pull off a makeover.
3. Radically simplify the user interface. The Second Life UI is a mess, and there's been no major changes to it in Second Life's 5+ years. Making the Second Life experience easy-to-use, even graceful, isn't a nice-to-have, it's a business imperative.
4. Abandon the idea that Second Life is a business app. I wasn't in Second Life to play, I was there on assignment for Reuters. The login server would crash. I'd try to reach sources, but Second Life's IM window would hang on "waiting" all day when trying to figure out who was online. "Teleports" -- the ability to move from point to point anywhere in Second Life -- would stop working and I'd get locked out of my own office. These weren't one-offs, they were my daily, first-hand, happens-all-the-time experiences. For all its bugs, Second Life is tolerable as a playground, but enterprise users will never and should never use it for business. Re-focus on the core mission: Keeping the hobbyists happy and converting potential recruits into hardcore (read: fees-paying) users.

None of these things will make Second Life palatable to the general public, but it will draw new traffic and keep a lot more potential users with the right temperment for Second Life from quitting in frustration on their first day. That might be enough for the next year or two.

There's an incredible depth, passion, and camaraderie to the Second Life community that more popular online experiences like MySpace or World of Warcraft can't match. And while I didn't find it compelling, there really is something awesome about buying be able to "buy" a grid of blank 3D space, mold it like clay into an elven forest, a futuristic space station, or a bdsm dungeon, and then invite your friends to hang out.

See Also:
Real Estate Crashes In Second Life, Too: Linden Lab's Bailout Plan
Linden Lab Pulls Back Second Life Price Hikes, Confirms Layoffs
Second Life Offers Business Teleconferencing, Now Penis-Free
How Google Could Have Made Lively Work: No Sex, More Ads, Firefox

Originally posted by Eric Krangel from Alley Insider, on November 21, 2008 9:05 AM

TPM Reader DS (and a number of others) makes a good point ...

You missed one thing about the 2006 elections, something I think was more important than corruption (although not unconnected):

Katrina.

Katrina confirmed everyone's worst fears about the Bush administration and incompetence - many were worried already because the Iraq well wasn't going so well, but they gave him the benefit of the doubt until Katrina. At that point everything people (even many who voted for Bush and GOP) suspected was not only true, but worse than imagined.

Suddenly the curtain fell away and everyone could see what a catastrophe we'd been led into and that the GOP cheerled these incompetents all along the way.

Katrina was the moment - look at the polls - the floor fell out from Bush and the GOP at that exact moment.

This is very true. Though, as DS suggests, I think Katrina was more a catalyst. Unfortunately, by the 2006 election, Katrina as an issue in itself had largely moved off the public radar in all but the places directly affected. But it was a profound catalyzing event. It really settled the public mind on the keys issues of hyper-politicization, cronyism and incompetence which had been which had been minority beliefs prior to Fall 2005 and became majority viewpoints afterwards. It also served as a confirmation and metaphor for the unfolding disaster in Iraq. So this is a critical part of the story. But I still think it was Bush and Iraq -- opinions on both of which had been decisively affected by Katrina -- that drove the 2006 wave.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 21, 2008 8:48 AM

When you get Hillary, you usually get Bill, too, but what about the rest of the foreign policy team she would bring with her to State -- and how well would they mesh with Obama's team?

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on November 21, 2008 8:46 AM

Here's another thing that's got some people worried about Secretary of State Hillary: Would she bring her old-guard foreign policy adviser types with her to the State Department, a cadre who are in some ways out of step with the more progressive crew that steered the foreign policy of the Obama campaign?

There seems little doubt that Hillary would try to bring her people abroad. "Successful Secretaries of State bring in their own people," foreign policy expert Larry Korb of the Center for American Progress told me a few minutes ago.

If Hillary does do this, it seems likely that this will discomfit Obama's foreign policy confidants -- some of whom opposed the Iraq War and argue for a clean break from the Dem establishment foreign policy mindset that's held sway for so long. The question would also be whether Obama advisers would find a comfortable home there and how much of a role they could carve out in crafting America's new global posture.

Among the Hillary people you can imagine going with her to the State Department are old-guard types such as Richard Holbrooke, Jamie Rubin, and Michael O'Hanlon. While some of Obama's foreign policy advisers had served under Bill Clinton, Obama had plenty of fresher faces, such as Samantha Power, who during the campaign strongly condemned the Hillary "conventional wisdom" foreign policy mindset that might dominate should she be elected president.

As Spencer Ackerman puts it in a good rundown on the topic, at stake is more than the potential for internal ideological conflict at State:

The dispute is only partly ideological in nature. While the coterie of foreign-policy thinkers around Obama have been more liberal, in an aggregate sense -- on issues like Iraq and negotiations with America's adversaries -- the Obama loyalists question the boldness of the Clintonites. They fear that Obama's apparent embrace of Clinton represents an acquiescence to the conventional Democratic foreign-policy approaches that they once derided as courting disaster.

The question is whether Hillary people at State will muddle what is arguably Obama's overarching foreign policy ambition: Fundamental change in the way national security is discussed in this country and a true and enduring transformation of our own views of what constitutes just and practical uses of our military power abroad. The dynamic bears watching.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 21, 2008 8:32 AM

If the translation to English is to be trusted, Egypt's strongest man generates 240 horsepower, is medically exempt from working because he might hurt someone in the workplace, and, well, it just gets better from there. Oh, and HE'S NEVER SLEPT. (via delicious ghost)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 21, 2008 8:09 AM

Meredith Stern Mutual Aid $10 This is a five color reduction linoleum block print. Two kitties with tails intertwined in a bed of catnip. This is the last 12 prints available. Linoleum block print 5" x 8" Signed/numbered edition of 39

Originally posted by Meredith Stern from Just Seeds, on November 21, 2008 7:40 AM

Back to back wave elections for one party, like 2006 and 2008, are extremely uncommon in American history. So what are the roots of the 2008 election? Clearly, the trends operated on many levels, some of which will be more apparent to historians in the future than they are to us today. But even now, even over the last eighteen months, there's one cause that remains a mystery to me and for which I've seen no really adequate explanation.

I'd put it something like this.

After the 2006 election, it was very clear that the public had turned strongly against President Bush and the Iraq War. The turn of the public mood wasn't limited to those two issues. There was the general backdrop of discontent with corruption in the executive branch and Congress, and other issues too. But those were the two big, resonating issues.

For a brief interlude after the election, it looked like the congressional GOP might move into some sort of quasi-opposition to the president, at least distance themselves significantly from him. If you remember, there was a brief period of equivocation on Iraq. And then, nothing. Within a month or so, it was clear that elected Republicans were doubling down on President Bush, the Iraq War and pretty much everything else. And that decision was reflected in the presidential nominating campaign as well.

But it's really the congressional GOP that is what I'm most interested in. I remember through 2007 thinking, What am I missing here? How is this not going to lead to another slaughter in 2008? And of course that is exactly what happened. The only thing surprising in retrospect is how aggressively the Republicans seemed to court the disaster.

Let me open it up for discussion. What happened?

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 21, 2008 7:39 AM

The Houston Street improvement project that has turned the thoroughfare into a construction warzone has already led to some interesting street furniture, but if we thought having a seat amidst the traffic insanity wasn't a very comforting thought, imagine having a seat and, uh, doing so much more. That's what the construction crews are dealing with at Houston and Broadway, and one Curbed tipster thinks the new landmark could be put to good public use: "I kinda like the idea of a port-o-potty in which to take a break during that epic trek across Houston Street."
· Good Seats Available at Houston Street Construction Hell [Curbed]

Originally posted by Joey from Curbed, on November 21, 2008 6:41 AM

"It's like, your life is a pair of amazing, limited-edition Louboutins. You can either wear them, or just look at them." - Faran, in a discussion on life (and fashion), last night.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on November 21, 2008 6:06 AM

The lead financial story today on CNN reads, “U.S. stocks looked set to rebound Friday from their recent fall after a report said financial giant Citigroup is considering selling itself.”

The report suggests Citigroup could be purchased by Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase.

In 2006, Citigroup announced it would pay $20 million over 20 years for the naming rights of the Mets new ballpark, which has been named Citi Field.

Nevertheless, despite the financial state of Citigroup, a team spokesman recently told Biz of Baseball, “Everything is fine with our naming rights deal for Citi Field.”

…like in most cases, if Citigroup is bought, it will retain its name and the deal with the Mets will remain in tact…

…that being said, i will forever hold out hope that the Mets and Apple will one day team up to create the first-ever iStadium, in which the team’s new home is a place where technology and baseball join forces…

…the best part is that we could call the stadium The Apple, in honor of the Home Run Apple, the Big Apple, etc…

…and then i woke up…

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on November 21, 2008 5:35 AM

Watch as Vladimir Nabokov reads the first paragraph of Lolita in English & Russian, shares his favorite books, and lists a bunch of things that he doesn't like.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

I'm about due for a reread.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 21, 2008 5:27 AM

Peter write a post a while ago about choosing a good InnoDB log file size.  Not to pick on Peter, but the post actually kind of talks about a lot of things and then doesn't tell you how to choose a good log file size!  So I thought I'd clarify it a little.

The basic point is that your log file needs to be big enough to let InnoDB optimize its I/O, but not so big that recovery takes a long time.  That much Peter covered really well.  But how do you choose that size? I'll show you a rule of thumb that works pretty well.

In most cases, when people give you a formula for choosing a configuration setting, you should look at it with skepticism.  But in this case you can calculate a reasonable value, believe it or not.  Run these queries at your server's peak usage time:

PLAIN TEXT

SQL:

1. mysql> pager grep sequence
2. PAGER SET TO 'grep sequence'
3. mysql> SHOW engine innodb STATUS\G SELECT sleep(60); SHOW engine innodb STATUS\G
4. Log sequence number 84 3836410803
5. 1 row IN SET (0.06 sec)
6.  
7. 1 row IN SET (1 min 0.00 sec)
8.  
9. Log sequence number 84 3838334638
10. 1 row IN SET (0.05 sec)

Notice the log sequence number. That's the total number of bytes written to the transaction log. So, now you can see how many MB have been written to the log in one minute. (The technique I showed here works on all versions of MySQL. In 5.0 and newer, you can just watch Innodb_os_log_written from SHOW GLOBAL STATUS, too.)

PLAIN TEXT

SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT (3838334638 - 3836410803) / 1024 / 1024 AS MB_per_min;
2. +------------+
3. | MB_per_min |
4. +------------+
5. | 1.83471203 |
6. +------------+

As a rough rule of thumb, you can make the log big enough that it can hold at most an hour or so of logs. That's generally plenty of data for InnoDB to work with; an hour's worth is more than enough so that it can reorder the writes to use sequential I/O during the flushing and checkpointing process. At this rate, this server could use about 110 MB of logs, total. Round it up to 128 for good measure. Since there are two log files by default, divide that in half, and now you can set

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

1. innodb_log_file_size=64M

Does that look surprisingly small? It might. I commonly see log file sizes in the gigabyte ranges. But that's generally a mistake. The server I used for the measurements above is a big one doing a lot of work, not a toy. Log file sizes can't be left at the default 5MB for any real workload, but they often don't need to be as big as you might think, either.

If this rule-of-thumb calculation ends up showing you that your log file size ought to be many gigabytes, well, you have a more active write workload. Perhaps you're inserting a lot of big rows or something. In this case you might want to make the log smaller so you don't end up with GB of logs. But also realize this: the recovery time depends not only on the total log file size, but the number of entries in it. If you're writing huge entries to the log, fewer log entries will fit into a given log file size, which will generally make recovery faster than you might expect with a big log.

However, most of the time when I run this calculation, I end up finding that the log file size needs to be a lot smaller than it's configured to be. In part that's because InnoDB's log entries are very compact. The other reason is that the common advice to size the logs as a fraction of the buffer pool size is just wrong.

One final note: huge buffer pools or really unusual workloads may require bigger (or smaller!) log sizes. This is where formulas break down and judgment and experience are needed. But this "rule of thumb" is generally a good sane place to start.

---

Entry posted by Baron Schwartz | No comment

Add to: | | | |

Originally posted by Baron Schwartz from MySQL Performance Blog, on November 21, 2008 4:52 AM

Is there a method to this obit verb tense madness?

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on November 21, 2008 4:20 AM

husband of the year award will likely go to mine, for he not only brought me chicken wings for dinner (mmm…chicken wings…), he also willingly went to see a 10pm showing of Twilight with me last night. Willingly. no force. no bribery. nothing. he was willing to go to the mall theater and watch this tweeny movie with me and 87 of my closest pre-teens and the one orthodox jewish dude who was there ALONE.

i came to terms with this yesterday. please don’t judge me for seeing it. or for racing out to see it before it was actually released. i don’t judge you.

much.

I have to admit, going in i was super skeptical about Robert Pattinson playing Edward. I was hoping for someone more, um, Nate Archibald-like. i even wrote about it here. and here.

BUT

he totally won me over. he was great.

and totally HOT. and totally not unlike Hayden Christensen, who now that i think about it…would have also made an excellent Edward.

the movie itself was pretty much exactly what i expected. a lot of angst. a lot of will-they-or-won’t they. a lot of smoldering glances. a lot of Bella being klutzy. a lot of pretty cheesy dialogue. pretty sub-par make-up jobs, especially on Peter Facinelli’s Dr. Cullen.

only i didn’t have to read any “she murmured” every three paragraphs. and i didn’t have to read Bella’s long and drawn out speeches about how stunning! and painstakingly beautiful! and gorgeous! Edward is.

(but please don’t get me started on the baseball scene. when you see it, you will have to explain to me what the hell was up with the hats. THE HATS?!?? my good god)

(or Jacob’s hair. PUKE)

so, needless to say, tweenAli LOVED it.

tweenAli also enjoyed getting free movie passes on the way out due to complications during the movie. they are doing construction in the mall and halfway through the baseball scene an alarm started going off. insert tween girl pandemonium here. and for about 5 minutes the surround sound disappeared.

and tweenAli also enjoyed watched a teen girl getting busted for having recorded the movie. AWESOME. me hearties, i’ve never seen that before. AAAAAAARRRRR!

so, all in all. no complaints. i’m just really thankful i didn’t have to see a midnight show, like someone else i know. because as it was, i needed a giant big-gulp sized diet coke to make it through the 10:00pm showing. but i’m so glad i did….and like a giggle little tweenybopper, i will be looking forward to the next three movies. because i really want them to just do it already.

*this title is totally unrelated to my post. but i love me some 30Rock. and i love me some Steve Martin. so, obviously, last night’s episode…made my entire month. well, except that whole election day thing. that was a pretty good month-maker too.

Originally posted by ali from Cheaper Than Therapy, on November 21, 2008 3:52 AM

In a report for the New York Post, Joel Sherman writes:

“Luis Castillo requested an offseason meeting in which he implored Mets officials not to trade him and also pledged to re-dedicate himself to offseason training to assure he is in top condition next season…Mets officials were pleased that Castillo did not want to flee from the problems. Instead, he stated a desire to play and win as a Met, and change the fans’ booing opinion of him, as well.”

Nevertheless, the Mets, Dodgers, Yankees and Indians are among the teams who have expressed interest in free-agent 2B Orlando Hudson, reports Jon Heyman on his blog for SI.com.

The Giants have ‘serious interest’ in Hudson as well, writes Chris Haft at MLB.com.

According to Heyman, Hudson is seeking a five-year deal worth more than $50 million.

…i am sure castillo is sincere…the thing is, can he change…

…frankly, the New York Post report reads more like a publicity effort from the Mets for castillo, who, from what i can gather, very few teams are interested in acquiring, regardless of what the Mets do to make a deal more attractive…

…the White Sox are rumored to be seeking a second baseman…they also want to rid themselves of Javier Vazquez…to me, there is a natural fit here…

…the Sox would get a second baseman, and while they’d be obligated to castillo for one extra year than they would have been to vazquez, the deal will cut $6 million from chicago’s payroll…

…similarly, the Mets pick up a fifth starter, which they need, for what amounts to an additional $6 million per season, but they clip their commitment by one season…

…for the Mets to make such a move, though, they need to be  certain of how to replace castillo, and right now they are totally focused on the bullpen and signing a front-end starting pitcher…

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on November 21, 2008 3:48 AM

Scientists are saying that we can make ourselves a whoolly mammoth for as little as $10 million. All it takes is a mammoth genome, a lot of painstaking work, and much computing power.

If the genome of an extinct species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with the genome of its nearest living relative. There are talks on how to modify the DNA in an elephant's egg so that after each round of changes it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes.

The article also notes that if this works for the mammoth, it might also be possible to do the same for a Neanderthal. What an age we live in.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 21, 2008 3:36 AM

Shared by mathowie
This is gonna be big, allowing anyone with a blog to build a community around it.

Today, the TypePad team is launching three exciting new features for everyone who blogs or reads blogs:

• Profiles (a reinvention of TypeKey)
• New commenting capabilities
• TypePad Connect, a new beta service that is free for all bloggers and extends these features to any site.

This isn't just about providing comments and profiles for your site, but also connecting your site's community with the rest of the social web.

As we complete the migration to the next generation platform for TypePad that Ben Trott talked about earlier this year we've released many new features for TypePad bloggers (improved design screens, AutoSave, and custom URLs to mention a few). But we've also been hard at work creating TypePad powered services such as TypePad AntiSpam, Blog It and Blog Link that extend the TypePad service to any blogger across the web. Our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to connect them with a wider community of readers, other bloggers and conversations.

Let's look at the new TypePad profiles first. Ever had a profile that got out of date? TypePad profiles take advantage of things you're already doing, to keep your profile up to date and interesting. If you connect with your Twitter account we'll automatically fill in your status. Leave a comment on a TypePad enabled site and we'll pull that in too. Update your profile picture and it will automatically change on every comment you've already made across TypePad enabled sites. TypePad profiles make it easy to connect with other commenters and conversations across blogs for readers and bloggers alike. And don't worry; we didn't forget the feeds, Microformats or OpenID either.

As a blogger, imagine the benefits to your readers if they are no longer "anonymous" but instead can choose to bring their photo and name with them from their TypePad profile. Commenters can also link back to a rich profile that contains their comment history, links to their own blogs, and even their accounts on Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or dozens of other services.

Open For Comment

We've also launched new TypePad comments in beta that integrate seamlessly with the new profiles. The new comment service has a sleek new interface and great features like threading, easy pagination, OpenID sign in, email notifications of replies and the ability to reply via email - all with TypePad AntiSpam built in - and is a great example of the changes we will be making to the core TypePad application in the coming months.

And now, we're combining all of this into the TypePad Connect beta. These new profiles and comments are not just available for TypePad bloggers but for ANY blogger or web site -- for free. TypePad Connect makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email.

We've made it easy for you to integrate comments and profiles with TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress software and Tumblr or you can just embed a small piece of JavaScript yourself. And we care about design, and know that you care about design too, so we made it easy to style TypePad Connect comments to match your design with just a bit of CSS.

TypePad Connects Everywhere

As I mentioned above, our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to create a service that helps them connect with their readers and other bloggers, in a more open, more powerful, and more meaningful fashion and this is what TypePad Connect is all about. We've been evolving the way that TypePad works, and today TypePad is much more than the blogging service that just celebrated its fifth anniversary, it is a service for all bloggers.

This evolution and openness isn't just limited to our technology or products — our advertising program now has more than a thousand participating bloggers, and many of them use platforms other than Movable Type or TypePad. Our Blogs.com community shows "The Best of Blogs" and many of the sites featured run on platforms that aren't made by Six Apart. Even our community marketing team (which we're calling our "Genius" group right now) has a mandate to support bloggers directly, helping anyone in the community regardless of platform.

There's plenty more coming, but please try our swanky new profiles and comments today on your TypePad blog or elsewhere via TypePad Connect! Let us know what you think and what else TypePad can do to make your blog even more successful. You can learn more about TypePad Connect, comments and profiles at http://www.typepad.com/connect/ or about using these features with your TypePad blog.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Six Apart News & Events, on November 21, 2008 3:05 AM

Parrots of South Slope

(via

Parrots of Brooklyn

)

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on November 21, 2008 1:29 AM

Much has been gushed about Ippudo Hakata Ramen in New York since its grand opening in March this year — news articles reported that New Yorkers waited in the brutal winter cold for up to 90 minutes to eat a bowl of steaming ramen that was a “religious” experience, as quoted in popular food blog, Serious Eats.

A friend who lives there declared Ippudo was her favorite after eating her way through many ramen shops in the Big Apple. With such a vote of confidence, I had to try this tonkatsu (pork broth) sensation when a couple of friends were in town for a visit.

For kicks, I decided to patronize the very first shop built in Ippudo’s chain, which is located in Ebisu, a chic well-heeled neighborhood known for its cool nightlife and culinary delights.

There wasn’t a line to get in (phew…) but it was pretty full of salarymen and OLs (office ladies). I got a seat immediately and pointed to the fabled Akamaru set. Being Singaporean, it was the natural choice as it’s topped with a spicy paste that is not in the Shiromaru one which is just plain tonkatsu soup.

Large bowls of spicy preserved spinach and bean sprouts were placed at every table — this simple but yummy appetizer whetted my taste buds for what was to come.

The rich, savory flavor of the ramen made everyone at the table slurp in silent appreciation. Oishiiiii (delicious)… The noodles were al dente and slippery, while I was just floored by the complexity of the soup — it was a melange of mysterious minced beans (probably from the spicy paste) and punchy meatiness.

You’ve got to try the sui gyozas (steamed pork dumplings) which swim in a clear, light broth and spring onions. Since I’m Chinese by ethnicity, I’m quite critical of gyozas and these little babies were definitely a five-star experience.

What’s unusual about the yaki gyoza (pan-fried pork dumplings) was it had a smidgen of yuzu (Japanese mandarin) paste on the side. The citrus bite completely transformed its heaviness and you’d feel you could stuff in just a few more.

Did I see the Ramen Gods in Ippudo? Almost, just almost. I’ve yet to find another shop that’s better and it’s no wonder that it’s touted as the best ramen chain in Tokyo.

-

Address: 1-3-13 Hiroo, Hainezu Ebisu, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
Tel: 03-5420-2225
Opening hours: 11am – 4am daily
How to get there: Take the West Exit from Ebisu JR station and head towards Meiji-dori. You’ll spot the shop next to a post office.

Originally posted by astrorainfall from Tokyo Metblogs, on November 20, 2008 11:02 PM

Today, the TypePad team is launching three exciting new features for everyone who blogs or reads blogs:

• Profiles (a reinvention of TypeKey)
• New commenting capabilities
• TypePad Connect, a new beta service that is free for all bloggers and extends these features to any site.

This isn't just about providing comments and profiles for your site, but also connecting your site's community with the rest of the social web.

As we complete the migration to the next generation platform for TypePad that Ben Trott talked about earlier this year we've released many new features for TypePad bloggers (improved design screens, AutoSave, and custom URLs to mention a few). But we've also been hard at work creating TypePad powered services such as TypePad AntiSpam, Blog It and Blog Link that extend the TypePad service to any blogger across the web. Our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to connect them with a wider community of readers, other bloggers and conversations.

Let's look at the new TypePad profiles first. Ever had a profile that got out of date? TypePad profiles take advantage of things you're already doing, to keep your profile up to date and interesting. If you connect with your Twitter account we'll automatically fill in your status. Leave a comment on a TypePad enabled site and we'll pull that in too. Update your profile picture and it will automatically change on every comment you've already made across TypePad enabled sites. TypePad profiles make it easy to connect with other commenters and conversations across blogs for readers and bloggers alike. And don't worry; we didn't forget the feeds, Microformats or OpenID either.

As a blogger, imagine the benefits to your readers if they are no longer "anonymous" but instead can choose to bring their photo and name with them from their TypePad profile. Commenters can also link back to a rich profile that contains their comment history, links to their own blogs, and even their accounts on Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or dozens of other services.

Open For Comment

We've also launched new TypePad comments in beta that integrate seamlessly with the new profiles. The new comment service has a sleek new interface and great features like threading, easy pagination, OpenID sign in, email notifications of replies and the ability to reply via email - all with TypePad AntiSpam built in - and is a great example of the changes we will be making to the core TypePad application in the coming months.

And now, we're combining all of this into the TypePad Connect beta. These new profiles and comments are not just available for TypePad bloggers but for ANY blogger or web site -- for free. TypePad Connect makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email.

We've made it easy for you to integrate comments and profiles with TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress software and Tumblr or you can just embed a small piece of JavaScript yourself. And we care about design, and know that you care about design too, so we made it easy to style TypePad Connect comments to match your design with just a bit of CSS.

TypePad Connects Everywhere

As I mentioned above, our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to create a service that helps them connect with their readers and other bloggers, in a more open, more powerful, and more meaningful fashion and this is what TypePad Connect is all about. We've been evolving the way that TypePad works, and today TypePad is much more than the blogging service that just celebrated its fifth anniversary, it is a service for all bloggers.

This evolution and openness isn't just limited to our technology or products — our advertising program now has more than a thousand participating bloggers, and many of them use platforms other than Movable Type or TypePad. Our Blogs.com community shows "The Best of Blogs" and many of the sites featured run on platforms that aren't made by Six Apart. Even our community marketing team (which we're calling our "Genius" group right now) has a mandate to support bloggers directly, helping anyone in the community regardless of platform.

There's plenty more coming, but please try our swanky new profiles and comments today on your TypePad blog or elsewhere via TypePad Connect! Let us know what you think and what else TypePad can do to make your blog even more successful. You can learn more about TypePad Connect, comments and profiles at http://www.typepad.com/connect/ or about using these features with your TypePad blog.

Originally posted by David Recordon from Six Apart News & Events, on November 20, 2008 7:07 PM

On CNN this afternoon Wolf Blitzer quoted some critical stuff I wrote yesterday about making Hillary Clinton the Secretary of State. So I wanted to add some context. It's not just that I have doubts about the job Clinton might do as Secretary of State, which I do, it's also that I want her to stay in the senate. I think it's the perfect job for her. Hell, she's my senator. I've vote for her. Her voice, ability to politick, her smarts, just who she is as Hillary Clinton are really needed there, especially as Ted Kennedy's health may limit his ability to push big legislation in the way he has for decades. It's not one or the other; it's both. She's needed in the senate.

I would note that of the readers who write in and explain why this is such a great idea, quite a few of them have an explanation that boils down to thinking that Obama needs to coopt Hillary, get her working for him on the inside so he doesn't have to worry about her trying to undermine his presidency on the outside. That's a much more cynical view of her motives than I've ever had.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 20, 2008 2:45 PM

I'm going to admit right off the bat, this post is going to suck. When I agreed to to do the Bat Around I thought I'd be able to rip out a post no problem, but once I saw the question my mind locked up. I'm just not up for writing a heartfelt well written origin story, ok? It doesn't help that there are a bunch of excellent posts out there already. So ya know what? I'm gonna mail it in. I've got card show purchases to post, High Numbers to rip, packages to address, trades to scan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped. I gotta post something though, so let's just do it Q&A style, shall we?

Most of us classify ourselves as some type of collector in this industry.

I AM THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE SMAUG.

HOARDER OF CARDS.

EATER OF SNEAKSY LITTLE HOBBITS WHO MESS WITH MY BRAVES CARDS.

MORTAL MEN VIEW MY TOPPS COLLECTION AND TREMBLE.

NOW IF YOU'LL EXCUSE ME, I NEED TO SO SACK GONDOR. THE MINAS TIRITH TARGET HAS BLASTERS OF STADIUM CLUB.

Player collector,

Yes.

team collector,

Yep.

set collector,

Absolutely.

auto collector,

Mmm-hmm.

first world,

Of course.

second world,

Sure, why not.

among thousands of other labels.

Yep, them too.

As you have navigated the hobby, what are the biggest challenges you face as that type of collector or label of hobby enthusiast?

Too many cards, not enough money, really not enough time, stacks of cards toppling and crushing me underneath, losing consciousness from lack of oxygen as the weight of the 1990 Donruss cards flatten my lungs. Typical stuff.

What have been your biggest successes

Buying oddball stuff cheap before they really took off value wise.

failures?

Buying everything else and watching as their value went straight into the toilet.

What would you like to see the manufacturers focus on to make your type of collector flourish in the hobby?

Just make quality cards for every price range in the spectrum. Don't mail in the inexpensive sets. Don't ignore the low end collector. Don't base your success or failure on a gimmick wholly unrelated to the cards themselves. Don't pull a GM and put all your eggs in the basket labeled "Let's Catch Some Whales" and fold when the market dries up for $300 packs. Actually the collector will flourish regardless. These suggestions will help the manufacturers flourish.

Feel free to provide blog examples, scans, poems, haikus, bar napkin messages, medical prescriptions, etc as complements to your posts.

The industry sucks
But I still love to collect
Bring back Topps Total.

If you feel your type has been covered on another blog, tell us how you do things the same or differently.

I think I'm the only bloodthirsty evil dragon card hoarder blog out there, actually. Well, there's Stale Gum, but Chris is more the Great Old One type.

If you don't identify yourself as a type, explain why, or explain how you think of yourself.

I AM LEGION. Of types. I'm complex. A complex card hoarding evil dragon collector thingy. Metaphorically, of course.

You do not have to answer any or all of the questions asked here.

NOW YOU TELL ME

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on November 20, 2008 2:26 PM

The NY Times has photographer David Dunlap running around NYC taking updated versions of the photos he took of the city for Paul Goldberger's 1978 guidebook to Manhattan, The City Observed: New York. Recent Now/Then comparisons include Grand Central Terminal, the corner of 59th St and 5th Ave (where the Apple Store is), and, perhaps the most striking pair of photos, the Hudson River shoreline.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 20, 2008 12:41 PM

When you experiment with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it feels like magic. You toss 500 questions into the ether, and the answers instantly start rolling in from anonymous workers around the world. It was great for getting work done, but who are these people? I've seen the demographics, but that was too abstract for me.

Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?

Answer #1. This is what Mechanical Turk looks like (click for full-size):

Answer #2. About $0.50.

Results

Here's my original request:

Upload a photo of yourself holding a handwritten sign that says "I Turk for ...", filling out why you turk. For example, "I Turk for Cash," "I Turk for My Kids," "I Turk to Kill Time," or whatever else you like. Be honest, be funny, be whatever you like.

As a good faith gesture, here's my photo.

If you have a webcam, you can simply go to Cameroid to snap a photo from your web browser, download the JPG, and upload it below. (Don't worry if the text is backwards, I can fix that myself.) DON'T provide any identifiable information, like your name or email, since that's a violation of MTurk policy.

The result will be used in a collage that can be found on my personal weblog, http://waxy.org. By uploading your image and accepting payment for the image, you give permission to me, Andy Baio, to use your image in all forms and media for any lawful purposes. (That's just cover-my-ass language. I'm almost certainly only going to restrict it to this one project.) The collage will show up there shortly after the HIT is complete. Thanks, everybody!

I started the task at $.05, but only two people responded in the first 24 hours. (And one of those was Joshua Schachter, who I'd told about the project.) Clearly, that was too low, so I increased it to $.25, receiving only eight submissions in 48 hours. (For reference, all 500 of my Girl Talk tasks were done in about an hour.) Increasing it to $.50 got me 20 more submissions in about 48 hours, after which it started to drop off quickly. I wasn't about to give dollar bills to random people for their photos, so I ended the experiment there. People aren't willing to give up their anonymity for cheap.

The final results: 30 people total — 10 women, 20 men. Almost all were white, mostly in their 20s and 30s. 21 said they turked for money, 9 for fun or boredom.

Thanks for pulling back the curtain, Turkers.

 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on November 20, 2008 12:02 PM

The 2008 election voting patterns in the southern United States followed the big cotton production areas in 1860 which in turn followed the shoreline of the shallow tropical seas that covered the southern part of the US 85 million years ago.

This is not a political blog. However, this is a story I couldn't pass up: the story of how voting patterns in the 2008 election were essentially determined 85 million years ago, in the Cretaceous Period. It's also a story about how soil science relates to political science, by way of historical chance.

Headline I'd like to see in 96 pt. type in the NY Times: Obama Elected By Rich Loamy Soils of Cretaceous Seas.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 20, 2008 11:28 AM

This, from the Associated Press, is just fascinating:

More Floridians voted for John McCain than Barack Obama on Election Day, but the Democrat sealed his victory in the state by winning more early and absentee votes.

An Associated Press study of 94 percent of the state's total shows that the Republican beat Obama by almost 5 percentage points on Nov. 4, but Obama trumped McCain by 11 percentage points in early and absentee balloting. Overall, Obama beat McCain 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent in Florida, becoming only the third Democrat in 11 presidential elections to carry the state.

In other words, early and absentee voting put Obama over the top in this key Bush state. Keep in mind that the Obama campaign was very aggressive in pushing supporters to vote early, with Obama or his wife Michelle, or Joe Biden, or other surrogates pushing the message at virtually every rally.

Chalk this up as just another way that the Obama campaign revolutionized modern campaigns -- from now on, no serious presidential campaign will dare not attempt a sophisticated early-voting strategy. And it's yet another reminder, as if you needed one, of just how well-planned and executed the Obama campaign really was.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 20, 2008 11:19 AM

Chase Utley, it was just announced, will undergo arthroscopic hip surgery to evaluate and correct any “labral or bony injury.” It’s stunning news and more surprising due to the high level of play from Utley throughout the season and playoffs. This is a serious injury that in the worst case could keep him out six months if there’s significant tears to the acetabular (hip) labrum. Several pitchers have come back from this type of injury - Justin Duchscherer being one - but no player comes to mind. (Update: Gordon Edes reminds me that Mike Lowell has a similar issue, but that his timetable is much shorter. Lowell is still expected back for Spring Training.) The timetable tells us that Utley may have more severe damage that Lowell.

I’ll be discussing this on XM 175 in moments and will be following this to see what the doctors found in surgery, in order to better assess when Utley will return.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on November 20, 2008 10:00 AM

Just a reminder, BlogAds is doing its fifth annual reader survey and we could really use your help. The more we know about you, the easier it is to sell ads and keep paying the bills.

Help us out!

Originally posted by Andrew Golis from Talking Points Memo, on November 20, 2008 9:48 AM

By Al Kamen Incoming first lady Michelle Obama has tapped Jackie Norris, President-elect Barack Obama's Iowa state director, to be her chief of staff. Norris, a high school government and history teacher and longtime Iowa Democrat, was Vice President Al Gore's Iowa political director in the 2000 presidential campaign and was finance director for future Iowa governor Tom Vilsack in 1998. Norris is half of one of Iowa's premier political couples. Her husband is Iowa...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Originally posted by The Trail from 44, on November 20, 2008 9:24 AM

We're focusing today on Mack "MackDaddy" Whittle, longtime CEO of South Financial Group, who pushed up his retirement last month so he could cash out with a $18 million Golden Parachute just before sending his bank hat in hand to the Feds to get $347 million in choice Grade A Prime bailout money.

You don't have to know too much about complex derivatives or even simple accounting to know that all dollars are fungible. So the more money out to Whittle is more money needed from the taxpayer to keep South Financial Group on its feet.

But we also know Whittle isn't the only one who's pulled something like this. And we want to put together a list of everyone who has. It doesn't have to be precisely like this. Gazillion dollar corporate retreats while you've turned your company over to the Treasury Department's corporate ICU will do fine as well.

So let us know all the examples you can think of.

Late Update: Surprise, surprise -- turns out Whittle was a part of McCain's South Carolina finance team. And now a shareholder is suing him to cough up some of the loot.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 20, 2008 8:55 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on November 20, 2008 7:00 AM

By Zadie Smith

Netherland
by Joseph O’Neill

Remainder
by Tom McCarthy

From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel. Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, took seven years to write; Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, took seven years to find a mainstream publisher. The two novels are antipodal--indeed one is the strong refusal of the other. The violence of the rejection Remainder represents to a novel like Netherland is, in part, a function of our ailing literary culture. All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene.

Originally posted by Zadie Smith from The New York Review of Books, on November 20, 2008 7:00 AM

While in Sapporo, Tadashi and I took a detour from our regional hot pot hunt to check out a famed local dish: the city's signature miso ramen. This is a city that boasts countless ramen joints, two ramen yokocho (old and new) -- narrow alleys chock-a-block with tiny ramen shops, counter service only -- and the "Ramen Republic," a ramen theme park occupying the entire floor of a shopping mall. Why all the hoopla? Let's start with the broth, thick, complex and rich as gravy, slow cooked from pork, ground pork and kombu, maybe also with dried scallops and niboshi, and finally mixed with miso. Then consider the fresh egg noodles, thin like spaghetti but squiggly, lemon-yellow from all the yolks, and satisfyingly toothsome. Now add the toppings: sautéed cabbage and bean sprouts, thinly sliced negi, pickled bamboo shoots (menma) and thick -- in one joint, 1/2 inch thick -- slices of roasted pork. Sprinkle dried, sliced tongrashi (red chilies) and you're set. It ain't light -- we're talking a load of pork fat -- but it's ain't overpowering either. All the flavors were balanced and absolutely delicious. On a bone-chilling Sapporo winter day I can't imagine anything more satisfying. Find the ramen shops Tetsuya and Keiyaki the next time you're in town.

Originally posted by Harris Salat from The Japanese Food Report, on November 20, 2008 3:58 AM

The struggle to adequately render letterforms on a pixel grid is a familiar one, and an ancient one as well: this bitmap alphabet is from La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus published in 1567.

Renaissance ‘lace books’ have much to offer the modern digital designer, who also faces the challenge of portraying clear and replicable images in a constrained environment. Ostaus’s alphabet follows the cardinal rule of bitmaps, which is to always reckon the height of a capital letter on an odd number of pixels. (Try drawing a capital E on both a 5×5 grid and a 6×6, and you'll see.) Ostaus ignored the second rule, however, which is “leave space for descenders.”

I’d planned to introduce this item with a snappy headline that juxtaposed the old and the new — for your sixteenth-century Nintendo! — before reflecting on the pixel’s moribund existence. Pixels were the stuff of my first computer, which strained to show 137 of them in a square inch; my latest cellphone manages 32,562 in this same space, and has 65,000 colors to choose from, not eight. Its smooth anti-aliased type helps conceal the underlying matrix of pixels, which are nearly as invisible as the grains of silver halide on a piece of film. And its user interface reinforces this illusion using a trick borrowed from Hollywood: it keeps the type moving as much as possible.

Crisp cellphone screens aren’t the end of the story. There are already sharper displays on handheld remote controls and consumer-grade cameras, and monitors supporting the tremendous WQUXGA resolution of 3840×2400 are making their way from medical labs to living rooms. The pixel will never go away entirely, but its finite universe of digital watches and winking highway signs is contracting fast. It’s likely that the pixel’s final and most enduring role will be a shabby one, serving as an out-of-touch visual cliché to connote “the digital age.” —JH

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Hoefler & Frere-Jones, on November 20, 2008 3:02 AM

The view out my cousin’s back window in Vermont on Nov 3.

Originally posted by finn from Modcult, on November 20, 2008 12:59 AM

by Adam Brickley

So, the word on the street today is that Sarah may have been offered up to $7 Million dollars to pen a book. Personally, I think she should take it…not for the money but for the exposure. In fact, I have suggested that writing a book would be a good step. However, I have to add one key caviat to my endorsement of the idea: if the publishers want her to just write a “memoir”, she should tell them to take a hike.
Memoirs are for has-beens…and Sarah is clearly just beginning her national career. What we need from her now is vision, not memories. Any forthcoming book by Sarah Palin needs to be forward-looking and contain commentary about the current political scene: what’s right about it, what’s wrong with it, and how we can fix it. If Sarah can use her own past accomplishments as a basis for a broader national agenda (and she can), than more power to her, but she needs to keep ideas at the center of her writing and use her biography only as proof that those ideas work. This book would need to be substantive and meaty, because it will probably be the lynchpin of any effort to dispel the Tina Fey stereotype of Palin-as-airhead.
Personally, I think she could eschew the biography end of things all together and write on policy. She’s one of the nation’s leading authorities on oil and gas policy, and one of its most dogged crusaders for ethical government. It should not be hard for her to crank out a volume on either of those subjects.
So, we can all celebrate the fact that the publishing world wants to hear from our favorite Governor, but we need to make sure that she knows what her devoted “fans” want to hear from her.
So, as the original “Palin fan” (at least here in the Lower 48), I’ll start the chorus:
SARAH, PLEASE FORGET ABOUT THE PAST AND GIVE US A VISION FOR THE FUTURE! (Besides, something tells me that, be the time this thing would go to print, the public might be hungry for some more genuine plans for “hope” and “change”)

Originally posted by Adam Brickley, aka "ElephantMan" from Draft Sarah Palin For Vice President, on November 19, 2008 7:16 PM

IMG00020
Originally uploaded by tuckergurl

I was just in DC and this sign just got me so psyched!!!

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on November 19, 2008 6:58 PM

Erik Ruin/Reid Books/etc. Nothing Factory $15 A musical shadow theater extravaganza in picture book & CD form. The booklet contains all the art & text from the show, with two fold-out sections, a unique screenprinted centerfold and hand-printed covers. The CD contains the art-punk soundtrack with songs and incidental music by the Aetherial Underpants Orchestra and narration by Anissa Weinraub. CD/Picture Book 7"x7",28 pages ed. of 400

Originally posted by Erik Ruin from Just Seeds, on November 19, 2008 2:56 PM

I CAN'T AFFORD TO LOVE NY. Word.

Originally posted by Alaina from alaina browne lives here, on November 19, 2008 1:24 PM

If you’ve forgetten your password to your Wordpress install it has a nifty email-a-one-time-key-to-retrieve-password flow built in. Which for some reason never works on my box. (probably has to do with how I have Postfix setup doing 2ndary MXing) In the olden days the solution to this problem was to connect your database and UPDATE the user_pass field with an MD5 of your desired new password.

But now we’re living in the future, so things are more complicated. I still connect to my database, and manually UPDATE users set user_pass=$hashed where ID=1, but now I need this handy script to generate the hashed password for me. Hopefully the 3 other people in the world this is useful for will find this blog post.

(And now I might start blogging again)

Photo from sarabbit

Originally posted by Kellan from Laughing Meme, on November 19, 2008 1:09 PM

Shared by mathowie
I've loved the Physics for Future Presidents series and actually come around on nuclear power as a result.

Five quick physics lessons for President-Elect Obama from the author of Physics for Future Presidents (@ Amazon). One of the lessons: nuclear power is the way to go.

It's true that after 300 years, nuclear waste is still about 100 times more radioactive than the original uranium that was removed from the earth. But even this isn't as scary as it sounds. If the waste is stored underground in such a way that there's only a 10 percent chance that 10 percent of it will leak -- which should be more than doable -- the risk will be no worse than if we had never mined the uranium in the first place.

Muller asserts that safe nuclear power is a solved technical problem and that the use of it is a political issue.

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 19, 2008 12:46 PM

Inspired by Emmett Williams, a practitioner of concrete poetry, Rob Giampietro has written three poems: Wastebasket, Snowflakes, and Spraypaint.

Giampietro has put out a call for someone to develop a Williams Word Generator. Drop him a line if you can help out...shouldn't be too much different than the many "words within words" generators scattered around the web.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 19, 2008 12:21 PM

And so the Alaska Senate race has truly come to an end: Ted Stevens has conceded the election, after Democratic challenger Mark Begich built up a small but nevertheless insurmountable lead in last night's vote count.

Stevens shocked the political world when the ballots counted on Election Night originally showed him winning the race, despite the fact that he'd just been convicted on multiple felony counts in a corruption trial. This sent organized punditry and Capitol Hill into a frenzy wondering how Stevens could have possibly been re-elected -- but it wasn't over yet.

Begich had banked a lead in absentee voters that happened to not be counted yet -- indeed, he quipped during an appearance on the Rachel Maddow TV show last week that his own early ballot had only just been counted the day before. And when those votes were all tallied, Begich was the winner.

Begich is the first Democrat elected to represent deep-red Alaska at the federal level since Mike Gravel was re-elected to his final Senate term in 1974. And Ted Stevens, who in the 1950s was a U.S. Attorney known for fighting crime and busting corruption, is a lame-duck convicted felon, who even if he had won would have faced possible expulsion from the Senate.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on November 19, 2008 11:57 AM

Congratulations to Don Wakamatsu, Major League Baseball's first Asian American manager. It's been far too long coming.

Won't be too much rooting for the Mariners, but will be rooting for Don, who was the A's bench coach this past year. Perhaps not so surprisingly, given the great number of them in the skipper position, Don played catcher in his college and 12-year pro career.

(While we're on the topic, here's a gratuitous shout-out to my childhood hero Lenn Sakata.)

Perhaps Don's rise means that someday the great Kurt Suzuki or any API will be able to do the damn thing if he so desires.

Originally posted by Zentronix from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on November 19, 2008 11:29 AM

Julie (of So-Retro Vintage Patterns) sent me this link to one of her babies. (Click on the image to visit the listing). Back me up on this, folks -- the woman on the right could fit HER OWN HEAD into her pockets, right? I'm not hallucinating?

Actually, even if I AM hallucinating, I'm not sure I care. Really, if you compare these pockets to all the enormous, obscenely expensive handbags that seem to be causing every celebrity ever snapped by a tabloid to list slightly to the right, they seem restrained -- sane, even.

(The dress on the right is actually very close to one of my favorite patterns, Butterick 7130, only with bonus giant buckled pockets.)

I do like how the woman in red has turned her face away from the spectacle, but is casting her eyes back ... Can't look, can't look away!

I was going to put a poll in this post but it would involve a lot of messy upgrading of my template, so I'll just ask you to leave a comment instead with your answer. Are these pockets:
A) ludicrous
B) practical
C) ludicrous, but less ludicrous than those ridiculous handbags (and certainly less ludicrous than legwarmers, which I thought had died in the 1980s and I'm disappointed in ALL OF YOU responsible for bringing them back, actual ballerina/os excepted)
D) "I'm wearing them right now, AIFG!"
E) Other (please specify).

(I promise I'll do a proper poll someday ...)

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on November 19, 2008 11:25 AM

Filed under things I really don't understand: Silver Towers/University Village, part of a residential superblock complex in Greenwich Village and designed by I.M. Pei, has been granted landmark status by New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Said the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, who battled to preserve the buildings:

Silver Towers is the first post-war urban renewal superblock development in New York City to be landmarked. While such urban renewal projects rarely receive high marks for design, Silver Towers is considered a watershed moment for one of the late 20th century's most respected and influential architects. The design won awards from the American Institute of Architects and the City Club, was dubbed "one of ten buildings that climax an era" by Fortune Magazine, and was cited as a basis for which Pei received the 1983 Pritzker Prize -- the most prestigious award for architects -- for his body of work up to that time. Landmarking Silver Towers not only helps preserve an eminently livable place and honors a great work of architecture, but it also acknowledges the importance of our city's past efforts to create affordable housing and public art.

These may or may not be great buildings, but that whole complex is just this big sucky void between the Village and Soho that no one can get rid of now. Blech.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 19, 2008 11:12 AM

A Hunter College study on cyclist behavior is making the rounds today, getting a long post on City Room. The data measure the extent to which cyclists take safety precautions and follow traffic laws. Helpful stuff to know, except that the findings are presented in a way that feeds into the worst stereotypes about cyclists and a blame-the-victim mentality toward traffic injuries and deaths.

In the post, headlined "Study Finds Cyclists Disobey Traffic Laws," the report authors call for greater helmet use and adherence to traffic laws. Again, all well and good, but leaving it at that reinforces the perception that cyclists would be much safer if only they obeyed the letter of the law. It's easy to hear echoes of NYPD's insistence, in the waning days of the Giuliani administration, that "cyclist error" was to blame in three quarters of deadly crashes. A follow-up study conducted by the advocacy group Right of Way [PDF] found otherwise:

Through careful reconstruction of crash circumstances, we were able to assign responsibility in 53 of the 71 fatal bicycle crashes during 1995-1998 for which we obtained police crash reports. We determined that drivers were highly culpable in 30 cases, partly culpable in 11 cases, and not culpable in 12 cases. Driver misconduct was thus the principal cause in 57% (30 out of 53) of the cases and a contributory factor in 78% (30 plus 11, or 41, out of 53).

Another way to view the Hunter College findings is that rates of traffic violations among cyclists are symptomatic of a system designed mainly to accommodate cars. In other words, cyclists follow the rules more when they feel safe. (City Room cites TA's Wiley Norvell to this effect, toward the bottom of the post.) This has been borne out on Ninth Avenue, where according to DOT's data the incidence of sidewalk riding declined from five percent to below one percent after the protected path was installed.

As Norvell told Streetsblog, "A lot of the traffic violations we see out there happen on streets that have absolutely no provision for the safety of the cyclist."

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on November 19, 2008 11:05 AM

Just a quick heads up that our bug tracking system at:

http://bugs.movabletype.org

will be unavailable from 9am to 1pm (pacific time) on Friday Nov. 21st as we migrate it to a new data center. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience.

Originally posted by Chris Ernest Hall from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on November 19, 2008 10:19 AM

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Rumors, iMac, Apple

It's not even December, yet Macworld rumors are starting to fly. Digital Times is reporting that Apple is among the vendors ready to use Intel's new 65W low-power desktop CPUs, specifically designed for all-in-one computers. The lower heat output makes these great little chips for the iMac.

Additionally, these chips would come with a faster bus, and even run a bit cheaper than the dual core chips Apple is currently using - the 2.33GHz, 2.66GHz and 2.83GHz chips cost $245, $320 and $369, respectively, according to Digital Times.

The iMac has been the star of many Macworld keynote speeches, and we expect the same this year. See you in January!

[Via Electronista]

TUAWRumor: Quad-core iMacs originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Dave Caolo from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on November 19, 2008 9:00 AM

No, don't fret, we're not reorganizing as a bank holding company to access TARP funds. And relative to a lot of other companies our finances are holding up well. But we are considering funding our own micro-bailout ... well, maybe nano-bailout, of one small sliver of the financial services industry.

What am I talking about? We're considering hiring a business and finance reporter-blogger. As you'd probably figure, we're not looking to gin up a TPM version of Squawk Box or have some slicked-back-haired right-winger ranting about zeroing out the capital gains tax or yelling about how undervalued the financial sector stocks are. And business and finance news wasn't something I'd really imagined TPM getting into. But we're already making plans to shift a lot of our TPMmuckraker.com resources to muckraking the financial collapse, the resultant bailout and all the shenanigans and self-dealing and new lobbying gambits. One of the things I most prize about TPM is that we've been able to stay nimble and light enough to be able to focus our resources on where the story is. And there's no getting around the fact that this is now where the story is.

We're not going to try to tell you which stocks to buy and, at least in our news coverage, what policies the government should be following. We'll focus on our area of core competence: muckraking ... finding where the wrong-doing is, the betrayals of public trust, particularly where business and finance intersect with government -- as they are now with a mounting frequency. Hopefully we'll also be pulling together the broader narrative that can be strewn about in a hundred different places and difficult to put together in clear view.

Now, I said above that we're considering hiring someone. And I put it that way because when we formally advertise a job listing we're not bluffing. We only list for a job when we're sure we're going to be hiring someone. In this case, we'll still in the planning stages. (I have to think through the finances and how it fits in with the rest of what we're setting out to do editorially this year.) But if this is an opportunity that interests you we'd like to hear from you. We're looking for someone in all likelihood with one of two professional backgrounds. Either someone with experience in business/financial journalism or (and here's where the bailout idea comes in) someone cast off by the rapidly downsizing financial services industry (who knows how things work) and always wanted to get into journalism and finds this a particularly auspicious moment. If you're interested, drop us a line at talk (at) talkingpointsmemo.com, with the a letter and resume and the subject line "finance blogger".

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 19, 2008 8:50 AM

After some discussions on the OpenSQLCamp 2008 conference we decided to move our development to Launchpad, to be in stream with other MySQL related projects.

We published our patches there https://code.launchpad.net/percona-patches, it is supposed to be main repository for the patches.

We advise to use Launchpad bug system to report bugs and also for feature requests.

---

Entry posted by Vadim | No comment

Add to: | | | |

Originally posted by Vadim from MySQL Performance Blog, on November 19, 2008 8:42 AM

Here's some very good news for those who are hoping that Obama moves quickly and ambitiously on health-care reform:

President-elect Barack Obama's incoming White House chief of staff challenged chief executives and other business leaders Tuesday night to join the new administration in a push for universal health care, saying incremental increases in coverage won't be acceptable.

"When it gets rough out there, a lot of business leaders get out of the car and say, 'We're OK with minor reform.' I'm challenging you today, we're going to have to do big, serious things," Rahm Emanuel said, speaking to The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, a conference convened to elicit corporate opinion on the challenges facing the new president.

Rahm also promised that the new administration would "throw long and deep" on major issues, health care being only one. While the devil will of course be in the details, the fact that Rahm himself is setting the bar very high for the incoming administration's expected health care reform efforts is welcome.

Late Update: Ben Smith has video of Rahm's speech.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 19, 2008 5:42 AM

Tomorrow will be the grand opening of the latest addition to the skyline of Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Atlantis Palm Resort, with over 1,500 rooms, will be hosting an opening ceremony with celebrities from around the world tomorrow night. The rapid development in Dubai and across the UAE hasn't all been easy lately, as infrastructure problems (handling rising levels of waste to match massive development), and world financial struggles have slowed progress. Wealthy Dubai continues to grow though, in both land area as new islands are built, and in height as new, taller skyscrapers are planned to best the Burj Dubai, already the tallest in the world. (28 photos total)

Camels are seen early morning on a beach in the Marina area of Dubai October 16, 2008. (REUTERS/Steve Crisp)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Big Picture, on November 19, 2008 5:39 AM

The Chicago Tribune gives us an update on the two young men featured in Hoop Dreams, the award-winning documentary about high school basketball stars trying to make their way through life and, hopefully, to the NBA.

Gates, the reserved one, has become an authoritative force who leads a church in the Cabrini area. He is married with four kids. Agee, a spirited charmer, doesn't have a regular job but is launching a line of "Hoop Dreams" apparel. He has five kids by five different women.

Agee also spends time working on his non-profit foundation that works with underprivileged kids. Hoop Dreams is available in its entirety for US viewing on Hulu.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 19, 2008 5:09 AM

If Hillary doesn't want -- or doesn't get -- the Secretary of State gig, she appears to have another high-profile option open to her that involves a topic with which she has some passing familiarity:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y), considered a prominent contender to become secretary of State in the Obama administration, was offered an alternative Tuesday -- to be a senior member of the Senate team aiming to overhaul the nation's healthcare system.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who has announced plans to craft sweeping healthcare legislation next year, asked the former presidential contender to head a working group focused on insurance coverage.

Politico reports that this not precisely what Hillary had hoped for on the health insurance front, but it would be a prominent post nonetheless.

Health care, of course, was the domestic issue where Hillary's differences with Barack Obama were most pronounced. But with questions swirling about how prominent a role Kennedy will play in driving reform on Capitol Hill, given his own health, Hillary seems like a logical back-up figure.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 19, 2008 4:42 AM

Sultana, Kenny Kenny and Richie Rich talk some crazy at PAPER's Fourth Annual Nightlife Awards.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on November 19, 2008 4:36 AM

Say what you will about Chuck Klosterman, but I feel like he really has some good lines in his review of Axl’s Chinese Democracy. The opening paragraph mirrors the thoughts I’ve been having leading up to the 11/23 release:

Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It’s more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom? I’ve been thinking about this record for 15 years; during that span, I’ve thought about this record more than I’ve thought about China, and maybe as much as I’ve thought about the principles of democracy. This is a little like when that grizzly bear finally ate Timothy Treadwell: Intellectually, he always knew it was coming. He had to. His very existence was built around that conclusion. But you still can’t psychologically prepare for the bear who eats you alive, particularly if the bear wears cornrows.

Not so sure about this, since it seems like there are are thousands of whiny bloggers waiting with greasy fingers to to post “Radiohead”:

For one thing, Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context—it’s the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file.

Snakes and robots:

A song like “Shackler’s Revenge” is initially average, until you get to the solo—then it becomes the sonic equivalent of a Russian robot wrestling a reticulating python.

And finally:

But Rose is the complete opposite. He takes the path of most resistance. Sometimes it seems like Axl believes every single Guns N’ Roses song needs to employ every single thing that Guns N’ Roses has the capacity to do—there needs to be a soft part, a hard part, a falsetto stretch, some piano plinking, some R&B bullshit, a little Judas Priest, subhuman sound effects, a few Robert Plant yowls, dolphin squeaks, wind, overt sentimentality, and a caustic modernization of the blues. When he’s able to temporarily balance those qualities (which happens on the title track and on “I.R.S.,” the album’s two strongest rock cuts), it’s sprawling and entertaining and profoundly impressive. The soaring vocals crush everything. But sometimes Chinese Democracy suffers from the same inescapable problem that paralyzed proto-epics like “Estranged” and “November Rain”: It’s as if Axl is desperately trying to get some unmakeable dream song from inside his skull onto the CD.

Originally posted by ry from Modcult, on November 19, 2008 2:33 AM

It really is happening! Last night on First Avenue and St. Mark's Place, I saw a cab driver and a passenger slug it out over her nonpayment of a fare. He tried to take her purse and clean her clock. She pretty much gave as good as she got. It was gnarly. This morning? There is BLOOD all over the sidewalk at Coyote Ugly on First Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets. Seriously. Blood! So let's check the stats from the NYPD. Oh, here we go! Last week in New York City, robberies were up 12% over the same period last year. Rapes were up 15%. Murders were up 40%! (Okay, tiny sample size on that—7 murders last week versus 5 last year.) There were 427 burglaries last week, up 4%. Anecdotally, there is graffiti where there was none before (including on, I'm noticing, USPS mailboxes). And friends are saying that they're hearing more and more about muggings. AND there are stalled construction projects all over, which are about to become dormitories for the homeless. I'm kind of excited! Also I may get a permit for a small Beretta. I appreciate a downturn but I'm not going to be a victim. And anyway, the New Old New York will need a New Bernie Goetz sooner or later. Since the last one has become a vegan kook.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Choire, on November 19, 2008 2:32 AM

It really is happening! Last night on First Avenue and St. Mark's Place, I saw a cab driver and a passenger slug it out over her nonpayment of a fare. He tried to take her purse and clean her clock. She pretty much gave as good as she got. It was gnarly. This morning? There is BLOOD all over the sidewalk at Coyote Ugly on First Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets. Seriously. Blood! So let's check the stats from the NYPD. Oh, here we go! Last week in New York City, robberies were up 12% over the same period last year. Rapes were up 15%. Murders were up 40%! (Okay, tiny sample size on that—7 murders last week versus 5 last year.) There were 427 burglaries last week, up 4%. Anecdotally, there is graffiti where there was none before (including on, I'm noticing, USPS mailboxes). And friends are saying that they're hearing more and more about muggings. AND there are stalled construction projects all over, which are about to become dormitories for the homeless. I'm kind of excited! Also I may get a permit for a small Beretta. I appreciate a downturn but I'm not going to be a victim. And anyway, the New Old New York will need a New Bernie Goetz sooner or later. Since the last one has become a vegan kook.

Originally posted by Choire from Choire, on November 19, 2008 2:32 AM

Crikey!  According to Australian researchers, humans and kangaroos shared a common ancestor 150 million years ago and have similar sections of DNA.  "We thought they'd be completely scrambled, but they're not," said one expert.  "There is great chunks of the human genome which is sitting right there in the kangaroo genome."  Well, this helps explain Yahoo Serious.

Side-eyed suspicious kangaroo from Sender-Inner Shawn P.

Originally posted by Not That Mike The Other Mike from Cute Overload, on November 18, 2008 9:57 PM

I'm not pimpin' I'm promotin'. Ok, this is a little idea I had to do when I couldn't find any blogs to pimp. It's kind of a rip off of Blue Heaven, but that the hell. I would have done it Monday, but some blogs came out of nowhere that needed pimpin'. I'm done with all that now so here's a few links and stuff from other bloggers from last week that really caught my eye. Go check 'em out if you haven't already. But first a telethon:

SAVE MARK'S CARDS

Stats on the Back is trashing his cards. Go here and tell Mark you want to save them! I've done my part... Don't let his cards end up like this.


All right now to the links. Now these are not necessarily the best blogs or the best posts ever and you are not less of a human being if I didn't link to you, these are simply posts that caught my eye enough when I read them to save the URL for later.

Ben Henry's swan song. If you don't click on anything else on this post, click on this.

Capewood goes to RenFest.

The Topps Archives shows off some fascinating old Topps promotional cards from the early '70s.

I Am Joe Collector has a long and excellent article on Beckett's influence through the years.

An interesting (eecch) autograph experience from the Sports Locker.

Incredible post on Veteran's Day from the Houston Card Collector.

And here is the winner for quote of the week:

Parallels are nothing more than doubles for dummies.

How true, how true...

Finally I have some housekeeping to do, so I'm going to do it here. three more packages came in yesterday, one from Kevin, one from Cardboard Icons and the last was the "Trade Me Anything" card from Thorzul.

Now that's a kick-ass card. Or even a kick ass-card. Both work in this case. I'll post the goodies from Kevin and Ben soon, I've got the card show post to work on at the moment. Thanks guys!

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on November 18, 2008 3:57 PM

When the Seattle Supersonics up and moved to Oklahoma to become the Oklahoma City Thunder, Sonics fan John Moe became a fan free agent. He arranged recruiting calls and visits with several teams around the league to see if they would have him.

So was he welcoming me aboard then?

"I am absolutely welcoming you into our franchise. We could use some [Timberwolves] fans right now. You're part of the blueprint. Absolutely."

I thanked him for the offer but told him I had other teams to talk to.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 18, 2008 11:07 AM

The transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 4 will host a public meeting Wednesday night regarding DOT plans for a protected bike lane on Eighth Avenue from W. 14th to W. 23rd Street.

Phase one of the project [PDF], from Bank Street to 14th, is currently underway, and plans are to extend the lane north next spring. Though the city is not bound by community board recommendations, it is important that supporters of the lane turn out to counter what has been vocal opposition -- particularly given the success of the cycle track on Ninth Avenue, which in its first year has seen:

• a 50 percent decline in injuries (from all crashes)
  
• a 41 percent decline in total crashes (36% decline in reportable crashes)
  
• a 36 percent decline in crashes involving pedestrians
  
• a drop in sidewalk riding
  
• a 57 percent increase in cyclists

The meeting will be held at the Fulton Center Auditorium, 119 Ninth Avenue (between 17th and 18th Streets), at 6 p.m. A DOT presentation will be followed by questions on the proposal, starting at 6:20. Public comments are to begin at about 6:45. Comments should be limited to two minutes.

Image: DOT

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, on November 18, 2008 9:02 AM

Howard Dean says that he's "fine" with the Senate's decision not to kick Joe Lieberman off the Homeland Security committee and suggested that the Senate had acted in accordance with what Barack Obama wanted.

In a phone interview with me just after the vote concluded, I asked Dean if he thought the Senate should keep Lieberman. He said that the Senate had acted "in the spirit of unification, which is what the President-elect wanted."

"He called the shots, and that's fine," Dean said, in an apparent reference to the tone Obama has tried to set in Washington as he prepares to take power.

Dean also said he understood the natural human desire for "revenge," a description that will dismay many of Dean's allies in the liberal blogosphere, who maintain (as do I) that this wasn't solely about retribution.

"I think it's in every human being's heart to get revenge," Dean said, though he didn't say that "revenge" was the only motive driving the anti-Lieberman forces. He added that the time had come to "swallow hard" and "put aside that kind of stuff."

"It's pretty hard to run the country based on, `We're all working together,' if your first act is to strip someone who was your political enemy...of power," Dean said.

Asked if Lieberman should keep the chairmanship given his performance at the post, Dean replied that it was up to the Senate to evaluate the job Lieberman did. "The Senate will do what the Senate does," Dean said. "It's not my place to interfere."

"They asked Senator Obama's opinion and he gave it," Dean said.

Late Update: To clarify, Dean did not say that the only motive driving the anti-Lieberman movement was revenge, and didn't specifically target the liberal blogosphere in his comments. His point about Obama was that Senators took their cues from the President-elect's desire for a tone of "unification." I've edited the above to make that clearer.

Late Late Update: Jane Hamsher also interviewed Dean, and pressed him very hard on the niggling question of whether Lieberman is, you know, qualified for the post that Senate Dems let him keep.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 18, 2008 8:59 AM

-Photo by Bauer-Griffin-
Britney Spears' career may be back on track, but the singer says her personal life is far from fulfilling.

In a documentary set to air on MTV on Nov. 30, Brit reveals that, since her very public meltdown last year, which led to her dad basically having control over her every move, she's been kind of just "existing" -- as opposed to really living.

"There's no excitement, there's no passion. I have really good days, and then I have bad days," she says in For the Record. "Even when you go to jail, you know there's the time when you're gonna get out. But in this situation, it's never ending. It's just like Groundhog Day every day."

"I think it's too in control," she adds. "If I wasn't under the restraints I'm under, I'd feel so liberated. When I tell them the way I feel, it's like they hear but they're really not listening. I never wanted to become one of those prisoner people. I always wanted to feel free." 

I feel sad for her -- like I wanna wear a "Free Britney" shirt.

Originally posted by Tracy Pepey from iVillage - Daily Blabber, on November 18, 2008 8:53 AM

Fresh out of the gate, a new site dedicated to the review of design-related books.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Subtraction.com, on November 18, 2008 8:42 AM

my favorite was Space Mountain Snob  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on November 18, 2008 7:59 AM

My favorite in the series:

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on November 18, 2008 7:43 AM

Has everyone heard about Malcolm Gladwell's new book? It's called Outliers: The Story of Success.

There's an excerpt in the Guardian which is fascinating; you should go read the whole thing (and check out his Pop!Tech talk, too) but here is the two-minute takeaway: when we look at people who are at the top of their game, it's not so much that they are fantastically talented -- it's more that they put in the time. How much time? About ten thousand hours of time, if you want to be the best of the best. (If you want to be merely good, shoot for 8,000 hours, and if you're okay with being just north of mediocre, 4,000 hours.)

The dress above is something I would love, someday, to be able to make. (It's the Charles James Butterfly dress, from the Chicago History Museum.) Let's assume, whether it's true or not, that I don't have to be a staggering 10K-hour rocket scientist to make it, but could skate by on merely 8K hours of practice. How far am I from being able to make this dress?

I've probably sewn an average of 15 hours a month for the past twenty-five years, sometimes a little more, and sometimes a lot less. But let's take 15 hours a month as average. 15 x 12 x 25 is 4,500 hours, putting me just above mediocre ... which, to be honest, is right where I would say my own sewing skillset is (and those of you who keep pointing out -- rightly -- that I should match my patterns better will agree!). But if I keep sewing at this rate, or, better yet, crank it up a bit more, I could be at Charles James Dress Level in another decade or so -- which certainly worth trying for, right?

TEN THOUSAND HOURS may sound a bit frightening, but to me (since I'm almost halfway there!) it sounds fantastically encouraging. To hear that I don't have to have some ineffable pixie-dust sprinkle of magic called talent or genius or knack to make the kinds of dresses I dream of -- all I have to do is KEEP AT IT? And that this notion is backed by Science? How great is that?

I'm also going to be more generous from now on in what I call "practice." Reading sewing blogs & magazines and seeing new techniques? Practice. Hanging out in the fabric store? Practice. Idly googling "Callot Soeurs"? Practice. These next 5,500 hours are going to FLY by, I tell you!

So ... what do you want to be great at? How fast can you get to 10,000 hours? I'll wait while you do the math.

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on November 18, 2008 7:20 AM

Matt Holliday had better love Mount Davis: The San Jose Mercury News reports this morning that the ongoing economic cataclysm could put the kibosh on the Oakland A’s plans for a new stadium in Fremont, at least for now.

As I reported for BP last year, A’s owner Lew Wolff’s plan for a 30,000-seat stadium in the East Bay city of Fremont relied on a complicated land-for-stadium swap: Essentially, Wolff would get the right to develop land around the ballpark as condos, and use the proceeds to pay off his $400-million-or-so stadium bill. Unfortunately, right now in California you can get condos free with your Happy Meal, so Wolff has had to revamp his plan: Now, he says, he’ll use naming-rights, concessions, and parking revenues to fund the stadium, while waiting for the housing market to pick up.

Not to disparage the word of a trusted real-estate magnate, but: fat chance. Cisco has already announced plans to buy the naming rights to a Fremont stadium, for $4 million a year - that’s enough to pay off at most $60 million in stadium costs, and probably less given today’s extortionate interest rates. That would leave something on the order of $25 million a year to come out of concessions and parking money - new concessions and parking money, if the A’s don’t want to take a loss on what they’re currently bringing in at the newly de-corporatized Oakland Coliseum. Given that stadiums almost never pay their own way with increased revenues, Wolff would almost certainly have to take losses for a few years in hopes that the real-estate bubble could eventually be reinflated, which seems like a risky gambit.

Wolff, as you might expect, kept a happy face on all this, telling the Merc News that he doesn’t expect to have to delay plans for a Fremont stadium, which at last word he was still hoping to open by 2011. “The best building I’ve done has been in times when I shouldn’t be building,” said Wolff. “We could easily put our plans on hold for two years, but that is the furthest thing from our minds.” Paraleipsis, anyone?

(For fans of football and the other football, the economic mess is also expected to throw a wrench into the planned San Francisco 49ers and San Jose Earthquakes stadiums; I have a bit more on this at fieldofschemes.com.)

Originally posted by Neil deMause from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on November 18, 2008 7:11 AM

Filed under: Software, Developer

Since getting schooled in the comments on my last mention of Versions (a favorite of Robert's), I've reacquainted myself with Subversion ... and come to really enjoy using this polished and highly usable SVN client. Git may have its benefits, but for a lot of what I do (especially solo web design), Subversion (and Versions) make a lot of sense. Versions is, as of yesterday, officially out of beta and available for purchase. I even received a 10% discount for being in on the beta test.

Versions 1.0.1 is already out, which fixes the registration issues that some of us ran into. The initial 1.0 release included a lot of additional functionality, and Versions has become an amazing tool for handling all manner of Subversion-related revision control. Top on the list of new features, and of pretty major importance (at least to me), is the addition of an "Ignore [file/folder name]" option to the context menu. The full release notes are available at the Versions site, where you'll also find the download for the free demo. Versions is retailing at €39.00 (about $49USD), and users on the email notification list should have received a 10% discount coupon number.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

TUAWVersions out of beta originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Brett Terpstra from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on November 18, 2008 6:30 AM

So we have a few bookshelves in our house–one of which is in our kitchen. Only one or two of the shelves in this bookshelf actually house books, most of which are food-stained cookbooks. The rest of the 4 or 5 shelves are given over to photographs, albums, pamphlets from schools, framed pictures, compact discs, pencils, letters, screwdrivers, coins, candles, bills, artwork, crayons–basically the knickknacks and detritus of daily living. We spend a lot of time in the kitchen, so it’s convenient and handy to just stash stuff there.

The only problem is IT DRIVES ME INSANE!

The randomness, and perceived messiness of the bookshelf drives me crazy. I look at it and I see chaos, complexity and disorder. I know I have a problem, but that knowledge doesn’t seem to help. I am constantly shuffling things around, grouping things, moving things, throwing things out while more yet more things get quietly added. I’d almost prefer the bookshelf to be somewhere out of sight, but then we’d probably use something else in the kitchen.

This morning, on my way to work, I got a call from Kesa asking where two flower petals were that needed to be ironed on to Chloe’s Girl Scouts uniform. They were in the bookshelf at one point. Did I throw them away? I can’t remember it’s all a blur. I admit that I probably did. I can hear Chloe crying in the background. I feel bad…and resentful about having to keep this bookshelf organized.

Why am I writing here about this? Well mostly it wouldn’t fit within a 140 byte limit. But srsly — I guess I just feel like this bookshelf is a living emblem of my professional life as a software developer at a library. I strive to create software that is simple in its expression, that does one thing and does it well, and which is hopefully easy to maintain by more people than just me. I relish working at an institution that values the preservation of objects and knowledge.

But I threw away the flower decal …

It’s important to remember that real life is complicated, and that the messiness is something to be relished as well. The useful bookshelf, or bag of bits, chunk of json, or half-remembered perl script in someones homedir are valuable for their organic resilience. Or as Einstein famously said:

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

I’m sorry Chloe.

Originally posted by ed from inkdroid, on November 18, 2008 5:58 AM

Looking for a copy of Mac Office for that special someone this holiday season? Microsoft's Mac BU has a deal just for you on the Macintosh Special Edition of Office 2008.

Read More...

Originally posted by jeff.smykil@gmail.com (Jeff Smykil) from Infinite Loop, on November 18, 2008 5:57 AM

Over the weekend, I posted a simple web page on our TypePad site called the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. I wrote it up with a lighthearted, snarky tone so a few old friends who recently lost their jobs as professional bloggers/journalists would understand what we could do at Six Apart to try to help them out. It seems like the program struck a nerve with thousands more of you, though — those first few friends have passed the link along, and in less than a day, hundreds of journalists have already signed up to participate.

In short, the program as described offers up a TypePad blog, a place in our Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, and a healthy dose of our expertise and insights into helping publishers and bloggers succeed online.

Reports From The Field

The Journalist Bailout program exists because we care about the future of journalism at Six Apart. I've worked at a newspaper, our CEO was founder of a magazine, and our staff across the company and around the world have worked in reporting, publishing, designing, maintaining and supporting journalism in print, in broadcast, and of course on the web in a variety of capacities. For years, I've followed pioneers like Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen who've being loud, sometimes strident, voices articulating a vision of how journalism will evolve. I've talked to working journalists in person at events put on by groups ranging from the Online News Association to Mediabistro. And perhaps most importantly I've talked to our customers who are succeeding in online journalism, at outlets ranging from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post, from small-town dailies to alt-weeklies to upstart blog networks to niche magazine publishers who are just making their first steps online.

These experiences showed me something I'd expected: A lot of people are thinking about how journalism is going to evolve online, and many people are passionate about making sure journalists make the leap.

What I hadn't fully expected was how gripping the stories from individual journalists have been. The mood of the emails we've gotten has ranged from hopeful to heartbreaking, from cynical to sincere. Overall, there's an optimism which indicates that having a starting point to do something proactive and positive will be a great first step for many journalists to take control of their careers in an industry that is going through enormous upheaval.

I know that journalists are a skeptical bunch, so I'm not trying to bullshit anyone: The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program is not a silver bullet. It's not going to singlehandedly preserve the career and income of every working journalist who has a job today. And frankly, the response has been so overwhelming that we won't be able to accept every application at first.

But what we can do is give journalists the tools to take control of their own presence online. This program will let a lot of the most eager writers and reporters learn the ropes about how to be more effective and successful on the web. That hope shows through in just some of the responses we've seen already:

• "Thanks for coming up with such a smart solution to the journalist's dilemma! Hope we can work something out."
• "You have no idea how many questions this answers for me that I never even quite understood how to pose."
• "Dear Six Apart, thanks very much for your kind offer, glad you are getting such a great response. I've been thinking about starting my own blog, and this seems like a good and fun way to do it."

The Road Forward

Our first order of business is to tend to the dozens of people who have already submitted applications. It will take a few days to get personal replies to everyone who wants to participate, and our criteria of evaluation for membership in the program will have to expand a bit to accommodate everyone who's applied.

In the future, we want to reach out to the many media organizations we already work with to find ways to make this new wave of independent journalism sites more successful and more effective. We know that a vast amount of the good journalism being done today is happening within traditional media institutions, and we think there are plenty of ways for both media companies and independent journalists to support and complement each other's work.

Finally, we'll be asking the entire community for help in defining how these sites will grow, evolve and thrive in the future. So, if you haven't done so already, read up on the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program, see if it's right for you, and if it seems like we can provide the tools to help you move your journalism career forward, then sign up to join us.

Originally posted by Anil Dash from Six Apart News & Events, on November 18, 2008 5:15 AM

While cruising the treacherous hills of San Francisco, Mr. Mickey met some fun cuties. MM's favorite full blown posse was this groups of Filipino Fashion Boys! Aren't they cute? From left to right it's Owen Buenaventura, Mr. Mickey, Michael San Gaspar, Bacca da Silva and Joseph Domingo in front. They all have collections and are couturing it up all over town! Photograph by Peter Davis

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on November 18, 2008 4:58 AM

• Big Service Cuts on the Table at Thursday's MTA Board Meeting (News)
• Exxon Chief: Hydrocarbons Are Here to Stay (NYT)
• Public Isn't Rallying Behind GM, UAW (NYT)
• Memo to GM: Redeem Yourself, Help Restore Transit Systems (Common Dreams)
• Senate Will Lose Major Pro-Transit Voice If Hillary Clinton Is Named Secretary of State (News)
• Bloomberg Admin Eager to Discuss Commuter Tax With Albany (NY1)
  
• Rider Grades for 7 and L Lines Hold Steady (NYT, NY1)
• Brooklyn Electeds in a Huff Over Two-Way Hanson Place (Bklyn Paper)
• Blaming the Victim: Rise in SF Traffic Deaths Seen as Liability for Ped/Bike Activists (SF Chron)
• Planet-Spanning Smog Clouds Dim the Sun Across Asia (TreeHugger)
  

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on November 18, 2008 4:10 AM

I've experimented with audio transcription lately, but always with big, clumsy humans. I'd happily use cyborgs speech recognition software, but even today, automatic conversion of voice-to-text is still flawed. Naturally, I was intrigued when Google announced they were adding voice searching to their Google Mobile iPhone app.

Google's flirted with voice-to-text conversion in the past, with GOOG-411 and their Audio Indexing of political videos on YouTube. But this is the first time they're offering a web-accessible interface for speech conversion, albeit completely undocumented, so I decided to poke around a bit to see what I could find.

Over the last few hours, I've been analyzing the traffic proxied through my network, trying to reverse-engineer it to get to something usable, but I've hit my limits. I'm posting this with the hopes that someone out there can run with it and find out more.

Behind the Scenes

Here's my best guess: When you first start speaking into the microphone, the iPhone app opens a connection to Google's server, waits for you to finish talking, and then does a quick and dirty conversion into a tiny binary representation of the waveform. (And I do mean tiny. These files are between 100-300 bytes.)

The waveform image is generated on the phone and displayed along with a "Working" indicator and the adorable "beep-boop" sounds. In the background, the binary file is being sent as a POST request to http://www.google.com/m/appreq/gmiphone. Here's what the headers look like:

POST /m/appreq/gmiphone HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Google/0.3.142.951 CFNetwork/339.3 Darwin/9.4.1
Content-Type: application/binary
Content-Length: 271
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: keep-alive
Connection: keep-alive
Host: www.google.com

The response from Google is an even smaller binary attachment. This is probably just an encrypted or compressed version of the converted text. In this case, for the words "chicken soup." Closer examination of the binary shows it can't contain the search text. (Read more in the comments.) What the hell?

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/binary
Content-Disposition: attachment
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:06:53 GMT
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Expires: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:06:53 GMT
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Length: 114
Server: GFE/1.3

After receiving the binary response to the POST, a second request is triggered, this time a GET request to clients1.google.com with the converted voice-to-text string.

GET /complete/search?client=iphoneapp&hjson=t&types=t
    &spell=t&nav=2&hl=en&q=chicken%20soup HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Google/0.3.142.951 CFNetwork/339.3 Darwin/9.4.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: keep-alive
Connection: keep-alive
Host: clients1.google.com

The response is an array of search terms in JSON format, for use in search autocompletion.

["chicken soup",[["http://www.chickensoup.com/","Chicken Soup for the Soul",5,""],["http://www.chickensoupforthepetloverssoul.com/","Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul",5,""],["chicken soup recipe","489,000 results",0,"2"],["chicken soup for the soul","1,470,000 results",0,"3"],["chicken soup dog food","462,000 results",0,"4"],["chicken soup with rice","467,000 results",0,"5"],["chicken soup diet","453,000 results",0,"6"],["chicken soup from scratch","364,000 results",0,"7"],["chicken soup for the soul quotes","398,000 results",0,"8"],["chicken soup crock pot","604,000 results",0,"9"]]]

Aaand that's as far as I can get.

Help!

Unfortunately, until I can figure out the format of the binary request and response to/from Google, playing with the voice recognition features is out of reach.

How much processing is happening on the phone, and how much on Google's servers? If it's happening remotely, in what form is the audio being transmitted and the results being returned? As Ilya points out in the comments, the response binary file is too limited to even hold the text.

Any ideas on cracking this mystery would be hugely appreciated. Anonymity for Google insiders is guaranteed!

 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on November 18, 2008 3:43 AM

I love JS-909, the Roland TR-909 drum machine emulator built entirely in JavaScript. After I finish a pattern, though, all I want to do is save it, share it, link to it, find and friend other people making patterns, listen to theirs, borrow and steal from them, learn from them and make more.

Instead, I'm stuck with my simple dance track that looks like this. Feel free to replicate that pattern manually and rock out with me in spirit.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on November 17, 2008 9:02 PM

I could go all defensive about this piece on Valleywag about our extravagant Disneyland trip, but I won't. Instead, I'll be gracious and help Owen during these troubled times for Valleywag. Here's a couple of story ideas based on a few photos from our weekend. Enjoy!  

Originally posted by Mena from Dollarshort, on November 17, 2008 2:16 PM

• TypePad - Why Blog - Journalist Bailout Program
  Love
  (tags: writing blogs humor)
• New York Times Shutters "Play"
  I will miss the quarterly pub--the Times's sports journalism is underrated. (Note that David Foster Wallace's piece on Roger Federer, considered one of the great sports journalism articles, was published by Play.)
  (tags: sports writing media)
• After 48 Years, Brand Pepsi Drops BBDO
  my oh my
  (tags: branding advertising personal)

Originally posted by David Wertheimer from Ideapad, on November 17, 2008 2:03 PM

I'm a fan of the Journalist Bailout Program, in which Six Apart is giving print and TV people free blogs with some advertising revenue—for free! It's the nicest thing anyone's done in ages. Not sure what set off Paul Boutin over at Valleywag (ha, well, he just got laid off too!) to trash it vehemently, but tempers are high these days. After all, I cursed out this heinous person who stole a cab from me the other day, using language I normally reserve for my part-time work doing interrogations at CIA black sites outside Brno. IN ANY EVENT. I meet journalists all the time who are up a creek financially and/or professionally, and then I ask: Well, where's your blog? "Oh, yeah, I've been meaning to do that...." So? Get on it.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Choire, on November 17, 2008 12:08 PM

Lovely design for Penguin's book of Bond short stories, Quantum of Solace.

The book collects together all of Ian Fleming's Bond short stories in a single volume for the first time and includes stories that inspired the Bond film classics From a View to a Kill, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, The Living Daylights and of course, Quantum of Solace, the latest in the series.

I love the Penguin logo incorporated into the 007 on the back cover.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 17, 2008 11:48 AM

Well, it has been a while since I last updated my blog with a new review, but you've got to understand that it was a hectic last two months of the season. From us chasing the playoffs and holding on to be the NL West champs, to us starting playoffs and being on the road to start both series.

The season was a lot of fun we did have many "downs," during but definately had more "ups" when it counted and just came up a little short. This was my second playoff experience and the first that I got a full taste of what its like to play on that stage.

The Cubs series was a blast. Many people doubted that we could go in there and take care of arguably the best team in baseball, but we were not lacking confidence when we marched into wrigley and won that first game. You could say it was our momentum from ending the season that helped us, but I've got to give some of the credit to T.J. Simers for reminding us everyday a month prior to the playoffs that "this organization had only won one playoff game in the last 20 years" (no pressure). It was nice to come back home with a two-game lead and win the series in front of our home crowd and allow them to enjoy the accomplishment.

Next up was Philly. I know it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but what can you say? They were the hottest team at the right time and played unbelievable ball in the month of October. They made all the plays they had to and the ones they didn't. They deserved to win that series  with the way they came together at the end. There are many things one could say we could of done differently, but we ran into a buzz saw. But for those of us returning, we are a year wiser and playoff tested to try a make another run in '09.

Now that I am out of breath, I would like all my faithful readers and ones who might occasionally glance to know I will be starting soon a Spring Training review here in my hometown of Phoenix --  some of my fave spots in the desert to grab a good bite. I'll try to make most of them around other Valley Spring Training sites, but btw I don't do Tucson.

Hopefully this will give you guys a chance to plan ahead and get excited for the '09 season. I'm not gonna lie -- I love the off time and being at home but the itch to put on those Dodger blues is growing in my belly already. So let me be the first to welcome everyone to my hometown, where I grew up and the best place for Spring Training. Can't wait to see you guys in February.

Andre

Originally posted by Andre Ethier from Dining with 'Dre, on November 17, 2008 10:13 AM

All the new features just have been finally documented, all the internal tests pass, so here goes another major step towards version 1.0 (or maybe 1.10 right away? or even 3.23?). Meet a beta version of Sphinx 0.9.9, introducing 34 new features; a handful of improvements and fixes worth a mention in the changelog; and numerous minor changes I did not count. Choosing top-10 features to highlight here was actually a tough job. (Even though choosing top-3 was a no-brainer.) Here they go.

• added select-list feature w/full expressions support
• added arbitrary brackets/negations nesting support to query language
• added config reload on SIGHUP
• added signed 64bit attrs support (sql_attr_bigint directive)
• added persistent connections, UNIX-socket, and multi-interface support (Open(), Close(), listen)
• added kill-lists support
• added MS SQL (aka SQL Server) source type support
• added inplace inversion of .spa and .spp (inplace_enable, 1.5-2x less disk space for indexing)
• added multiforms support (multiple source words in wordforms file)
• ...and 20+ other features in the changelog

Normally this major changeset would be declared an alpha. However, thanks to brave testers, 0.9.9 already runs in production on several sites. And also its test coverage is actually even better than that of 0.9.8. So we can light-heartedly call it beta (as in "no known major bugs").

Bundled website update includes a few extra links, of which I personally would claim C# .NET API port and Ubuntu package (in Contributed software section) most interesting. And, as you see, we've also refit News and Docs sections; you now can (anonymously) comment on the posts and submit 'em to places like Digg. Testing time!

Originally posted by shodan from Sphinx search engine news, on November 17, 2008 10:08 AM

Are you on flickr?

It's pretty much the easiest way to put pictures online, as in, even my grandparents use it.

Well now there's Flickrista, (good name) which is full of the best fashion photography culled from the greater flickr.

It even has an editor, Andreas Climent. If you're an aspiring photographer you can't ask him to feature your images on the site, but you can add your favorites to the Flickrista Flickr Group in the hopes he'll pay them attention.

As for us, we're thinking of making our interns scan every magazine in the office to start an online editorial archive.

But we're way too nice.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on November 17, 2008 9:55 AM

Washington Post: 5 Myths About an Election of Mythic Proportions. "Exit polling suggests that there was no statistically significant increase in voting among [black or young voters]," and other debunking. Worth remembering that Obama's victory, as noted here previously, is far from the national mandate given to, say, Ronald Reagan.

Related: I watched and enjoyed Obama's "60 Minutes" interview last night. Barack is an intellectual man who is not afraid of the truth; he and Michelle are balanced, quick to smile, and down-to-earth. (Although there was some bemused discussion in my home as to how extensively the "mom in chief" runs the Obama family, and what that suggests about the president-elect.)

Originally posted by David Wertheimer from Ideapad, on November 17, 2008 9:53 AM

The Yes Men's Andy Bichelbaum and Eyebeam senior fellow Steve Lambert explain on CNN's !ISSUES

Originally posted by Elections 2008 from Eyebeam reBlog, on November 17, 2008 9:22 AM

You might have seen the grainy cockeyed bootleg trailer over the weekend but now the real deal is up on Apple's site in various HD-grade qualities: the second trailer for J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek movie. From Wikipedia:

It is the eleventh Star Trek film and features the main characters of the original Star Trek series, who are portrayed by a new cast. It follows James T. Kirk enrolling at Starfleet Academy, his first meeting with Spock, and their battles with Romulans from the future, who are interfering with history.

I'm not a proponent of the idea that any Trek is good Trek so I really want to hate this movie but it looks kind of awesome. At least f'ing McG didn't direct.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 17, 2008 9:18 AM

I could go all defensive about this piece on Valleywag about our extravagant Disneyland trip, but I won't. Instead, I'll be gracious and help Owen during these troubled times for Valleywag. Here's a couple of story ideas based on a few photos from our weekend. Enjoy!  

Originally posted by Mena from Dollarshort

Originally posted by David Jacobs from randomwalks/dj, on November 17, 2008 9:16 AM

Filed under: Odds and ends, Flickr Find

At the Austin Maker Faire last month, careful observers noted a small addition to a miniature main street created by the Texas LEGO User Group: An Apple retail store, complete with products inside.

TexLUG created a town and space-themed layout that included working trains and motors. Other photos of their impressive handiwork are available on Flickr. You might also enjoy this attempt at a Lego Apple Store, accessories sold separately.

TUAWFlickr Find: An Apple Store in Lego land originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Robert Palmer from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on November 17, 2008 9:07 AM

Now even one of Joe Lieberman's leading Senate allies appears to be turning on him:

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), a close ally of Sen. Joe Lieberman, said the Connecticut Independent should pay a price for his campaign attacks against President-elect Barack Obama.

"There need to be consequences, and they cannot be insignificant," Carper said in a Monday interview with The Hill.

Carper, however, would not say whether he favors stripping Lieberman of the Homeland Security chairmanship. Still, this is noteworthy, because Carper was one of the few Senators talking to other Senators about Lieberman's fate.

That an ally like Carper is calling for "significant" consequences after talking to his fellow Senators suggests he realizes that there's a depth of anger at Lieberman within the caucus that cannot be mollified without some kind of real action against him. One lingering question is whether Harry Reid will only ask for a vote tomorrow on the chairmanship, or whether he'll also ask for votes on other, lesser punishments or on some kind of compromise.

Meanwhile, Josh Orton makes a key point that's gotten lost in all this debate: The political thing to do here is for Dem Senators to vote for Lieberman to keep the chairmanship, while the good governmental decision is to vote to give him the push.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 17, 2008 9:06 AM

As we know, crisis can mean opportunity. And sometimes crisis leaves so much broken that it's the once in a generation or a century opportunity to build stuff from the ground up rather than tinkering on the margins and making incremental change.

Over the weekend I was discussing the question of whether or not we should be bailing out the auto industry. One issue that has come up over the weekend is that we may be wrong to assume that bankruptcy just means conventional Chapter 11 reorganization (which in the abstract at least could be a good thing) rather than liquidation. In the current economic climate and with the credit markets still out of whack, bankruptcy might actually lead directly to liquidation. That probably means at least a million jobs eliminated at in one fell swoop -- something I don't think we can allow in the current situation.

One other point behind the effects on individual families' lives and the macro-effects on the economy, I think there are real national security implications to losing the domestic auto industry because you lose a substantial amount of your heavy manufacturing base. Maybe I've just got my head stuck in the 20th century on this front; but I don't think so.

A friend points me to this website: it's Tesla Motors. They have a car that is 100% electric, goes 244 miles per charge and goes from 0 - 60 in 3.9 seconds. Now, I know electric car market is very complicated on both the technology and business fronts. A lot of TPM Readers know a lot about it; and I know very little. I'm sure this Tesla car costs a gazillion dollars. And maybe Tesla's crap. And some other manufacturer is the one that's on the right track. (I'm sure I'll hear from a lot of you soon on this. And that's great; I want to know.) But that's not the point. Some people are really far ahead working out the technology. And I'm curious to hear who that is.

But the point is that we've got the hood up and maybe the engine out on the national economy. That's a bad situation on a lot of fronts. But it's also the opportunity to really change things. Not just fix things on the margins but make the big changes. As long as we're talking about sums of money in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, let's not restrict ourselves to considering whether we throw Detroit a lifeline that keeps them in motion and employing their workers through the current recession. Maybe we need to invest 50 billion dollars in having a mass market fully electric car in five years. I don't see anybody who doesn't agree that whatever the costs of letting GM go under, that it's management who drove this company into the ditch with a lot of terrible decisions and unwillingness to change. So maybe we take GM into some sort of managed restructuring, push out management, clean out the equity holders, and use the 'company' as the vehicle for leapfrogging the US into the 21st century, non-hydrocarbon auto industry.

As you can see, there are a lot of details I don't have a handle on. And I'm going to be trying to come up to speed. But one thing I'm confident about is that the real danger we face is being too timid, not too bold. We're going to spend a ton of money -- whether it's to bailout the auto industry, keep the Great Lakes states on life support for ten years or putting in place some top to bottom program to get us to where we actually need to be. The money, for those who have eyes to see it, are essentially sunk costs at this point. The danger is that we spend all the money and come out the other end still with a big region of the country tied to a dying industry, no true progress on the energy/climate crisis front and a lot more debt.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 17, 2008 7:07 AM

We spent 2 years making the Alinea book... so you can spend two years cooking it. From the #1 rated restaurant, Alinea, and the #1 chef in America, Grant Achatz, comes Alinea, a 6.5 pound doorstop of food innovation, essays, and stunning photography. Food for thought. $31.50, regular edition -- $75, slip-covered edition, only available through our website: www.alinea-book.com. The Alinea Mosaic is now free for everyone... www.alinea-mosaic.com -- extra videos, recipes, essays, and a user forum.

Originally posted by sponsorships@kottke.org (kottke.org sponsorship office) from kottke.org, on November 17, 2008 6:15 AM

From Serious Eats: New York

New York's WNYC radio is talking to Michael Pollan right now about ag issues that President-elect Barack Obama should be aware of in taking office. There's an online petition to encourage Obama to choose Pollan as agriculture secretary. You can listen online now as it airs or later, when the show's audio is eventually archived at that same link.

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on November 17, 2008 6:10 AM

Mark Bittman talks about the problems with overfishing and the prospect that in the future, most or all of the fish we eat will be farmed.

The biggest consumers of these smaller fish are the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Nearly one-third of the world's wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world's fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil. (To make matters worse, as much as a quarter of the total wild catch is thrown back -- dead -- as "bycatch.")

This infographic about overfishing is worth a look. It's a pity that Bittman felt compelled to write this from the "snob" point of view (which was exacerbated by the editor's choice of title). As the article makes clear, overfishing is an important issue that affects the earth's entire population, not just a few picky fish eaters.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 17, 2008 6:00 AM

• Can Detroit Switch From Carmaking to 'Transportmaking'? (NYT)
  
• Stanley Crouch: Obama Should Rebuild Rail System (News)
• MTA May Cut the Number of Subway Station Agents (News, NY1)
• Bloomberg Undeterred After Court Deals Setback to Hybrid Cab Initiative (NY1, News)
• Silver Flirts With Commuter Tax Again (Post)
• Exurbs Require Twice as Much Subsidy as Walkable, Transit-Oriented Development (Worldchanging)
• Teens Use Car as Weapon, Critically Injure 19-Year-Old in Bayside (News)
• Drunk Driver Crashes Into Livery Cab in Astoria, Killing Two (NYT, Post, News)
• Post Shames Public Figures for Abusing Parking Placard and License Plate Privileges
  
• NPR Profiles Worksman Cycles of Queens, America's Oldest Bike-Maker
  

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on November 17, 2008 4:04 AM

We're very excited to announce the new release of Google SketchUp 7. If you don't already know about the fun you can have with SketchUp, here's a quick recap:

SketchUp is software you can use to build 3D models of anything: your house, killer robots, furniture, trees, abstract art — anything. Architects and engineers use it to design buildings and other structures. Woodworkers use it to plan their projects. And lots of people use it to figure out where to put their furniture. SketchUp is easy to learn, it comes in free and Pro versions, and it's more fun than a houseful of clowns. Oh, and you can use it to build models for Google Earth, too.

So what's new in SketchUp 7? There's too much to list here, but we focused on three major areas for this release:

• Making it even easier to get started – We've created a new class of "smart" objects called Dynamic Components, which are simpler to work with for new modelers. Take a look at this video to see what I mean:

• Making it easier to share what you make and collaborate with other people – We built a better link between SketchUp and the rest of the 3D world, made it possible to "sign" your models, and added Google Docs–style collaboration and sharing to our 3D Warehouse.

• Adding powerful features for experienced SketchUp Pro users – SketchUp is only half of the SketchUp Pro suite; the other half is all about sharing your work with your clients. LayOut 2 (which is now officially out of beta and rarin' to go) lets you create multi-page documents and presentations. Your models are linked to your LayOut file so that changing the former automatically updates the latter.

Take a look at the What's New in 7 page on the SketchUp website to get the whole scoop. There's a great video to watch, and it stars some of the more prone-to-sunlight members of our engineering team — in lab coats, no less. Don't miss it.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Product Evangelist

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on November 17, 2008 4:00 AM

Aha, Obama will be doing online fireside chats, but in video format on YouTube.

Online political observers say President-elect Obama's innovative, online-fueled campaign will likely evolve into a new level of online communication between the public and the White House -- the Internet-era version of President Franklin Roosevelt's famous "fireside chats" between 1933 and 1944.

Here's Obama's first video address as President-Elect. His transition team, potential cabinet members, and other experts will also be recording videos in the coming weeks.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 17, 2008 3:39 AM

The amount of spam email decreased by more than 66% last week after a single company was knocked offline by their ISP after the Washington Post dug into their activities. But sales of Spam, the midwestern delicacy, are up, up, up because of the crappy economy.

Through war and recession, Americans have turned to the glistening canned product from Hormel as a way to save money while still putting something that resembles meat on the table. Now, in a sign of the times, it is happening again, and Hormel is cranking out as much Spam as its workers can produce.

In a factory that abuts Interstate 90, two shifts of workers have been making Spam seven days a week since July, and they have been told that the relentless work schedule will continue indefinitely.

People are also buying fewer socks and more frozen pot pies. And Spam can be added to the list of unlikely economic indicators, joining sushi, Big Macs, cigarettes, and others.

Update: Oh, and lipstick.

An indicator based on the theory that a consumer turns to less expensive indulgences, such as lipstick, when she (or he) feels less than confident about the future. Therefore, lipstick sales tend to increase during times of economic uncertainty or a recession.

(thx, dann)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on November 17, 2008 2:36 AM

hearst tower

announced last week was the winner of the 2008 international highrise award. foster + partners
received the award for their hearst tower building. completed in 2006, the 46 storey hearst
headquarters is build on top of an existing art deco building. designed with sustainability in mind
the tower consumes less energy, utilizing outside air ventilation up to 75% a year. it was the first
building in new york city to achieve a leed (leadership in energy and environmental design) gold rating.
when constructed its triangulated structure used 20% less steel than a conventional office tower.


structure


all image © foster + partners

more:
http://www.fosterandpartners.com

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on November 17, 2008 2:18 AM

In conversations and on mailing lists addressing the design of interactive media, I’ve found myself growing uneasy with just how little understanding most people practicing in the field have of how they are influenced by the various theories that undergird are standard practice. I think it can be problematic that so people are working in the context of these theories don’t understand how the theories’ assumptions are coloring their approaches.

What do I mean by theory? Theory is a robust conceptual framework that undergirds a practice. Standard thoughtful practice of design for interactive media is predicated on a cobbled-together set of theories, most of them coming out of the HCI community, which has been heavily influenced by cognitive psychology (think Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things). So you have things like distributed cognition, perception, attention, etc. Cog psych tends to focus on the individual.

Another major influencer is Activity Theory, which I believe gained traction as researchers studied the workplace, and wanted to understand how technology influences groups of people, not just individuals. Since the dawn of the Web, there’s also been significant inroads by the Library and Information Science community (Information retrieval, metadata, etc.).

As experience design leads to people trying to understand more complex situations, we’re seeing folks embrace anthropological and sociological methods… which also have their various theoretical underpinnings, far too numerous to go into here.

I believe that my exposure to and understanding of various theories (not to say I’m an expert in them) has heightened my experience and practice in design for interactive media. But I also know I’m a knowledge wonk who gets off on such things. Still, I think people will perform better when understanding the theoretical constructs in which they operate, so they can appreciate self-imposed arbitrary limits that may not have realized. Pragmatists might take issue, saying that all that matters is practice and results. That might be true if we were designing simpler systems. I think theory gives us tools for making smart heuristic judgments that help manage the complexity inherent in our work.

Originally posted by peterme from peterme.com, on November 16, 2008 6:34 PM

Artist: vitostreet

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Wooster Collective, on November 16, 2008 5:10 PM

I can't be the only one who's thought of this.

In late December of last year The New York Times wrote a lengthy article about the various donors to the Clinton Foundation, and the conflicts of interest (real or apparent) they might create for Sen. Clinton should she become president. At the time Bill Clinton said that if Hillary were elected he would disclose the identities and contribution totals of all the Foundation's contributors going forward, though not the ones that predated her presidency.

The Foundation's contributors include not only a number of heads of state but also a lot of high-flying businessmen who play the game so high in the stratosphere that what we normally consider foreign policy questions routinely play into their business interests.

Now, Secretary of State is not president. But in the foreign policy realm, it is as close as you get. So how does this all play out if she's nominated to serve as Secretary of State? Does the same going-forward disclosure policy apply?

Late Update: I'm not sure when today this article went up. But it turns out the Times has a piece up on their site about precisely this question.

Latter Update: TPM Reader PD reminds us of this follow-up to the December 2007 Times article. Also by Becker and Van Natta.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on November 16, 2008 4:19 PM

From Serious Eats

Feel the soothing sensation of edamame beans popping out of their pods, over and over and over again, with this Japanese Mugen Puni Puni Edamame Beans Popping Key Chain from Bandai. These aren't your normal edamame beans; there are 12 different faces, ranging from "Old Man" to Panda." Unfortunately, it's currently sold out, but when Strapya World gets its next shipment, I'm going to buy five of them for hours of non-stop entertainment. Watch the edamame beans in action, after the jump.

Popping Fake Edamame and Real Edamame

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats, on November 16, 2008 2:00 PM

Astria Suparak, director of the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh), captured this touching moment as I helped hang one of two Haliburton SurvivaBalls in preparation for the Yes Men exhibit this past week. The show, "Keep it Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with the Yes Men", is their first exhibition of props and ephemera from their projects and was curated by Astria. It will run through February 15.

Originally posted by Shaun Silfer from Just Seeds: Blog, on November 16, 2008 12:28 PM

In the NYTimes today, Mark Bittman writes about the perilous condition our oceans are in from the vantage of a seafood eater (the graphic at left was published by the Times to accompany the article). Having been thinking recently about how and why the conditions of our oceans fail to fully capture our imaginations in the same way our methods of raising livestock and corn do, I was glad to see it.  Here's how it opens:

"I suppose you might call me a wild-fish snob. I don’t want to go into a fish market on Cape Cod and find farm-raised salmon from Chile and mussels from Prince Edward Island instead of cod, monkfish or haddock. I don’t want to go to a restaurant in Miami and see farm-raised catfish from Vietnam on the menu but no grouper.

"Those have been my recent experiences, and according to many scientists, it may be the way of the future: most of the fish we’ll be eating will be farmed, and by midcentury, it might be easier to catch our favorite wild fish ourselves rather than buy it in the market."

Read the article—it's quick and concise.  The hope lies of course in a brutally obvious, but for Americans seemingly impossible, course of action: Don't spend more than you make.  Or, don't capture more fish more than the oceans produce.  Fisheries throughout the world must practice sustainable fishing or they will not survive, and we will lose a fundamental source of pleasure, diversity, and healthfulness in our diets.

Originally posted by michael ruhlman from ruhlman.com, on November 16, 2008 5:46 AM