The Edwards Drama Awaits a Denouement - NYTimes.com
Mr. Edwards once calmed an anxious Ms. Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band.
« September 6, 2009 - September 12, 2009 | Main | September 20, 2009 - September 26, 2009 »
September 19, 2009
Emoji Dick
using Kickstarter to hire Mechanical Turkers to translate Moby Dick to a CC-licensed book of emoji icons
Feeling clever.
Lazy Saturday. Rather than grade the stack of exams currently waiting for me, I am letting them sit in my office so that some of their germy coating can die off before I handle them too extensively. This may be paranoid and deranged, but (a) why look an excuse for procrastination in the mouth, and (b) there were a couple of all too vivid occasions on which a student was schnurfling ostentatiously with one hand (and nose) and handing me the exam with the other. SCHRURGHFRFRFRF. Mm, swiney delicious.
Cecily sent me this charming piece of brain imaging research, showing that certain areas in the brains of deceased Atlantic salmon show activation during a cross-species perspective-taking task.
Hello, I'm a cogitating dead fish!I know the feeling.
(The point of the poster, of course--which is written in a delightfully dry tone, and you should click through to enjoy it--is that fMRI research often neglects to do all the cross-comparisons necessary to correct for false positives. If you're actually interested, you can read more about it here. But my point is that we're all a little bit like dead salmon, really, when you think about it, innit?)
Photo of the Day: Hand-Pull Noodles
Noodles are a beautiful thing—watching them being made, even more so. This photo from Rodzillaaaaa on Flickr captures the art of whipping hand-pull noodles in mid-flight.
BREAKING: Busta Rhymes Announces DJ Roc Raida's Death, "My Personal DJ Is Gone"
X-Ecutioner member and Busta Rhymes' personal deejay, Anthony "DJ Roc Raida" Williams, has reportedly passed today (September 19).
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
i had dinner once with thom mayne, it was nowhere near as fun as...
i had dinner once with thom mayne, it was nowhere near as fun as this
yes, me too.
Edward Vielmetti: What I would be doing if I were being incredibly attentive to your email.
ryota aoki's new ceramics laboratory vol 2 at ippodo gallery, ny
'bijoux' by ryota aoki
ryota aoki's new ceramics laboratory vol. 2 exhibition opened earlier this week at
ippodo gallery, new york.
'bijoux' is a white porcelain work produced from a mold, shaped like 2 joined bowls.
each piece is finished by boldly cutting away a part of the original to create a unique work.
aoki infuses the clay with a special glaze he developed. in the kiln the glaze is slowly
forced out of the clay to coat the snow white porcelain. bijoux’s secret is its ability to
combine an icing flower-like fragility and jewel-like solidity.
'bijoux'
'bijoux'
'bijoux'
'bijoux'
ryota aoki in his studio
September 18, 2009
Circumnavigation for Good
Flickr member James Bowthorpe, a.k.a GlobeCycle, is about to complete the fastest circumnavigation of the Earth on a freakin’ bicycle. He started on March 29th, 2009 with the goal of raising £1.8 million for research into the causes of Parkinson’s Disease. Starting and ending in London, England, James will have ridden over 18,000 miles in about 150 days. Back in August he increased his daily mileage from 120 to 150 miles per day (!!!), putting him on track to break the current world record by nearly four weeks. He’s been busy geotagging, so you can see a map of his photos all the way around the world.
He’ll be arriving back in London this Saturday afternoon. If you’re in London, you can meet him at the Roehampton Gate Cafe in Richmond Park at 4pm GMT and ride with him to the Hyde Park bandstand. If you go, take some photos and tag them with GlobeCycle.
All photos from GlobeCycle.
See Hidden Files in Snow Leopard’s Open and Save Dialogs
Shared by anildash
I love when a tip says "simply", followed by a simultaneous three-key combo that you have to press.Great Snow Leopard detail from Rob Griffiths:
In any Open or Save dialog in Snow Leopard, simply press Shift-Command-Period to display hidden files and folders. This command is a toggle; hidden files will be displayed as you navigate various directories in the Open or Save dialog.
‘Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009’ at the New York Public Library - WSJ.com
"Pearl Street, which runs through the neighborhood that is today Chinatown, was named for the oyster shells that were once used to pave it."
Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by stamen to wsj nyc street map - More about this bookmark
California Joblessness Reaches 70-Year High
The unemployment rate in the country’s most populous state underscores how the incipient economic recovery continues to elude millions of Americans seeking work.
How Not To Sell Stolen Baseball Cards
You don’t have to dig very deep to find stories about cards going out the back door in collecting. It’s only natural for employees making low wages to want to earn some extra cash. In Pete Williams’ book ‘Card Sharks’, he even wrote about the “Mexican Mafia” and their intricate ways of stealing Upper Deck cards.
So while this practice is not something new or uncommon, one would think you’d be at least a little smart about how you unload stolen and/or backdoored cards. Well someone didn’t tell eBay user “CargoLargo” who placed on eBay a giant lot of 2008 Bowman Chrome cards which included:
1,482 Rene Rosoni autographs
480 of 500 Rene Tosoni Refractor autographs
241 of 250 Rene Tosoni Xfractor autographs
142 of 150 Rene Tosoni Blue Refractor autographs
44 of 50 Rene Tosoni Gold Refractor autographs
23 of 25 Rene Tosoni Orange Refractor autographs
PLUS
24 of 25 Tim Bascom Orange Refractor autographs
It’s clear that Topps Company a victim here. Someone either stole these cards from them or they were delivered to the wrong address and are being sold illegally. After all, these cards feature on-card autographs and had to be sent to the players to sign. Unfortunately, this is one reason why card companies use sticker autographs.
Topps is currently hard at work dealing with the situation.
You can view the auctions while they are still up HERE.
(h/t – Freedom Cardboard)
New, Manly “Kid” Commercial Begs The Question “Where’s Play?”
Shared by Gavin
This made me sad for Kid.Before this post says anything, let’s just acknowledge some facts:
Christopher “Kid” Reid is 45 years old. Partner Christopher “Play” Martin is 47.
Christopher “Kid” Reid used to have a head like an eraser. Him and partner “Play” used to make classic comedies such as House Party, House Party 2, House Party 3, and Class Act. Then they went their own way. Kid got married, got serious, and hung his hair hat up for life. Play married Lisa from Coming to America, because “she always gets the good ones”, and had a son with her. They then promptly divorced, once their “Who could American forget about quicker?” competition got too heated.
And today? Kid is a man who looks gentle and is making local commercials for suit stores:
The video is aight, clearly missing hints of this man.
But what of Play, America?
WHAT OF PLAY?
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PLAY!?
Any updates would be appreciated.
We Need Predators
Roger Peet We Need Predators $16 Along with amphibians, songbirds, pelagic schooling fish and everything else, global predator numbers are crashing like so many zeppelins. This is a terribly dangerous phenomenon. As a species, we'd have a lot less problems if we still had someone around to eat us like we so desperately need to be eaten. This image is an homage to the tigers of Panna National Park in India. Hand drawn, hand cut from paper and rubylith, hand printed. 4 color silkscreen print 12"x18" Signed, unnumbered
President Obama’s Rosh Hashana Message
Watch President Obama’s Rosh Hashana message in which he offers warm wishes for the holiday and calls for tolerance, peace and security for Israel.
Two Weeks Out: Diablo, David Byrne, and The Brave Keep Undefiled Wisdom of Their Own.
The problem with books that get adapted into movies, is that, well, if you’ve taken the time to read the novel then you’ve created an entire ecosystem of scenery, face and motivations in your head. It’s a completely unique world that’s precious and belongs only to you. But when an auteur armed with a budget and his own ecosystem comes along, all those images are forcibly replaced. It’s like a referendum on your imagination. It’s not even a matter of not seeing the movie; advertising and promotion are unavoidable. So while there is some thrill in watching fuzzy-wuzzy creatures come to life or some Victorian suitor resurrected, it most often feels like a transgression, like something is being taken, not given. And that’s why I won’t be seeing “The Informant,” which is based on the Kurt Eichenwald book. (Ha, got ya.) But here’s some stuff that you should see and do.
Still. True. We are all up in arms about adaptations, due to news of a movie version of Netherland—and also there is product placement in the upcoming “The Road.” (How?) Harumph!)
On to delightful things!
Movies: Consider The Fox
Jennifer’s Body. Me and The Awl staff are torn on this moving picture. But I’m going to overall endorse it and tell you that Megan Fox embodies the evil alpha queens of Heathers and does a pretty marvelous job delivering Diablo Cody’s dialogue. Here are six other great reasons to see it. (Today)
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: Oh man, I really liked this! (II know, surprise!) Mr. T has a big-ass part and is surprisingly a pretty fine voice actor. It also has a kicky script (even though it has a obligatory ‘message to young people’ ending tacked on. Boo!) and transfixing effects. (Today)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: So, this was a risky move, right? It’s not all bad, there are some very good monologues and sincere performances but there is a mortal flaw: David Foster Wallace. Writer/director John Krasinski, of Office-fame, did not adapt the book for the screen - as in, the actors are essentially reading off the page. Which means you have 17 different character actors all talking like DFW, it’s unnerving and kind of deadening. Still, not terrible though!
Also, this trailer for Paranormal Activity, which comes out in small release on the 25th, has been getting a lot of hype and has been called one of the scariest movies EVER. Thoughts? Anybody?
TeeVee: EmMehs?
You know, I love the silliness and pomposity of the Oscars but the Emmys have always been totally lifeless. BUT! TV is kinda better than movies these days, right? So it could be cool this year. Also. Mad Men looks to sweep so might be worth tuning in to see steely Hamm eyes and man bangs. (ALSO! Our fabulous pal Mary may be live-blogging right here! SUSPENSE!) (9/20)
Bookses
Everyone and his mother is reading tonight! Bennett Madison! Paul Ford! Others! (9/18)
Preorders:
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. Hey guys, Hornby! (9/29)
Richard Powers: Generosity: An Enhancement. (9/29)Music: You once were poor and lonely, wise and brave
Lightning Dust, live. Rather spooky indie folkies, really quiet enjoyable—opening for someone we’ve never heard of, at Bowery Ballroom. (9/19)
PLASTIC ONO BAND. FOR REAL. (9/22)
A.F.I. There are a slim selection of our readers who understand why A.F.I. is a ‘problematic’ but super catchy punk-vegan-straight edge band that enjoys commercial success. Do you want to be one of them? (9/29)
Mariah Carey. We love her. She has problems. She is probably a genius. (9/29)
Things To Do In New York That Do Not Involve a Trattoria
Tonight, awesome Miami photographer Naomi Fisher opens a new show at Leo Koenig. It is about a bunch of vintage Versace she found in the trash and nature? Totally worth it. (9/18)
Brooklyn Fashion Festival+Williamsburg Fashion Weekend is being billed as THE TENTS VS. 11211 (9/19)
The Craft Beer Scavenger Hunt. For those of you who like hops and being zany. (9/19)
Taxi Driver at the MOMA! (9/21)
David Byrne will be speaking at Barnes and Noble! Someone bring me a silver hair spike! (9/22)
There’s a fake wrestling show thing at the UCB . It’s called Cage Match. Described as Winner vs. Classic Masculinity. (9/24)
Doesn’t that just sum it all up? Have a blessed weekend, you guys.
Google contradicts Apple, states Apple rejected Google Voice
Filed under: Apple Corporate, iPhone, App Store
The Google Voice story grows even murkier today as new details arise about its App Store rejection. When the FCC launched an inquiry into the presence of the Google Voice app on the App Store, Apple, AT&T and Google all provided formal response letters. Portions of Google's letter were kept confidential from the public. Today, after several requests, Google finally released their entire FCC letter to the public.
In it, Google states that Apple did in fact reject the Google Voice app for the iPhone, and that Phil Shiller met and talked to Alan Eustace at Google about the rejection. Google's letter contradicts what Apple has stated, that they never actually rejected the Google Voice app.
Today's news adds another element to the disappointment and confusion over the presence of Google Voice on the iPhone. Apple stated to Engadget that they did not reject Google Voice and that they continue to look into bringing it to the App Store. TUAW has contacted Apple for a further statement about the rejection details. We have not heard anything back yet.
[via Engadget]TUAWGoogle contradicts Apple, states Apple rejected Google Voice originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Mix It Up: A la Louisiane at Eleven Madison Park
"I felt pampered and relaxed—for the same price as a cocktail at any high-end bar in the city."
[Photograph: Robyn Lee]
After reading the New York Times's four-star review of Eleven Madison Park and gawking at the cocktail recipes from Mix Shake Stir: Recipes from Danny Meyer's Acclaimed New York City Restaurants, I was on a mission to find out firsthand what the bar experience was like at a four-star restaurant.
A meal might have to wait until I can get a reservation, but a drink at the bar had no such limitations. On a recent Monday night, I strolled in to the majestic space, perched on a leather stool at the polished-wood bar, and was greeted by Leo Robitschek, the head bartender. He handed me a menu and, as I was perusing the selections, poured me a glass of water, placed a silver dish with three wells filled with bar snacks: citrusy cured olives, waffle potato chips, and mixed nuts.
The cocktail menu was divided into several sections, including Light Spirited and Dark Spirited. One of the latter caught my eye immediately—the à la Louisiane. This cocktail has a bit of a history, and once I got talking to Leo, he confided that he'd given the original recipe an updated tweak or two—changing the proportions a bit, and livening it up with two types of bitters, in the style of a Manhattan. Leo's cocktail making was beautiful and precise; he used a gorgeous glass pitcher in lieu of a pint glass, and a long, elegant mixing spoon with a small trident on the back end.
The recipe, after the jump.
As I sipped my drink and nibbled on my snacks, gazing down the bar, I felt pampered and relaxed—for the same price as a cocktail at any high-end bar in the city. Danny Meyer is known for his hospitality, and the bar at Eleven Madison Park has that magical quality that makes you feel special each time you visit. Take my advice: go there when you want to treat yourself to something special, even if you can't stay for dinner.
Luckily for us, Leo was happy to share the original recipe for the à la Louisiane, as well as the updated Eleven Madison Park version.
Eleven Madison Park à la Louisiane
2 1/2 oz Old Overholt Rye
1/2 oz benedictine
3/4 oz Carpano Antica Sweet Vermouth
2 dashes of Peychauds bitters
2 dashes of Bitter Truth Decanter Bitters*Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass that has been washed with absinthe. Garnish with a cherry and an orange twist.
*This unusual bitters can be found online at CocktailKingdom.
Original à la Louisiane
1 oz rye
1 oz sweet vermouth
1 oz benedictineStir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass that has been washed with absinthe. Garnish with a cherry.
Marchand: Public Pressure could Influence Wilpons
In his most recent Marchand Minute for 1050 ESPN Radio, Andrew Marchand cites an associate of the Wilpon as saying the only way to get the Mets to spend money this offseason will be public pressure.
…i am not sure what this means… the buzz around new york has long been the Mets will cut payroll this off season, and only spend around $15 million on new acquisitions… i don’t necessarily believe that… i mean, the club has a ton of holes, it is about to conclude a hugely disappointing season, and they will need to sell new ticket plans and ads for next season… and so, while it might sound prudent to cut budget today, i will not believe it until i see it… perhaps that is the public pressure marchand is speaking of… it’s not necessarily a fan uprising, but a looming fear of empty seats in 2010…
To listen to 1050 ESPN Radio online, click here.
Molly Returns
Molly is officially back at Rocketboom and is excited to report the daily news starting Monday! Send us your interesting and cool news stories at news@rocketboom.com
Lack of parental pressure turns nos into yeses
When the usual methods of getting your child to do something fail, perhaps try the exact opposite approach instead.
They direct the parents to temporarily back off almost entirely: to stop asking their child to do the desired behavior and say it's OK not to do it at all, stop offering praise or other rewards for doing it, and mask their attitude of engaged enthusiasm or frustrated rage with an appearance of bland disinterest in whether the child does it or not. What happens next, frequently, is that within a day or two the child starts doing the behavior with no prompting from parents or anyone else.
The explanation of why this technique works is pretty interesting. We've tried it a bit recently with Ollie and his extreme disinterest in brushing his teeth and we're seeing some promising results, although I imagine this works better with slightly older kids.
Tags: parenting psychology
Where to Find Megan Fox: Scorching hot starlet Megan Fox will...
Scorching hot starlet Megan Fox will not be found at sceney restaurants. Instead she frequents the Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, or her fave, the Red Lobster. Conan's response: "You're the perfect woman." [EMD]
Aquatarians Repent! Kurt Cobain Proved Wrong!
Whelp, there goes a nice moral rationalization for eating eating seafood. Turns out goldfish recognize and remember pain and dead salmon recognize human facial expressions. (WHAT.) You kinda always suspected, right? I mean, the way lobsters scream when you stab them.
L’Shana Tova! Time for Apples, Honey and News on Bees
Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year and it is customary to eat lots of sweet things during this holiday to symbolize what we hope will be a sweet new year. That’s why Rosh Hashanah meals usually include apples and honey, honey cake, sweet challah with raisins and so on. Since we are a little bee obsessed here on the TakePart blog, I thought it would be a good time to round up some news on these inestimable pollinators:
The 41st world apiculture congress, Apimondia, is currently in session in Montpellier, France. Ten thousand beekeepers, entomologists and other scientists are all asking the same question: What is killing our bees? Colony Collapse Disorder is still a mystery but this phenomenon continues to be a cause for great concern. From the AFP:
By some estimates, this unseen, unsung work is worth more than 200 billion dollars a year, often through hives that are trucked to monoculture farms to do pollinating magic at specific times of the year. Wild bees, bats and other pollinators are simply not numerous enough to do the trick.
Read more about Apimondia from the AFP article, “Bee Deaths Set Apiculture Congress Abuzz”
UC Davis’ Department of Entomology just launched a website that is a one stop hive for everything you need to know about honeybees and native bees. Have a look around: Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility
And you should check out this great article from the Earth Island Institute Journal, The Plight of the Bumblebee.
Shana tova u metuka! Have a happy and sweet new year!
andrew frank at gartner on google's ad exchange
Worth reading in full; I loved these bits most.
Agency buyers and ad networks, which often find themselves in “co-opetition,” are highly motivated and empowered to put considerable price pressure on additional intermediaries, especially if their name is Google. In its AdSense search business, Google has the advantage of opaque pricing and weak competition; in display exchanges, transparency reigns, and Google has plenty of competition. Agency buyers and ad networks, already feeling squeezed, have in common buying power and experience, which will drive exchange margins to a minimum. On the other side, publishers, especially those who consider themselves “premium,” are feeling even more squeezed, and are talking with agencies about private exchanges for their own networks that could minimize price friction in the value chain. Such developments will drive Google out toward the long tails of sites and advertisers, where display tends to lack the performance qualities of search.Of course, as Frank points out, "many have lost betting against Google."
cyclops-leveling is the new block-rocking
Bob Lefsetz does a rundown of the top selling records. Coming in at number 48, Darius Rucker's "Learn to Live."
A Hootie record. Serviceable songs delivered in a heartfelt manner. This still works in country, but not in pop. In pop you’ve got to dress up like an alien, use computers and have beats that would level a cyclops. But it’s the country artists who have careers, who people want to see on the road. And if you still think country is twang, you haven’t listened in eons.
even dead fish show emotion once in a while
A group of scientists at the University of Santa Barbara conducted an experiment where they put a dead 3.8 pound salmon in an fMRI machine, showed it pictures of people in social situations "with a specified emotional valence" and asked the fish what emotion the person in the photo was experiencing.
The result? The dead fish's brain lit up.
The lesson? Remember to correct for chance. I love the understated tone of the discussion on their poster.
Via Language Log.
All Of My Purple Life
I missed out on too much Prince, when I was kid. Weirdly enough, I thought of Prince as my mother's music. I think all black kid's who came up in the 80s had mothers who loved Prince. Much of my favorite Prince stuff, not from me rocking it, but from my Moms. She loved Kiss and the video. I remember she thought the line "You don't have to watch Dynasty, to have an attitude," was great.
One thing I've appreciated about Prince, as I've aged, is that he knows how to sing about sex, like a man honestly singing about sex. Much of the misogyny in hip-hop (and I suspect in other art forms too) comes from, forgive my profanity, a deep-seated fear of ass. Men--and especially young men--fear what they will do to be physically involved with a woman with whom they're infatuated. They compensate by turning this fear on its head and projecting. They make women into temptresses, gold-diggers, and villains, and make themselves into conquering heroes. Pussy don't rule me, they'll say--even though pussy ain't thinking about them. Which is the problem, or rather their problem.
But Prince was never afraid of himself, or what he'd do. On the contrary, he embraced it. In a song like "Erotic City" he earns the right to say "We can fuck (funk) until the dawn," by first saying,"Every time I comb my hair\Thoughts of you get in my eyes," or "All of my hang-ups are gone\How I wish you felt the same." He revels in the wanting, in the potential for rejection, he does not fear it. And having done that, he goes out and makes his own demands,Women, not girls, they rule my worldThat is just great. It's all there, and so confident--a mixture of his own power ("Act your age, not your shoe-size.") and vulnerability ("they rule my world.") I think that mix of vulnerability, confidence and honesty was why our mothers loved him. I think that was the sort of alchemy we missed in hip-hop. We got close a few times--notably De La Soul on "Buddy" or "Eye Know," or The Roots on "Silent Treatment" or "You Got Me." Also, there are a few Outkast joints. But we never achieved that sort of confidence--that sort of true manhood.
I said they rule my world
Act your age, not your shoe-size, Mama
And maybe we can do the twirl.
But hey, that's why he's arguably the greatest pop musician of our time. Know if he can just get off the homophobia tip.
Note: Mets Win, Mets Lose, at least Finish 15th
SNY.TV’s Ted Berg said on Twitter:
“People hoping the Mets lose so they get a better draft pick are way more optimistic about their drafting ability than I am.”
…this is an important point… this is also why i am not necessarily rooting for the Mets to lose… i mean, let the chips fall where they may, since i have no way of knowing if next year’s fourth
pick in the draft will end up being better than the seventh pick, and so on, and, of course, like berg is alluding to, that has everything to do with whether the Mets can develop that player in to an influential major leaguer, which is an uphill fight for every team – just look at the odds…
…that said, i am rooting for the Mets to finish among the 15 worst teams in the league… because, if the Mets finish any place within the first overall 15 picks of the draft, they will not lose their first pick if they sign a Type A free agent, like, say, Matt Holliday… assuming things stay as is, in a holliday scenario, they’d surrender a second-round pick instead…
…for what it’s worth, to finish with the 16th, the Mets need to catch fire and finish around .500 this season, jumping ahead of the Cubs and Twins in the standings, which is more or less impossible since there are only 16 games left in the season… in other words, it’s all good, and looking like the Mets will have a first-round pick next season, regardless of whether they sign a Type A free agent…
To follow Berg on Twitter, click here, to follow me, click here.
You’re Being Watched
I was driving down 3rd Ave when I saw some amusing graffiti out of the corner of my eye on this building…
In case you didn’t notice the inconspicuous security camera…
Ha, great. Made me laugh.
-SCOUT
Rich Coggins, by Cardboard Gods
via cardboardgods.net Yesterday on the train home I looked around at my fellow riders and wondered which of us was closest to death. Nobody looked particularly sickly, and the oldest guy was probably only in his fifties, not really that much older than me. I don’t know why the thought came into my head. I have a pile of loose cards in my shoebox that works as my “on deck” circle. These are the cards that I have considered writing about on this site but haven’t yet gotten around to doing so.... I have also spent the last several months expending all my energy and heart on focusing my baseball card prayers into a full-length book (due out April 2010) that tells the story of my life and of the life of these gods and how the two have always been intertwined. In certain ways it’s a book that I have been working on for many, many years. Little wonder that I feel a little played out right now. While we anxiously await Anil's post on how blogging is hip-hop, Josh Wilker makes the case that blogging is baseball card collecting.
All Just a Big Misunderstanding
SNL explains the real story behind Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst (including a brief appearance by Kristen Wiig as Michele Bachmann).
Late Update: The James Carville impersonation towards the end is pretty good, too.
Artist Karen Kimmel
Shared by sippey
Very cool -- love Karen! She's a long time favorite in our house...
As creative as she is altruistic, artist Karen Kimmel leads stencil workshops geared for children that she calls Art of Exchange.
The L.A.-based artist has been stressing the importance of creating art and helping kids make "some sick stuff" from California to New York, setting up workshops at Creative Growth in Oakland and Arizona's Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in addition to partnering with Andy Spade on The Avant Garde Preschool project.
Due out soon, the Exchange Collection laser-cut stencil set (pictured right) contains six original designs inspired by nature and made of flexible plastic. Also included is a grommet-bound coloring book packed with six pages of neon cardstock for cutting along with 12 templates.
If you can't wait, check out Kimmel's wood veneer and colored acrylic ornaments, available for purchase from the A+R Store, or her hook rugs, both lovely additions to any home.
For a full spectrum of her artwork and upcoming projects, or to download her 172-page portfolio full of past projects like the Baguette bag for Fendi and the Make Your Mark shoes for Nike, check out Karen Kimmel's website.
For those in L.A. this weekend, Kimmel will be hosting an artists workshop with New Editions, open to parents and kids alike at the J.Crew store in Malibu on 20 September 2009. Check out the Lipstick Tracez blog for more information.
It's a Little Quiet in This Corner
Aww. These Talk threads have few or zero replies as of today. Anyone have anything to say?
Trying My Own CheeseBread Sticks
"I have my own sourdough starter that I've been nurturing and I want to make cheese bread sticks. Any ideas for a good recipe?"
What to eat in Redmond, Oregon?
Monaco and Area
"Any great spots in or around Monaco, particularly markets, boulangerie or charcuterie options?"Inexpensive Eats in Newport, Rhode Island?
"I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for an inexpensive lunch place in Newport, Rhode Island. I'm looking for something where you can order at a counter and sit down, without waiters or waitresses. Thank you for your suggestions."What Herb Combo to Use in Goat Cheese?
"I am making a goat cheese tart and it calls for herb goat cheese. I only have regular goat cheese, but I have some fresh herbs: thyme, rosemary, sage, tarragon, and basil. Which combo of herbs should I use?"
Oh, Nixon
From the comments about this photo on If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger:
Tags: Richard NixonFred: As amusing as that picture is, Tricky was many things, but not a Dope.
Greg: Fred, you're right of course but unfortunately there wasn't an eighth dwarf named "Shifty."
Testing...
IMG_5503, originally uploaded by tienmao.Sippeystyle.
Smoking Silliness
Courtesy of Andrew, Will Saletan notes the foolishness of trying to ban smoking in public parks:Let's step back and recall how we got here. When tobacco fighters began to outlaw smoking in elevators, buses, restaurants, bars, and public buildings, their stated rationale was to protect nonsmokers trapped inside. Then the crusade moved on to apartment buildings, extending the same theory: You can't smoke in your apartment, because the smoke seeps under your door into hallways and other people's apartments.Now this rationale has moved outdoors. Way outdoors. David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner who led the anti-smoking fight in the 1990s, says New York City is doing the right thing, because "the majority of the population today doesn't want to be breathing in tobacco smoke, whether indoors or outdoors."
That's true. I hate tobacco smoke. I don't want to breathe it anywhere. I don't want the tiniest particle of it to touch my lungs, even if my nose doesn't notice it.
But do I have the right to that standard of purity? If so, doesn't that justify a ban on smoking absolutely anywhere? Forget parks and beaches. If you smoke in your backyard, aren't you violating my airspace? In fact, aren't you violating my airspace by lighting your grill or driving your car down my street? How far does my right to clean air extend?
But think of the children!
"We don't think children, parents, when they're standing at soccer games, should have to be breathing in smoke from the person next to them," Farley said after unveiling the city's 10-point plan alongside Mayor Bloomberg. "We don't think our children should have to be watching someone smoke."
Man, if you live in New York, and the worst your kid sees is someone smoking a cigarette, you're doing really good. Seriously, if this is your top concern, maybe you should live in Utah.
First Look: New White House Farmers' Market
"Michelle Obama started her speech by saying she had never seen so many people excited about fruits and vegetables."
[Photographs: Tressa Eaton]
White House Farmers’ Market
810 Vermont Avenue NW, Washington DC 20005 (b/n H and I Streets; map)
Hours: Open Thursdays from 3 to 7 p.m. through Oct. 29.
The brand new White House Farmers' Market (run by local market organization FreshFarm Markets) opened for the first time yesterday on Vermont Avenue between H and I streets, just outside the White House grounds.
After waiting in a huge line, shoppers passed through metal detectors, got patted down by secret service, and had their reusable market bags inspected. Waiting on the other side of the metal detectors were fruit and vegetable farmers, meat farmers, producers, cheese makers, and flower vendors.
D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty shopping for Asian pears.
From left: Michelle Obama shaking hands; beets marketing.
The directors of FreshFarm Markets joined D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty and a local farmer to speak about how important the market's opening day was. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack warmed up the crowd saying that "Every family in this country needs a farmer."
Soggy day outside
Secret service checking bags.
Michelle Obama started her speech by saying she had never seen so many people excited about fruits and vegetables. She talked about the overwhelming success of the White House Garden and her own path to local, healthy eating.
She admitted that she often resorted to take-out for her family before having butlers and cooks around, but thanks to farmers' markets, families can now eat fresh, real food much easier. She also acknowledged that parents everywhere are trying to do the best they can for their kids and that the bad-for-you food is also often the cheapest.
Michelle Obama also drew connections between healthcare costs and cheap food, noting that a new approach to eating is what helps her family get through the day, whether they're having a cabinet meeting or tackling math homework.
Michelle Obama after her speech.
After her speech, Mrs. Obama worked the line of cheering supporters, shaking hands with excited shoppers and eventually shopping (with a nifty market basket in tow) for cherry tomatoes and kale at The Farm at Sunnyside. White House Chef Sam Kass would not reveal what he planned to do with this dino kale.
Shopping for dino kale.
The crowd was filled with excited federal employees cheering (and watching from windows) as Mrs. Obama mentioned the nearby offices of the Treasury, the GSA, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Now that the market has officially opened, area workers can dash out to pick up produce for dinner during an afternoon break or en route to the Metro. The market is steps away from the McPherson Square and the Farragut West Metro stops.
Jose Andres (center)
Many D.C. chefs were present, including José Andrés of Cafe Atlantico, Jaleo, Zaytinya, and Oyamel; Todd Gray of Equinox (where Mrs. Obama celebrated her birthday in January); White House pastry chef Bill Yosses; and White House assistant chef Sam Kass who has been an active participant in the White House Garden project.
The new White House Farmers’ Market, located at 810 Vermont Avenue NW (between H and I Streets) will be open on Thursdays from 3 to 7 p.m. through Oct. 29. All vendors at the market accept food stamps and WIC and senior citizen coupons.
Related
Video: Inside the White House Garden
Serious Green: 6 Rules of a Good Farmers' Market
No Beets Will Grow in the White House's Organic Vegetable Garden?
Ahem.
Hello, internet! What has been going on with me other than crocks of fermentation, you ask? Well, today I met with my department chair and told him that I am pregnant. Having done this, I reckon that there is no point in waiting any longer to tell anyone else, so here is some exciting and highly unexpected news for you, my tens of readers: I'm pregnant!
I thought I'd find this announcement wonderfully freeing, and that I'd have lots to say, but it seems that I'm feeling suddenly shy instead. It is difficult not to be acutely aware of how boring I now have the opportunity to be, not that this has not always been the case.
Meanwhile, the period of prime pregnancy exhaustion has apparently run out while I was keeping things under wraps, so you've missed out on your chance to read the very most thrilling tales of falling asleep in a chair. Try not to be too disappointed. I'll come up with something else just as interesting, I'm sure.
I Been There!
Gov. Sanford stands up for fellow South Carolinian Joe Wilson.
Foliage map
Foliage map for New York and New England. You can register as a "Foliage Ambassador" on the site to report on the progress in your area.
Tags: foliage maps
I’m Reading: about Guilt, Disappointment, Sweetener & Seaver
Brooklyn Met Fan says, ‘It’s OK to not watch anymore.’
Jason at Faith and Fear in Flushing asks if this is the most disappointing season in Mets history, and lists his top five of all time.
MetsGrrl doesn’t even think she’s “supporting the team in the true sense of the word.”
In the offseason, Promote The Curse proposes five changes that should happen to Citi Field, including “Murals, placards, neon lights,” and, “do something with the stairwells.”
…they are completely barren, but, hey, so were the ramps at shea… if the Mets ever start contending, those stairwells will be rocking… but until then, they are just lifeless exits…
Instead of spoilers, the Mets are ’sweeteners,’ explains Metstradamus.
Finally, since living in the moment is no fun, Never Forget ‘69 relives this day in Mets history, writing, “Seaver manhandled the Expos lineup striking out 9, walking 3, allowing just 5 hits and more importantly, no runs. Another complete game, Seaver’s sixth in a row, was the ace’s 23rd of the season.”
Rich Coggins
Yesterday on the train home I looked around at my fellow riders and wondered which of us was closest to death. Nobody looked particularly sickly, and the oldest guy was probably only in his fifties, not really that much older than me. I don’t know why the thought came into my head.
I have a pile of loose cards in my shoebox that works as my “on deck” circle. These are the cards that I have considered writing about on this site but haven’t yet gotten around to doing so. This Rich Coggins card has been in that pile longer than any other card. It’s a card that I remember from my childhood and that, upon first looking at it as an adult, after years of these cards being out of my sight, gave me the same jolt that it had given me as a kid. It’s a jarring thing to stare at Rich Coggins as he appears on his 1976 Yankees card. It always has been. Many times in the last three years I’ve picked up the card and felt that jolt, but I was never able to put that feeling into words. Why do I feel the need to bury everything with words?
I started Cardboard Gods just a little over three years ago (first post on 9.10.06, to be exact), and I often pine for the what seems to me now to be the simplicity of that start. At that time my cards had been disentangled from the rubber bands that had kept them sorted into teams when I was a kid, and so everything was loose in the box. My plan was to start every single day by blindly dipping my hand into the box and pulling out a card at random and writing about it. This method, coupled with the fact that I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time looking at my cards in years, lent an exciting freshness to my first attempts to attach my own words to the cards that had centered my childhood. It was as if I had found a way to once again look at the cards for the first time.
As the odd practice progressed, I found my thoughts stretching out, making it difficult to post something once a day (plus: I am lazy), and I also found myself wanting to come at the cards from many different angles beyond just jotting my impressions of looking at the randomly chosen card. Often I’d find myself thinking about a certain player and how he related in some strange way to a story opening up in my head, but then to find that player I had to dig through my whole box of unsorted cards. Eventually I decided to sort all my cards back into teams, again retracing the steps of my younger self, and with that the element of randomness was diminished. I still sometimes try to pick a card at random, but by now I know generally where each stack is located in the shoebox (I have them piled by division) and I know the relative thickness of each team. I can no longer fake my way past the sobering fact that almost all of my cards have already come to me.
A certain sense of aftermath has presided over things here at Cardboard Gods for the last few weeks, a feeling that it’s all been done, all been said. I suppose this is only natural. In addition to writing about my cards on a regular basis for three years, I have also spent the last several months expending all my energy and heart on focusing my baseball card prayers into a full-length book (due out April 2010) that tells the story of my life and of the life of these gods and how the two have always been intertwined. In certain ways it’s a book that I have been working on for many, many years. Little wonder that I feel a little played out right now.
A little cross-eyed. A little disheveled, with buttons undone. A little like I’m staggering through the dusk. A little closer to the end. A little like Rich Coggins. Indeed, Rich Coggins, erstwhile Bumbryesque speedster and singles-swatting Orioles outfielder, was not long for the game at the time of this disquieting photo. He played in just seven games for the Yankees in 1976 before they tossed him into a Ken Brett for Carlos May deal that landed him on the White Sox, where he batted a funereal .156. When a batter hits .156, the sun has set for good. Rich Coggins had to wander out into that darkness beyond the heaven in which he had existed for a handful of years. He joined all the rest of us. All the acolytes. All the fallen gods.
Since I started this site, some of the gods have slipped away altogether, including most notably the very first player I wrote about, Mark Fidrych (who, after Yaz–may he live forever–is the second-most-featured player on this site). But Rich Coggins is still around. And I’m still around. I don’t know how Rich Coggins is handling the aftermath, but I plan to keep on finding ways to pray my way through these cards to the cross-eyed heaven of this one brief life.
A Soldier’s Voice Rediscovered
A recording of a radio broadcast of a battlefield Sabbath service in Germany in 1944 has become an unlikely YouTube hit.
Scientists find area responsible for emotion in dead fish
Neuroskeptic covers a hilarious new study that involved brain scanning a dead salmon and finding activation in the brain as it 'looked' at photos of human faces.
The authors are not genuinely arguing that dead fish have brain activity but have run the experiment to show that some common statistical methods used in fMRI research will give false positives if they're not adequately controlled for.
The research, led by neuroscientist Craig Bennett, was presented as a poster at a recent conference and has the brilliant title of "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction" and is available online as a jpg.
I'd say that this research was justified on comedic grounds alone, but they were also making an important scientific point. The (fish-)bone of contention here is multiple comparisons correction. The "multiple comparisons problem" is simply the fact that if you do a lot of different statistical tests, some of them will, just by chance, give interesting results.
Most statistics used in psychology, and indeed brain imaging, are based on calculating a p value.
Usually, a p value of less than 0.05 is considered significant and this means that if there was genuinely no difference in the things you were comparing, you would get a false positive less than 5% of the time.
But your average fMRI brain scan analysis can involve 40,000 comparisons, so even if there's nothing going on, some bits of the brain are going to seem active just through falsely detecting noise and measurement error as real effect.
To help prevent this, you can correct for multiple comparisons by reducing the 5% cut-off to a smaller amount. Unfortunately, some of the standard methods of doing this can be so strict as to create false negatives, when genuine differences are dismissed as statistical noise.
There is no hard and fast rule about which methods to use, but our salmon neuroscientists have graphically illustrated how misleading results can occur if we naively assume that not correcting accounting 'multiple comparisons problem' will give us an accurate picture of brain function.
Kudos to the Neuroskeptic blog for picking up on this and for some excellent coverage of this study.
Link to Neuroskeptic on dead salmon study.
jpg of conference poster.
Plack middleware
Middleware is some great (but sometimes abused) features in Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack. HTTP::Engine also had this middleware concept and had some great "plugins". So it's time to write the new middleware framework for PSGI and Plack.
In PSGI, middleware is just a PSGI application thatdoes the both application and server side. It takes the $env hash like application does and then runs the original application like a server does, and then return the response. Middleware can do pre-processing on the $env hash or do post-processing on $env or $res. Example middleware would be doing some X-Sendfile work, normalizing proxy IP address using X-Forwarded-For, map static files to /static, catch the runtime error and display a beautiful stack trace or profile the runtime requests using profilers like NYTProf.
Today I made a middleware branch on Plack repo so writing and enabling middleware is now extremely easy:
use Plack::Middleware qw( Foo Bar Baz ); use Plack::Builder; my $app = sub { ... }; builder { enable Plack::Middleware::Foo; enable Plack::Middleware::Bar %options; enable Plack::Middleware::Foo %options; $app }This syntax sugar is just cloned from Rack::Builder, and it looks really easy and intuitive. If you don't like the DSL you can also use
->wrap(@options, $app)to do the same.
September 17, 2009
zadi: why i love old books: I found this written in an old book...
zadi: why i love old books:
I found this written in an old book I have: The portable Blake (who I was obsessed w/ in my teen years and am revisiting).
There’s something about knowing that a book has been handled and absorbed by someone else. That someone has flipped and dog-eared its pages and drifted off into a daydream spurred by a word.
And when you find someone has written a note or quote in one of its margins, or highlighted a sentence — man, that’s like hitting the jackpot. :)
I love books that look like they’ve lived.
VMware Fusion 2.0.5, 56% off
VMware Fusion 2.0.5Wow! Demand for this promo has been unbelieveable! We have currently exhausted our allotment of Fusion serial numbers but will have more soon. No worries! If you purchase now you will receive a serial number as soon as we get them. In the mean time, feel free to check out Fusion; you can use it for up to 30 days without a serial number (and can register it when you receive your serial number). -The MUPromo Team
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VMware Fusion makes your Windows-on-Mac experience the safest possible with a suite of features to keep Windows safe and sound. From automated, timed snapshots, to embedded antivirus and antispyware software, VMware Fusion keeps Windows on your Mac sparkling.Mac-like and User Friendly
Built from the ground up for Mac users, with an obsessive eye towards being a "good Mac citizen" VMware Fusion is the easiest, most Mac-friendly way to run Windows on the Mac. A Mac-first user interface ensures that users get the features they expect, like customizable tool bars, searchable Apple help, Boot Camp support, dock notification integration, and more.Power to Burn
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Raekwon On Kanye West's VMA Outburst, "He Either Had To Be Drunk Or Felt Like 'F*ck That, I Own The Awards'" [Video]
Wu-Tang Clan's Raekwon has put in his thoughts regarding Kanye West's televised Video Music Awards on-stage rant last weekend and said the rapper was likely drunk or overly confident in himself.
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
@caterina and @cdixon make some great points in support of NYC’s nascent tech revival.
Chris:
New York City has many of the same strengths as Silicon Valley – merit-driven capitalism, the embrace of newcomers and particularly immigrants, and a consistent willingness to reinvent itself.Caterina:
…it may be that creativity and invention are more dependent on the networks in which the creator participates than their individual genius or their willingness to put in the hours. As we’ve so often seen, great ideas occur where there is a confluence of ideas taken from the environment surrounding the creator or creators.Having spent a good deal of time working in technology both in NY and Silicon Valley, I’ve found that the NYC network is more diffuse and harder to find a path into. I think it has something to do with the fact that there’s so much else going on aside from technology — the valley might hold the title of the best place for start-ups in technology, but NYC is the best place for many things.
The diversity of experience on the 20×200 team is incredible and inspiring. Everyone I work with has done a bunch of other things aside from technology, and not one of them set out for a tech career to begin with. Among us are photographers, musicians, artists, writers, lawyers, teachers and wine experts. We all love the internet (a lot! too much?) but what drives us most is our love of art and the people who make it.
Does this happen in Silicon Valley? Perhaps, but my time spent there — which I loved, for the record — was about an immersion in technology. Here in NYC it’s about the thing itself.
Both environments have their merits, and like Caterina, I get to enjoy both. As readers of the 20×200 newsletters know, I spend a lot of time in the Bay area. My friends there have a fluency and familiarity with technology that I find lacking here in New York. There’s a drive for innovation that’s almost palpable, and many are the true believers who are convinced that technology will save us all.
I love that way of thinking, and I’m also willing to put my money on technology as a solver of the many things that ail us, but all that innovation speak can be exhausting and then there’s the fact that you can’t hail a cab there.
My non-techy friends in NY can be downright phobic and I often find myself making sheepish excuses for Twitter and Tumblr and Foursquare. The fear of what’s coming is incredibly exasperating, knowing as I do that it’s already here.
Then again, if you live too long inside the echo-chamber, it’s easy to forget who’s going to be using all this technology in the end. The reality check is important, almost as important as being able to hail a cab whenever I damn well please.
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Mens Fashion and Style Icons
Men's Fashion, from stylecrave.com:
This former diver-turned-actor has proved to bald men everywhere that it if you are losing hair, there is still hope: you just have to get in really good shape, acquire a street-smart Londoner accent, and kick a lot of ass. But in all seriousness, Statham has been able to earn major roles even though he shares few characteristics with the stereotypical Hollywood leading man. He also tends to carry himself in a confident way that never looks bad. He is probably the most unassuming inclusion in this list, but deserves mention nonetheless.Why not.
because you can't spell innovation without t.o.s.
So Sarah Lacy tees off on the startups that demo'd at TechCrunch50 this week:
Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world. There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google.
I wasn't there, and I only half-heartedly followed along in blogotwitland, so I'll take Sarah's word for it -- she's smart, she's great writer, and she does a good video interview.
But! I think there's one company -- Udorse -- that is pushing the boundaries in an area where we haven't seen much innovation lately...the all-important terms of service.
First, some background: Udorse is a "visual endorsement engine" that lets you tag photos of you and your friends with endorsements of the products in those photos. Here's Robin Wauters' Techcrunch description of the demo (or you can just go watch it):
Udorse co-founder Geoffrey Lewis picked a photo of him and a friend who works as a fahion designer. Endorsing in this case is done by selecting an item – the dress she’s wearing – and identifying it with a description and associated brand name, with the extra ability to add links and commentary to the highlighted item. Every time someone sees the photo and clicks the associated Udorse icon or link, they are able to gather more information about the product or directly be referred to the website where it can be bought.
I know. So good, right? It gets better, though. The real innovation lies in their terms of service. Most of the TOS is the typical stuff about your account and limitations of liability and content ownership and all the things that no one ever reads.
But check out section C, titled "Udorsement Rules."
By Udorsing a photo (a "Udorsed Photo"), you represent and warrant that (1) you have the written consent of each and every identifiable natural person in the Udorsed Photo to use such person's likeness in the manner contemplated by the Service and this Agreement, and each such person has released you from any liability that may arise in relation to such use; ...
I know. "Written consent." So good, right?
Wait -- before you roll your eyes, think of the opportunity they're creating: if Udorse takes off, there's a huge need for a marketplace of third party developers of workflow solutions that help you quickly and easily get consent from all your friends in your Udorsed photographs!
In the meantime, I've Udorsed a photo of this TastyKake truck, since it's not a natural person.
Seriously, I really do love TastyKakes of most varieties.
best of CNN
via www.cnn.com The predator, nicknamed Raptorex, lived about 60 million years before the T. rex Why did CNN's writers switch between "T. Rex" and "Tyrannosaurs Rex" throughout the story?
CHART OF THE DAY: The Internet Is Finally, Primarily A Content Platform
It used to be the Web's only real killer app was communications -- email. But these days people use the Internet for content consumption more than anything else.
Users spend 88% more time consuming content on the Internet each month in 2009 (7 hours) than they did in 2003 (3 hours, 42 minutes), according to a study conducted by the Online Publishers Association's Internet Activity Index.
Whereas people used to spend 46% of their Internet time communicating in 2003, in 2009, that number is now down to 27%. As indicated in the chart below, content consumption is up to a 42% share from 34%.
See Also:
- CHART OF THE DAY: Apple Stock Rockets Toward All-Time High (AAPL)
- CHART OF THE DAY: 24% Of Newspapers Still In The Internet Dark Ages
- CHART OF THE DAY: Pay TV Thrives Despite Hulu Threat (NFLX, CMCSA, TWC)
Bitch, please.
So yes, it’s a bummer that Michaela Watkins got fired from SNL but I have to say, I will not miss her Angie Tempura character one bit. I never found this joke funny. It’s too easy get cheap laughs by taking potshots at the Internet’s worst tendencies, and I involuntarily cringe when people do it, the same way I cringe when someone takes any “joke” that had blog currency three years ago and exports it to meatspace. Like when a standup comedian says something about the “world wide information superhighway.” (Or: “meatspace.”) Oof. That is how I always felt about those “Bitch Pleeze” sketches, basically: “Oof.”
Sure, go ahead and make your joke about how I can’t find the humor in a caricature of an iced-coffee-addled, pajama-clad, facial-ticcy blogger who spews inarticulate scattershot hate at the world because it just hits way too close to home. Ha ha! Congratulations, you have been promoted from Captain to Admiral Obvious in a fancy ceremony; here is your new uniform and some medals. Also, HarperStudio is going to publish a book of your best mean anonymous blog comments. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?
Sorry, that’s enough of that. Let me just gracefully back up from there into what I was wanting to say which is that for some reason, no matter how ungrateful the Internet* can sometimes be, I am often moved to speak up in its defense. (You’re welcome, douchetards!) This is a perverse and self-defeating impulse but sometimes I just can’t help myself.
At 11 this past Sunday morning I attended a panel discussion at the Brooklyn Book Festival about the future of literary fiction. This panel was moderated by former Soft Skull publisher and current niche social publishing community-startup -starter Richard Nash and featured Lipshitz 6 or, Two Angry Blondes author T Cooper and Anna In-Between author Elizabeth Nunez. My boyfriend Keith was also on this panel and this, aside from my deep abiding love of panel discussions, is why I was there. Obvs in the interest of domestic harmony I will recuse myself from commenting on anything that Keith said except to say that basically I agreed with him. Luckily I don’t have to mention anything he said in order to contextualize anything the other panelists said because, even though the event was nominally a discussion, each of the panelists went off in his or her own direction. One thing nobody ended up talking about was what, specifically, might happen to fiction in the future, but since soothsaying is a ridiculous thing to expect from a panel of non-psychics I wasn’t disappointed by that, per se. What I was disappointed by was the way both Nunez and Cooper seemed to be cultivating — possibly without realizing they were doing so — a seeming sneering disdain for their audience, both the audience in the Community Room of Borough Hall and the potential audiences of their novels.
Nunez began her remarks by mentioning that she had just learned that morning that her new novel, recently published by Brooklyn-based indie Akashic, had been selected as an Editor’s Pick by the New York Times Book Review. However, she told us, in spite of this honor and in spite of also getting tons of awards and nice reviews over the years for her many other novels, her books do not sell very many copies. Her theory about why her books don’t sell more copies is that the publishing industry is too dumb and racist to figure out how to market a black author who isn’t Terry McMillan or Zane. It is a frightening bad sign for the future not just of books but of America, that Elizabeth Nunez’s books are not bestsellers. I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating but this really was what Nunez wanted to talk about, at the outset of this panel. At times she seemed to be trembling with rage.
And you know, I absolutely sympathize with her, to a point. There aren’t a lot of people who would disagree with Nunez that the book industry’s business model is deeply flawed and that we need to come up with new ways of enabling books that aren’t by Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer to connect with their audiences. In fact, many people are actively working to do just that. And so railing against the old, flawed model — especially when introducing yourself, and maybe your work, to a roomful of people who most likely do something with their lives that has to do with the industry you’re maligning — seemed like an odd tactic, fomenting-change-wise.
Then T Cooper started talking about The Internet.
Conversations about The Internet tend to dog any conversation about the future of book-reading and book-publishing. This one was especially interesting because it took on not only the question of whether The Internet — meaning not only e-book-to-iPhone downloading and other methods of book-reading that don’t involve books as physical objects, but also online marketing and the idea of self-branding — will Change Everything, but also whether the reams of internet-writing that many of us spend our days consuming and creating are changing our ability or desire to read non-online, process-oriented fiction and nonfiction. And this is actually an interesting question, one that I don’t know the answer to. I like reading and writing both kinds of writing, so I hope they will both continue to exist. I understand why people think they are opposed, but to examine the reasons why people think they are opposed gets us into a long and messy conversation about, among other things: Do people have a right to expect to get paid or to get attention for doing what they love? I think that artists who aren’t getting the money or the eyeballs they think their work deserves often blame these deficiencies on the Internet in a way that earlier generations might have scapegoated another new technology: the television, the radio, etc. But actually, being able to make a living and/or command a wide audience by writing literary fiction or nonfiction has always, in every generation, been a privilege accorded a motley — and maybe kind of arbitrary! — few. File under “life’s not fair.” Please believe me that I’m just as upset about this as Cooper, Nunez, and you are. But: life is not fair.
T Cooper fears that unedited, ill-thought-out online reading and writing is crowding out the curated, edited writing that appears on the printed page. He doesn’t, he says, want to see a review of Keith’s book next to a picture of your cat. He is uninterested in kitty pix in general. The idea of a Twitter novel makes him want to “kill himself.” He said that he didn’t understand why people thought other people wanted to hear about what they ate for breakfast, clearly expecting a laugh from the audience that only sort of came. (That was when I started to cringe and think of Angie Tempura.) Nunez nodded vehemently: “I always tell my writing students that your first draft is like vomit — it doesn’t smell good and no one should see it but you!” she said. Both authors shook their heads in saddened disbelief about why anyone wants to spew their vomity rough drafts all over the internet for the world to see. They complained about being encouraged by their publishers to blog, to Tweet. They resisted the undignified idea that they would be forced to be available to their readers via online presences that they themselves would have to participate in creating. At this point, an audience member asked all the panelists how involved they had been in their books’ marketing campaigns. I don’t remember exactly what Cooper said at this point but he seemed to regret that he’d had to be involved at all. In general the idea seemed to be that book marketing ought to be something that an omniscient, dogged employee of one’s publisher does while the author remains behind the scenes, unsullied by hustling.
While Cooper and Nunez sat there and basically expressed their disdain for people who work in publishing and people who are interested in reading or writing about books online, I wondered who, exactly, they thought was sitting there in the Community Room at 11am on a Sunday, listening to them speak on a panel about the future of fiction. Or maybe they hadn’t thought about this at all.
I think — and I base this opinion on having worked in book publishing — that a lot of authors think of “readers” the way we think of any intangible but demonstrably present phenomenon, like bacteria. We can’t see them, so we don’t think about them much. We like them in theory when they’re helping us, digesting our food et cetera — in fact, we take it for granted that they will do so – but mostly we only notice them when they’re making us sick. It’s not a given that authors make the connection between the way they feel about books and writers they like and the way someone might feel about them, and their work. Readers are not bacteria, though. They are people, and they are, potentially, everywhere – including, increasingly, online.
Being a jerk, I raised my hand and mentioned this to the panelists, but I was too vague — I said they had to be willing to reach readers “where they lived.” Nunez said she was willling to do any event, anywhere — “Just tell me where!” she said. And then the panel was over.
*I know, I hate people who talk about “The Internet” like it’s all one thing, too, but that’s part of the point I’m making, somehow.
Philadelphia Avoids Massive Layoffs With State Senate Vote
I think this means we get to keep our libraries.
PubSubHubbub is a Lot Easier Than It Sounds
I've begun digging into PubSubHubbub, the real-time RSS update protocol created by Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin of Google and Martin Atkins of Six Apart. I was under the impression that it's harder for RSS publishers to use than the RSSCloud Interface, but that isn't the case. The specification is simple and precisely written, adopting conventions like RFC 2119 that make a spec considerably easier to understand, and it communicates using basic HTTP requests.
I wrote the software that runs the Drudge Retort, so I decided to add Pubbub support to it this morning to see how it works. (I'm tripping over the name "PubSubHubbub" like crazy, both when I write and speak, so I'm giving the protocol a nickname.) Pubbub delegates all the work required for update notification to a server called a hub. Google offers a hub at http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ that's free for use by all feed publishers, so I'm relying on it.
First, I added a link element to the Retort's RSS feed that identifies the feed's update hub:
<atom:link rel="hub" href="http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com" />
Because this element comes from the Atom namespace, I had to make sure it was declared in the feed's top-level RSS element:
<rss version="2.0"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:sitemap="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">The bold portion is the Atom declaration. I already was using an Atom element in the feed, so I didn't need to change this.
When a new story is posted on the Retort, the Pubbub hub must be notified that a change has occured. This is handled by sending a ping to the hub with the URL of one or more feeds that have been updated.
I've written an open source Weblog Pinger library in PHP, so I upgraded it to support these pings. A Pubbub ping employs HTTP requests (REST) instead of XML-RPC, the protocol used by Weblogs.Com and similar services. I wrote a new function, ping_rest(), that can send a ping to any Pubbub server.
By the time I was done, I'd spent an hour on the code and a few hours testing it out. So now when I post a new item on the Retort, Google's Pubbub server sends the full text of the item to all readers that support the protocol. This is faster and simpler than RSSCloud, which tells readers to request the feed again.
To give you an idea of how fast Pubbub can be, when I posted a new story on the Retort, it showed up 20 seconds later on FeedBurner, one of the first RSS services to support the protocol.
Per Se Dinner Offers First Sips Of New Bacon Beer
On Friday nights many people go on the quest for a good beer but take that simple idea to Per Se restaurant in New York City and the idea gets a little more complicated (and fabulous). Tomorrow, September 18, Per Se is hosting a beer-paired tasting dinner with brewmaster Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery. Brooklyn Brewery Beers will be matched with a seven-course tasting menu. Among the other offerings, this is your first chance to taste "Reinschweinsgebot" an innovative beer infused with bacon from Benton's Country Smokehouse. You can't go wrong with bacon. This event will take place in the Per Se Private Dining Room and costs $350 per person.
Per Se Dinner Offers First Sips Of New Bacon Beer originally appeared on Luxist on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Where's the world's best food?
The Guardian lists the best 50 foods to eat and where to get them. I've had a few of these (ravioli at Babbo, pork at Gramercy, pho at Pho 24, pastrami at Katz's, etc.) but, sucker that I am for such things, I particularly enjoyed reading about the Turkish olive oil available at an electrical supply shop in London:
Tags: best of food listsAt his electrical supply shop in London's Clerkenwell, Mehmet Murat sells wonderful, intensely fruity oil from his family's olive groves in Cyprus and south-west Turkey. Now he imports more than a 1,000 litres per year. His lemon-flavoured oil is good enough to drink on its own.
Portis: "Clinton Portis Can't Do Everything"
Both The Post and The Times ran stories this morning on Clinton Portis's unselfishness, and the way he's declined to call for more carries after the Week 1 loss. The topic was also raised on Portis's weekly appearance on the John Thompson Show Tuesday afternoon, and since there's no conversation in D.C. sports like a conversation between Thompson and Portis, I thought I'd provide the full quotes. If you're a fan of referring to yourself in the third person and checking Portis paperwork, you oughta love this. Thompson: "Clinton let me just ask you this, and I just got finished defending your coach. I like the guy, I don't think he's a commercial, I think it's gonna take time. Ok, but I'm gonna ask you on the side that I don't understand...When I watch y'all play and I look at Clinton Portis, I'm saying that they're trying to blend
Pelosi: "The Public Option Will Be in the Bill That Passes the House"
This will come as a welcome moment of relief for House progressives and public option enthusiasts.
"I fully support the public option. The public option will be in the bill that passes the House," Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters today.
Last week, Pelosi said "This is about a goal. It's not about provisions. As long as our goal of affordability and accessibility and quality, meeting the four...goals that we have in the legislation, then we will go forward with that bill."
But all along she's been a strong proponent of the public option, and earlier in the process she insisted that a bill without a public option could not pass in the House.
Cook the Book: Spaghetti alla Carbonara
I consider Spaghetti alla Carbonara one of my culinary secret weapons. No matter how sad the state of my refrigerator, chances are that I have all of the ingredients on hand to produce a steaming and satisfying plate of carbonara. I've learned over the years that as long as I have a few eggs, a chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and some sort of cured pork product, I will never go hungry nor will I be disappointed.
There might be a few other incarnations of pasta that are equally as quick, but none deliver the richness of this simple mix of bacon, eggs, and pasta. If you have never made this dish before, Ari Weinzweig's recipe from Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon is a great place to start. Boil the pasta, crisp up some pork (bacon, pancetta, guanciale, even diced salt pork will do), drain the pasta, add it to the rendered pork fat, mix in the eggs and grated cheese, toss with a generous amount of black pepper, and you are finished.
Once you learn the basic formula you can add your own touches. Fresh herbs are always a nice addition—I am particularly fond of parsley and chives. You can deglaze the pan with white wine for a little added acidity or add a touch of cream if you like your pasta a bit saucier.
Win 'Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon'
As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon to give away this week. Enter to win here »
Spaghetti alla Carbonara
- serves 4 as a main course, or 6 to 8 as a side dish -
Adapted from Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon by Ari Weinzweig.
Ingredients
1 pound spaghetti
6 ounces (about 3 slices) pancetta (or guanciale), diced
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
6 fresh eggs, beaten
2 ounces Parmigiano-Reggiano, or more to taste
Coarse sea salt to taste
Freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper to tasteProcedure
1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and add the spaghetti. Stir well to keep from sticking. Cook until al dente, about 10 minutes or so.
2. Meanwhile, in a 12-inch skillet fry the pancetta in the olive oil until the fat has melted completely and the meat is crisp. Remove the pancetta from the pan, reserving the fat. Reduce the heat to low, being careful not to burn the fat.
3. When the spaghetti is done, drain and toss with the fat in the skillet.
4. Working quickly, pour the eggs over the pasta. Don't dally or the mix will get cold; at the same time you don't want the pan too hot, lest the eggs overcook. Quickly add the pancetta, lots of freshly ground pepper, stir well, and get it out of the skillet and into very warm bowls ASAP. Salt to taste, then sprinkle some freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano over the top, and eat while it's hot!
Barack Obama, Jedi Knight
The President recently hosted a rally at The White House in support of Chicago's bid to hold the 2016 Summer Olympics. Some members of the Olympic fencing team were there. Obama was given a plastic sword. Photos were taken. Photoshop (with an assist from me) did the rest.
Here's our President attacking an unseen Sith Lord or perhaps someone condemned by a death panel:
And having finished them off to the delight of the assembled, a victory pose.
Tags: Barack Obama remix Star Wars
Jason Santa Maria: Make Yourself Presentable
"I have two basic rules for slide design: simple and big. Type should always be big enough to read from the back of the room, and simplicity is best to convey information quickly." and "I never memorize what I want to say. Instead, I rehearse so that I know the concepts I’m trying to convey. " and "You are not invisible up in front of everyone, so merely reading bullet points off a slide that anyone in the audience can clearly read themselves is not enough." Excellent article on the art of presenting --> Go read it
Music: Manchester Independent Economic Review reports
Pictured above are a series of reports printed on sugar paper for the Manchester Independent Economic Review. -> See more of their work --> Aisle One
Hey, fellow reader users -- did anyone else notice that they
Hey, fellow reader users -- did anyone else notice that they killed the "G L" keyboard shortcut to bring up the "go to label" hover box? Or am I imagining things? I know "G T" works to do the moral equivalent, but burning in new muscle memory = painful. I guess it makes sense with all the _L_iking going on around here lately, but damn you kids get off my lawn with your change.
With love,
Frequently asked question guy
New York Times Examines Summer Of Death
This article suggests that the Summer of Death™ is essentially a Boomer meditation on mortality, but we shouldn’t let that contention obscure the most important part of the story: The Summer of Death™ IS MINE, BITCHES! Where is my goddamn credit?In other news, autumn officially starts on the 22nd, so there are only five days left for the Reaper to pad his total. Yesterday he added actor/comedian Henry Gibson, whose performance in Nashville really should be up on YouTube.
A ‘French Chef’ Whose Appeal Doesn’t Translate - NYTimes.com
This NY Times piece about how the French are largely unaware of Julia Child reminded me that she wasn't always "all that" in American professional kitchens either. When I began my professional cooking career in 1981, most of the people I met were who had been working in kitchens for a while were either dismissive of her, or in some instances hostile.
Rene Chardin, a chef born in Champagne, France and for whom I worked from 1982-83, often teased me by comparing my technique to Julia Child's. In the 1990's when I was teaching at the New York Restaurant School, there was an instructor there who had been a sous chef at the Rainbow Room when Julia Child came in to do a spot as a guest chef. Jim (not his real name) told me that the kitchen staff thought she was a joke; a home cook that did not belong in a professional kitchen. They called her "shoemaker" behind her back and some refused to work with her.
Of course, my anecdotal experience does not prove that anti-Julia sentiment was widespread in American professional kitchens, but I'm certain that there was more of it then than now.
A ‘French Chef’ Whose Appeal Doesn’t Translate - NYTimes.comThe best sauce in the world is hunger.
McDonnell At Debate: I Support Working Women; Deeds: No, He's Lying
The Virginia gubernatorial debate is going on (a live stream is available here) and moderator David Gregory kicked off the questions by asking Republican nominee Bob McDonnell about his single worst Achilles' heel: The thesis he wrote in grad school, in which the 34-year old McDonnell denounced working women.
McDonnell responded by citing his own personal family life: His wife has been a working woman and mother for his whole political career, and he encouraged all three of his daughters to pursue master's degrees. He especially cited his oldest daughter, Jeanine, who has served in the Army in Iraq.
"I would say that's the ultimate working woman," said McDonnell. "I supported her going into the military and being able to defend this nation, and I'm proud of her."
Deeds then responded: "I didn't write when I was 34 years old that working women are a detriment to the family. I didn't write when I was 34 years old that Roe v. Wade ought to be overturned. I didn't write when I was 34 years old that contraception decisions ought to be subjected to the government."
Gregory asked Deeds why he didn't raise this in 2005, when McDonnell narrowly defeated him for state Attorney General. Deeds continued with the point that McDonnell's whole record of staunch social conservatism was predicted by the thesis -- and said it was a mistake to not know about it. "The thesis puts in context his entire record," he said. "Now we didn't know about the thesis in 2005. I'll take responsibility, we didn't have that research done."
And Deeds accused McDonnell of willful dishonesty: "It contains a provision that says people don't want this kind of leadership, they're not ready for this kind of leadership, and you can't tell them what you're gonna do until you're elected."
McDonnell insisted again that he does not oppose working women. "I support equal pay for women," he said. "I support equal pay for any other character, other than merit."
From Taco Bell to drug kingpin
In the late 90s, it was easy to get good pot in Idaho...just drive across the border to Canada and pick some up. Nate Norman decided to take advantage of that situation and became an unlikely drug kingpin.
Having doubled their initial investment in roughly a day, Nate and Topher quickly planned a second run. This time, they bought two pounds. Before they knew it, they had gone from struggling to put gas in their cars to running a major pot enterprise that was bringing in thousands of dollars a day. "Within a few weeks I went from selling eighths to quarter pounds," says Scuzz, who could pass for a pro snowboarder with his goatee and wraparound shades. "Our plan was to make 3 million and get out. When you crunch the numbers, that's nothing. We figured out we could do it in fourteen months. But when you're making twenty or thirty grand a week, why the fuck would you stop?"
It doesn't even spoil the story to tell you that it all came crashing down, as these things inevitably do.
Tags: crime drugs
“Billy Twitters and his Blue Whale Problem”
Saw this children’s book at a bookstore:
…there’s no way it’s not a reference to the Fail Whale ;-)
Here it is on Amazon, BTW:
Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem
How Alan Turing Finally Got a Posthumous Apology
Guest blogger John Graham-Cumming initiated and led the successful petition drive to procure an apology to Alan Turing from the UK government. John is the author of The Geek Atlas, CTO of a stealth-mode start-up, and a longtime programmer who has a doctorate in computer security. If you're in London this Saturday, September 19, come by the launch party for his book at the Brunel Museum.
There's a long tradition in the UK of direct democracy, with citizens
petitioning the Prime Minister themselves. Typically, thousands of
signatures are collected on paper and then delivered directly to the
Prime Minister's home at No. 10
Downing Street in London. The petitioners arrive at No. 10 and
hand the signatures through the open front door.
But the British government has made great strides to bring many
aspects of government relations into the electronic age. Through the
non-profit MySociety.org the
government has created web sites (all with open-source code) for
citizens to interact with local and central government offices.
One such web site is the No. 10 Downing Street href="http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/">petitions page (its code
is open-source and can be found href="https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysociety/pet">here).
I used the petitions web site, a collection of Web 2.0 technologies,
and a bit of media savvy to successfully petition the government to
apologize for the prosecution of the seminal computer scientist href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing">Alan Turing.
And I did most of it from the top of a red London double-decker bus
using an iPhone.
Alan Turing did three amazing things in his working life: he laid the
foundations of computer science by thinking up a theoretical computer
called the Turing
Machine, he worked through the Second World War breaking Nazi
German codes, and after the war he worked on artificial intelligence
and defined the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test">Turing Test. His
life was cut short at 41 when he had begun to work on href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis">morphogenesis in
plants.
Alan Turing was also gay and he was prosecuted for "gross indecency" (essentially being gay) in 1952. To avoid prison he agreed to be injected with female hormones as a sort of 'cure' for homosexuality. Two years after his prosecution he was dead: he killed himself by eating an apple dipped in potassium cyanide.
June 23, 2009 was the anniversary of Alan Turing's birth (he would
have been 97) and I posted a blog entry entitled href="http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/alan-turing-deserves-apology-from.html">Alan
Turing deserves an apology from the British Government. It
generated a few comments and I posted a follow-up entry the next day
with an example of href="http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/turing-test-and-prejudice.html">how
I would apologize for my government's actions in 1952.
That night I created a href="http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/">petition on the
No. 10 Downing Street web site asking for a government apology for the
treatment of Alan Turing.
On August 4, 2009 the petition was approved and made public. I
mentioned it on my blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, and href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739135">posted it to Y
Combinator's Hacker News. At the time I thought I'd have a hard time
getting 500 people to sign. Little did I know the petition would
gather over 30,000 signatures in 37 days and elicit an incredible
apology from the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown preceded by a
personal call to my mobile phone.
This chart shows the number of signatures per day between August 4,
2009 and September 10, 2009. (click for larger view)
The same day the story appeared on Reddit. Signatures started to come in slowly.
The next day the petition was picked up by the first journalist to write about it: Jessica Geen of Pink News wrote an online only story which made the story jump over from being covered just by computer scientists and into the LGBT community. The LGBT press would turn out to be a strong ally reporting on the growing petition throughout the campaign.
Four days later, on August 9, 2009 the petition passed 500 signatures. This was the magic level needed to get a government response. I was still pretty skeptical of getting an apology but I certainly wasn't going to be satisfied by 500 names and kept promoting it on Twitter, my blog, and elsewhere.
The first really big break came on August 16, 2009 when the Manchester Evening News wrote about the petition. Manchester was where Alan Turing died and where he had worked before his death. There's a great deal of local pride in Manchester's adopted local boy Alan Turing. The following night I was a guest on BBC Radio Manchester's gay hour.
On August 18, 2009 the petition made the national news with a major story in The Independent, and at the same time the first celebrity name appeared on the list of signatures: Richard Dawkins.
With one celebrity name and national press I began to think the petition might really get noticed. The following night Richard Dawkins and I appeared on Channel 4 News to talk about the petition (Dawkins was filmed looking regal in his garden; I was filmed in classic programmer clothing: bad shoes, dirty shorts and a crumpled shirt). The same day I appeared on the BBC World Service and PRI's The World.
Sitting on the bus each morning I would catch up on email regarding the petition and scan the list of signatures looking for celebrities who I would then try to contact through their agents. I also plotted how to get the story in the press. Anyone who wrote about the story got added to my Turing/Media email list and each morning I would prepare an update on the story with the number of signatures, who had signed and any other events, and send it out.
Over the next week many things happened: I appeared on BBC Radio Ulster, I wrote a letter to Her Majesty The Queen asking her to consider a posthumous knighthood for Alan Turing, the veteran human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell signed the petition and I received an email from the writer Ian McEwan to say that he had signed.
I knew it was time to get the story out as widely as possible and so I emailed two BBC journalists that I knew to say that I thought the petition was an important story and that they needed to cover it.
Do you think you'd be interested in covering the Alan Turing Petition? It's now got backing from Richard Dawkins and has been covered by BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Northern Ireland, The World Service, Channel 4 News, The Independent, ...Watch: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/pardon+for+enigma+codebreaker+alan+turing/3315187
for good background.There are now 4,800 signatories.
John.
On August 31, 2009 BBC News online covered the story with a long article about the petition, and its celebrity backers. The night before I had gone to bed feeling happy that there were 5,000 signatures on my petition; I woke up to 16,000, by the next morning there were 20,000. That day I appeared on BBC Radio Scotland.
The single enormous leap in signatures in the chart above happened because of the BBC News online story.
On September 1, 2009 I appeared on BBC Radio 4's PM program, CNN covered the campaign, I appeared on CBC's As It Happens, and Stephen Fry signed and tweeted urging his followers to sign.
The same day I received two extraordinary emails. Unbeknownst to anyone I had written to MI5 asking them to release documents about Alan Turing's death in an effort to clear up any doubt about whether his death could have been murder. They denied my request.
The second email came from a member of Alan Turing's surviving family. The BBC report had erroneously said that he had no family. But that was incorrect: Turing's three nieces remembered him well, and he had a surviving nephew.
On the bus home I heard directly that Alan Turing's nieces had many memories of their Uncle Alan. They even still had his teddy bear. I hung up and sat at the back of the bus and cried quietly. I had always felt that Alan Turing's treatment was appalling, but to hear the family speak of the man was too much. I was convinced that I had to see my campaign, which had started on an impulse, to its completion.
Two days later I raced up to Bletchley Park to film the definitive report on the campaign with BBC Newsnight's science editor Susan Watts. The report ran that night and the same day international coverage of the campaign exploded with stories in the major press all over the world. The Newsnight story featured an interview with Alan Turing's nieces and nephew describing the terrible treatment he had endured and giving their blessing to the petition.
On September 7, 2009 I did a final piece of radio, appearing on BBC Radio Ulster. The same day I began to feel unwell with what would turn out to be a nasty bout of flu.
Lying in bed on September 10, 2009 I had to check my email because of a work commitment the following day. In my Inbox was the following email:
John - I wonder if you could call me as a matter of urgency, regarding your petition. Very many thanks!Kirsty
Kirsty xxxxxxx
10 Downing St, SW1A 2AA
Tel: 020x xxxx xxxx
Of course, I called back! I was told that the apology was coming that night and that "Gordon would like a word with you". At 19:44 that evening my mobile phone rang and I was handed the Prime Minister.
"Hello John. It's Gordon Brown. I think you know why I'm calling you."
Update The nice folks at No. 10 Downing Street and the petitions team released a spreadsheet of the actual day-by-day signatures for the petition period that gives an even clearer picture of the effect of different news outlets (the chart above came from my hand written, sporadic notes). (click for larger view)
Irony thy name is... Steve Perry?
This story is just absurd on so many levels. Take it away, San Francisco Chronicle:
Steve Perry, the former lead singer for Journey, will be at Dodger Stadium wearing his Giants cap as usual when the team plays there this weekend and he will leave before the eighth inning, as usual, but not to beat the traffic.Oh well how sad for you, Steve Perry. Maybe, just maybe though, the Dodgers are trying to use the song for different reasons. Not so much as a rallying song, but because of the other intrinsic property of anything related to Steve Perry. I will defer to expert research on this subject.
Late last season, the Dodgers started playing Journey's "Don't Stop Believin' " before the bottom of the eighth inning every night as a rally song, and Perry leaves before they do.
"I have to," he said. "I don't want to hear it."
Why? Because Perry is a diehard Giants fan who cannot stand the fact that the Dodgers "hijacked it first" and use it to win games.
Perry has friends on the Dodgers. He admitted it was "amazing" the first time he heard the entire stadium singing along with his voice and finds it appropriate the song is used by sports teams. Still, he said, "It tweaks me to know they're using the song as a rally song. I really wish we'd have hijacked it first. I think the song is about hope and power, and it's working for them, damn it."
i’m not saying my friends are glamorous and good-looking,...
i’m not saying my friends are glamorous and good-looking, i’m just saying.
out of print books come back to life as printed books
"It's like things are coming full circle," Google spokeswoman Jennie Johnson said. "This will allow people to pick up the physical copy of a book even if there may be just one or two other copies in some library in this country, or maybe it's not even available in this country at all."via tech.yahoo.com
On Demand Books and Google teaming up to bring the ability to create bound and printed copies of the out-of-print books Google has scanned in. Starting with 2 million public domain works. $8 a pop suggested retail with a 25% fee half of which will go to charity.
These "public domain" books were published before 1923 — an era that includes classics like "Moby Dick" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" as well as very obscure titles. The paperbacks churned out in Wednesday's demonstration of the Espresso included "Lathe Work For Beginners," "Dame Curtsey's Book of Candy Making," and "Memoirs of A Cavalier," a Daniel Defoe novel that never caught on quite like his most famous work, "Robinson Crusoe."
On amazon:
Memoirs of a Cavalier is available for $23.99 or .99 in Kindle via public domain.
Dame Curtsey's Book of Candy Making - 1 used for $47
Lathe Work For Beginners - assuming this is the book by Yates which seems to be the classic then
a reprint for $9.90 an original for $30. For the reprint The Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,505,228I went to some presentations about this machine years ago and it is neat to see it come to life. Easier, more satisfying in the form factor, and costs less than printing them out yourself. A store would need to print about 16,600 books to earn out the $100,000 cost to buy the machine (which you can lease) apart from supplies (and interest). Or to think about it in a slightly different way you need to print over 4,500 books a year for 4 years to cover the cost. Opens up a whole new, trickle of sales for stores. Perfect for colleges which is where they are starting.
Sustain Our Libraries!
I made this print in grassroots support of the public library system of Pittsburgh. Most of the posters I printed include the Pittsburgh-specific informational text at the end of this entry. I printed a few without the text to sell on Justseeds to recoup my costs and pay my library fines! (seriously). Dig the rubylith-cut children's book illustration-style, hearkening back to my own childhood, when I would walk to the library every day in the Summer!
Public libraries are so crucial for folks in all walks of life, and their services are becoming even more crucial with increased unemployment, cuts to youth programs, access to computers and continuing education...Libraries fulfill all these roles and more; for many disinvested communities, their public library branch is a community center. The Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh, our public library system, is really incredible; they order good progressive-to-radical books, have a spectacular graphic novel section, a very active teen section and programming; a zine collection in both the teen and adult sections(!); the Pennsylvania Room is an incredible resource for doing local research, including a bangin' photo archive; the library also hosts concerts, film screenings, zine readings, classes and more...
Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh lost 10% of their Allegheny Regional Asset District (RAD) funding this year. RAD accounts for $17 million, or 70% of the library's total budget. CLP are facing state budget cuts of 15-55%. CLP still only receives $40,000/year from the city of Pittsburgh, the same amount that Andrew Carnegie stipulated when he created the libraries over 100 years ago! All this, while CLP's capital campaign (for rebuilding and renovating old buildings, not for operational costs) has exceeded its goal of $55 million, and is still growing; it's wonderful to have a beautiful building to read in, but this is happening at the expense of staff hours and smaller, less-glamorous branches.
These severe reductions in funding could mean reduced services, hours, even closing some branches!
What can we do?
Some suggestions:
- Write letters to the editor of local papers
- Attend city council meetings
- Call RAD and recommend funding restructuring.
- Donate $ to the library (to the development office, earmarked for 'operating')
- Throw a benefit for the library to raise awareness and $!Check out http://www.carnegielibrary.com/future/#ppyl for more information
Seriously Italian: Walnut Bread from Umbria
Few things fill me with more satisfaction than baking a loaf or two of my own bread. Mind you, I’m not an expert, but I’ve got a stable of favorites I turn to again and again, the best of which are simple, yet full of interesting texture and flavor. Pan Nociato is a cheese-spiked walnut bread from Umbria that never fails to please.
The combination of savory and sweet is what makes this bread so special, which is typically found in the southern part of Umbria, from Perugia to Todi. Walnuts give the bread its name, but its true character comes from the combination of nuts with aged sheep's milk cheese, plumped raisins, and red wine. The wine stains the dough deceptively—it looks like a hearty wheat bread but the texture is soft and slightly chewy.
Umbria is the region that contains Norcia, a town high in the mountains famous for its butchers and cured meats. Pan Nociato is a natural partner for affettati misti, a platter of cold cuts that might include Norcia’s sweet prosciutto, wild boar salame, and rustic capocollo, or hearty soup made from farro and lentils from Umbria’s hills, flavored with the prized local black truffles.
The worst mistake you can make when making bread is rushing the proofing stage—keep in mind that a slower proof results in a more flavorful final product. I like to make this dough after dinner and leave it to do its business in the darkened peace of the fridge. Fridge proofing lets you watch bad reality TV (or Grey’s Anatomy), log in a solid night of sleep, and still turn out fresh, flavorful bread at any point the following day. Just be sure to bring the dough to room temperature before you put it in the oven.
I like to shape this into three small rounds, so I can enjoy them slowly during the week and make petite slices that are perfect for snacking.
Pan Nociato
Ingredients
1 package of active dry yeast
1 1/4 cups warm water
3 1/2 to 4 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour, plus additional for the bench
a heaping 1/2 cup golden raisins
3/4 cup red wine
1 large egg
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
4 ounces of medium-aged pecorino (sheep’s milk) cheese), grated
1 cup walnut pieces, toasted, cooled and coarsely chopped
1/3 cup pine nuts, coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh rosemary
1 egg for washProcedure
1. In a medium bowl, dissolve the yeast in 3/4 cup of warm water; add a pinch of sugar to the bowl and let it bubble up for a few minutes. Whisk in 1/2 cup of the flour. Cover the sponge with plastic wrap and let it proof for 30 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, place the raisins and red wine in a small saucepan over medium heat just until the wine begins to simmer. Turn off the heat and let the raisins plump in the wine as the entire mixture cools to room temperature.
3. When the sponge has proofed, scrape it into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add the remaining 1/2 cup of water to the bowl along with the raisins and wine, the egg, and the extra-virgin olive oil and mix briefly on low speed to combine the ingredients and break up the egg. Add the flour, salt, and sugar to the bowl and mix on medium speed to form a soft dough. Add the cheese, nuts, and rosemary to the bowl and beat again for about a minute, then switch to the dough hook. Knead the bread on medium speed for about 3 to 4 minutes, adding more flour if necessary, until the dough has formed a ball and is glossy and elastic.
4. Remove the dough from the mixer bowl and place it on a floured board. Dust it lightly with flour and continue to knead by hand for 2 to 3 minutes until the dough is springy, elastic, and smooth.
5. Place the dough in a large bowl or container greased with extra-virgin olive oil. Cover with plastic or a fitted lid and place the dough in the refrigerator to rise overnight, 10 to 12 hours.
6. The following day, the dough should be tripled in bulk. Remove it from the refrigerator and allow it to come to room temperature, about 3 to 4 hours.
7. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
8. Gently deflate the dough and divide it into three equal pieces. Form each piece into a tight ball, and place on a baking sheet that has been sprinkled with a bit of cornmeal. Cover the dough balls with plastic and allow them to rise for 30 to 40 minutes, or until almost doubled in bulk. Gently score the tops with an "X." Beat the egg lightly with a tablespoon of water and brush the breads with the egg wash.
9.Bake the breads for about 10 minutes, then lower the heat of the oven to 325°F and continue to bake until they are evenly deep, golden brown, and sound hollow when thumped with your finger, about 20 to 30 more minutes.
10.The breads are best enjoyed after they have cooled completely, and will keep wrapped for 3 or more days.
Richard Price's Lush Life
[Richard Price] originally thought of writing a historical novel, one that would dramatize the experience of the immigrant Jews who thronged the Lower East Side a hundred years ago. “But then I realized that’s probably the most well-documented immigrant movement in history,” he said. “A guy comes over here, and his first job is working in a sweatshop. His second job is writing a novel about a guy working in a sweatshop. How am I going to do this better than Henry Roth did?” New York Times: Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium I mean, we all hate hipsters, right? Even hipsters hate hipsters. But Jesus, man—Richard Price? Guy straight-out, fucking, detests, hipsters. Can work up a decent lather of sympathy for any subculture in the underworld: Junkies, drunks, liars, cops, murderers, thieves, real-estate kingpins—all human, complicated, explainable, damaged, worthy of respect. But hipsters? No. Makes for the only dishonest writing in the book: twenty intolerable pages of a bullshit hipster memorial service that comes off as pure cartoon satire—allegory of the infestation of the once-noble LES. I mean, I know hipsters aren’t exactly an oppressed class or anything, but still. Feels unfair. New York Mag: Stalking the Gramno "The novel gained further attention when it was revealed that US President Barack Obama would be reading it during his 2009 summer vacation."I just finished this.
The Biggest Full English Breakfast in the World
Mario’s Cafe Bar in Westhoughton, UK, serves the largest full English breakfast in the world, according to Guinness World Records. The Ultimate Breakfast costs £10.95 ($18.05) and consists of 10 eggs, 10 sausages, 10 rashers of bacon, 10 slices of toast, five black pudding slices, tomatoes, mushrooms, and baked beans for a total of about 5,000 calories. If you eat it in 20 minutes, you can get it for free. Thankfully, no one has yet to finish it—methinks the aftermath would not be worth the £10.95 you save. [via Metafilter]
Related
Full English Breakfast
English Breakfast in Maidenhead, England
Photo of the Day: Just A Humongous Bucket Of Eggs And Meat
Internet Memes = Illegitimate Cousin of Traditional Memes Ellie...
Internet Memes = Illegitimate Cousin of Traditional Memes
Ellie killed it with her slides.
via @andrewbaron
elspethjane: You have to understand the joy I felt after finding this photo to go with our Casecamp.org presentation. I think it’s fits perfectly with the caption.
'Curb Your Enthusiasm' preps for a 'Seinfeld' reunion - Sepinwall on TV
The "Seinfeld" cast reuniting on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" with Larry David."You know those reunion shows, they're so lame, really," Larry David suggests in an upcoming episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." "They never work. The actors are 10 years older. It...
September 16, 2009
Free iPhone Keynote and PowerPoint templates help get you from thought to finish
Filed under: iWork, Developer, iPhone
Mockapp.com has created both Keynote and PowerPoint templates of iPhone UI elements, and has made them available as free downloads. Say you had a dream in the middle of the night about the most awesome iPhone app that, to your surprise, no one has thought of yet. Instead of waking up in a deep sweat and scribbling said ideas on paper, you could dream them up on Keynote.
After mapping out your concept on Keynote, you could then pitch it to others in a Keynote presentation. The Keynote and PowerPoint templates include alerts, the iPhone keyboard, arrow icons, buttons, as well as a host of other UI elements.TUAWFree iPhone Keynote and PowerPoint templates help get you from thought to finish originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
The Light Saber Option
Fresh for the fall roll-out, Obama unsheathes light saber for health care denouement.
If you must know, it's the Chicago Olympics 2016 Slideshow from today's event at the White House.
Yo, God. I know you’re creating the world, and I’mma let you finish…
Man that’s so rude Kanye… can’t you see God’s busy?
Found by Tina
Who Wants A 1/1 Derek Jeter?
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about my desire to give away a 1/1 card. Unfortunately, despite my early success in pulling the elusive cards in 2007, I’ve only pulled one in over a year and gave it away long ago in a previous contest.
Well, it appears Upper Deck was reading because they have sent a handful of 1/1 printing plates which I will exclusive give away at Wax Heaven over the next month starting this weekend. The first contest starts on Saturday and it’s for two Yankees plates, one featuring Derek Jeter and the other Joe Torre.
I haven’t yet decided on how to give away the plates so if you have any suggestions by all means leave a comment here, on Twitter, Facebook, or through my personal e-mail. All I know for sure is you will need a WordPress account (FREE) with an avatar to participate.
Looking forward to hearing your suggestions.
Weekend Cook and Tell Round Up: The Temporary Vegetarian
For last week's Weekend Cook and Tell challenge we asked you to go temporarily vegetarian by making a satisfying meatless main. This challenge proved to be a popular one, here are some of our favorite herbivorous responses:
Cantaloupe Alone is no vegetarian but this Fall Flavored Red Lentil Soup with Eggplant was a hit.
ElizabethS and friends made a spread of vegetarian Spanish-inspired tapas. Check out the pictures over at The Manhattan (food) Project.
The ambitious morgancain made not one but three vegetarian dishes, a mushroom rice casserole, a quinoa lentil curry, and a grilled corn and black bean salad.
NotAmerican and family are mostly vegetarian so it's no surprise they have great ideas for veggie mains. Grilled portobello and haloumi sandwiches with mayo and roasted red pepper sound particularly enticing.
KarynMC decided that dessert was the way to go. She made chocolate mousse and vegan banana bread baked into dinosaur shapes—cute!
Taking advantage of all of the tomatoes and eggplants at the peak of their season right now, whoot likes to make ratatouille and serve it with homemade pita rounds.
joyyy whipped up some vegetarian chilaquiles using tomatoes, tomato paste, hot sauce, eggs, and tortillas she just happened to have in her fridge and pantry.
One of cybercita's favorite recipes is an artichoke frittata. What sets her frittata apart from the rest is the addition of bread crumbs, smoke paprika, and thyme.
Jilly knows that just because something is vegetarian doesn't mean it can't be decadent. Case in point, her potato and leek pizza with a rosemary and Parmesan cream sauce on puff pastry.
kirbie just so happened to be invited to a vegetarian potluck. These potato salad tofu pockets were a success at the party and the next day in her new bento box.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in this week's Weekend Cook and Tell challenge. We love to keep up on what all of you are cooking up at home. Be sure to head over to Talk and read about next week's challenge: favorite brown bag lunches.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Whole Foods Offsets Its Electricity in North America
The organic retail giant has bought 776 million-kilowatt-hours of renewable energy credits from wind farms.
A Bike-to-School Bright Spot in NYC
No sooner did Brad post about the dismal state of biking to school in most of the country than City Room published this great little story about the opposite trend here in New York. A few dozen schools are trying to make it easier for students and parents to bike in every day. Writing for the "Spokes" column, Josh Brustein profiles Meghan Faux and her daughter Ryan, who ride to P.S. 261, an elementary school in Boerum Hill:Photo: Josh Brustein/New York Times.
There are no estimates about how prevalent bicycle commuting is among parents, students and teachers at New York City’s schools, but a morning spent in front of P.S. 261 gives credibility to Ms. Faux’s claim that she is not an anomaly. P.S. 261, which has about 830 students, is one of 34 schools to have requested that the Department of Transportation install bike racks through the department’s CityRacks program. Last spring, the department installed five bike racks in front of the school, giving parents an alternative to the chain-link fence that they had been using to lock up bicycles to that point.
The school’s principal, Zipporiah Mills, said that the racks had made it easier on parents, and that the popularity of bringing children to school on bicycles had been growing for several years.
Also among the parents Brustein interviews: Livable Streets Education director Kim Wiley-Schwartz, who's raising two kids to ride bikes.
This actually got me thinking about Saturday night's bike slam design battle. Team New York, you were on to something with this whole Safe Zones thing. How many more parents and childrens would bike to school if they had safe routes to travel?
elspethjane: Kenyatta and me before our presentation at Case...
Kenyatta and me before our presentation at Case Camp. We miss Jamie!!!!!Agreed. And Hi, Jamie.
A Beer At...Eddie Rickenbacker's
Shared by Eve
Picture of 27 lb cat, pls.San Francisco lays claim to hundreds of bars, but only a tiny fraction of them get regular press. This column is about the other ones, the ones untouched by mixology madness. Your guide is Citysearch editor and bar aficionado Patrick Heig, who will take a look at the city's more anonymous watering holes, one at a time. His words follow:
[Photos: Jennifer Yin]
Breathing through an oxygen tank, surrounded by a cloud of cigar smoke, potato-shaped and tyrannical, he rules over the place like Jabba the Hut from a filthy loveseat next to the bar. In the 70's, he was a major player in the nightlife game--along with a young Harry Denton he ran Henry Africa's, a swinging 70's fern bar--and even thus prostrate he retains a degree of Lotharian swagger. These days, his sidekick is Mr. Higgins, a 27 lb. tabby who shares his owner's bigshot mentality, penchant for naps and indifference to health code violations, and together they run this novelty pub on Minna Street in SoMa.
Like his first bar, Eddie Rickenbacker's is named after a swashbuckling war hero; unlike his first bar, it's a terrible place to get laid. In his mind, the owner has created a smoky, martinis-at-noon, Mad Men-esque environment where men can be men and women can be whistled at. In reality, Eddie's attracts a steady stream of middle-aged, divorced men, motorcycle buffs, and curious passersby, and the few women on the premises are under the establishment's employ. Still, the $2.50 Irish coffees are a morning drinker's dream, the sprawling menu of classic pub food would be considered good in a less precious city, and there's a lot to look at.
Eddie Rickenbacker's is a sort of museum, perhaps best described as a Museum of Stuff Old Guys Are Into. There are the forty-three vintage motorcycles, many dangling above the bar from wires no thicker than a cocktail straw; the exceptionally tall can experience the thrill of a 1915 Harley Davidson's tire rubbing against one's head, the rest of us will have to wait for an earthquake for motorcycle-to-head-contact, but still, when it happens: Wow. There's a model train that runs on a track around the room, every once in a while emitting a deafening choo-choo! entirely out of proportion to its otherwise to-scale dimensions. Then there are the display cases full of historic firearms, many used by the US cavalry against the Indians, along with some odds and ends, like General Custer's epaulets, and even, at one time, a handful full of teeth Custer knocked from the mouth of his sex-slave squaw. A bit culturally insensitive, sure, but for anyone who's ever lost the rent money at Cache Creek? Priceless. Somewhat incongruous with these items are the almost canonical collection of antique Tiffany lamps--reportedly half a million dollars worth, and the owner's most prized possessions--and the aforementioned cat, which are more like Things Aunt Gloria Is Into.
I've been a bit hard on Eddie Rickenbacker's, to be sure. I was actually fascinated by the motorcycles and old guns, thoroughly enjoyed a crab sandwich and pint of Anchor I had for lunch, and any bar that chooses Edith Piaf over Lady Gaga deserves some credit. I even admired the cat, whose outre insouciance and regal demeanor I intend to emulate. Service however, needs work, as the bartenders who know their business seem rundown from carrying all the weight, while the corps of inexperienced young girls, hired for their looks and "background," must be tired of being berated by their moribund, foul-mouthed bossman. Men like him being so rare in this great city, the tendency is to regard them as a mere curiosity, like a bearded lady, although I guess those aren't so rare around here. Anyway, I say, when you come across one, don't just stare at it: shame it, make fun of it; poke it with a stick. Or, you know, post a pithy, overwritten review of his joint on the internet, and see what happens.
—Patrick Heig· Past Editions of "A Beer At" [~ESF~]
Boxee Hires Ex-CollegeHumor Dude To Run Product
NYC-based Boxee has hired CollegeHumor cofounder Zach Klein to head up product, the company announced.
"Zach has the magic touch and we are very excited to have him on the team," Boxee CEO Avner Ronen said on the company's blog.
See Also:
- Boxee Raises Another $6 Million To Make Cable Look Crappy (AAPL, CMCSA)
- What Boxee Can Learn From TiVo (TIVO)
- Boxee Adds MLB.TV, Windows Support (MSFT)
Seriously Meatless: Baingan Aloo Charchari
Serious Eater Michael Natkin of the vegetarian blog Herbivoracious drops by every Wednesday to share a delicious recipe to expand our vegetarian repertoire.
[Photograph: Michael Natkin]
Westerners tend to think the full range of Indian main dishes consists of wet curries and tandoor-cooked meats. There are actually a huge array of cooking techniques used throughout the subcontinent. Today's eggplant and potato charchari demonstrates an unusual Bengali style never seen in American restaurants.
After the initial frying of spices, the vegetables are added along with enough water to steam them tender, and cooked without stirring until all of the water evaporates. Then they stay on the heat while the fat at the bottom of the pan fries the lowest layer of vegetables until crispy and dark. This crust is mixed into the dish to add a bit of flavor complexity reminiscent of outdoor cooking.
The result is a dryer-textured dish that makes a nice contrast to the typical saucy curry. Serve it with this Chana-Mushroom Masala, basmati rice, and plain yogurt or a simple raita for a real feast. The best pot for cooking a charchari is something heavy and easy to clean (but not non-stick) like an enameled cast iron Dutch oven.
A note about a couple of the ingredients in the recipe: curry leaves can be confusing. Curry powders are made from a mixture of many spices but do not include an actual curry leaf! Curry leaf is a somewhat tough, nutty-tasting leaf used a bit like a bay leaf in European cooking. It's added to a dish to infuse the flavor, but not eaten directly.
Many Indian groceries will have a stash of them, but you may have to ask. You can store them in the freezer and just pull out a few when you need them. If you can't find it, the charchari will be fine without it. Asafoetida powder, otherwise known as hing, will definitely be available at any Indian grocery. It is used in very small amounts to provide a resinous, garlicky background flavor and possibly a digestive benefit. If you don't have it, add a clove of minced garlic.
Baingan Aloo Charchari (Char-cooked Eggplant and Potatoes)
- serves 2 as a main course or 4 as part of a larger Indian meal -
Adapted from Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Yamuna Devi.Ingredients
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 tablespoons butter (or omit the vegetable oil and use 6 tablespoons of ghee)
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
2 serrano chiles, seeded and slivered
1/4 teaspoon asafoetida powder
6 curry leaves (if available)
1 1/4 pounds waxy potatoes, 1-inch dice
1 medium eggplant, about 1 pound, unpeeled, 1-inch dice
1 1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspooon turmeric powder
1/4 teaspoon lemon zest
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 pinch ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon fennel seeds
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
garnish: cilantro or thinly sliced green onionsProcedure
1. In a large, fairly deep pot (like a Dutch oven), heat the oil and butter over a medium flame. Add the mustard seeds, ginger, chiles and Asafoetida powder. Fry until the mustard seeds begin to pop.
2. Immediately add all of the remaining ingredients (except the garnish) and 1 1/4 cup of water. Stir once, bring to a boil, and reduce the heat to maintain a simmer. Cover lightly, enough so that some steam will cook the top layer of vegetables. You don't want to serve raw eggplant. Or potatoes.
3. Without stirring, cook until the vegetables are quite tender. If necessary, add a bit more water but no more than a couple tablespoons at a time.
4. When the vegetables are done, remove the lid, raise the heat slightly, and cook until the liquid is gone and you hear a frying/sizzling sound on the bottom of the pot. You can probe the bottom a little with a spoon to see what is going on. We aren't looking for burned food—when you can feel a little bit of crust forming, turn off the heat and allow to sit for 5 minutes. Then stir it all together, garnish, and serve.
Time To Talk Music
Let's lighten it up a bit. I'm rocking The Most Serene Republic's new record, but I love the Wild Beasts joint--Two Lovers. It took a moment to grow on me. But I'm in. And yeah, I've gone over to the dark-side. The joint below is pretty cool---a little two bouncy for me. I'm more into the two title tracks. Meh, who am I kidding. I like this one too.
Somebody said I need to check the new Rae, too. I said I wouldn't, but I think I kind of have to. Cuban Linx changed my life ("I'm high power, put Adina Howard to sleep..") I owe the God his due.
What are you rocking?
Born for the Part
Rove on Family Guy cameo: "I play myself, meaning the son of Satan, the spawn of evil," Rove said."
on my list: see the flaming lips
One of the things that's on my list to do before I have a coronary from eating one too many bacon-wrapped waffle dogs is catching a Flaming Lips show. Especially after seeing this pic from Ryan Muir...
Also, if anyone's up for sponsoring my "pre-bacon-wrapped waffle dog coronary" list, gimme a shout.
A collection of kisses
A kiss - a simple act that can convey a diverse array of meanings. A kiss can be intimate and private, or meant for public display, it can convey love and affection, or simply provide comfort. Its use as a greeting is under fire in our current climate of H1N1 fear, as the French government has begun encouraging citizens to forgo "la bise", their traditional cheek-to-cheek kiss, for health reasons. Gathered here are 33 recent photos of kisses expressing greetings and farewells, congratulations and joy, respect and, above all, love. (33 photos total)
Hoefler & Frere-Jones: Tungsten
A few years ago, we started wondering if there was a way to make a flat-sided sans serif that was disarming instead of brutish, one that employed confidence and subtlety instead of just raw testosterone. It was an unusual design brief for ourselves, completely without visual cues and trading in cultural associations instead: “more Steve McQueen than Steven Seagal,” reads one note; “whiskey highball, not a martini” suggests another. The result is Tungsten®, a tight family of high-impact fonts in four weights: muscular and persuasive, without sacrificing wit, versatility, or style. --> Go get it
PSGI new spec draft is out: prefork getting faster and now we got decent Coro engine
I've merged all the feedbacks and things we noticed during the Plack implementations back to the main PSGI spec draft and updated it. It has lots of answers to the common questions and gotchas when writing a new server implementation. It also has a big list of contributors!
I updated Plack::Impl::Coro to now use the excellent Net::Server::Coro module, and it's now less code, passes all the tests and runs brilliantly fast like 2500 req/s for the simple Hello World app. I also enabled Coro::AIO (that uses IO::AIO inside) to sendfile(2) based file serving, which is as fast as AnyEvent based asynchronous server.
This new Coro backend is quite a big deal since now your app can block as long as the block automatically yield to the other threads (coroutines) using Coro:: magic. For instance, slowapp.psgi which does "sleep 0.1" can run like 100/s (instead of 10/s) on a single thread Coro server because sleep() can now be cooperative and non-blocking using Coro::Timer.
We found some issues with a big file (2MB) serving with AnyEvent backend on Linux when IO::AIO is not available. Seems like it's a problem with our code usage with AnyEvent->io and AnyEvent::Handle, which doesn't really work efficiently against local files on Linux (epoll). It's still reasonably fast on other platforms or Linux with sendfile support, though.
Kazuho has been improving the performance of Prefork server, while Daisuke Murase is working on Danga::Socket based asynchronous server so that we can all PSGI app from Perlbal etc.
Good progress!
One pig, 185 different products
PIG 05049 by Christien Meindertsma recently won the 2009 Index Award in the Play category. This book looks amazing.
05049 was an actual pig, raised and slaughtered on a commercial farm in the Netherlands. Rotterdam designer Christien Meindertsma was shocked to discover that she could document 185 products contributed to by the animal.
Meindertsma's design includes the publication of her book, PIG 05049, which charts and pictures each of the products supported by the animal. The surprise is in the fact that elements of production contributed to by pig farming include not only predictable foodstuffs -- pork chops and bacon -- but far less expected non-food items: ammunition, train brakes, automobile paint, soap and washing powder, bone china, cigarettes.
The caption on the page reads:
Fatty acids derived from pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent in crayons and also gives them their distinctive smell.
Crayons smell like pig bone fat. I don't think I'll use crayons ever again without thinking of that little factoid.
See also I, Pencil. Nobody knows how to make a pencil and nobody knows where all the parts of a pig go either. (via design observer)
Tags: books Christien Meindertsma design food PIG 05049
Extreme Photoshop FAIL
Baseball card collectors want it all and they won’t settle for anything less. So that might explain the Update/Traded sets that have been a force in The Hobby long before I ever picked up a pack of cards. Still, sometimes it may be best to accept defeat rather than release a monstrosity like the 2002 Topps Traded Jason Bay.
In case you didn’t know, Jason was drafted by the Montreal Expos in 2000 but was a San Diego Padre before becoming a staple with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Playing with the Red Sox this season, Bay is nearing career-highs in home runs and RBI while playing on a team that’s leading the American League in the Wild Card race.
Still, there’s just no excuse for the Photoshop FAIL of the 2002 Topps Traded card. It’s almost as bad as the 2008 Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects Josh Reddick, with perhaps the worst Photoshop disaster of all-time in trading card history. In case you missed that one, click HERE.
(h/t – Padrographs)
(thumbnail leads to a full-size scan)
Jeter's record-tying nachos This message
Jeter's record-tying nachos
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Skim and Plunge
The editors at Yale University Press were nice enough to invite me to edit this year's edition of Best Technology Writing. It's a great collection of essays, by some of my very favorite writers, and I encourage you to pick up a copy. I wrote an opening essay for the book that tries to wrestle with the ways in which technology writing has changed over the past few decades. Here's a section of it:The ubiquity of the digital lifestyle has forced us to write and think about technology in a different way. Think back, for example, to Stewart Brand’s classic 1973 Rolling Stone essay on the first video gamers, “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among The Computer Bums.” When Brand stumbled across those Stanford proto-gamers, battling each other via command line, it was clear to him that he’d just glimpsed the future. Of course, it took a true visionary like Brand to recognize what he’d encountered, and to write about it with such clarity and infectious curiosity--in the process inventing a whole genre of technology writing that could do justice to the encounter. But there is something about that experience that is also by definition short-sighted: any given technology will mean very different things, and have very different effects, when it is restricted to a small slice of the population. Brand’s opening line was “Computers are coming to the people.” That was prescient enough. But as it turned out, what he saw on those screens actually had very little to do with gaming culture today. SPACEWAR let Brand sense before just about anyone else that information technology would become as mainstream as rock-and-roll or television. But he couldn’t have imagined a culture where games like Spore or Grand Theft Auto -- both of which are deftly dissected in this volume -- are far more complex, open-ended and popular than many Hollywood blockbusters.
Likewise, hypertext, until mid-1994, was an emerging technology whose power users were almost all writers of experimental fiction. You could look at those links on the screen, and begin to imagine what might happen if billions of people started clicking on them. But mostly you were guessing. A shocking amount of the early commentary on hypertext--some of it, in all honesty, written by me--focused on the radical effect hypertext would have on storytelling. Once hypertext went mainstream, however, that turned out to one of the least interesting things about it. (We’re still reading novels the old-fashioned way, one page after another.) And that’s precisely the trouble with writing about a technology when it’s still in leading indicator mode. You could look at those hyperlinks on the screen, and if you really concentrated, you might imagine a future where, say, newspaper articles linked to each other. But you could never imagine Wikipedia or YouPorn.
Now we don’t have to imagine it at all: the digital future, to paraphrase William Gibson, is so much more evenly distributed among us. We don’t have to gaze into a crystal ball; we can just watch ourselves, self-reflecting as we interact with this vast new ecosystem. Some of my favorite passages in this collection have this introspective quality: the mind examining its own strange adaptation to a world that has been transformed by information technology.
Consider this paragraph, from the opening section of Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:
I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.Carr intends this as a critique, of course, and his observations will no doubt ring true for anyone who spends hours each day in front of a networked computer screen. I feel it myself right now, as I write this essay, with my open Gmail inbox hovering in the background behind the word processor, and a text message buzzing on my phone, and a whole universe of links tempting me. It is harder to sit down and focus on a linear argument or narrative for an hour at a time. In a way, our prophecies about the impact of hypertext on storytelling had it half right; it’s not that people now tell stories using branching hypertext links: it’s that we actively miss those links when we pick up an old-fashioned book.
Carr is right, too, that there is something regrettable about this shift. The kind of deep, immersive understanding that one gets from spending three hundred pages occupying another person’s consciousness is undeniably powerful and essential. And no medium rivals the book for that particular kind of thinking. But it should also be said that this kind of thinking has not simply gone away; people still read books and magazines in vast numbers. It may be harder to enter the kind of slow, contemplative state that Carr cherishes, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I think of our present situation as somewhat analogous to the mass migration from the country to the city that started several centuries ago in Europe: the bustle and stimulation and diversity of urban life made it harder to enjoy the slower, organic pleasures of rural living. Still, those pleasures didn’t disappear. People continue to cherish them in mass numbers to this day.
And like urban life, the new consciousness of digital culture has many benefits; it may dull certain cognitive skills, but it undoubtedly sharpens others. In his essay, Carr derides the “skimming” habits of online readers. It’s an easy target, particularly when pitted against the hallowed activity of reading a four-hundred page novel. But skimming is an immensely valuable skill. Most of the information we interact with in our lives -- online or off -- lacks the profundity and complexity of a Great Book. We don’t need deep contemplation to assess an interoffice memo or quarterly financial report from a company we’re vaguely interested in. If we can process that information quickly and move on to more important things, so much the better.
Even loftier pursuits benefit from well-developed skimming muscles. I think many of us who feel, unlike Carr, that Google has actually made us smarter operate in what I call “skim-and-plunge” mode. We skim through pages of search results or hyperlinked articles, getting a sense of the waters, and then, when we find something interesting, we dive in and read in a slower, more engaged mode. Yes, it is probably a bit harder to become immersed in deep contemplation today than it was sitting in library in 1985, But that kind of rapid-fire skimming and discovery would have been, for all intents and purposes, impossible before the web came along.
The benefits of this new consciousness go far beyond skimming of course, especially when you consider that many of the distractions are not tantalizing hyperlinks but other human beings. Here’s Andrew Sullivan describing one of the defining aspects of the experience of blogging, in his revealing essay, “Why I Blog”:
Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague. Again, it’s hard to overrate how different this is... [B]efore the blogosphere, reporters and columnists were largely shielded from this kind of direct hazing. Yes, letters to the editor would arrive in due course and subscriptions would be canceled. But reporters and columnists tended to operate in a relative sanctuary, answerable mainly to their editors, not readers. For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.
No doubt the intensity and immediacy of the feedback has its own disruptive force, making it harder for the blogger to enter the contemplative state that his forebears in the print magazine era might have enjoyed more easily. Sullivan’s description could in fact easily be marshaled in defense of Carr’s dumbing-down argument--except that where Carr sees chaos and distraction, Sullivan sees a new kind of engagement between the author and the audience. Sullivan would be the first to admit that this new kind of engagement is noisier, more offensive, and often more idiotic than any traditional interaction between author and editor. But there is so much useful signal in that noise that most of us who have sampled it find it hard to imagine going back. After all, the countryside was more polite, too. But in the end, most of us chose the city, despite all the chaos and distractions. I think we've made a similar choice with the Web today.
(Excerpted from The Best Technology Writing 2009. Now go buy a copy!)
Advantage: Nerds
Wired has a fantastic post on MIT students Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh, how figured out how to take the above picture for . . . wait for it . . . $148.
They put a camera 18 miles above the earth -- that's half-way into the stratosphere and high enough to see the earth's curvature and the yawning maw of space -- for less than $150.
Their ingenius contraption used a helium-filled weather balloon towing a styrofoam beer cooler. Inside the cooler was (1) a digital camera with an 8 gig memory card set to take pictures every 5 seconds, (2) instant hand warmers to keep the electronics from freezing; (3) a GPS-equipped disposable cell phone to act as a homing beacon once the rig landed. (From that altitude, the beer cooler took 40 minutes to fall back to earth.)
More book titles, if they were written today
The two threads on book titles as if they were written today are still going strong...there are some really good ones in the comments.
Then: The Bible
Now: A Million Little Signs and WondersThen: The Sun Also Rises
Now: Drink, Bullfight, MopeThen: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Now: Why Do Apples Fall Down and Not Up? Answers From The Cutting Edge of PhysicsThen: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
Now: Frankenstein: Wrath of the SupercorpseThen: Declaration of Independence
Now: The Pursuit of Happiness: How to get control of your continent and have fun doing it!Then: The Oxford English Dictionary
Now: Word Up! 300,000 proven ways to express yourself in speech and writingThen: To Kill A Mockingbird
Now: To Kill A Mockingbird (A Novel)Then: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Now: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A NovelThen: Cry, the Beloved Country
Now: Black. White.Then: Little Women
Now: Concord 01742Then: The Hobbit
Now: HobbitThen: The Art of War
Now: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Strategy GuideMany of the entries took old fiction titles and converted them to contemporary non-fiction titles -- e.g. Cinderella becomes How to Escape Being Bullied Without Once Standing Up for Yourself -- which wasn't really the point of the exercise but entertaining nonetheless.
Oh and if anyone wants to whip up book covers for any of these, feel free.
Tags: books
User Experience = $5 Million per Employee
On Monday, it was announced that Mint.com was to be acquired by Intuit for $170 million.
On Tuesday, Aaron Forth, the VP of Product at Mint.com, spoke at UX Week. It was an excellent talk, sharing how Mint is structured to deliver rapid, user-focused innovation (in short: everybody cares about UX + nimble development processes allow for swift iterations). Among the things he mentioned was that Mint.com has 35 employees.
I did some quick math, and then tweeted:
Mint.com has 35 employees. Sold for $170MM. That’s $5MM per. That’s the value of UX. #uxweekIt’s proven to be the most re-tweeted thing I’ve ever written.
Mint.com’s success, much like any web pure-play, is largely dependent on the quality of its user experience. Especially in the realm of personal finances, where people are anxious about their performance, security-conscious, and easily confused by all the abstract terms, fees, and numbers.
Mint’s smart user experience orientation also provided immense leverage. A staff of just 35 has been able to build something robust, sizable, and, for many people, important. I’ve argued elsewhere that a secret of quality of user experience is that it enables businesses to get the most value out of existing, and potentially limited, resources. Mint’s case is a proof point.
Dear Bill Thompson
Dear Bill Thompson,
I have never met you. As far as I know, no one I know has ever met you. I couldn’t pick you out of a lineup—and I can say that because I just now went Googling for a picture of you and I didn’t even know you were black, so I didn’t even know that saying that would have icky weird racist overtones! Seriously. WTF? And I say this as the kind of primary-voting nerd who briefly got into it with Leslie Crocker Snyder campaigners last night on the street. (So maybe I called her a killer, and maybe a bunch of Aborn campaigners laughed their heads off.) And yet here you are, the Democratic contender for mayor of New York. Right now, you are not going to be the mayor, to put it politely, which is to say, you are barely a blip on the map in a political landscape where the tiny Red Sox-loving mayor is a strangely dominant, compelling and, most importantly, famous entity. So what are you going to do? Who are you going to appeal to?
The pissed-off. As your people probably keep bringing up over and over, and one hopes you aren’t baffled as to why, yesterday’s election reflected a real dissatisfaction, what with at least four, and maybe six, incumbent City Councilmembers getting punted out. Good riddance! Bloomberg’s attacks on you are that you have both no experience and bad experience, and your attack on him is “he overstayed his welcome,” which is, eh, so-so. But what he’s saying about you is just like what everyone said about Barack Obama. Who won fans through oratory and inspiration. Which leads us to…
The debates in October. Oh, look, free TV time. A lot of people don’t like Bloomberg but we’re not dissatisfied with him because, at the end of the day, we all think he’s our daddy and we know he’s a little mouthy. Like, we feel that he would go down to D.C. and go toe-to-toe with Rahm if it came to that. We know he’s a dick, and we respect that! But what’s not as obvious is to us, as emotional voters, is that 1. we’d be “safe” with someone else as mayor and 2. that someone else could stand up for us. Make it clear exactly how Bloomberg has undermined the middle and working classes. (And he has, no two ways about it.) Your voters are Stuy Town residents, and black people, and young people. Oh, wait, look at that—a complete overlap with the Obama vote! Which leads us to….
The Obama strategy. Once upon a time there was an Obama campaign that was not yet a money-printing machine! I remember standing in a parking lot somewhere in Pennsylvania and he got out of this cheap rental car, all gray and tired, going to make some speech. There was no machine there yet. Sure, they had more money than you have now, because you have no money. But what the Obama campaign garnered through showing up anywhere, anytime was enthusiasm, instilling the kind of fervor that it is easy to tap in the young people. You know who is excited about door-knocking and phone-banking for you? OH RIGHT, PRETTY MUCH NO ONE. So go excite a constituency, and put them to work as autonomous field captains. People will work for free if they believe in a cause, and they are set loose to work, which leads us to…
You don’t need the money. Bloomberg’s insane coffers, well, whatever! Bloomberg pays for thousands of ads because he can. Do you know what is free, however? Editorial space on blogs, TV and newspapers. But you have to give them something to write about. Sit down with your three smartest people and brainstorm twenty ways to get attention. Guess what? This is New York! Your stunts don’t have to be too cautious. This is seriously a day and age when nearly all attention is good attention. (Just don’t fuck with Taylor Swift, I guess!) You should have a little fun. You should…
Tear some shit up. YOU HEAR ME? Don’t be cautious. Enter a pie-eating contest. Start making fun of Eric Gioia on Twitter. Or Perez. Get photographed at lunch with Tina Fey. It is not 1985! You have to be a character in our imagination. We have to know who you are, and conceive of you in our minds. We have a cartoon idea of Bloomberg in our heads; he’s the little annoying dude who can’t shake that horrible accent who gets driven around in a black Suburban. Who the hell are you?
Printing Police Handcuff Keys
Using a 3D printer. Impressive.
At the end of the day he talked the officers into trying the key on their handcuffs and … it did work! At least the Dutch Police now knows there is a plastic key on the market that will open their handcuffs. A plastic key undetectable by metal detectors….
Omniture acquired by Adobe
Adobe to buy Omniture for $1.8 billion.
We observe this transaction with interest, as Ai is a certified Omniture partner, and many of our clients are on the Omniture platform. Omniture has grown by leaps and bounds in the years we've worked with them, and they have built an excellent software suite that proves useful on a daily basis. (We also, of course, use Adobe products regularly.)
This is probably its main complement to Adobe: creating software that its users embrace as part of their daily workflow. Beyond that, this author finds the acquisition curious. Omniture is all about data--aggregating it, processing it, manipulating it. Adobe's software, on the other hand, is about creativity, and empowering users to do better, more attractive work.
I suppose there's a similarity from that empowerment angle--both the Omniture suite and Adobe's core products enable people's work to be more sophisticated than they would be on their own, or with a competing product.
The inevitable culture clash may arise in time, too. For now, I'm sure Omniture and Adobe will run independently. But as the businesses merge, it will be interesting to see whether, and how, Adobe's creative California culture will absorb the data wonks in Utah that powered Omniture's expansion.
Adobe is calling it a merger of art and science. I suspect Wall Street knows the truth.
Serious Heat: The Quickie Banh Mi
Note: On Wednesdays, Andrea Lynn, senior editor of Chile Pepper magazine, drops by with Serious Heat.
It was a banh mi sushi roll that inspired it all. I had a few friends over for a sushi-making gathering, where I tried out a banh mi sushi roll (very good, in fact). One friend remarked, “What is a banh mi?” For those not in the know, this is the sandwich of all sandwiches for spicy food lovers. Slathered with a mayo-Sriracha mixture, a banh mi is a Vietnamese-inspired sandwich made from pickled veggies, cilantro, jalapenos and various meats piled on a French baguette.
So just because there's no banh mi restaurant in your area, doesn’t mean you can’t experience the deliciousness of this exotic sandwich. I tried to make an easy version, but with enough taste and pep to still mimic the original. My problem with most banh mi recipes is they're too complicated to attempt, either with time-consuming braised pork or other difficult recipes for the meat.
When I think of "sandwich," I want it to be easy. One option to make this quick is using supermarket paté (I got mine from Whole Foods) and boneless pork chops. I think it's a pretty easy solution to this zesty, flavorful sandwich without compromising too much of the original flavors associated with it.
The Quickie Banh Mi
- makes 4 sandwiches -
Zest Factor: Medium-HighIngredients
1 1/2 cups rice wine vinegar
Sriracha
1 large carrot, shredded with a grater or peeler
2 cucumber, peeled, seeded and cut into strips
1 red onion, thinly sliced
Paté (store-bought), thinly sliced
1 pound thin boneless pork chops
Salt and freshly ground pepper
4 baguettes
Mayonnaise
2 jalapenos, sliced
Cilantro bunchProcedure
1. In a small bowl, add rice wine vinegar. Combine with 1 teaspoon (or more) of Sriracha, and whisk until mixed. Add sliced carrots, cucumbers and onion. Place in the refrigerator, and let sit 20 to 30 minutes.
2. Sprinkle pork chops with salt and pepper. In a sauté pan over medium-high heat, cook pork until browned, just a few minutes on each side. Remove from pan, and cut on the bias.
3. Split the baguettes down the middle, and coat with thin layer of mayonnaise. Add desired amount of Sriracha over the mayo. Layer with pork chop slices, paté slivers, jalapenos and marinated vegetables. Top sandwich with cilantro, and serve.
TUNGSTEN: A New Font Family from H&FJ.
A few years ago, we started wondering if there was a way to make a flat-sided sans serif that was disarming instead of brutish, one that employed confidence and subtlety instead of just raw testosterone. It was an unusual design brief for ourselves, completely without visual cues and trading in cultural associations instead: “more Steve McQueen than Steven Seagal,” reads one note; “whiskey highball, not a martini” suggests another.
The result is Tungsten®, a tight family of high-impact fonts in four weights: muscular and persuasive, without sacrificing wit, versatility, or style. Now starting at $99.
Tungsten. Exclusively at H&FJ.
Plant Seeds
Josh MacPhee Plant Seeds $10 Another one that pretty much speaks for itself. This print is another move to simplify design and content and create the equivalent of radical street signs. 2 color silkscreen print 17"x11" signed
September 15, 2009
Ze Frank Wants Some Respect
Aretha Frankline belted it the best, "R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find out what it means to me..." What's going on in this country? Does everybody need a beat down?!
I love this meme.
I love this meme.
A Quick Note On Buried Cities
A quick note about the Governors Island “excavation,” for those who are interested…
I was on Governors Island this past weekend, and happened to stumble on the “Dig” without knowing a thing about it. I paid $5 and was completely fooled into believing it…at least, at first.
I was blown away as I entered the site and saw the water tower and power lines. The idea that a town from the 1950’s was buried and being excavated totally grabbed my imagination, and I was eating it all up. The church steeple, the chimneys…It was too good to be true! There were even “archaeologists,” one of whom I had a good ten minute conversation with about the site. He had answers for everything, and I congratulated him on the great job his team was doing.
It was only when I got deeper into the exhibit that I started noticing some odd elements: a chimney with bike handlebars sticking out of it. A gas station that looked like it had been transported from another dimension. Post-1950’s cars buried underground. My bullshit meter suddenly went into the red. I started to realize that the whole thing felt phony…like a film set.
I walked out pretty pissed off, feeling I’d been had. I couldn’t believe I’d had a full conversation about a fake town with an actor posing as an archaeologist (probably laughing at me the whole time). A quick internet search brought up a volunteer job posting online for the Dig, and a key requirement was your ability to “keep a secret.” More searching found a mention of it as an art installation…I should have guessed. I was pretty angry, and started writing a post to expose their ruse…
And then I started laughing as I looked back on my pictures. “Goverthing”?? Chimneys everywhere but not a single house? Soil and building levels that make NO sense when you think about it? I realized that I was only angry because I was the butt of the joke. The whole thing is a lot of fun, if you think about it, and I decided I didn’t want to be the know-it-all to blow all their hard work. At least, not so bluntly.
So I presented it exactly as I had experienced it (albeit with a lot of sarcasm that I unfortunately think was taken to be genuine). Unlike the exhibit, though, I wanted to alert people to it being phony at the end, so I finished with a reference to the Feejee Mermaid, a legendary hoax by PT Barnum in which a monkey and a fish were sewn together and advertised as a “gen-u-ine mermaid.” I figured that would answer everyone’s questions to its legitimacy. I was wrong.
While I think the installation is very well done, I have a problem with the fact that it never admits to being a hoax, not even when you’re at the end of the tour. Yes, it may seem obvious from my blog entry, but it is much more compelling and believable in person, and most of the visitors I saw left with the impression that everything they had witnessed was absolutely real (at least one commentor on the blog entry was totally convinced it was genuine after visiting).
And I don’t think that’s fair. If you don’t educate your audience, you’re playing them for lab rats, a social experiment for the sole benefit of the artist(s). Yes, people are sheep. Wow. Yes, people believe what authority figures tell them, often no matter how ridiculous. Amazing. Yes, people are willing to let go of logic to believe in something they want desperately to be real. Astounding.
I think the “excavation” would be so much more powerful and effective if visitors were told at the end that everything they had experienced was a hoax. It would amaze them to realize how easily they had been duped, and perhaps make them less susceptible to it in the future. It would also allow them to re-tour the site with a completely different understanding and appreciation for the work. And it would make the art honest, if art can in fact be honest. If it were me, I’d have a final indoor exhibit on how the entire thing was planned and built.
Anyway, I definitely recommend you visit it in person for the full effect – and bring some friends! You’ll get a kick out of watching them pump the water tower lever “30 times” according to the directions, despite the fact that you can simply just press the button and a spray of water will come out.
-SCOUT
Brad, let's get together
Brad Fitzpatrick did what I used to do, say what he really thinks in a blog post about RSS stuff. It's fine, but it is just his point of view. There are other points of view that are valid, like mine.
About "just happen to work at Google" -- come on, man -- how many people who don't happen to work at Google can add code to the following products: 1. Feedburner, 2. Google Reader, 3. Blogger.
Further, prior art is really important, it's how you keep the breadth of the pile of tech we create as small as possible, allowing us to build higher with the finite brain capacity each of us has. The cloud element was right there in the spec. And when we talked, you knew about it. So to say you never heard of it, well -- I think you had.
It's true -- I was pretty freaked when I saw the note at the top of your spec that RSS didn't matter. Sometimes I think Google really believes that. Now I'm here to say RSS does matter. You can't pretend it doesn't because it does. You blew every kind of smoke at it when we talked. That's really good motivation for a guy like me who takes pride in his work.
Now why did I get busy with rssCloud? Primarily because I wanted to remember how it worked. Once I got started, I remembered why I liked it, so I kept going. That's all.
Brad, we should get together and talk about bringing our projects together. This is what you were going to have to do whether I reactivated rssCloud or not, because RSS is there, and it's huge, and you were trying to ignore it.
Unpaid Internships – Common but Illegal
Unpaid Internships – Common but Illegal:(via soupsoup)
The scenario is fairly typical: a company offers an opportunity to ‘break into the business’ in exchange for the intern working for free. You see many examples of this in the entertainment industry. […]
In order to qualify as an unpaid internship, the requirement is simple: no work can be performed that is of any benefit at all to the company. That is, you can not deliver mail, sort files, file papers, organize a person’s calendar, conduct market research, write reports, watch television shows and report on them, read scripts, schedule interviews, or any other job that assists the employer in any way in running their business.
New York’s entertainment industry runs on unpaid (or severely underpaid) interns. It’s embarrassing, and it disgusts me — it effectively limits jobs in the business to people who already have enough money (or, more commonly, whose parents do) to afford to live in New York at a loss for a long time.
And once you get past the internship stage, it doesn’t get much better. I’ve never seen the disconnect between starting salaries and cost of living be as grossly and unnecessarily out of proportion as the entry-level jobs in the New York entertainment industry.
Hecho en Dumbo Leaves Brooklyn; Sunburnt Cow Roasts a Cow
Shared by Jake Dobkin
Hecho, you have betrayed me!Dumbo: Hecho en Dumbo is leaving Brooklyn for the Bowery and plans to open in the Marion’s Continental space by January. [Fork in the Road/VV]
East Village: The Sunburnt Cow celebrates its sixth anniversary this weekend. Friday, watch the Australian Football League Finals live with a $10 all-you-can-eat buffet and a two-hour all-you-can-drink special for $20, starting at 9 p.m. Sunday, a three-hour, $20 drink special is in place; at 11 a.m. there’s a free brunch buffet, and at 3 p.m. the restaurant will spit-roast a cow and give away the beef. [Grub Street]
Hell’s Kitchen: Cheyenne Dinner was shipped off to Alabama today. [Eater]
Midtown East: Brasserie celebrates five decades of service on September 30, with a $95 five-course menu of iconic dishes like Le Filet de Bison ‘Rossini’ from 1979 (with wine pairings) served from 7 to 9:30 p.m. [Grub Street]
Midtown East: Bento boxes are 20 percent off at Chiyoda Sushi this month. [Midtown Lunch]Read more posts by Alexandra Vallis
Filed Under: bowery, brasserie, east village, hecho en dumbo, marion's continental, midtown east, neighborhood watch, sunburnt cow
Gimme some sugar, baby: Army of Darkness sounds on the iPhone
Filed under: iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, App Review
Long before I was an Apple nerd, I was a horror nerd. More specifically, I was an Evil Dead/Sam Raimi/Bruce Campbell freak, and even maintained a website devoted to their 1993 masterpiece. I'm both surprised and excited to see my two obsessions collide in the form of an iPhone app devoted to Army of Darkness [iTunes link], the third of the Evil Dead series. Sure, some people use their iPhones to be more productive and create spreadsheets, but sometimes you just need a simple app that screams "shop smart, shop S-Mart!" or "see this? This is my BOOMSTICK!"
The app is a simple soundboard app, consisting of 16 audio clips from the film that can be played at the touch of a button. There's also a "slideshow" mode where you can hear all the clips in a row accompanied by an image slideshow. It is definitely not the most full-featured iPhone app, but for the horror fans out there it will make a great addition to your iPhone dock.
The app is free and, as far as I'm concerned, essential to every iPhone. If you like it, be sure to check out the other MGM soundboard apps [iTunes link] with audio clips from Robocop, Silence of the Lambs, Fargo and Rocky (all free except for Rocky, which is $0.99).
[via iPhone Savior]
Thanks to Seth for the tip!TUAWGimme some sugar, baby: Army of Darkness sounds on the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Good Ideas from Vermont Libraries
“The Vermont Department of Libraries has been publishing Good Ideas irregularly, beginning in 1988. Each edition includes the contributions of many public libraries. This blog was set up to continue the tradition but make it easier for librarians to search, use and print the resources.”
(Un)Inhabitable? - Art of Extreme Environments
The Maison Européenne de la Photographiein Paris is currently hosting the 10th edition of the Festival @rt Outsiders. (Un)Inhabitable? - Art of Extreme Environments explores the meaning of living in extreme environments.
These environments are either those that were, until recently, uninhabited by human beings and that contemporary science and technology is turning into "inhabitable" places (Antarctica, underwater world, outer space, deserts); or they are those that the consequences of man's actions have ruined and made "uninhabitable" for himself but also for other species.
Ana Rewakowicz, SleepingBagDress Prototype IIIt seems that every single European city is coming up with its own global warming-infused exhibition. @rt Outsiders was smart enough to narrow the focus of its show and to present a couple of artworks that stand out for their complexity, beauty and sense of involvement with the subject.
Sounds from Dangerous Places, Chernobyl, 2006-2009 © Peter CusackOne of them is Sounds from Dangerous Places, Chernobyl, by sound artist Peter Cusack. Since the nuclear catastrophe of April 26, 1986 nature at Chernobyl seems to be thriving. As humans were evacuated from the exclusion zone around the nuclear power station over 20 years ago, animals moved in. Existing populations multiplied and species not seen for decades began to return (although not every scientist agrees with the statement that the benefits for wildlife from the lack of human activity outweigh the risks of low-level radiation.)
Sounds from Dangerous Places, Chernobyl, 2006-2009 © Peter CusackSounds from Dangerous Places, Chernobyl is part of a broader project by Cusack to collect sounds from sites which have sustained major environmental damage. Impressed by the natural sounds of springtime in the Ukrainian city --dawn chorus, nighttime concert as well as frogs and nightingales-- the artist coupled photographs taken at and around Chernobyl with sound recordings. The sound of birds singing, the view of lovely old houses and wild flowers contrast with the sinister image we have of dilapidated buildings and the invisible radioactivity crackling through Geiger counters. This is one of the most striking works in the show as it's one of the rare artworks that explores Chernobyl without stopping at its potential for spectacularity and drama. As Cusack writes:
There is, often, an extreme dichotomy between an aesthetic response and knowledge of the 'danger', whether it is pollution, social injustice, military or geopolitical. The project asks, "What can we learn by listening to the sounds of dangerous places?"The project also provides us with a further opportunity to reflect on some governments and industry suggestion that nuclear power is one of the greenest fuels available right now and that it would allow us to cut carbon dioxide emissions and keep climate change at a tolerable level.
Audios of Chernobyl Dawn and Chernobyl Frogs.
Rose after Martian environmental exposure. Photo credit: c-lab; 2009Howard Boland & Laura Cinti presented a new version of The Martian Rose, an experiment about life on Mars. A series of roses were exposed to Martian conditions using a planetary simulation chamber specifically built for Mars.
The fragile floweres were placed inside a biochamber that simulates most of the extreme conditions found on Mars. The low pressure, the hard penetrating UV-light and the chilling temperature.
The roses emerged, dark red, frozen, their shape intact. The project reminds us that no matter how many spaceships we build and launch into outerspace, no matter how much we want to adapt and explore new planets, space is still a pretty unhospitable place for men.
Shiro Matsui, EP04 Dewey's Forest, 2009EPO4 Dewey's Forest, by Shiro Matsui, was inspired by Silent Running, a sci-fi movie that depicts a future in which all plant life on Earth has been made extinct, except for a few specimens preserved in a fleet of space-borne freight ships. The artist designed a garden for weightlessness. An experiment of the garden should be sent to the International Space Station during the Autumn 2009, in collaboration with JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency. The garden looked fit and healthy when i visited the show. I'd be curious to see what the plants look like in a month or two.
Plants are locked in a rotating machine, behind a porthole and thus unreachable, allowing the vegetation to grow in all directions, like in weightlessness. A camera is filming the garden from inside, capturing the audience looking at it. Visitors cannot enter the garden anymore that astronauts can go outside.
Moon Museum, 1969 © Forrest MyersIf a garden can thrive in space? How about art?
On July 20, 1969, Armstrong steps onto the surface of the Moon. This same year, Forrest Myers invited 6 leading contemporary artists of the day to create an artwork for our natural satellite. Robert Rauschenberg drew a straight line; David Novros, a black square; Claes Oldenburg, Mickey Mouse; Andy Warhol expanded his signature into a penis; John Chamberlain drew a template like the ones used to produce paintings done with automobile lacquer and Forrest Myers, a computer drawing. The result is a Museum for the Moon made of drawings miniaturized on a ceramic tile (1,9 cm x 0.60cm). Several of them were made but only one tile was (secretely as NASA never answered Myers' letters) attached to the Landing Module of the November 1969 Apollo 12 mission.
Steve Eastaugh's 'Headhome in Antarctica', 2003
Moulting Adelie penguins overlook the statue gardenIn 2003, while he was an artist in residence at the Australian Antarctic Base of Davis, Stephen Eastaugh created a sculpture garden between the meteorology building, a usually-frozen sea and a public mostly made of penguins. The sculptures look like small totems. Inspired by a wooden head planted in a pile of rocks years ago by an unknown explorer, they compete with the antennas, flagpoles and windsocks distributed around the station.
My pictures, c-lab has more images as well as a review of the exhibition.
The 10th edition of the Festival @rt Outsiders, curated by Annick Bureaud and Jean-Luc Soret, runs until October 11, 2009 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. If you're in Paris on Wednesday don't miss the conference and debate that will focus on the economic and political challenges in the Arctic territories, an area coveted for its reserves of oil, gas and other materials buried deep under the
ocean floor.This piece originally appeared on we-make-money-not-art
Related posts:
Biorama 2: Inside The Hollow Earth
Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009
Delivering Messages Through Art: The Canary ProjectHelp us change the world - DONATE NOW!
(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 3:04 PM)
At home with Keith Hernandez
Newsday's Neil Best visits the Hernandez residence and gets a little peek into Mex's surprisingly quaint home life. Example:
"Hernandez removed the copy of Moby-Dick from his collection and announced one of his offseason plans: Joining [his wife] in reading the book.Aloud."
Read the entire story here.
LANrev speeds mass deployments of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Filed under: Desktops, Enterprise, Software, Cool tools, Education, Snow Leopard
When you only have a handful of Macs in an office or household to upgrade to a new operating system, it's no great problem to run around with the installation DVD and upgrade one machine at a time. But when you're supporting a large office or school environment, it's impossible to take the time to manually upgrade each machine. That's where tools like Apple Remote Desktop and LANrev come in handy.
LANrev 5.2 has been released today, with full compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard. LANrev uses a proprietary imaging process that saves the home directory and OS settings of each machine during an automated OS deployment, so that the users are back up and running as quickly as possible afterwards.
IT professionals can not only roll out Snow Leopard faster using LANrev, but the application also tracks Snow Leopard machines for asset inventory and provides for remote management of Macs. LANrev has an asset inventory for storing license numbers and purchasing information, which is critical for audits. LANrev can track the location of stolen Macs and provide law enforcement officials with information to locate and recover the machines. For those who are concerned about power usage, LANrev does automated power management of large Mac installations, putting Macs to sleep or shutting them down when they're idle.
Unlike Apple Remote Desktop, LANrev works in cross-platform environments, so it's useful for situations where a small group of Mac users may exist in a Windows world -- or vice versa. No pricing info is available on the LANrev Web site, so be sure to contact one of their distribution partners if you're interested in this professional administration tool.TUAWLANrev speeds mass deployments of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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As Adam Rubin in a post to twitter points out, this is the first game where nothing is at stake for the Mets since the end of the 2005 season. via www.metsblog.com This hit me for the first time last Thursday, at the ballpark. Even the security card was praying for rain so we could all go home. It's been a bad year for the Mets, but I miss Baseball already.
Introducing Google for the Public Sector
(Cross-posted with the Google Public Policy Blog)The 2008 elections demonstrated how technology can increase political participation, and now we're beginning to see the power of Web 2.0 come to government.
On the heels of last week's Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., we're excited to launch Google for the Public Sector, a one-stop shop of tools and tips that local, state and federal government officials can use to help promote transparency and increase citizen participation.
The site helps government agencies:According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, nearly four out of five American Internet users go online to find government information. Technology will help play a key role in making this information accessible, useful and transparent.
- Make your website, and the information it offers, easier to find. For example, in less than 50 technical staff hours, Arizona's Government Information Technology Agency made hundreds of thousands of public records and other webpages "crawlable" to search engines and visible in Google search results.
- Visualize your information and tell your story in Google Earth & Maps to the hundreds of millions of people who use them. The State Department runs an interactive Google Map of Secretary Clinton's travels, which shows where she has been and includes photos and videos.
- Use the power of online video to engage millions of potential viewers and give constituents a voice. In the U.S. alone, the Senate, House of Representatives, White House, and federal government, among others, all have YouTube channels.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector Project Manager
Long physics lectures can kill you!
The answer to this Fermi problem is a bit surprising.
Assuming you're not in a big lecture hall and the professor shuts the door at the start of class, how long does it take for you and your classmates to deplete the oxygen enough to feel it?
Here's a taste of the reasoning behind the answer:
So one person needs about 2lb of oxygen a day, or .9 kg. But how many liters is that? Oxygen has a molar mass of 16 grams, so oxygen gas, or O2, has a mass of 32 grams per mole. One mole of gas at standard pressure and temperature takes up 22.4 liters.
A commenter over on Fine Structure notes that CO2 is more of a problem than oxygen.
Tags: physics scienceI don't know if they brought this up on physicsbuzz yet, but lack of oxygen isn't really uncomfortable (though it can kill you). Increase in CO2 is what triggers the apparent need to breath. I am pretty sure the minimum partial pressure of O2 is around 0.16 bar. Actually, that is the min recommended, I don't know if that is the pass-out limit.
Breaking: Adobe To Acquire Omniture For Approximately $1.8 Billion
Adobe Systems has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Omniture for the former to acquire the latter in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion on a fully diluted equity-value basis. Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for $21.50 per share in cash. The proposed offer represents a premium of 45% over Omniture’s average closing price for the last 30 trading days through yesterday’s close.
The completion of the transaction, pending regulatory approval, is expected to close in Q4 of Adobe’s fiscal year. The company believes the acquisition will be accretive to its non-GAAP earnings in fiscal year 2010.
Omniture will become a new business unit within Adobe. Omniture’s CEO, Josh James, will be joining Adobe Systems as the unit’s Senior VP, reporting directly to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.
At the same time, Adobe reported that third-quarter earnings fell to 35 cents per share from 50 cents per share a year ago. Adobe shares fell 3.6 percent in after-hours trading to $34.34. Omniture shares were halted after the close.
From the official statement:
By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and ubiquitous clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies, Adobe will be well positioned to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices.
The combination of the two companies will increase the value Adobe delivers to customers. For designers, developers and online marketers, an integrated workflow—with optimization capabilities embedded in the creation tools—will streamline the creation and delivery of relevant content and applications. This optimization will enable advertisers and advertising agencies, publishers, and e-tailers to realize greater ROI from their digital media investments and improve their end users’ experiences.
Omniture was founded in 1996 and currently counts approx. 1,200 employees worldwide. It’s the largest worldwide provider of Web analytics, with a product portfolio of 12 products serving over 5,000 customers across the globe. It reported revenues in fiscal year 2008 of about $300 million.
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Photos - The Secret to Great Espresso
The secret to great espresso, in fact the secret to all great coffee, is that there is no secret. No magic formula. No easy answer. The secret to great coffee is in the details and in the hard work applied by everyone involved in every part of the process. As Baristas we know that we are the last step in a long line of people working to bring high quality coffee to consumers.
Morning Lightning
Holy crap — here’s where all that noise came from Saturday morning. WBTC points us to this epic shot of a lightning-enshrouded Golden Gate Bridge taken by Flickr user fgfathome, looking south from the Coast Guard station.
And a note from the National Weather Service — this was the first time San Francisco has seen rain on those days.
A 2-DAY RECORD RAINFALL WAS ALSO SET AT SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TODAY. ACCUMULATED RAINFALL TOTALLED 0.27 INCHES AND BECOMES THE FIRST TIME IN RECORDED HISTORY RAINFALL WAS SEEN ON THESE TWO DAYS.
The perfect city
Based on his world travels and city biking, David Byrne imagines his ideal city.
Tags: cities David ByrneIf a city doesn't have sufficient density, as in L.A., then strange things happen. It's human nature for us to look at one another -- we're social animals after all. But when the urban situation causes the distance between us to increase and our interactions to be less frequent we have to use novel means to attract attention: big hair, skimpy clothes and plastic surgery. We become walking billboards.
Mothers and Scientists - We're really on the same side.
Amazing how many university study dollars go into proving advice from your mother. We have come to rely on scientific studies so much that we forget the truth in simple, age-old advice. Remember an “apple a day…” Well, eating one before a meal has helped people lose a notable amount of weight and offered amazing help with blood sugar. How about the scientific reasoning about why men like curvy women? Not only do hourglass women have more reproductive hormones but women who gain weight in their hips have smarter children. Hmm, scientific proof that opposites attract?
Now we hear that simply washing your hands with soap may be the easiest way to slow swine flu.
NYTimes.com - “A host of recent studies have highlighted the importance and the scientific underpinning of this most basic hygiene measure. One of the most graphic was done at the University of California, Berkeley, where researchers focused video cameras on 10 college students as they read and typed on their laptops.”
I should say the NYTimes does give credit to mothers twice in the article for hand washing as well as elbow sneezing. Here I’ll stop criticizing the money spent because I know university students need the experience.
Incidentally, I eat this scientific trivia up for breakfast, snack on it… It’s my favorite page in The Week magazine. It’s one of the few things I collect - scientific studies proving old wives’ tales and motherly advice. I can only assume that we seek out scientific proof and advice because we’ve all moved so far away from our mothers.
AHT Visits the 'Martha Stewart Show'
At this moment, I'm blogging from the audience of the Martha Stewart Show. Stewart is taping a burger show that will air this Friday, September 18. I figured I'd blab about it while in the audience. Some familiar faces here. George "Hamburger America" Motz, Daniel Boulud (making some burgers to promote DBGB), Pat LaFrieda, Andy D'Amico(Five Napkin Burger), Corner Bistro owner Bill O'Donnell, and Liran Mezan (BLT Burger).
I'm not normally one for live-blogging (so 2004), but I'll be updating this post throughout the taping (well, as long as my battery holds out). I'm sitting in the audience for most of the show, but apparently I'll be asked up to sample a burger. Stay tuned.
Sat around in the green room with George Motz. Met Bill O'Donnell from Corner Bistro. He's going to be cooking mini CB burgers for the audience. Mini b/c there's no way you could do full-size for this crowd.
That's Bill O'Donnell (Corner Bistro owner) in the background.
George will eventually be sitting next to me. Wondering if he's going to come out wearing the same "I Love Burgers" shirt they asked me to wear (above). My mom's going to see me on TV and think I'm being disrespectful, showing up on Martha's show wearing a T-shirt. (Mom: They had the whole audience wear them.)
2:08: Just met some folks in the audience visiting from California. Berkeley. I hipped them to Emilia's Pizzeria. Yeah, I know. Burger show, not pizza. But I did give them some burger recs for the city, though.
Waiting for show taping to start. Should be any minute now.
2:22: Looks like some other burgers being tasted here are Blue Ribbon Brasserie, Cafe D'Alsace, Country, Minetta Tavern's Black Label burger, and Shake Shack.
2:23: George comes out. He's wearing the T-shirt under his shirt.
2:28: Wow. The warm-up guy. He's got the audience in a frenzy. I can't hear myself blog.
2:29: Daniel Boulud comes out.
2:32: Burgers are coming out and being placed on a table. Not eating lunch before this was a mistake.
2:39: And so it begins. Martha's out on the set. Introducing the different burgers.
2:43: That not eating lunch thing? Yeah. A really bad idea. And Martha reeling off the burgers' ingredients ain't helping. Jeebus
2:44: Interesting how this thing is taped. Crackerjack crew. They had a couple table islands on wheels in front of the main island that Martha usually stands behind. When the first guest came on (Pat LaFrieda), they wheeled those tables out in a hurry just as the camera dollies rolled through the space.
2:46: Pat LaFrieda started out in the butcher shop at 10, he says. He advocates for grinding your own beef. (AHT does, too.) Martha says her mom (Big Martha Kostyra) used to grind the family's own meat for burgers.
2:48: Yes, I was able to reference Martha's maiden name in a flash. I worked at Martha Stewart Living magazine for six years. I know way more about Martha than any civilian should. ;)
2:51: You know, Twitter would be better for this (@ahamburgertoday), but I want to preserve this thread, and apparently Twitter only saves the last x-many-thousand tweets. Also: I've found that the search function on Twitter is sometimes buggy and that you can't always find everything you know you've #hashtagged </ end twitter rant>
2:53: Martha giving everyone in the audience the KitchenAid grinder attachment. Martha: I have the grinder; I just need my KitchenAid fixed. Will you have it fixed it for me?
2:58: Second segment about to start. Getting nervous about my part. Also thinking of all the work piling up in my inbox.... :-/
Surprisingly, the light in here is difficult to shoot in with the iPhone. Hard to keep the camera still enough to get sharp focus.
George's book gets a plug.
3:02: George just spoke on camera. I'm right next to him. Hope they didn't get me in the shot. I tried to laugh and smile at the appropriate moments so I didn't look like a zombie freakazoid. George sounded great! Perfect spiel about the rich and varied panorama of burgers across the country. Namechecks Bobcat Bite in New Mexico and Solly's Grille in Milwaukee.
3:11: They're bringing around Corner Bistro mini burgers. George says they're really good. I'm not eating—I don't want to be caught on camera eating or get food in my beard.
3:12: Andy D'Amico onstage now for Five Napkin Burger. Holy crap, you should see the size of the precooked patty. It's formed in a VERY TALL ring mold. OMG, does that smell good. This is torture. Prediction: Whatever burger I sample, I am going to like it.
3:23: Before the next segment. Producer giving me my cues. Says Martha is wondering what the response is to the blogging. (Where are the comments, people?!?! You're making me look bad.) Also asks how many followers @ahamburgertoday has on Twitter.
Me (sheepishly): "Um, about 1,100...."
Producer: "Martha has almost a million and a half."
Yeah. I know. Don't rub it in. I have .00073333 as many followers as she does. Where's the beef? Follow me, people: @ahamburgertoday
3:28: Wow. I hope I didn't sound like an idiot! Just talked to Martha on camera. Blushing so red right now. She asked me why I started a burger blog, mentioned Slice as a precursor to it (anyone coming to this entry now, visit Slice, too!), and asked for my fave burgers. The producers told me she might ask this and that I should have 2 picks from NYC and 2 picks from around the country. Unfortunately, only got to plug the NYC picks (Zaitzeff and the Motz Burger at Water Taxi Beach). Would have namechecked The Cozy Inn in Salina, Kansas (fabulously oniony sliders) and Joe's Cable Car in San Francisco (they have an in-house butcher grinding the meat fresh).
3:31: Oh, wow. I'm going to be sampling Liran Mezan's salmon burger (BLT Burger). And cue the the fish-burger haters in the comments in 3... 2... 1...
3:32: Salmon burger topped with: tartar sauce, pickled red onions. Doesn't sound too bad.
3:42: OK. It actually was pretty good.
I know, I know, I'm going to get chewed out by y'all, but it was well-balanced, the salmon (freshly ground) had a nice fresh flavor, and the tartar sauce and pickled onions were a good foil for the fish.
I probably looked like a pig eating on camera. And then I think I got a little grabby reaching across Martha to try to get a napkin. But, hey, I needed to clean up for the camera! (Sorry, Martha.)
3:45: Dunno what's going on now. They told me I was going to sample-eat the burger near the end of the show. I think they're making one more thing. Or maybe this is the show closer. Yes. Looks like Martha is going to plug Everyday Food and a chicken-burger recipe that appears in the magazine.
3:47: I think I'm on camera again. Trying to type without looking at the screen. I'm a master typist, though. Let's see how many mistake-free words I can type. Martha is making roasted poblano peppers. George Motz is watching over my shoulder as I type. And ... Oh, I thought the camera was leaving me. No luck.
OK. George is laughing now at what I 'm typing. </typing shtick>3:49:Martha butters and grills her buns. She knows what's what.
3:50: And we're done.
3:51: And scratch that. We're now starting the outro segment. Martha brings out all the chefs for the outro. They're all eating their burgers:
3:55: And we're done. For reals. Martha, now that taping is over, asking me for more deets on the salmon burger. (I was only able to say, "Mmm, it's good," before she and Mezan continued their banter.
4:45: And, back in the office. Stopped off to get some lunch. Hitting "save" on this post and then going to dig in.
I can laugh now, but I'm not going to pretend that it didn't hurt.
So last night I’m running out of my building and two girls who were in their early 20s at most got on the elevator with me. We get to the lobby, where there are a couple of very heavy doors to the street, and BECAUSE THAT IS HOW I WAS RAISED I do the thing where you swiftly maneuver around so you can hold both open. They each made a big show of saying “Thank you,” which was nice, but as they went east and I went west I heard one say to the other, “I told you, old guys are the only ones with manners these days.”
I'm Not Dead
Just crazy-busy, unlike the women in this pattern illustration:
I feel that these ladies, if not ladies of absolute leisure, spend their copious free time in those stereotypical pursuits of reading novels and eating bon-bons. Plus, hairstyles like the ones here require tremendous maintenance and make me think that the most strenuous thing they do all day is put up with pudgy, sweaty men winking at them and calling them "Sugar."
That hair just doesn't say "day job" to me. Unless you're Dolly Parton, in which case you get to call OTHER people "Sugar," while working three times as hard as anyone else in heels three times as high. That woman amazes me. (And her singin' ain't bad, neither.)
Do I sound jealous of these women on the pattern envelope? I may be, but only of the ruffles. I covet those ruffles. (And maybe the bon-bons. I've been in California a MONTH and have had NO See's Candies. That's just wrong.)
If you think this dress would magically transform you into such a creature, you're in luck, because Wendy at PatternStash is offering 20% off everything today and tomorrow. You can use the money you save for more bon-bons. (Or a fall. Whichever.)
It's Kanye's Fault
David Brooks on the decline of the West:When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.Part of this is Brooks critique of the past half-century, or rather half-critique. From Brooks' perspective, the problem is that Sonia Sotomayor didn't go to school in 50s or early 60s, not that her chosen school didn't admit women in the 50s and 60s. Likewise Brooks doesn't cite the immodesty of George Wallace declaring eternal segregation "in the name of the greatest people to trod this earth," he cites the immodesty of Muhammad Ali. The response offends Brooks. The conditions that produce the response, less so.But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call "expressive individualism." Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.
Everything that starts out as a cultural revolution ends up as capitalist routine. Before long, self-exposure and self-love became ways to win shares in the competition for attention. Muhammad Ali would tell all cameras that he was the greatest of all time. Norman Mailer wrote a book called "Advertisements for Myself."
Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private "Crossfire"; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan's egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don't even notice it anymore.
This isn't the death of civilization. It's just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day "Command Performance," comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It's funny how the nation's mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.
That's because the conditions are, themselves, built on American immodesty. I'm thinking of Jack Johnson winning the championship, and modest Americans launching pogroms against their fellow immodest Americans. I'm thinking about Birth of a Nation's defense of treason, and a sitting president offering his immodest endorsement. I'm thinking about a country, circa 1850, whose politicians lorded over one of the last slave societies in the known world, and immodestly argued that it was a gift from God.
Even Brooks view of the "Greatest Generation" is myopic. In 1948 Strom Thurmond authored the segregationist Dixiecrat charter, while immodestly fathering a daughter with a black women. In 1946, Isaac Woodward, a veteran of World War II, was beaten and blinded--while in uniform--by South Carolina police. The police were prosecuted, but the jury acquitted them, and a court-room full of Americans broke out in immodest applause.
This is history through the veil, again. It's virtually impossible to be a black person and believe that Americans were somehow more humble in the past. Our very existence springs from an act of immodesty. I can't even begin to imagine the Native American read on this one.
Serious Eats Is Bringing Hot Doug's to NYC October 7
[Hot Doug's Chicago dog. Photographs: Robyn Lee]
Listen up, serious eaters! For one night only, Doug "Hot Doug" Sohn is taking his show on the road and bringing it to Astor Center in New York City. To score some of Chicago's finest hot dogs, you would usually have to hop a plane to O'Hare, drive out to Avondale, and wait in a two-hour line at the legendary Hot Doug's (that's what Robyn and I did a couple of weeks ago, but man was it worth it).
But for one evanescent eve, you can book a table for two right here in Manhattan with Doug himself. The chef, owner, and resident personality behind this beloved institution will join us for the evening, serving up Chicago-style hot dogs, foie dogs, and his famous duck fat fries.
The foie dog and duck fat fries.
Each $65 ticket represents a table for two and a meal of two Chicago dogs, two foie gras dogs, an order of duck fat fries, and a six pack of beer, as well as a tasty surprise to start. It's a bargain even if the meal was one you could get any old time, an amazing steal when you consider the airfare that would usually be involved.
There is an early and a late seating but only 30 spots for each, so act fast.
The Hot Doug Experience
October 7, 2009
Two seatings: 6:30 and 8:30 p.m.
At The Lounge in Astor Center, 399 Lafayette Street, New York NY 10003 (just above 4th Street; map)
$65 for two people, includes 2 Chicago dogs, 2 foie dogs, duck fat fries, and a six pack of beer
David Foster Wallace, lowbrow hero
David Foster Wallace may eventually become more well-known for his non-fiction, not the novels he struggled so mightily to perfect.
Tags: David Foster WallaceBecause if this is the way it all shakes out, DFW, instead of having to ride the stock exchange of literary taste in dead white male novelists, will find himself in a distinguished little nook of odd artists who labored to produce highbrow work -- but who sort of ass-backwardsly won permanent and inarguable fame in lower-browed fields.
Some quick examples include C.S. Lewis ("Chronicles of Narnia"), A.A. Milne ("Winnie the Pooh"), and Roald Dahl ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"), who considered themselves, respectively, a theologian, playwright, and fiction writer, but who ended up as brilliant children's fabulists. There's Theodore Geisel, who chose a silly pen name like "Dr. Seuss" because he wanted to reserve his given name for the Great American Novel he had in him. One Arthur Sullivan composed the music for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" among other bombasts, but is chiefly remembered nowadays, along with his impish partner Gilbert, for his musically innovative spoof operas.
PSGI/Plack: Now we feel like writing real web servers!
Continuous hacking!
Daisuke Murase made FastCGI backend for Plack!
I noticed some issues with PATH_INFO tests when testing with FastCGI and lighttpd. So here's my investigation how they handle them differently. It's a mess. More contributions welcome.
We did some benchmarking with running Catalyst natively with Catalyst::Engine::Apache2 and with Catalyst::Engine::PSGI + Plack::Impl::Apache2. The benchmark shows the number is roughly the same, which proves that PSGI decoupling and abstraction doesn't slow things down, and of course, could be optimized further because of this low level nature, which is awesome.
Randy J. Ray is blogging about HTTP parsers with Perl (and XS).
Kazuho's been working on adding keep-alive support to the standalone server: the apache bench now shows 4000 req/s with -k option! He is now working on the standalone prefork server.
We've found bugs and made patches against IO::AIO to support sendfile(2) in FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
Kazuho pointed out that Impl::Standalone and Impl::AnyEvent code might have a problem with bigger file (like ~2MB) and voila! We added that to the unit tests and it revealed a bug, which was immediately fixed.
tokuhirom made FastCGI protocol client in pure perl. This might not really matter in PSGI/Plack frameworks but would be useful to test our server side implementations, as well as implementing FastCGI connector for perlbal.
Yappo pointed out benchmarking Hello World running on HTTP::Engine::Interface::ServerSimple and Hello World running on Plack::Impl::ServerSimple show almost the same result. It seems true, so "HTTP::Engine is slow because of Request/Response objects creation" feels like a myth. HTTP::Engine is still slower than the native Hello World raw PSGI app, but the overhead doesn't really matter when your web application takes more than 0.01s to serve your page.
I made Sledge::Pages::PSGI plugin to turn your Sledge web app to run on top of PSGI stack for my friends who use the web application framework I wrote 7 years ago :) You need a patched CGI.pm from my fork.
We'll show more numbers once everything gets stable, but so far the number seems promising and very interesting. Simple Hello World is now 4000 req/s with Standalone server with keep-alive on, and 2MB photo file serving runs fastest on AnyEvent server (300 req/s) with sendfile(2) and AIO enabled while other dumb implementation suffers from I/O in the perl land like (80 req/s).
Jody Powell, 1943-2009
Joseph Lester “Jody” Powell, press secretary to Jimmy Carter, died yesterday at the age of 65. Powell’s staunch support of his boss made him one of the more reliable press secretaries of the modern era, but was also symbolic of the “not ready for prime time” nature of the Carter administration. Still, there was something rather admirable about his feistiness:
During Carter’s governorship, a top opponent of busing to achieve school desegregation called the governor a “gutless peanut brain.” Mr. Powell shot back a note that “respectfully” suggested the man “take a running jump and go straight to hell.”
That said, he is best remembered for sharing with the world the “killer rabbit” story.
It began late one afternoon in the spring of 1979. The President was sitting with a few of us on the Truman Balcony. He had recently returned from a visit to Plains, and we were talking about homefolks and how the quail were nesting and similar matters of international import.Suddenly, for no apparent reason — he was drinking lemonade, as I recall — the President volunteered the information that while fishing in a pond on his farm he had sighted a large animal swimming toward him. Upon closer inspection, the animal turned out to be a rabbit. Not one of your cutesy, Easter Bunny-type rabbits, but one of those big splay-footed things that we called swamp rabbits when I was growing up.
The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.
Carter beat the rabbit off with a paddle, but the story was more damaging than the attack itself. There’s a cautionary tale in there somewhere.
The Last Unanswered Kanye West Question
The long (coming on 36 hours now!) national Kanye nightmare seems to be over. The dust is settling. Kanye has served the ultimate penance—in fact, having Jay Leno put his hand on your knee seems a little cruel and unusual. (And watch that clip only if you must; really, it’s not good for children or other living things.) But still: one very important and highly unanswered question remains.In Kelly Clarkson’s open letter rebuke of Kanye, she included this cryptic bit of personal information:
“It’s absolutely fascinating how much I don’t like you. I like everyone. I even like my asshole ex that cheated on me over you…which is pretty odd since I don’t even personally know you.”
We have been waiting a whole day for someone to explain this. Kelly Clarkson had a boyfriend who cheated on her because of her feelings about Kanye West? Or about his own feelings? I’m having trouble imagining the scenario. “Fine! If you don’t like Kanye, I guess I’m going to have to look outside our relationship to find someone who can better meet my needs sexually.”
Or was it somehow to gain Kanye’s favor? “I tried to be faithful. I didn’t want to cheat. But Kanye told to me to. And he’s that important to me.”
Also, the whole “over you” locution is disturbing, evoking as it does accidental, unhappy threeways.
Please, Kelly: Another open letter to explain.
Check Out BPR
I’ve always said I only interview players that say something interesting. David Laurila’s latest contribution to BPR goes one step further, letting two of the most unique players in baseball interview each other. It’s one of the most intriguing setups you’ll hear, as Gabe Kapler and Fernando Perez talk baseball without any limits and (as you’ll hear) without any edits. BPR is one of few places in the sports world where we’ll give someone both the time and the freedom to say whatever they want.
Also be sure to check out the BPR archives for an interview with former Royals Athletic Trainer Mickey Cobb, Baseball America’s Player of the Year Jason Heyward, who we had on when we had him as the Braves #1 prospect, and coming up later this week, SI’s Joe Posnanski talks about his new book “The Machine.”
Steele Blasts Resolution Against Wilson: "Democrats Don't Want An Apology. They Want A Side Show"
RNC Chairman Michael Steele has released a new statement condemning the House Democrats' upcoming motion of disapproval against Rep. Joe Wilson -- which Steele incorrectly refers to as a censure -- in yet another sign that the Republicans are closing ranks around Wilson:
"In another stunning example of hypocrisy, congressional Democrats are wasting taxpayers' time and resources on a legislative measure to censure Congressman Joe Wilson so they don't have to talk about their exceedingly unpopular health care plan. Without question, Joe Wilson made a terrible error in judgment and has wasted no time in extending a personal apology to the president. The president has accepted his apology."If we are going to march Members down to the well of the House to apologize, Joe Wilson is going to have to get in line behind Nancy Pelosi, who attacked the intelligence community who protects us, Charlie Rangel who cheated on his taxes, Jack Murtha - a walking scandal, and we all know how the Democratic leadership tried to protect William Jefferson.
"Democrats don't want an apology. They want a side show - something to shift the focus away from their government-run experiment on health care."
Dolphin safe tuna an ecological disaster?
The dolphin issue changed how tuna fisherman fish...but the new method is actually worse for marine life overall.
By trying to help dolphins, groups like Greenpeace caused one of the worst marine ecological disasters of all time. Few other fisheries are as bad for groups like sharks and sea turtles as the purse seine fishery, and none are as large in scale.
(via the browser)
Tags: fishing green
Happiness, weight-change, and smoking are all contagious
Read Clive Thompson's fascinating new article on social contagion - whether your behavior affects your friends' (and friend's friends) happiness, weight, and health , and how that might work.
September 14, 2009
SystemTap – DTrace for Linux ?
Since DTrace was released for Solaris I am missing it on Linux systems... It can't be included in Linux by the same reason why ZFS can't be - it's licensing issue. Both ZFS and DTrace are under CDDL, which is incompatible with GPL. So you can see DTrace and ZFS on Solaris, FreeBSD, MacOS, but not on Linux.
However I follow the project SystemTap for couple of years (it was started in 2005), which is supposed to provide similar to DTrace functionality.
Why I am interested in this tool, because there is no simple way under Linux to profile not CPU-bound load (for CPU-bound there is OProfile, see for example
http://mysqlinsights.blogspot.com/2009/08/oprofile-for-io-bound-apps.html). I.e. for IO-bound or for mutex contention problems OProfile is not that useful.SystemTap is included in RedHat 5 releases, but I was not able to get it running even in CentOS 5.3 (it crashed and hung every so often). Latest updated RedHat 5.4 promised some more fixes to SystemTap, so I decided to give it more try as soon as I got RedHat 5.4 on hands.
Surprising, but now it runs much more stable. I was able to get profiling of kernel and system calls.
Here is simple script to show IO activity per disk per process (well, it is similar to iotop, but iotop is not available in RedHat / CentOS)with output like this
CODE:
This example maybe is simple, but the point is that there is rich scripting language with tons
of probes you can intersect ( kernel functions, FS drivers functions, any other drives and modules)What else I see very useful in SystemTap it can work in userspace. That is you can use it to profile your and any application that has -debuginfo packages ( all -debuginfo for standard RedHat RPMS you can download from RedHat FTP), but basically it is info you get compiling with
gcc -g.Well, there seems another war story going on. To profile userspace application with SystemTap your kernel should be patches with
uprobespatch, which fortunately is included in RedHat based kernels, but not included in vanilla kernel yet. So I am not sure if you can get userspace profiling running in another distributives.There is quite simple script that I tried to hack around MySQL ®
CODE:
with output which I get running simple SELECT against InnoDB table:
CODE:
Again, this case is maybe too simple, but basically you can intersect internal MySQL function and script (measure time, count of call, statistics) what you what. I did not figure out yet how to intersect C++ style function (i.e.
ha_innobase::index_read), so there is area to investigate.So I am going to play with it more and do some useful scripting to get profiling of MySQL.
And it seems SystemTap can re-use DTrace probes available in application, as you may know DTrace-probes were added into MySQL 5.4, so interesting how it works.
I should mention that there is second alternative of DTrace... It's .... DTrace port. Looking on blog it seems one-man project and currently author is fighting with resolving userspace issues. I gave to this a try, but on my current RedHat 5.4 after several runs I got "Kernel panic", so it's enough for now.
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Tweeted and Deleted: Obama Rebukes Kanye West
By Garance Franke-Ruta President Obama called musician Kanye West a "jackass" during an interview Monday with CNBC, an ABC News anchor reported to his followers on Twitter. But the tweet caused some red faces at ABC, and the network soon apologized for publicizing what had apparently been an off-the-record comment. "Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a 'jackass' for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT'S presidential," "Nightline" co-anchor Terry Moran wrote Monday evening. Moran has more than 1 million followers on the microblogging service. CNBC objected to the post, which was apparently from a portion of the interview that was supposed to be off the record. Moran quickly deleted the comment (although it still can be accessed online), and an ABC spokesperson apologized for the tweet in a statement first posted on Politico. Moran "prematurely tweeted ... before our editorial process had been completed. That was
Letterpress Alphabet Posters
via www.apartmenttherapy.com
Patrick Swayze: Hip Hop Icon
…or Patrick Swayze: Hip Hop (Lex)iconThe passing of Patrick Wayne Swayze is of significance if not for his role as a successful actor and choreographer, but for the courage of his long-fought battle against an aggressive case of Stage IV pancreatic cancer. He catapulted to stardom with his Golden Globe-nominated performance in Dirty Dancing, and later appeared alongside Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg in the 1990 film Ghost. But Swayze didn’t just make an impact in the world of cinema. His unintended influence on hip hop culture can not be understated and mustn’t be undervalued. The term “Swayze” (and, as a nod to his film, “going ‘Ghost’”) became popular in the early ‘90’s, employed as a synonym for “leaving”, “going” or “disappearing”. Like much of the slang to emerge from pop culture of the last twenty years or so, this term was berthed from the hip hop lexicon, featured within the rhymes of notable emcees. Below I’ve included a selection of some of my favorite “Swayze” quotables. Feel free to contribute in the comments section:Reach for the pistol and you're crazy/
Try to blast and I'll be swinging that ass like Patrick Swayze/
- Kool G Rap; “The Symphony Part II”I'm sick, insane crazy, Driving Miss Daisy/
Out her fuckin’ mind now I got mine I'm Swayze/
- Method Man; “Bring the Pain”You got me strung like I'm young and it's crazy/
You're making me nervous, I don't deserve this, I'm Swayze/
- CL Smooth; “Searching”The n****s went wild, the hoes went crazy/
We dropped the microphone, then we Swayze/
- E-Swift; “Can’t Tell Me Shit”I try to stay aware of the drama, it's crazy/
Plus, see I got to tell your mama that I'm Swayze/
- Dres (of Black Sheep); “Who’s Next?”Then he was Swayze, the shot must’ve dazed me/
Thug's selling drug, busting slugs, but he ain't crazy/
- Big Noyd; “Right Back at You”But now I'm Swayze, ghost, the rap host/After it’s all said and done though, Biggie had the best “Swayze” quotes:
Who rip shows, from coast to coast/
- PMD; “It’s Going Down”Lick your toes, bitch? Fuck no, you must be crazy/
Squirt in your face and then I'm Swayze/
- The Notorious B.I.G.; “Big Booty Hoes” & “Bust a Nut”Commitments, I'm Swayze, no time for the ill shit/
Rest with the n****s on that real blood-spill shit/
- The Notorious B.I.G.; “Let Me Get Down” & “Living the Life”That's why I bust back, it don't phase me/
When he drop, take his glock, and I'm Swayze/
- The Notorious B.I.G.; “Runnin’” & “Runnin’ (Dying to Live)”
the devil's in the details
What Mena wrote about the Gatsby Summer Afternoon -- "If the event was an eBay seller, it would get a strong A+++++ Would do business with again!" -- goes double for the post itself. More like this, please.
Read news fast with Google Fast Flip
One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!
Today we're adding a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Fast Flip, accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.
To build Google Fast Flip, we partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content. It also tests our theory that being able to read articles faster means people will read more of them, driving more ad revenue to publishers.
The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we're looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.
We've also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so you can browse on the go. This is accessible at the same address.
Go to Google Labs and give Fast Flip a spin. If you have suggestions to make the service better, please let us know. We'll keep working on new ways to improve your news-reading experience. Happy flipping!
Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Researcher, Google News
Befriend a Novice
Around half of all attendees to a YAPC have never attended a YAPC before.
As of today, 7680 people have uploaded a distribution to the CPAN.
Several hundred people -- over a thousand -- have credits in the source code to Perl 5.
In any given yearly period, a few dozen people have contributed more than a single patch to Perl 5, Rakudo, or Parrot.
PerlMonks has a couple of hundred very active users.
It takes months of effort to get a dozen potential students for each year's Google Summer of Code for Perl.
A new edition of the book Programming Perl may sell hundreds of thousands of copies. A new edition of Learning Perl may sell tens of thousands of copies.
A controversial or active Perl blog most may get a dozen comments.
There may be a million people in the world who've wrote more than one line of Perl code for some purpose. Go find a novice, encourage him or her to continue learning Perl, and -- most importantly -- introduce him or her to the community. You don't have to file a bug on rt.perl.org or rt.cpan.org or fix the XS documentation in the Perl 5 core or help bootstrap the Parrot JIT or organize a conference or volunteer to mentor a TPF grant. Yet you'll get much, much more out of Perl if you add your little bit to the wider Perl community.
If we are to improve our community to welcome more participants (and we should do that), we should also actively recruit new participants. Don't wait for them to come to us. Let's go find them and invite them and make them feel welcome that way, too.
Photo of the Day: Happy Peanut
I spotted this happy peanut on the side of a stand at a street fair on Mulberry Street this past Saturday. Something about the peanut seemed so endearing. The wide, excited eyes. The raised, stubby arms with splayed fingers. The little blue cap. The red sash. This peanut is just so freakin' happy to be a peanut. Methinks I need to start putting together a Happy Peanut costume for Halloween.
Related
I Want This: Shin Bob, a Ball of Old Rice
Photo of the Day: Eggplant Man
Photo of the Day: Cupcake vs. Muffin
15 Interrupting Kanye Memes
Because.
Terror Plot You Didn't Hear Of?
You may or may not have seen the reports that FBI agents raided several residences in Queens today as part of counter-terrorism investigation. Authorities say there was no specific plot in progress and, according to the Times, a law enforcement official said they had "only a hazy view of the group, its operations and goals, but decided to act fearing that undercover surveillance had failed to detect plans that might be developing."
There are very few details about just what this is about, other than the suggestive clue that senior members of Congress have been briefed on the investigation. But it's precisely the dearth of information that caught my attention.
Over recent years we've been used to a pretty standard pattern: cable nets get tipped about some major terrorism plot or cell that's been taken down. There's lot of video and background reports from law enforcement officials. And then over days or weeks it becomes clear that it's some sort of Key Stone Cops affair or a hair brain plot to get water to defy the law of physics to climb up Manhattan island to flood it or just some derelicts or borderline personalities who got taken in by some FBI informant. They're not all as comical as the notorious and hilarious Seeds of David cult down in Miami, but the general pattern has been pretty consistent: a lot of media muscle flexing and scary talk with a pretty feeble denouement.
So why is this one so hush-hush? This, frankly, is how you'd expect law enforcement to deal with a real terror being rolled up. Terse general notification and no one really commenting. To be perfectly clear, I know nothing about what this plot is about or who was arrested or what they're accused of doing. But the MO on the part of law enforcement seems very different.
New Yorkers: Tomorrow Your Vote Really Counts!
Once every eight years a New York City resident's vote really, truly matters in a big way. Tomorrow is that day.
Sure, every election matters. But if you live in New York City you've probably been conditioned to believe your vote doesn't mean much. Fund-raising and media appearances aside, presidential campaigns mostly ignore us while the Electoral College ensures that the votes of people who live in places like North Dakota and Wyoming are nearly three times more valuable than our own. Every once in a while we see a contested Congressional race but even the most shockingly useless incumbents are impossible to get rid of. U.S. Senators, these days, are machine-picked like non-organic industrial produce. And in the New York state legislature, incumbents are re-elected more than 90 percent of the time. Assembly Members and State Senators leave office in handcuffs and pine boxes.
So, it would be somewhat understandable if you decided to sit out tomorrow's Democratic Primary. But that would be a mistake!
Thanks to the remnants of New York City's term-limits law, the vagaries of our one-party system, and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau finally relinquishing office after 35 years, tomorrow's election is important and your single, individual vote matters more than usual. Hotly contested, multi-candidate City Council seats will be won with as few as 5,000 or 6,000 votes. That's it. That's all it takes to win the job. Since the general election mostly doesn't matter in the Democrat-controlled Council, the person who is likely to represent you from January 1, 2010 through the end of 2017 will be selected tomorrow by just a few thousand Democratic primary voters. Why not be one of them?
Streetsblog doesn't do formal endorsements but we've received a lot of requests for voter guidance. So, I'd like to share with you the candidates that I'm going to be voting for (or would vote for if I lived in their district). I'd also be curious to hear from the Streetsblog commentariat. Who will you be voting for? And don't forget: If you're looking for the candidates' positions on livable streets issues in general, check out T.A.'s candidate survey.
Manhattan District Attorney
Given the pathetic state of New York City traffic enforcement, this may be the most important vote for Livable Streets activists. New York City's District Attorneys need to do a much better job of preventing reckless driving and holding violators and the NYPD to account for the vehicular death and destruction that's a regular part of New York City street life. On these issues and others, Richard Aborn distinguished himself at last June's Transportation Alternatives debate and his transportation safety plank is most impressive. Aborn's got a real shot to win this one. If I lived in Manhattan, he'd have my vote.New York City Public Advocate
Eric Gioia distinguished himself with the guts and good sense to break with the rest of his Queens delegation and vote in favor of congestion pricing last spring. He's smart and energetic and doesn't come across as a political hack. But I'll never forget the day in the spring of 2002 when my new City Councilman, Bill de Blasio appeared at a 76th Precinct community council meeting holding a letter I had written him about the incessant horn honking and sociopathic motorist behavior on Clinton Street in Cobble Hill. Before I could even raise the issue myself, Bill pressed the Precinct commander to get some cops out there to crack down on the honkers. I'd never written a letter to an elected official before and de Blasio's public advocacy on my behalf of my hyper-local issue was a real God-Bless-America moment for me. Unfortunately, in the intervening years de Blasio has been not-so-hot on big issues important to Streetsblog readers. Alas, I'm still going to vote for him.
New York City Comptroller
From hybrid taxis to support for bike infrastructure to the bikes-in-buildings bill, David Yassky has been Livable Streets advocates' best friend in City Council for years. I think it's great that he opened up New York City budget information via this web site. One unique qualification that you may not have read about (perhaps because it's not the most relevant) is the fact that he's married to Diana Fortuna, former president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a non-partisan watchdog group that monitors the finances and operations of New York City and New York State government. You've got to assume David's picked up some good comptrolling tips over the dinner table. Bottom line: Yassky's up against three hackazoids from the Queens Democratic machine. This one is a no-brainer. Yassky all the way.Brooklyn City Council District 39
This is my district and I'll be voting for Brad Lander tomorrow. I was impressed with the work that Brad's Pratt Center did on pushing bus rapid transit during last year's congestion pricing battle. Unlike the Campaign for New York's Future, Pratt did a great job of countering the elitism argument by bringing middle-class voices into the debate to talk about how transit service is, fundamentally, an economic equity issue. Brad's experience at the Fifth Avenue Committee makes him best qualified to win affordable housing and work with real estate developers to make sure that the public gets more benefit from their projects. Gary Reilly is great on transportation but has too little real-world political accomplishment and experience. Josh Skaller is an outstanding candidate, a great guy and a kick-butt activist. I wish he were running for State Assembly in District 52!
Brooklyn City Council District 33
I worked with Jo Anne Simon on the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project and have been a fan of hers for a long time. Though she's always been great on bike, pedestrian and parking issues, she was too tentative and cautious on congestion pricing, a policy that would have paid tremendous benefits to District 33. Evan Thies, a former Yassky chief-of-staff, played an active role in last year's campaign to pass congestion pricing and improve bus rapid transit as a consultant for Environment Defense and the Pratt Center. I was really impressed by his work and I think he'd be a great representative for the district. I'd vote for Evan. Steve Levin has said some good things about transportation policy but do you really want to give Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez a seat in City Council?Manhattan City Council District 1
It's been a real race-to-the-bottom when it comes to livable streets in Lower Manhattan. Downtown activist Ian Dutton insists that, despite his recent awfulness on the Grand Street bike lane and other issues, Alan Gerson is the least bad choice. With all due respect to Ian, I would never pull the lever for Gerson. PJ Kim seems young and smart enough that he would pay attention to the thousands of livable streets activists who live in his district. It's time for a change in District 1.
Queens City Council District 26
Jimmy Van Bramer seems to be the only candidate voters can count on to do the right thing when it comes to issues like bus rapid transit, bike lanes and -- if it ever comes back -- congestion pricing. Like Yassky, I also think Van Bramer's partner, Dan Hendrick of the League of Conservation Voters is a big personal asset.Brooklyn City Council District 35
Medhanie Estiphanos has great campaign talking points on livable streets issues and has formally endorsed the Kheel Plan for free mass transit. But Estiphanos doesn't have much of a shot to win. That's why if I lived in this district I'd vote for Tish James. She's been bold and energetic in protecting her neighborhoods from inappropriate development and her main opponent, Delia Hunley-Adossa, is a shill for Forest City Ratner, the developer of the ill-conceived Atlantic Yards project. On the big issues, Tish has consistently sided with livable streets advocates, and she’s made some solid Community Board picks.
Queens City Council District 25
Helen Sears is a lackluster incumbent who seems to believe that renegade cyclists are the big problem on the traffic-choked, auto-oriented streets of Jackson Heights. Daniel Dromm showed a real understanding of transportation and urban environmental issues at T.A.'s candidate debate. Word has it, Dromm has a decent shot at beating the incumbent. I'd love to see him win it.
Queens City Council District 20
Evergreen Chou has, far and away, the best name and the best facial hair in this race. And S.J. Jung distinguished himself in the T.A. candidate survey. But John Choe, the favorite, is a smart, sensible guy with a ton of experience in Council. My big concern with Choe is whether he will end up being as politically craven as his former boss, John Liu has been on transportation and environmental issues. I've had good personal interactions with Choe. He's good to deal with. So, I lean in his direction.
Bronx and Upper Manhattan City Council District 8
Of the 30 council members who voted for congestion pricing last April, no one spoke with more personal conviction than East Harlem rep Melissa Mark Viverito. She really gets urban environmental issues in a district that desperately needs leadership on these issues.
Bronx City Council District 16When it came time for a tough vote on congestion pricing, Helen Foster, who represents a section of the traffic-choked, asthma-riddled South Bronx, chose not to show up for work. Word has it Carlos Sierra has a half-decent chance at knocking her off. That's why I'm a member of the Sierra Club.
sfj on atp (planes are the best)
Sasha Frere-Jones' ongoing blog coverage at The New Yorker of the upstate New York indie rock festival All Tomorrow's Parties was the perfect antidote to a weekend filled with VMA madness. I followed along only as a jealous fanboy should; here are a few highlights...
I loved the post about Steve Albini's band Shellac...
“Wingwalker” is either about a woman who entertained people by walking on the wings of biplanes, or about someone who imagines himself to be that wingwalker, or a plane. (The repeated phrase, “I’m a plane,” allows Albini and Weston to imitate planes with their arms stretched out. Symmetry can be fun.) This version of “Wingwalker” included several ad-libbed endorsements of planes: “Planes weigh more than houses and they fucking fly!” Albini yelled. “Planes are the best.”
His photo of the stage setup made me want to buy a kit and start drumming again.
Who wouldn't want a schedule package baked into the form of a View-Master?
Barry asked Kii to incorporate the View-Master into the original art, but it was my idea to have the reels as time cards, and to have the book and envelope program look like a View-Master pack. In a perfect world, we would have provided everyone with their own ATP View-Master and done 3-D shoots with all the bands.
Mmmm, 3-D. And finally, advice from SFJ on how ATP can serve as a model...
ATP isn’t just a model for music festivals—it’s a business model for everybody in the arts. Keep your costs low, spend on what counts, keep major corporations out of it, treat everybody decently, and have the confidence and patience to let these strategies work.
The inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps
People usually think of business competition as occurring between substitutes – products that serve similar functions for the user. Famous substitutes include Coke and Pepsi, and Macs and PCs.
In fact, especially in the technology sector, some of the most brutal competition has occurred between complements. Products are complements when they more valuable because of the existence of one another – e.g. hotdogs and hotdog buns, PCs and operating systems.
There is inherent tension between complements. If a customer is willing to pay $2 for a hotdog plus bun, the hotdog maker wants buns to be cheaper so he can capture more of the $2, or lower the price of the bundle and thereby increase demand. (For a great primer on competition between complements, I highly recommend this Joel Spolsky post. I’ve also been writing about complements, here and here).
Microsoft is famous for destroying companies that offer complementary products, either by bundling complementary apps with Windows (Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger, IE) or aggressively competing head-to-head against the most popular ones (Adobe, Intuit). The surviving 3rd party apps are usually ones that are too small for Microsoft to care about. The best (selfish) economic situation for a platform like Windows is lots of tiny complements that have little pricing power but that make the platform itself more valuable.
One of Google’s main complements is the web browser and desktop operating systems, which is why they built and open sourced the Chrome browser and OS. Google’s other big complement is broadband access – hence their excursions into public Wifi and cellular spectrum.
So what does all of this have to do with Twitter? At some point, significant (non-VC) money will enter the Twitter ecosystem. I have no idea whether this is will be by charging consumers, charging businesses users, search advertising, sponsored tweets, licensing the twitter data feed, data from URL shorteners, or something else. But history suggests that where there is so much user engagement, dollars follow.
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose Twitter’s eventual dominant business model is putting ads by search results. Who gets the revenue when a user is searching on a 3rd party Twitter client? Even if Twitter gets a portion of revenue from ads on 3rd party apps, there will always be an incentive for them to create their own client app, or to “commodotize” the client app by, say, promoting an open source version.
I’m not saying this will happen in the immediate future. First, Twitter and a lot of app makers* have raised a lot of money, so aren’t under (much) pressure yet to generate revenues. Secondly, some of the lucky Twitter apps will get acquired by Twitter. I think this is what many of their investors are hoping for. But those that aren’t so lucky will eventually find their biggest competitor to be Twitter itself, not the substitute product they see themselves as competing against today.
* when I saw Twitter apps, I mean any product, website, or service that eventually makes money and depends on Twitter’s API.
Captive electricity
Dazzling work by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto his film.
See also Peter Miller's Polariod experiments.
Tags: art Hiroshi Sugimoto photography
WAR vs. Win Shares
I have an unhealthy obsession with baseball stats denoted in wins. I think they're cool, and I enjoy the fact that each one is a "theory" of how baseball works. That's why I like having many win-based stats; I think there is something to learn from each one and I'm in no hurry to anoint one particular stat "the best." That would take away the fun. via www.hardballtimes.com And we wouldn't want to take away the fun.
Why Mint.com + Intuit is a Big Idea
Today, exactly two years after launching at TechCrunch40, I’m excited to announce that we have signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Intuit, makers of Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax, for approximately $170 million. It’s a great opportunity that could bring Mint.com’s unique approach to personal financial management to millions more consumers and small businesses as well as the 1,800 banks and credit unions serviced by Intuit.
In two years, we’ve attracted over 1.5 million users, found over $300 million in savings, managed $50 billion in assets, and helped people track nearly $200 billion in purchases. Most importantly, we’ve helped a lot of people better understand and do more with their money. Thousands of people have told us that Mint.com has helped them pay off debt, control their spending, manage job loss, and even resolve money disputes with their significant other. Expect all of this goodness to increase after the acquisition closes. And yes, expect Mint.com to remain free!
This acquisition makes sense to me because, first and foremost, Mint.com and Intuit share a common vision. Intuit is, and has always been, a very customer-centric organization, with constant usability studies and follow-me-homes that observe how people use software and the problems they’re trying to solve. This is fully aligned with my design philosophy here at Mint.com.In addition, by joining Intuit, we can accelerate our ability to add more fantastic new product functionality into both Quicken and Mint.com. This means more people will find it easy and affordable to stay on top of their money issues. Bottom line? I see this as a chance to take a big leap forward toward our ultimate goal of improving the national savings rate.
Personally, I’ll play a leading role in the next phase of the evolution of Quicken, one of the best known, most trusted, and respected brands in software. A recent survey showed that 85% of U.S. adults had heard of Quicken. It’s humbling to work with the people who really pioneered the field of personal finance applications.
Intuit is equally excited. They recognize Mint employees as innovative thought-leaders in the field, who can make a breakthrough contribution to Intuit’s connected services strategy.
We expect the deal will close by the end of the calendar year. We’re looking forward to the opportunity to be part of a larger team with more resources that will continue to deliver the best personal finance tools out there!
Aaron Patzer
Founder and CEOFor Intuit’s take see: http://blog.quicken.intuit.com/announcement/2009/09/14/mint-com-to-join-the-intuit-family/
Monday morning stuffff
Chuck Barris used to announce The Gong Show as just some stuffff.
Of course our stuffff is very serious.
A new Rebooting The News with guest Dan Gillmor. One of our best. Dan drills into just what rssCloud is and realtime. He's one of the best interviewers out there. It was my turn this week to name inspirations, and I chose Young People, as exemplified by Blake Ross, Joe Hewitt, Matt Mullenweg and Joseph Scott. You can skip to the last five minutes of the podcast, it's worth listening to. Usually we choose older folk as inspiration, but we have to remember that youth, in the right hands, is itself inspiring.
I posted a proposed addition to the rssCloud walkthrough.
Typepad announced support for Pubsubhubub. I predict on Twitter that we will bridge it with rssCloud so support of one will get you compatibility with th'other. Earlier I admitted to being a dork and not seeing them as being in competition. After all, they're not commercial products. What I care about is decentralizing the realtime web, so we're not dependent on one company. Both methods accomplish that. The real problem is centralization.
Andy Oram at O'Reilly wrote a stirring ode to decentralization. At one time O'Reilly was a big proponent of P2P. Maybe they will be once again?
Blow the Shofar: It’s Almost Rosh Hashana!
This year Rosh Hashana falls on Sept 19, welcoming in the year 5770 on the Jewish calendar. Apples and honey are often part of the celebration, symbolizing a sweet new year. Why not celebrate by making a fun apple cozy, tasty apple tart, cookies, or crepes, or decorate with some beautiful honeycomb glass or a painted pomegranate? Speaking of apples, check out this incredible 3D art quilt! There are lots of fun and yummy apple crafts and projects around the boards, too! L’shanah tovah!
Show Some Respect, Boy
Kudos to Maureen Dowd for going there. 'There' being some public recognition of what should be inescapable by now: that a lot of the more electric and intemperate reactions to President Obama come from people who cannot or will not accept that a black man is the President of the United States.
I think Dowd was right to see it behind Wednesday night's outburst from Rep. Joe Wilson (R) of South Carolina, a man previously best known as one of the last hold-outs for keeping the confederate flag flying over the Capitol in South Carolina. And you didn't have to wait for the night of the speech though. The day before the speech, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) of Georgia said Obama needed to show some "humility" when he showed up on Capitol Hill Wednesday night. I've heard presidents criticized, pilloried, even villified for lots of things. But I don't think I've ever heard one warned to show some humility.
It's no accident that both comments came from white men from the Deep South in their early to mid-60s. I won't say because I don't think this is all the GOP, just as I don't think that all the opposition to Obama is rooted in atavism and paranoia. But it is a big chunk of it. And it's the 'chunk' that's got the voice at the moment and increasingly seems to be calling the shots.
A month with the 15" MatteBook Pro
After a month of use, I appreciate my new matte-screen MacBook Pro even more.
The battery life is very good. During typical web/email activities at medium screen brightness, it’s easy to get 7-8 hours. I never expected it to be this good, and it has changed the way I use it at home: since I almost never need to use it for more than 2-4 hours at a time, I never worry about running a power cord to wherever I’m sitting. I just use it on battery, then plug it in when I put it back into its stand for the night.
It runs cool. Some parts warm slightly after a while, but no part of it gets noticeably hot unless you’re heavily loading the CPU for a while. Again, I never expected it to run as cool as it does, and this makes longer periods of use much more comfortable than I expected.
It’s fast. And it will be even faster once I put an Intel X25-M SSD in it (whenever prices make sense). This is likely to extend its useful life.
The matte screen was worth every penny and every bit of hassle for the exchange.
The only downside is the weight, which really isn’t bad unless you’re loading up your bag with other heavy things, in which case you’ll want either the Air or no laptop (usually the better option). But I’m not bringing it with me every day anymore since I no longer have a commute during which I can reasonably use it. It mainly exists as a secondary household computer and a travel/mobile workstation, so the weight is far less important than if I were carrying it in a bag every day with a heavy camera.
The lineup is clearly defined for me now, and I’m confident that I made the right choice:
- MacBook Air: Ultimate for portability. Limited capabilities, performance, and screen resolution. Acceptable plastic-glossy screen. The SSD option is a must since the 1.8” hard drive is so slow.
- Plastic MacBook: Most economical. Good portability. Mediocre build quality that ages poorly. Great capabilities, good performance, limited resolution. Acceptable plastic-glossy screen.
- 13” MacBook Pro: Good portability. Great capabilities, good performance, limited resolution. Awful glass screen.
- 15” MacBook Pro: Moderate portability. Great capabilities, great performance, good resolution. Great matte-screen option.
- 17” MacBook Pro: Poor portability. Great capabilities, great performance, excellent resolution. Great matte-screen option.
Some glass-screen owners say it doesn’t bother them. They’re fortunate: they have the most options. But many weakly accept the glass with excuses like “It’s not too bad” or “I’ve gotten used to it.”
I prefer to buy products that don’t need me to make excuses for them. “Not bad” isn’t enough. I want good. I don’t want to tolerate my computers — I want to be delighted with them, like I am with my Mac Pro.
So, until (and unless) there’s a matte-screen option on the 13” MacBook, I see two major contenders in the lineup: the Air with SSD for ultraportability, and the 15” with matte for most other priorities. Given my priorities, I’m extremely satisfied with the choice I made, and using it is a delight.
In fact, this is the happiest I’ve been with a laptop since my first one, the 15” PowerBook G4 that introduced me to the Mac in 2004. Both times I’ve chosen the 15” form factor, I’ve been happiest with my choice. Hopefully I’ll remember this myself before I have another three-year affair with the 13” lineup full of performance and screen-size frustrations.
Former Domino Editor Launches Online-Only Design Magazine, Lonny
Remember when those dark days of winter became a little more dark when Condé Nast announced that they were folding Domino back in late January? We do. Heck, we even ran a contest featuring reader's fondest memories about the now-absent home magazine. But perhaps this fall, that feeling of warmth and possibility might return to all of our now-frigid hearts (are we being too dramatic here?) with an announcement a reader just send our way:
Michelle Adams, who served as market editor of the now defunct Domino magazine, is launching Lonny Magazine, an online decorating and lifestyle publication. Photographer Patrick Cline will also help lead the magazine. The magazine will publish on a bimonthly basis in a traditional print magazine format on its Web site. It is expected to launch in October.Anxious to see it. We're not so sure about its lifespan should it stay in that current PDF-style format, as a lack of linkable content might prove to be something of a blunder for the project (same goes for any web-based project that's built in a similar way), but we'll certainly wait to see what comes of it before we pass any judgment. Our fingers are certainly crossed that it rekindles some of that Domino greatness.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Mussels
Photo by Donna
I prepared a special meal for dear friends on Saturday, one of those meals that takes the better part of the day to set up. It's been a long time since I spent all day in the kitchen. Trip to the farmer's market in the morning, store all the food and shuck the corn (boil and eat half a dozen ears for breakfast, no better late summer breakfast,heaven), then start checking off the list—shuck, boil, shock, peel the lima beans, cook off the clams and strain the stock, make the corn sauce, cook off the bacon, etc. Kitchen work broken only by the forty minutes to drive my daughter to her friend's to get ready for the homecoming dance that night. Gorgeous late summer day. Long, meditative, solitary work in the kitchen, a real pleasure.
But of all the courses and the elaborate sauce work that went into the meal, the best part of it was the course that took the least amount of work—from start to finish, the course that was the most fun to eat took all of five minutes prepare, cook and serve, and underscores the supremacy of product over craft and the fact that the most important part of cooking is the shopping.
My dear friend Peter had requested lobster. Then he said, how about clams? And I said, How about braised pork belly, and Peter said, "Oooooo, that sounds good." Pork belly and shellfish would be an awesome combination. So I called my friend Ingrid who lives in Stonington, Maine, and gets the VERY best shellfish in America. Costs an arm and a leg due to shipping but we wanted the very best.
When the box arrived I found a surprise. Ingrid had miscounted her mussels orders and found she had an extra sack, which she'd thrown in with my clams and lobsters. Hers are little baby mussels which she refers to as bouchots, after the French method of growing them on ropes attached to poles. They're about two inches long and their shells are so clean they require no debearding. Best of all though is their flavor—they taste of the sea, like that fresh sea air, but above above all, they're sweet. So sweet.
That's why it's best to do as little as possible to them. They're a gift, don't get in their way, don't put them in a fancy party dress. This method works for any good mussel and the way I recommend preparing them:
Mince a shallot and put them in the bottom of a big cast iron enamel pot with a cup of white wine, a cup of light chicken stock (fresh, otherwise water or nothing), a handful of thyme and half a stick of butter. Add the mussels, cover and put over high heat. Just when the pot steams, they're ready. Serve them in big bowls with plenty of the cooking liquor and warm crusty baguette. If possible serve them outside on a late summer Saturday evening when the sun is low and golden and you are with your best friends.
The morning's fresh corn, boiled for 60 seconds, the mussels finished if a few minutes, a reminder that the best food on earth requires the least amount of effort.
Janet Jackson “Make Me”
While the ‘09 VMA’s will likely be most remembered for being the show where Kanye totally did poor, sweet Taylor Swift wrong (two wagging fingers of shame directed at you, Mr. West; standing ovation and rapturous applause to you Beyonce for being a Grade-A class act!), let us not forget the other interesting-to-great moments produced by this year’s “M”TV Awards: Lady Gaga’s “death” (and her continuing climb up Mt. “WTF”); Pink managing to make a dull song like “Sober” so much more interesting thanks to a really cool (and quite uncomfortable-to-watch) high-wire act; a teary-eyed Eminem and tone-deaf Tracy Morgan reminding us once again that Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” is one of the best pop songs ever; Madonna’s surprise appearance and her touching, though somewhat awkardly Madonna-centric, tribute to the King of Pop; Asher Roth NOT winning the Best Hip Hop Video Moonman (we can’t stress how important that is)…and of course, Janet Jackson’s opening live performance of her and her bro’s “Scream”.
Perhaps like most of you, while watching JJ strut her (once again slimmed down) stuff to the aggressive dance-pop of that 1995 semi-hit, we were reminded of how much we really longed for Janet to give us something new and exciting…something that hearkened back to her reigning Control-thru-“All For You” heyday…something unlike the passable, but oh-so-far from “WOW!!!”, stuff heard on her most recent albums.
Imagine our excitement to receive something close to that…erm, “something” in “Make Me”, a “gift” she very recently posted on her website. And oh what a great present it is!!
A disco-licious R&B workout in which she coerces some guy to get up off the wall and help “save the party” by lighting up the dancefloor (and her nether-regions) with his electric moves, “Make Me” gives us everything we could possibly want from a Janet record in 2009: It’s sexy, but not pathetic-sexy (as she’s been prone to deliver for quite some time now); features her disregarding that annoying, edge-of-orgasm talk-rap thing she likes to do for some actual singing; and, most importantly, bears this buoyant, roller skate jam of a groove we can’t get enough of.
Could we FINALLY be getting the real Janet “comeback” album we’ve anticipated for what seems like forever now? From the sounds of this, maybe so…
Mint gets eaten by the Borg
Intuit is buying Mint.com for a whopping $170 million. That's a lot of money for a company which has yet to make a dollar in profit — indeed, it found itself in need of an extra $14 million in equity capital only last month.
So what makes Mint worth so much? The website basically has two main possible revenue sources. The first is the way it's making money right now (or getting revenues, anyway): armed with its users' financial information, it can act as a broker, introducing them to offers from financial-services companies which might be a good deal. And like any broker, it gets to keep a commission.
There's also what Mike Arrington calls “a goldmine of user data” — incredibly granular information on the saving, spending and borrowing habits of 1.4 million registered users who between them account for $175 billion in transactions, and $47 billion in assets. If that information is added to the information which Intuit already holds, it could provide unprecedented insight into how Americans deal with money.
The problem is that while Mint is generally much-loved, Intuit is generally much-hated. Mint is free; Intuit is constantly trying to squeeze every marginal dollar out of its customers. Mint's user experience is a joy; Intuit's is gruesomely bad. (And is possibly responsible for the whole nightmare that was Tim Geithner's tax situation.) Mint is trusted; Intuit isn't.
The fear is that Intuit will stop showing Mint's customers the offers which are best for them, and will start showing Mint's customers the offers that are best for Intuit, even if those offers are predatory or otherwise unsuitable. And as for the money which Intuit might squeeze out of those users' personal financial data — again, while I trusted Mint not to do anything evil, I don't have the same feelings about Intuit.
I do have a Mint account, but I don't use it very much, and it's a bit glitchy. I think I'll probably deactivate it now. Better safe than sorry.
MTV Video Music Awards Tweet Tracker Visualization
As it was previously announced from Reuters to the interwebs, the VMA Tweet Tracker [mtv.com] is a real-time graph of Twitter activity that highlights the social news surrounding the Video Music awards by aggregating the most popular terms being tweeted around this event.Developed by Stamen Design and social media monitoring company Radian6, circular bubbles with celebrity head shots grow and shrink in real time according to the number of according tweets, while an interactive timeline at the bottom of the screen provides a way to browse back and forth through different points in time.
Seems the short Kayne West outburst was good to overshadow the whole event, Twitter wise?
September 13, 2009
Rickman Sessions
Earlier this year, a friend of mine turned me on to QI, a quiz show that asks a celebrity panel obscure trivia questions, then rewards the panelists for either guessing correctly or for coming up with the most interesting answer, regardless of whether it's right or not. It's an absolutely brilliant show that basically gives you a chance to listen in while witty people sit around and chat.
I'm sure I'll post more excerpts of QI soon, but this 2-min clip about British villains in Hollywood movies is priceless. Emma Thompson is among the guests, but it's John Sessions (formerly of Whose Line Is It Anyway?) who really steals the show with his fantastic impression of Alan Rickman.
Stamen and Radian 6's MTV VMA visualization of Twitter activity
as I watched, the Kanye bubble exploded because of this debacle [via]
Technology is occasionally wonderful
Just ran home about to head out to another event (very busy Sunday!). Can't find my phone. Did I leave it at the previous event or did I lose it somewhere in my car? Enter MobileMe.
Short answer: it's somewhere around here, nothing to worry about. Time to even blog about it. Amazing.
In the Classroom, Old is Good
Examiner column for September 16.
A new semester at George Mason University is full of hope. Students may be turning over a new leaf or embarking on a new living arrangement or a new major. Anything is possible.
As predictable as the sense of infinite possibilities, though, is the anxiety of returning students. Some have been away from school only a semester or two, but some return after a decade or two. Those mature students have never achieved their degrees for a range of reasons: they were in the military, raising families, or working long hours.
Returning students think of themselves as “old,” not “returning,” but their experiences enrich every college setting. Not all the 20-year-olds want to be in the classroom, but every single returning student I’ve taught has been grateful for the opportunity to lose sleep reading and writing for my class.
They are more relaxed in their interactions with other students—invaluable when the class is a writing workshop. In their peer review groups, returning students know how to give constructive criticism because they’ve done that with co-workers and family members. Unlike many younger students--intimidated by having to give criticism--the older students realize that “criticism” isn’t always negative, and is essential to the revision process.
Imagine what marriage or parenting would be like if we hesitated to congratulate family members on their strengths, and suggest ways to shore up weaknesses? Those life lessons are what make older students the backbone of any writing class. In many way the most unhelpful and lazy comments are those that say “everything’s fine.”
Additionally, older students are not as afraid to raise their hands as younger students. I plead guilty to not speaking out when I was in college. I always felt my insights might be obvious, or—worse yet—stupid. I was secretly jealous of those who never doubted their own opinions, and their right to express them. At some point, my favorite English professor wrote on a paper, “You need to speak up more in class. You have lots to say.” That was a turning point for me.
Experience isn’t just salutary on the student side of the podium. In teaching, older is often better. I heard from many students at Oakton High School that they appreciated that I wasn’t “uptight. Young teachers are slaves to their class rules!” they’d complain. I think I occasionally “bent” the rules with impunity because my experience told me that no administrator would chastise a teacher whom they knew was successful with both students and parents.
Yet I would never have had the opportunity to bend rules or teach Senior Seminar if my Ph.D. in literature and experience teaching college part-time and full-time had not led the state to waive requirements for education credits. “Alternative certification” is as effective as traditional methods of certification, according to a recent study by the National Center for Policy Analysis. Without that waiver, I would not have spent 23 years in the high school classroom.
So if family members hesitate to return to college, or contemplate a career move to teaching, encourage them to turn over a new leaf. Make their dreams part of a movement to welcome age and wisdom into the classroom.
Kymera’s Magic Wand is a universal remote
Kymera’s Magic Wand is a universal remote.
The Magic Wand is a a buttonless remote control that can learn up to 13 infrared (IR) codes from existing remote controls and replay those codes when the user makes one of 13 predefined movement “gestures.”
Alright Harry Potter fans, admit it, this is pretty damn cool. Who doesn’t want to turn their volume up by making circular motions with the wand, or switch between two channels by snapping the wand at the TV? Sign me up.
(Obviously this begs to be hidden when you have guests over.)
The City of Dreaming Books.
I had two articles posted on Friday, one on the Brewers’ immediate future another on Mat Gamel, Alcides Escobar, and Colby Rasmus. I have also filed a blog entry on Wade Davis that isn’t up yet.
Walter Moers’ The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear was one of my favorite books of 2008 (books I read last year, that is, not books published last year), and his follow-up, The City of Dreaming Books
, looked like it was more of the same, with a setting of particular interest to me, literature.
It is, like Bluebear, wildly imaginative, full of wordplay (including fictional author names like Asdrel Chickens) and incredibly sharp characters and settings. Moers has a gift for making the insane seem normal and for precise descriptions of places that evoke clear images in the reader’s mind, and, as in Bluebear, Moers has his main character, Optimus Yarnspinner, go through a series of vaguely ridiculous character-building adventures, although Yarnspinner does less to help his own cause than Bluebear did.
The problem with City is that the action plot isn’t well connected to the character-development plot. Yarnspinner spends 2/3 of the book in the catacombs under Bookholm and, while there’s plenty of action down there, the emphasis is on his development as a storyteller – both the effects his experiences have on his thinking and his ability to actually craft a story. There’s an obvious revenge plot at work, with Yarnspinner and one other prisoner looking for escape and vengeance on their captors, that portion of the plot is set aside for hundreds of pages. Moers brings it back when Yarnspinner and his comrade make their final escape attempt at the end of the book, and the resolution was quick, obvious, and cursory. I’m not arguing with the general plot, but with the lack of integration between that thread and Yarnspinner’s time in the catacombs. City is still a great read, but more for its cleverness and humor than for the action-oriented portion of the plot, and Bluebear was more imaginative and funnier.
Next up: The reissue of Leo Durocher’s classic memoir, Nice Guys Finish Last
, due out on Tuesday.
Writing kernel modules in Haskell
There must be a crowd of people out there thinking that they would get into kernel development, but only if they could do it in Haskell. Here is a web site with instructions on how to do just that. "By making GHC and the Linux build system meet in the middle we can have modules that are type safe and garbage collected. Using the copy of GHC modified for the House operating system as a base, it turns out to be relatively simple to make the modifications necessary to generate object files for the Kernel environment." This leads to code which looks like:
hello = newCString "hello" >>= printk >> return 0Just don't try to merge it upstream.
Spin
Kristine Virsis Spin $16 Portrait of a woman spinning yarn. 2 color silkscreen print 18"x24" on translucent fiber paper signed/unlimited edition
![This former diver-turned-actor has proved to bald men everywhere that it if you are losing hair, there is still hope](="http://stylecrave.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/statham1.jpg"){kind=link}
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