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One evening in August, Kyle Turley was at a bar in Nashville with his wife and some friends. It was one of the countless little places in the city that play live music. He’d ordered a beer, but was just sipping it, because he was driving home. He . . .
Malcolm Gladwell on football injuries.
Pete Yahnke Home Is Where The Cart Is $65 view larger image here This print is inspired by some of the folks at Dignity Village here in Portland and the many folks that survive living in Forest Park or in the nooks and crannies of Portland. I have seen many amazing bike carts used to carry everything from scrap metal to full size couches. I've even seen a few carts that people pull around and then sleep in at night. When I got a tour of Dignity Village last year out tour guide was extremely proud of the bike cart he built and used as his main hauling device for all his living needs at Dignity. This image celebrates these folks. 5-color screen print from original linoleum block print printed on light blue recycled acid-free paper 25" x 39" signed edition of 75
Written by Gimundo
Ever heard of Stanislav Petrov?
Probably not—but you may very well owe him your life.
Petrov, a former member of the Soviet military, didn’t actually do anything but that’s precisely the point.
In 1983, Petrov held a very important station: As lieutenant colonel, he was in charge of monitoring the Soviet Union’s satellites over the United States, and watching for any sign of unauthorized military action.
This was the Cold War era, and suspicions were high; on September 1, the Soviet Union had mistakenly shot down a Korean aircraft it had believed to be a military plane, killing 269 civilians, including an American Congressman. The Soviet Union believed that the United States might launch a missile attack at any moment, and that they would be forced to respond with their own arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Several weeks after the airplane disaster, on September 23, another officer called in sick, so Petrov was stuck working a double shift at a secret bunker, monitoring satellite activity, when “suddenly the screen in front of me turned bright red,” Petrov told BBC News. “An alarm went off. It was piercing, loud enough to raise a dead man from his grave.”
According to the system, the United States had launched five missiles, which were rapidly heading into Soviet territory. The U.S.S.R. was under attack.
All Petrov had to do was push the flashing red button on the desk in front of him, and the Soviets would retaliate with their own battery of missiles, launching a full-scale nuclear war.
“For fifteen seconds, we were in a state of shock,” he told The Washington Post. “We needed to understand, what’s next?”
Though the bunker atmosphere was chaotic, Petrov, who had trained as a scientist, took the time to analyze the data carefully before making his decision. He realized that, if the U.S. did attack, they would be unlikely to launch a mere five missiles at once. And when he studied the system’s ground-based radar, he could see no evidence of oncoming missiles.
He still couldn’t say for sure what was going on, but “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” he told The Post. “I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.”
Luckily for all of us, he decided not to push that button. Later, his instincts were proven right—the malfunctioning system had given him a false alarm, and the U.S. had not deployed any missiles. Thanks to Petrov’s cool head, nuclear war had been narrowly averted, and millions of lives were saved.
Unfortunately, Petrov didn’t exactly receive a heroic reward from the Soviet military: Embarrassed by their own mistakes, and angry at Petrov for breaking military protocol, they forced him into early retirement with a pension of $200 a month. Petrov’s brave act was kept secret from the outside world until the 1998 publication of a book by one of Petrov’s fellow officers, who witnessed his courage on that terrifying night.
Since the book’s publication, Petrov has been honored by the United Nations and presented with a World Citizen Award, and there has been talk of giving him the Nobel Prize. Still, the humble Russian scientist plays down his role in averting a nuclear crisis: “I was simply the right person in the right time, that was all,” he said in the upcoming documentary, The Red Button and the Man Who Saved the World.
We’ve got to disagree with him. Sure, he may have done nothing but in this case, it might just be the hardest thing to do.
By Kathryn Hawkins for Gimundo, the site for good news, served daily.
From our archives:This is the post that made me discover Gawker, it came up when I was searching for photos of the Conde Nast cafeteria to send to someone I’d invited to lunch.
An old classic from a completely different era, March 24, 2003:
I pressed on, making my way to the next obstacle: Conde Nast security. I easily talked them into giving me a “guest pass,” by ingeniously having them call someone I knew “on the inside,” having pre-arranged for the insider to demonstrate a flicker of recognition when my name was mentioned. I eluded their suspicions even further by loudly complaining that “that pathetic Remnick” wouldn’t stop calling and begging me to write for his silly little publication. I don’t know if anyone by the name of Remnick works for Conde Nast, but my little ruse seems to have worked, thereby demonstrating the first rule of journalism: when in doubt, make shit up.
I was handed a guest pass in universally tasteful shades of black and gray with a little circular white sticker affixed to the lower half. The floor number was clearly marked on the circle, but I can’t reveal which one, as I have agreed to protect my source. (Twenty four hours later, I will realize that the little white circle has developed a bright pink grid of some sort. One of those newfangled timed-release stickers. How cunning! But also flawed; I take some small comfort in knowing that had I not come out alive, The Authorities would have been able to pinpoint the exact time of my death by the pinkness of my sticker.)I’ll admit it—that was a fun post to do. To this day, no one asks me to lunch at the Conde cafeteria without making a jokey reference to it—followed by, “you’re not going to blog lunch, are you?” (Me: “Is someone paying me to?”)
It’s tough being a Ken Griffey Jr. collector. If you really want to make your collection one of a kind, you have to spend hours of your life on eBay fighting off other rabid fans for a unique item. It’s not at all uncommon to see a 90’s insert featuring “The Kid” sell for a thousand dollars.
Luckily, his 1989 releases have all come back down to Earth in the last decade or so thanks to the “junk wax” label given to most of those brands, even Upper Deck. You can actually find raw copies of Griffey Jr.’s Upper Deck, Topps, Donruss, and Fleer rookie cards for a few of dollars a piece at most.
Just try to find a few of Albert Pujols’ 2001 releases for under $500 a piece. It’s impossible thanks to certified autographs, serial numbered parallels, and other new innovations that came to be after Griffey Jr. played in his first game with Seattle.
The card you see below comes from 1989 Franklin Caramel. While there are no print runs or even basic information on the set available through Sports Collectors Digest’s 2009 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, copies have sold for under $10 dollars on eBay.
In case you think all we baseball collectors see is retro-themed products, this 1989 release was modeled after 1910’s E93 Standard Caramel cards. Other players in the set include Jim Abbott, Mickey Mantle, Rickey Henderson, Willie Mays, and Don Mattingly to name a few.
Everything old is new again . . .
What do i do when i want to find a new cool underground band that would appeal to my emotional side? Easy. I draw a scatterplot.Now let's see. I take a sample of 215 bands including those on top of the Billboard 200 (who are these people?) and calculate an average number of plays per each listener (via last.fm data). All things equal, the higher the average, the the more devoted the band's fans are. Like this:Then i draw a scatterplot basted on the whole set of data:Each red dot is a band. Y-axis represents the total number of the band's listeners, the x-axis represents the average number of listens per each band's fan, the blue line is the "alien average". The swarm in the left bottom corner is the "moshpit of doom" - your band is nothing special in the public's eyes if you are there.Assuming music is able to arouse certain emotional states in humans, RADIOBUTT thinks that we can justly hypothesize as follows. If a band has a huge amount of listeners then it probably appeals to some common human emotion and everybody can enjoy their songs. If a band has little listeners, but plays per listener (PPL) rate is high, it must mean the band was able to appeal to some sort of less common emotion and the higher the PPL the harder it is to substitute the band by some other band. Let's look at a couple of examples:According to last.fm-ers, Coldplay digs their "common emotional" best, with Radiohead, Arcade Fire, The Killers, Nirvana (44), Muse and The Beatles not far behind. On the other end of the scattergraph are Porcupine Tree, Beirut, Brand New and Paramore (!?). They appeal to their respective subcultures in the way no one else can. Barbara Streisand is in the very bottom left corner which is a statistically significant proof that she must be an alien who does not get human emotions. Unlike aliens, humans like to categorize stuff, so let's break our graph into quadrants:Black Hole Corner: the existence of a completely substitutable yet extremely popular band is highly unlikely. This might be the end of music industry/human race in case one eventually appears.One-Hit Wonder Quadrant: last.fm-ers do not respect these band's albums but find a few songs digestible. The Verve ("Sonnet" case) and Black Eyed Peas (... ... ...) are the prominent inhabitants of this quadrant.Moshpit of Doom: nobody cares about these people. Every band starts in this corner, but very little number of them will be able to leave it. Memory Tapes, Nurses, Fuck Buttons still have a chance to get away. Barbara, Whitney Houston and probably Foreign Born (PPL=9) are there forever.Quality Common Band Quadrant: these bands can tap into our mass unconscious, they are too prolific to stay underground. Many people are pretending they don't like these bands in accordance to the "bands-you-like-are-the-bands-i-used-to-like" principle. Coldplay, The Killers, U2, and, apparently, Portishead are all there.Average Quadrant: these people are neither here nor there. It's as if their music is so ambiguous general public cannot make their minds up. Placebo, Bjork, Modest Mouse, The Smiths.Common Hip Quadrant: music of the people who consider themselves cool without realizing there are too many of them to be all cool simultaneously. A sweet place for indie labels to tap into. Mew, WHY?, Beirut, Elliott Smith, Bright Eyes, Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective.Sweet Corner: the residence of a few bands with an enormous staying power. They've always been there and they always will. Every band wants to be in this corner and every major label wants to f**k them with a 360 deal. Radiohead, The Beatles.Old Folk's Corner: bands drift into this quadrant on the wave of their mediocre fame from the Average Quadrant. Nobody's supposed to be here in a perfect world. Metallica.Real Hip Corner: you can never know whether you'll like a band from this corner. These bands build a very special relationship with their fans, employing subliminal messages, infrasound and Freudian psychoanalysis.There's still one question that begs to be answered: Where does an individual belong in this quantified universe? To illustrate a point, i plotted my musical preferences over the previous scattergraph. RADIOBUTT calls it the "alien test":There is an easily observable shift of the average "alien slope" down, toward the more hip bands. This means i like bands that don't get common people's emotions rather than otherwise. If your musical preferences drag the 'alien slope's" right end much below the Real Hip Corner, it must indicate your extraterrestrial origin; if the left end gets around or above the One-Hit Wonder Corner - you're an emotional namby-pamby of exceptional mediocrity.So, finding a new cool underground band that would appeal to your emotional side is as simple as one-two-three: collect a huge sample of all available to you bands, make a scatterplot, pick a quadrant that represents your musical preferences and enjoy. And of course, there are many more things you can do with statistics in the world of music. Which means RADIOBUTT is Getting Gay With Statistics might be back.---* Disclaimer: RADIOBUTT is Getting Gay With Statistics is completely gay and should not be taken too seriously unless you want to.
This Sunday (tomorrow) the Twins are hosting the Yankees in game 3 of the ALDS. Will this be the last Twins game at the Metrodome? Possibly. Check out ScoreboardGourmet's Twins/Metrodome coverage so you know what you're getting into for this moment. Think this series will return to NYC? Maybe when pigs fly. Ha. That's a sign from Jimmy John's, Minneapolis sandwich shop. I'm clever this morning, in between being irate (hate hate hate Verizon).
Following the evolution of technical objects over time generally reveals interesting matter. Philosophers such as Gilbert Simondon theorized a bit this issue and proposed that technical evolution shows phases of continuous progress (based on adaptation) alternating with other phases that he called “saturation” during which major improvement emerge as a reconfiguration of the structure (invention).
Applying this to recent artifacts such as game console is quite interesting (yes game console are recent compared to the kind of technical objects philosophers take as examples). The Nintendo DS as a resurgence of the “game and watch” industrial design is a curious instance of such principles. The dual screen, as well as the clam-shell platform (plus the A and B buttons) can be seen as the major characteristics of this resurgence. However, the D-pad is clearly an invention that appeared after the game and watch interface. There would - of course - be a lot more to analyze here.
Why do I blog this? digging more and more into the philosophy of technical objects in conjunction with frequent visits to the flea market leads to fruitful thinking/discussions about design.
Thanks to Bernadette for sending me this Pop Matters article, written for the 16th anniversary of River Phoenix's death. I can't relate to all of it - her love-hate relationship with him as an actor was all love-love for me - but it has some lovely bits to it. Here's an excerpt:
I finally understood what made River Phoenix special. He had the singular ability to portray real, honest emotion in all its vast ugliness. His nose ran; his body twitched; his voice cracked and stuttered. At times, he was barely audible. But with a choppy, sotto voce delivery, he gave audiences an unpleasant, unsatisfying, cathartic release by revealing all the pain and fear and frustration that they fought so hard to hide.
As in Stand by Me, Phoenix’s shining moment in My Own Private Idaho occurred in the form of a fireside confession. That confession is additionally notable as Phoenix himself wrote it.
His performance wasn’t perfect—he still couldn’t play happy convincingly, and some of his choices were inexplicable—but he had something, an instinct, an ability to make himself transparent. He wasn’t just vulnerable; he was laid bare. As Peter Weir said, “Laurence Olivier never had what River had.” He wasn’t just some teen heartthrob; he was one of the few artists to come out of the 80s who not only had the chance to survive the decade but to transcend it.
The little oil light was guttering, and her glass held a sliver of ice and a maraschino cherry stem. She'd been sitting there so long I'd heard the man at the piano play "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" three times; he didn't really have that big a repertoire. The waiter had been waved off so many times that he had given up coming by at all.
I don't know what she was looking at, but when he sat down it startled her. I felt her jerk in the chair.
"Been here long?" he asked. It could have sounded mean, but he didn't sound mean.
"A while." She smiled at him, out of habit. The next word was almost forced out of her mouth. "Billy?"
"You know you shouldn't expect a man with a boy's name to be responsible," he said. "There was a man in from out of town, and something about a poker game."
I felt her shoulders sag, slightly. It wasn't enough to see, just to feel.
"I'd say he sent his apologies, but you'd know I was lying." He made a little half-grimace, half-shrug.
She squared her glass on the bar napkin. "Thanks for coming by," she said. She reached for her black satin clutch from the seat next to her.
"Hey," he said, a little too quickly. "It's still early." He looked around the nearly empty lounge. There was one couple dancing. The piano player looked bored.
She didn't say anything.
"One dance," he said.
"I should really ..." Something in his face stopped her, I think. He looked like a man it would be difficult to be rude to. "Sure. One dance."
I didn't know the song, but this late, it didn't really matter. They moved out to the floor, where the other couple had given up the pretense of steps and were just in a shuffling embrace.
They danced well together. Not in a showy, cruise-ship way, but a comfortable way. They fit. His arm tightened around her waist.
"Neal," she said. She stiffened.
"One of these dances," he said. "Or maybe on one of those picnics you have with you and two plates and the ants. Or on New Year's Eve, when you're standing alone when the ball drops. Right? Someday?"
"I can't say someday." She exhaled. It was almost a sigh.
"I can say someday. I can say today. I can say always."
For a minute there, I thought that she would relax, move closer to him. I thought I could feel her considering it, holding her breath, her arm across his shoulder and her hand against the nape of his neck, just laying there; it felt like there was something electric, like the hum of an engine.
"Who's this making time with my girl?" There was a too-loud voice, and too much aftershave, and then she was spun around. Neal was standing by himself, and she was held tight by other arms.
"Just keeping her entertained." His voice was almost light.
"Next time, little brother, try card tricks," Billy said. "Howzabout a drink?" His breath smelled as if he'd had a few already.
"I think I'll call it a night," Neal said, but he didn't move away from the dance floor right away, but stood looking as Billy steered her back to her chair. Two drinks were waiting on the table.
She let Billy pull out her chair, and she sat down in it, but she didn't look at his face. I think she was watching Neal walk out the door.
The best part of Vanity Fair has always been the Proust Questionnaire, which poses roughly the same set of questions each month to a different celebrity. In honor of a new book compiling the questionnaires, Vanity Fair is letting you fill out your own PQ and will tell you the celebrities with whom you match most closely. (Be forewarned - they don't actually show you your match's answers.) So I took it, eagerly awaiting my results. Might I be close to Emma Thompson, Catherine Deneuve, Ted Kennedy or some other brilliant luminary?
No. No, I'm not. My answers matched with Joan Collins (97.8%!) and Yoko Ono (86.62%).
Damn.
Try your luck here.
What are elected Republicans saying about Obama's Nobel, with a few exceptions, pretty much nothing. Reporters inboxes are crying out for attention across Washington.
One of the more vexing conundrums with which we’ve been faced in the evolution of this site is what to do with the final Friday post. Barring some earthshattering news event which compels one or the other of us to race to our laptops, whatever we stick up here late at the end of the week will remain atop the page until we return on Monday morning. But what should it be? A review of the week’s most interesting posts? Boring, plus you loyal readers have already sifted through them. A collection of amusing videos which we might not otherwise mention? There are no videos we might not otherwise mention, particularly me, because I am somehow both lazy and committed to a fairly regular schedule of new material. An open-ended question meant to provoke discussion and thereby allow space for a conversation that can continue throughout Saturday and Sunday? It’s not an idea of which I’m overly fond, and, besides, it’s the kind of gimmickry I’d just as soon not resort to. We all hate those posts that end with a question blatantly aimed at prompting reader response. It feels cheap. Anyway, what would you all suggest? Alternately, what are you doing this weekend?
Life has a list of 30 dumb inventions, including the Hubbard Electrometer (invented by L Ron Hubbard to measure pain in tomatoes), the fast-draw robot, TV glasses, and the rainy day cigarette holder.
Tags: lists
"What you want in your stomach, a girl or a boy?"
- Plies, Headboard
In case you're wondering, this is the wrong way to discuss having a child. I can't even believe he says in your stomach — It's a baby. Not a pizza.
Filed under: Worst potential father / Not romantic
The downward spiral of the space formerly known as Buddha Bar continues, with news leaking today that the owners are being sued by their attorneys over unpaid legal bills. It seems that Little Rest Twelve (the group operating what is now Ajna Bar) still owes the firm of Baker & Hostetler over $300,000 for 2 months of work in their in their trademark case against Buddha Bar Worldwide.
Little Rest Twelve was shocked by the cost of Baker & Hostetler's work and hired another firm, Fish & Richardson, on a fixed fee. Too bad Little Rest didn't pay them either, and owe the second firm over $100,000. Despite all of these legal bills, Little Rest lost the case against the parent company and had to change the name anyway, making the opening of BB NYC one of the biggest busts in New York restaurant history.
· Baker Firm Sues High-Profile Bar Over Unpaid Legal Bills [NYLJ] (subscription req'd)
· Baker Hostetler LLP vs Little Rest Twelve [PDF]
· Buddha Bar Coverage [~ENY~]
Via Timothy Buckwalter comes Jerry Saltz at nymag.com on the Obamas' White House art, and the reaction from art world types.
And just as inevitably, art insiders were disappointed in the choices. ... The esteemed if reliably irascible Artnet critic Charlie Finch...wrapped it up by calling the Obamas "as right wing as Bush in the art department." Washington Post critic Blake Gopnik sneered that some of the taste on view was "mild". ... Are these people kidding? Do they really think the Obamas should have hung (let's say) a Kara Walker paper silhouette of a slave girl performing fellatio on a slaver who excretes a pickaninny? Do they remember that only a year ago George W. Bush was decorating his office with generic cowboy paintings — plus Saddam Hussein's pistol? In nine months we've gone from generic Western landscapes and photo- realist images of cacti to a painting by one of the most prickly contemporary artists around.Emphasis mine. Worth reading the whole thing, esp. his take on the Obamas hanging Ed Ruscha's I Think I'll... ("what it conveys perfectly is not waffling, but thinking").
Via Al Shaw at hello, motion comes this photo from Arnold Schwarzenegger's twitter stream.
"This is how I start my day," he tweets. Fantastic.
Hugger Industries posted a photo:
The posting screen of TypePad Motion
They said it couldn't happen. They said Shea Stadium was gone for good.
But Shea Stadium has returned. This time it's in Bushwick, Brooklyn. And instead of baseball, it's all about the music, baby.
According to an article in BushwickBK.com DIY music studio named Shea Stadium opened last spring to help cut young bands a break.
"Named after the former home of New York's major league underdogs, a new all-ages music venue in East Williamsburg provides a unique service for Brooklyn's young, start-up bands. Instead of receiving pay, all bands that play shows at Shea score a professionally mixed live recording of their set.
With its graffiti-tagged white brick walls, stage constructed of cheap lumber, semi-busted toilet, and exposed pipes running across its not-quite low ceilings, Shea Stadium has all the attributes of a Brooklyn DIY venue. And, in keeping with the scene's values -- and the club's namesake -- aesthetics fall a far second to what's actually being accomplished in the space. In addition to helping young bands dodge the prohibitive cost of booking studio time, Reich and his partners are constructing "a public library of recordings" on a terabyte hard drive. While that library is focused on the bands, it's by all means inclusive of that element that makes Brooklyn DIY so great: community.
At Shea, the crowd is part of the set, which is ultimately part of the archive. Microphones dangled from pipes at the back of the venue's main performance space -- just beyond the plexiglass window of Reich's mixing booth -- hone in on the crowd's audible interactions with the band. It might not occur to listeners accustomed to studio albums, but capturing the energy of the crowd at a boisterous show is nearly as important as recording the band itself.
After a few exhibition shows to work out the kinks in sound recording, Shea Stadium hosted its official opening day on Friday, May 22nd. A four-act, all-ages benefit for the broadsheet concert calendar Showpaper, the crowd on opening night -- both on stage and in the audience -- was on the younger side. The audience was raucous, especially for the headliners, an accordion-fronted band called Whack, but the vibe was communal, inclusive, and appreciative."
Of course, it wouldn't be Shea without some controversy. The space was evidently co-founded by a Pat Shea, who apparently was booted by his partners. The namesake writes in the comments to this article:
Doesn't it make more sense to have Pat Shea living and working at Shea Stadium? Yeah. I know. I like how I'm mentioned absolutely NOWHERE at all. That place wouldn't have opened it's doors if it wasn't for me and my good friends building tirelessly for nothing. No one else involved had the time to put into it like I did.
Pat Eponymous also threatens legal action against Shea Stadium and recommends no one go there.
Dysfunctional. Aesthetically challenged. Hard to get to. Yup, that's Shea Stadium all right! Rock on Shea.
The Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies explains the who, what, when, and why of ‘Where The Hell is Matt‘. Story links: Meme Scenery, Destroy All Humans - ps2 - Mission 01 Destination Earth!, Where The Hell is Matt — Interview with Matt Harding, Where the Hell WAS Matt?, Where the Hell is Matt Maps, Where the Hell is Matt Archive, Where The Hell Is Dousch, Mark English - Where The Hell Is Predator?, Where The Hell is Matt’s Girlfriend?, Where the Hell is Matt? - Team Fortress 2 Style, Where the hell is Matt’s Habbo?, Where the Hell is Matt? on Jimmy Kimmel Live 8-6-08, Numa Numa Guy with Gecko, Somebody’s Watching Me, Where the Hell is Matt? (2008), Matt Confesses: Where the Hell is Matt? Video an ‘Elaborate Hoax’, Matt Reveals the Hoax is a Hoax at MacWorld. For more on this and other Internet Phenomena visit the MemeDB at knowyourmeme.com!
I'm not sure what to make of this, but the NAACP just sent out a press release congratulating President Obama on his Nobel Prize and noting the storied company in which it puts him:
President Obama joins the likes of Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa in winning the Nobel Peace Prize and is also only the third sitting President to receive this honor, with President Theodore Roosevelt and President Wilson preceding him. President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Al Gore are also Nobel Peace Prize winners after they left the White House.But the release makes no mention of Martin Luther King, Jr., who at age 35 in 1964 was the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace prize at that time and turned over the prize money to advance the cause of civil rights.
I don't want to overstate the omission because I suspect it's just an inadvertent oversight. But the fact is Obama is connected umbilically to King through so many historical threads. Without King, it's difficult to envision a Obama presidency. Both of them winning Nobels adds to the richness of that historic connection. For all its political salience today, awarding the Nobel to Obama is also a ratification of King -- and of the decision the Nobel committee made 45 years ago.
Over the years, many Baseball Prospectus staffers have been hired away by major-league teams, which is a source of pride for us. We’ve gained a reputation as being a source of bright, dedicated people whose approach to baseball can be of considerable value to front offices, and if that reputation means we have to replace starters a bit more often than is optimal, well, it’s worth it.
Of course, it’s not just our staff but our readership that brings a lot to the table. If you read the comments sections, if you followed the BP Idol series, you know that the analytical approach to baseball isn’t something we have on lockdown. There are great ideas everywhere, smart people thinking about the game in ways that over time will make baseball a better game and MLB a better industry.
To tap into that pool of knowledge, one major-league team has come up with a question with which to screen candidates for potential opportunities in their front office:
If you had access to all of the information available to a major league team - both public and proprietary data, such as scouting reports, training reports, video, etc - what question(s) would you attempt to answer with that data? How would you go about that process? What potential problems do you foresee?
You can reply to this question via mlbquestion@gmail.com. If you’d like to be considered for a position, attach a resume to your response. In the interest of everyone’s sanity, please do not inquire beyond your initial submission. Every response will be read, but the team will only contact those people with whom it wishes to follow up. The deadline for responses is November 9, 2009, one month from today.
A long-time reader chimes in ...
My boss is a Nobel Laureate (Physics). So of course I was interested in his reaction because he is fairly plugged in to the thinking of the various Nobel committees, even those outside his domain. Anyway, he was absolutely elated by Obama's win. He sees the award not so much a recognition of anything Obama has accomplished yet, but rather as a very strong statement of support for his agenda, and an endorsement of his approach to international affairs.It is, in short, about what they hope he will be able to accomplish by following the path he has set out for himself. He also felt it was meant (to a lesser extent) as a rebuke of Bush, Cheney and the neocons, which is one reason why so many Republican heads are exploding over this. The Peace Prize is always political, but this time more so than most. He also felt that Obama's speech was pitch perfect, and that Obama got it right in saying the award was "a means to give momentum to a set of causes" and a "call to action."See my own thoughts about what this is about here.
What an unusual day this has turned out to be.
The fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and utility produced popular impressions which still exist.This quotation would hardly surprise anyone who follows electric vehicles. But it may be surprising to hear that in the year when it was written thousands of electric cars were produced, and that year was nearly a century ago. This appeared in a 1916 issue of the journal Electrical World, which I found in Google Books, our searchable repository of millions of books. It may seem strange to look back a hundred years on a topic that is so contemporary, yet I often find that the past has valuable lessons for the future. In this case, I was lucky — electric vehicles were studied and written about extensively early in the 20th century, and there are many books on the subject from which to choose. Because books published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able to view them easily.
But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.
Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.
Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.
The next year we were sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the project. While we have had disagreements, we have a common goal — to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a result, we were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.
There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. I would like to take this opportunity to dispel some myths about the agreement and to share why I am proud of this undertaking. This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.
Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders, giving them an incentive to step forward.
Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort. But despite a number of important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the requisite resources. At least one such service will have to exist if there are ever to be one hundred.
If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions. While new projects will not immediately have the same rights to orphan works, the agreement will be a beacon of compromise in case of a similar lawsuit, and it will serve as a precedent for orphan works legislation, which Google has always supported and will continue to support.
Last, there have been objections to specific aspects of the Google Books product and the future service as planned under the settlement, including questions about the quality of bibliographic information, our choice of classification system and the details of our privacy policy. These are all valid questions, and being a company that obsesses over the quality of our products, we are working hard to address them — improving bibliographic information and categorization, and further detailing our privacy policy. And if we don’t get our product right, then others will. But one thing that is sure to halt any such progress is to have no settlement at all.
In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will “impress the necessity of something being done” to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.
I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this opportunity.
Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology
(This first appeared in the New York Times, available here.)
This is great. What better way for comic artists to celebrate Harvey Pekar’s birthday? Pekar, whose autobio-comics self is famously drawn by different artists throughout his career, is rendered lovingly by over 90 different cartoonists as part of The Pekar Project.
Shown here: two of my faves, Laura Park and Jeffrey Brown.
Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Comics, Harvey Pekar, jeffrey brown, laura park, portraiture
White House sources tell me the shock was real today when President Obama was chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize.
No one was ready, instead focused on some upcoming battles on Afghanistan and health care, and staffers were preparing for Obama's planned speech this afternoon on financial regulatory reform.
Still, the team is playing catch up - they haven't even updated the White House blog yet, though the Barack Obama Twitter feed offered the one-word reaction above.
Robert Gibbs said Obama was "very surprised" and said that when he called the president with the news, "I believe he was asleep."
Gibbs also said he was alerted even earlier in the morning with calls from the situation room and reporters seeking comment.
Obama didn't even know he was nominated, Gibbs said. The nominations are kept secret unless those who put forth the name make it public.
"Even if someone told the president, he wouldn't have put much stock in it. Which is to say, this was a total surprise," an administration official told TPMDC.
Among the remaining questions - what will Obama do with the $1.4 million in prize money? White House aides tell me they will offer a readout of this later today. They also haven't made public whether Obama plans to travel to Oslo to accept the award.
Obama himself tried to make light of the unexpected award in his remarks earlier:
"Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning.After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, 'Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo's birthday.'
And then Sasha added, 'Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.'
So it's -- it's good to have kids to keep things in perspective."
Late update: ABC's George Stephanopoulos had a funny anecdote along these same lines today:
Two key White House aides were both convinced they were being punked when they heard the news, reported ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. "It's not April 1, is it?" one said. Upon being called by ABC News at 5:45 ET this morning, a White House aide said, "This better be good." When told by ABC News that the president had won the Nobel Peace Prize, the aide replied: "Oh, that is good."
It's that time of year again, the Earth's northern hemisphere is tipping away from the warmth of the Sun. Days in the north are getting cooler and shorter, leaves are changing, animals migrating and many harvests are underway. The wet summer in New England this year should make 2009 a banner year for brightly-colored fall foliage in the area. Collected here are a group of photographs of recent Autumn scenes around the northern hemisphere. (32 photos total)A group of Common Cranes gather in dawn light, on a lake in the German state of Brandenburg, close to Berlin September 26, 2009. From September to November tens of thousands of Cranes use the rural area close to the German Capital for a stopover during their migration from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe to their wintering quarters in Spain. The agricultural plains surrounding Berlin are among the biggest crane roosts in Europe with several tens of thousands birds gathering during the peak of migration. (REUTERS/Thomas Krumenacker)
the japanese toy maker takara tomy has just released a talking alarm clock with different expressions called
clockman. the clock is a small black box that features a colourful button on top and a face on the front.
the alarm comes to life when activated, moving its face in various expressions and talking to the user.
apparently the clocks each represent a different blood type, A, B, O and AB. the clocks make comments
based on the user’s blood type, reacting accordingly. the concept is based on a popular japanese book
series explaining the personality differences between people with different blood types. so essentially the
clock will wake you up in the morning in way that works best for your blood type. so far the concept is
only available in japanese and doesn’t include a blood test.
http://www.takaratomy.co.jp/products/clockman
TPM Reader BJ nominated for TPM Email Excessive Literalism Award which was created to bring attention to on-going research in snark impairment ...
Please correct your flatly incorrect statement that Hitler won the Nobel Peace Price, or any of the Nobel prizes for that matter. He was briefly nominated and that nomination swiftly removed. He later signed a law forbidding Germans from accepting the Nobel prizes when winners were regularly anti-Nazi. Some were arrested for even responding to the committee. Your incorrect and unreferenced statement is the kind of thing that the right will take out of context (of which you provided none as there was none to provide) and make it into one of their echo-chamber facts.This should be done immediately.
Shared by Mike
?!????!!!!!!!!!
Far from simply photoshopping an animal head on a human body, the pet portraits of Valerie Leonard reflect a level of care and personality that's peerless in the field. Inspired by the Old Masters, as well as film and family portraits, her images balance a level of whimsy with a stateliness befitting their regal subjects.
Based in Connecticut, the artist devotes days to each portrait. The process varies for each pet, but usually involves studying images of the particular animal, as well as researching the characteristics of the breed in general. She then researches classic artists for the most fitting painting, using the client's direction as a guide. Once chosen, she morphs the animal image into the human form. In the final product, the animal features and background are often cobbled together from a composite of different images.
Our introduction to Valerie Leonard came when our friend Josh Spear surprised us with a portrait of CH mascots Otis and Logan titled The Royal Twins (below). Of course, we were impressed and delighted. Leonard was good enough to share a bit about her process and some samples from along the way which you can see after the jump.
Joyent is very excited to partner with Yahoo! to create its newest Free Developer Program! Joyent is offering developers a Launch Accelerator optimized for the Yahoo! Application Platform free for one year! The Yahoo! Application Platform allows you to reach our users and improve the Yahoo! user experience by building and ...
President Obama's only real diplomatic accomplishment so far has been to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy from unilateral bullying to multilateral listening and cooperating. That's important, to be sure, but not nearly enough. The Prize is really more of Booby Prize for Obama's predecessor. Had the world not suffered eight years of George W. Bush, Obama would not be receiving the Prize. He's prizeworthy and praiseworthy only by comparison. via robertreich.blogspot.com Robert Reich.
This pair of photos illustrates the story of Ice Cube's realization that there is no such thing as edgy.
After an SNL sketch that seemed to suggest that President Obama hadn’t accomplished very much, he turns around accomplishes on of the most impressive things a person can accomplish, winning a Nobel Peace Prize:
“The Nobel Committee announced in Oslo that it has awarded the annual peace prize to Barack Obama, just nine months into his presidency, ‘for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.’
The award cited in particular Mr. Obama’s effort to reduce the world’s nuclear arsenal. ‘He has created a new international climate,’ the committee said.”
The announcement came as a surprise to most people, even the White House. I kind of think that Obama’s winning says a lot about where our world stands today. It says we need to change things and it in a sense signals to the world and also to the US that the things Obama has been proposing (and as SNL pointed out, not being successful with) are important and are what we need now. The award in a sense says that the future is more important than the past and to me reads as a call to action.
It could however hurt Obama, as the Republicans seem to think that being popular in the international community is a flaw–but then again they see anything Obama does as a flaw, which super infuriating. As of late, with health care espeically, I kind of can’t handle the way “news” networks like Fox are able to criticize Obama and tear him down non-stop. The other “news” networks should be just as ashamed of themselves for not regularly pointing out how ridiculous all of this Obama hating is. At least we have Jon Stewart I suppose.
But hopefully his winning the Nobel Peace Prize will be good in the end, because it is really a wonderful accomplishment and an inspiring message about hope.
*photo by marcn (CC)
President Obama's only real diplomatic accomplishment so far has been to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy from unilateral bullying to multilateral listening and cooperating. That's important, to be sure, but not nearly enough. The Prize is really more of Booby Prize for Obama's predecessor. Had the world not suffered eight years of George W. Bush, Obama would not be receiving the Prize. He's prizeworthy and praiseworthy only by comparison.
I'd rather Obama had won it after Congress agreed to substantial cuts in greenhouse gases comparable to what Europe is proposing, after he brought Palestinians and Israelis together to accept a two-state solution, after he got the United States out of Afghanistan and reduced the nuclear arm's threat between Pakistan and India, or after he was well on the way to eliminating the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Any one of these would have been worthy of global praise. Perhaps the Nobel committee can give him half the prize now and withhold the other half until he accomplishes one or more of these crucial missions.
Giving the Peace Prize to the President before any of these goals has been attained only underscores the paradox of Obama at this early stage of his presidency. He has demonstrated mastery in both delivering powerful rhetoric and providing the nation and the world with fresh and important ways of understanding current challenges. But he has not yet delivered. To the contrary, he often seems to hold back from the fight -- temporizing, delaying, or compromising so much that the rhetoric and insight he offers seem strangely disconnected from what he actually does. Yet there's time. He may yet prove to be one of the best presidents this nation has ever had -- worthy not only of the Peace Prize but of every global accolate he could possibly summon. Just not yet.
I don't expect Republicans to be cheering for Obama. And notwithstanding my comments below I can totally understand their having their collective noses a little bent out of shape over a first year president of the opposite party winning a Nobel totally out of the blue. But I honestly would have predicted a short window of semi-graciousness at least in official statements. But check out Michael Steele's official response from the RNC.
We've set up an open thread at TPMCafe to discuss Obama's Nobel Peace Prize.
Ever since the New York Times made us feel sorry for On Prospect Park and its handful of residents, we've wanted another peek at life inside Brooklyn's bird killer. Finally, two local bloggers have come forward to satisfy us! Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn emerged from a book reading at 1 Grand Army Plaza with a rave review (and a red Richard Meier on Prospect Park West goodie bag!):
the event was in the living room/kitchen of a Plaza Street facing apartment on the third floor—a columned space that can comfortably seat 100 people. The kitchen had an enormous counter/island with some gorgeous looking appliances that sort of disappear seamlessly into the walls.(Maybe that's why some residents have trouble finding their microwaves?)
We were all set to rush over with an offer...but then we turned to the other review. Fucked in Park Slope liked little about the place beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows (Richard Meier: bringing The Standard to Brooklyn).
The apt was laid out like a reverse railroad (in a straight horizontal line, instead of a vertical line). HATED that. I don't know anyone who specifically likes a railroad layout for an apt, so who the fuck wants to pay a few millies for a REVERSE RAILROAD? (A. apparently no one since the apt is still empty)...I didn't notice any gorgeous interior fittings, any really beautiful door knobs, killer faucets, or really anything else that screamed: I JUST PAID 4 MILLION DOLLARS FOR THIS APARTMENT!Thankfully, the building's prices are still dropping like birds.
· Momasphere: Fun to See Inside Richard Meier [OTBKB]
· FYI: The Richard Meier Building On Prospect Park = Totally Lame [FiPS]
· All On Prospect Park coverage [Curbed]
“This is a once in a lifetime event,” said some scientist on the ‘Today Show’ this morning. “How often do we hit the moon?” NOT OFTEN ENOUGH, if these INCREDIBLY UNFULFILLING IMAGES are anything to go by. Where are the explosions? Where is the destruction? The moon is probably LAUGHING AT OUR IMPOTENT RAGE RIGHT NOW. I can hear its smirking, dismissive tone: “You call yourself a planet? That’s the best you can do? I’ve had harder impacts from junk I picked up off the galaxy. Nice try.” DAMN YOU, NASA, you’ve played us all for fools once more.
But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down. via www.nytimes.com The spectre of the spectre of lost books is horrifying. Google is in a better position to solve this problem then Amazon, but Google has squandered the public trust (even moreso than Apple and Microsoft, which is shocking). Sergey makes an impassioned defense of books and by proxy, of his company. Sicha yesterday, Brin today. The news business should not be hit driven, but good job by the Times nonetheless.
I got curious about how big the edge is for post-season teams playing at home. This is actually pretty easy to research with the PI.
In post-season history through 2008, home teams have won 668 playoff games. I found that by doing a Pitching Game Finder search, limiting to playoff games, limiting to home team, and limiting to wins. At the bottom of the results page is the total number of such games. Doing the same for losses shows 560 such games. So there you have it--home teams in the playoffs are 668-560, which is a winning percentage of .548.
Let's compare that to the regular season. The PI covers only 1954 to present, and through 2008 the home team has won 58,958 games. Meanwhile they have lost 50,335. (I got these numbers also with Pitching Game Finders, just going on regular season games instead of post-season.) That's a winning percentage of .539.
So in the playoffs, historically, the home team has had a slightly bigger edge than they have during the regular season.
In the wild card era (1995 up to games through 2008) home teams in the playoffs are 243-207, a .540 winning percentage. In the regular season over that same span, home teams are 17,918-15,343, a .539 winning percentage.
It seems that the extra edge home teams once enjoyed in the post-season has been eradicated in the wild card era. It's interesting to wonder why this is the case.
Historically, the schedule was more balanced meaning that all teams played a similar schedule. That's different today, where teams play many more games within their own division, meaning that more balanced divisions tend to see more even records (think about the NL Central in recent years) whereas divisions with a couple of crummy teams tend to produce teams with lots of wins (think about the AL East, where bad Baltimore and, until recently, Tampa Bay teams allowed the Yankees and Red Sox to rack up great records.) This means that in the past, teams with a better record probably really were better, whereas these days the unbalanced scheule means a 95-win team may not be as good as an 85-win team.
So historically in the playoffs the teams with home-field advantage tended to be truly better teams whereas these days it's a little more random.
It's not the accustomed stance of a writer or blogger. But this one does have me at something of a loss for words. I notice the condemnation of the Taliban, the edged snark of the superciliati. But I also see Ana Marie Cox's first-off Twitter: "Apparently Nobel prizes now being awarded to anyone who is not George Bush." And while less than generous, I think she's on to the root of the matter. But perhaps not precisely in the way she thinks.
This is an odd award. You'd expect it to come later in Obama's presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.
Here's what you may have missed from last night while defending your home turf.
- Jon Lester was unable to get the Red Sox off to a good series start against the Angels. The team from the West Coast won by a score of 5-0 as John Lackey looked quite sharp. Let's hope the Angels keep it rolling.
- Matt Holliday proved to be quite mortal for the Cardinals as his 9th inning error led to two runs that effectively buried the Red Birds in a 2-0 hole in the series. Long term extension here we come!
- Meanwhile the Rockies capitalized on the pregnancy of Cole Hamels wife and emerged victorious in a tight 5-4 victory that evened the series and kept them close to the defending champs. Surly Philadelphia fans are surely blaming a fetus for the outcome of this game.
In the UK, men account for 72% of bike journeys, 84% of fatalities, and 81% of recorded injuries. That makes a certain amount of sense: men tend to be more aggressive cyclists, and that means their chances of having an accident rise.
But there's a twist when it comes to truck-cyclist collisions in particular:
This year, seven of the eight people killed by lorries in London have been women…
There are no national figures but there's little reason to think it is any different.
In this particular case, it seems, aggression helps, and timidity can be fatal:
In 2007, an internal report for Transport for London concluded women cyclists are far more likely to be killed by lorries because, unlike men, they tend to obey red lights and wait at junctions in the driver's blind spot.
This means that if the lorry turns left, the driver cannot see the cyclist as the vehicle cuts across the bike's path.
The report said that male cyclists are generally quicker getting away from a red light - or, indeed, jump red lights - and so get out of the danger area…
Marian Louise Noonan, 32, from south London, is a confessed kerb-hugger, and that leaves her feeling quite vulnerable on the roads, unlike her husband.
“He cycles much more aggressively and is aware of all the traffic around him. He cycles as if someone is going to hit him and makes sure he is in a safe position,” she says.
“I'm much more nervous of my cycling ability, I'm frightened people might hit me, which means I don't cycle in a positive manner.”
The main problem is the attitude of other drivers, she says, as they make her feel like she does not belong on the road.
She also feels reluctant to put herself at the front of the traffic at red lights, which is the safest place for cyclists to be.
My experience from cycling in New York is that men are more likely than women to run red lights, much more likely to run red lights by weaving through flowing traffic, and much more likely to “bike salmon” up the street against traffic. All of these things are, needless to say, dangerous. On the other hand, women are less likely than men to wear helmets, and they're also more likely than men to be riding significantly slower than traffic. Those traits I think make them more likely to get hit by a truck, and more likely to be killed if that happens.
The optimal combination for bikers — which I see in the UK much more than in NYC — is to be both law-abiding and aggressive. Don't be shy about riding in the middle of the road if it's not safe to ride on the edges, and certainly don't be shy about driving faster than traffic, because that's safer than having traffic drive faster than you. But obey red lights, stop behind the line and not halfway into the street, and be conscious about not getting in the way of pedestrians. Maybe, in some utopian future, they might eventually start being conscious of not getting in the way of cyclists, especially in dedicated bike lanes.
via www.flickr.com
I combined all of the great works done by tokuhirom, kazuho, nipotan and Sartak: render Devel::StackTrace object as an HTML. As a bonus, if you render WithLexicals object it will display the lexical variables with JS toggle button.
Plack middleware and plackup has now been converted to use this new StackTrace screen. Pretty slick!
NBC is being sued by The Font Bureau for stealing fonts.
We're hiring a new member of our publishing team who will work from our New York City office: Social Media & Publicity Associate. It's a great job for someone who's really into and gets TPM and who's really into and gets social media. Is that you? If it is, we really want to hear from you.
Job description and instructions for applying under the fold.
(Instructions on how to apply here.)
Social Media & Publicity Associate
Location: New York City
Job Description: Implement TPM's social media strategies focused on distribution, audience growth and relationship with core audience. Applicants must be deeply familiar with TPM, its areas of news specialty as well as its place within the new media world. They must also be intimately familiar with the social media world, including key sites and communities (Digg, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), as well as emerging trends in the field. Good news judgment, hardcore attention to detail, no fear of web traffic analytics and crazy work ethic each an absolute must. This is a junior level position on our publishing team but includes ample opportunity for advancement. Competitive salary for qualified applicants; health care and 401k benefits provided.
My friend Emily pointed out a great quote in this week's New Yorker, in an article about the painter Luc Tuymans, who describes how he creates his work: "It's like I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to do it." Peter Schjeldahl, the article's author, notes that "uncertain ends, confident means is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know."
And a Lao-Tzu quote I found today: "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving" which espouses a similar approach.
I favorited a YouTube video: She's not even from Manhattan.
- Ruth Reichl Responds: "People keep talking about it as this sort of high-end place for rich people..." [AP]
- Dublin's Culinary Identity Crisis: Too many fancy coffee shops, not enough vinegar and chips. [Independent.ie]
- San Francisco Bagels: Do any decent ones exist? [SFist]
- Leafy Greens: Riskier than beef, says the FDA. [Chicago Tribune]
- Pioneer Woman Cooks: Ree Drummond's blog-turned-cookbook. [PI]
- True Fondue: Technically, it has to be made with Vacherin and Gruyere cheeses mixed with Fendant wine and cherry schnapps. [HuffPo]
- Vending Machine: A German farm sells local produce from one. [MNN]
"Asked about his name, Mr. Foo said, 'Well, I’m half Chinese, half Puerto Rican, but my father’s best friend was named Singh, so he named me that.'"
Revenue figures for September and October issues of Condé Nast's monthly magazines are not yet available. However, their diminished page counts suggest the revenue shortfall is continuing. Barring an unexpected rebound in advertising spending, revenues for the rest of the year are likely to put the company's year-over-year revenue decline at close to the $1 billion mark.
via Newsweek
Because this blog was a birthday present it is traditional around this time of year for me to post a state of the blog-union address. Past editions of this post have been like:
“I need this blog! And I own that. I am not ashamed to need or to have a blog. Blog blog blog. I love you, Emily Magazine.” ( turning one, October 2006)
“it’s amazing to see this little stop-motion portrait of your former brain. My obsessions and observations and jokes seem so alien and so familiar at the same time.” (turning three, October 2008)
As Emily Magazine’s fourth birthday approaches, though, I am not feeling so sanguine about this blog’s present, or its future. I bet this will change! I hope so. But for the moment, my brain is so cluttered with strange and conflicting ideas about what a blog should and shouldn’t be and what I’m trying to do, in general, with this kind of writing — because, I do think that blog-writing is a different kind of writing than edited printed-matter writing– that I’m having trouble figuring out what I even want to say. I keep doubling back and second-guessing and tweaking my word choices and my grammar in even the most basic (i.e., m-dash-free) of sentences. I’m rereading everything to see how it looks through the eyes of some half-imagined critic — a critic who, no matter what I do or say, will always think that I got here, wherever he supposes that to be, by dint of something other than hard work and skill. There is no pleasing this critic, I know. Also, he is (half) imaginary. But I can’t get him out of my head.
As you can imagine, this is not a very fun way to write, but it’s how I’ve been writing for the past few … weeks? Months? I am trying to figure out when it started, so I can try to diagnose the cause of the disease. It might have something to do with the fact that, over the course of the past few weeks, I have read my book from beginning to end some fourteen billion times. (This sounds impossible but you have to keep in mind that my book is not very long!) At some point during this process, which also involved being heavily and skillfully line-edited by both my actual editor Amber and my trusted best editor-friend, I began to feel that I was no longer capable of having a coherent thought, much less writing a coherent sentence. I lost the heedless confidence that is necessary to blog-writing. This heedless confidence, you may have guessed — or if you have a blog, you may already know – is the blog-writer’s Achilles heel, and also his greatest strength. (That’s where his strength is! In his heel! OH FUCK IT ALL TO BITS.)
The thing is, I really do like being edited. I think it is a privilege, even though it can bring you into cripplingly close touch with your (”actually” “really,” “disgusting,” parentheticals) worst bad habits. And I get what people are saying when they bemoan the fate of the generation of writers that’s currently growing up without ever knowing what it feels like to have someone reach into your piece of writing and wrest out what feels to you like one of its still-palpitating organs and throw it carelessly into the organ-bucket on the floor. No, it doesn’t feel good. But it’s good for you. That showy sentence, that reblog-worthy turn of phrase, was probably not serving your overall point. Possibly it was just reiterating something you’d already said better in the previous paragraph! It was a cancer in your piece, and your piece is better off without it. People are writing lots without ever knowing that feeling, and their writing is the worse for it.
Or is it? I’m not sure. There are some blog posts that any editor in his right mind would take a scythe to that I love to read in their natural state. I would rather, no offense, read thoughts as they pop into Choire’s crazy brain rather than read them after they’ve been steamrolled into something still lovely but a bit flatter by the Times’ house-stylizer. It might be that I am looking to have my attention grabbed in a certain way when I’m reading on a screen, or it might not — after all, I am talking here about actually having more patience for circuitousness and idiosyncratic syntax when I’m reading online, not less. I don’t know! I don’t know what it is! I love blogs! I love reading blog posts. I hope someday to once again love writing blog posts. But I don’t think everything in the world should be a blog post; I’m glad that I made it so that my book is something different than a long printed and bound blog post.
At first I typed “better” instead of “different,” but actually — ACTUALLY — I think the point is exactly that “better” is not what I’m talking about.
BREAKING: Tracy Morgan joined Twitter. Mission Accomplished.
fortunately, he's writing columns for Boing Boing and working on a big new project
Jon Heyman of SI.com quotes a Mets person loyal to Omar Minaya as saying, “Omar would be gone if not for that extension,” which will pay him $1.1 million each of the next three seasons.
Heyman also confirms the Mets are considering jobs for Kevin Towers and J.P. Ricciardi, “particularly with longtime scout Sandy Johnson telling Mets people that he’s likely to retire.”
Towers had been GM of the Padres, and Ricciardi had been GM of the Blue Jays, both of whom were fired last week.
…i am torn on this idea…
…on one hand, how many decision-makers can one team have… by my count, if towers or jp is hired, they’ll essentially have four not-GMs, but kind of GMs, in the front office, including minaya, Ownership and to a lesser extent John Ricco… frankly, i am not sure the team’s problem is having too few chefs in the kitchen…
…on the other hand, i am all for the Mets bringing in smart, baseball people to get the team back on track… the more the better, in fact…
Merlin on Bob Mould's See a Little Light...
It’s probably hard for ex post facto Hüsker fans to realize how abrupt this departure seemed. Great, light/dark record. In retrospect, B’s late 80s/early 90s stuff sounds like a catepillar crawling out of a bottle into a room full of other realtively recent butterflies.
Yes, but I'm sure it wasn't really that song that did it, since it was the fourth track on the record. I'm sure the initial shock came with Sunspots, track one, which is pretty damn far away from Bed of Nails...
Blogs are good for picking nits.
SNL’s Deep House Dish may have been creating a mock rivalry between ultimate icon Madonna and current talk-of-every-town GaGa, but the sketch did illustrate that there are a few requirements to being a dominating diva.
Here, four of the key elements that led to these two conquering the charts and the monde of mode:
1. Eschew pants, of course. After dedicating unlimited hours to yoga, Pilates and the Anderson Method, assets must be placed front and center.
2. Become a blonde. Both Gaga (nee Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) and Madge (born Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone) ditched their brunette roots years ago.
3. Lash Out. Overdone eyes are de rigueur for aspiring performers. Rumors of Madonna sporting mink lashes by Shu Uemura on her R-Invention tour spawned the company’s new Luxe line, a synthetic version featuring criss-crossed strands for a more dramatic effect. Or try applying the individual Make Up For Ever to create a customized look. And the only-at-Sephora fiber-infused Fiberwig mascara promises fluttering—and lengthened—lashes without the hassle of glue.
4. Bestie up with MJ. Duh.
Sponsored Topics: Saturday Night Live - Madonna - Lady Gaga - Pilates - Yoga
I had no idea that subway billboard fixture Dr. Jonathan Zizmor was bringing his hallucinogenic brand of advertising to the small screen, but apparently he has! You can get all the details here, but I’m going to just keep replaying this over and over because I am HYPNOTIZED.
Michael O'Malley built this wood-fired brick pizza oven recently on the side of the road in Los Angeles for a workshop through Machine Project. He then walked his students through the pizza-making steps, from shaping dough balls to maneuvering that peel. Since the oven was so scorching hot, the pizza was done in two and a half minutes. Watch the video, after the jump.
How to Make Pizza in a Makeshift Wood-Fired Brick Oven
[via Makezine]
Related
My Pizza Oven: Mark Wilkie, Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn
My Pizza Oven: Mark Graban, Fort Worth, Texas
My Pizza Oven: Nick and Robin Gladdis, Paso Robles, California
It's a sad day for D.C. residents and half-smoke lovers everywhere: Ben Ali, co-founder of landmark greasy spoon Ben's Chili Bowl, passed away last night. As DCist points out, "the chili, half-smokes, cheese fries and shakes that have made Ben's Chili Bowl famous since it opened in 1958 are still prepared the same way today as they were when Ben first started."
chrysanthe thought i would like these. chrysanthe would be correct.
via newyork.seriouseats.com "If the good folks at Bouchon Bakery would add some crispy bacon to the filling, Elvis might come back from his grave to partake."
the sports trading card company topps has enhanced their 2009 card collection with augmented reality to
bring them to life. trading cards haven’t changed much over time, but topps recently launched a new type
of card that when viewed through a computer camera, becomes an interactive 3d animation. using
augmented reality, the cards display a small animated player that rotates and moves with the card. the user
can even interact with the player, by placing it on a flat surface. each player has a different game to play
ranging from throwing a baseball at a target to catching pop-flies all controlled via the computer keyboard.
the topps 3d live cards are already available for baseball and football, with other sports to come soon.
the technology for the cards was developed by total immersion, a french company specializing in
augmented reality.
http://www.toppstown.com
My new breakfast of champions.
[Photograph: Robyn Lee]
If any serious eater is coming to New York this fall to holiday shop I have my new breakfast of champions sandwich to steer you towards: Bouchon Bakery's Fluffernutter sandwich (peanut butter, sliced bananas, and house-made marshmallow cream) on the third floor of the Time Warner Center. Toasty, buttery golden brown on the outside and warm, creamy, and melty on the inside, it's my idea of a perfect sweet breakfast sandwich. If the good folks at Bouchon Bakery would add some crispy bacon to the filling, Elvis might come back from his grave to partake.
Bouchon Bakery
Time Warner Center 3rd floor, 10 Columbus Circle, New York NY 10019 (map)
212-823-9364
Actress, singer, model, Queen of France. And now… artist. Is there anything Carla Bruni can’t do? The work (see more here) reveals an obvious debt to the sketching of the young William Strang, but the playfulness of the lines conceals an almost foreboding intensity which puts one in mind of certain pieces by Egon Schiele. I can’t wait for her Conceptualist phase!
"Well, he's unmarried," I said. "He still lives with his mother. He's in therapy, and it doesn't look like he'll ever get out of therapy. And he didn't go into literature."Interview with Maurice Sendak.
From the NYT front page, October 8, 1929, in reference to Game 1 between the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago Cubs:
The Athletics won, 3-1.
September 5, 2009 -- Jamie Lidell performs at the Warp20 NYC Closing Party at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, NY.
Jamie Lidell is a diva (in the best possible sense of the word).
Read the Pitchfork report.
View the full photo set on Flickr.
This is from a lovely post on the Powell's blog by Tod Davies:
We went to our dog agility class today, which, for the uninitiated, is a hilarious kind of mini-Grand National training for dogs... hoops, tunnels, jumps, climb-its... the dogs love it and we, surprising ourselves, do too. It's a great pleasure to take the long drive across the valley floor between the mountains, past the ranches and small-town houses, out to where Diane has all the brightly colored obstacles set out on her fresh mown grass.
Diane, who teaches the class, is one of those very American women you never hear about. A good neighbor, a quiet citizen, a person who thoroughly enjoys her life, and has created that life to give her a decent, unextravagant living by doing the things she loves best. She's one of those people (thank God for them) who volunteers actively at the local animal shelters, and really makes a difference with her volunteering. She's the one who started a free obedience class with each adoption; she goes out every week and teaches new pet owners how to get the best out of their pets. Doing that, she single handedly cut the return rate on dogs to the shelter by a half. That's where we met her, when we adopted one of ours.
I've probably seen John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards in concert more than any other band. I don't own more than a CD or two of theirs now, but I always enjoyed the live experience, and Lurie was at the center of several art circles that I loved. He was a close friend of Jim Jarmusch's, starring in the indie breakthrough Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law (which also featured Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni). He did a lovely score for Jarmusch's Mystery Train, another favorite movie of mine. He had bit parts in Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas and David Lynch's Wild at Heart. And he was the host of the hilarious Fishing with John series, which featured guest spots with Jarmusch, Waits, Matt Dillon, Dennis Hopper and Willem Dafoe. I dont think I could stomach Wild at Heart anymore, but I'm a big fan of all these other efforts.Lurie was also a player in one of my all-time favorite art scenes: downtown NYC circa the early 80s. He had a part in Downtown 81 (along with fellow downtowners Debbie Harry, Arto Lindsay, Stranger than Paradise costar Eszter Balint, Diane Brill, Kid Creole, Fab 5 Freddy, Vincent Gallo, Debi Mazar, Coati Mundi, Cookie Mueller and Glenn O'Brien), which is famous primarily for its star, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who is also my favorite painter. (Interesting fact: Gallo and Basquiat were in a band together called Gray; one fo their songs is on the soundtrack.)
Unfortunately, Lurie contracted Lyme Disease in the 90s and hasn't really been able to write music since. However, he has been able to continue his painting, and will have new exhibits in both Tokyo and New York this month. In honor of their opening, whitehot magazine is running an interesting interview with Lurie. It was sad to hear that he and Jarmusch, who once wrote the liner notes to a Lounge Lizards CD, aren't really in touch. But it was also fun to hear his comments about Basquiat:
KF: New York was going through what was then Neo-Expressionism. Names like Schnabel, Fischl, Basquiat were among the known and popular. You knew Basquiat. Were you affected by him as an artist in any way?
JL: Haha - he was a kid who used to follow me around and sleep on my floor. He would constantly ask me how he could make a living so he could keep his girlfriend.
KF: I'm not sure about the circumstances surrounding your friendship with Jarmusch...but he knew Basquiat as well. Was there a link between the three of you?
JL: I don’t remember Jim knowing Jean-Michel, actually. So to answer your question, “No…” But I do remember that Jim was storing the movie equipment at my house when he was making Permanent Vacation. And Jean had been awake for days and was now sleeping on my floor in the front room where the equipment was. He had slept for nearly 12 hours and Jim and the crew were coming in and out to get equipment. At first, they tried to get around Jean but then eventually they found it easier to pick him up and move him. He never woke up, which I found very impressive. Jim certainly did not know him then. What year is that? 1980 maybe…
KF: I’m still trying to get the image of Jean-Michel being lifted off the floor out of my mind...Haha - How often would he sleep on your floor?
JL: He wasn’t there all the time - about a third of the time.
KF: On a somber note, Jean-Michel's funeral...You played for him.
JL: That was an odd day, was the same day my Uncle Jerry died. The funeral was weird. His father did this thing where only rich, famous painters were invited. And I and many others weren't supposed to be allowed in. But I said fuck that and crashed it. Crashing a funeral, how strange that is.
I left early and on the way out, they were bringing out the casket out of a side door as I went by.
I walked over to Roosevelt Hospital where my uncle was getting chemo. There were people he knew outside crying. And I realized what was going on.
I don't know what happened next, I found myself on the corner of 42nd Street with no jacket and no tie. I just lost it, I guess.
That thing I played at the memorial Glenn O'Brien put it together. It was about a month or so later.For the whole interview, click here.
via www.canabalt.com
Canabalt is my favorite new iPhone game! It's absolutely perfect, because I can only possibly play it for a couple of minutes per game (and that's when I do really well; most of the time, it's under a minute), and yet it's a couple of minutes of pure escapism (literally).
Today Brownstoner launched a directory for local resources that can help if you are renovating or involved with any aspect of real estate from contractors and designers, to lawyers and real estate brokers. It is a paid directory. Businesses can sign up for basic listings or more full blown mini-sites on which they can collect leads, post photos, and in one case even an employment form. These pages because they are associated with Brownstoner and coded with some SEO care should do better in search than the websites of these small businesses. It is a model of a product that could bring revenue to local and specialized sites steeped in a long print and web tradition that should be a nice revenue source for the smaller publisher and give them the ability to create packages with low to medium effort. It is also something that I am really pleased to have created over the summer with my friend Kael Goodman at Blankslate. Hopefully other sites both local and vertical will take advantage of it.
If a breaking ball crosses the plate at a point between a batter’s knees and the midpoint between his shoulders and pants, it’s a strike, no matter what the anachronism behind the plate thinks he sees. In eighteendicketysix, a human being was state-of-the-art technology for making these decisions. Now, you can get better information-we do get better information-by using better technology. Championships should be decided by the players and by what actually happened, not by what somebody thinks happened. via www.baseballprospectus.com I agree... so I blogged it!
John Perrotto made the point, via Twitter, that the umpires in today’s Rockies/Phillies failed for the cycle, blowing calls at first base (Jimmy Rollins), second (Cliff Lee), third (Yorvit Torrealba) and home (pick one).
I feel like I write more about umpires than many people do, and it’s because I feel strongly that what happens on the field isn’t subject to interpretation. If a player’s foot hits a base before a glove with a ball in it touches that player, that player is entitled to the base, he’s safe, and that doesn’t change because some middle-management functionary says otherwise. If a breaking ball crosses the plate at a point between a batter’s knees and the midpoint between his shoulders and pants, it’s a strike, no matter what the anachronism behind the plate thinks he sees. In eighteendicketysix, a human being was state-of-the-art technology for making these decisions. Now, you can get better information-we do get better information-by using better technology. Championships should be decided by the players and by what actually happened, not by what somebody thinks happened.
Now, whenever I bring this up, I get a chorus and three verses of “But It Would Take the Human Element out of the Game.” My problem with this is that the complainer makes themselves heard via a global communications network, accessed via microcomputer and wireless technology, which allows their opinion to be seen by billions of people. Once done expressing themselves, and perhaps feeling peckish, they can microwave a pizza, or even research a better dinner option, using a powerful search engine that has indexed vast stores of knowledge about the human experience, the universe, and local eateries. Without moving from the spot from which they keyed in their opinion, they can read countless reviews of potential dining options. Once they settle on one, they can punch a button on their keychain to start their car, activating the seat warmers while they turn on their high-priced home-alarm system. While walking to the car, they can call their spouse using their handheld telephone to see what they would like for dinner, and when the call isn’t picked up, they can follow up by typing in a message that will arrive instantly. Inside the car, our poster uses his Global Positioning System to find the best route to his culinary choice, and punches up a station from the hundreds offered via the small unit that pulls signals from a satellite orbiting the planet. Distracted by the choice between baseball talk and light rock, he is jolted back by the beeping of his vehicle, which has sensed that he’s backing into traffic and alerted him, saving him thousands of dollars in damages and potential neck and back pain. Along the way downtown, he pays a toll not by scrambling for change but by slowing down a bit and allowing the overhead sensors to read his in-car transponder. Similarly, he pays for his dinner not with cash but with a debit card that instantly transfers the money out of his account to the resturant. Despite being a hardcore baseball fan, he drives back calmly, listening the the start of the next game on his satellite radio system-the road team’s broadcast, as he can’t stand the blowhard who does color for the home team. He pulls into his driveway, lights triggered by motion sensors so that he can park safely and walk to his door, which he opens not with a key but a keypad. Safely home, but a bit chilly, he dials up the thermostat a few degrees, takes his food and settles in front of his 52-inch high-definition television. Despite having listened to a couple innings in the car, he fires up his DVR and starts watching from the first pitch, fast-forwarding past the commercials, rewinding to take another look at his favorite player’s diving catch in the second.
Satisfied with his meal and pleased by his team’s performance, he reaches for his laptop computer, less than an inch thick and light as a feather, to rejoin the conversation. He’s pleased to find that three people who he’s never met agree with him about the role of umpires in major league baseball.
My wife used to run a fairly popular weblog called We ♥ Prints. In between getting married, having a baby, and not sleeping, she didn't have enough time to update the site.
I'm happy to tell you she's back, on a new host (TypePad like me) and with a gorgeous new print by MARS-1.
So head over there, welcome her back, and buy some prints!
Quick pet peeve break.
I use tabs in my web browser, a lot. I especially use them in combination with my keyboard so that I can open links in new tabs: command-click in Safari means "open this link in a new tab". It lets me rack things up in the background without breaking my reading flow. This works for all normal links on the web.
It is a unique and special source of frustration to me when websites fuck about with Ajax and inadvertently break completely normal features of the web like this one. As far as I can tell, the idea is to offer regular HTML links, but introduce a javascript callback which changes them to a redirection at the moment that they are clicked. Looks like a link, but does not act like a link. Adam Greenfield writes about the potential future suckage of ubiquitous computing in just these terms: the addition of superfluous, unexpected behaviors to otherwise regular objects that no doubt seem like delight in the lab, but translate to frustration in the regular world.
Unwelcome magic.
For a long time, I thought it was just Twitter pulling this kind of thing (ask my coworkers about my occasional "fuck twitter and their stupid fucking fuck website" outbursts in the office), but recently I've started to see it being used on Wordpress blogs, even ones that aren't visibly hosted on a wordpress.com domain. I'd be a lot happier with my browsing if I didn't have to play guessing games before clicking on things - "is this a link or not a link?"
To see this behavior in action, check out the latest from Matt Jones and try to get the browser to open those links in a new tab with a command-click. It doesn't work because it needs a moment to jump you to "go2.wordpress.com".
Now back to your regularly scheduled lack of communication.
View more presentations from Tatsuhiko Miyagawa.
Today I did a presentation about PSGI and Plack for Six Apart engineering team including our Python dev team and MT service developers from our New York office.
The presentation got well received and some demonstrations like StackTrace, ReverseHTTP and NYTProf (which I started working on last night, will commit to the git repo later) really wow'ed them.
I'm happy to give this talk in other external meetings or conferences, like SF.pm meetup. Stay tuned :)
me and my boyfriend discussing some conceptual stuff we found
(Image from The Stranger which also has an article today about the sign’s restoration)
RIP John Elway, originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro.
Note to self: take more time reading this curious book by Karl Gerstner, a swiss typographer. It’s a document about his design process in the early days of the computer era. Definitely not about recipes and direct solutions, it’s rather a sort of reflection on possible design models.
Perhaps it’s a tad too oriented towards graphic-design but there seems to be some interesting elements in there that go beyond this domain.
Why do I blog this? gathering notes for an introductory course next week about design processes in various contexts.
In the "Linking to your own blog" topic in Talk earlier today, arm1970 wanted help finding a link to a thread where SE'ers with blogs listed their blog names and URLs. I found it for arm, but ...
There are actually A FREAKIN' TON of "blog" topics in the Talk archives—including several more "SE'er blog roll calls." I thought it would be fun to list them all here, after the jump ...
SE Community Member Blog Roll Calls
It's not surprising that many SE community members are also bloggers—and that they're insanely talented. Lots of links to bookmark here.
Do you blog? What's your URL? [11/2/2007]
Food blog roll call [4/27/2008]
SE'er Food Blogs [5/18/2009]What Are Your Favorite Blogs?
I bet there's some overlap between the SE'er food blogs above and people's fave food blogs below.
What's your OTHER favorite food blog? [1/31/2007]
Favourite food blogs? [9/13/2007]
Favorite food blog? [8/30/2208]
What Are Your Favorite Food Blogs? [10/12/2008]
SO MANY food blogs!!! [11/11/2008]
Food Blogs? [2/16/2009]By Genre or Region
Healthy Food Blogs? [1/29/2007]
Know a good cheese blog? [7/11/2007]
Best Vegetarian Blogs? [10/2/2007]
Seattle Food Bloggers [11/12/2007]
Really good cooking/recipe blogs [5/12/2008]
50 Blogs from 50 States [5/24/2008]
Hilarious Cake Blog [8/19/2008]
Veggie Food Blogs? [11/7/2008]
Diabetic veggie blogs? [11/7/2008]
Best NYC Food Blog? [2/17/2009]
Regional/Road Food Blogs [4/21/2009]
Wine Blogs? [7/15/2009]Blogging Advice & Thoughts on Blogging
For folks already blogging (or those thinking of starting), there's some golden advice to mine from these topics.
Do you share your real identity on your blog? Why or why not? [5/11/2007]
How to get a food blog read and noticed [10/30/2007]
The ethics of blogging [10/31/2007]
Starting a food blog ... [4/27/2008]
Food Blog Trolls [6/18/2008]
Others using your blog content for their blog-help!! [9/4/2008]
Bloggers -- and Blog Readers -- are Sheep [11/30/2008]
How to structure a food blog correctly? [7/4/2009]
Blogspot or Wordpress? [8/18/2009]Help Me Name My Blog!
Something was in the water starting in April of this year. Lots of people asking for help naming their blogs. Hope you all found the help you needed!
Food Blog Name Suggestions [6/11/2008]
Please Reply: Need help thinking of baking blog name!!! [4/14/2009]
Yet Another Food Blog: help me name it [4/28/2009]
Please help me find the perfect FOOD BLOG name! [5/14/2009]
clever cooking blog names [6/4/2009]
Help naming a blog! [6/22/2009]
I need name ideas for my cooking blog [7/20/2009]
Whale-Five FUCK YEAH!
Tags: animals
youngna just threw down the gauntlet big time
If you haven't had occasion to dip into the Worldchanging site, they've compiled a list of their favorite/best/most popular articles from the past on the occasion of their sixth anniversary.
Tags: best of lists Worldchanging
Yup. We tried 39 mustards.
[Photographs: Robyn Lee]
Mayo phobia is understandable. Ketchup disdain can be justified (people always have complex relationships with tomatoes). But not liking mustard? Oh, come on. Mustard is just the little something-something that sandwiches, hot dogs, burgers, salad dressings, and pretzels need. When people say they don't like mustard, alarms sound in my head: Not to be trusted.
But even a mustard enthusiast would have trouble stomaching 39 kinds of mustard. We dolloped, squeezed, scooped, and dunked into jars and tubes of all types of the yellow condiment—sometimes it wasn't even close to yellow.
After visiting four stores and staring at many condiment aisles, freaking out any nearby employees and shoppers, we found mustards to fit into the following categories:
- Yellow
- Dijon
- Deli-Style and Spicy Brown
- Honey
- Full of Seeds
- "Other" (trust me, they didn't fit anywhere else)
The results, after the jump.
Best Yellow
Plochman's not only came in the funnest-to-squeeze rotund tube (with "25% MORE FREE!*") but it was exactly what every picnic needs to have. Not offensively vinegary, it was mellow but still offered that sturdy "yellow" flavor that you want on hot dogs and burgers. Plus you have to trust a company that's been around since 1852—a year before Vincent Van Gogh was born, as the website points out.
Guldens vs. French's
"I grew up eating this," was the response everyone gave, no matter which brand. This is the Crest vs. Colgate battle of the mustard world. It's tricky to name a winner since you're just going to piss the other group off, and they'll insist you're wrong. "To me, [insert one of them here] is what yellow mustard should taste like. The other one is too metallic, gross, and/or stupid." Sorry to cop out of picking, but this decision was too emotionally strenuous.
Best Organic Yellow
Who knew there was such a competitive market for organic yellow mustards: Annie's, Whole Foods 365, Eden Foods. But of them all, Annie's tasted the most like the cheap-o classic. It wasn't complicated. So if for some reason you need to organicify every aspect of your life, down to the mustard, this won't compromise the iconic taste.
Best Deli-Style
Ba-Tampte (means "tasty" in Yiddish) is what you want on your pastrami on rye. "The very essence of mustard," said one taster. Great texture, a bit spicy, and there's a menorah on the label—can you really argue with that? If the Jewish delicatessen approves, bring it. Plus it was only $1.50 for a 16-ounce barrel.
Best Spicy Brown
There's not much separating this category from the aforementioned "Deli-Style" (alright mustard scholars, come out and correct me, I can take it) but the winner here was Kosciusko. Made by trusted Plochman's, this was one of our favorites overall. It's not hot but still wakens your sinuses—not attacking, just nudging—while still having flavor. The ingredients read: White Distilled Vinegar, #1 Grade Mustard Seed, Water, Salt and Spices. Not sure what #2 mustard seeds taste like, but the #1 is doing the trick. Comes in a small nine-ounce jar.
Best Not-Too-Sweet Honey
If you like your honey mustard more mustard than honey, Gulden's will make you happy. Just a smidge spicy with lots of good texture bits, it's not part of the dessert mustard family.
Best Fancy-Pants Honey
If it comes in a hexagonal-shaped jar and costs $5.29 for eight ounces, it's fancy-pants. Honeycup is super thick, almost pasty. It would never work in a squeeze bottle. Spicy and zippy, it's more than just brown sugar (the first ingredient, by the way) and honey (the fifth). Take a whiff and your nostrils will borderline flare. A little goes a long way.
Most Versatile Honey
Annie's Naturals would be good on nuggets and sandwiches alike. Not oozing with sweetness, it's just an all-around mellow honey mustard.
Most Like Birdseed
If you like to floss after your mustard, you'll love Maille's Old Style moutarde. There's hardly any filler paste between all those seeds. Slightly sweet and super vinegary, the little pebbles pop in your mouth. Good for kickstarting a sandwich.
Best Classic Dijon
Grey Poupon, you've still got it. You're still what I want to pull out of my glove compartment when a polished dude in a Rolls-Royce happens to cruise by. Spicier and more complex-tasting than many other mustards—but still available at non-complex stores like Target—this gets your attention. Maille (prounounced "my") was also a favorite. Slightly less up-your-nose spicy, it's creamy and smooth with a more interesting Dijon-y flavor, if that makes any sense.
Bonus: Grey Poupon Mustard Commercial
Super Bonus: Wayne's World Spoof
Most Sinus-Clearing Mustards
Trader Joe's Dijon deserves a category all its own. The my-nose-just-exploded category. Geez, put a warning label on that. It's like Grey Poupon squared, multiplied by infinity. Also spicy, but somehow more acceptable since it comes in a teeny 3.5-ounce tub: Colman's. My papa always keeps a jar of this in the cupboard—the same jar since I was small. You really just need a dab. He swears it also helps with sore throats and colds. Mister Mustard (look for the mustached chef image and "HOT" in all caps) might be tougher to find, but is also good.
Least Mustardy Substance
Um. You are 18 other things before you are mustard. Made in Vermont, Fox Hollow Farm's Fox Mustard looks like molasses and is equally goopy. But there's a great progression of flavors happening here—from sweet to spicy, back to sweet again. Made with balsamic vinegar and fresh garlic (and were those curry whiffs?) this should never go on a hot dog, but could be nice on ribs or really specific sandwiches.
Most Disappointing Overall
The Whole Foods 365 line is usually solid as far as generic brands go (they won our last olive oil taste test). But, yikes. The dijon tasted like metal. The yellow went way overboard on apple cider vinegar. And did a bee ever go near the honey mustard?
Mustard with the Biggest Cult Following
When we asked for mustard suggestions, the love for Oregon-based Beaver brand came pouring in. "Unbelievable stuff!" .. "I'd just squeeze out a little bit on my finger and eat it raw." .. "The favorite in our house."
More commonly known for dams and buck teeth, the beaver is apparently a successful mustard mascot too. The Beaver brand is easy to find all over the West Coast, and according to Beaver Mustard headquarters, parts of Chicago, Texas, Florida, and South Carolina—but beyond that, not so much. "Beaver has always been easier to find on the West Coast and Inglehoffer on the East," said representative Roger Klingsporn on the phone.
Inglehoffer is made by the same Beaverton Foods company (replace rodent with mustached man mascot) and exactly the same recipe for some flavors: Sweet Hot, and Cream Horseradish.
[Flickr: passiveaggressivenotes]
Beaver mustards are so delicious, they even inspire passive aggressive notes like this one, which had someone so upset, they even used the verb "absconded."
Mustard Doodles
Per taste test tradition, Robyn supplied the artwork. When exposed to mass quantities of things, her hand cannot be controlled.
Did you think that the Black Room reveal is the final trick that the Standard Hotel had up its sleeves? Think again. Behold the Highline Room, a private event space at the level of the adjacent High Line elevated park that has recently begun hosting events. It may not have a hot tub, giant pretzels or panoramic city views, but it does look pretty nice. Word is that all private events will now be held in the Highline Room, and the Boom Boom Room is no longer available for private events, but naturally there are always exceptions to any rule.
· Behold the Standard's Black Bar [~ENY~]
Now that’s a fucking sandwich.
Just got a ham cap and salami from Mike’s Subs out in Dunellen, NJ where they still make a $5 “half” sandwich that’s the size of a small dog. Will you look at how much meat is on this thing? And that’s just half of the half!
Fuck off, $5 Footlong. Your length don’t mean shit if you’re as thick as a noodle. This is how it’s done, pre-capitalist style. When you didn’t stuff it full of lettuce in order to fake it’s girth and maximize profit per unit. This is a vegan’s nightmare.
And yes, all of this meat and cheese and oil will kill me, but so will the RF from the iPhone I’m using to send this post. At least I’m getting a tasty sandwich out of the deal.
People want to believe that Apple wouldn’t take out a popular feature and replace it with nothing, but that’s the plain truth. via daringfireball.net Gruber strikes out against Apple's something something. Reading Steve Jobs' blog, it looks like the love affair is over.
Remember that Star Wars Tauntaun sleeping bag we told you about a while ago, based on The Empire Strikes Back?
It's coming out for real! IN NOVEMBER!
ThinkGeek, which posted it as an April Fool's joke this year, posted this note:
My favorite twitter bot, discovered after a tweet about the moon, has to be @ObiWanKenobi_. Note the trailing underscore, very important. The underscoreless guy isn't any fun at all.
Alex posts his thoughts on SF.
Last Friday I almost linked to the following, but it seemed kinda random and without a point, but now I think since we're discussing the subject, here it is:
And everyone did admit there was a problem, at least with trash. Other problems cited included the bathrooms, hipsters, Mexicans, irrigation, wind, people who don't own property next to the park, Critical Mass, politicians and, despite all these apparent defects, too many people. And that, friends, is the essential irony. For a park that is "dying," it is quite popular! —Comedy of the Commons: Dolores Park
Amber and I recently bought a place very nearly in the middle of SF after spending a year in The Sunset in a single family home. We looked at the cost of renting versus owning and of course the "paint my own walls" factor and decided to buy.
So here we are in nearly the middle of the city with the poop of indeterminate origin, the garbage, the terrible city services (our Mayor twittered about how to get rid of the tabloid newspaper that makes up a large part of that garbage flying around the streets), and DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE MEXICANS.
Here's another funny quote from something on a real-estate blog: "If ever I miss San Francisco, I will take a dump on my own doorstep and write myself a parking ticket." For a few months after we bought I couldn't go to real-estate blogs for fear of seeing something horrible like prices had fallen even further. I can go now that rates are up (and prices too!).
House Type as Object exhibition and pop-up shop. October 20th, 6-8pm.
Type Directors Club
347 West 36 Street, Suite 603
New York, NY.
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Republican former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie brushed off the new Fairleigh Dickinson poll that showed Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine taking a one-point lead, after having trailed Christie during the whole general election season.
"Did anybody think I was going to win this by 10? Raise your hand if you thought it was going to happen," said Christie. Nobody raised their hands.
"We're in a dog fight in the last four weeks in New Jersey as the Republican candidate for governor. Who would have predicted that?" Christie said sarcastically. "All I can tell you is this: 45 polls, 44 of them we've been ahead. We're still ahead in every other public poll except the FDU poll."
It should be noted that when Christie referred to 45 polls, he meant all the polls this whole year (and maybe even going back further). But as a general rule in politics -- and especially in New Jersey -- it doesn't matter where you are in January, but where you are in October and November.
Maya Lin’s original competition submission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Architectural drawings and a one page written summary. It was chosen from 1,421 entries submitted.
Japanese saran wrap. There are a million reasons to check out the incredible Tortoise General Store, online or in person in Venice, California, but no matter how much you fall in love with the breathtaking Onda pottery or equally breathtaking Sori Yanagi-designed cookware, don't forget the saran wrap. There's nothing else like it. As I was walking through the shop yesterday during a visit to LA, the gracious owner, Keiko Shinomoto, who runs Tortise with her equally gracious husband Taku, pointed out the wrap as I was swooning over all the other wonderful stuff there. Keiko was right. One of the (many, many) things that surprised me while working this past spring in restaurants in Japan was that chefs there used the exact same saran wrap as regular civilians. Here in America, by comparison, all the professional kitchens I've been in use industrial-sized rolls of clear film. It's no accident: Everyday Japanese saran wrap is thicker than the stuff in America, and somehow keeps foods fresher. In fact, I usually secret a few rolls in my luggage whenever I return from Japan. (I can't believe I'm admitting this in public.)
Okay, moving on from the saran wrap (!), the Yanagi cookware is particularly inspired, beautifully designed and perfectly functional. And for all you hot pot fans: Tortise also carries a nice hot pot from Iga, Japan, where some of the best earthenware vessels are hand-formed. I guess you can tell I was really delighted to discover this tasteful shop. Here are a few pictures of things I found there:
Helsinki Monopoly board and map, originally uploaded by hugovk.
Blind justice, originally uploaded by moleitau.
This headpiece, from Paris based Maison Michel, went on sale on Net-a-Porter this morning.
The site suggests pairing "this opulent accessory with your favorite LBD to bring bygone beauty to a modern cut." We suggest:
1. Wearing it as a necklace and perhaps layering with other pearls in homage to McQueen's sea theme, or The Little Mermaid.
2. Double wrapping it around your ankle to achieve some of that ankle/shoe fringe we've seen - and loved - on the Spring/Summer 2010 runways.
3. Putting your $2,195 toward a pair of Brian Atwoods and this adorable ombre Miu Miu clutch. In total, you'll spend an extra couple of hundred, but hey, it's worth it.
4. Jumping for joy because the recession must be over.
Sponsored Topics: Paris - Alexander McQueen - Little Mermaid - France - Ile-de-France
Scientists discovered that it's likely that some individuals with high testosterone actually perceive other people's anger as a reward. Researchers tested the subjects' testosterone levels and assigned them "learning tasks" where images of faces were subliminally flashed in response to their performance. Participants who had higher testosterone levels responded better to angry faces than to neutral ones, even though the faces were on screen too briefly to identify. Michelle Wirth, who led the study, explained how this can possibly be correlated to other testing methods:
"Better learning of a task associated with anger faces indicates that the anger faces were rewarding, as in a rat that learns to press a lever in order to receive a tasty treat. In that sense, anger faces seemed to be rewarding for high-testosterone people, but aversive for low-testosterone people."So the next time it seems like that person is trying to piss you off, reward them with a knuckle sandwich.
Tags: psychology science
Or: There Is No Replacement for Creator Codes in Snow Leopard
Ignore, for the moment, the specific technical details of how creator codes work (or, perhaps better put, worked). What matters is the behavior they enabled, which was the ability for documents of the same type to open in different applications by default. A very common case: HTML files. For things like readmes and other files downloaded from the web intended to be read as rendered HTML content, yes, I want them to open in my web browser by default. But for “.html” files I’ve created myself, I want them to open in my text editor by default. That used to work; now, in Snow Leopard, it does not.
Launch Services is the subsystem of Mac OS X that determines which application will open a file by default. What I mean by “by default” is that you, the user, indicate that you want to open a file, without directly specifying which app you want it to open in. Most commonly, double-clicking a file in the Finder opens the document in its default handler.
Starting in Snow Leopard, these default file bindings are determined entirely by file name extensions; HFS+ creator codes, if present, are now ignored. The only way in Snow Leopard to set a document to open with an app other than the one that claims ownership of that document’s file name extension is to use the Finder’s Get Info window to make the assignment manually. Behind the scenes, this adds a “usro” resource to the document’s resource fork, the contents of which resource are not the app’s bundle identifier (e.g. “com.apple.TextEdit”) but rather a hard-coded string with the path to the app itself (e.g. “/Applications/TextEdit.app”).
That’s it — file name extensions and these “usro” resources are the only remaining ways to bind a file to an application. And, as Chris Suter documents in this piece on his weblog, the only way to add such a resource to a file is by way of a private Launch Services API. Users can do it manually using the Finder’s Get Info window, but there is no supported public API developers can use to do this in third-party software (cf. this thread on Apple’s Cocoa-Dev mailing list from two weeks ago).
Now, as for the actual technical details of type and creator codes, there’s no question that they’re dated. (Not as dated as file name extensions, though.) They date all the way back to the original Macintosh in 1984, a machine with 128 kilobytes of RAM which used 400 kilobyte floppy disks for storage. Every byte was precious, so type and creator codes (along with numerous other aspects of the original Mac OS) were implemented with concise but cryptic four-byte codes (“OSTypes”). As an aid to human readability, the four-byte codes were typically rendered as four-character MacRoman-encoded strings. Many of these strings are naturally mnemonic: The type code for a plain text file is “TEXT”, the type code for an application is “APPL”. I’ll bet you can guess the type code for JPEG files. Application creator codes were often cute: the Finder’s creator code is “MACS”; BBEdit, created by Rich Siegel, has the creator code “R*ch”.
But there’s only so much you can do with four bytes. There’s no good reason today to cram everything into four-byte codes (nor any good reason to use a single-byte text encoding for strings). Mac OS X 10.0 introduced a superior way to uniquely identify applications: bundle identifiers. Bundle identifiers like “com.apple.Safari” and “com.apple.iTunes” are more expressive, informative, and obvious than creator codes like “sfri” and “hook”.
So as John Siracusa pointed out in his “Metadata Madness” piece, there is no need for a new “replacement” for creator codes. The replacement is the bundle identifier, and it has been here since 2001. Every Mac app already has a unique bundle identifier. What is missing, though, is any supported way to associate a bundle identifier with an individual file to indicate which app created the file.
In the old type/creator code system, files were assigned to applications on an individual basis. In Snow Leopard, Launch Services only considers the file’s type, the type comes from the file name extension, and default bindings can only be managed between types and apps, rather than individual files and apps.
Snow Leopard, effectively, gives us the file-to-application binding policy of Windows 3.0.
Interpolation Regarding Uniform Type Identifiers and Purported Claims That They ‘Fix’ Creator Codes
Each time I’ve linked to coverage elsewhere regarding Snow Leopard’s disavowal of creator codes, a few readers have kindly emailed me links to Daniel Eran Dilger’s piece on the topic, entitled “Inside Snow Leopard’s UTI: Apple fixes the Creator Code”, assuming that the article proves what it claims. It does not. I off-handedly referred to it as “blathering” last week, prompting several readers to ask why I’d say such a thing.
So, OK, I’ll bite.
The title of the piece claims “Apple fixes the Creator Code”. Then in the first paragraph:
Instead, Apple has invented a superior alternative for the old Creator Code in order to support a variety of new features. Here’s why, and what the new Uniform Type Identifiers offer.
That sounds interesting, especially since my understanding of UTIs was that they do not in any way replace the functionality of creator codes.
Then come 2,900 words, none of which explain what was promised in the headline and first paragraph.
Then comes the penultimate paragraph, where Dilger writes:
Users who miss being able to automatically open a file using the app that originally created it can pester their app’s developer to get on the ball with UTI. Any application that has been updated since 2005’s Tiger, but which does not yet support UTI, has opted not to support an important feature of the Mac platform.
This is simply flat-out wrong. There is nothing any developer can do, with UTIs or with any other supported technology, to restore the functionality of creator codes in Snow Leopard. It’s just wrong. UTIs indicate a file’s type, not the application in which it should open by default. Furthermore, developers can’t even directly assign UTIs to files. UTIs are derived from file name extensions.
And then we come to the very last paragraph:
Everyone else, including many of us who didn’t ever understand why the system launched files using a specific app rather than the one we had defined for that given file type, can continue using the Finder’s Open With menu, drag and drop app launching, or set a permanent per-item default “creator” app for opening a selection of documents by using the Get Info panel.
So, after claiming at the outset that Apple has “fixed” creator codes by “inventing a superior alternative”, followed by 3,000 words of muddled technical information regarding a technology that is unrelated to binding files to applications, Dilger admits that there is no replacement for creator codes in Snow Leopard, but it’s good news anyway because he never liked the previous behavior in the first place. His closing paragraph is technically accurate, but is completely at odds with the article’s title and opening premise — unless he meant that Apple has “fixed” creator codes in the same sense that one “fixes” a dog.
People want to believe that Apple wouldn’t take out a popular feature and replace it with nothing, but that’s the plain truth.
End of Interpolation, Back to the Main Point, Which, as a Gentle Post-Interpolation Reminder, Left Off With a Snide Remark About Snow Leopard’s File-to-Application Binding Policy Being Effectively the Same as That of Windows 3.0
Take a step back and consider that the term creator code itself shows just how different things are today. When the Mac was created, nearly all documents were proprietary binary file formats. The only app that could read MacWrite files was MacWrite, etc. Even when apps could read other apps’ file formats, they typically did so only through an import/export process. You could, say, import a Word document into ClarisWorks, but not by opening the file directly and writing back to it.
Today, on the other hand, many of the files we work with use common, open file formats: text files, JPEG and PNG graphics, MP3 audio, MP4 video, etc. When you double-clicked a MacPaint file in 1985, there was no question which app you wanted to open it: MacPaint. Today, though, there might be a dozen apps on your system that can open a JavaScript source code text file or an MP3 audio file. “The app that created it” can no longer be assumed to be the answer to the question “Which app would you prefer to open this file with by default?”
The situation is therefore far more complex today. One way Apple has dealt with this complexity is with the fairly-recent addition of the “Open With…” contextual menu in the Finder, which shows a list of apps that claim to be able to open files of the selected item’s type. And there’s always drag-and-drop.
The creator code long ago stopped meaning “the app that created the file”, and instead meant “the app this file should open with by default”. What matters is that the feature is now gone, not what it was called or what a hypothetical actual replacement in the future would be called.
And to be clear, the new binding policy in Snow Leopard is popular with many users. If you really want all files of the same type to open in the same app by default, then a system based exclusively on file name extensions works. Apple could have replaced creator codes with something superior, based on bundle identifiers, but they did not. And even if they plan to do so in the future,1 there is no good reason for dropping creator code support from Launch Services now, before the replacement arrives. The simple truth is that many people — including, obviously, at Apple — prefer binding files to applications exclusively through file name extensions.
“Make it a preference” is often (if not usually) the wrong way to solve a problem, but a case like this, where many people prefer/expect it one way and many prefer/expect it the other, is exactly the sort of situation that calls for a preference setting.
I could go on and rant about the inherent inelegance of storing two essential pieces of a file’s metadata, name and type, in a single field — shackling what Apple proclaims to be “the world’s most advanced operating system” to a metadata limitation of MS-DOS from 1981 — but there’s no use crying over spilled milk.
Don’t hold your breath. ↩
Back at the introduction of iPhone SDK 3.0 (check out the video in the Apple Keynotes podcast), Scott Forstall demo’ed Map Kit, showing how to display locations in with the attractive Maps GUI. He added that turn-by-turn apps would be permitted, with one proviso: “bring your own maps”.
So… what does that really entail and mean?
Well, back up and look at what the iPhone provides. Core Location uses whatever location technologies are available to a device — Skyhook’s wifi positioning system, cell tower triangulation, and/or GPS — to determine your location. Depending on your hardware, you may also get a course (which indicates a direction of travel) and on iPhone 3GS you can get a heading from the compass, indicating the orientation of the device.
Map Kit, on the other hand, is responsible for displaying location data. Given a location to center on and a zoom level, you can show maps of the location, and decorate the map with annotations (often displayed as push-pins) that represent points of interest on the map.
So what’s missing? The ability to get any kind of location data other than the user’s current position. You can show the user on the map, but there’s little in Core Location or Map Kit that relates the location to what’s around it. Map Kit does provide “reverse geolocation”, so you can get some region information for a point (city, state, country for sure, maybe street if you have a good location). But even if you see streets on your map view, there’s nothing in the provided APIs to tell you what or where those streets are, what’s located on them, or how to move about them.
This is what “bring your own maps” means. Simple iPhone apps might be able to put a bunch of Lat/Lng pairs on a map from some kind of data source (like a database of where you’ve sent tweets from), but can’t really do anything with that data other than display it. Nothing in the provided APIs lets you, say, search for all the Apple Stores in Michigan, or get directions to one of them.
The point of “bring your own maps” was made again in the WWDC Map Kits presentation, noting that there are many map services out there. And this is true. Programmable Web has a nice list of dozens of online geolocation, mapping, and other location services. You just need to pick one, incorporate it into your application, and do whatever logic you’re going to do with the data you receive from it: show points of interest on a map, calculate routes, etc.
I’ve been working on prototyping a geo-app and it turns out that bringing your own maps is a bigger problem than you might think. As an end user, there’s a glut of online map sites to freely play with. But using this data in an iPhone application is quite another story.
The major road blocks come from terms-of-service limitations:
- The iPhone SDK TOS forbids using any interpreted language, so SDKs that use server-side languages like Java, PHP, etc. are off-limits.
- Many of the mapping sites put the majority of their work into a JavaScript API, but again, you can’t run JavaScript by itself in an iPhone application (even though this is a much-touted form of development on the Mac, as seen in Dashboard widgets and Quartz Composer).
- As an upshot of the previous two points, you generally need to find a map service that offers data via a web service, or a similar network protocol. It’s possible that a C or C++ API could be incorporated into a native iPhone app, depending on what libraries it uses (stdio and BSD sockets already being present on the iPhone).
- Most map providers explicitly prohibit commercial use, at least at their free level of service (which only makes sense… why would they pay to license map data and let someone else make money off it?) Some allow commercial use in specific web-centric scenarios, such as hosting Google Maps on a site that is supported by advertising.
- Many providers prohibit initiating a search from a sensor-determined location, ie, the GPS-identified current location, which obviates the whole point of many potential iPhone location-based apps.
- Some providers explicitly prohibit incorporating their mapping data with other providers’. Since Google’s tiles are the visuals for Map Kit, you can’t incorporate data from Bing’s map service into an
MKMapView.So, I spent last night going over the Terms of Service from various providers. Here are the good and bad points (from the POV of developing a paid iPhone app) from each:
- Google Maps (FAQ, terms)
- Good: Commercial use OK if freely available (presumably an ad-supported free app would qualify?). Non-web apps specifically permitted (if free).
- Bad: Can’t use in paid app. HTTP API limited (doesn’t do directions, though this is the top feature request). “Maps Data” API still driven by creation/manipulation of maps, not geo-data by itself. No real-time guidance (10.9.a). Only to be used for displaying Google maps (10.12)
- Yahoo! Maps (terms)
- Good: Free, even for some commercial uses. REST web service.
- Bad: Can’t use with GPS data (1.f.vi), can’t use for anything other than showing Yahoo! maps (1.f.ix).
- MapQuest (terms)
- Good: Most (all?) functionality available via HTTP/XML.
- Bad: Free access is only for evaluation (2.4.b). Not clear if starting your search from a GPS position is prohibited. See if you can make sense of this proviso from section 3, because I can’t:
“[You may not...] derive results from the Service based on sensor-derived location data or information or input in the form of coordinate data, provided that a coordinate location or location derived by a single sensor, including without limitation a sensor incorporated into, connected to or in communication with any mobile device or system, may be used solely as an origin or destination in deriving a map or direction;”
- Navteq (terms)
- Good: Multiple web services
- Bad: 30-day trial (10K sessions or 10K transactions), then must pay for license. Haven’t yet found the TOS for commercial licensees (the evaluation terms are fairly short, and of course preclude use in commercial apps)
- Teleatlas (terms)
- Good: N/A.
- Bad: C#, VB, and Java only.
- Bing Maps Web Services (terms)
- Good: Free terms apparently prohibit only the routing of multiple GPS-located objects (but also prohibit presenting “individual maneuvers” of a route sync’ed to user’s GPS-located position).
- Bad: Dev Kit for web services requires downloading an .exe (uh, no). Programming reference is all in terms of CLR langauges (C#, VB, J#, etc.) [except possibly for C++ ?]. No integrating with other mapping platforms.
- OpenStreetMap
- Good: N/A.
- Bad: No API. Not even clear how you restrict a search to a geographic area. Web results border on useless (no hits for “subway in grand rapids” or “subway 49525″)
Some of these clearly cannot work in an iPhone application, most notably those that that are built around languages that don’t exist and/or are forbidden on the iPhone (sure, you can probably statically compile a scripting language, but is that really going to be easier than just finding a web service you can call from Obj-C?). Of those that remain, the big question is whether enough of the deal-killers go away with commercial licensing. For example, if you can find points-of-interest or routes with Bing, but can’t put them on a Google Map, then Bing is probably out of the running.
To top it all off, there’s a question of financial viability. Your map licensing model probably needs to match your app’s pay model. If you’re going to charge for your app, you need to make sure the location service you license is fully paid up for as long as your app may be in use out in the field (which is indefinite). If the map service is a recurring fee, maybe you get around this by selling to the user as the app plus n months or years of service, then fund the future use of the app with in-app purchase. Another option if the map service requires periodic payment is to give the app away free, support it with advertising, and use recurring ad revenues to pay the mapping bills. This clearly has both merits and hazards, to say nothing of the dubious prospect of serving up tiny little hard-to-see Google ads if your app is meant to be used in a moving vehicle.
A final point: with so many of the TOSes written with the expectation that they’ll be used in webapps, maybe that’s an equally valid way to go for some applications. After all, iPhone 3.0 provides location awareness in Safari, so you could write a web app that figures out where it is when run on an iPhone.
"I guess Doug believes about hot dogs what Mark Twain wrote about fences. Good hot dogs make good neighbors."
Since Robyn had never been to Chicago before our recent visit, I decided she had to experience the deservedly much heralded Hot Doug's, the self-described encased meats emporium and sausage superstore. When we arrived, already at least partly sated and fortified by the serious barbecue we practically inhaled at Honey1 BBQ, the line was already past the church that is two doors down from Hot Doug's.
I've always found the outside line at Hot Doug's to be an integral part of the Hot Doug's experience (especially on Fridays and Saturdays when Doug Sohn serves his duck fat fries). Why?
Because the queue is filled with an interesting assortment of characters. Hot dog-loving Chicagoans who know how delicious Doug's dogs and duck fat fries are; serious eaters of all ages from out of town who've heard they cannot go to Chicago and not go to Hot Doug's; and a smattering of food professionals, chefs, and food writers there to see just what the fuss is all about.
And everybody is friendly and chatty to boot, so waiting in the Hot Doug's line just doesn't seem like torture, though I have to admit that the stop at Honey1 BBQ helped as well.
It took us about half an hour to make it inside to the front of the line. That's when serious eaters get their first glimpse of Doug himself, who is always there taking orders and money. Doug is the only one who I have ever seen taking orders at Hot Doug's, which is really cool because he makes the whole experience personal and memorable. He is incredibly friendly and efficient, genuinely helpful, and manages to move the line along without being a jerk.
There were four of us, including one non-meat eater, so we ordered two regular hot dogs (one steamed and one grilled), an Atomic Bomb (a damn spicy pork sausage with blood orange mustard and habanero-jack cheese), a fancypants Foie Gras and Sauternes Duck Sausage (with truffle aioli), an order of the bagel dogs and tater tots, and of course some duck fat fries. Were they worth the wait?
Oh yes, they were.
The regular Chicago dogs were just really good Chicago hot dogs augmented by caramelized onions, which turns out to be an inspired addition to the Chicago hot dog condiment canon. I like the extra color and slight crunch supplied by the grilled hot dogs, but the steamed one is a more tender dog.
The Atomic Bomb ($7.50) was really, really, really hot (that's hot to the third power) courtesy of the habanero-jack cheese and the red pepper in the damn spicy pork sausage. It was too hot for me, but the hot food freaks at the table loved it.
The Foie Gras Dog ($9) has creamy chunks of foie gras strewn on top. It's actually a well thought-out and constructed (and obscenely rich) dish that happens to be in hot dog form. When the Chicago City Council banned foie gras in 2006, Doug was actually the first restaurant fined for violating the ordinance.
The bagel dog bites were just fine, as were the tater tots, but the duck fat fries were sublime. They were more than just ducky.
The vegetarian dog was, well, much appreciated by the vegetarian with us.
We got to taste one more fancypants hot dog, the fabulous and highly recommended smoked Portuguese linguica ($7.50) with the saffron rouille and 12-month Manchego cheese, thanks to our chef neighbor in line who sat at the table next to us.
To me that's what eating at Hot Doug's is all about--the vibe that Doug himself creates. I guess Doug believes about hot dogs what Mark Twain wrote about fences. Good hot dogs make good neighbors.
Hot Doug's
3324 N. California Avenue, Chicago IL 60618 (map)
773-279-9550
This morning, Topps Company gave collectors a full sneak peek into the Chris Speakman Propoganda-style inserts from the upcoming 2009 Topps Updates & Highlights.
Topps’ Online Store is selling limited-edition screen prints numbered to 200. Along with being able buy the prints, you can actually get a preview of the cards as 29 have been listed on their site.
The artwork measures 17″ x 21″ and is printed on high-quality, 100% acid-free archival paper. Each print is $60 dollars and is signed and numbered by Speakman.
You can check out the full gallery HERE.
Evan Narcisse is worried:One would hope that Wayans' ambition isn't exceeding his grasp. I pray that it's not ego driving this move. Despite how it may look from the work they produce, I always got the sense that the Wayans Bros. as a collective understood their comedic roots. In Living Color had some cutting satire in its time. (Though as I understand it, Marlon wasn't necessarily part of that creative engine.) You could even trace a sketchy line from more earnest fare like the Jeffersons and 227 forward to that stupid WB sitcom Shawn and Marlon starred in in the '90s. The throughline that connects their project is a stubborn insistence on visibility. They make movies that make money and, while that may seem strictly mercenary, the cold truth in Hollywood is that profitability is the only way you get a spot onscreen or get a producing credit. Hell, I'd even call it brilliantly subversive if wince-inducing crap like White Chicks and Little Man turn out to be the reason the Tinseltown movers and shakers greenlight the project and Wayans as Pryor. And as I sit here and type this, I can't think of any actor who could play Pryor. That's ironic when you consider scads of comedians who've appropriated--consciously or not--Pryor's tics and techniques. Could any of them breathe life into a portrayal of the man himself...I'd like to have seen Eddie give it a shot.
Anyway, this gives us an opportunity to revel in the glory of Live On The Sunset Trip. Thank God they got prisons. Heh.
I favorited a YouTube video: As Conde Nast shuts down more magazines, publishers work to find a digital solution to their future.
I can't believed I've lived the last year without watching this video.
Damn you, internet, for failing me yet again. My quality of life could have been vastly improved.
Via David Jacobs comes news of this hidden pref for OS X users: single-application mode.
That's right, the original single-application mode in Mac OS X Public Beta is still with us. Although it was always intended as a simple option for people who are not computer experts, it turns out to be an interesting option for the power user.
The tidbits article linked above was written by Lewis Butler.
Lewis Butler is a longtime Unix system admin, postmaster and Mac geek. He is a frequent contributor to a large number of mailing lists under his "LuKreme" alias.
You don't say...
We agreed that a lot of what we then considered "working hard" was actually "freaking out". Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn't have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn't -- and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.
I would likely give the same advice, but I wonder if it's actually true. Perhaps working hard/freaking out was exactly what was needed at the time, whether or not it seems efficient or correct in retrospect. You need to travel that road so you can find a better way the second time around.
Tags: business Caterina Fake working
We agreed that a lot of what we then considered "working hard" was actually "freaking out". Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn't have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn't -- and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.
I would likely give the same advice, but I wonder if it's actually true. Perhaps working hard/freaking out was exactly what was needed at the time, whether or not it seems efficient or correct in retrospect. You need to travel that road so you can find a better way the second time around.
Tags: business Caterina Fake working
Old Snake appears to be wearing the gauntlets of Serpentor (in black rather than Serpentor's dark green). This is contrary to the series' production bible, which notes that his bare fingers should be visible through torn gloves, and that his skin is scaly, like that of a real snake (the animation of this Transformers episode, as with a good half of season 3 episodes, is not stellar, so this costume detail may be simple misinterpretation). Due to all of the GI Joe series being connected in one continuity line, It is possible for this to be Cobra Commander after the events of Sigma6 which took place in 2006 as did Transformers season 3 and the series GI Joe: Extreme. via en.wikipedia.org The one woman in the world who wanted to watch GI Joe (the Wayans' version) two nights in a row? I married her. Here's a non sequitor from wikipedia. So hello, typepad brings you apple, baseball, baseball, baseball, baseball and GI Joe. This is a blog written by a seven-year-old. Time to go, it's the scene where Scarlett jumps out of a helicopter and fires the laser crossbow.
The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome opened in April of 1982. Technically, it was "inflated." As anyone who has ever exited the Metrodome knows, the facility is actually pressurized by air, like a hot air balloon. via www.theawl.com After tonight's (excellent!) game, the Metrodome lives to "play ball" again. Abe Sauer's notes on the "inflated" venue are worth your time this evening.
Michelle just finished a triathlon. I blogged, twittered, and foursquared something AT THE SAME TIME.
Flush with their $700B in bailouts from taxpayer dollars, are your banks showing you the love?
Quite the contrary. Banks continue to increase their non-interest fees and charges as a way to mitigate the huge investment and loan fees suffered as a result of the financial crisis and by all indications this is unlikely to change any time soon, with or without an economic recovery.
Banks like to point out that these charges are completely avoidable as long as you pay bills on time and don’t spend any money that you don’t have. Whether you take the banks at their word or not, there are indeed ways to avoid fees such as
unnecessary service charges, insufficient funds (NSF) and overdraft charges, late payment fees or getting your interest rates raised.With new regulations looming in Congress, America’s financial institutions are paying close attention to squeezing every dime onto their bottom lines, so you need to pay attention too.
So when was the last time a $1.25 espresso actually cost you almost more than $100 when it triggered a cascade of bounced payments?
A new study by Bankrate.com shows banks are continuing to boost bottom lines at your expense by racking up record fees and charges—before new Federal Reserve rules, expected by year’s end, force them to reduce or eliminate such penalties.
Every time you bounce a check, overdraw with a debit card, dip under a minimum balance, or use another institution’s ATM, banks clean up. The cost of careless banking has risen to an all time high. Based on a survey conducted in August, Bankrate found that, compared to last year:
· NSF charges on bounced checks increased 2.1% to an average of $29.58.
· Tiered overdrafts, which increase charges at the second or fifth bounce over 12 months, now average $33.88 and $36.19. (Some banks admit to processing the largest of multiple payments first to rack up more charges.)
· ATM surcharges rose 12.6% to an average of $2.22. (Banks increasing the fee outnumbered those reducing 7-to-1.)
· Monthly service fees for interest bearing accounts were up 5% to a record average of $12.55.
· On a positive note, Bankrate found that 76% of non-interest bearing accounts are now free of monthly service charges or minimum balances.
“Take steps to avoid fees,” suggests Bankrate senior financial analyst Greg McBride. “Note any fees and balance requirements of your account, request a link between your checking and savings accounts, and keep track of the available account balance so that your money stays your own.”
The FDIC calculates banks will earn as much as $43.6B from non-interest income related to deposit accounts in 2009, which apparently doesn’t even include non-network ATM surcharges. According to economic research firm Moebs Services, 44.5% of banks and credit unions earn more on non-interest revenue such as fees than on interest income.
Bankrate’s Laura Bruce suggests six tips to avoid getting stung by fees:
1. Visit bank websites to investigate your options
2. Choose a checking plan that has only the features you need
3. Know your balance and don’t risk a bounce
4. Plan for cash needs and only draw cash from your bank’s ATM
5. Consider interest checking only if it’s high-yield and you can maintain the required minimum or meet other requirements such as direct deposits
6. If necessary, connect checking to overdraft protection with a savings account or credit card. (Otherwise, be sure to tell your bank to turn off automatic overdraft protection on you ATM and debit card transactions).
Banks claim that mechanisms such as clearing checks against insufficient funds amount to a service rendered—and indeed, it’s only about 25% of Americans who “take advantage” of these services. On the other hand, the FDIC characterizes such charges as unregulated lending that often costs consumers the equivalent of thousands of points of annualized interest. On that basis, even the typical interest charged by payday lenders pales in comparison.
Last month, a number of major banks, including Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America already promised to scale back their assessments for overdrafts, especially when the shortfall is less than $5 or $10. But as one Daily Mail writer quipped when UK banks finally lowered their rates last year (from overdraft charges as high as £38), “If charges are fair, then why lower them?”
Steve Barth blogs about work, play, society and politics at Reflexions.
Congratulations to the Minnesota Twins for winning the AL Central in what can only be described as dramatic fashion.
I'll admit it - I was rooting for a stadium tonight.
In game 163 of the 2009 season, I wanted to see the Metrodome win.
And I wanted to see ex-Met and clever manager Ron Gardenhire get into another playoffs. It's almost like the Mets are in, except not.
The Twins finally prevailed 6-5 in 12 innings in the best game I saw all year.
So lets go Metrodome. Take it to the Spankees tomorrow! Do it for Shea.
Palm made some announcements yesterday, so I suppose I ought to post a follow-up to my post about the nightmare of dealing with their App Catalog submission process.
After I posted that, it really made the rounds. I was surprised at how much press it got so quickly. So, with a PR disaster like that, you'd think the first thing Palm would do would be to finally post my apps, right? Well, they still haven't. Even though they stated their intention of posting my two applications in their app catalog way back in early July, neither the intervening months, nor the recent bad press, has caused them to actually post them.
Obviously I'm more concerned about the bigger picture: I want Palm to make it easy for all developers to get their software into the hands of anyone who wants it, without Palm being a roadblock between them.
But still, if you were Palm, wouldn't your first step be to actually resolve the problem for the guy who brought your broken system to the attention of the press? I guess they don't see it that way.
One of the new guys at Palm twitted at me that he wanted to talk on the phone about this stuff, and I replied, "What more is there to say? Just post my apps already." Apparently the peanut gallery thinks that was "rude", but after having spent three months, thirty-ish emails, and the aforementioned 160-line blog post explaining my position, I don't think they really require clarification on where I'm coming from. Seriously, have I been unclear?
The only conversation I'm really interested in having about this at this point is one that ends with them saying, "Hey, your apps are in the app catalog now." And you know, a one-line email saying that would do just fine. We don't have to do that on the phone.
Anyway, yesterday they made an announcement. Here's their press release and here's their attempt to explain what the press release says in English.
I found even the second link somewhat confusing, but as far as I can decipher, what it says is this: starting in December, developers will have these three options:
- Sell or give away your app through Palm's App Catalog, after Palm has reviewed, nitpicked and finally approved your app, and after you have paid $99 per year and $50 per application. Palm keeps 30% of every sale.
- Sell or give away your app through some kind of "second-class-citizen" app catalog that Palm intends to create, without Palm reviewing your app first. You still have to pay $99, and Palm still keeps 30% of every sale, but you don't have to pay $50 per app.
- If your app uses one of the recognized open source licenses (BSD, GPL, etc.) then Palm will let you give away your app in that "second-class-citizen" app catalog without paying for the privilege.
We still really have no idea what this second-class-citizen app catalog will look like, since they say it won't exist for two to three months. That means it doesn't help those of us who have working apps today that we would like to get into the hands of our users today, but it's a step in the right direction, assuming that getting things into the second-class-citizen catalog is a whole lot easier than getting it into the "real" catalog has been so far. (It won't surprise you to learn that based on their past behavior, I don't think that's a particularly likely assumption. But we'll see.)
But this is all needlessly complicated.
Here's what I want:
- A developer makes the executable of their application available on their own web site.
- A user visits the developer's web site via the web browser on their phone, and clicks on the link.
- A dialog box asks, "Are you sure you want to do this crazy thing?"
- The application installs. Done.
That's how it worked on PalmOS. That's how it works on desktop computers! Anything more complicated than that is just stupid.
Surprising good news.
What was the most watched show in the history of cable? Last night’s Vikings/Packers game: http://bit.ly/1JZGiW
"Life-size jellybean children and butterflies," said my friend while we walked past The National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. My first thought: Huh? And then I looked up to see that he was just reading off the banner outside the museum.
We didn't go in the museum to witness the jellybean children for ourselves, but I found this photo from Flickr user khaz to get a closer look at the installation by artist Sandy Skoglund. There are mirrors on both sides to create the illusion of neverending jellybean children whose heads are twisted 180°. They just go on. Forever. (Skoglund also made jellybean adults in her photograph Shimmering Madness viewable at sandyskoglund.com.)
Related
Amazing Chewing Gum Art
Creative Candy Photography
<a href="http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/02/kathryn-parker-almanas-pretty-food-autopsy-photography.html'>Food Autopsy Photos by Kathryn Parker Almanas</a></p>
We've tweaked our "Share" feature to make it even easier to embed a TEDTalk in your WordPress blog. Below the video window, for any talk on the site, click the red "Share" button, and notice the new feature: an embed code just for WordPress:
For more details -- though not too many more, because it's very easy -- visit the WordPress support page.
I need to update Modern::Perl. I waited until the release of Perl 5.10.1. I'm going to add autodie as a dependency (but not enable it; that's for you to decide to use). I'm also going to load IO::Handle, per Yuval's suggestion in Are Filehandles Objects?.
Note that perl5i does this.
These are all simple and obvious changes. I've blocked on a larger change, related to a simple philosophical user interface question for the module:
What happens when what's "modern" changes?Adding an installation requirement and loading two new modules won't hurt anything. It won't change any existing code. There are no compatibility concerns.
Future changes might have compatibility concerns. If you
use Modern::Perl;by itself, you're taking a slight risk that you may have to revisit existing code after an upgrade. What's modern in August 2009 might not be as modern in August 2010 and certainly won't be modern in August 2019.Elliot Shank wrote in A reasonable approach for Modern::Perl the example code:
use Modern::Perl as_of => '2009-06-23';What do you think?
I'd like to avoid complex date parsing where possible. I've also considered changing M::P version numbers to dates like
2009.10.06. The unification is tempting and the implementation is, at worst, of only modest difficulty.What do you think?
(One other requested change is to enable
no Modern::Perl;. I'm considering the best way to do so.)
Monogamy can be such a grind, right? Cheating is tough too, though. There’s that terrifying halo of guilt that radiates around you after the act. It serves as both repellent and aphrodisiac, causing one’s partner to inch ever-closer to you after a tryst. Then there’s a particular upswing from the adrenaline. What a fool you were to put such a thing at risk! After all that comes the slow-boiling and consuming resentment towards your partner, the one who has robbed you of spontaneity and anonymity. You know what helps? A sudden trip and/or a new hairdo.
§ Let us first turn to Betty’s magnificent make over. Sophia Lauren? Anita Ekberg circa 1963? I think we can narrow the prototype down to Brigitte Bardot, actually, in her middle Euro sex kitten period. (That’s long before the outspoken racist period.) In a 1961 profile of the then-26-year-old actress, Life magazine tried to pinpoint what made Bardot’s on and off screen persona so appealing to both mass audiences and the European intelligentsia:
Roger Vadim, Brigitte’s first husband, close friend and often director, thinks he knows. Vadim says, “Women are passing through a terrible crisis. Brigitte symbolizes their strivings for equality in conduct with men. That is why her real fans are not men, as some think but women.”
Novelist Marguerite Duras, who wrote Hiroshima Mon Amour, says the opposite. “Bardot represents the unexpressed desires of males for infidelity,” she argues. “Many women do not like Brigette. They never look her in the face. They look sideways, shrinking away. They see in her disaster.”Well. By golly, as Connie would exclaim.
§ Ah, Connie. Here is a little something from his 1957 autobiography, “Be My Guest,” about the ethos of the Hilton brand in far-off lands. Hilton wrote that each of his international hotels was “a little America,” a “laboratory” where foreign guests could “inspect America and its ways at their leisure.” Seems like a certain American couple’s idea of leisure is being away from America.
§ Did you catch the quick Ogilvy reference this week’s episode? (I’ve taken to chanting Oggy Oggy Oy Oy when the Ogs is mentioned. Fun drinking game!) Don referenced his Hathaway shirt.
§ While we missed Peggy, we did get some Joanie—ah, did you like the Hermes logo looming in the background at Bonwit Teller (RIP), which now I’ve decided is just a Mad Men visual cue for regrettable sex. So Joanie mentions to Pete (ugh, that cad! He is the wormiest) that her hubby is thinking of going into psychiatry!
Psychiatry still had a dubious reputation in the mid-century, as it was considered only as a viable treatment for social deviants and criminals. Attitudes towards psychiatry started to thaw in the mid-60s. Thanks to a mental health speech given by President Kennedy in the summer of 1963, the profession was rapidly becoming more mainstream. Kennedy loosened up federal money so states could begin to deinstitutionalize state mental health programs and allow doctors to set up private practices in the community. Psychiatric hospitals were essentially warehouses for the crazy and senile at the time. For instance, this description from 1963:Georgia’s only mental hospital, saddled with the stigmatic name of State Hospital for the Insane at Milledgeville, was a monstrous snake pit. Behind the façade of an administration building that looks like the White House, it was crowded to its rotten, rat-infested rafters with 12,000 patients. At least 3,000 were senile oldsters who did not belong there—any more than the epileptics, dope addicts or alcoholics who jammed the hospital. Comparatively few patients ever got better, and those who did succeeded mainly on their own resources, for among Milledgeville’s 50 doctors, many of dubious repute, were only three psychiatrists.
States like Georgia, Nebraska, and New Mexico with small populations and less wealth were set to gain the most from Kennedy’s initiative. It was now the doctors who appeared on a wait list instead of the patients. Perhaps that’s why Joan’s rapey hubby suggested relocating to Alabama?
Captivity, it seems, is bad for everyone.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper always has more Mad Men Footnotes here.
Wow. With PhotoSketch, you just draw a sketch, label each item, like so:
and then the system goes out, finds photos that match the sketched items and their labels, and automatically pastes it all together into one composite image:
The site is down right now but the paper is available for download and this video gives you a taste of how it works:
Again, wow. (via migurski)
Tags: photography remix video
A x application challenge in keeping with New York City's drive to become more transparent, accessible, and accountable. $ 20,000 in cash prizes * Plus lunch with Mayor Bloomberg and tons of public appreciation. *new contest to create apps out of NYC.gov's data mine.
At 5 p.m. (EDT) the Twins will play the Tigers in an extra season game (163!) for the American League Central title. While the Twins’ inspired play helped them get here, the game is mostly the result of the Tigers’ complete—complete!—meltdown. It’s the second straight year the Twins season has ended with such a playoff game. It’s the 108th year the Tigers season has ended with them still being from Detroit. But even more woeful is that, should the Twins lose, it’s the last baseball game ever at the Metrodome.
The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome opened in April of 1982. Technically, it was “inflated.” As anyone who has ever exited the Metrodome knows, the facility is actually pressurized by air, like a hot air balloon.From the beginning, the Metrodome has become everything an urban sports complex is not supposed to be: it was built cheap and came in several million dollars under budget. It was made to “get fans in, let ‘em see a game, and let ‘em go home”—not to separate them from as much of their money as humanly possible. It has hosted two world series championships, a super bowl, Kirby Puckett and a number of division titles. It is an Iowan breeding ground and in Kevin Costner’s post apocalyptic America, the president governs from here. In perhaps the greatest of all stadium sins, it was instantly, and permanently, profitable for the city. Being a native of Wisconsin, where stadiums run millions over-budget, rob taxpayers blind, produce no hope of championships, immediately break and literally kill human beings, the Metrodome is a horrendous insult to baseball.
Players and fans complain that the Metrodome is too good for the long-ball, giving Twins hitters an unfair season-long advantage. Statistics have proven this to be untrue. But the Metrodome’s interior teflon-coated fiberglass cloth has resulted in many fielders losing the ball in the ceiling—though as many of those errors seems to have been by the Twins as by their competitors. On two occasions balls have literally been lost in the vent holes in the fabric.
Next year the Twins will be playing at a brand new outdoor stadium. It, like everything else in Minnesota, is named “Target” (suck it Best Buy!), yet two-thirds was paid for by taxpayers. Still, today’s game is perfect example of the drawbacks of outdoor baseball in Minnesota, as it is 48 degrees and raining. (To say nothing of outdoor Minnesota baseball next April.)
So with the Twins at Target Field and the Gophers at their new TCF Bank Stadium and the Timberwolves at Target Center Arena and the Wild at the Xcel Energy Center, what Minneapolis certainly needs is another stadium. And of course that is now exactly what the Vikings want which will probably result in the dome being torn down in another year or so.
That's the flag of the Benin Empire, a pre-colonial African state situated in modern Nigeria that lasted from 1440 until 1897. (via andre)
Tags: flags
Today as, unlike other sites, The Awl marks no sort of anniversary at all, co-founder and Associate Editorial Director Alex Balk talks about the first five months and sixteen days’ surprises, obsessive commenters, print’s premature obit, Sarah Palin, his enormous penis… and what’s next for the site.
So how was your first five months and sixteen days at The Awl?
Excellent! I’ve finally found a medium commensurate to my peculiar metabolism. That sounds believable, right? I revel in the immediacy, the responsiveness, the real-time-ness. I used to be the impatient type. Now I’m the serene type. Because I’ve started drinking in the mornings! No more waiting around for bars to open or Choire to run out for cigarettes so I can sneak a quick shot. I put the bottle right out there on the table and pull from it pretty much throughout the day. Plus I’m working with a brilliant young staff and a superb executive editor, Cat the Cat, who runs the show.How’s traffic these days?
Beyond our wildest hopes when we started last April. We closed September at a million billion monthly unique readers and 35 million trillion page views, which is up 70 percent and 220 percent, respectively, since our first month. It took me two years to build my Tumblr to less than half that number. And the readers are loyal: 60 percent of them come back again within 24 hours. Lord, do they ever. It’s like they NEVER STOP COMING AND NEVER SHUT UP. Of course, keeping ‘em satisfied is a 8/5 task. I know what the tireless blogger Andrew Sullivan means when he told me last summer that he sometimes gets so high on weed he can see through time itself.Do you read the comments?
Each and every one of them. I embroider the wittiest ones on pillows in my spare time. We have well over 40 zillion commenters who have each commented over 500 zillion times! There’s one called Cho who often weighs in with a contrary view on doing posts about Lauren Conrad. Earlier this year I was introduced to a Tuvan throat singer who was visiting New York, and he told me he liked The Awl. Yeah right, I thought, until he suddenly blurted out “Grrrrgrgrgrglllgrgrglll!” It’s all about undertones with those people.I log onto The Awl and find bear videos alongside Chris Lehmann’s column on the grotesqueries of American capitalism. What’s the big idea?
That’s the big idea. Bear videos, rich people things—it doesn’t matter, as long as both are covered with a sharp, original, Awly take. Or we need a post.What’s with you never being on TV?
Nobody asks. Why am I NOT ON TV? I’m FUCKING GORGEOUS! This face could sell anything! Why won’t any of those bitches book me?Any new developments?
It’s been nothing but new developments round here. Last week we emptied the ashtrays for the first time in three months. We looked like coal miners! Oh, the fun we had.On the site itself we’ve rolled out four new verticals: Contributors, Most Viewed, Most Commented, and most recently Read On, our new “extended post” feature. The gorgeous photography and photo galleries that you see on most sites, by the way, have been something we’ve talked about doing, but we haven’t yet been bothered enough to actually look into it. We need to train our readers to blindly click through anything, which hasn’t happened yet. A few more bear videos might dumb ‘em up, though.
Where’s the advertising?
Hey, don’t be so impatient! We were lucky in a way to start in the deepest recession since 1929. Our business plan required us to focus on traffic first, then in the second half of the year on advertisers—which was a good thing because there weren’t any. Now we have started to reel ‘em in, led by our business manager and digital guru David Cho. From our small start with fart jokes, we’ve ramped up to, I dunno, whatever you see to your left. There’s lots more in the 2010 pipeline. We have literally seven hundred bazillion ads coming in! David Cho, our advertising manager, co-originator and one of the sharper minds of the three of us, has challenged us to think beyond the troubled banner ad, and we are well on our way. He’s planning a nudie calendar for Christmas, but so far I’m the only one who has volunteered.What has been your top moment and one you’d like to forget?
One I’ll never forget was the high of two weeks after our launch when we were both like, You know what, fuck this, let’s take the afternoon off and go have lunch. Which we did. Separately, of course, because we don’t want to spend one more second in each other’s presence than absolutely necessary, but it was still a great, great afternoon.And we’ve had many great highs since. I’m particularly proud of the contributions from [Can we have an intern fill this slot in with the name of every columnist ever? What? We don’t have an intern? Well why the fuck not? Oh, right, like I’m the only sex harasser here. Fuck you, I hate you!] Doldrums? Hmm, not many. Except when a friend like Benson the carp dies and you are as close to the grief of the readers who comment as you are to the throb of political excitement when it catches.
Are you and Nick Denton still on friendly terms?
You betcha. Last time I saw him he actually said “Go away” to me rather than just giving me that two-fingered salute that means “fuck you” in England like he usually does.I heard you have a Secaucus bureau? What’s next, Hoboken?
No Secaucus bureau yet, thanks. The whole notion of bureaus is so 20th century. Get me a smart blogger with a laptop and an iPhone in Jersey City or Fort Greene and The Awl is in business. I realized how fast good foreign journalists will find you during the Iran elections right after we launched. We had a constant stream of great pieces on the crisis from terrific Iranian journalists who were on the ground. I mean, sure, we ripped them straight off of Twitter, but that counts.Are you still writing print’s obit?
Yes. Yes I am. Suck it, print, you dying motherfucker. I hope you choke on your ink bottles. I will bury you deep in a hole in the ground, rape your corpse, and then defecate on your violated carcass. I will—I’m sorry, what was the question?How often do you come into the office?
Every goddamn day. It’s like entering a crackhouse, only with worse lighting.Which story are you more obsessed with, Silvio Berlusconi or Sarah Palin?
I am sick of both of them. But it’s safe to say that Palin’s got a better rack.Who’s more dangerous to the world?
Neither, if The Awl has anything to say about it. Because we are THAT IMPORTANT. We’re the ones who came up with the phrase “Summer of Death,” you know. Did you know that? Because we did.Anything else?
I want to thank our hard working staff, our columnists who do excellent work for no pay, the rich people who are probably chomping at the bit to give us a gajillion zillion dollars, and our wonderful readers for your enthusiasm, repeat visits, commenting obsessions, video addictions—and a fabulous first five months and sixteen days. You too, Cho. Ya traffic-whoring DB.
Here’s a video that ties together so many of the day’s themes thus far: Pennsylvania, bears, excessive reliance on videos, and secret Swedish cities of woodworking lesbians. (Okay, not that last one, but I really love that story.) Anyway, two things: One, do not keep wild animals in your home, because they will kill you, and, two, Fox News is biting my bear beat. Don’t make me get all Summer of Death on your ass, Murdoch.
A little over two years ago award-winning novelist Jon Evans released Beasts Of New York, a self-described “children’s book for adults”, online and for free under our Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license. He chose this license to help facilitate sharing, a decision we elaborated upon previously:
Evans wanted to write and release a novel his publishers found unmarketable. As he puts it, “try to imagine telling people with a financial interest in your writing success that you want to write a whole book about a squirrel”. Evans saw CC-licenses and online publishing as a means to allow his work be read freely, while at the same time retaining potential commercial avenues for the book (Evans “cautiously expect[s] [Beasts of New York] to eventually find a publisher”).
It is now apparent that Evans’ optimism was well merited – Beasts of New York will see a physical release through Canadian literary press The Porcupine’s Quill early next year, largely based on the online traction the novel received. Beasts of New York has been downloaded legally around 6,000 times from Feedbooks and Manybooks and has become Evans’ most-popular and highest-rated book on Goodreads.
Uh, yeah, I would say that is pretty fucking awesome.
What does a town under quarantine—walled off against the world, shutting its doors against commerce—feel like? What if those doors have been forcibly shut, against the citizens' will? What is it like to be medically captive in a city? At the very least, how does one pass the time?
More than two years ago, while living and working in San Francisco, I would often spend my lunch breaks down at Stacey's, an amazing bookstore that sadly went out of business this past spring. One of the books that I gravitated toward—and eventually purchased—was The Plague by Albert Camus.Camus's novel—about a quarantined city in North Africa called Oran, where the bubonic plague has erupted, originating in rats that have come crawling out into the streets to die en masse—seems to illustrate quite well the proposition that fiction is an extraordinarily effective medium through which to describe architectural and urban experiences. One of Camus's characters, for instance, surveys the quarantined city laid out before him: "At that moment he had a preternaturally vivid awareness of the town stretched out below, a victim world secluded and apart, and of the groans of agony stifled in its darkness."
Quarantine, Camus suggests, can have the effect of heightening the sensorial impact of certain urban details: "For in the heat and stillness, and for the troubled hearts of our townsfolk, anything, even the least sound, had a heightened significance. The varying aspects of the sky, the very smells rising from the soil that mark each change of season, were taken notice of for the first time." The city has become amplified, so to speak, by its isolation. We even read that a "new paper has been launched: the Plague Chronicle"—as if all of these newly noticed details, and the alterations in daily routine that revealed them, were too numerous—and far too extraordinary—not to catalog.
But the city looms, stripped of vitality, anemic, its purpose gone; it is urbanism as depicted by Giorgio de Chirico.The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
In any case, I won't review the book here; it is worth reading, even if it's emotionally imperfect, so to speak (and often a bit boring), but its literary merits are not what I'm concerned with here. I'm concerned with its descriptions of space.
I thought, then, especially in light of the quarantine studio that kicks off in NYC this autumn, I would simply excerpt some of Camus's more memorable thoughts on quarantine.
For instance, he writes, describing this strange state of medical siege-urbanism:At first the fact of being cut off from the outside world was accepted with a more or less good grace, much as people would have put up with any other temporary inconvenience that interfered with only a few of their habits. But, now they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration under that blue dome of sky, already beginning to sizzle in the fires of summer, they had a vague sensation that their whole lives were threatened by the present turn of events, this feeling of being locked in like criminals prompted them sometimes to foolhardy acts.
Oran, Camus continues, its city gates closed against foreign visitors, its citizens often sitting there, listless in the desert heat, "assumed a novel appearance."You saw more pedestrians, and in the slack hours numbers of people, reduced to idleness because shops and a good many offices were closed, crowded the streets and cafés. For the present they were not unemployed; merely on holiday. So it was that on fine days, toward three in the afternoon, Oran brought to mind a city where public rejoicings are in progress, shops are shut, and traffic is stopped to give a merry-making populace the freedom of the streets.
What is there to do in quarantine? Not much, it seems:So now he drifted aimlessly from café to café. In the mornings he would sit on the terrace of one of them and read a newspaper in the hope of finding some indication that the epidemic was on the wane. He would gaze at the faces of the passers-by, often turning away disgustedly from their look of unrelieved gloom, and after reading for the nth time the shopsigns on the other side of the street, the advertisements of popular drinks that were no longer procurable, would rise and walk again at random in the yellow streets. Thus he killed time till nightfall, moving about the town and stopping now and again at a café or restaurant.
This level of ennui—"You could see them at street corners, in cafes or friends’ houses, listless, indifferent, and looking so bored that, because of them, the whole town seemed like a railway waiting-room"—unsurprisingly soon breeds violence (and, with it, glimpses of a new constitutional order):It was incidents of this sort that compelled the authorities to declare martial law and enforce the regulations deriving from it. Two looters were shot, but we may doubt if this made much impression on the others; with so many deaths taking place every day, these two executions went unheeded—a mere drop in the ocean. Actually scenes of this kind continued to take place fairly often, without the authorities’ making even a show of intervening. The only regulation that seemed to have some effect on the populace was the establishment of a curfew hour. From eleven onwards, plunged in complete darkness, Oran seemed a huge necropolis.
For all of these descriptions, however, the question remains: what is the effect of quarantine on a city's populace? Can public policy reach down into the emotions of a resident and predict how he or she might react? And how is urbanism itself transformed by states of temporary—but enforced—isolation?
For that, a much larger conversation about quarantine and the city must ensue.
Or, 'Ed Levine's Existential Bagel Crisis'
[Photographs: Robyn Lee and Carey Jones]
The Heisen-Bagel Uncertainty Principle
n. The principle of bagels that holds the following: The act of transporting a bagel to a second location produces fundamental uncertainties in its inherent qualities, such that determining a true "best bagel," in a head-to-head face-off, becomes impossible.
It's a question asked so often that it's astounding that we've never attempted an answer.
Who makes the best bagel in New York?
There are a few clear contenders. In the past, Ed has leaned toward the Upper West Side's Absolute Bagels; his exhaustive 2003 bagel hunt for the New York Times also saluted Bagel Oasis and Hot Bialys in Queens, Terrace Bagels in Windsor Terrace, and Manhattan stalwart Murray's.
And then there are Ess-A-Bagel and H&H, and neighborhood favorites like Bagel Hole and Brooklyn Bagel—all of whom have their fanatical defenders.
So we organized a simple taste-test. Serious eaters would fan out over the three most bagel-happy boroughs and hurry back to World Headquarters with their piping hot loot, as fast as their feet, bikes, buses, trains, subways, or Zipcars could carry them. We'd cut them all up; we'd do a blind tasting; we'd ponder their merits and crown a winner. Simple, right?
But it wasn't that easy.
Ed, hard at work.
The problem became clear as we chomped our way through Round One, pens at the ready, taking bite after bite. None of the bagels were more than two hours old. All of them had been hand-delivered that morning. But chewing through so many mouthfuls of plain bagels, we all felt the same uneasy feeling descending upon us. Ed broke the silence.
"They all taste the same."
Well... not quite the same.
No one mistook Dunkin' Donuts bagels for Murray's, say. (Although it should be noted that Dunkin' didn't place dead last.) Some bagels were clearly superior to others. But none really stood out. None jumped off its plate and declared itself a first-class New York bagel—and these were the best of the very best.
"They aren't calling to me," said Ed Levine—a man who had once written the sentence "No city, perhaps in the history of the world, is so closely identified with a breadstuff as New York is with the bagel." Who had used words such as superb and terrific and huzzah! to describe the very same bagels that sat before us.
There was only one bagel that the tasters rallied around—and that was one from the neighborhood bagel shop, a dark horse, one we'd thought little more than a control.
Ed hung his head, a full-blown mid-life bagel crisis coming on. What was going on?
The Realization
That corner bagel shop, Brooklyn Bagel—Bagel 1 in our blind taste test—told the whole story. Swooped up on the way to the office, those bagels weren't more than 15 minutes old. Bagels that had traveled from the outer reaches of Queens had spent more than two hours on the rapid decline. And since early-bird Ed had trekked up to Absolute Bagels at the crack of dawn, their three-hour old contestants came in dead last.
Our conclusion? A bagel's half-life, untoasted and unadorned, is no more than half an hour. It was far less than any of us had thought, but after more than thirty minutes, we saw a rapid decline in texture, crust, and even taste. Brooklyn Bagel's initial victory? Simply a matter of freshness.
And therein lies the fundamental problem of a blind test. Let's call it the Heisen-Bagel Uncertainty Principle. (Credit the name where credit is due.) It seemed that the very act of assembling a critical mass of bagels requires enough time that a fair comparison is rendered impossible. So a blind bagel taste-test could never produce conclusive results. And in Round One, Brooklyn Bagel's proximity to the oven threw our bagel sensors all out of whack.
So for Round Two, we synchronized purchase times more closely; no three-hour elderly bagels, no shiny young superstars. And in this controlled environment, our results were a good deal more informative. Here are our bagel conclusions.
The Painfully Terrible Control Group
We threw Dunkin' Donut's bagels in as a foil, and luckily for our credibility as food journalists, no one took the bait. The texture: "Very crusty, but way too bready." The color: "Evenly brown. That shouldn't be the case, should it." And the ultimate indictment: "I grew up eating these bagels. I also grew up in Kansas City!"
That said, more than half of our tasters ranked Dunkin's bagels above two or three local establishments. Chew on that.
Ed, on Lender's "New York Style" Pre-Sliced Bagels: "I love the size. But that's all I love."
The Big Names We Didn't Love
Once schmeared, there's nothing wrong with a good old H&H Bagel. But on their own, our crack tasters found them dense and sweet. "Way too dense," said Ed. And the seven-ounce monsters from Ess-A-Bagel were called "incredibly dry," and "funky, almost moldy-tasting."
The Solid Contenders
Terrace Bagel, in Brooklyn's Windsor Terrace, gave us a puffy, just sweet enough bagel that some liked for its "slight tanginess" and others for its "nice hole structure." Ed said he'd take a decent hike to pick a few up. But it didn't have a particularly crisp crust, and it was far bigger than most of us wanted in a bagel.
Murray's? Our tasters had some problems with the texture ("chewy but not crisp"; "like a Posturepedic pillow"). But the slightly malty taste got quite a few positive marks.
Ed liked Hot Bialys, which once ranked in his Top Five bagel list: "Not as crisp as I would like," he said this time, "but great flavor." Another taster agreed. "Very yeasty, good yeasty." Others weren't so kind. "I wish this had some texture." "Plasticky, ugh!"
Terrace Bagel: 224 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn (map); 718-768-3943; Murray's Bagels: 500 Avenue of the Americas (map); 212-462-2830; Hot Bialys: 11663 Queens Blvd, Flushing (map)
The Elusive Heartbreaker
Let's call it the Heisen-Bagel principle at work.
Rushing out of the Bagel Oasis in Queens, I tore my teeth into a fresh, plain bagel—and literally stopped dead in my tracks. As the cars tore by me on the LIE, I stood there on the side of the road, chewing blissfully. This was without question the best bagel I had ever eaten. The initial bite and crust. The way the inside pulled apart softly when I ripped it in half. The doughy, yeasty, but not too sweet interior. I felt as if I suddenly understood what a bagel was supposed to taste like. I got back on the freeway convinced that Bagel Oasis would win the day.
The tasters' comments? "Bready." "Dull." "Springy-chewy, but otherwise unmemorable."
I couldn't believe my eyes. But back at the office, a few hours later, I tried a piece of the bagel they sampled—and every comment was right. Two hours had made all the difference in the world.
Bagel Oasis: 183-12 Horace Harding Expressway, Fresh Meadows, Queens (map); 718-359-9245
The Surprising Game-Changer
Here's Brooklyn Bagel, just around the corner from Serious Eats. In Round One, it was the unanimous winner. "Crisp, with a noticable crisp SOUND!," one taster wrote. "Nicely salted," said another. "I'd travel far for this one," someone scribbled. "Perfect bagel shell." "Um—yes."
But the second time around, when these bagels had aged along with the others, it wasn't all so sunny. "Soft, some chew, but not much crunch." A minutes-old Brooklyn Bagel was as good as any we tasted. That said, an hours-old one wasn't bad, either.
Brooklyn Bagels: 300 West 23rd Street (map); 212-675-7171
Ages Badly, But Otherwise Excellent
Ed's go-to, Absolute Bagels, fared terribly in the first round. Excerpted notes: "I guess this is edible." "Boring." "Eh." And: "I would only eat this if it were on my kitchen counter. AND if I were too hungover to leave the house."
But when a bit newer, and perhaps more importantly, not held up against newer bagels, they earned a solid silver medal for their real outside crunch, fine hole structure, and perfect salty-malty-sweet balance. Ed: "Now these are the Absolute Bagels I remember really liking."
Absolute Bagels: 2788 Broadway (map); 212-932-2052
The Ultimate Victor
Ed, on the merits of Bagel Hole:
Bagel Hole's plain bagel had just about everything I look for in a bagel. It makes a satisfying crunching sound when I bit into it; the exterior actually required the use of my teeth; it was a lovely dark brown color; it was moist and almost light on the inside, and it wasn't absurdly large. No sign of bagel elephantiasis on this puppy.
Bagel Hole: 400 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn (map); 718-788-4014
Ed's existential bagel mid-life crisis was over. No more bagel angst, at least for the moment.
Post-Script
Friend of Serious Eats Harvey suggested a way to combat the Heisen-Bagel.
"Kidnap Ed. Blindfold him. Toss him in the back of a van, drive him around New York, and feed him minutes-old bagels from all of these places."
Now that's a YouTube hit in the making.
It's called Asperatus. Here's the Wiki entry:
The clouds are most closely related to undulatus clouds. Although they appear dark and storm-like, they tend to dissipate without a storm forming. The ominous-looking clouds have been particularly common in the Plains states of the United States, often during the morning or midday hours following convective thunderstorm activity. As of June, 2009 the Royal Meteorological Society is gathering evidence of the type of weather patterns in which undulus asperatus clouds appear, so as to study how they form and decide whether they are distinct from other undulatus clouds.
One more pic after the jump:
As the last, perhaps most apt remembrance of the 2009 New York Mets season, we present the greatest AFLAC trivia question of all time. Forgive those Braves fans. It's been a disappointing season for them, too, so they probably needed a slight reminder that there are others far, far worse off. All AFLAC trivia entries should be sarcastic, we think. The real question: Did you know the answer?
Read more posts by Will Leitch
Filed Under: atlanta braves, baseball, mets, ouch, sports
From a 1995 memo sent by the managing director of Tavern on the Green about how to identify Ruth Reichl, then the dining critic of the New York Times. (Sadly, the whole thing appears to be subscriber-only.) Reichl, of course, went on to be the editor of Gourmet, which closed yesterday.
We've known for a long time now that, as soon as the Senate Finance Committee reports out a health care bill, Majority Leader Harry Reid, along with Finance chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), Senate HELP Committee chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA), and White House officials will sit down to produce a single piece of legislation to bring to the floor.
And we've known for a long time now that the White House's role in the negotiations will be key. Already, Senate aides are letting it be known that the White House will have to lead on all the issues around which Democrats have been unable to find consensus--issues like the public option.
So which White House players are likely to be in the room? Roll Call reports:
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Ann DeParle, Obama's chief health care adviser, are expected to be at the table throughout the talks. White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag also is set to play a role, primarily on issues where health care and the federal budget intersect.That's an interesting set, particularly considering that Emanuel has been the White House official most linked to the idea of including a triggered public option in the final health care bill. And that's to say nothing about his famous, or infamous, force of personality.
The shape of the legislation that comes out of those discussions will likely have a determinative effect on what's in the bill the President actually signs. So we'll be watching closely.
Filed under: Culture, ATT, Verizon Wireless
Ouch. If you've been waiting for another flare up in the old carrier wars, here you have it. Turning Apple's "there's an app for that" slogan on its ear, Verizon has introduced a campaign touting its network coverage. The ads -- which highlight the company's new tongue-in-cheek "there's a map for that" catchphrase against tuneful, chirpy music -- also boast that Verizon's 3G blanket is a whopping five times the size of AT&T's. Does this do anything to dispel the idea that Verizon and Apple may be getting together for that phantom tablet? Who knows, but it's fun to watch the fireworks. Check out the full commercial after the break.
[Via All Things Digital]Verizon removes gloves, begins 'There's a map for that' anti-AT&T ad campaign (video) originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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I taught Nathan to say "Yankees" this weekend. ("Yangee!") He recognizes the interlocking NY and gets that we have matching caps. Between this and his Shake Shack dinner, I've hit a new fatherly peak.
Nathan's mother, meanwhile, has him hooked on her chocolate chip cookies. So we have all the important things covered.
used as a forensics tool
John Nack:
Today at Adobe MAX, the company announced that Flash tools will be able to build applications for iPhone that can be distributed through Apple’s App Store. A beta version of Flash Professional CS5 with this new capability is planned for release later this year. These aren’t Flash SWF files, they’re native iPhone apps.
This is not a port of the Flash runtime. You can’t use this to load Flash content over the web. What it means is that Flash developers can export native iPhone apps — compiled ARM binaries in .ipa packages — which can then be submitted to Apple through the normal App Store process. There are already seven such apps (built using beta versions of the new Flash developer tools) available in the App Store.
This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.
Loved this when I was a kid; all those shapes right there in those circles.
Tags: philipglass Sesame Street video
"For me Gourmet has always been the gold standard for food magazines."
The editor's letter from the premiere issue (January 1941) of Gourmet magazine.
By now you've all read the shocking news this morning, courtesy of the New York Times, that Gourmet is going to cease publication with its upcoming November issue. The news hit anyone with a love for great writing and seriously delicious food hard. Really hard. For many of us Gourmet symbolized much of what we love about food journalism: terrific writing, careful editing, and beautiful photos. In recent years Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl has also added food politics and harder food news reporting into the magazine's editorial mix, which was much appreciated by me, at least.
With the uber-consulting firm McKinsey snooping around Condé Nast headquarters for the last three months, rumors have been swirling about the future of Gourmet and its sister publication, Bon Appétit. Although some people have expressed surprise that the powers that be at Condé Nast (that would be the Newhouses) decided to axe Gourmet instead of Bon App, I had always heard that Bon Appétit was in fact the more profitable magazine. When the bean counters are counting beans at a company like Condé Nast, the magazine with the biggest pile of beans behind the masthead is generally the one left standing. Even Reichl's undeniable rock star food-writer status could not stand in the bean counters' way.
"I can't talk about it now, it's too raw. I've got to pack up my office." —Ruth Reichl, on L.A. Times' Daily Dish
Some will undoubtedly point the finger at the popularity of the web as the principal reason for Gourmet's demise. I am sure it did play a role, but, truth be told, Condé Nast owners the Newhouses have never exactly embraced the digital world, so any finger-pointing in this situation would have to start with them. The reality is that Gourmet was built in a different time (1941 to be exact) for a very different sort of media universe. (See our post where we look at the first issue of Gourmet.)
For me Gourmet has always been the gold standard for food magazines. I remember how insanely proud I was when my byline first appeared in Gourmet. I have gotten to know many of the editors and writers at Gourmet over the years, starting with Ruth Reichl predecessor Gail Zweigenthal, and I have found them to be an extraordinarily talented and savvy bunch, a group that was equally passionate in discussing pizza and hamburgers as foie gras and caviar.
RIP, Gourmet. Serious eaters everywhere lament your passing.
"Gourmet will speak that Esperanto of the palate that makes the whole world kin..."
Gourmet's premiere issue, the January 1941 "Holiday Issue." Click to enlarge. [Photographs: Adam Kuban]
Earlier today we all read the sad news that Gourmet magazine was closing and that its final printing would be the November 2009 magazine. But let's take a look back to the very first issue of Gourmet—January 1941.
The first issue of the magazine was also its first holiday issue, as seen at the bottom of the cover, below a menacing cross-hatched and becloved boar's head illustration. The iconic scripted "Gourmet" title is instantly recognizable as is the elegantly sparse design—no cover lines here, just the tagline the magazine used throughout its 69 years, "The Magazine of Good Living."
Pearl V. Metzelthin was the magazine's first editor; Louis P. De Gouy its first chef; and Earl R. MacAusland its first publisher. Subscriptions were $3 a year.
Unlike the magazine we know and love today, there are very few photos in the first issue (no real surprise there), but there are plenty of jaunty illustrations. Let's take a closer look at the then-newcomer's style--along with its table of contents and mission statement. (More photos, after the jump.)
Gourmet Magazine Table of Contents, January 1941
Gourmet's premiere-issue table of contents, January 1941. Click to enlarge.
Page 4: An Introduction to GOURMET
Page 6: Burgundy at a Snail's Pace, Samuel Chamberlain
Page 11: Le Gourmet, Tony Sarg
The caption reads, "The wild pheasant deserves profound veneration." Click to enlarge.
Page 12: Game for Gourmets—and Others, Louis P. De Gouy (above)
Page 14: This Little Pig Went to Table, Pearl V. Metzelthin
Page 16: Help Yourself to the New Year, Elizabeth Lounsbery
Page 18: Gastronomie Sans Argent, Gourmet Chef
Page 20: Gunning for Gifts
Chef Georges Gonneau of the Hotel Pierre was featured in the inaugural "Famous Chefs of Today" column. Gonneau was born in France, and "During the World War, Chef Gonneau was mobilized. Afterward he became chef of the Commission d'Armistice, headed by Marshal Foch, at Spa, Belgium, where he served memorable meals to all members, including General Pershing." The illustration here is by Don Freeman.
Page 22: Famous Chefs of Today, Don Freeman and Gourmet Reporter (above)
Page 24: The Choice of Wine, Peter Greig (above)
Page 26: Negus and Nog
Page 27: Gourmet's Meal of the Month, Georges Gonneau
Page 28: Food Flashes, Clementine Paddleford
Page 30: Specialités de la Maison, P.V.
World War II had been raging for two years already in January 1941, but the U.S. would not yet enter for almost another year. Still, the war's presence finds its way into the pages of Gourmet via this ad for Huntley & Palmers Betterwheat Biscuits. Click to enlarge.
Pages 35 and 46: Food Questions and Answers
Page 44: Ed Wynn Wishes Gourmet wWell
Page 48: The Last TouchEditor's Letter, Gourmet Issue 1
Readers outside the publishing business couldn't be blamed for skipping the monthly editor's letter. I know I did until I started working in the magazine industry. But the introduction to the first issue of Gourmet deserves a look-see:
To you—A Lover of Good Food—we introduce Gourmet, the Magazine of Good Living
The name Gourmet is selected for this publication because it typifies the acme in appreciation of food perfection. Ina broader sense, however, the word gourmet signifies far more than just food perfection. It is a synonym for the honest seeker of the summum bonnum of living.
The art of being a gourmet has nothing to do with age, money, fame, or country. It can be found in a thrifty French housewife with her pot-au-feu or in a white-capped chef in a skyscraper hotel. But where it exists, the practitioner of this art will have the eye of an artist, the imagination of a poet, the rhythm of a musician, and the breadth of a sculptor. That is the subtle amalgam of which the true gourmet is compounded.
Never has there been a time more fitting for a magazine like Gourmet to come into being. Good food and good living have always been a great American tradition. At our very fingertips in this land of glorious plenty lie an abundance and variety of foods unequalled anywhere. And our native, unquenchable thirst for discovery is now leading us daily into new and exciting channels of exploration in the realm of fine food and drink.
But perhaps more important than all else today should be our recognition of that Biblical axiom, "Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry." How much more significant this admonition is today when the made hurly-burly of our modern daily existence forces us all to catch hold of the charged wire of noisy, strident living—and when the need to let go is the gravest task that faces us all! It is a wise person indeed who makes the satisfying of his palate an exciting, stimulating adventure—a time when he completely dissociates himself, if only temporarily, from the discordance of the world—a time when he responds to the sensuous enjoyment, not only of food but of its color and form and savor—a time when friend holds fellowship with friend—when ease (never the apathy of a glutted diner) promotes that delicious feeling of physical and aesthetic well-being. And when, for a brief moment, we recapture the mellow moods and manners of a bygone day which unashamedly followed the pursuit of happiness in such admirable fashion.
Gourmet seeks to connect this link of a gracious past with the tempo of today, and to initiate a healthy curiosity in those who have heretofore thought of eating as merely the satisfying of hunger. It hopes to start them on explorations into new bypaths of culinary delights , to whet their appetites and excite their senses so that they will strive for broader horizons in their dining and wining adventures—and so that this new enjoyment will soon become a part of their lives.
To those who would like to share a gourmet's joie de vivre, Gourmet promises a policy dedicated to presenting the unusual in food, its sources, its combination in menus, exciting news of the coteries-that-make-news in diplomatic and society circles, of culinary hobbies and amusements. In short, Gourmet will speak that Esperanto of the palate that makes the whole world kin ... good food, good drink, fine living ... the universal language of the gourmet.
Pearl V. Metzelthin, Editor
Louis P. De Gouy, Chef
Earl R. MacAusland, Publisher
In addition to belonging to the design team of rockstars, I also belong to a rock band of designers. My all-designer band has taken a promiscuous attitude to our band’s online presence. We’ll make a band page on whatever new music site sounds worth the set-up time and see what sticks. Like the parent who overloads her kindergartener with too many extracurriculars, we’ve signed our band up for 20+ music sites. But there is only one web-related question we get from other bands and new fans: “Do you guys have a MySpace?”
Why is ugly, ad-heavy, slow-loading MySpace still the main site people go to to hear bands? Trendy teens and clueless entrepreneurs alike have moved on from the sleaze, but not bands. It’s still the main way our band gets listened to, connects with other bands, and sets up shows. After three years with an account and an unimpressive (by band standards) 40k+ views, we get contacted by bands from Berlin to Burlingame looking to play shows in San Francisco. It’s a popularity contest, I admit, that I subscribe too. If a band has less than 5k views, I’m thinking they’re babies at this band thing.
Why do people still use MySpace to check out bands? Consistency. I can go to Beyonce’s page and Simon Lebron’s page and find their songs in the same place. There is also a high chance of finding out who’s in the band, their next show, and contact information.
Until another site can boast every band’s info like this, I will be checking MySpace. With Ugh. As a designer, there are several sites out their that are furthering design in the name of music. Here are my three favorites:
The Sixtyone is like D&D for music snobs. Quests, levels, a “music adventure”: game on! T61’s straightforward, clean design doesn’t have a ton of personality, but the site interactions are very thoughtful. Press play in the header and you’ll see what I mean with the uninterruptible music player and friendly corner dialogs. Our reoccurring user success story that we haven’t seen on any other sites (except maybe YouTube)—we get rabid fans from T61. They email us saying they remember when we were just Level 7 and they have been there bumping us (a good thing) ever since. And then they show up to our shows and tell us some more! Flippin’ awesome.
Muxtape is an elegant beauty. The site’s most recent and totally legal incarnation allows indie bands, by invitation only [hot breath on nails], to build themselves a page showcasing their songs, about information, and likely some big photos of themselves all chopped up. I love how this site encourages user-created good design. Bands are confined to a 3x4 grid to fill with whatever they please, but really what more do you need? Since the good design on Muxtape requires no hacking, the designs are usually elegant and simple.
The Next Big Sound allows you to see how a band is doing in a nice little data visualization. It surveys the views, listens, comments, and fans a band has on a handful of big music sites. The real high-school fun happens when you can compare the popularity of different bands. The graphs is usefully colorful and easy to recalculate. Unlike the other two mentioned sites, this site isn’t as interesting to folks without bands. But bands beware—NBS can be a mood-altering substance.
So what have we done with our design freedoms and constraints on all these sites? Well, if you really must know—here is my band, My First Earthquake, are on all the mentioned sites: The Sixtyone Muxtape Next Big Sound Myspace
And totally within our own control: Our site
The Gourmet editor makes her first public statement: "Thank you all SO much for this outpouring of support. It means a lot. Sorry not to be posting now, but I'm packing. We're all stunned, sad." Meanwhile Eater National has compiled industry reactions to the news. [Twitter; Eater National]
Last week, I found this picture of a group dinner at Guero's restaurant in Austin, TX, taken during South by Southwest in 2002.
At the time, most of us at the table knew each other primarily through the web and through the then-nascent blogging community. But in the seven and a half years since then, many of us have gone on to become entrepreneurs or creators, launching dozens of companies and products. I'm still collecting names and companies in the comments on Flickr, but just a cursory glance shows founders from Blogger, Six Apart, Adaptive Path, Flickr, Gawker, Twitter and more.
I point this out not (just) to name drop — you can click through to the Flickr image to see notes about who was there, read what they've done, or add your own annotations. But I also wanted to highlight one of the most important resources that creative people need to truly succeed: A community of peers.
In the business world, and especially in the technology industry, we focus a lot on the functional requirements of raising money, or on the technical requirements of having certain features or technological capabilities. What I've found, though, is that being part of an active, ambitious, supportive and diverse community of peers is just as valuable, if not more so, than any of the more prosaic prerequisites for success. That's even true in this photo — some of the people whom I met in person for the first time that night or that weekend have gone on to become among my closest friends, the biggest supporters of my work, and have ventured their formidable social capital to support my career. An even more diverse community of others whom I met at similar dinners or other events have played a similar role as well. Yet, at the time this photo was taken, I don't think any of these people had ever taken venture capital money for any project they'd ever done — everyone here had bootstrapped their way to the table.
So, it's easy to focus on the money or the little technological accomplishments, but I am glad I found these old pictures as a nice reminder that we should set aside time for a great meal with smart friends every once in a while. If it's not enough enticement that you're just having a good time, you can also justify it as one of the most worthwhile investments you can make in your future success.
JESUS CHRIST, IT TOOK ME 49 SECONDS TO EVEN FIND THE “TABLE OF CONTENTS” LINK ON THE NEW YORKER’S WEBSITE. All I can see is “MOST EMAILED” and “FOLLOW US ON TWITTER” and a “GET A FREE UMBRELLA” and BUNCH OF DAMN BLOGS and a parade of podcasts that, does anyone listen to those? Maybe they do, I don’t know, I don’t have a long commute or whatever. Seriously, what the hell people! I want to read your word-based content, I do, I value it, but you are hurting me here! Oooh, a new Vijay Seshadri poem!
Caffeine
This is why the world produces more than 16 billion pounds of coffee beans per year. It's actually an alkaloid plant toxin (like nicotine and cocaine), a bug killer that stimulates us by blocking neuroreceptors for the sleep chemical adenosine. The result: you, awake.Water
Hot H2O is a super solvent, leaching flavors and oils out of the coffee bean. A good cup of joe is 98.75 percent water and 1.25 percent soluble plant matter. Caffeine is a diuretic, so coffee newbies pee out the water quickly; java junkies build up resistance.2-Ethylphenol
Creates a tarlike, medicinal odor in your morning wake-up. It's also a component of cockroach alarm pheromones, chemical signals that warn the colony of danger.Quinic acid
Gives coffee its slightly sour flavor. On the plus side, it's one of the starter chemicals in the formulation of Tamiflu.3,5 Dicaffeoylquinic acid
When scientists pretreat neurons with this acid in the lab, the cells are significantly (though not completely) protected from free-radical damage. Yup: Coffee is a good source of antioxidants.Dimethyl disulfide
A product of roasting the green coffee bean, this compound is just at the threshold of detectability in brewed java. Good thing, too, as it's one of the compounds that gives human feces its odor.Acetylmethylcarbinol
That rich, buttery taste in your daily jolt comes in part from this flammable yellow liquid, which helps give real butter its flavor and is a component of artificial flavoring in microwave popcorn.Putrescine
Ever wonder what makes spoiled meat so poisonous? Here you go. Ptomaines like putrescine are produced when E. coli bacteria in the meat break down amino acids. Naturally present in coffee beans, it smells, as you might guess from the name, like Satan's outhouse.Trigonelline
Chemically, it's a molecule of niacin with a methyl group attached. It breaks down into pyridines, which give coffee its sweet, earthy taste and also prevent the tooth-eating bacterium Streptococcus mutans from attaching to your teeth. Coffee fights the Cavity Creeps.Niacin
Trigonelline is unstable above 160 degrees F; the methyl group detaches, unleashing the niacin—vitamin B3—into your cup. Two or three espressos can provide half your recommended daily allowance.
"I make no presumptions. The game won’t always be there for me, either. The newspaper business is in crisis, still trying to figure out a model to monetize content on the Internet, and so, so many talented people have lost their livelihoods amid these choppy seas."Andrew Baggarly, Giants beat writer, in a story well worth reading on blogs.mercurynews.com
Starting our thank yous for the 2009 baseball season, we begin with Pablo Sandoval. At some point soon, we'll be reading the stats about how many of the Giants 88 wins wouldn't have happened without him. And we saw how fun he made watching the games. Thank you Pablo for a fun 2009!
Befitting his role, today he hit the game winning home run in the last game of the season:
So it was proper that the game's central figure was perhaps the most grateful Giant of all -- third baseman Pablo Sandoval, who broke a 3-3 tie by homering off Ryan Webb to open the 10th. Sandoval reinforced his emergence as an impact hitter with his 444-foot clout to center field, which was the seventh-longest home run in PETCO Park history.
Sandoval's glittering statistical line features a .330 batting average (second in the NL), 25 home runs and 90 RBIs. It was a remarkable performance for a player in his first full Major League season who just turned 23. Sandoval himself understood just how singular he was.
"I can't believe it," he said. "Every time I went to the ballpark or went home, I said, 'Thank you, God, for letting me play baseball today.'"
via SFGiants.com
This was a difficult season, there were a ton of dramatic off-field stories, painful injuries, crazy moments, and disappointing results, but, I still love the Mets, and I’ll still be sad when there is no game tomorrow. via www.metsblog.com
[Photo: Robyn Lee]
At the Atlantic Food Channel this week, Regina Charboneau writes about her memories of Sunday lunches when growing up, and her time at the dinner table with her own children. It's often said, of course, that getting the whole brood around the table is an important way to nurture a strong family, not to mention teach kids proper nutrition and manners.
But in the New York Times, Jan Hoffman takes a slightly more pragmatic perspective. "Like breastfeeding and Baby Mozart tapes, family dinner has become a red-hot item on the good-parent scorecard, by which mothers in particular judge one another and themselves," she writes. "But as parents go to ever more breathless effort, or feel ever more guilt-ridden, are we becoming too literal-minded about 'family dinner'?" With erratic schedules, and innumerable demands on every parent and kid's time, gathering around for a lovingly cooked meal may not be realistic.
What do you think? Do you regularly sit down to family meals? Are these an anchor of your day? Or is the "family dinner" an ideal that's not always possible?
Recently, I wrote a guest post for the science-fiction blog io9.com, for their feature on “Future Metro”, entitled “The city is a battlesuit for surviving the future”.
It referred to a talk I’d given at Webstock covering similar territory – and both the talk and the post featured images from the Usbourne book “The World of the Future: Future Cities” by Kenneth Gatland and David Jefferis.
Tom Coates shared those images with me as we reminisced about the book – and the influence it had on us during our formative years.
Many other people of my generation have remarked on it and other books in the series looking at future engineering and technology as being early inspirations.
Imagine my surprise when one of the authors of this ur-object showed up in the comments of my io9 piece – and my dismay as he – very politely – complained about a lack of credit.
David – my apologies.
It was remiss of me not to credit the image, and also not to fully acknowledge the impact your book had on me when I was young. Thank you very much for your work, and thank you for taking the time to comment on my writing. I hope posting this helps make up for that.
David is still writing on science, engineering and technology – and running a couple of sites that are still right up my street: Starcruzer and Scale Model News – the latter with childhood hero and total mind-gangster Mat Irvine!
Irvine used to create special effects for Dr Who and Blakes’ 7, then come on Saturday morning kids tv shows to tell you how you could do exactly the same with your pocket money that afternoon.
He was an early DIY/Maker culture hero – but that’s for another blog post…
Let's go Mets!
Founder of the TWiT Netcast Network (and my co-host at This Week in Google) Leo Laporte did a fantastic talk for the Online News Association last week about his path to starting TWiT. Laporte’s goal is to create a live news channel for techies online: content for smart, devoted people who are conversant in this stuff, not the mainstream BS tech coverage you get on TV. There are several gems in this talk, especially for folks wondering about the economics of niche publishing online. My favorite, however, was this part. Leo says that back in the day, after explaining to a TV exec that it’s worth targeting a small group of smart computer enthusiasts, the exec told him:
Advertisers don’t believe it’s worth advertising to smart people, because smart people don’t pay attention to brand. Smart people make an actual choice, they can’t be tricked or convinced. They research. So we can’t sell ads to a network for smart people.
Then Leo said, “Suddenly television makes sense, doesn’t it?” to a great big laugh.
Watch the whole talk for an interesting look back at Tech TV, how and why it failed, what Leo won an Emmy award for, and what led him to founding his own online network. You’ll quickly see why my other TWiG co-host Jeff Jarvis calls the TWiT Network “the model for the new media model.”
When you write and talk about technology professionally, you’re always tasked with explaining things in simple terms–which is useful for more folks, but forces you to dumb down things and sometimes even leave out interesting details. In fact, one of my favorite TWiG moments happened episode 4, where I started to explain that you had to “cron a job on your server” and then stopped myself and apologized for being so geeky. “Oh that’s fine. We’re all geeks here,” Leo assured me. I nearly did the happy dance. What a relief to talk comfortably about technology and assume your audience is smart enough to keep up. That’s what Leo’s doing at TWiT–deciding not to dumb things down (AND making money doing it).
For more on Leo’s philosophy and ambitions with TWiT, check out this (unembeddable) interview he did at Mixergy.
Always a bittersweet day.
Dada Visualization (Infaux Graphics?) makes its way to the Sunday New York Times.
Are we too old to trick or treat? | Ask Metafilter [comment]
Wonderful anecdote from MeFi:
I grew up in a college town, and one Halloween our doorbell rang and we opened the door expecting to see trickortreaters— but what was in front of our open door—was another door! Like, a full-on wooden door, that had a sign that said “Please knock.” So we did, and the door swung open to reveal a bunch of college dudes dressed as really old grandmothers, curlers in their hair, etc, who proceeded to coo over our “costumes” and tell us we were “such cute trick or treaters!” One even pinched my cheek. Then THEY gave US candy, closed their door, picked it up and walked to the next house.
[via]
Thanks Theodore Roosevelt. This inspires me every time I read it:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
