Penetrating the Park Slope Food Coop, over at Things I Ate That I Love.

Originally posted by emily from Emily Magazine, on October 31, 2009 11:17 AM

Molly, Ellie, Ella, and Leah take a road trip to the New Jersey Pine Barrens in search of the Jersey Devil (with a special guest.) Music by The Discoghosts

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on October 31, 2009 2:27 AM

incredulous.

Apparently I wasn’t buying whatever she was selling. (via yatta)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on October 31, 2009 2:10 AM

In a school district in Illinois, students are being encouraged to dress up as historical characters or delicious food items rather than vampires or zombies. In Texas, a school has issued suggestions for “positive costumes” for the annual Halloween dance. At Riverside Drive, a Los Angeles public school in the San Fernando Valley, the Halloween parade is being defanged right down to its jagged fingertips. via www.nytimes.com Halloween isn't as scary as it used to be, by Jennifer Steinhauer.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 30, 2009 3:54 PM

From Slice

You're probably wondering why it's been a bit quiet around here around Slice lately. Well, I'm on a crazy mission. I'm eating pizza in various western states this week on a whirlwind trip of five cities. Seriously, it's been nonstop travel with barely time to offload pics from my cameras. I'm just now catching up.

Ken's Artisan Pizza (top) is in a quiet residential neighborhood in Southeast Portland, a couple blocks south of Burnside and the more hoppin' part of SE 28th Avenue. That doesn't stop people from lining up before the place opens for creations like the Bacon Pie (above). [Photographs: Adam Kuban]

Ken's Artisan Pizza

304 SE 28th Avenue, Portland OR 97214; map); 503-517-9951; kensartisan.com/pizza.html
Pizza Style: Artisanal. Somewhat Neapolitan but not really.
Oven Type: A massive wood-burning beauty
The Skinny: Ken's Artisan Pizza is the outgrowth of weekly Monday pizza nights that baker Ken Forkish used to do at Ken's Artisan Bread in Northwest Portland. So popular, he opened a pizzeria

Lines, lines, lines. I've stood in them at Frank Pepe's and Sally's Apizza in New Haven, Connecticut. I've frittered away countless hours of my life waiting for Di Fara's Dom DeMarco, in Brooklyn, to do his thing. The Grimaldi's under the Brooklyn Bridge is famous for its line. This is all somewhat understandable; all these pizzerias are in cities known for the cheesy pies they produce.

So the thought of Portland, Oregon, having not one but two line-worthy pizzerias flummoxed me. See, I lived in Portland in the late '90s, and back then, there was no wait-worthy pizza. But I'd heard in various pizza circles and from my new friend, This Is Pizza's Adam Lindsley, that you'd better get to Ken's Artisan Pizza shortly before it opened if you wanted to be in the first seating of the night. (Yes, I mentioned there being two places; I'll post about the second one in a future entry.)

And so, I found myself once again, after a nine-year absence, on Southeast 28th Avenue, a strip that was at once familiar and quite a bit changed by the real estate boom of the early aughts-zeros.

I arrived at Ken's at 4:45 p.m. (it opens at 5 p.m.), and there was already a mini line consisting of a young couple and toddler and some other dude. Within the next five minutes, it was around the corner and past the windows you see on the left of the building.

The place filled up fast (above), and even though I was third in line, we almost didn't get a seat. This Is Pizza's Adam Lindsley showed up just before opening, but two other members of our party were just a tad late and the hostess put us in a holding pattern, understandably, not wanting to give up a four-top table without everyone present.

But all was fine once my friends showed up. We got a table right by the window with perfect light and ordered the following ...

An arugula pie, at my friends Guddy and Belle's suggestion. I'm usually not into salad on pizza, and I was surprised that Guddy, a hearty Chicago native, recommended it, so I figured it had something going for it. It wasn't my favorite pie of the Ken's visit, but I'd order it again. Plus, as the first pizza stop of this mad trip, I was preemptively trying to get some greens into my itinerary.

Of course we did a Margherita. I want to sample a plain, stripped-down pie at all the places in addition to a pie that is considered the place's specialty. As longtime Slice readers know, I've found the Marghertia or a plain cheese pizza a good way to benchmark a pizzeria's performance. You can more easily taste the flavor of the crust, sauce, and cheese.

And Ken's Margherita didn't disappoint. Befitting its bakery roots, KAP's crust is flavorful, crisp, and chewy. Whereas with many pizzas, you feel sort of an obligation to finish the crust even if it's bland (well, at least I do), you'd have no such problem with Ken's crust. It needs no embellishment, though it doesn't hurt to sop up any fallen sauce with these "pizza bones."

Despite the trend toward "artisanal" pizza, Ken's is one of the few places I've seen use the term in its name. And I soon found out why. Despite the size of the pies and the use of a gigantic wood-burning oven, Ken's really is less "Neapolitan" than just plain "artisan" (whatever "artisan" means).

There are little embellishments on the Naples style. Like this: As I had read on Lindsley's blog, the sauce, a tangy swath of orange-red, takes on some heat from a little bit of chile flakes and some added savoriness from fennel seeds.

Here's the Fennel Sausage, Onion, and Calabrian Chile Pizza. With the strong Margherita base topped with excellent sausage and fiery chiles, how could you not love this thing? This was my favorite of the Ken's portion of the evening.

And here's the upskirt. Yeah, it's probably not as "leopard spotted" as some folks would like, but I assure you it was flavorful, crisp, and chewy.

And here's the oven where the magic happens. This thing is gigantic. I've never seen a wood-oven as big as this one.

I'm going to have to cut this report short, as I'm writing from the airport and my plane to my next destination is about to board. I'll be back atcha later today with action from Apizza Scholls.

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on October 30, 2009 12:35 PM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on October 30, 2009 10:37 AM

Just as in the Matrix the humans had originally created the machines that undermined them, to some large degree, Yahoo began Google. And Yahoo would do well to suggest that the most human way for the web to evolve is if we all work together to organize it ourselves — a mission that happens to fit in well with Yahoo's largely-mishandled acquisitions of Flickr and Delicious. I'm not sure that the marketing folks at Yahoo are going to embrace that narrative, but an interesting opportunity definitely exists around the larger concept. via dashes.com

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 30, 2009 10:31 AM

On the NY Times small business blog, Bruce Buschel shares 50 things restaurant servers and staff should never do. The next 50 will follow next week.

Tags: business   food   lists

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 30, 2009 10:04 AM

Filed under: iPhone, App Store

The NBA, via MobiTV, has made available its "League Pass" service to the iPhone via the League Pass Mobile app [iTunes link]. Like the MLB At Bat app [iTunes link], League Pass Mobile allows you to stream live NBA games onto your iPhone -- over 40 live NBA games per week. There's also the ability to view stats from the current game, and look at scores from games across the league. Subscribers can also replay full games up to 48 hours after the game has been played.

I'm a basketball junkie, and a former subscriber of NBA League Pass Broadband, the NBA's desktop version of the service -- former, because I actually just canceled my subscription yesterday. I found the service subjected too many games to blackouts, which often prevented me from watching many games of my beloved world champion Los Angeles Lakers. As a result, I'd often hop on over to my local sports bar to watch the game, which set me back at least US $12 with beer factored in. This year, instead, I'll be sacrificing the comfort of watching games in front of my desktop (and now the potential of watching it on my iPhone) for the peace of mind that the game I want to watch will be available at my local sports bar.

NBA League Pass Mobile is available for US $39.99 in the App Store.

TUAWWatch live NBA games with League Pass Mobile for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Sang Tang from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on October 30, 2009 9:00 AM

Just in time for Halloween: Chinese scientists investigating the mating habits of short-nosed fruit bats observed that the female bats frequently perform fellatio on the males during intercourse, and that mating sessions were shown to last longer when fellatio was performed. Which is a valuable lesson that everyone out there should take to heart, am I right, fellas? (There is actual bat blowjob video at the link, if you are so inclined.)

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on October 30, 2009 8:20 AM

The Rise & Fall of The Nintendo Wii:

When we first got the Wii a couple of years ago, it was a universal hit at Arc90. The bowling and golf games in the Wii sports package were just plain fun.

Fast forward about six months from the time we got the Wii and it’s a completely different story. It was hardly being used. Fast forward two years to today and I can confidently share that it probably hasn’t been turned on in over a year.

Every Wii owner I’ve spoken to, including myself, has the same story.

I’m not sure what could reasonably be done at this point to give the Wii better longevity and gameplay depth. Nearly every third-party title is are awful. Nintendo’s games trickle out at a snail’s pace, and many of them are just as shallow, or more so, than Wii Sports.

One aspect that really doesn’t help is how dated the Wii’s graphics hardware is. It didn’t matter as much when the system was released in 2006 and everyone was (rightfully) enamored with the innovative new gameplay mechanics. But the Wii’s 480p resolution and Gamecube-era graphics hardware produce drab, dated, jagged-edged output on now-quite-affordable HDTVs, and it’s not helping the system age gracefully.

But the shallow, short-lived novelty of the few good Wii games is the truly fatal flaw. As this article states, it was a fad — and it ages as poorly as one. Playing Wii Sports today feels like reliving a shallow one-hit-wonder from the past, like listening to Kris Kross ironically in a PT Cruiser on your way home to feed your Tamagotchi and talk about Ron Paul on Reddit.

I’m not sure what Nintendo could do to convince the growing number of people tired with the Wii to come back to it. New sales were happening quickly enough that they didn’t need to care, but that’s now slowing. Where does the Wii go from here?

Like most used-up fads, I don’t think there’s a future for it.

I have no idea what Nintendo’s next console will look like, but I don’t think they have any great options. The novelty that made the Wii such a powerful fad will remove most people’s motivation to ever buy another system like it.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on October 30, 2009 8:20 AM

Mindy-Lee Mansour, mother of Supreme Queen winner Kailee-Cassidy Mansour, stopped by the PAPER offices earlier this morning. She took time off from choreographing K-C's Western-wear routine to wish you all a happy Halloween!

Photo by Carol-Lee Mansour

Originally posted by Alexis Swerdloff from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on October 30, 2009 8:15 AM

The Wall Street Journal turns up its nose at the forthcoming auction of the art collection of Lehman Brothers, which is going up for sale on Sunday. “Many of the works are by unknowns, meant primarily to decorate wall space,” says the WSJ. Sure, it’s not exactly a world-class collection by any stretch—but also it’s not at all a bad group of artists, or “unknowns.” And most of the works seem to be prints, so of course this is by no means a big bucks auction. But a Julie Mehretu print for five grand? A recent Ed Ruscha for a grand? A 1975 Calder print for $1200??? This is like fun bargain basement shopping—with actual investment potential. You snobs!

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on October 30, 2009 7:40 AM

If you use the Sphinx search engine and have been watching the development branch (0.9.10) and wondering when to upgrade, I'm here to tell you that "now" is a great time. As of r2037, the last major issue I regularly saw has been fixed. The other big bug was fixed in r2031.

Late last week I began testing those fixes in a "burn-in" test I've developed that makes liberal use of indextool --check. Instead of seeing index corruption within an hour, I saw none. After 3 days of no failures, I deployed it to a subset of our search back-end servers. Yesterday we deployed it to half of the remaining servers.

So far, so good!

I should note that all our index corruption was merge related. Sphinx wasn't building corrupt indexes out of the box, but the merges (usually filtering merges) could produce corrupted indexes.

We were upgrading from a lightly patched version of r1894. That meant rebuilding our indexes to use the new and more compact format. Some of the obvious benefits of the upgrade:

• smaller disk and memory footprint
• pre-fork support to spawn searchd children at start up
• more reliable shutdown and pid file handling
• kill lists
• mysql protocol support
• lots of small optimizations and fixes

Thanks to the Sphinx team for their excellent work. I look forward to the release of Sphinx 1.0.

(comments)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Jeremy Zawodny's blog, on October 30, 2009 7:26 AM

Hoo-boy. Have I been busy (and it shows no signs of slowing down or stopping)!

Here's some stuff I would have written about, had I had the time:




That above is City Quilter's new NYC Subway fabric. (I love CQ and try to visit when I have a spare half-hour in NYC. Beautiful, well-laid-out quilt fabric store!)

Mary Beth sent me a link to the Home Sewing Is Easy fabric. Home Sewing IS easy, but maybe not as easy as shown here ...

Our own Cookie's hilarious (and useful) post on hairstyles, over on LuciteBox.

Gwen has some really cute and useful fabric-yardage cards here (which you'll need if you don't just follow my advice in this post).

Robin sent me this link from eBay. Art lover? You want (or maybe don't want) to click.

I love this dress, from Jen at MOMSPatterns:



(She's also having a Spooktacular Sale for two days and two days only! Use coupon code 'spooky25' when you check out and you'll save a whopping 25% off of your orders. Code expires at the stroke of midnight on Halloween [EDT].)

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on October 30, 2009 7:10 AM

I favorited a YouTube video: with apologies to pretty much everyone. Matt got an iphone that was broken and made a little video. It lacked pizazz. He got it replaced.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from mathowie's YouTube Activity, on October 30, 2009 7:01 AM

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Just in case you missed it, I got my wish from a while back: there is an official version of the classic board game Settlers of Catan, called just Catan, on the App Store right now. I'm still playing Kolonists, the unofficial knockoff that got kicked off of the store for infringement, but if you've got wood for sheep, this official version should get you your portable fix. If you're unfamiliar with the Catan juggernaut, check out this thorough piece from Wired.com.

There's hot seat multiplayer gameplay (I assume you just can't cheat by looking at what resources other people have), or a few AIs to tangle with if you don't have friends at hand, and the game includes a scrollable board to play on, game stats to track, and a tutorial for those of you who haven't rolled the dice and tried to build the Longest Road yet.

The game is created by United Soft Media, a German company that's also ported the game to the DS, and while it's not quite as shiny as the Xbox Live port (my personal favorite version of the game, outside of the real thing, of course), the reviews on iTunes say it gets the job done, at least while you're waiting for the next board game night (and while we're talking about board games, can I recommend Dominion? Best table game I've played in years). The game is $4.99 and available right now. Anyone have any ore?

TUAWOfficial Settlers of Catan out now on App Store originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Mike Schramm from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on October 30, 2009 7:00 AM

Every year, a bunch of dumbasses at The Morning News complete a story, teeing off from the beginning of a trite Halloween urban legend. This year: the babysitter gets a scary phone call. This is my favorite part.

The phone rang.

“What do you want, douche?” Shelly said.

The voice was whispering now and Shelly could hear a mobile playing in the background. “OK, I’m in the baby’s room right now. I’m looking at the baby. Checking it, as it were, which is something you should do once in awhile. There is undeniably a baby in the house.”

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on October 30, 2009 6:40 AM

Speaking of, here's another good one:

Took me awhile to realize that truck is carrying more than just baggage.

Tags: this is a metaphor for something

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 30, 2009 6:37 AM

Alex Rodriguez has struck out 3 times in both Games 1 and 2 of the 2009 World Series. Via Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Post-Season Batting Game Finder, here are the "leaders" for most games in the post-season where the games were 9 innings or less with 3+ whiffs in the contest:

                   Games Link to Individual Games
+-----------------+-----+-------------------------+
 Duke Snider           5 Ind. Games
 Ryan Howard           5 Ind. Games
 Reggie Sanders        4 Ind. Games
 Jim Edmonds           4 Ind. Games
 Willie Wilson         3 Ind. Games
 Dan Wilson            3 Ind. Games
 Chase Utley           3 Ind. Games
 Alfonso Soriano       3 Ind. Games
 John Shelby           3 Ind. Games
 Alex Rodriguez        3 Ind. Games
 Manny Ramirez         3 Ind. Games
 David Ortiz           3 Ind. Games
 John Olerud           3 Ind. Games
 Willie McGee          3 Ind. Games
 Evan Longoria         3 Ind. Games
 Kenny Lofton          3 Ind. Games
 Reggie Jackson        3 Ind. Games
 Chone Figgins         3 Ind. Games

Then again, perhaps it will be Ryan Howard that A-Rod has to "chase" for this title?

Originally posted by Steve Lombardi from Baseball-Reference Blog, on October 30, 2009 6:35 AM

Remember that hot Science Times article from this summer explicating just how fireflies’ light flashes are a call-and-response mating system? “In at least some species,” wrote bug smut peddler Carl Zimmer, of stuff he learned from Tufts University evolutionary ecologist Dr. Sara Lewis. “Females may use flashes to pick out males with the biggest gifts.” (”Nuptial gifts” being coiled packages of protein males fireflies inject into female fireflies along with their sperm.) Well, turns out that the phosphorescent flashes serve another, less sexy purpose, too.

According to an article at the Discovery Channel website, fireflies flash as a warning to bats, and maybe other potential predators, not to eat them.

“Fireflies are often toxic to bats,” writes Discovery’s Jennifer Viegas, “which see the nighttime flashing and steer clear of the insects.” She cites a recent study by Paul Moosman, Jr., an assistant professor of biology at the Virginia Military Institute, who says, “I believe it is quite possible that bats would attempt to eat fireflies, especially if the firefly was not flashing.” (Surprising, because everyone thinks of bats as totally blind. Not totally: Mooseman explained that bats’ famed echolocation is good for navigating and foraging system, but it “is an imperfect mechanism for identifying prey.”)

The problem with the warning flashes (and this goes back to that first Times story), is that there are certain other predators—another, cannibalistic species of fireflies in fact, called Photuris—that actually do like to eat fireflies. These sick fucks watch for the flashes of their amorous brothers and sisters, only to swoop in and devour them in the act. “They pounce, they bite, they suck blood—all the gory stuff,” Dr. Lewis said. That’s some Friday the 13th shit right there.

Originally posted by Dave Bry from The Awl, on October 30, 2009 6:20 AM

Some in the Java community are linking to Sun Chairman and Co-Founder Scott McNealy’s comments in the Oracle OpenWorld keynote, in which he wistfully looks back at the soon-to-be-gone Sun and boasts that they:

Kicked butt, had fun, didn’t cheat, loved our customers, changed computing forever

Sorry to bust the warm fuzzies, but we should append that history with a few more words:

and failed anyways

Sun lost money for most of this decade, as its stock fell more than 95%, reaching the point late last year where its market valuation equaled its cash and investments, meaning the market considered the company’s business as having no value whatsoever.

As engineers, we can romanticize Sun’s “good guy” behavior over fine craft beers all night, but at the end of the day, the company ceased to be viable, destroying a great deal of wealth in the process. Sometimes, it seemed like Sun wanted to be the non-profit FSF instead of a publicly-traded company. At least they got the “non-profit” part right.

And clearly understanding Sun’s failure matters because the kinds of things that Sun did are now going to be considered liabilities. Sun tried like crazy to win over the open source community. The community demanded that Sun support Linux, even though Sun would presumably favor its own flavor of Unix, Solaris. But they went along with it… giving companies a reason not to buy Sun hardware and instead lash together cheap Linux boxes, or buy heavy iron from Linux-loving Sun rival IBM. The community demanded that Java be open sourced and, after a series of fits and starts, it finally was, with the ultra-hippie GPL license no less. Ultimately, the community came to believe it had a blank check written against Sun’s engineering resources, as typified in the infamous “changing of the guard” episode of the JavaPosse and the somewhat testy reply.

But what did all these giveaways accomplish? The next time a community goads a company into open sourcing its crown jewels, the critical response may well be “yeah, that worked great for Sun.” In fact, that was pretty much Fake Steve’s take on Sun over the course of Sun’s decline, mocking the company’s giveaways, as it frittered into irrelevance. At the end of the day, how is FSJ not right on this one?

It’s ironic that Sun’s love of the open source community was largely unrequited. As late as 2007, Slashdot founder Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda was still expressing his eternal hatred of Java, and even in GPL form, Java has been slow to win acceptance from the F/OSS types. In an even more ironic twist, Slashdot’s tone has softened lately. For example, a recent article on Android game development quoted its source as saying “While iPhone apps are written in Objective C, the Android SDK uses relatively more programmer-friendly Java.” Why the sudden love for Java? Because it powers Android, the most plausible rival to the iPhone, now telephona non grata to the Slashdot community. In other words, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Too late for Sun though, and it’s not clear that a greater acceptance from a community that, by definition, doesn’t like to pay for stuff would even matter anyways. Perhaps the takeaway is that we all need a more realistic attitude about what individuals and companies need to do to continue their existence. Charity is swell, but it’s not necessarily a viable business model.

Originally posted by cadamson from [Time code];, on October 30, 2009 5:23 AM

Eyed! Extremely famous 82-year-old ____ Alex K____, with his wife A., dining alone at great old restaurant M____, in the neighborhood of S____. They were spotted conversing and laughing and sipping espresso. At one point A., who has had the same haircut since 198-, laughed delicately. She also nibbled on a small cookie. They looked so happy! Even though I truly dislike his ____, it was fantastic to eye the twosome as they went off down S____ Street together. With her to his side, he stepped into one of the tree basins that are excised from the sidewalk, so as to make way for other pedestrians, temporarily leaning on the tree for balance.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on October 30, 2009 5:20 AM

elspeth, molly

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on October 30, 2009 5:10 AM

There is a certain well respected venture capital firm (VC) that has a program for fledgling entrepreneurs.   The teams that are selected get a desk, a small stipend, and advice for a few months from experienced VCs.  I could imagine back when I was starting my first company thinking this was a great opportunity – especially the advice part.

Here’s the problem.  A few years into the program, approximately 25 teams have gone through it.  The sponsoring VC funded one team and passed on the other 24.  None of those other 24 have gotten financing from anyone else.  Why?  Because once you go through the program and don’t get funded by the sponsoring VC, you are perceived by the rest of the investor community as damaged goods.

Most early stage investors are bombarded with new deals.  There is no way they could meet with all of them, or even spend time seriously reading their investor materials.  In order to filter through it all, they rely heavily on signals.  The person referring you to them is a very big signal.  Your team’s bios is a very big signal. And if you were in the seed program of a VC who has a multi-hundred million dollar fund and who decided to pass, that is a huge signal.

Meanwhile, the unsuspecting entrepreneurs think: “I was at a prestigious VC this summer – this will look great on our bios and company deck.”  The truth is exactly the opposite:  the better the VC, the stronger the negative signal when they pass.

Thus, the most important question to ask before taking seed money is: How many companies that the sponsor passed on went on to raise money from other sources?

The best programs don’t have sponsors who are even capable of further funding the company.  Y Combinator simply doesn’t do follow ons, so there is no way they can positively or negatively signal by their follow on actions. (Although now that they have taken money from Sequoia people are worried that Sequoia passing could be seen as a negative signal.  I just invested in a Y Combinator company and was reassured to see Sequoia co-investing).  Other seed programs lie somewhere in between — they aren’t officially run by big VCs but they do have big VCs associated with them so there is some signaling effect.   (I would call this the “hidden sponsor” problem.  I didn’t realize the extent of it until I got emails responding to my earlier seed program posts from entrepreneurs who had been burned by it).

The most dangerous programs are the ones run by large VCs.  I would love for someone to prove me wrong, but from my (admittedly anecdotal) knowledge, no companies that have been in large VC seed programs where the VC then stopped supporting the company went on to raise more money from other sources.

As has been widely noted, startups – especially internet-related ones – require far less capital today than they did a decade ago.  The VC industry has responded by keeping their funds huge but trying to get options on startups via seed programs.  Ultimately the VC industry will be forced to adapt by shrinking their funds, so they can invest in seed deals with the intention of actually making money on those investments, instead of just looking for options on companies in which they can invest “real money.”  In the meantime, however, a lot of young entrepreneurs are getting an unpleasant introduction to the rough-and-tumble world of venture capital.

Disclosure:  I am biased because as an early stage investor I sometimes compete with these programs.

Originally posted by chris from cdixon.org - chris dixon's blog, on October 30, 2009 3:52 AM

leaping tricia

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on October 30, 2009 3:50 AM

Just in time for Halloween, we’ve put together our list of the best horror movies that take place in New York City! If you think we’ve overlooked a film, or disagree with our choices, battle it out in the comments!

Without further ado…

EVIL BREWING IN THE CITY

Double Feature: Ghostbusters / Ghostbusters II
Does Ghostbusters really need an explanation? Though we’ve all seen it a million times, Ghostbusters is endlessly rewatchable and an excellent group film (I’ve seen entire crowds quote the dialog from start to finish). As for its New York content, the movie gives viewers one of the best tours of the city ever captured on celluloid, and as a plus, the geography of the movie actually makes sense!
Watch For: a brief glimpse of Ron Jeremy in the crowd outside Dana’s at the end of the film.

Say what you will about Ghostbusters II – when I reference 1) Vigo the Carpathian or 2) the River of Slime, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and that’s gotta mean something, right? (hell, chances are you even know what a “slime blower” is). Though basically a carbon copy of the first in nearly every way (underdogs become heroes, Venkman wins over Dana, a larger-than-life icon brought to life in the finale, etc.), this one still has its charms (New Yorker’s immense hate and disdain manifesting itself into a pink sludge? Brilliant!)
Watch For: Ray’s Occult Bookstore, located at 33 St. Mark’s Place

Rosemary’s Baby
Another no-brainer. To those that see the film as being a bit dated and campy, I feel they’re missing the point. In my opinion, the characters are among the most realistic ever to populate a horror movie. Rosemary is both incredibly well-meaning and immensely naive, but she never comes off as a horror movie ditz. In many ways, it is her unyielding desire to please that causes her to ignore the obvious and get in such deep trouble.

Her husband Guy, easily one of the sleaziest villains in film history (he lets Satan rape his wife – can you get any worse?), is not a one-dimensional antagonist; we see him change from loving husband to self-centered asshole as the film progresses, an organic shift for his character. And though very much over the top, the Castevets are perfectly believable as the kind of kooks who would try to bring about the return of Satan. For some reason, people tend to picture Satanists as being robe-wearing goth types. Imagine instead that the crazy aunt and uncle in your family accidentally stumbled upon some dark magic and used it to bring about Lucifer. If you were to walk in on the ceremony, the appearance would be comical, but the results horrifying – one of the film’s juxtapositions that I love.

C.H.U.D. (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers)
You can stop worrying about the alligators in the sewers – it’s the CHUD’s you’ve gotta watch out for! A schlocky B-movie, but a charming B-movie at that. If you’re looking to make fun of this MST3K-style, you might find yourself surprised. Daniel Stern actually gives a decent, non-hammy performance (a rarity!) as the head of a homeless shelter. Not too many scares, but a lot of creepy fun.

SOMETHING’S BEHIND YOU…

Cat People
If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favor and rent Cat People. Directed by horror maestro Val Lewton, Cat People is about…well, people that turn into panthers, and features at least two masterful moments of suspense that have stayed with me since I first saw the film (I’d mention more, but I don’t want to ruin them). Though Cat People wasn’t actually filmed in the city, look for a decent recreation of a Central Park transverse.

Wait Until Dark

I gotta be honest (and I know I’ll lose a lot of you on this one): I’m not a Wait Until Dark fan. My parents hold it to be one of the scariest movies ever, but though I’ve seen it a number of times, I’ve never really understood the appeal. Ultimately, it feels to me like filmed theater, which I really, really dislike. If you’re going to make a movie version of a stage play, just make sure to bring something cinematic to it. Instead, the camera is plunked down in practically a fourth wall position to film the proceedings (which at times are distractingly theatrical), and to me it feels hammy and flat. Yes, the finale in the dark is clever, but while I can imagine it having a great effect for anyone watching the stage play in a pitch black theater, on the screen, I feel it loses most of its impact.

But!

I know I’m in the minority on this one, and if I’m going to have CHUD on this list, I have to include Wait Until Dark too!

THEY’RE DESTROYING THE CITY!

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
One of the first monster movies, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms tells the story of a hibernating dinosaur who, after being awoken by atomic bomb testing in the Arctic, comes to New York and tears the place up. The special effects, by master Ray Harryhausen, steal the show and are definitely worth a viewing. In a way, the movie is basically the same as…

Cloverfield
Though a bit overhyped when it first came out, Cloverfield is a fun first-hand jaunt through New York City as a space monster wreaks havoc. The geography makes NO sense (they skip the Williamsburg bridge AND the Manhattan Bridge to take the (more photogenic?) Brooklyn Bridge as an escape route, and somehow walk from Spring Street to 59th Street in a matter of minutes) and the characters are especially unlikeable, but the handy-cam nature of the filming is well-used with the special effects to add a sense of realism to the whole thing…lending to some decent suspense and jump moments.

MONSTERS ON THE LOOSE!

King Kong
Another no-brainer. What more can be said about King Kong? (though nowadays, would Kong prefer to climb the Time Warner Center?).

Q: The Winged Serpent
The tag line for this film – “It’s name is Quetzalcoatl…Just call it Q. That’s all you have time to say before it tears you apart!” – should give you a very good idea of what you’re in for. Regardless, it’s a fun monster movie featuring the winged Q, who has been busy snatching people up throughout the city. Filmed on location at the Chrysler Building, you get a look at the top-most floor of the spire (which surprisingly looks like a wooden attic!).

Planet of the Apes
I stayed away from sci-fi for this list (Independence Day, Escape from NY, etc.), but I’ll make an exception for Planet of the Apes. Not a New York movie, you say? Did you not see the ending? The whole thing was filmed in and around New York!

MOVIES TO AVOID

End of Days, Dark Water, I Am Legend (CGI zombies are not scary, period; two hours of watching Will Smith get chased by cartoony pixels is mind-numbing), Gremlins II, and especially…

Friday the 13th: Pary VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan
Look, this might be great if Jason actually got to Manhattan. Unfortunately, too much of the film takes place on a cruise ship BOUND for Manhattan (Jason has hitched a lift from Crystal Lake along with a high school senior class). Once he finally arrives, Jason causes a bit of mayhem on the streets, but then disappears into the sewers for the film’s climax. Yeah, lots of fun and plenty of victims in the New York’s sewer system, right? Jason is ultimately killed by “toxic waste” being flushed through the sewer.

-SCOUT

Originally posted by Scout from Scouting NY, on October 29, 2009 10:50 PM

Spin It – Reinventing The Bathtub: A shower that is not gross when you want to bathe in it. I likes. (via Freckles)

Originally posted by Mike D. from Mike Industries, on October 29, 2009 9:32 PM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 29, 2009 5:22 PM

All of these costumes are cheap, pretty throw-it-togetherable, and will make other people around you hungry.

1. Food Mascots

From left: Sun Maid Raisin girl, Morton Salt Girl, Jolly Green Giant, and the Chiquita Banana lady. [Photograph: Tressa Eaton]

• Sun Maid Raisin Girl: A bonnet, white blouse, head scarf, and basket full of grapes. (Bonus points for sunshine rays emanating from your body)
• Morton Salt Girl: Wear a yellow dress (preferably with a huge bow) and hold an umbrella. (Fun fact: that would be our own Serious Green columnist Tressa Eaton in the photo!)
• Jolly Green Giant: Green shirt, green leaf-bearing toga, and green headband. Act jolly.
• Chiquita Banana Lady: A woven hat full of fruits piled on top, big hoop earrings, and a poofy dress.

2. Deviled Egg

[Flickr: txkimmers]

Most ladies probably have a devil horns headband and tail lying around from a previous devil costume. Multiply that by a white blob with yellow center—ta-da, everyone's favorite finger food.

Get two pieces of white poster board, cut two large ovals (of the same size), and color in a yellow yolk on one. Punch two holes at the top of each egg and string yarn through the holes, connecting them so they sit on your shoulders. Or you can always use a white sheet instead of poster board, and cut it into a poncho shape.

3. Trader Joe/Josephina

The unofficial Trader Joe's commercial.

Because dressing up as a cashier from any other grocery store just wouldn't be as cool. Wear a Hawaiian shirt, lei, and name tag (include your hometown).

4. Sriracha Tube

[Flickr: Shannon At Zeer]

This requires super advanced puffy paint skills. Get a red shirt and white puffy paint squirter from your local crafts store and, with a Sriracha bottle nearby, recreate the rooster design and "HUY FONG FOODS, INC." labeling underneath. Find a green hat; wear it.

5. Gummy Worm

This is not an actual person, just inspiration. [Flickr: digipam]

Basically just wear one shade on top and one on the bottom for that classic duotone gummy worm look. Squiggle around with awful posture all night.

6. Fruit Tree

Wear brown pants and a green long sleeve shirt. Pick up some artificial fruits at a crafts store or 99-cent type place and wrap them around your arms and torso haphazardly.

7. Bag of Jelly Bellys

That would be my lifelong friend on the left who's been rocking this costume since we were little. [Photograph: Tovah Moss]

Blow up a bunch of multi-colored balloons, but not too huge. Take a dry cleaners bag and cut two leg holes at the top (the hanger side). Step into the bag and fill it with balloons. Punch out two arm holes and tie the top around your neck with a big bow.

8. California Raisin

California Raisins commercial, circa 1986.

Take an extra-large black trash bag (if they start making a purple version, opt for that), hold it upside-down and cut a hole towards the top for your face. Put the bag over your body (please do not suffocate) and poke holes for your arms. Wear big sunglasses, white gloves, high-top Converse, and pants of some sort. Toy saxophones are also encouraged.

9. Top Chef-testant

Top Chef Las Vegas. [Photograph: Bravo]

Wear a white lab coat and try to bring up topics like olive oil-poached halibut and turnip foam as much as possible. For a creepier twist, pick a specific person from this season's Top Chef Las Vegas.

10. Chipotle Burrito

[Photograph: chipotle.com]

How often do you get to use an entire box of aluminum foil at once?! Exactly. Just wrap yourself up until you're covered and look like approximately 1,000 calories.

Related

Best Food-Inspired Halloween Costumes
Photo of the Day: Rice Krispie Treat Costumed Kitty
Video: Martha Stewart With Babies In Food-Inspired Halloween Costumes

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 29, 2009 3:00 PM

“Weird Al” Yankovic rehearsing for Know Your Meme

Stay tuned for a special guest.

(via knowyourmeme: Andrew Baron)

Episode coming soon.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on October 29, 2009 2:09 PM

You probably know our reporters better. But behind the scenes Andrew Golis, TPM's Deputy Publisher, has been a big part of TPM's growth and accomplishments over the last three years he's been working at the site. Today's Andrew's last day. He's leaving to take a job at Yahoo! News helping create ... what else, a new news blog. 'Nuff said. We wish him luck and thank him for all his work.

We've just posted photos of Andrew's impromptu going away party a few moment ago in our NY headquarters at our Facebook fan page. (If you stop by, take a moment to become a TPM fan on Facebook.)

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 29, 2009 1:59 PM

via newyork.seriouseats.com "Introducing the Serious Eats World Series, where the food emanating from the City of Brotherly Love is pitted against the quintessential eating experiences of the Big Apple. We'll let Derek Jeter, Jimmy Rollins, Mark Texeira, Ryan Howard, and the newly at peace A-Rod settle the question of baseball superiority on the field. We're going to settle the issue of food superiority on the plate and on the blog." - Ed Levine

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 29, 2009 1:52 PM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on October 29, 2009 1:30 PM

[Image: McSweeney's]

Literary journal McSweeney's is usually published as a book, but their next issue, #33, will be in the form of a broadsheet-sized, Sunday edition newspaper called San Francisco Panorama. Like other newspapers, it will include timely news, arts and sports coverage, comics, a magazine, and—most importantly for us—a food section. In their words:

...possibly, seriously, the best food section that has ever appeared in any newspaper anywhere, with an incredible modular ramen recipe from New York's own David Chang and a fifty-eight-step lamb-belly photo essay from San Francisco's Ryan Farr.

The issue will be available next month.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats, on October 29, 2009 1:30 PM

via www.flickr.com

Yeah, the new theme rocks.

The banner photo was taken in Koh Samui in 2006 with my pretty old Canon point-and-shoot camera. The photo is obviously retouched a little bit with Picasa to look better, though :)

Originally posted by miyagawa from bulknews.typepad.com, on October 29, 2009 1:27 PM

The easy single-handed operation of the iPhone¹ is not one of its obvious selling points but is one of those little features that grows on you and becomes nearly indispensable. A portable networked computing and gaming device that can be easily operated with one hand can be used in a surprising variety of situations.

Eating is the most obvious potentially one-handed activity most of us engage in. If you must do something other than just enjoy your food ferchristsake, you can answer emails, read Twitter, or catch up on the latest at nytimes.com while munching on that salad.

People carry things. Coffee, shopping bags, books, bags, babies, small dogs, hot dogs, water bottles, coats, etc. It's nice to be able to not put all that crap down just to quickly Google for the closest public restroom (aka Starbucks).

It is very occasionally necessary to use the iPhone while driving. No, not for checking your stock portfolio, you asshole. For directions. Glance quickly and keep your thoughts on the road ahead.

My wife spends about five hours a day breastfeeding our daughter and has only one hand available for non-feeding activities. That hand is frequently occupied by her iPhone; it helps her keep abreast (hey'o!) of current events, stay connected with pals through Twitter & email, track feeding/sleeping/diaper changing times, keep notes (she plans meals and grocery "shops" at 3am), and alert her layabout husband via SMS to come and get the damned baby already.

Straphangers in NYC and elsewhere know what a great one-handed device the iPhone is. Riding the subway and reading has never been so easy, especially during rush hour when pointy hardcovers become weaponized. (Getting shived by a hardbound Harry Potter on the 6pm 5 train is no joke.)

Tim Carmody, one of the shopkeeps over at Snarkmarket, recently broke his arm but is getting plenty of use out of his iPhone: "They should have an ad -- 'If you've got a broken arm, this is the perfect phone for you!'" Broken arms are uncommon, but plenty of people have more permanent physical conditions necessitating one-handed interaction with the world.

And a list of one-handed computing activities wouldn't be complete without at least quickly mentioning, well, you know. It rhymes with "whacking off". I think I've said enough.

Two areas where the iPhone really shines in its one-handedness are gaming and typing. One-handed gaming is pretty much impossible with the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP, but the App Store is full of games that require only your thumb for input. I've been playing lots of Shake & Spell and Strategery lately. Typing with one hand on the iPhone is almost as easy and fast as with two. You can actually *write* on this thing with one hand; not just SMS messages and tweets but also blog posts, emails, meeting minutes, and the like.

[1] This footnote still applies. (Yes, that was a reference to a footnote within another footnote. (And that was a parenthetical within a footnote. (...))) ↩

Tags: iPhone

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 29, 2009 1:13 PM

Shared by Eve
Bloomington, IN, tap water is also amazing. Limey!

Memphis Water. Yum!

When I moved to Muncie for college, I was prepared to miss a lot of things about living in Memphis. I wasn’t prepared to miss something as mundane as the tap water. I’m not sure where the water in Muncie came from, but it seemed like it had to settle a little bit before you could drink it and it had a very specific, slightly oily taste.

Not to get all hyperbolic, but Memphis tap water is hands down the best tap water I’ve ever had. It’s crisp, clean, clear and doesn’t taste like anything.

Memphis water comes from a huge underground aquifer (not the Mississippi River). When you turn your tap on to brush your teeth, the water that comes out is the same stuff that companies bottle and sell in vending machines. I’d be really interested to compare the bottled water sales figures for Memphis and another city of its size.

Memphians, don’t take your amazing tap water for granted. Put down that bottle of Dasani and raise a glass. Cheers!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from I Love Memphis, on October 29, 2009 12:52 PM

via www.mmmeow.com

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 29, 2009 12:33 PM

via www.papermag.com "Florent Morellet, owner of the now shuttered West Village restaurant Florent, is one of several artists featured in a group show called "The Map as Art" at Christopher Henry Gallery (127 Elizabeth St.). There's an opening reception on November 5th from 6 to 9 p.m"

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 29, 2009 12:00 PM

1. Cymbals Eat Guitars are playing a free show tonight, October 29, 8 p.m., at Soundfix Records (110 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg). Yes!

2. Florent Morellet, owner of the now shuttered West Village restaurant Florent, is one of several artists featured in a group show called "The Map as Art" at Christopher Henry Gallery (127 Elizabeth St.).  There's an opening reception on November 5th from 6 to 9 p.m.

3. Also opening next Thursday, November 5, is Paul McCarthy's "White Snow" at Hauser & Wirth (32 E. 69th St.).  The exhibition of drawings focuses on Snow White and runs until December 24.  Did we just hear Walt Disney rolling over?

4. The world's biggest B-Boy battle will be held on November 18 at the Hammerstein Ballroom.  All the details are here.

5. Artist Krink (né Craig Costello) customized a Mini Cooper S.  Check it out here.

6. Music streaming service Last.fm will launch an online video service in early 2010.

Originally posted by Alexis Swerdloff from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on October 29, 2009 11:43 AM

A compelling tip in the inbox this morning shared the news that residents in Gramercy are abuzz over a rumor that Danny Meyer is looking to open a restaurant in the old church space on 21st Street and Central Park South. The space, a former antique store, is linked to a still operating church, Calvary-St. George's Episcopal Church, and a thrift store, but it is quite a promising prospect. Just look at that exterior!

A visit to the area confirms that a restaurant is going in there and that two restaurateurs are trying to get the space, but no one could confirm that Mr. Meyer, mayor of Gramercy, was after it himself. Union Square Hospitality Group is, for now, staying mum. It should be quiet the space no matter who wins out.
· All Plywood Coverage [~ENY~]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater NY, on October 29, 2009 11:37 AM

Shared by Allen Y Chen
I actually LOLed

What do you do when you’re a reality show abortion with 8 peanut sized babies, brand new lips and a slew of paparazzi outside? Put them in little devil costumes and just laugh. Laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. It’s huhluhluhlarious!!

Wait, only, hol’ up. Babies, why you cryin?? It’s a joke, cammannnnn. Don’t be like that babies! Here, have some candy.

In other news, Octomom’s neighbors? Super psyched about life. The only way we could even forgive this woman for trick or treating is if she rang each doorbell 9 times.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Best Week Ever, on October 29, 2009 11:21 AM

The London School of Economics and Political Science joins The Commons on Flickr as our 30th partner! Here’s a little about them in their own words,

The London School of Economics and Political Science was founded in 1895; The decision to found the School was made at a breakfast party between four Fabians: Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Wallas, and George Bernard Shaw on 4 August 1894. Over the last few years we have noticed an increasing interest in our photographic collections relating to the LSE. The photographs, however, are spread across different archive collections and have only been possible to view in hard copy in our reading room. In response to this, the project, LSE: a History of Pictures was set up to digitise at least 1000 images for open access on Flickr, which has been funded by the LSE Annual Fund. – LSE

They begin their Commons journey with 20 sets, spanning the life of the school from the 1890s onward and offering a snapshot of student and academic life in London. A few sets to get you started are….

British Political Posters, c1905-c1910 – Period editorial posters depicting both economic and political concerns of the day.

LSE Founders and Early Days 1895-1920s – Meet the four founders of LSE, Charlotte and George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, from a 1932 trip to Russia.

Formal LSE Staff Portraits – including Karl Popper, Beatrice Webb and H.G. Wells.

Or just check out student life at LSE in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s!

Originally posted by Cris Stoddard from Flickr Blog, on October 29, 2009 10:52 AM

Andrew reminds us of this laugher served up by TNR during 2004 Democratic primary:

"It may take years, or even decades, for Democrats to relearn the lessons we thought, naively, they had learned for good under Clinton. But one day, Joe Lieberman's warnings in this campaign will look prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again guide the Democratic Party. It will be the work of this magazine, to whatever small degree possible, to hasten that day,"

That's a pretty ridiculous statement, and I thought it was ridiculous at the time. But it's the sort of thing your bound to eventually say if your in the business of doling out opinions. I'm sure, at some point, someone will go back through the archives and saying something equally stupid. Comes with job, I guess.

On the real, though, I wish TNR had been right. Lieberman is a nightmare.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ta-Nehisi Coates, on October 29, 2009 10:37 AM

Ubuntu today released its latest offering namely Ubuntu Karmic Koala version 9.10. Ubuntu Karmic Koala comes with lots of new features.

New Features in Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10

•  Upstart - an event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon which handles starting of tasks and services during boot, stopping them during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running. 
•  Software Center - a graphical utility for package management in Ubuntu. It replaces the Add/Remove programs tool.
  
•  GNOME version 2.28
• Quickly - An easy way to develop applications for Ubuntu and package them in a deb format.
• Ubuntu Karmic Koala is available in 25 languages.
• Linux kernel 2.6.31
• Ubuntu One - Integrates your Ubuntu machine with the cloud providing you free 2 GB of space to store and synchronize all your data like Tomboy notes, imortant files, contacts et al. More space is available for a nominal price of $10 / month.
  
• Better support for Intel chipsets.
• Ext4 file system by default.
• Grub 2
• Improved and enhanced AppArmor.
  

Of course, Ubuntu 9.10 is not without its share of glitches. Do check out the release notes for the lengthy list of issues that users might face while running this Ubuntu version.

How to download Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10

You can download Ubuntu 9.10 by visiting this page and choosing a mirror closest to your geographical location. You are encouraged to use bittorrent to download the ISO as it will ease the load on the Ubuntu servers.

For more news, tips, and reviews on all things Linux, Open source and Free software, visit Linux Help blog.

Originally posted by noreply@blogger.com (Ravi) from All about Linux, on October 29, 2009 9:40 AM

At one point during last night’s first game of the 2009 World Series, Philadelphia Phillies manager Charlie Manuel was shown in the dugout wearing a batting glove. Leaving aside for a moment the greater absurdity that baseball managers wear uniforms at all (picture a basketball or football coach doing the same) let’s consider the possible reasons why Manuel was dressed to take some cuts.

1. The one-glove look was a marketing ploy to promote the new Michael Jackson concert movie.

2. Manuel was a little chilly. Just judging from what I could see on television, it looked pretty raw out there. The man is sixty-five years old. Maybe the conditions were making the joints in his fingers ache, and a batting glove was the only thing around to add some extra insulation.

3. It was a tribute to Marlon Brando’s classic bit of physical improvisation in On the Waterfront. In that movie, there’s a scene in a playground in which Eva Marie Saint drops her glove, and Brando picks it up  (at least I think that’s how Brando gets his hand on her glove—it’s been a while since I saw the movie). Instead of handing it back to her, he plays with it as they continue to talk, putting the tiny thing on his hand as he sits on a swing. In some ways, it’s the most moving moment in the film for me, this tragic battered fighter momentarily playful and innocent as a child. Manuel seemed to be as loose in the dugout last night as Brando was during the glove scene, and you can’t help but wonder if such a playful approach to a pressurized moment helped bolster the ridiculous poise of Phillies ace (and stunt-fielder worthy of the Indianapolis Clowns, the King and His Court, and his namesake and fellow lefty Bill Lee) Cliff Lee as he mowed down the previously unstoppable Yankees.

4. Charlie Manuel was, is, and always will be a hitter. This was the theory put forth by color commentator Tim McCarver as he noticed the glove. I tend toward this explanation, too. If you had ever had a period in your life when you bashed balls over the fence, you’d probably feel that power was always inside you, somewhere, no matter how old you got.

Charlie Manuel did his slugging in the minors (in his second-to-last year as a pro he pounded 30 homers and drove in 102 runs at Albuquerque), as did the man shown here, Danny Ozark, arguably the most successful manager in Phillies history before Manuel’s time. As the back of the 1978 card above relates, before Ozark led the Phillies to two 100-plus win seasons and three division titles during the 1970s, he played for twenty years in the minor leagues, hitting 238 home runs, including 31 as a 23-year-old in Abiline, and 32 as a 33-year-old in Wichita Falls.

The undeniable success of Ozark and Manuel, neither of whom ever got any buzz as a baseball genius (Manuel seems most often to be portrayed as a bumpkin, while Ozark gained far less attention for his winning ways than for his hilarious baseball-related utterances), raises the question of whether a slugger might make an inherently good manager. If so, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom on the matter, which tends to celebrate former scrappy infielder types, such as Leo Durocher and Billy Martin, the idea being that because they couldn’t smash a ball several hundred feet they had to learn how to use their mind to get an advantage during their playing days, and so they developed a better overall sense for the game. (Former catchers are also the beneficiaries of this kind of positive stereotyping. Three of the final four managers in the playoffs this year were catchers, Manuel being the exception–and the one who has gotten the least consideration as a brainy managerial maestro.)

The slugger, on the other hand, knows how to slug. And isn’t that the rarest thing in baseball to know about? Someone who has bashed home runs on a professional level must have some advantage that isn’t much talked about when discussing the factors that make up a good manager. Maybe they know that staying loose helps. Maybe it’s that they simply value the importance of slugging: They let their sluggers slug. Along those lines, I heard recently—I think it was during the radio pregame of an NLCS game—that Billy Beane, the Moneyball-inspiring general manager of the A’s, once played for Manuel during Beane’s minor league playing career, and that Beane has said that Manuel is the best manager he’s ever been around. I wish I could find a quote to confirm this, but I’m pretty sure that’s what I heard. It makes some sense. Manuel’s teams don’t bunt much, and though they steal bases, they make sure to do so in optimal situations, their success rate well above the level needed to make the stolen base a useful tool.

Don’t bunt. Don’t take unnecessary risks on the basepaths. Never take the batting glove off a slugger’s hand.

Originally posted by Josh Wilker from Cardboard Gods, on October 29, 2009 9:14 AM

Might be related to the fact that I’ve finally watched ‘The Watchment‘ movie yesterday, maybe the geek side in me, but I just came across this nice photo gallery by Steve Schofield, portraying a bunch of real life people dressed up as their favorite sci-fi characters.

Originally posted by pecus from /var/log, on October 29, 2009 9:02 AM

Originally posted by John Michael Boling from Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest, on October 29, 2009 9:00 AM

It’s A Girl! (At Gawker, Finally):

Tracking Gawker gender hires is the new tracking SNL gender hires?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fimoculous, on October 29, 2009 8:40 AM

Regardless of your rooting interests last night, you had to be impressed by the complete domination of Cliff Lee. The Yankees have a great offense, but he made them look foolish all night, keeping all-star hitters off-balance with a mix of pitches that don’t look like they should be that hard to hit. He set the tone from the first hitter of the game, striking Derek Jeter out with this three pitch sequence:

Fastball, 91 MPH, foul
Curveball, 75 MPH, foul
Cutter, 85 MPH, strikeout

This was just a clinic on how to pitch. He changed speeds, eye level, and movement, finally putting Jeter away on a pitch up in the zone that, on it’s own, is pretty hittable. You generally don’t want to throw 85 MPH at the top of the strike zone, but Lee had set that pitch up perfectly with his first two offerings, and got a good contact hitter to swing right through it.

He had everything working last night, including a nasty curveball that Fox never tired of talking about. But for me, it was Lee’s change-up that was his true out pitch last night, and the reason he was able to shut down a line-up with some really good right-handed hitters. He threw 21 of them on the evening, 18 of which went for strikes, including five swinging strikes where the opposing hitter was just badly fooled. Actually, let’s just look at all of those change-ups.

1st inning, Mark Teixeira, ball.
2nd inning, Jorge Posada, foul.
2nd inning, Hideki Matsui, swing and a miss.
2nd inning, Robinson Cano, flyout.
3rd inning, Nick Swisher, swing and a miss.
3rd inning, Melky Cabrera, called strike
3rd inning, Johnny Damon, called strike.
4th inning, Mark Teixeira, called strike.
4th inning, Alex Rodriguez, swing and a miss.
4th inning, Alex Rodriguez, swing and a miss.
5th inning, Nick Swisher, ball.
5th inning, Nick Swisher, flyout.
6th inning, Melky Cabrera, flyout.
6th inning, Derek Jeter, ball.
7th inning, Jorge Posada, groundout.
8th inning, Nick Swisher, called strike.
8th inning, Nick Swisher, called strike.
9th inning, Mark Teixeira, groundout.
9th inning, Alex Rodriguez, swing and a miss.
9th inning, Jorge Posada, called strike
9th inning, Jorge Posada, foul.

The final total: three balls, five swinging strikes, six called strikes, two foul, five in play outs. Lee’s change-up was almost perfect. He used it against the power hitting Yankee right-handers, but also mixed it in to lefties effectively as well.

The “spike” curveball might have been the more interesting story for Fox to focus on, but the change-up was what led Lee to pitch one of the best games in World Series history.

Originally posted by Dave Cameron from FanGraphs Baseball, on October 29, 2009 8:11 AM

Lots of great recommendations in this thread about UWS brunch.

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from Comments from Alaina Browne, on October 29, 2009 7:59 AM

“Maybe. I never say never.” --Gwyneth Paltrow when asked if she would ever take up designing. We are fairly (well, totally) impartial when it comes to GP, so we say, totally go for it.

Sponsored Topics: Video Games - Games - Jenson Button - Simulations - Driving and Racing

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on October 29, 2009 7:32 AM

You may have heard of We Were Once a Fairy Tale, a short film Spike Jonze made starring Kanye West as a self-obsessed obnoxious pop star who drinks too much. An alien-like creature has inhabited his body and Kanye must expel it so he can die peacefully -- or something like that. It's certainly open to interpretation. Adding to the confusion -- or fun -- is a video posted on Jonze's inspiring blog We Love You So where the director takes Kanye to task for being... Kanye. Fed up with the texting Kanye, Jonze gets a chance to act out his fantasy.

Originally posted by David Hershkovits from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on October 29, 2009 6:51 AM

After discovering the recipe for Robie's Buttermilk Flapjacks in a magazine a year or two ago, my wife has been making them for breakfast most Saturdays and they are, no foolin', the best pancakes I've ever eaten. They are fluffy and moist and delicious. Here's what you do.

Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl, whisk, set aside:

2 cups flour
2 tbsp sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp fine salt

Combine the wet ingredients in a second bowl, whisk:

2 cups buttermilk
4 tbsp melted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 beaten eggs

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and whisk until just combined. Fry in a pan with butter. Top with maple syrup and devour.

Don't skimp on the ingredients here. Use real butter and real vanilla extract, but especially real maple syrup and real buttermilk. Depending on where you live/shop, actual buttermilk might be difficult to find. The term "buttermilk" formerly referred to the liquid left behind after churning butter but nowadays refers to a cultured milk product not unlike drinkable yogurt. The only real buttermilk we've been able to find (in VT and MA) is Kate's Real Buttermilk; even at the NYC Greenmarket, the best you can find is cultured buttermilk made with whole milk. At least attempt to avoid most grocery store buttermilk; it's made from skim milk with added thickeners and such, basically buttermilk without any richness, which is, like, what's the point? Oh, and no powdered buttermilk either...it messes with the texture too much. The point is, these are buttermilk pancakes and they taste best with the best buttermilk you can get your mitts on.

Tags: food   pancakes

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 29, 2009 6:34 AM

We've owed you some results since we ran our latest reader survey a couple of weeks ago. Basically, there was very little difference between the results of the recent survey and the one we conducted back in 2007, but it's still fun to look at.
  - 45% have been reading since before 2007
  - 80% check the site at least once a day
  - 45% check the site several times a day or more
  - Male/female split was exactly 50/50
  - 46% are in their 30s, 25% are in their 40s
  - More than 95% have a college degree or higher
  - Bankers and lawyers were the two highest-represented professions
  - More than 60% work in Manhattan
  - 70% make at least $100,000 per year
  - 90% live in Brooklyn, 4% in Manhattan
  - 20% of Brooklyn dwellers in Park Slope
  - 59% own their own place: 53% houses, 26% co-ops, 21% condos
  - 50% of renters planning to buy within next two years
  - 74% of owners have fixed rate mortgages, 11% have none at all
  - 30% think the Brooklyn market has already bottomed
  - 50% think the market will bottom at some point in the next year
  - Park Slope most favored nabe for investment over next 3-5 years
  - 58% of home owners spend at least $2,500 a year on upkeep
  - 49% would be willing to pay a premium for LEED certified construction
  - 53% of readers have used the Forum in the past year to find a contractor
  - 55% own a car
  - 55% are childless, 22% have just one child, 23% have two or more
  - 59% of readers with school-age children send them to public school
  - 74% go out to dinner at least 3 times a month
  - 35% order take-out at least 10 times a month
  - 50% have used the Restaurants section to find a restaurant
  - 72% have a Facebook account, 24% have a Twitter account

We'll drop some more detailed graphics on you over the coming weeks.

Originally posted by Brownstoner from Brownstoner, on October 29, 2009 6:00 AM

Erik Ruin The Destruction of Olive Groves (10 Plagues series) $15 Originally designed and printed as a part of Liberty Cabbage Theater's play An Olive on the Seder Plate. The series, the Ten Plagues of the Occupation, explores the effects of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. 1 color silkscreen print 17"x22" unsigned/unnumbered White ink on heavy black paper

Originally posted by Josh M. from Just Seeds, on October 29, 2009 5:26 AM

Who knew that a long article about F Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns could be so interesting?

The five months of furious short-story writing in 1923-24 had left him with a stake of $7,000. In Great Neck, that would only cover two and a half months of expenses. How could he stretch the $7,000 to gain the time to finish Gatsby? Earlier, as he was struggling to save, a friend wrote from France to suggest that Fitz-gerald join the many Americans living well in Europe on the strong American dollar. The friend wrote that it cost one-tenth as much to live in Europe: he had just finished "a meal fit for a king, washed down with champagne, for the absurd sum of sixty-one cents." Fitzgerald thought, based on the friend's recommendation, living expenses on the off-season Riviera would be low enough to let him finish Gatsby without any short-story interruptions.

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald   money   writing

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 29, 2009 5:22 AM

Last night, my kids and I settled in to watch the World Series. The top of the first ended uneventfully. Then my nine-year-old asked for dessert, a request denied by his mother.

This inspired one of the more memorable tantrums in nine-year-old history. In true Met style, the kid never made it into the second inning.

Watching this episode reminded me of another classic World Series watching moment:

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on October 29, 2009 5:14 AM

getting married, originally uploaded by Alaina B..

Originally posted by Alaina from alaina browne lives here, on October 29, 2009 5:10 AM

Filed under: Odds and ends

Didn't it seem like it was ages ago that those Microsoft commercials with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates commercials aired? You know, the one with the shopping for shoes, as well as the one with the duo bonding with a family. Don't remember? Well, apparently neither does Jerry Seinfeld, who was purportedly paid USD $10 million for the commercials.

In the latest episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm -- which happens to be one of my all time favorite shows -- Jerry is actively discussing ideas with Seinfeld creator, Larry David. In the scene, a MacBook Pro is prominently shown on Jerry's desk.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

TUAWSeinfeld back with the Mac in latest Curb episode originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Sang Tang from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on October 29, 2009 5:05 AM

Google on Wednesday revealed a free online navigation service that will be a part of its forthcoming Android 2.0 mobile operating system. It could also come to the iPhone, the company said, if given the green light by Apple.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from AppleInsider, on October 28, 2009 4:15 PM

• Baby Cows: Humanely raised veal is feeling a renaissance. [WashPost]
• The Most Important Meal: Huevos motuleños from the Yucatán and other breakfasts from around the world. [Woman's Day]
• Boo-Rito: Wrap yourself in aluminum foil on Halloween and get a freebie burrito at participating Chipotles after 6 p.m. [Philadelphia City Paper]
• Tony Bourdain, Eyepatches: Some day he'll dress up as a pirate and trick-or-treat with his daughter. [DH via Eater]
• Dana Cowin Quoth: "There are plump turkeys, and, I'm not kidding you, there's skinny turkeys...chesty turkeys, breasty turkeys..." [Gawker]
• Avocado S&P Shakers: Kinda want these. [Etsy]
• Trends Schmends: We told you what we thought. Another reaction to the Chicago Tribune's 10 Worst Dining Trends. [Balitomore Sun]
• Clay Pots: Meet a woman who owns over 100 of them. [LAT]

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 28, 2009 2:45 PM

This is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading a few lines from his poem, America. You may recognize the recording from its use in Levi's new ad campaign:

I thought for sure that Ryan McGinley had directed this and the O Pioneers! commercial but it turns out he just (just!) did the photos for the print campaign. (via slate)

Tags: advertising   levis   photography   poetry   ryanmcginley   video   waltwhitman

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 28, 2009 1:46 PM

Farofa Nation is a small T-shirt company founded two years ago by art directors Serge and Ana Castagna to raise money for TASK (The Abandoned Street Kids of Brazil Trust), which supports efforts to curb youth homelessness in Brazil. Named after farofa, a popular Brazilian dish made of toasted yucca root and a blend of spices that reflects the eclectic melting pot that is Brazilian culture, the Castagnas started the company after seeing the intense poverty and alarming conditions that many children live in on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. The debut collection, which includes 15 designs, is now available online and includes graphic prints  that are silk screened on sweatshop-free American Apparel tees. They come in a range of bright colors and designs moderately priced at $26. Ten percent of all sales will directly benefit TASK's efforts to secure housing and provide safe environments for abandoned children in need.

Originally posted by Alexis Swerdloff from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on October 28, 2009 12:14 PM

It seems to me that the best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past. If you subsist entirely on two-year-old entertainment, and the corresponding two-year-old technology used to power it, you're cutting your fun budget in half, freeing up that money for more exciting expenditures like parking meters and postage.

Welcome to the Cult of the Somewhat Delayed. Don't go to first-run movies in the theater; catch them nine months later on Netflix. Get on the waitlist for new books at the library. Buy used, used, used. This approach dovetails nicely with Last Year's Model.

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 28, 2009 12:14 PM

By: Nicholas Carlson

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Harvard Research Confirms: People On Twitter And Facebook Are Just Like Us!
• Newspaper Ad Sales Quarterly Growth
• US Advertising Spending, By Medium

Originally posted by The Business Insider from Silicon Alley Insider, on October 28, 2009 12:01 PM

This is an amazing photo.

Taken by Joe Marshall and posted to TwitPic with the tweet...

Wtf is happening to the Bay Bridge? Looks like part of it fell off and hit some cars. Blocking 2 lanes wowow

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on October 28, 2009 11:29 AM

(Cross-posted on the Google Student Blog)

We had a busy summer here at Google interacting with students through a wide variety of scholarship, internship and networking opportunities across North America. Here's a look back at a few of our programs (you can bet we'll be hosting them again!) along with news on some upcoming initiatives.

Rising college sophomores participated in two Google programs: Google FUSE, in its inaugural year, and the Google Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI).

For FUSE, we welcomed 50 rising college sophomores to our New York City office for a three-day retreat designed to connect students from groups that are under-represented in the field of computer science. The retreat focused on making connections between students and Googlers, encouraging students to create meaningful academic experiences and allowing them to learn more about possible career paths via hands-on activities, panel discussions and a bit of fun around the New York City area.

Another group of twenty rising sophomores spent two weeks at the Googleplex in Mountain View for the second annual Computer Science Summer Institute. This special program included an interactive and collaborative Computer Science curriculum, as well as a living-learning residential experience for student networking. Students worked in teams to create an interactive web application using Python in Google App Engine. When not in class, they heard technical talks from Google engineers, spoke with professionals from across the technology industry and academia about the many things they can do with a Computer Science degree. They also had some fun joining the Bay Area summer interns on a boat cruise and catching a baseball game after an exciting San Francisco scavenger hunt.

In addition, our engineering internship program hosted more than 450 college (undergraduate and graduate) interns in 15 locations across North America. These interns were an integral part of the engineering team and made significant contributions this summer working on exciting projects including Android, Chrome, Docs and machine translation.

We also had more than 100 students working across multiple functions, including sales and engineering in Mountain View, New York, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Boston as part of the Building Opportunities for Leadership and Development (BOLD) Program. BOLD is a 10-week internship program designed to provide exposure to the technology industry for students from groups that are historically underrepresented in technology. This summer experience includes a unique glimpse into a business or engineering career, professional development and leadership courses, as well as one-on-one mentorship designed to further support professional growth.

Of course, we realize that growing future leaders in engineering and business doesn't just start with college students. For this reason, we partner with the LEAD programs in both business and engineering to encourage outstanding high school students to pursue careers in these fields. This year, all four LEAD Summer Engineering Institute participants had the opportunity to tour a local Google office to attend technical talks and interact with Google engineers (okay, with some tasty food and video games thrown in as well).

As part of Google's ongoing commitment to recognizing student achievements and promoting leadership, we also offer a number of academic scholarships. We are currently accepting applications for the Google Lime Scholarship for Student with Disabilities in the U.S. and Canada, and the Anita Borg Scholarship in Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the United States. In case you're curious, we offer a host of scholarships for many other international regions.

If one or more of these opportunities sounds like something you'd like to participate in, you can find applications for full time opportunities and summer internship opportunities on our student job site. Visit our scholarship page for more information on our scholarship opportunities. And follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates on application deadlines and new program announcements.

Making an early connection playing People Bingo at Google FUSE.

Taking a break from bowling during Google FUSE.

Posted by Kyle Ewing, Talent and Outreach Programs - University Programs and Recruiting

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on October 28, 2009 11:19 AM

Headless meter poles on Madison Avenue, awaiting rebirth. Photo: Wiley Norvell.

New York's trusty single-space parking meters are a dying breed. They've served commercial corridors admirably, but they're rapidly giving way to muni-meters (which are much better suited for innovations in curbside pricing, like DOT's PARKSmart program).

The downside of the shrinking meter supply: New Yorkers have even fewer options to lock up their bikes. While DOT is in the process of adding 5,000 bike racks in the next few years, the rate of rack installation hasn't kept up with the rapid pace of meter removal. So cyclists could breathe a little easier last week, when DOT revealed that it will repurpose defunct meter poles as bike racks, a policy that advocates had been urging the agency to adopt.

We're already seeing signs of re-born meters out on the street. Transportation Alternatives' Wiley Norvell sent this pic of headless poles on Madison Avenue, where DOT will convert four meters per block (two on each side of the street) into bike racks.

Prior to voting overwhelmingly in favor of protected bike lanes at last week's Manhattan CB 8 meeting, the board also approved a motion to convert meters to bike racks on Madison from 69th Street to 90th Street. But not before a lengthy debate prompted by the board's liaison to the Madison Avenue BID. Apparently concerned about sidewalk clutter, the BID doesn't want converted bike racks on the avenue itself, but on the corners of each side street instead. (This would defeat the purpose of the conversion, since there are no parking meters on side streets.) The notion that customers ride to their shops has yet to gain sway with this particular BID.

As Norvell told Streetsblog, more official bike parking is good news for everyone who uses the sidewalk. "Lack of on-street parking is why bikes end up chained to anything and everything that's nailed down," he said. "Converting these existing poles to bike racks is a fast and inexpensive way to increase the supply and keep sidewalk clutter under control."

So, what will the meters look like once the conversion is complete? We have a request in with DOT for an image of the final product. Norvell tells us the re-purposed meters will incorporate the "hoop" design of the city's new official bike rack. For some out-of-town previews, here's how they do it in Sacramento and Baltimore. And Matt Roth at Streetsblog San Francisco wrote up a great piece this summer detailing how several other cities handle the disappearing parking meter problem.

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog New York City, on October 28, 2009 8:56 AM

Site vs. stream

Jay: "The web is detaching itself from web 'site' and it's becoming 'stream.'"

Dave: "If that's true, how do we get this thing to open up? It's not good enough for me to be dumping stuff into Twitter space and then complaining later than they don't own it. Because they do own it."

Jay: Maybe it will take an user revolt like what happened at Digg in 2007.

Dave: Why didn't the Suggested Users List trigger something like that? "The way Twitter is organized, it tends to dissipate those things."

Jeff: "Things die out so quickly.... The half life of an idea on Twitter is about six minutes... That's what we have to solve here."

Dave: If Twitter was an open web-based system we could fix these things.

Jeff: "The blogosphere has the permanence that Twitter doesn't have. It's the old page web, the SEO web.... Use Twitter to feed something, if Twitter is the end in itself, we're screwed. We're putting things into this dispersed cloud that disappears."

via rebootnews.com

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on October 28, 2009 8:28 AM

The album cover’s not dead just yet, as proven by this mindblowingly awesome one for American Idol star Adam Lambert’s debut record.

via Best Week Ever.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from shey.net, on October 28, 2009 8:12 AM

above: collating artnoose's zine ker-bloom

I am doing a zine reading at the Carnegie Public Library on Thursday October 29th with awesome cohorts Leanne O'Connor (New to Everything zine), Artnoose (Ker-bloom zine) and Hannah Bean (Fat Snakes Are Patient zine). I will hopefully have my one-pager and the other ladies will have new zines to share. There might be treats. There will totes def be a zine-reading open mic without a mic after we read. Come enjoy sweet zine culture!

ZINE READING
Thursday, October 29th
6pm-8pm

Carnegie Library Main Branch (Oakland)
Classroom A
free, all ages

Originally posted by Mary Tremonte from Just Seeds: Blog, on October 28, 2009 8:06 AM

It does not sound like anything I would have been interested in, and you may easily feel the same way. And yet, “The Art of the Samurai,” just put up on view at The Met, is an exquisite, do-not-miss, unbelievable exhibition—even for those of us who know absolutely nothing about Japan, ancient or recent history, ferrous metallurgy and/or war. At heart, this exhibition is actually about super fabulous outfits! I mean, mind-blowing, 400-year-old, space-age, unbelievable, gorgeously-made rock star outfits, constructed from hay-smoked deer leather and steel and silk and gold.

There is an outfit of ceremonial armor made for an ambassador who went traveling around the world somewhere around the time when John Hancock was in diapers. (I may be off by 75 years one way or the other because I know nothing about history! But the context: unbelievable!) There are hats so gorgeous and so refined and bizarre that they look like some crazed concoction of scatter-brained, pot-smoking French 1980s fashion designers. One, in particular, is a swooping black swirl, that resolves into a black, angled fist at the top; it is clutching a Buddhist ceremonial object that looks like an infinity symbol version of an eggbeater. It is insane.

The entire exhibition is a giant, mind-blowing WTF explosion. WHAT IS THIS COAT, with Dutch sailing ships on the back?

HI, VOLCANO COAT, from the 17th Century!

I don’t even know what to say about this.

Also there are swords galore. Now I am not a person who cares about swords. But this is some unbelievable swordy goodness. Also there is an insane video about the traditional making of swords, which is some seriously laborious business, taking as it does some six months and undoubtedly much accidental burning and mutilation.

The show is rotating objects throughout its run, so you should go now, and then in a few months, in part because NO ONE WILL EVER SEE much of this again. Like, it is cobbled together from families and repositories of official cultural treasures and stuff and that we even get to see it at all is amazing. We highly endorse it.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on October 28, 2009 7:37 AM

Wow, we didn’t see this one coming. Today Google announced Google Maps Navigation (Beta) which features turn-by-turn GPS navigation with voice guidance. The new navigation system is part of Google Maps for mobile and is available for phones with Android 2.0.

If you were thinking about buying a shiny new GPS unit for Christmas, save your money and get the service for free on your phone.

Highlights of the service include:

• Search in plain English (watch video). No need to know the address. You can type a business name or even a kind of a business, just like you would on Google.
• Search by voice (watch video). Speak your destination instead of typing (English only): “Navigate to the de Young Museum in San Francisco”.
• Traffic view (watch video). An on-screen indicator glows green, yellow, or red based on the current traffic conditions along your route. A single touch toggles a traffic view which shows the traffic ahead of you.
• Search along route (watch video). Search for any kind of business along your route, or turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants, or parking.
• Satellite view (watch video). View your route overlaid on 3D satellite views with Google’s high-resolution aerial imagery.
• Street View (watch video). Visualize turns overlaid on Google’s Street View imagery. Navigation automatically switches to Street View as you approach your destination.
• Car dock mode (watch video). For certain devices, placing your phone in a car dock activates a special mode that makes it easy to use your device at arm’s length.

I really hope G1 owners get Android 2.0 now.

Originally posted by Taylor Wimberly from Android and Me, on October 28, 2009 7:11 AM

via www.scoutingny.com "I like the broken teacup on the table with the mouse in it…" Me too!

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 28, 2009 7:09 AM

Shared by buzz
I too miss the sort of "this is my life" tone of old-school blogs.

Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here. – Dan Cederholm

This is the idea I’ve been trying to place with again, really starting just this week, rejecting the consensus about how to blog that’s emerged over the last couple years, and holds up Digg-ability and Techcrunch-i-tude as good indicators. Dan, of course, said it better.

It’s probably an indicator of slipping into my dotage, but a new stray link and I’m happily back wandering through those early archives, even my own, having stumbled across a rather odd review of the rather minor Ruled Britannia, circa 2003 earlier this evening.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Laughing Meme, on October 28, 2009 6:56 AM

Shared by Bru
...only in the u.s. :(

Amazon has a sampler album of music from Philip Glass available right now for free. Not sure how long that will last so snap it up. See also lots of inexpensive classical music on Amazon.

Tags: mp3   music   Philip Glass   philipglass

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on October 28, 2009 6:53 AM

Shared by Eve
Metblogs is useless.

The Bay Bridge was closed around 7 pm this evening after the emergency repair accomplished over the Labor Day weekend broke apart, raining heavy steel pieces and cables down on westbound traffic.

California Highway Patrol officers are still working, two hours after the incident, to clear heavy traffic from the bridge, after which it will be closed in both directions indefinitely. Monitor the Twitter account @baybridgeinfo for information.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from San Francisco Metblogs, on October 28, 2009 6:52 AM

Originally posted by jcn from photo_a_day, on October 28, 2009 6:51 AM

Today I invite you to head over to a clip Loge13 loyalist Bobster made (sorry no embed possible). He has created a wonderful compilation of the deconstruction of Shea Stadium, culminating in the old girl's last moments. If you're depressed now, just wait to watch this! via www.loge13.com

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 28, 2009 6:34 AM

Please please forgive me for being late to the Sanchez hot dog party. Here's a youtube Clip of the Mid-Game Sanchez condiment application and chomp. If I find something better I will post. You know you're in an intense game when you have time for an encased meat snack. I don't feel bad about it at all... the Raiders have delicious encased meat on offer. Somehow that sounds wrong, but I'm serious. And now back to my main thinking: Yankees Angels Game 1!

Originally posted by Sara Pepitone from Scoreboard Gourmet, on October 28, 2009 6:12 AM

John Koblin got his hands on the New York Times' employee buyout offers—which handily include a breakdown of the numbers of employees in every one of the paper's departments. Behold something massive beyond reason!

The exact numbers of the NYT's departments aren't quite as cloaked in mystery as the New Yorker's masthead, for example, but it is hard to get up-to-date figures. Until now! The striking thing, of course, is just how many people it takes to put this paper out. ("Takes" is the wrong word. How many people they use). Some of the biggies:

Reporters at Metro: 50
Size of Business Desk: 85
Size of Washington Bureau: 45
Total size of Art Department: 113
Size of Metro: 103

The Metro desk appears to be the paper's biggest, as we've always heard. Fifty reporters. More than enough to put out an entire newspaper in a third-tier city. Think about that while also thinking about the meager size of Metro's space in the NYT Some of the paper's sections seem reasonable, or even shoestring—Dining and Week in Review both have staffs of five. So why does the Book Review—also a weekly section largely written by freelancers—need 14 editors?

It's a mystery. But we know 100 people will be gone from the newsroom by the end of the year. And we'll probably never see numbers this high at the NYT again.
[Full list at the NYO. Pic: AP]

Originally posted by Hamilton Nolan from Gawker, on October 28, 2009 6:08 AM

(Cross-posted with the Google Mobile Blog)

Since 2005, millions of people have relied on Google Maps for mobile to get directions on the go. However, there's always been one problem: Once you're behind the wheel, a list of driving directions just isn't that easy to use. It doesn't tell you when your turn is coming up. And if you miss a turn? Forget it, you're on your own.

Today we're excited to announce the next step for Google Maps for mobile: Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for Android 2.0 devices.

This new feature comes with everything you'd expect to find in a GPS navigation system, like 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone's Internet connection.

Here are seven features that are possible because Google Maps Navigation is connected to the Internet:

The most recent map and business data
When you use Google Maps Navigation, your phone automatically gets the most up-to-date maps and business listings from Google Maps — you never need to buy map upgrades or update your device. And this data is continuously improving, thanks to users who report maps issues and businesses who activate their listings with Google Local Business Center.

Search in plain English
Google Maps Navigation brings the speed, power and simplicity of Google search to your car. If you don't know the address you're looking for, don't worry. Simply enter the name of a business, a landmark or just about anything into the search box, and Google will find it for you. Then press "Navigate", and you're on your way.

Search by voice
Typing on a phone can be difficult, especially in the car, so with Google Maps Navigation, you can say your destination instead. Hold down the search button to activate voice search, then tell your phone what you want to do (like "Navigate to Pike Place in Seattle"), and navigation will start automatically.

Traffic view
Google Maps Navigation gets live traffic data over the Internet. A traffic indicator light in the corner of the screen glows green, yellow or red, depending on the current traffic conditions along your route. If there's a jam ahead of you, you'll know. To get more details, tap the light to zoom out to an aerial view showing traffic speeds and incidents ahead. And if the traffic doesn't look good, you can choose an alternate route.

Search along route
For those times when you're already on the road and need to find a business, Google Maps Navigation searches along your route to give you results that won't take you far from your path. You can search for a specific business by name or by type, or you can turn on popular layers, such as gas stations, restaurants or parking.

Satellite view
Google Maps Navigation uses the same satellite imagery as Google Maps on the desktop to help you get to your destination. Turn on the satellite layer for a high-resolution, 3D view of your upcoming route. Besides looking cool, satellite view can help you make sense of complicated maneuvers.

Street View
If you want to know what your next turn looks like, double-tap the map to zoom into Street View, which shows the turn as you'll see it, with your route overlaid. And since locating an address can sometimes be tricky, we'll show you a picture of your destination as you approach the end of your route, so you'll know exactly what to look for.

Since there's nothing quite like seeing the product in action, we made this video to demonstrate a real-life example:



The first phone to have Google Maps Navigation and Android 2.0 is the Droid from Verizon. Google Maps Navigation is initially available in the United States. And like other Google Maps features, Navigation is free.

Visit google.com/navigation to learn more and browse a gallery of product screenshots. Take Google Maps Navigation for a spin, and bring Internet-connected GPS navigation with you in your car.

Posted by Keith Ito, Software Engineer

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on October 28, 2009 6:01 AM

'parking in rainbows' by henrik amberla from findland, is one of the 66 shortlisted entires
from our recent designboom competition 'think outside the parking box' in collaboration
with nissan.

large parking lots are often a mess. we get lost amongst rows upon rows of cars.
parking in rainbows makes the parking experience itself more enjoyable. parking spots are
arranged in a semi-circular formation, with each row categorized by car color, resulting in a
rainbow of vehicles. suitable for malls, fair grounds and trade fairs but excellent for towers,
allowing visitors to view their achievements from above.

the jury has almost finished making their selections and results of the competition will be
published soon.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on October 28, 2009 6:00 AM

Image: Tasha Marie

An artist from MAC Cosmetics painted a woman as a comic book character for Halloween — right down to the dot printing style of old comics books. Or, alternatively, as a figure from a Roy Lichtenstein painting.

The pictures were taken by publicist and photographer Tasha Marie. You can view more at the link.

Link via Geekologie | Artist’s/Company Website

Originally posted by John Farrier from Neatorama, on October 28, 2009 5:20 AM

The NY Times has a really sweet story about Thomas Keller and the rekindling of his relationship with his father.

Mr. Keller ate many of the dishes in the book with his father at Ad Hoc. Even after the accident they would go, despite the physical challenges of getting his father out of the house. Ms. Cunningham said she used to worry about how customers might feel watching the famous chef feed his father. "Here he was taking care of his father just like a baby," she said. "For Thomas, it didn't make the slightest difference. Whatever he could do to make his dad comfortable he did."

The chef as caretaker, literally feeding a loved one...I don't see anything unusual about that at all. Isn't that what all chefs should aspire to? (thx, andy)

Tags: food   Thomas Keller

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 28, 2009 5:12 AM

Mets 21-year-old OF Fernando Martinez had season-ending surgery on his right knee in late September.

According to the team’s website, here, Martinez will begin playing in early November for Leones del Escogido in the Dominican Winter League.

…thanks to Rafael T for the link…

“I have begun to run the bases and my body has responded well,” Martinez is quoted as saying, noting he intends to play left field.

He hit just .176 with seven extra base hits in 29 games for the Mets during June and July.

…i no longer know what to make of martinez… i see the potential… i get it…  but, in addition to learning how to take a pitch, it seems his biggest hurdle will be how to stay healthy… people who watched him in Triple-A this season raved about his overall game, saying he hit to all fields, had power and played outstanding defense… the question is, can he manage his body through a full, professional season… i mean, he has never played in more than 90 games in any one season, and this is the fourth-consecutive year he missed time due to some sort of injury… and so, it will be difficult for the Mets to build a team and count on him to ever plug a hole, even if, in an ideal world, he is more than capable of doing so one day…

Speaking of prospects…

The team’s Instructional League started this week at their complex in the Dominican Republic.  To learn who is playing, and where they’re playing, check out this post from Adam Rubin for the Daily News.

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on October 28, 2009 5:08 AM

Just when thought you couldn't miss this woman more, we find that Bea Arthur has left $300,000 to the Ali Forney Center in New York, an organization that supports homeless LGBT youth.

The center supplies a number of services to youth around the city, including food, emergency housing, medical treatment and HIV testing. The announcement of Bea's donation came with the center's plans to build a house that will shelter 12 homeless youth and name the building in her honor. Executive director Carl Siciliano said they were "overwhelmed with gratitude that Bea saw that LGBT youth deserve as much love and support as any other young person and that she placed so much value in the work we do to protect them and to help them rebuild lives." Thank you, Bea.

The Ali Forney Center was named after a homeless queer teen who dedicated his life to helping other homeless queer youth, was an HIV prevention worker, and advocated for the NYPD to investigate a series of murders of homeless queer youth in New York City. In December of 1997, Ali was murdered. Check out more about the org here.

Via The Advocate.

Originally posted by Vanessa from Feministing, on October 28, 2009 5:07 AM

As a service to all Met fans who wander through Loge13, I will be posting on the Diamondvision videos of anything not having to do with the Phillies/Yankees World Series.

Last night, I posted a clip of Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell debuting "Lets Go Mets Go" on MTV.

Today I invite you to head over to a clip Loge13 loyalist Bobster made (sorry no embed possible). He has created a wonderful compilation of the deconstruction of Shea Stadium, culminating in the old girl's last moments. If you're depressed now, just wait to watch this!

I'll keep flooding the zone with distracting "Think of England" moments until this post season nonsense is over.

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on October 28, 2009 5:06 AM

My attempts to conduct a straw poll over Twitter regarding which team Mets fans would root for if they absolutely had to pick one of their most bitter rivals in this World Series taught me a few things. On the one hand, there are apparently no Mets fans on Twitter because the response was paltry to say the least. Or maybe they just realized they shouldn't be reading me unless they want to suffer a torrent of abuse and mockery. If this latter scenario is the case, then more power to you, Mets fans, you're a lot smarter than I thought.

However, I figure it would be nice to think of the little people on this most joyous of World Series Game 1 days. To do this, we turn to MetsBlog.com, who took the time to conduct exactly the poll I sought to. Actually they conducted a poll of who do you want to lose the series. To the results!

As of the time of my penning this post, the results were as follows:

Phillies - 56%; Yankees - 44%

I'm not sure if this is surprising to me or not. The Phillies have inflicted a lot of recent bad memories on the Metropolitans to be sure, but the rivalry with the Yankees has some very deep seeds. What do you guys think? Should we even care? They're just Mets fans after all.

Originally posted by J from 3:10 to Joba, on October 28, 2009 5:00 AM

This image is called Still Shopping and Soldiering. It references the Death by Trampling of a Wal-Mart employee on Black Friday. It is about 38" x 28"

Originally posted by Colin Matthes from Just Seeds: Blog, on October 28, 2009 5:00 AM

My (messy) notes from Ben Cerveny’s talk at Urban Labs which was organized by Citilab (Cornella, near Barcelona)

The talk was entitled “The city as a platform: computational systems for urban urbanism” and the basic take-away was the proposition to see the city as an Operating System.

Ben is interested in how to make urban phenomena legible and feed them back into people’s experience. Which is why he works with Stamen that he describes as a data viz agency. In other words, representations that make visible these invisible complexities to give people a tool to visualize them.

He recently started Vurb (a pun on “verb” and “urban”) as a follow-up to his previous venture, the “Playground Foundation” in Amsterdam. In this previous project, he was interested in how to build an infrastructure in a city to allow a new sort of play… that take advantage of behavior patterns, computational resources, create new meaning of play and may have a transformational effect… turned today into VURB… which is interested in going beyond play.

He reminded us that the city is already shaped by information as shown by a picture of the first newspaper in amsterdam “amsterdamsche courant”. BUT what is new: citizens are now information makers and the city is an aggregation of an enormous quantity of data (from plumbing infrastructures to digital photographies and GPS) that reflects the individual expressions of all the residents… and can be perceived now in its entirety.

What does this produce? while 20th century cities were consumables, 21th century cities will be collaboratively produced, no longer to-down but completely emergent… a bit like this evocative picture of the “New Babylon” by Constant Nieuwenhuys:

All of this lead to this idea of an operating systems for the built environment The various layers of the urban stack are differentially accessible to citizen input:

• sensor networks: not so much
• dynamic infrastructural services
• collaborative modeling: everybody is expressing their aspiration for the city, this is captured in a software model that represents a parallel state: the “cloud city”, a set of information that is dynamic, active and aggregated… almost the spirit of the city… the idea that all of the human information and the history of the city lives in a dataset that can be used in different circumstances

We can then have a real-time model of urban scale space: it reflects a politics of a situation, a model does not reflect the entire reality. What type of model do we want to represent the city? Ben claims that we don’t want one, we want a thousands! like web-services… there are going ways to bring models on space. The other side of the model is who is in the model, who takes advantage of the model: social networks are the inhabitants, which leads to massively multi-participant models… like an offline game.

Ben drew a parallel between urban planning and game design… the “secret school of learning interaction design” (as it teaches to design for users who do not read manuals, teaches how to make people learn new things progressively… or WoW status aggregation is twitter avant la lettre)

Another thing that I found interesting in his talk was this comment about Barcelona:

“I’m interested in looking at barcelona on the Google maps… look at how the barrio gotico is messy and then you see the grid… look at the boundaries… they look as if you could move a slider to accelerate the transition between the messy old city and the grid“

Originally posted by Nicolas Nova from Pasta&Vinegar, on October 28, 2009 4:24 AM

One of the trickiest dilemmas facing any show on the bubble for renewal is how to end your season. Do you go with a cliffhanger, essentially daring the network to cancel you and risk upsetting your small but loyal audience if you don't get renewed? Or do you play it safe and wrap everything up, even if that means there are no stories left to tell? The third season finale of "Friday Night Lights" handled this problem as elegantly as I've seen, brilliantly serving both masters.

Originally posted by Alan Sepinwall/The Star-Ledger from New Jersey Entertainment - TV & Film, on October 28, 2009 2:49 AM

First post of many in the run-up to holiday season... the Trek Onesie. 

Beautiful. From Thinkgeek. Where else. $16.

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on October 28, 2009 2:16 AM

There is absolutely no way I’ll be able to make this relevant to tech. But I’m posting it anyway. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, vetoed a California legislative finance bill – AB 1176. The letter is terse and to the point. And the first letter of each line in paragraphs 2-3 are even terser and more to the point.

Schwarzeneggers battles with the state legislature are epic. But this just goes way beyond epic. It’s something for the history books.

I wish I had the time to do this kind of thing in my posts here on TechCrunch.

See the SF Chronicle for all the quotes and denials.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programing.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Originally posted by Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, on October 28, 2009 1:05 AM

GSI Commerce is buying Rue La La (competitor of competitive shopping site Gilt.com) for $350 mm. Here's the money quote, so to speak, from Michael Rubin, CEO of GSI.

“What you are getting is completely addicted customers,” he said. “It’s completely viral. There are virtually no marketing costs in this business.”

And this from Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor:

“The nice thing about the deal sites is their selection complexity goes way down. That allows them to focus on picking sales very closely and driving values for customers interested in those deals.”

OK, maybe it's not competitive shopping. Maybe it's editorial merchandising. Or both? Either way, it's worth watching...

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on October 27, 2009 10:39 PM

Is the Bay Bridge open? is a single-serving-site I put up tonight. Please note that you should not rely on this site for actual information about the state of the Bay Bridge.

Also, has anyone else noticed the irony in the fact that the first name of the Bay Bridge spokesperson is Bart?

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on October 27, 2009 9:40 PM

Halloween is the only time of the year that I actually pay attention to store window displays, and I’m always impressed by the offerings on Bleecker Street in the West Village. I took a bike ride down Bleecker today to take some pictures (I’m convinced there’s some sort of secret neighborhood association that spreads extra leaves on the ground to make the West Village feel extra-autumny):

The Ralph Lauren stores (that’s right, stores – there are four of them within a block of each other) usually take their Halloween windows very seriously (as I’ve noted in the past), though I think this year’s are a mixed bag. First up is the Ralph Lauren store at 390 Bleecker (which I believe is their “Double-L-R” store, whatever that means).

In the window are a pair of skeletons dressed to go ice-fishing, or maybe hunting. I dig that the skeletons have their pants-legs rolled up to expose bones. My favorite of the four stores.

Less than a block away is the Ralph Lauren kids store.

I like the pumpkin-headed kids flying around on broomsticks (though I think, if they were feeling especially subversive, those kids in front could be holding their own pumpkin heads in their hands, or standing on them or something):

Across the street is the Ralph Lauren women’s store:

There’s something going on here, but I’m not exactly sure what it is. Weird manequins, creepy dolls, cobwebs everywhere…Maybe a Great Expectations/ Mrs. Havisham thing? It’s unclear.

I like the broken teacup on the table with the mouse in it…

The other window has an antique stroller and a bird cage. Overall, I think this needed a more specific theme to tie it all together other than general weirdness.

Finally, there’s the Ralph Lauren 2: Electric Boogaloo store next door:

The theme here seems to be something like a meat locker after a mannequin slash-fest. I like that the arms and legs are all hanging on hooks, the hands covering the ground, and the one in the bag…

…and how the neighboring window has shelves of decapitated mannequin heads…But this one takes a bit of imagination and I think falls short. A chainsaw or a butcher’s knife in the hands of the standing mannequins could have  made a big difference.

I was really blown away by the Marc Jacobs store at 385 Bleecker, in part that people were actually waiting in the rain to go in (note the poor kids, helpless against their parents whims)…

…but more to the point, the floor-to-ceiling bone wall completely covering the windows is very cool.

Inspired by Paris’ catacombs?

Lots of great detail:

Down at Sixth Avenue, American Apparel shows you that their clothes can easily be used for the superhero in need:

Last and definitely least, the season FAIL award goes to Mulberry at 387 Bleecker…

…for already having Christmas decorations in the window.

Can we at least wait til the jack-o-lantern candles blow out?

-SCOUT

Originally posted by Scout from Scouting NY, on October 27, 2009 8:05 PM

My latest column in the Malaysia Star: Underworld lingo. The column, as always, is written for an audience that may not be perfectly fluent with English.

...

In 1931, the Los Angeles Times published a story headlined Underworld lingo. It was a lexicon of criminal cant and jargon written by Ben Kendall, a police reporter.

Kendall formerly was a police reporter in Chicago, too, where he uncovered bribes and corruption by making friends with pickpockets, safeblowers, and shoplifters. Some eight years later, Kendall would be indicted and convicted for his role in bribery related to illegal gambling in Los Angeles.

So, given his experience on both sides of the law, one can only assume that the lingo he recorded was genuine. But how much of it lasted? Seventy-eight years on, we find that some of the lingo is still in use, while some of it has vanished.

Alky is recorded by Kendall as “straight alcohol.” Most people today would use it to mean an acoholic drinker rather than the drink itself.

Angle he records as “a plan; a lead,” which is more or less how it’s used today. If someone says, “I don’t know what his angle is, but he’s up to no good,” they’d mean that the fellow seemed to be planning something suspicious.

Booster does indeed still mean a shoplifter. Boost in general means “to steal” and a booster bag is a specially designed bag that is meant to conceal stolen merchandise as it is taken out of a store.

Chiv is common still in prison lingo, though it’s usually spelled shiv. An even older form is chive, meaning a knife as far back as the 17th century. A shiv is a knife, too, but in prison slang it is especially a crude, improvised one, such as a toothbrush that has had a razor blade attached to it.

Grand still means a thousand dollars. Take still means “a share,” too, but it’s a fairly straight business term: “What’s my take on all this? If he gets 15% of the ticket money, I want 15%, too.” A pay-off is still a bribe or a payment made to someone to keep them from hurting you or your things.

Haywire, Kendall writes, is a “mental aberration.” Today we’d say that a machine went haywire more often than we would say a person went haywire. We mean the machine started malfunctioning.

Jam still means trouble or a sticky situation. “Can you help me out with the rent this month? I’m in a jam until payday.” Or, “I’m in a jam with the wife. She doesn’t know I was at the bar last night. Tell her I was at your house.”

Lug he defines as a “stupid fellow; a hanger-on,” which is close to the way we’d use it today, but not quite. We’d say a man (almost never a woman) is a big lug, which would mean that he was kind of stupid, but also clumsy or ungainly. It’s often used as an affectionate insult. “You big lug! You didn’t have to bring me flowers!” might be the kind of thing a woman would say in a fake tough voice.

Muscling in is still done pretty much as Kendall defined it: “to force one’s way in for a cut on the profits of a venture.” People still get nailed, too, meaning they get caught or arrested. And screwy still means “crazy.”

Kendall calls a wing-ding “a fit; berserk,” which is a meaning that other dictionaries show to have been more common in the past. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it more fully as “a fit or spasm, esp. as simulated by a drug addict” and in a “weakened sense, a furious outburst.”

However, only a later meaning is used today, which is “a party.” I daresay that no-one who today throws a wing-ding is faking a seizure so that they can get controlled drugs from a doctor.

Yentz hasn’t lasted. It meant “to outsmart” or “to defeat.” It was sometimes spelled yence or yince and had another crude, sexual meaning that meant “to have a non-romantic act of copulation.” Both meanings are synonymous with different meanings of screw.

Loogan (sometimes spelled loogin or lugan, according to the Historical Dictionary of American Slang) is also no longer used to mean “a minor hoodlum,” though hood, recorded by Kendall, is still used to mean “a petty gangster.”

For what it’s worth, I find loogan in Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary of 1825 with a definition of “a rogue” and in a couple of modern amateur lists of prison slang online as meaning “mentally ill prisoner” in Ontario, Canada.

Perhaps one of the most interesting additions to Kendall’s slang list is his definition of quim as “anybody’s sweetheart.” Historically, and more often, this term has meant “the vagina.”

Even when used to mean “a woman” (a usage confined mainly to North America) it has usually been the crudest of terms meant to refer to the woman as chattel (a personal possession) or as nothing more than the target of sexual acts. It objectifies her as being no better than what her sexual organs are good for.

It’s possible that Kendall only knew the term in a purer, more innocent form. But I imagine, especially given his connection with the rougher corners of the underworld, that he knew very well about its less polite meaning. He would have had a laugh at getting such a coarse word printed in a daily newspaper in a time when even hell and damn might not have been allowed.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Lexicographer's Rules, on October 27, 2009 7:46 PM

I favorited a YouTube video: Dave Winer, entrepreneur, software developer and writer discusses his relationship with the infamous Twitter Fail Whale.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from anildash's YouTube Activity, on October 27, 2009 5:00 PM

Okay, okay, Jesse didn't really say that.  But the day after I posted Ant's art, Jesse set this cappuccino on the bar nonchalantly, and for the briefest moment I wondered if his eyes were saying, "Blog THAT." 
A day later, Ben at State Street was like, ownage!  At least his double design sort of said so.

And the very next afternoon at Cayuga Street, I ordered my 4 PM capp from Heather, and lord knows she outright schooled the gents.  Alas, no cam in hand.  That milky mandala is gone forever.

You know what's brilliant?  Getting your daily dose from baristas who are truly pursuing their craft.  You don't get the sense these guys are competing.  To me, they seem to have a calm focus at the time of delivery, and you can tell they've been learning from each other on bar and in the lab.

Sorry for the crappy cellphone pics, they hardly convey the thrill of seeing one of these beauties plopped down in front of you, exactly when you could use a little beauty. 

Devorah just sent me the link to Rate My Rosetta, where baristas worldwide submit their creations.

Originally posted by Jeff Katris from Gimme! Coffee News, on October 27, 2009 4:07 PM

"I get emails all the time that are ten paragraphs or more, and include a twenty page attachment. I do my best to read them and give a good response to them. But honestly, a one paragraph email explaining who you are, why you are writing, and a link to you web service is a whole lot better. If I am going to spend fifteen minutes on your business, I'd much rather it be fifteen minutes using your product than reading about it."

 Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by stamen to $ business vc - More about this bookmark

Originally posted by stamen from Delicious/stamen, on October 27, 2009 3:24 PM

Gary Matthews Jr is not a good baseball player. He’s also completely unaware of this. Here’s a quote from the LA Times:

“I don’t expect to be back; it’s time to move on,” outfielder Gary Matthews Jr. said as he packed his belongings in the team’s Angel Stadium clubhouse today. “I’m ready to play for an organization that wants me to play every day. This organization has other plans, and that’s OK.”

And about that contract of his?

“It’s definitely not as big as it was a year ago,” Matthews said. “Obviously, there are some teams that can’t afford it, but when I’m playing every day, I feel I can be a top-line center fielder, and that, I would think, is what a lot of teams want.”

.

Well, he is right about one thing – his contract is not as large as it was a year ago. It’s still a boat anchor of a deal for a player who has basically no chance of ever starting for another major league team again. Over the first three seasons of his contract with Anaheim, Matthews has been worth -$5.3 million in salary. That minus sign is not a typo. Given his performance relative to the value that could have been found by playing any random Triple-A guy instead, Matthews owes the Angels $5.3 million for taking wins off the board. Even without the contract, he’d have a hard time convincing anyone to employ him in 2010 after two straight seasons of below replacement level production.

The contract makes it impossible for the Angels to trade him, so in the end, they’ll just end up releasing him, at which point Mr. Matthews may be shocked to learn that other teams do not share his optimism about his ability to still be a top-line center fielder. He’s 35-years-old and hasn’t shown any ability to hit or field since 2006. The market for aging veterans has collapsed the last few years, as useful players such as Kenny Lofton, Ray Durham, and Frank Thomas have been forced into early retirement against their wishes. Teams simply aren’t willing to use roster spots on players that they feel will create problems in reserve roles, choosing instead to give opportunities to hungry twenty somethings who will work their tails off to live the dream.

Over the last three years, Matthews has proven that he’s not worthy of a starting job and not willing to accept a reserve role, so in the end, he’s probably going to find himself with a new job entirely – one that has nothing to do with playing major league baseball. Sorry Gary, but you probably just talked yourself right out of the game.

Originally posted by Dave Cameron from FanGraphs Baseball, on October 27, 2009 3:01 PM

Marco Arment posted a thoughtful reply to my off-the-cuff post about e-readers and I wanted to respond to a couple of things.

Most people won't instantly jump to buy ebook readers after seeing them in TV commercials or liveblogged keynotes. They need to be experienced in person. (The ability to do this easily will give Barnes & Noble a huge advantage over Amazon.) And they'll spread via good, old-fashioned, in-person referrals from friends and coworkers.

I want a good e-reader more than anything...I instantly fell for the screen when I saw the Sony Libre a few years ago. I do a *ton* of reading, upwards of 100-150 pages a day when I'm working full-time. About 0.5% of those pages are from books. But the Kindle? I tried it and didn't like it. The screen is still great...the rest of it didn't work at all for me. And this is what is frustrating for me...the Kindle seemed right for buying books but not for what I want it for: reading all that other stuff. I know the functionality exists on these devices to read blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc., but they're marketed as book readers (Arment even calls them "ebook readers" instead of "e-readers"), the user experience is optimized for book reading, and the companies (esp. Amazon and B&N) view them as portable bookstores.

But there are a lot of people -- including, significantly, most people over age 40 - who don't like reading tiny text on bright LCD screens in devices loaded with distractions that die after 5 hours without their electric lifeline.

Agreed. I don't particularly enjoy reading text on the iPhone; I'd prefer a larger e-ink screen. Instapaper support on the Kindle was almost enough to make me get one...but not quite yet.

Most of Kottke's problem with ebook readers can be solved in software

The problem isn't that you can't route around Amazon's design decisions with clever hacks, but that Amazon chose to optimize the device for reading (and buying) books. I.e. the software *is* the problem. That is not so easily solved...to do so, Amazon has to address it. And maybe they will. I hope they do.

I'm not including RSS feeds or PDFs in the discussion. RSS feeds aren't reading: they're alerting, discovering and filtering.

Off-topic, but this isn't my experience. I'd say about 30-50% of my reading is done directly in my newsreader...there are plently of blogs out there that aren't link blogs or Tumblrs.

Tags: books   Instapaper   Kindle   Marco Arment

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 27, 2009 1:55 PM

Nice Redesign:

CNN overlaid a FULL PAGE Flash ad on their front page. I use ClickToFlash. So, predictably…

Originally posted by (author unknown) from stevenf.com, on October 27, 2009 1:50 PM

New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has bipartisan credentials and has been praised by Republicans and Democrats alike, including President Obama.

Many major national politicians are staying out of Bloomberg's reelection campaign (Obama, for example, backs the Democratic candidate Bill Thompson) but the praise is resurfacing in the final days of the race.

TPM reader DO flagged for us a glossy 8 1/2 x 11" Bloomberg campaign mailer featuring a full-page photo of former Vice President Al Gore, saying it "appears to be a strong endorsement." (It's not.)

"If Gore remains passive about this it will be tantamount to accepting Bloomberg's apparent claim that Gore has endorsed him ... or Gore is playing a political game in which he is endorsing Bloomberg, but is leaving himself a plausible denial that he has endorsed Bloomberg while he tacitly accepts Bloomberg's brochure being send in his name," DO wrote us.

TPMDC checked in with Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider, who affirmed her boss' friendly quotes about Bloomberg over the years.

"Former Vice President Gore has not formally endorsed a candidate in New York Mayoral race," she said, declining to comment on the specific mailer since she hadn't seen it.

"Over the years, former Vice President Gore has made a number of positive comments about Mayor Bloomberg's environmental leadership - as well as the leadership of other mayors - around the country," Kreider said.

I also asked Bloomberg spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker about the mailer. She sent me some remarks Gore made last month she said make "clear" that Gore "offered strong praise of Mike for his leadership and record on the environment."

"The mailer reflects those sentiments and it does not say that he offered a political endorsement," Hazelbaker said.

From the Sept. 24 transcript:

Al Gore: "I want to say first of all that it really is an honor to be here with my friend Mayor Mike Bloomberg. It is without any hesitation whatsoever that I say to you that he has been doing a spectacular job of providing leadership as the Mayor of the capital city of the world - that's the way a lot of people think of New York City. And if every mayor of every city on this planet had the kind of commitment and understanding and determination of what needs to be done to solve the climate crisis, then we would solve the climate crisis in short order. "And I want to thank you, Mike, for not only doing the right thing and not only providing great leadership on this issue, but taking the time to really understand it thoroughly, and even more important than that, thank you for really putting your heart in it. I really appreciate that."

From the Q and A following the event:

Reporter: "This is for the Vice President. Sir, you spoke very highly of Mayor Bloomberg's leadership on climate change initiatives, and I'm wondering if that means you are supporting him in the Mayor's race, or your fellow Democrat?"

Al Gore: "Well I think today's event demonstrates among many other things that the issue of solving the climate crisis goes beyond party politics and party labels. And I'm proud to endorse the leadership and the actions the Mayor Bloomberg has been taking for quite a long time on this issue and this is just another example of that. I am a recovering politician. I'm on about step nine, so I try to stay out of the partisan races, but I'm very proud of Mike Bloomberg's leadership, I really am. I'm not just saying it. I get a chance to work with mayors all over this country, and actually mayors in lots of other countries as well, and I know real leadership on the environment when I see it, and this is the real deal."

Originally posted by Christina Bellantoni from TPM Election Central, on October 27, 2009 1:50 PM

We already know plenty of people who've eschewed traditional turn-by-turn GPS systems in favor of plotting it out for free on Google Maps, and now there's whispers that Mountain View is coming after the rest of the market with a free nav app. That's at least what nav services providers are saying to Forbes, who think El Goog is gearing up to release a free ad-supported navigation app after making moves to use its own US maps instead licensing data from Tele Atlas and putting ads on the iPhone Maps app. Obviously that would shake things up a ton -- and make Android devices a huge bargain -- but we'll see where this all leads over the next few months.

[Via Fierce Mobile Content; thanks Elad]

Filed under: Cellphones, GPS, Handhelds, Software

Google developing free navigation app? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Nilay Patel from Engadget, on October 27, 2009 1:24 PM

In More Intelligent Life this week I wrote a follow up of sorts to this post.   Back then I’d told off the kind of “feminists” who want to police what kind of women’s voices get heard because, they say, there is “limited space for women’s writing voices” and the voices that do get heard are “innacurately emblematic” of their gender.  I had countered that “when I was younger and found I had no outlet for my ‘writing voice,’  I spent ten bucks on a domain name and fifteen bucks on hosting and then, bingo, I had one.”

There are some obvious problems with that assertion, though, and I address them here.  I also talk about ‘A Fortunate Age’ by Joanna Smith Rakoff, and why women — myself included — can be such catty bitches to each other, and whether it’s true, as one male writer once told me, that when it comes to books, “boys compete with boys and girls compete with girls, like the Olympics.”

So. Read it!  It’s just like  a blog post I’d write here, except it’s on another blog.  Also this blog is part of a British publication (the Economist), so the post is mildly in British (at one point I say that I “can’t bear” something.)  You can imagine me reading it in my patented BBC announcer voice.  Well really the only thing I know how to say in that voice though is “and the fighting … continues.”  But that actually works for this; “Among women, the fighting … continues.  This is Emily Gould, signing off.”

Originally posted by emily from Emily Magazine, on October 27, 2009 1:12 PM

Word has trickled out today that I've joined the NBC ranks, so we might as well be a bit more specific about it. As of yesterday, I'm the Managing Editor of lifestyle content across NBC Local Media's growing number of city sites, and I'll be focused on developing new brands and franchises for the company and fine-tuning existing offerings. As for the good ship, it's no secret that my role at Eater has changed significantly over the last 10 months, and you may note that in addition to Founder, the masthead now has me listed as Editor-at-Large. Practically, this means I'll file periodically, with things like Tuesdays with Jeffrey and the Deathwatch. I'm also working closely with the current team -- to the extent they tolerate me -- on continued growth of our properties, new, old, and national, though not in an operational capacity. Questions? This thing still works. --BL

Originally posted by Ben Leventhal from Eater NY, on October 27, 2009 12:52 PM

I received in email today an invitation to be in a research study tracking web searches. The teaser for the study says:

"In this study, we're interested in learning more about how people use search engines to find information on the Web. ... The duration of the study is 3 weeks. To participate you will need to ... be willing to install a small piece of software on your home computer that will log your web browsing & searches [and] answer a few simple questions related to your searches on a daily basis (for a 3 week period)."

The research group is offering $200 for participation, which seems like a rather paltry total for the privacy invasion it invites. But the question is a good one for the masses: how do we use search engines to find information on the Web? So obvious yet so undefined.

I decided to peek at my own Google queries on my work computer to analyze themes and trends. I consider myself a pretty solid, if shallow web searcher: I can almost always find what I'm looking for, though I tend to rephrase searches to find better results than dig past the first 20 or 30 results.

Some of my own trends, exposed:

• I use quotes. A lot. Many of my searches force Boolean-style operations on Google, allowing me to pinpoint terms as written. I find a lot of proper nouns this way, such as "dan gingold" "mach five", which helped me track down my former coworker's band. (I have Pandora to thank for that one. And Dan is now my Facebook friend. Natch.)
• I do a lot of iterative searching, as noted above: "fountains of wayne" then "fountains of wayne store" then "fountains of wayne closed" and "fountains of wayne timely demise."
• Maybe I shouldn't admit this, but I have a whole bunch of mp3 searches in my results, for when I want to hear that one song one time at work.
• I use Google Maps a lot, and I apparently fine-tune my mappings a lot--I'll do a town-to-town search, then I'll put in the specific destination, and then tweak my settings somehow. (So restless.)
• I also use Google for a lot of searches that could take place on the site itself, because it's easier just to do the google. I have dozens of people's names with linkedin in the search, and many references to aiaio or Timely Demise from cross-referencing my own archives.

I'm sure there's more insight to be had, but that's quite an interesting start. How do you do the google?

This is a cross-post from aiaio.

Originally posted by David Wertheimer from Ideapad, on October 27, 2009 12:45 PM

A year ago today my awesome wife started her contractions early in the morning and by MIDNIGHT we were holding our little boy. Today Mark is one year old.

There really are no words to describe how important my family is to me or how much Mark has completely changed everything in my life. It was surprising (but not unexpected) to see this crazed, instinctual dad show up on day one.

What was not expected was that I discovered this incredible feeling of admiration for my own parents. Somewhere after college (when loans were paid off) I think I took for granted all the hard work they put into raising us. I'm tearing up just writing this now. What a wonderful thing.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on October 27, 2009 11:37 AM

From Michael Lombardi:

Winning football games is being able to cover the many details that present themselves each week, and Manning leaves no stone unturned, regardless of the quality of the opponent. He takes every team seriously, and his drive for perfection is a remarkable trait.

Since Manning entered the league in 1998, he's achieved a quarterback rating over 100 in 40 percent of the games he's played. Meanwhile, over half of the teams have had more than 10 different starting quarterbacks. As the quarterback carousel goes round and round, Manning has been able to live in the continuity of the system. As he told me, "I have only played in three systems my entire life -- high school, college and the pros."

As the famous French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld once said, "I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it." I greatly admire Mr. Manning, and without having to root against him, watching him perform is just plain incredible.

He isn't the best ever--yet. Watching Manning this season, though, I really think he has a shot. He threw a TD to Dallas Clark this week that was just perfect.

It's weird watching him though, because Kenyatta's family in Tennessee kinda hates him (They got a street named after him. Peyton Manning ain't never won nothin. This was pre-Super Bowl.) I can't even give you the details, because I've never much cared. I think they were huge Tee Martin fans. Anyway, whenever I'm going on about Manning, Kenyatta gets this mock-Tennessee accent going and sort of mutters Peyton Manning don't walk on wartah.

Uhh, yes he does...

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ta-Nehisi Coates, on October 27, 2009 11:00 AM

Fifteen years ago today, HotWired (my second start-up) was launched, introducing the banner ad onto the internet. It's very hard to imagine it has been that long and quite frankly that anyone on the internet even remembers although it was wonderful to see AdAge magazine commemorate the anniversary with a very sweet piece by Frank D'Angelo, whose agency (Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer) ended up buying 4 of our first 14 advertisements. Frank writes:

Has any one item in our industry been encased with so much debate -- at times even disdain -- as to its true value, role and contribution to marketing communications from its inception in 1994 to this day? Yet the display banner is the impetus to the creation of the online advertising category that will reach beyond $24 billion in 2009, according to eMarketer. Perhaps more important, no other development since has advanced advertising measurement, effectiveness and accountability than the display banner.

Given the amount of time gone by and how fast things change on the internet, one article in AdAge is probably the right amount of celebration (although we are throwing a small party later tonight to get as much of the gang back together again). And I will say that probably 80% of what you read about that time period (I'm looking at you Wikipedia) is somewhere between incomplete and the intentional rewriting of history. But hey, I'm still too young to be an old bitter man, I'll write that post on the 25th anniversary.

Love them or hate them, advertisements on the internet have funded a lot of great content, applications and services that we all use for free every day. If we hadn't launched HotWired with ads on October 27, 1994, no question someone else would have brought the model online soon thereafter, so we don't claim any genius on the idea. But someone had to do it first, in scale and with a lot of original content behind it to support the model and that ended up being a group of us at Wired magazine. Yay us!

I hope you'll join me in the celebration!

Originally posted by Andrew Anker from quid.pro, on October 27, 2009 10:48 AM

The Mets won the 1986 World Series 23 years ago today, Oct. 27.

For a recap of the game, check out Mets Merized Online.

In a post to Faith and Fear in Flushing, Greg Prince says, “You never forget your second.”

…i recently moved, and stumbled upon a box i have been lugging around from house to apartment to house over the years… in it, was the VCR tapes i recorded Game 7, the news and parade on… i haven’t watched it yet, because i no longer own a VCR… how’s that for marking the passage of time… but, i look forward to sitting through it… i thought i lost those tapes…

Speaking of which, this video on YouTube from IceManNYR is of the intro to the Ticker-Tape Parade Show on WNBC:

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on October 27, 2009 10:39 AM

Justice Scalia says that had he been on the Supreme Court in the 1950s, following his originalist philosophy he probably would have dissented from Brown v. Board of Education. [Late Update: Jack Balkin at Balkinization has reviewed the video of Scalia's appearance and finds that the local newspaper misquoted Scalia, who actually said he would have joined Justice Harlan in dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson, not in Brown.]

Quoting the local newspaper report ...

Using his "originalist'' philosophy, Scalia said he likely would have dissented from the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared school segregation illegal and struck down the system of "separate but equal'' public schools. He said that decision, which overturned earlier precedent, was designed to provide an approach the majority liked better. "I will stipulate that it will,'' Scalia said. But he said that doesn't make it right. "Kings can do some stuff, some good stuff, that a democratic society could never do,'' he continued. "Hitler developed a wonderful automobile,'' Scalia said. "What does that prove?''

The Hitler reference seems needlessly offensive, in the context. But this actually strikes me as either a tellingly revealing statement on Scalia's part of bad values or a failure of imagination.

I've always thought that an originalist reading of the 14th Amendment actually gets you pretty much the result of the Brown decision. It's Plessy (i.e., "separate but equal") that is the judicial activist decision that pretty plainly departs from the intent and plain letter reading of the amendments in question. Brown's reliance on social science-y arguments (though very was in significant measure an effort to operate within precedent -- that is to day, within Plessy -- to get you back to what the Civil War amendments actually pretty clearly mean.

So, if he's an originalist, I don't see why Scalia could not have signed on to Brown, just with a fundamentally different judicial reasoning.

Late Update: We're getting the video to verify Balkin's take on what Scalia actually said. But assuming that's right, as you can see, Scalia and I seem to be on the same page, seeing Plessy as the problematic decisions -- not only in moral-political terms, as most would now agree, but on constitutional interpretations grounds too.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 27, 2009 9:22 AM

[Full disclosure - the author of this article has been employed multiple times in the Education Department of the Andy Warhol Museum as recently as June 2009, teaching screen-printing to high school students.]

Last week, Shepard Fairey opened a massive retrospective exhibition at Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum. "Supply and Demand" drew a sold-out opening night crowd that watched Fairey DJ alongside Z-Trip while sporting a swank three-piece suit. In the months prior, Fairey and his team toured around Pittsburgh wheat-pasting his familiar designs on building facades both permitted and not, and across from the museum he installed a temporary mural over top of a pre-existing mural by a younger local artist. The silent, creeping presence of Fairey's designs around the city felt eerily similar to the lead-up for the G20 summit this past September, in which faceless PR firms delivered meaningless graphics touting business and lifestyle opportunities to cover dozens of vacant storefronts in downtown in an attempt to scrub the visual landscape. All of this new wallpaper gave an impending and queasy feeling to anyone paying attention: Pittsburgh, once again and without consent, would play host as a playground for the powerful.

Fairey is one of the most recognized designers in the U.S. today, and the litigation surrounding him and the image sourcing for his art is a circus of it's own. Most bizarrely this spring for Pittsburghers (and anyone else who noticed) local designer Larkin Werner was sent a "cease and desist" (later recinded) by Fairey's legal team over the use of the word "Obey" in conjunction with the homespun "Steelerbaby" kewpie doll for sale on the internet. That, as well as prior stumbles in image use and Fairey's latest snafu with the Associated Press, has highlighted some interesting points about Fairey's privilege as a celebrity and artistic image sourcing in general. Many have been quick to smirk at the perceived appropriateness of Fairey's work in a museum dedicated to Andy Warhol, himself a controversial, multi-disciplinary artist with a mind for business. In fact the museum has a history of bringing stimulating and provocative content to Pittsburgh with consistency and an acute sense of history and context. In the case of "Supply & Demand", however, the whole drumroll and presentation feels scripted and aloof.

On top of the absurd legal battles keeping Shepard Fairey's lawyers and critics busy, a wealth of debate about whether or not the artist's work is "fair use" or even "plagairism" has been steadily sprouting on blogs (like Justseeds') for some time. Often, the accusations fly from the keyboards of other artists, particularly printmakers who consider themselves more engaged in social justice work than Fairey appears to be. It's easy to come off as jealous and spiteful "haters", but as printmakers perhaps what we want most from Fairey as a "political" artist - and don't get - is an analysis of capitalism and its ills that aligns with our own. We want to look at his work, with it's alluring red and black imagery, apparently focused signifiers, and "underground" origins and find an ally in this struggle.

But we don't find that ally in Shepard Fairey. Instead we find a depoliticized and fairly macho entrepreneur, throwing history in our faces and proving to us that, quite frankly, it's easy as hell to make a nice profit off of the "look" of something. If anything smarts more than the annoying sting of Fairey's slick fashion line or the Fuji/Obey track bike, it might just be the sickening feeling of watching someone like Fairey produce color-coded images with little resonance, take handsome promo shots for Vogue Italy after pasting his work on a failed urban storefront, and revel in his street cred and controversy while museums that should know better pander to his status. What the rest of us get from "Supply and Demand" is nothing more than a slick package of redundant imagery, and the Warhol does a surprising disservice to its visitors by touting the work in this exhibit as politically relevant social critique. The best idea I suppose one could take away from "Supply & Demand" is one about how easily we can be sold image and identity, for at it's essence the exhibit is a retrospective of Fairey's "Obey" brand name.

It can't be said that I went to see the new show without prior bias, nor can I refrain from admitting that I appreciated the two cases of Fairey's oldest drawings and related creative ephemera. Yet, besides the usual critiques I might have had with Fairey's past work, I felt something else while walking around the museum, and perhaps a friend said it best: "It just feels like another Dude making work with beautiful women in it" - and, I would add, a short catalog of images of power. Something that doesn't get said about Fairey's work very often is that he easily typifies a tired "boy's club" mentality regarding art. Women, if they appear in his work at all, almost exclusively do so as beautiful faces and bodies. Guns, tanks, machines, fists and stern faces proliferate. It's a troubling feeling to be standing in an exhibit so obviously full of machismo, but the idea hadn't occurred to the curators: as the captioning paragraph to a large image entitled "Arab Woman" proclaims, "Fairey's commitment to challenge preconceived assumptions and stereotypes - in this instance about gender and culture - underlines his engagement with the most pressing issues of our time." Was I just missing something? In another room I found a celebration of men in music, including a wall of portraits of well known and successful musicians: Flava Flav and Chuck D, Slick Rick, Tupac Shakur along with Joe Strummer, Ian MacKaye and others. Debbie Harry appeared a token addition on one end, not far from a close-cropped shot of some apparently revolutionary panties. Perhaps what we're seeing here is just a selection of Fairey's own favorites, and the man is welcome to listen to, be inspired by, and illustrate whatever he likes. The impression it left, however, was of having visited the bedroom of an enamored teenage boy still coping with issues of sexuality and gender in his surroundings.

Contrary to the hype text on the walls of the Warhol, I'll offer that excitement about Fairey's show doesn't stem from an underlying genius to the current work or even audience expectations of something terribly new - and this is exactly where one can locate Fairey's working method. People love "Obey" like they love Bath and Body Works, Hot Topic, or American Eagle Outfitters. Walking into "Supply & Demand" is like walking into a store in the mall: the consistency is the reason for continued purchases and branded enthusiasm, and Fairey's work is a brand you can buy into with ease. I think in this light it's clear that Fairey is a master of business sense, a shrewd calculator possessing a design understanding which manages to appeal to a set of visceral cues that imply "revolution" as well as the sexiness of grafiti or street art. To this end, Fairey deftly removes dialog and context from his work, and the result is slick, ready-to-wear merchandise. Viewers of a portrait of a young Bobby Seale, captioned as "co-founder of the Black Panthers", don't even have to care who the Black Panther Party ever was, it just looks cool. The real power in Fairey's work, the power flexed not just on these museum walls but on walls all over Pittsburgh, lies in his ability to pander to deeply rooted consumer desires: many people want the t-shirt without the politics, the image without the struggle. Rather than analyze this tension, the Warhol cheerleads Fairey's work without pause, bringing into question whether curatorial motivations had more to do with the artist's celebrity than with anything his work might bring to the table.

Originally posted by Shaun Silfer from Just Seeds: Blog, on October 27, 2009 9:00 AM

Tons of new features and improvements in the imminent new version of Android. The web browser appears to have caught up to MobileSafari in several ways, including HTML5 database and geolocation support, and double-tap to zoom. The email client adds support for Exchange and, moving ahead of the iPhone’s MobileMail, adds support for a combined “all accounts” inbox view. Check out the official video for a tour of the new features.

(Via Daniel Sandler.)

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 27, 2009 8:55 AM

Tim Parks

Isia Leviant: Enigma, 1981

What happens in the brain when we look at a painting, listen to music, read a book? This was the subject of Neuroesthetics: When Art and the Brain Collide, a workshop conference at IULM University Milan bringing together a mix of neurobiologists and art historians. The atmosphere was tense and expectant, the art folk anxious that they wouldn’t understand a word, the biologists concerned that their work would seem underwhelming and wrongheaded.

Star speaker Semir Zeki, professor of neuroesthetics at University College London, set the ball rolling with an extraordinarily defensive performance. Art critics accused him of being reductive but hard science could only proceed step by step on the basis of demonstrable proof. He quoted and rubbished a sentence from Gille Deleuze on Francis Bacon:

The figure … acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head, and acts through the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone.

How could one take seriously anyone who used terms so loosely? “The brain is part of the nervous system!”

What Zeki was trying to demonstrate was the brain’s response to ambiguity, a major element in most aesthetic experience. He showed slides of the Rubin vase, the Kanizsa cube and triangle, and Isia Leviant’s “Enigma.” In the case of the vase and the cube, the brain could only see only one of the two alternatives at a time, but it could never shake off the other and would keep switching back and forth, without resolving the issue, a characteristic that Salvador Dali had exploited in his “paranoiac critical” paintings. He went on to show slides of which parts of the brain were activated when responding to such stimuli.

“If you tell me,” responded Ron Chrisley, “which circuits of a computer are active when its chess program moves knight to queen’s bishop three, you haven’t told me much, have you?”

It was that kind of conference.

Various speakers wondered whether robots could be endowed with an aesthetic sense. An experiment was described in which neurons from a rat’s brain in a lab in Australia were connected via the Internet to digital cameras in remote parts of the world, one week New York, the next Paris. When a camera focused on a face the neuron response triggered an artificial arm that drew on paper for as long as the stimulus continued. The results were not impressive. In one case the artificial arm ripped up the paper. Someone suggested that perhaps the aesthetic experience here was watching the machine at work, not contemplating the images it produced.

What was most disturbing was the rather crude notion of “aesthetic experience” that the scientists seemed to entertain. The word “beauty” was used as if we knew what it meant. Zeki spoke of art constituting a form of knowledge that would refine our ability to act and hence increase our chances of reproduction. There was no discussion of the fact that an art critic might have a more complex response to, say, Mondrian than someone who had little experience of painting.

Above all, there was no awareness of the positioning of each aesthetic experience within the accumulating history of viewer, listener or reader. When I remarked in the closing discussion that none of the speaker’s experiments had tackled the word, the poem, the novel, or more generally the aesthetic of narrative, a voice behind me cried out, “Thank God!”

The high points, for those eager to follow these things up, were Ron Chrisley’s paper “How Aesthetics Might Assist a Neuroscience of Sensory Experience” and Riccardo Manzotti’s “Art, Brain and the World: A Physical Unity.” Describing the coining of the word “neuroesthetics” and the claim to say much about aesthetic experience as largely a PR coup by the Zeki camp, Chrisley concentrated on the specific task of describing how a robot might represent space to itself and navigate through it, while Manzotti rejected the very idea of consciousness as representation, insisting rather on the constant physical interaction of mind and environment through sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.

Reassuringly, all differences dissolved when we tasted dinner, during which there was much discussion of the problem of raising funding.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The New York Review of Books, on October 27, 2009 8:27 AM

I just love Baseball Reference’s new SHARE feature | The Baseball Zealot

A nice rundown of our stats sharing tool.

Originally posted by Sean Forman from Baseball-Reference Blog, on October 27, 2009 8:13 AM

Marc and Clint are defending ebook readers from the categorical criticism and doubt in blogs over the last few days, sparked by remarks by John Gruber and Jason Kottke.

I got a Kindle 2 in February, mostly so I could make Instapaper work well on it. I expected it to be used mostly as a development device that I would occasionally use to read a book.

The following week, Tiff was packing lightly for air travel, and I made her take the Kindle instead of a handful of books. She thought it was weird and unnecessary, but she semi-reluctantly tried it for the trip.

I just got it back a few weeks ago.

Tiff plowed through more than 20 books on the Kindle. At one point in the middle, she read a book on paper (because it wasn’t available on the Kindle) and absolutely hated it. Her commentary was priceless: she couldn’t easily look up word definitions, she couldn’t change the font size, it was awkward and lopsided to hold near the beginning and end, and it would lose her place if she fell asleep while reading.

Most people won’t instantly jump to buy ebook readers after seeing them in TV commercials or liveblogged keynotes. They need to be experienced in person. (The ability to do this easily will give Barnes & Noble a huge advantage over Amazon.) And they’ll spread via good, old-fashioned, in-person referrals from friends and coworkers.

“Oh, is that the book reader thing? I heard about that… How do you like it? Can I see it?”

And how many Kindle owners have you met who didn’t love it?

This isn’t a recipe for explosive growth. They’re not taking over or killing anything. And techies don’t need to care much for them to succeed. Engadget and Gizmodo can keep obsessing over tiny LCD devices and foldable Acer tablet concepts and are safe to completely ignore this market once it’s no longer shiny and novel. But there are a lot of people — including, significantly, most people over age 40 — who don’t like reading tiny text on bright LCD screens in devices loaded with distractions that die after 5 hours without their electric lifeline.

And this is one 27-year-old with 20/20 vision¹ who also prefers it.

Most of Kottke’s problem with ebook readers can be solved in software:

But all these e-readers — the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, et al — are all focused on the wrong single use: books. (And in the case of at least the Nook and Kindle, the focus is on buying books from B&N and Amazon. The Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book.) The correct single use is reading. Your device should make it equally easy to read books, magazine articles, newspapers, web sites, RSS feeds, PDFs, etc.

And I’ve already solved part of that. Despite making an iPhone app optimized for reading magazine-length text, I mostly read long content with my very beta Kindle-export feature (which sucks, and is about to be replaced with a much better version) because it’s so much more comfortable — the e-ink screen really is much easier on the eyes, and much more text fits on the Kindle’s screen than the iPhone’s. (If the rumor consensus is to be believed, the Apple tablet unicorn will only solve the latter problem.)

Writing off an entire category of devices because of easily improved software limitations is invalid and unwise. I love reading on my Kindle, and I hardly ever read books. I’ll do my part to make blog posts, online magazine articles, and news stories just as easy to read as books.²

I don’t expect the ebook-reader market to be the next hot thing. But it’s also not a fad, and it’s not going away. These are great devices for reading, even if you need to use one before you’re convinced, and any objection to their current software limitations is likely to be temporary.

⁽³⁾

---

1. I have 20/20 vision for now, at least. I know it won’t last forever, but I’ll enjoy it while I can. I wasn’t so lucky with hair, so I’ll take the advantages that I can get. ↩

2. I’m not including RSS feeds or PDFs in the discussion. RSS feeds aren’t reading: they’re alerting, discovering and filtering. My preferred workflow, which Instapaper embodies, places RSS-inbox-clearing entirely before the reading step as its own process that’s always done with high speed using a native feed reader on a regular computer.

   For a variety of technical and practical reasons, I don’t consider PDFs to be a good reading experience on any platform. It’s also not possible to universally transform them well, or even acceptably, to any screen smaller than their intended print size: letter-sized paper, usually. The Kindle DX comes close, but it’s a large, specialized device that’s not as well suited for the mass market as ebook readers with screens in the 6” range.

   There’s also always going to be a subset of web and book content that doesn’t work well on ebook readers, such as content with a lot of tables, diagrams, photos, or embedded source code blocks. This matters to some, but lack of good support for this type of content won’t prevent the category from being generally successful. ↩

3. This is my first use of footnotes. Normally, I hate them. But I’m experimenting to see if I can find a way to make them not suck. Specifically, it should be possible to read the article linearly without jumping to any footnotes, then read the footnotes at the end after you’ve read the whole thing without needing to jump back to the references in the article to remember what they’re talking about. ↩

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on October 27, 2009 8:01 AM

Filed under: Software, Snow Leopard

Today is release day for VMware Fusion 3.0. The app has more than 50 new enhancements including:

• Support for both 32-bit and 64-bit Snow Leopard kernels.
• Integrated Migration Assistant guides you through migrating from the PC to a virtual machine.
• First virtualization product to support for Windows Aero, including Flip 3D and Aero Peek.
• Support for DirectX 9.0EX with OpenGL 1.4 with new WDDM graphics driver.
• Greatly reduced memory usage when using Windows Vista and Windows 7 virtual machines and newly created Windows XP virtual machines
• Faster disk and graphics performance on Snow Leopard.
• Banish the Start Menu with Always-on Applications Menu on the Mac menu bar.
• Access to Windows taskbar tray items in Unity view in the Mac menu bar.
• Run 3D games and play 1080p video in Unity view.

I started trying to upgrade my copy to 3.0 late last night and into the early morning hours, but the VMware servers insisted I wasn't in the database. I noticed an increasing number of similar complaints on the VMware forums, so I can't tell you about my installation experience, or how it all works with Windows 7.

Stay tuned for more info as we get that sorted out, and hopefully your upgrade experience will be better.

TUAWVMware ships Fusion 3.0 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Mel Martin from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on October 27, 2009 8:00 AM

Last week’s Top Chef was not only fun because it was Restaurant Wars but because they had super sustainable seafood chef Rick Moonen on the program.  Now this week I am even MORE excited because the guest judge is Natalie Portman who is not only an awesome actress (and was in our voting video series) she is a supporter of veganism!

One thing that has always made Top Chef a little less fun for me (I still love it though) is that I’m a vegetarian (sometimes vegan) and I usually can’t eat what they are cooking.   Natalie Portman as a guest judge almost guarantees that I am going to get to watch an episode where I can eat everything on the menu!  It also means that the world at large will (hopefully) get to see how awesome and tasty vegetables, oils, grains and fruit can be all on their own.

Tune in Wednesday night and definitely watch the little promo below to wet your vegetarian appetite (I love how they build up the chefs wanting to use meat).

Originally posted by blair@takepart.com from TakePart Social Action Network™, on October 27, 2009 7:50 AM

I've become an obsessed viewer of Mad Men this season, catching each episode on its first Sunday night airing and hitting the web afterwards to read reactions. The best place to do this is the blog of New Jersey Star-Ledger television critic Alan Sepinwall, who posts an extremely long critique of each episode that attracts hundreds of interesting comments.

For several weeks, Sepinwall's readers have been increasingly critical of Suzanne Farrell, the outspoken young teacher who is Don Draper's latest hoochie mama. They think she's "cuckoo bananas" and a Fatal Attraction waiting to happen, which I find to be a weird reaction.

I posted a comment along those lines Sunday night, asking this question, "When did an assertive woman who is open and direct about her feelings and clear about her needs equate to crazy? Particularly in the world of Mad Men where the cost of repression is made so abundantly clear."

Sepinwall responded: "I think the drunk-dialing scene in 'The Fog' and the eclipse scene in 'Seven Twenty Three' provided enough in-show evidence for people to at least wonder if something is off about Miss Farrell, if not know for sure that there is."

Though subsequent episodes may prove me wrong, I think Farrell makes viewers tense because she's more self-aware than any of Draper's previous conquests. This trait makes it harder to believe that once they're over, she'll go quietly into that good night.

But it does not make her a bunny boiler. Farrell has never done anything that would call her sanity into question more than, say, masquerading as another man and continuously pursuing empty sexual relationships that could destroy your family.

If you show up next Sunday night on Sepinwall's blog, make note of his rules: Don't post spoilers or talk at all about the preview of the next episode.

Originally posted by Rogers Cadenhead from Workbench, on October 27, 2009 6:33 AM

After a extended period of spotty coverage and a mysterious "on hold" post last week, today Josh Ozersky announces his departure as Senior Editor of Citysearch and the death of The Dash Feedbag, the one year-old site he left Grub Street to create. He is apparently moving on to bigger and better things and the Feedbag site will shift away from news and opinion into "a special project." So, where will readers go to get their Pat LaFrieda and Michael White love, their stories of Cutlets' excesses? He says it will all be revealed in time. For those interested, Da Zersk's full statement is reprinted ahead. And Josh, please let the accounting dept. know where to send the $25 check.

Last week’s annoucement of the Feedbag’s temporary derangement was, at best, a stopgap measure. I wasn’t ready to announce my plans, and I’m still not, except to say that big things are in the works. Big! And more than one of them too. But, sadly, that means that I’m leaving Citysearch as Senior Editor, Restaurants. One week from today will be my last day here, and the last day of The Feedbag as you know it. So what is on the way?

Well, I can’t quite tell you yet. I’m going to blog for another week in this same reduced, Ubik-like stream of consciousness to which you may have become accustomed; and then things are going to change.I have a warm affection for Citysearch, and wanted to find a way to stay involved with a team of people I have a lot of loyalty too. So we have a plan to a major shift on The Feedbag away from news and opinion, and into a special project that I can promise you will be very, very cool. Sadly, I can’t make any announcements about that yet, either. But as Michael Corleone told his caporegimes, “There are things being negotiated now that are gonna solve all your problems and answer all your questions. That’s all I can tell you now.”

· The Fate of the Feedbag Foretold [TFB]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater NY, on October 27, 2009 6:26 AM

In my consulting, it’s often useful to reframe questions about design or technology as political matters. A given feature set is rarely limited by technology — just about anything can be built, it’s just a matter of institutional priorities. Outside of this, I’m also finding many apparently technical issues can be better understood when reframed politically.

Two via Mike:

The Decline of the Landline: “In many ways the landline network is still an essential utility. Maintaining landline networks provides thousands of jobs (the landline operators support more pensioners than even the car industry does). Landlines are the platform for many public services, such as emergency response. And taxes on landlines are the basis of the complex system of subsidies to ensure universal service, meaning an affordable phone line for all. The phone network is thus not just a technical infrastructure, but a socioeconomic one.”

On Reinventing the Firm “As I argue, drawing on Ronald Coase, a firm is a political response to an economic problem: managerial power and hierarchy is one efficient way of dealing with the uncertainties attached to the employment relationship. But this doesn’t prevent us from considering alternative political settlements, that are potentially more democratic and more productive.”

Hunger is not a lack of food:

Ending Africa’s Hunger: “Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more. This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world.... But there's a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn’t a problem of production so much as one of distribution.“

Interview with Devinder Sharma: “Hunger in India is at a level today that it very shameful. We have this hunger existing at a time when we have a mounting food surplus. We have an unmanageable food surplus, which is a record in history, and we also have a record number of hungry with us today. This paradox forced me to get into this issue of hunger. There are two ways of looking at it. One, of course, is the grassroots effort that one can do to bring people out of hunger. The other, to my understanding, is that hunger is the result of policies, national and international. The basic idea, or the basic focus, today, is to keep one half of the world hungry, because you can only exploit the hungry stomach. You cannot exploit a full stomach, somebody who is very happy and fed.”

Maternal mortality is not just a medical issue:

A Tipping Point on Maternal Mortality?: “During World War I, more American women died in childbirth than American men died in war. Then, after women’s suffrage became a reality, maternal mortality fell sharply. It seems that when women were accepted fully into the political system, then resources were also made available in the health system and they, less marginalized, were able to take advantage of them.”

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on October 27, 2009 6:10 AM

From Serious Eats: New York

[Photos: Carey Jones]

We've written about their banana whip; Ed's raved about their contributions to the New Amsterdam Market. But even though we've got a long-standing relationship with The Bent Spoon—one of our contributors worked there, and I spent several years making near-daily visits—we've never done the definitive post. So it was about time we made a return trip.

Opened in May of 2004 by Gabrielle Carbone and Matt Errico, The Bent Spoon is less an ice cream shop than a lab of ingredient wizardry. Sure, they have a few standard house flavors—no, not chocolate chip and strawberry; more like chocolate habanero and cardamom ginger.

But "seasonality" doesn't quite capture the philosophy behind the rest of their rotating offerings. It's not "Where can I get the best ingredients for this ice cream?" Rather, "This is what I want to be eating right now. Let's make an ice cream out of it!" That explains the sweet potato ice cream and the Triumph Brewery stout, the crème fraîche ice cream and the heirloom tomato sorbet. Olive oil. Bourbon with caramel and sea salt. Earl grey. Red cabbage. And, literally, hundreds more.

The Spoon works closely with surrounding farmers and dairies, milking the most out of their New Jersey location. Princeton may be a straight shot down the Northeast Corridor from New York, but wander half a mile outside the town proper and the farms pop up around every bend.

"We choose to support local farmers, producers, and purveyors," reads Carbone's whimsical handwriting. "You are really tasting and experiencing the essence of this region."

[Photo: Robyn Lee]

And local ingredients turn up everywhere, from the milkshakes to the baked goods. The Bent Spoon's cookies are reliably fantastic: smooth, just-crumbly peanut butter cookies; super-buttery chocolate chunk; pliant, spicy molasses; hearty, sugar-topped oatmeal raisin; and chewy, musky ginger cookies. They taste like the best sort of homemade cookies—taste carefully, and you can still sense the butter and sugar they started as.

Cupcakes come both big and tiny. The cake itself is moist and mild, with a bit of a bite in the crumb, intensely rich buttercream frosting on top.

But no matter how cold the New Jersey winter may get, no matter whether you've already ordered a cookie and a silky, European-style hot chocolate, it's impossible to resist the ice cream. On my most recent visit, that meant earthy New Jersey pumpkin mascarpone with cacao nibs, New Jersey honey, peanut butter, and cranberry cider and pear prosecco sorbets. Each one was phenomenal. The latter sorbet had the gritty, hefty mouthfeel of a real pear; the honey had a raw, floral taste that made one wonder where the bees had been landing. I found a tiny bit of cranberry stem in the former, but I didn't mind. Just an extra dimension.

These are the kinds of flavors so powerful that they go beyond mere taste—conjuring up memories, rather than just sensation. "This tastes like Peanut Butter Ripple at this one, tiny ice cream place on the Jersey shore," mused my dining companion, as we worked our way through the flavors. "This tastes like stealing my neighbor's pears in September." "This tastes like Thanksgiving." And with the lingering warmth of all those pumpkin pie spices, with the bite of cranberry and sweetness of apple, it truly did.

It was a sharply cold October night when we sat outside, shivering over our ice cream, one bite at a time. But across the street, back at the Bent Spoon, there was a line out the door. Even into the winter months, they draw a crowd, students and families crunching in from the snow for their frozen desserts. It's hard to make sense of. Well, until you've gotten a taste.

Related:
Sugar Rush: Banana Whip at the Bent Spoon in Princeton
Ice Cream Worth Shouting About (And Eating in the Cold)

The Bent Spoon

35 Palmer Square West, Princeton NJ 08542 (map)
609-924-2368‎
thebentspoon.com

Originally posted by Carey Jones from Serious Eats, on October 27, 2009 6:00 AM

From Recipes

[Photos: Greg Takayama]

To those who claim there's nothing better than a juicy steak, I offer the stomach as this week's counter-argument. Nose-to-tail eating affords a whole range of enticing textures. We often judge food by its taste, but texture is equally significant.

Chewy, stringy, mushy, spongy: though nothing one would want in a steak, these adjectives take on positive connotations for offal. Consider tripe, which is meant to be chewy and spongy in a tender, slowly-stewed kind of way. Tendon, another underappreciated part, turns soft and mushy after many hours of cooking.

Charred on a cast iron or hot griddle, the different layers of pork stomach become soft, chewy, and crisp all at once. It's the most powerful argument we have for offal: to seek a novel culinary experience, we can turn towards the non-fleshy parts of the animal.

The layers of a pig's stomach afford discrete textures. The exterior layer is the thinnest and most wrinkled, with very little elasticity. The substratum reveals more tender sheets of fatty tissue. These softer, interior layers are porky with a rubbery mouthfeel, pleasantly chewy—like a basket of fried clam strips. There's also a spongy element to the interior, the result of the fatty tissue that's broken down in the simmering process.

Pork stomach happens to be one of my favorite digestive-related parts—much more manageable to cook and eat than the kidneys. The latter organ filters the toxins by way of urine and its taste reflects its function, for better or worse. On the other hand, stomach possesses a muted sense of that feral flavor. Like tripe, its bovine counterpart, pork stomach requires a lengthy stewing period before it can be crisped.

Depending on your senses, the stomach of the pig prior to cooking emits a feral, fetid, or foul odor. As pink and wrinkled as a newborn rat, raw stomach is pungent with scents akin to fecal matter. Taking a whiff suggests the magnitude of stench in a pig farm. Even if the animals are humanely raised, there's no hiding the arresting odors of digestion. As I lowered my nose into the folds of the sac, I sensed the musk of dirt and pig slops.

But those thoughts gave way to appetite as the stomach cooked, bobbing along in an enameled cast-iron pot filled with spices and aromatics. Over the course of two hours, the offal-intensive smells in the pot subsided and a porky aroma like that of the trotters emerged. (Prior to stewing, the stomach is best cleansed with a short period of parboiling to remove the frothy, grey scum and the offending odors.)

My favorite taco of all time, tacos buche, employs the stomach in a quick sauté. (Depending on the cook, "buche" can also refer to the lower intestine of the pig.) Drawing inspiration from this Mexican application of pork stomach, I used my own charred stomach bits as the main filling for arepas. The arepa is a Venezuelan bread fashioned from corn. It's the South-American version of the English muffin, with a crisp exterior and a spongy, soft crumb inside.

Having never made arepas before, I spent a few days fiddling with the consistency, thickness, and cooking methods for the dough. Barring the labor-intensive procedure for transforming corn kernels into finely ground corn flour, the second-best option for arepa dough is the brand "Harina P.A.N." White and only slightly grainy, it a crispy and tender arepa that crackles with each bite, with just the right tug on your teeth. (Having tried both the "Masarepas" brand as well as "Harina P.A.N.," only the latter produced arepas with a hard shell.)

Timing is key to making a great arepa. Crisped in butter, the arepas are then baked in the oven for at least twenty minutes to sufficiently cook the interior. After frustrating trials yielding undercooked arepas, I reconciled myself to a more hands-off approach. Low and slow heat on the cast iron, with no more than one flip per arepa, sets the stage for proper browning in the oven. Like tortillas, frequent flipping discourages the arepas from ballooning in the middle with hot air. Cooked all the way through, the arepas will emit a hollow sound when tapped.

That evening we stuffed our arepas with freshly made salsa, cheese, and black beans. The spongy interior of the bread readily sopped up the porky juices from the stomach. Subsequent nights were filled with stomach as well: crisped and tossed with rice, or roasted with vegetables, each application displayed the textural uniqueness of the organ.

Charred Pig's Stomach

Ingredients

1 pork stomach
1 onion, peeled and washed
a bouquet garni (thyme, parsley, marjoram, etc)
1 jalapeño pepper, washed and halved
½ teaspoon peppercorns
salt to taste, approximately 1 teaspoon

vegetable oil for charring

Procedure

1. Bring a large pot of water to boil. Add the stomach and let boil for 2 or 3 minutes to get rid of some of the impurities. Remove the stomach from the pot and set aside to cool. When sufficiently cool, cut into 3 or 4 smaller segments for ease of stewing.

2. In a medium-sized pot, arrange the stomach along with the rest of the ingredients (except the oil, for frying). Add enough water to cover the stomach. Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer gently, uncovered, for 2 to 3 hours.

3. Remove the stomach from the broth and let cool. Reserve the stock for another use.

4. When cooled, cut the stomach into slivers.

5. In the meantime, heat a cast iron until extremely hot.

6. Brown the slivers until the edges are golden brown and crispy. Once in a while, stir the slivers around in the pot to prevent sticking. Serve immediately.

Arepas

Ingredients

equal parts water and Harina P.A.N (scale according to your needs; the ratio is always 1:1)
a pinch of salt

butter and oil for pan-frying

Procedure

1. Bring your quantity of water to a boil. Place the Harina P.A.N. in a mixing bowl and carefully add the boiling water and pinch of salt.

2. Quickly stir the water around with the Harina P.A.N. to distribute the liquid evenly. Knead with your hands until the mixture comes together in a cohesive ball, with very little cracking. Like Play-Doh, the dough should be moist, but not wet and sticky.

3. Break off a lump of the dough the size of a small plum, and roll it into a ball using your palms. Gently flatten and pat it down in your hands until the dough is about half an inch thick and 3-4 inches in diameter, tapering the edges to be slightly thinner than the center.

4. Shape the rest of the arepas, covering the rounds of dough with saran wrap to prevent drying out. Leftover dough may be wrapped and kept in the refrigerator for several days.

5. Preheat a cast iron skillet or oven-proof pan over low heat. Add the butter and oil. Very slowly pan-fry the rounds of dough, flipping only once per arepa. When done, the surface will be lightly golden-brown. The process should take 10 to 15 minutes minutes.

6. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

7. When arepas are lightly been browned, place your pans into the oven and bake the rounds for 20 minutes or more, until the dough is golden brown and very crisp on both faces. Slice in half with a bread knife to make a pocket for your stuffing. The arepas may be kept warm, in a bowl covered with a towel.

Originally posted by Chichi Wang from Serious Eats, on October 27, 2009 5:15 AM

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables.

I love fucking fall.

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 27, 2009 5:01 AM

From Recipes

Note: You may know Carolyn Cope as Umami Girl. She stops by on Tuesdays to help us cook through seasonal surplus with ease.

[Photographs: Carolyn Cope]

Ever since my inaugural trip to Zuni Cafe in San Francisco with my sister last month, I've been showing all the signs of a borderline-creepy unrequited crush on the restaurant. Whatever you tell me, I guarantee I'll find a way to relate it to my dinner at Zuni. What, you don't like your hair today? That reminds me of the insanely delicious ricotta gnocchi at Zuni. You know, because in Italian they're sometimes called malfatti, which means poorly shaped... like your hair.

I leaf through the cookbook wistfully three, maybe four times a day. I wish I could tell you I don't sometimes stroke it a little, trying in vain to evoke a response. It's been a month now since our night together, and Zuni hasn't called. Not once. Still, I wait by the phone night after night, turning down invitations, just in case. It's getting downright embarrassing, and everyone can see that. Everyone except me.

This salad, like all of Zuni's food, is the ideal version of itself. Food like this can only be born of love.

Zuni had our hearts from the minute we sat down. They seated us in view of the bustling, open kitchen on a cozy little bench, next to each other. We soon realized that all the other tables in our section were occupied by couples who knew the servers by name. Oh, my God, they think we're regulars! We took it as highest praise, and as we sipped our cocktails, we were the happiest, proudest couple in the house.

Which was great, until we realized that because we look so much alike, we were that tragic couple where just to see the one is to comprehend the infinite depth of the other's self-absorption. Was it possible Zuni didn't adore us as much as we adored ourselves? Uh, Zuni, I mean. As much as we adored Zuni.

Any doubts we had dissipated instantly with our first bites. Every morsel tasted like the idealized version of itself. No, wait a minute—the idealized version would be the one you haven't heard snore yet, or seen in its B-team underwear, the one born of a creepy unrequited crush. Zuni's food was the ideal version of itself. And food like that can only be born of love.

Shredded Radicchio with Anchovy Vinaigrette, Bread Crumbs, and Sieved Egg

Adapted from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook

-serves 4-

Ingredients

3/4 cup fresh bread crumbs
5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 anchovy fillets, chopped
1 large shallot, minced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 medium heads radicchio (about 12 ounces)
2 hard-boiled eggs, peeled

Procedure

1. Preheat the oven or toaster oven to 400° F. Drizzle one tablespoon of the olive oil over the breadcrumbs and toss, kneading slightly with your fingers, to distribute. Spread the breadcrumbs on a sheet pan or toaster oven pan and bake for 6 minutes (or a bit longer in the toaster oven) or until golden in spots, tossing once or twice if necessary. Cool completely.

2. In a small bowl, combine the remaining olive oil, vinegar, anchovies, shallot, and salt and pepper to taste.

3. Remove any wilted outer leaves from the radicchio. Wash, dry, quarter and core each head. Slice each quarter crosswise into 1/8-inch slices. Place in a salad bowl, tossing to separate slices. Toss in the breadcrumbs. Drizzle the vinaigrette over the salad and toss. Taste and adjust seasonings if necessary.

4. Push the eggs through a medium-mesh sieve onto the salad. (Seriously, it works. But just as seriously, you'll want to use a sieve you can put in the dishwasher. If you'll excuse the flagrant pun, whoever tried this the first time had some serious huevos.) Toss just a few times and serve.

About the author: Carolyn Cope writes Umami Girl and manages a CSA in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Originally posted by Carolyn Cope from Serious Eats, on October 27, 2009 4:30 AM

An obvious but surprisingly under-practiced design principle is to “embrace the medium.”  Applied to software, this means building applications that take advantage of the strengths of the platform instead of trying to mimic the strengths of another platform.

iPhone and Wii games provide many stark abuses of this principle. Call of Duty is perhaps the single best franchise on the XBox and PS3, but the Wii version is almost unplayable.   They basically just did a straight port of the game, with worse graphics and using the Wiimote as a shaky aiming device.  It’s not an accident that the best Wii games are made exclusively for the Wii (and that most of those games are made by Nintendo itself).

iPhone games are perhaps even worse violators of the “embrace the medium” principle.  Recently I was thinking about downloading Madden 2010, but as soon as I saw the screenshots I knew I’d hate it:

You can see they are trying to force the XBox/PS3 control scheme onto a device with completely different set strengths and weaknesses. The iPhone’s strengths are:  touchscreen, gestures, accelerometer, networked, always with you. Its weaknesses:  no buttons, small screen, poor graphics/processor (compared to consoles).  The best games – Flight Control, Spider, Rolando – are designed from scratch to take advantage of the iPhone’s strengths.  Take Flight Control as an example:

You guide the planes by mapping their routes with your finger.  It’s such a simple, elegant and fun game, and one that could only exist on the iPhone.  It embraces the iPhone-ness instead of fighting it.

Originally posted by chris from cdixon.org - chris dixon's blog, on October 27, 2009 3:09 AM

... and this makes me want to cook them and eat them:

Cooking them well is all it takes. Eric Ripert still remembers the oyster mushrooms when he was a young cook at Robuchon's 3-star Jamin. He had to cook each one individually to get that perfect sear. That's what it takes, that's what makes the difference.

via blog.ruhlman.com

I usually cook a handful of mushrooms along with some butter, salt, pepper, and thyme; but I might need to try this one-at-a-time method to get them just right, because a perfectly-cooked mushroom sounds delicious.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on October 26, 2009 9:35 PM

Merlin's Melody Nelson post this past weekend got me on a Gainsbourg kick.

Histoire de Melody Nelson is, indeed, one of my favorite albums of all time, but this weekend I spent some time with some of my other favorite Gainsbourg--and Gainsbourg-related--albums, any of which would be perfect for someone who loves Melody:

• L'Homme à Tête de Chou: a mid-70s sort of rock opera about murdering a shampoo girl with a fire extinguisher.
• Anna (soundtrack): a late-60s soundtrack for a musical with Anna Karina; it's a lovely bridge between Gainsbourg's 60s pop and 70s rock.
• Jean-Claude Vannier, L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches: I wrote about this back in 2005 when it was re-released. Vannier collaborated with Gainsbourg on Melody Nelson, and this early-70s album has a really similar sound, but it's even more bizarre.

All highly recommended.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on October 26, 2009 9:26 PM

MySQL as a web service from Amazon. Interesting.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 26, 2009 9:14 PM

Anil Dash is now on the list too and has 99K followers, and he's a working man, and I'm sure he can be influenced. I unfollowed Anil when he made a joke about how it feels like being on the Yankees. Exactly. That's what I dislike intensely about the Yankees. Their sense of entitlement. Maybe not so much by the players, but by the fans. Twitter is like blogging, it's best when it's just people. The people with millions of unearned followers must be uncomfortable, wondering when the millions are going to catch on via www.scripting.com Dave, I know Anil (as you do) and let me tell you he may talk a Yankee game, but he is a Met through and through. And I say that with all my love!

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 26, 2009 6:39 PM

[Flickr: d76]

There was some debate over on Talk as to what a proper Fluffernutter includes, but it's been clarified. Two untoasted pieces of white bread (like Wonder), creamy non-organic peanut butter (like Skippy), and Marshmallow Fluff. That is all. No bananas, no honey, no artisanal bread, no crunchy peanut butter. Yes, we are taking the Fluffernutter nuances very seriously.

Related
Photo of the Day: What The Fluff Festival
Fluffernutter: Massachusetts' State Sandwich?
Video: The Marshmallow Temptation Test

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 26, 2009 5:00 PM

Sure, fine, make your single-use devices. But all these e-readers -- the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, et al -- are all focused on the wrong single use: books. (And in the case of at least the Nook and Kindle, the focus is on buying books from B&N and Amazon. The Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book.) The correct single use is reading. Your device should make it equally easy to read books, magazine articles, newspapers, web sites, RSS feeds, PDFs, etc. And keep in mind, all of these things have images that are integral to the reading experience. We want to read; help us do it.

Tags: books   Kindle

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 26, 2009 3:59 PM

So how did we go from a White House at loggerheads with the Senate leadership last Thursday night over a public option, to a deal today that's exactly what the leadership wanted?

This evening I spoke with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who was in that infamous Thursday night meeting with President Obama and other Senate leaders--and who has been one of the most persistent advocates of a public option on Capitol Hill. As Schumer explains it, the disagreement between the White House and Senate wasn't substantive so much as it was tactical: The White House had its doubts that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could really get 60 votes for a public option with an opt out for states.

"The President listened very carefully," Schumer said in an interview moments ago. "He wanted to make sure that the strategy upon which we were embarking had the ability to carry through."

Schumer has been at the center of the fight over the public option from the earliest days of the health care debate--always there to pull it back from the brink when it at times seemed on the verge of collapse. This situation was no different. After the Thursday meeting, four sources in different Democratic offices told me that the White House had suggested they believed a strategy of pursuing Sen. Olympia Snowe's preferred compromise--a triggered public option--might be an easier path to 60 votes. In the end, though, Schumer and the rest of leadership seem to have prevailed upon President Obama that they've picked the right strategy.

"I think substantively the White House probably preferred a stronger public option than a trigger," Schumer said. "We talked about this for a while in leadership and the White House wanted to hear our thoughts--and when they heard them they thought that this was the right strategy to get our caucus together."

Today, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the President stands behind Reid as he builds support for the public plan.

"A lot of people around here have faith in Harry Reid's abilty to count votes," Schumer told me.

Does that mean that triggers are dead? Schumer wouldn't characterize things that way, but he did note that, as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) suggested, the move risked alienating many in the caucus.

"I think that, to many many people in the caucus...the trigger was never very attractive. I think it was Jay Rockefeller that said whenever you have the trigger, it never goes into effect," Schumer said.

At the very least, then, triggers were dealt a very serious blow today. But what happens now in the House? Should leaders there settle on a public option with negotiated rates to minimize the differences between their bill and the Senate's bill? Or should House Speaker Nancy Pelosi keep pushing for a public option that sets reimbursement rates slightly above Medicare's, to ensure that the most robust public option on offer gets a hearing in the final negotiations?

Schumer's mostly mum, "each body has to find its sort of middle point in the Democratic caucus, and I think this is the middle point in the Senate."

But, he says, the public option will redound to Democrats' benefit in the end.

"I think the public is for the public option. During those bad days in mid-summer, the dog days of August, the hard right misinformed the public as to what a public option was." Schumer says. "They said it was a mandate."

"I had lots of people coming up to me to say 'I like my insurance, why are you forcing me,'" into a government health care plan. But ultimately, he says, Democrats' repetition of the word "option," and the theme "choice," helped them win the argument with the public.

I asked Schumer whether he thinks Democrats made the right decision by calling it "the public option" instead of using the Medicare brand name to make it more appealing to the public.

"Yes, definitely," Schumer said. "In America, people like choices."

Originally posted by Brian Beutler from TPM Election Central, on October 26, 2009 3:41 PM

why can we only "like" something on facebook? do you dis.like something? simply copy and paste the URL "http://dis-like.com" into a facebook comment window and post.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rhizome.org Artwork, on October 26, 2009 3:06 PM

• Michael Pollan Quoth: "A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius." [Reuters]
• Tea Bag Curtain: Anthropologie's window display in London. [TeaForJoy]
• Roadkill: Thousands of pounds of beef lost after a Mass Turnpike accident. [BG]
• 527 Calories for a Muffin?! Study proves that fast-food calorie labels in NYC have changed cosumer habits. [Reuters]
• Katy Perry's Food Fight: She started one with her birthday cake and liked it. [E]
• Sandwich Boomlet: Exploring the the Bay Area's sandwich renaissance. [SC]
• What a Houston Taco Truck Commissary Looks Like: It's pretty cool. [HP]
• Jelly Belly Sodas: Nine will be launched, all made of 100% cane sugar. [BevNet]

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 26, 2009 3:00 PM

While tech fiends are anxiously awaiting web tablets made by Apple and TechCrunch, a recently-launched French touchpad device could become the darling of culinary geeks. Made specifically for kitchen use, QOOQ is a touchscreen tablet that aims to coach and assist both beginning and experienced cooks.

For EUR 349, the device comes loaded with 500 interactive recipes and 10 instructional videos. Customers can add their own recipes and—for a monthly fee of EUR 12.95—get access to a further 2,000 recipes and 500 video, with 50 new recipes added every month. Membership also includes unlimited access to a culinary guide that covers everything from wine pairing to chopping techniques. Spillproof and wifi-enabled, QOOQ was developed entirely to be used in the kitchen. Placed flat on a countertop, it rests on 'claws' that keep it safely elevated from crumbs and damp prep areas. It can also stand upright, for easier reading and for use as a digital picture frame (the device is multi-purpose: it also includes a radio and a weather station).

QOOQ's founders hope to encourage people to rediscover the pleasure of cooking, while making their lives simpler with features like intuitive menu planning tools and automated grocery lists. QOOQ's interface and recipes are currently only available in French—for anyone in food publishing in other parts of the world, this could be a natural fit.

Website: www.qooq.com
Contact: contact@unowhy.com

Spotted by: Thibaut Bayart

Originally posted by Springwise from Springwise - Food & Beverage, on October 26, 2009 2:49 PM

It's that time of year.

TPM brings on a new class of interns each season. And we're now taking applications for our Winter 2009 cycle. TPM interns are probably as intimately and rapidly involved in the preparation and production of news coverage as interns at any other news organization. And that ranges from work on the news section of the front page to research for our news blogs to video editing to bylined articles.

About half our current staff started as interns and we have a very solid record placing interns at media jobs at other great publications. Needless to say, this fall is going to have no shortage of political news. The application deadline is November 6th. To find out details for how to apply, click here.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 26, 2009 2:28 PM

What really happens on the NFL sidelines? People eat hot dogs. At least Mark Sanchez of the New York Jets did at yesterday's game against the Oakland Raiders, only to be busted by cameras. He later apologized for wolfing down the tube meat, saying he "wasn't feeling very good" and needed a snack. Thanks to a great zoom-in job, we see that Sanchez is a mustard man. Sounds like he needs to read our mustard taste test for optimal sidelines snacking pleasure. The video and Sanchez's explanation, after the jump.

Bus-ted

Mark Sanchez Responds

[via Gothamist]

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 26, 2009 2:15 PM

a little module with content from your Reader subscriptions and Gmail contacts  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on October 26, 2009 1:29 PM

This past September, you may have heard about the launch of our Data Liberation site, a central place on the web detailing how you can easily move your data into or away from Google's cloud. Today, we're adding another product to our growing list of liberations: the "Convert, Zip and Download" feature in Google Docs, which allows you to download a bunch — or all — of your Docs simultaneously.

This new feature comes out of a collaboration between the Google Docs engineering team and Google's Data Liberation Front, a small team of engineers that aims to make it easy for you to transfer your personal data in and out of Google's services by building simple import and export functions.

"Convert, Zip and Download" now joins dozens of other liberation features across our product offerings, ranging from Blogger's full blog downloads to email export from Gmail using IMAP and POP3. The feature lets you bundle your Google Docs in a format of your choice (MS Office, Open Office, PDF, etc.) and download them as a zip file. No longer do you have to download each document individually, which can take a lot of time if you have hundreds of documents like I do! All you need to do is select the relevant Docs, click on "Export" from the "More Actions" menu and download them in one go. (Check out the Google Docs Blog for more details.)


We hope you find the new export feature useful. We strongly believe that you — not the products you use — should control your data, and be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We've already liberated more than half of our products, and are working hard to address the remaining challenges. Keep an eye out for more upcoming Data Liberations.

You can also take a deeper look into product liberation at dataliberation.org, follow us on Twitter @dataliberation or contribute suggestions for services that you think need to be liberated on our Data Liberation Moderator page.

Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Engineering Manager, the Data Liberation Front

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on October 26, 2009 1:18 PM

Originally posted by The Sartorialist from The Sartorialist, on October 26, 2009 1:09 PM

Primum non nocere – the Latin phrase meaning “First, do no harm.” That sentiment is drilled into physicians from the beginning of medical school, but perhaps it should be emblazoned on every dugout wall in baseball as well. In the ALCS, we saw two managers over-analyze situations, causing harm to their own team time and time again, and now it appears that Charlie Manuel may be on the verge of following in their footsteps.

Manuel will send Cliff Lee to the hill on Wednesday for game one of the series, as he should. However, he has not been willing to disclose the rest of his playoff rotation, and reports are surfacing that he may go with Pedro Martinez in the second game in lieu of Cole Hamels. The rationale appears to be based on recent performance – Hamels has struggled in the first two rounds of the playoffs, while Martinez was able to hold down the Dodgers in his NLCS appearance.

However, at some point, you have to step back and realize that recent performance simply cannot overcome what we know about the respective abilities of the two pitchers. Hamels is the better pitcher by a significant margin. It’s not even close.

The appearance of Hamels’ struggles this year are mostly just noise. His 2009 FIP of 3.72 is exactly equal to his 2008 FIP, as his walk, strikeout, and home run rates are nearly identical. The ERA jumped by over a run per game due to a 55 point increase in his batting average on balls in play. He was a bit lucky last year and a bit unlucky this year. Overall, he’s the same guy he was a year ago when he led the Phillies to a World Series title and was being crowned the new young ace of the National League.

Martinez simply isn’t in that league anymore. He did a nice job down the stretch for the Phillies, but even in a limited sample of nine starts, he wasn’t as good as Hamels. He pounded the strike zone and missed some bats, but his fringe fastball up in the zone led to a ridiculously low 29.5 percent ground ball rate. Not surprisingly, he gave up a bunch of home runs, which is consistent with his performances over the last several years. He throws enough strikes and has a good enough change-up to be effective, but he’s prone to throwing a couple of meatballs each game.

To decide to go with Martinez over Hamels, you have to significantly undervalue the gap in talent and overvalue everything else. Pedro may have a history with old Yankee stadium, and you might prefer a guy with his personality on the mound, but that stuff doesn’t make up for the fact that Cole Hamels is a far superior pitcher to Pedro Martinez right now. Mike Scioscia made a similar mistake by going with Joe Saunders due to non-talent reasons. It’s not a good idea.

The Yankees have it right – throw your best pitchers as often as possible. Hamels is the second best pitcher on the staff. He should start game two. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. .

Originally posted by Dave Cameron from FanGraphs Baseball, on October 26, 2009 12:55 PM

On his Tumblr blog today, College Humor founder turned big IAC dude Ricky Van Veen lays out the politics of "New York Power Meals," as told to him by a "good friend/scene veteran" (OMG Barry Diller?). The breakfast part is kind of confusing to us, but then we've never been asked to breakfast (and we're totally fine with that!):

"Breakfast means you’ve got a current deal to discuss (if you already have a relationship) or you’re willing to consider a relationship with someone new, but that person isn’t especially important."

We totally agree with the coffee part (so Betty Draper!), but our burning question to Ricky is: What about brunch?

Guide to New York Power Meals [Ricky Van Veen]

Read more posts by Lindsay Robertson

Filed Under: college humor, power meals, rich people everyone likes, ricky van veen

Originally posted by Lindsay Robertson from Daily Intel, on October 26, 2009 12:45 PM

It’s been almost two years since I last saw Shonen Knife; too long. They played Vancouver’s less-than-palatial Biltmore Cabaret; I got close to the stage with my camera.

As to the band and their music, I can’t really add much to what I said in that last concert piece and in 2006’s 5✭♫: Burning Farm. They’re under-appreciated and great. So I’ll stick with the venue and the context and the pictures.

Strange Magic

That was the opening act, named presumably after the ELO song; I always hated ELO. Like ELO, Strange Magic has a lot of musicians on stage (at least four guitars). They managed to rock out a bit and the lead singer, a woman with Asian genes, had some real charisma. If they exist online I can’t find them behind all the ELO.

The Biltmore

I’m used to being harassed when I try to use my SLR to photograph musicians. The current common practice, which is that it’s OK to bring a point-and-shoot but not a “serious” camera, is about to break down in the face of the serious small cameras now starting to arrive on the scene.

Anyhow, the beefy security guy, going over me outside the Biltmore in the autumn storm, wanted a look in my bag. My K20D isn’t big as SLRs go, but I had the 50-135 zoom on; the bouncer said “Damn that’s big camera. Better get it out of the rain, brother” and opened the door for me.

Good start; and then they had pints of decent beer for $5, and there was plenty of room to sit down if you felt like it. I couldn’t help but notice that at any one time, at least a third of the audience was leaning over their mobile devices communicating with somewhere else. I guess that’s just the way it is these days.

The big problem is that the stage is only maybe a foot high. More on that later.

Three Women from Osaka

As the membership has shifted over the years, it’s more and more obvious that Shonen Knife is really a vehicle for Naoko Yamano. I’m totally a fan; she writes great songs, sings with rock-’n’-roll gusto, plays simple to-the-point guitar solos really loud with beautiful tone, and leads a damn tight band.

Which is to say, I see her as a giant of contemporary music. Unfortunately, she’s a very short giant; I happened to be in a passageway as the band came through it, and none of ’em would reach my shoulders. So Naoko opened her first between-songs rap, in her deliciously cute broken English, saying “You are all so... tall. And we are so short. But it’s OK, we jump sometimes.”

So unless you were right up against the stage, you really couldn’t see them. I managed that, behind only one row of short-ish people, at the stage-right corner, which is away from where Naoko stands. And there wasn’t nearly enough light, and shooting at f2.8, ISO 1600, 1/60sec, the camera could barely cut it; the autofocus was useless. So let’s just say these are about expression not precision.

The pix look cleaner and more composed and professional if I make them black and white, but I’m sorry, Shonen Knife is just not a black-and-white band. These pictures, blurry and colour-drenched as they are, look like what I saw.

The upside of being stage right was that I was right up next to Ritsuko, the band’s rookie member on bass and vocals. And boy, does she ever have some maximum-rock-’n’-roll moves.

It was her first visit to Vancouver; hey Ritsuko, come back any time!

In terms of raw performing talent, my fave is Etsuko the drummer, who puts out an absolutely astounding chatter-and-roar, punctuating the songs’ flow perfectly without ever losing the precise back-beat thunder. I can’t imagine how much they have to practice to stay that tight at that speed.

Toward the end of the show, someone in the audience held out their point-&-shoot camera, and this weirdly Japanese moment occurred when the band struck a pose, back to the audience, for the roadie to take the picture. I was at the side of the stage holding down the “shoot” button and caught a piece of someone else’s flash.

You really ought to see them if you get a chance.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from ongoing, on October 26, 2009 12:00 PM

Shared by rick
dudes and dudines, i don't like cupcakes, and this makes me feel sort of ill.

caitlintime: onlycupcakes

Originally posted by (author unknown) from b-r-double o-k-lyn drama, on October 26, 2009 10:59 AM

There! Better, right?

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on October 26, 2009 10:30 AM

Every six months, the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases data about newspapers and how many people subscribe to them. And then everyone writes a story about how some newspapers declined some amount over the year previous. Well, that’s no way to look at data! It’s confusing—and it obscures larger trends. So we’ve taken chunks of data for the major newspapers, going back to 1990, and graphed it, so you can see what’s actually happened to newspaper circulation. (We excluded USA Today, because we don’t care about it. If you’re in a hotel? You’re reading it now. That’s nice.)

Some surprising trends: the New York Post has the same circulation it had two decades ago! Also, the once-captivating battle of the New York City tabloids has become completely moot.

Some unsurprising trends: the Los Angeles Times is an absolute horrorshow. Not shown: the Boston Globe disappearing off the bottom of this chart, in a two decade decline from 521,000 in 1990 to 264,105 this year.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on October 26, 2009 9:40 AM

More than just a win for Drupal, it’s a win for open source software in general.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 26, 2009 9:32 AM

This awesome infographic shows the internet costs and speeds around the world for the top 20 nations in the ITIF Broadband Rankings. Unsurprisingly, we don't compare too well.

Number one is, predictably, Japan, where the average broadband speed is 60mbps and they pay $0.27 per 1mbps. We, in comparison, average 4.8mbps and pay $3.33 per 1mbps, putting us at #15. Be sure to click the above image to see it in its full glory. [Zach Klein]

Originally posted by Adam Frucci from Gizmodo, on October 26, 2009 9:00 AM

Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition: cloud computing made real

Latest version of popular operating system allows businesses to build on proven Ubuntu server technology

LONDON, October 26, 2009: Canonical today announced the general availability of Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition for free download on Thursday 29 October. Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition introduces Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as a fully supported technology. This is an open source cloud computing environment, based on the same Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as Amazon EC2, that will allow businesses to start taking advantage of the possibilities of private clouds. Private clouds allow businesses to reap the benefits of flexible compute environments while avoiding the security, regulatory or policy restrictions inherent in pushing data onto a public cloud.

read more

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ubuntu - news, usn, on October 26, 2009 8:59 AM

Antville has a list of the 100 best music videos of the decade, the first 50 or so are embedded right on the page. (via fimoculous)

Tags: best of   lists   music   The 2000s   video

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 26, 2009 8:54 AM

In all of New York baseball, starting with the day in 1846 when Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbockers and the New York Nine crossed the Hudson to Hoboken to play the first recorded baseball game anywhere, there has never been anything like it ... not the Bobby Thomson home run, a spear aimed at the heart of all that was Brooklyn ... not the perfect World Series game by the Yankees' Don Larsen ... not the World Series catches by Willie Mays and Sandy Amoros and Al Gionfriddo. via www.nj.com This is what Mets fans are left with - "remember 1969."

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 26, 2009 8:10 AM

New York rapper Saigon recently spoke on the difficulty rappers from the Big Apple face and explain why 50 Cent was the last successful artist to come from his hometown.

[Visit SOHH.com for more information]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from SOHH.com Dailies, on October 26, 2009 8:00 AM

From BBC News:

A picture of a hunting wolf has won the prestigious Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009 award.

Jose Luis Rodriguez captured the imaginations of the judges with a picture that he had planned for years, and even sketched out on a piece of paper.

“I wanted to capture a photo in which you would see a wolf in an act of hunting – or predation – but without blood,” he told BBC News. “I didn’t want a cruel image.”

Not bad. But the internet fixes it up for him.

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on October 26, 2009 7:30 AM

Filed under: Rumors

There's a loud buzzing this morning, and it's not just the hangover from late-night celebrations of the Yankees' pennant win; quite a few tech and Mac sites (we heard it first from Edible Apple, although it's really everywhere now) are reporting on week-old remarks from the New York Times executive editor, Bill Keller, that were supposed to remain off-the record -- and of course are now playing on video all across the web.

If you look at the transcript of his chat, or the 8:20 mark in the video, you'll see him refer to delivery of journalism to mobile platforms, and then he mentions the "impending Apple slate."

Is this a simple moment of wishful thinking for Keller, or is it linked to the presumptive starring role that daily newspapers would play on the hypothetical Apple wundergadget? I can't wait to find out.

Read on to see the video.

Continue reading Did an NYT editor let the 'Slate' slip?

TUAWDid an NYT editor let the 'Slate' slip? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Michael Rose from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on October 26, 2009 7:15 AM

In Prague, multiuse paths include men in hats who escort girls with bows and bikes that are separated.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.

Originally posted by DL Byron from Bike Hugger, on October 26, 2009 6:50 AM

LOUISVILLE, KY— The nation's first academy for doughnut-shop hostesses has held its inaugural graduation ceremony last Saturday. The class, of ten aspiring fried-dough doyennes, graduated in an hour-long ceremony which featured a ten-minute silent intermission at the halfway point, "In homage to the hole," Academy Director Gilda Grant pointed out.

"Doughnuts are important in our culture," Grant said in her commencement address. "They are eaten by bums and presidents, by children and the elderly, by the police and by criminals alike. Serving doughnuts is a sacred responsibility."

Members of the first graduating class were equally solemn. "I am looking forward to the day when everyone knows the difference between a cruller and a buttermilk cake," said Sandy Muller, of Fells Point, Wisconsin.

Employment prospects seem bright for these students; many have already received offers from doughnut shops in their hometowns. But with their new credentials, they can afford to be picky. "I got an offer from a place in High Point," said one student, who didn't want to be named. "But they spelled it D-O-N-U-T, so I turned them down."

Grant expects that enrollment in the academy will continue to increase. "In hard times and in good, people want doughnuts. And doughnuts are tastier when served by a trained professional."

[Today's pattern is from Sheila at Out of the Ashes, who is offering 15% off through Wednesday night -- use the code BIGTHANKS. Thanks, Sheila!]

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on October 26, 2009 6:06 AM

Copyright © 2009 Brown Sharpie. Thanks for reading Brown Sharpie! Check out the shop: Brown Sharpie at cafepress:)

Originally posted by courtney.gibbons from Brown Sharpie, on October 26, 2009 5:29 AM

Guest blogger Ali Gitlow sent us this great new interview with NYC street artist Dan Witz, check it out!:

Brooklyn-based artist Dan Witz has been contributing his unique brand of witty realism to NYC’s street art scene since before an easily identifiable ‘scene’ existed. Through his in-depth serial projects, Witz has made poignant commentary on the crumbling Lower East Side of the early ‘90s, September 11th, the gentrification of Manhattan and, subsequently, Brooklyn. Constantly engaged with the architectural fiber of the city, he has embedded poetry into the asphalt, hand-painted hummingbirds onto walls and installed real gloves clinging to drainage grates, making it seem a person is trapped inside, desperately clawing to reach the light of day. Witz’s work is not always so serious — some of his most engaging pieces are his pranks, for which he has affixed papier-mâché noses to building facades and installed renegade street signs reading ‘Don’t even think about thinking about parking here.’

On November 5th, Witz’s solo show entitled Dark Doings will open at the Carmichael Gallery in Los Angeles. We asked him a few questions in anticipation:

Ali Gitlow: Why do you usually work in series' on the street?

Dan Witz: I guess that’s my way of keeping things under control. Even though I’ve been at this for years, I never get used to how chaotic and unpredictable it all is. Every project I do starts one way, with what I think it’s going to look like, then one thing leads to another, all sorts of accidents happen and invariably I end up with something totally unexpected. To be honest, the lack of control can be kind of nerve wracking. I mean it’s exciting, but it’s like my life is lived in a state of constant emergency.

This year I started with what I thought was going to be the last of my Kilroy variations, with the hands in classic ‘Kilroy Was Here’ positions in the vents on the Ugly New Buildings. After about a month of working that, so many cool new possibilities emerged that the original Kilroy concept became just the overture, the prelude to a much larger Ugly New Buildings project. By the end of the summer things got so out of control it morphed into my recent project, “In Plain View”. I’m not complaining, I’m glad I’ve hit such a fertile vein, but I need some kind of organizational framework or it’d just turn into complete insanity.

AG: How did you decide to paint your hummingbirds in the street in the late 70s? Were you inspired by graffiti? Were you at all concerned with advancing your fine art career?

DW: I was an art school punk: terminally dissatisfied, full of hubris, extreme. Opinions were my identity. To me, the word ‘career’ next to the word ‘artist’ automatically meant selling out. To be fair, even if I wanted to sell out back then, nobody was buying. You had to be in your forties and preferably white and know the right people to get a show in most galleries.

The real truth is I started painting on the street because in the summer I like being outdoors. I was dimly aware of how strange an art move this was, but at the time I was too preoccupied with how intense (and dangerous) the whole painting process was and how much fun I was having to think it through too much.

Those first bombed subway trains really cracked me open and got me thinking though. True, by 1978, graffiti had already become an art movement: there were stars and hierarchies and rules, but it was still mind blowing and illegal and I loved it. These artists definitely inspired me to work outdoors and be in people’s faces. Stylistically though, I’ve always been a realist, my pull has always been towards representational painting. I called my tiny, anonymous hyper-real hummingbirds an ‘anti-tag’.

AG: It's awesome you photographed your street work right from the beginning. How do you see the relationship between street art and photography?

DW: It really depends on the street art. Like most street artists, I keep the photos on the down-low aesthetically so as not to interfere with the documentation. But sometimes, with some of my projects, I can see how the photograph itself can be an art object. Unfortunately I seem to be pretty much the only one who thinks this. It’d be nice to sell the photos to support the work but that hasn’t really worked out.

AG: How do you think your acrylic street pieces changed once you began incorporating vinyl stickers into the mix?

DW: I started using stickers in the early ‘90s, when I began using Photoshop. At the time, for me, the new digital techniques were a form of sampling, which with the kind of music I was listening to really made sense. The new technology really freed me, especially financially. Up until then, my chief criteria for what I could do was if I could afford it. Which usually meant I couldn’t do what I wanted to.

AG: How important is placement to your work? Do you scout locations beforehand, or do you make on-the-spot decisions?

DW: Again, it depends on the project. Some things need to be in exact locations; others I have no idea, I just go out and let it happen. Usually, I use my motorcycle for installations which gives me a freedom and flexibility that’s been a great advantage. Good for fast getaways too. But when the stuff is actually going up it’s always very in the moment, always an improvisation.

AG: The contrast between super-bombed train interiors at the start of the ‘80s and the minimalist imagery you placed within them is really staggering. How did you feel about the proliferation of graffiti at the time?

DW: I’ve always had the greatest respect for graffiti writers. Ever since the beginning I’ve been super conscious of never stepping on theirs or any other street artists’ toes. I’m glad to say it’s mostly been reciprocated. The early ‘80s subway pieces you’re referring to were definitely me riffing on the crazy noise of the tagging, but it wasn’t until the mid-‘90s that I started actually interacting with the graffiti — with the way the layers of tagging made the walls so vibrant and deeply spatial.

AG: You did a series in 1980 where you stuck some colorful toys in dog shit on the road. How did you come up with this idea?

DW: All along, I’ve had a side practice of pranks. Mostly they’re one-offs, occasionally some turn into multiples. It was a long time ago but I’m pretty sure I did that whole series in one day.

I came up mostly through the music scene of the early ‘80s in downtown New York. For most of my twenties I was in bands, and one of the most serious rules of that world is that rock and roll should never take itself too seriously.

AG: You began the Hoodies project in the mid ‘90s as a reaction to lots of folks getting addicted to heroin. Why did you decide to put up stickers of similar imagery in 2005?

DW: I was tagging my new neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This was just when the whole demolition and gentrification thing was getting started out here. The original hoody character was about a lot more than drugs. It’s kind of a danger sign, an archetype (for me) of disenfranchisement and loss.

AG: Have you ever had a bad run-in with the cops?

DW: Yes. Never been arrested though.

AG: How do you view the relationship between your street and gallery work? Has this changed over the years?

DW: Each side has benefitted from the other. Some technical innovations, like using digital media to make stickers, I’ve adapted for studio use. Most of my paintings now have digital photos as underpaintings. I’ll admit I have a fantasy that one day it’ll all be the same: I’ll have one uncomplicated means of production (in a huge clean studio with mute leotarded assistants), but knowing me, that wouldn’t work out. I’d get bored.

AG: Tell me a bit about the series of paintings you did depicting women with cell phones.

DW: It’s so beautiful. Every time I see someone in a dark place looking at their cell phone it takes my breath away. For years my main subject to paint was people. Then, a few years ago after 9/11, I did some shrine paintings (and street art) which got me interested in techniques of painting light. That became the main subject for my easel paintings. The cell phone people are a combination.

AG: Gentrification and the creation of massive, homogeneous buildings has been a major theme you've tackled. How do you see the state of affairs right now?

DW: I’m not against gentrification. If you live in New York City that would be like saying you’re against other unstoppable forces of urban nature, like noise or bad smells. But, that said, these new corporate condo towers they’ve plopped down in my working class Brooklyn neighborhood are so arrogantly out of step with their surroundings that I had to do something. And I have to say I’m loving the new surfaces, and, weirdly, because it’s totally new to me, I’m really enjoying working with the clean lines and symmetry. The truth is, for better or worse, I’m glad this place keeps changing. It keeps me changing — and awake.

AG: Do you ever listen to music while painting indoors? What about when putting up work outdoors?

DW: Yeah, I listen to music while I work in the studio. My favorite new form of music is Shuffle. It’s all I can listen to anymore. I can’t imagine hearing two songs in a row from the same artist, much less the same era or genre. Although, I have to say, I recently saw Animal Collective for like the fifth time. They are unbelievable.

While working outside, I have to be so in touch with my surroundings, so focused, that music or even conversation would be a disaster. I don’t even really like friends along watching me (or photographing — which is why there’s next to no pictures of me doing street art).

AG: Are you still into the punk scene at all?

DW: No. But I seem to know a few Suicide Girls… and a lot of my friends have been through Dharma Punx. Tattooed miscreant Buddhists. The music though, no.

AG: What cities have you hit besides New York?

DW: I’ve put up work in London, Paris, Copenhagen, L.A., San Francisco, Amsterdam, and a few other places.

I usually work wherever I go (or, preferably, am brought). I recently made a road trip south and did the first of my In Plain View pieces up and down the East Coast. I installed these occupied vents in high traffic locations like airports and bus terminals; I put them up in plain view, in places where hundreds of people a day pass by. My hope is that absolutely no one sees them. That’s my goal. To have something right out there in plain view that no one will see.

Bonus flic!:

Originally posted by Josh M. from Just Seeds: Blog, on October 26, 2009 5:00 AM

Photo by Donna

Donna got these from the mushroom man at our farmers market because they entranced her. But what to do once she's had her way with them?!

Much depends on the mushroom. Big meaty fat cepes and chanterelles are excellent roasted. The coolest looking mushroom, the morel, likes soft heat and a creamy environment. These are varieties the forager Connie Green calls "act of God mushrooms," mushrooms that appear from out of nowhere, mushrooms that must be stalked.

But for cultivated mushrooms, which is what most of us work with, everyday mushrooms, I always go with really high heat—a smoking hot pan, plenty of neutral oil. Most cultivated mushrooms—the ubiquitous white button, oyster mushrooms (above), shiitakes—don't have a big flavor on their own.  It's up to the cook to elevate that flavor. You do this by browning the mushroom, and you can only accomplish this at a temperature that's so hot, the moisture in the fungus doesn't have time to start falling out.  Once that happens, as soon as water gets into the pan, the temperature drops to 212 degrees and you can't get any more browning. All you get is lots more moisture. Another way to drop the temperature of your pan is to put too many mushrooms in it. The key to really tasty mushrooms is high heat and not crowding the pan.

I salt immediately upon putting them in the pan then add minced shallot . Mushrooms cooked this way can be chilled and reheated gently in butter.  Pepper them and give them a small squeeze of lemon to finish. If you can find good mushrooms like the ones above, simply prepared and served with some crusty baguette, they can be a meal in themselves. They also make a fantastic, sauce-like accompaniment to roasted chicken or veal or asparagus.

Other ways to vary them are to deglaze the pan with some white wine after you've got a nice sear on the mushrooms. A pinch of curry powder can  heighten their flavor—not so much that you can taste the curry, add just enough to intrigue. Add whole cloves of garlic and fresh thyme to the oil just before you saute mushrooms, and they'll pick up these aromatic flavors.  Mushrooms add a depth and savoriness to eggs, vegetables, meat and fish—great on their own when well cooked, and they're a powerful way to add flavors to other foods.

Cooking them well is all it takes. Eric Ripert still remembers the oyster mushrooms when he was a young cook at Robuchon's 3-star Jamin. He had to cook each one individually to get that perfect sear. That's what it takes, that's what makes the difference.

Originally posted by michael ruhlman from ruhlman.com, on October 26, 2009 4:04 AM

A few things are held true throughout baseball fandom. One of them is Barry Zito’s contract being described as a general manager’s worst nightmare. It’s been a while since someone quantified just how horrendous it is though.

In December 2006, Brian Sabean and the Giants outbid Bill Bavasi and the Mariners in order to land the overrated southpaw billed as an ace. As Nate Silver, amongst others, noted at the time, the deal was perfectly reasonable if you believed Zito could replicate his ERA. Unfortunately for the Giants, Zito’s ERA was a confluence of a spacious ballpark and a bloated amount of stranded baserunners. The contract – or, perhaps, The Contract to Giants fans – held a length of seven years (with a club option) and $126 million (given a $7M buyout for 2014 the contract is actually worth at least $133 million and has the chance to be worth more than $151 million).

To date, the Giants have paid Zito roughly $43M. He has posted FIP of 4.82, 4.72, and 4.31 in innings totals of 196.2, 180, and 192. After park and league adjustments that works out to WAR of 1.7, 1.4, and 2.2 or in dollar terms: $6.9M , $6.4M, and $10M; a sum of $23.3M. Quick subtraction shows the Giants losing about $20 million on the deal so far, and, as mentioned, there are still four years and $90 million left.

The somewhat good news that arrives is Zito had his best season (as told by WAR) since 2005 last year. His fastball went faster, as he used it less than before, and he relied heavily on an upper-70s slider. Maybe he can at least replicate that success heading forward, although it still won’t prevent him from being a punch line.

Originally posted by R.J. Anderson from FanGraphs Baseball, on October 26, 2009 4:00 AM

Here's your musical kickoff to the work week. If nothing else this allows for me to impose my superior musical tastes on the masses. Now you may be asking, "What does this have to do with baseball?" To which I answer, "Fuck all." But you'll be hearing some good tunes regardless. Suggestions for next week's Tuned Up can be sent here. Or leave 'em in the comments.

This week it's Built to Spill playing "Oh Yeah."

Originally posted by J from 3:10 to Joba, on October 26, 2009 3:30 AM

This illustration ran in The New York Times on October 25th on the cover of the Metro section (New York edition). The essay by Alana Joblin Ain describes her experience being suspended from shopping at the Park Slope Food...

Originally posted by keegan from invisibleman, on October 25, 2009 8:29 PM

1. The Bar Kays - You've Made A Change In My Life
2. Goldie Alexander - Spend My Life With You
3. One Way - Shine On Me
4. Larry Graham - Sooner Or Later (Big Jacks' edit)
5. Dayton - The Sound Of Music (European mix)
6. Kleeer - Tonight
7. The Funkacise Gang - Funkacise
8. Ritchie Family - All Night All Right
9. Kashif - Lover Turn Me On
10. Dayton - Out Tonight (Frankie Rodriquez' Nightly Club Mix)
11. Unlimited Touch - Searching To Find The One
12. Final Edition - I Can Do It (Anyway You Want)
13. Vernon Burch - Get Up
14. Carrie Lucas - Dance With You
15. Gaz - Sing Sing (Big Jacks' Edit)
16. Carmen - Time To Move
17. The Sylvers - Reach Out
18. Dcup - To Be In Love
19. Aretha Franklin - Jump To It
20. Lenny Wiliams - You Got Me Running
21. Carl Bean - I Was Born This Way (Instrumental)
22. Chic - Soup For One
23. Chaka Khan - Fate
24. Chic - Chic Cheer
25. Nick Straker Band - A Little Bit Of Jazz
26. Northend featuring Michelle Wallace - Happy Days
27. Geraldine Hunt - Can't Fake The Feeling
28. Orange Krush - Action
29. Teena Marie - I Need Your Loving

Originally posted by (author unknown) from BrooklynRadio.net, on October 25, 2009 6:36 PM

From this Times story:

In his initial posting on the topic, Mr. Daulerio suggested less-than-scrupulous concern for the accuracy of the rumors he repeated: “Chances are, at this point, there’s some truth to them,” he wrote. “We’ll just throw ’em out there” and wait for the reactions. But in the interview, he said he adhered to the same standard of proof as any traditional news organization, repeating only those things told to him by multiple sources with close knowledge of the subject.

This is the paragraph that’ll get glossed over. Gawker likes to suggest that it shamelessly rumormongers, but it doesn’t in any traditional sense. And “multiple sources with close knowledge of the subject” is pretty traditional sourcing.

There’s another question, re: whether Deadspin should be publishing information about the sex lives of ESPN employees, especially if they aren’t public figures. But the Times seems more interested in the fact that AJ is a blogger taking on a sports news network.

Nonetheless, having been lied to by lying PR people who lie on a number of occasions, I understand AJ’s reaction.  I think they should be publicly outed every time they do it.  (For the opposite of this principle, see GossipCop, which happily—and either knowingly or stupidly—regurgitates publicist lies, perpetuating the problem.)

Deadspin Opens Gates of ESPN Sex Rumors [NYT]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spiersblr, on October 25, 2009 5:37 PM

"Today the Google Maps team is rolling out a number of refinements to the look and feel of our maps, the biggest such changes since we first launched about 4.7 years ago. In that time we've been steadily adding details like walkways, address labels, bus stops, new country coverage, and improved satellite imagery, but the look of the map hasn't changed much. Today's changes are intended to keep the same information-rich map while making it easier to pick out the information that is most useful. The changes affect both the 'Map' and 'Hybrid' styles, and include numerous refinements to color, density, typography, and road styling worldwide."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on October 25, 2009 3:32 PM

New from Adobe Labs, Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop:

Further proof that Adobe is trying to eradicate the world of buffaloes.

Originally posted by Mike D. from Mike Industries, on October 25, 2009 12:42 PM

This isn’t simply a woman’s issue; it affects us all. It isn’t about blaming men, or about embracing feminism, which remains a toxic term for some women. Instead, it is up to all of us to help change the conversation.

How do we get to there from here?

First, we can begin by telling girls to have confidence in themselves, to not always feel the need to be the passive “good girl.” In my time as an editor, many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion?

I’ll tell you. Exactly ... zero.

Sure, it’s a risk to ask for a raise. But women need to take risks — and to realize that at some point they will fail. This is an incredibly hard thing to do, especially for women brought up in a culture that celebrates unrealistic perfection in every sphere, from beauty to housekeeping.

via www.nytimes.com

Originally posted by Alaina from alaina browne lives here, on October 25, 2009 12:40 PM

Monsieur Proust is the account of Proust's final decade, as told by Celeste Albaret, his servant and confidante. He lived his final days, as is well known, in a cork-lined room with the curtains drawn, awake mostly at night, writing his masterpiece. Albaret kept to his strange hours, fixed all his meals, took his clothes to be laundered, and sat and listened to his accounts of his childhood, his social life and the many people he had known. After Proust's death, Albaret lived for 50 years in obscurity, refusing any inquiries for interviews from journalists and biographers. She finally agreed to narrate this account in her 80s, just to correct the many myths and inaccuracies that had grown up around Proust, to tell his story as best she could. It's quite an engaging read, and I was deeply impressed by Albaret's devotion to and love for Proust. Halfway through the book, I flipped to the back cover, and was a bit taken aback by the review by Angus Wilson printed there:

The strangest story...it can be read, I think, only with the most continually warring emotions--admiration for Proust's courage to endure the slow suicidal routine on which his great novel depended; admiration for Celeste's courage in adapting herself to such a monstrous service;...at last, a deep physical revulsion as one would from a brilliant evocation of a madman's padded cell by his mental nurse; and a strange embarrassment at being privy to a relationship at once so intimate and so deforming...

"Suicidal" "monstrous" "cold-blood" "revulsion" "deforming" "madman" -- wow. I was reading it as a study in devotion, service and sacrifice. I tried to figure out where such revulsion had come from, and it seemed to me that people in Western society have a horror of selflessness, and what they perceive of as subordination and subservience. In some ways this book was a perfect and remarkable complement and contrast to the expendable warrior theme of my prior post on Dogfights and Gameness with their triumphs and heroics -- here was a quiet, modest life, lived in the service of another. She took pleasure in warming Proust's bathwater to the perfect temperature, fixing his coffee just so, and knowing exactly which hat he wore on which occasion.

How do you decide what you should devote your life to? Why would this reviewer feel such disgust at Albaret's chosen path? And since I think he wrote this in the 50s, he wasn't able to read, say, Wendell Berry's essay Feminism, the Body and the Machine which outlines, for me, why a household economy, such as the one Albaret was participating in, though not his wife, is a good, honest way of living. Far from being exploited, she was being made a part of something she knew to be important. She found someone who needed her, and their small, unusual family subordinated itself to a great task: the creation of a work of art.

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on October 25, 2009 11:35 AM

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.

This move is obviously a big win for open source. As John Scott of Open Source for America (a group advocating open source adoption by government, to which I am an advisor) noted in an email to me: "This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. The White House's adoption of community-based software provides a great example for the rest of the government to follow."

John is right. While open source is already widespread throughout the government, its adoption by the White House will almost certainly give permission for much wider uptake.

Particularly telling are the reasons that the White House made the switch. According to the AP article:

White House officials described the change as similar to rebuilding the foundation of a building without changing the street-level appearance of the facade. It was expected to make the White House site more secure - and the same could be true for other administration sites in the future....

Having the public write code may seem like a security risk, but it's just the opposite, experts inside and outside the government argued. Because programmers collaborate to find errors or opportunities to exploit Web code, the final product is therefore more secure.

More than just security, though, the White House saw the opportunity to increase their flexibility. Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support. In many ways, this is the complement to the Government as Platform mantra I've been chanting in Washington. When you build a vibrant, extensible platform, others add value to the foundation you establish; when you join such a platform, you get the benefit of all those features you didn't have to develop yourself.

Of course, it's easy to imagine that the use of open source software will slash the government's IT budget. After all, this software is freely downloadable. I have a feeling it's quite a bit more complicated than that.

First off, government has a huge number of special requirements (remember the flap over President Obama's blackberry?) Second, don't underestimate the difficulty of doing business in Washington. Procurement is done through a complex ballet understood by few open source companies. Third, a big IT deployment like this requires coordination between many companies, each providing a piece of the puzzle. According to techpresident.com, no fewer than five firms were involved in the switch: prime contractor General Dynamics Information Systems, Drupal specialists Phase 2 and Acquia, hosting provider Terremark, and CDN-supplier Akamai. (Disclosure: O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in Acquia.)

The special nature of the government marketplace is one of the reasons why I launched the Gov 2.0 Expo, which will be held in Washington DC next May. There are huge opportunities for open source, web 2.0, and new media companies in government, but there are also challenges reaching that market. One of my goals for the event is to increase the visibility of cutting edge technology firms not just to government agencies, but also to the prime contractors who are putting together these complex procurements.

The net-net is that I suspect that simply using open source software won't slash government IT budgets, at least not right away. What it will do is increase the amount of value we get for our money and the speed with which new technology can be adopted. Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts.

It's also important to realize that using open source is very different from contributing to open source. Despite the exaggerated claims in the AP story, that "the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit", the White House has not yet released any of the modifications they made to Drupal or its operating environment back to the open source community. The source code for Drupal (and the rest of the LAMP stack) is indeed available, but the modifications that were made to meet government security, scalability, and hosting requirements have not yet been shared. In my conversations with the new media team at the White House, it is clear that they are exploring this option.

Giving modifications back to the Drupal community is the next breakthrough announcement that I'll be looking for.

Releasing code is more than just being a good open source community citizen, though. Code sharing is a major cost-saving opportunity for government. There are countless government agencies at the federal level, not to mention at the state and local level, that perform similar functions. Yet each of them does its own development, driving up costs. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has made a great step forward in web services by creating data.gov. I'm eager to see an analogous code.gov portal for government agencies to share their open source software code.

Originally posted by Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies., on October 25, 2009 10:28 AM

Okay, I've now officially read all 500 or so of your emails on mobile devices following up on Friday evenings request for your thoughts and comments. The results still track pretty closely with the summary I posted last night. But I really cannot tell you how helpful these emails are. I'm always surprised -- perhaps more overwhelmed than surprised, but it's a powerful feeling -- when I dig in with readers to get leads and responses to a question like this. So, many thanks.

Before I go any further, if you haven't sent us your thoughts already, we really, really want to hear from you about this. Here's the post describing what we want to know. If you haven't already please give it a look.

The gist remains heavy interest in an iPhone app, very limited interest in a Kindle edition, even among Kindle enthusiasts and a lot of interesting details about different kinds of interest on different platforms. We've also gotten a lot of good detail and insight on the split between iPhone users who just want a version of the site that's optimized for the iPhone browser vs. those who have really bought into and gotten into the app concept and aesthetic.

Now, I know I started this conversation when most of you are or were getting some downtime over the weekend. So if you're just checking in now, I'd really appreciate and profit from your feedback. We're trying to get a sense of how you use your mobile device, if you have one and how you'd like to read TPM on one of them, if you would.

If you want to help out, here's the original post, soliciting your preferences and experiences. And here's a summary of what we'd heard as of last night. Please keep the emails coming. It's very, very helpful.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 25, 2009 9:59 AM

[Image: Photo by Richard Mosse, from Time magazine].

Photographer Richard Mosse, who BLDGBLOG has interviewed in the past and who is one of many participants in this autumn's "Landscapes of Quarantine" design studio, has just published a new series of photographs in Time magazine documenting the flow of goods into and out of the Gaza Strip.

This economic flow is literally underground, however, as it passes beneath the supervision of both Israel and Egypt, through a network of often quite sophisticated tunnels; channeled under pressure through tiny pores, it exhibits a surprisingly low viscosity, we might say.

"The tunnels vary in size and scale," journalist Abigail Hauslohner explains in the accompanying article. "Some are fragile dirt shafts; others feature wide, wood-reinforced passageways." There are, according to the users and builders of these spaces, "hundreds of tunnels—some weaving right over one another at different depths—that are mostly used to import commercial goods that range from food and baby formula to computers and even cars." Livestock is frequently herded across the border, through electrically lit tunnels, sometimes uphill.

"Centered around the town of Rafah," Hauslohner explains, these tunnels "are virtually the only way that goods have reached the residents of the tiny territory since 2002, when Hamas took control of it and Israel imposed a blockade on the its land and sea borders."

[Image: Flexible infrastructure: "The tunnels' electric and phone systems are a study in improvisation," we read; photo by Richard Mosse, from Time magazine].

The required physical infrastructure for these constructions spill out to include "warehouses that sell the tools used to physically shape the tunnel industry: shovels, rope, pulleys and electrical cords, plus pickaxes, hammers, nuts, bolts and screws in all sizes. The industry of making the tunnels is a booming business on its own."

In the following image we see "tunnel heads," where the subterranean structures breach the Earth's surface and allow exit or entry.

[Image: "Dirt from the digging litters the landscape," Time explains. "The smugglers say that Israel's blockade gives them no choice. Says one Rafah shopkeeper, 'Even if Israel destroys all of the tunnels entirely, I'm quite sure that the they will only be dug again and again.'" Photo by Richard Mosse, from Time magazine].

Check out the rest of the photographs over at Time; but be sure to browse through Mosse's own website for some other, incredible work.

Originally posted by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG, on October 25, 2009 8:39 AM

"1917, Day of the Revolution, soldiers on [maybe a street name?]"

This is a postcard set detailing the Revolution(s) of 1917 in Russia. Someone was auctioning these awhile ago and I kept the images. The October (Bolshevik) Revolution was only 92 years ago today!

My great grandparents were Armenians in the Russian military on the Turkish front, and had to flee the country following the revolution. I only bring this up because these images seem like forever ago, but my grandmother was with them and is still alive—this all happened within a lifetime! Anyway, my Russian is pretty spotty, and I am especially bad at reading cursive (also the resolution on these images is not so good) but here are some vaguely, hopefully, accurate translations!

This second set of postcards is mixed. The upper left postcard is also, I believe, on the day of the October Revolution. Clockwise from there is a demonstration in March of 1917. Below that, "...funeral for the victims of the revolution...." is all I can make out. And finally is "Marcher's Square(?). People's Festival. May 1st 1917." The banner in the middle says 'Land and Freedom.'

These are all from the October Revolution, I believe. Clockwise from top left: ?, then vehicle (looks like Lenin in the passenger seat), bonfire (the burning of stamps?), and finally the arresing of the government at the Duma(?).

And finally, on the left, crowd surrounding a courthouse during the October Revolution, and on the right is a May Day demonstration (pre-Bolshevik Revolution) on May Day 1917 outside of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Originally posted by icky from Just Seeds: Blog, on October 25, 2009 5:30 AM

Falc0n writes "WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software. Dries Buytaert reflected on this, adding: 'this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally posted by Soulskill from Slashdot, on October 25, 2009 5:27 AM

Molly Fair Direct Action $15 Inspired by a quote from anarchist writer Voltairine de Cleyre, "Direct action is always the clamorer, the initiator, through which the great sum of indifferentists become aware that oppression is getting impossible." In other words, throw a wrench in the system. 2 color silkscreen print printed on archival paper 11"x15" signed/unnumbered

Originally posted by Molly Fair from Just Seeds, on October 25, 2009 5:09 AM