Comic David Cross replies to Larry the Cable Guy’s criticism in an open letter.
As for being a multi-millionaire in disguise, that’s just merely a matter of personal taste for me. I do not begrudge you your money at all, it is sincerely hard earned and you deserve whatever people want to give to you. What sticks in my craw about that stuff is the blatant and (again, personal taste) gross marketing and selling of this bullshit character to your beloved fans. Now look, if someone wants to pay top dollar to come to one of your shows and then drop a couple hundred more on “Git-R-Done” lighters and hats and t-shirts and windshield stickers and trailer hitches and beer koozies and fishing hats and shot glasses etc, then good for you. I just think it’s a little crass and belies the “good ole boy” blue collar thing you represent.
Some information on apple cider doughnuts, including a recipe. Looks like the cider is substituted for the water in the dough recipe. We bought some of these while apple picking in NJ this weekend. So good.
Felix Rodriguez received the order from the Bolivian military high command. There was a simple code: 500 meant Che Guevara, 600 dead, 700 alive. 500 - 600 was the command.
How do designers employ wit, irony — even subversion — in the service of making a connection with their audience, and how can they replicate these connections across a body of work? Are there limits to commercializing this kind of design, or are we seeing new opportunities for the provocateur in an ever-commoditized world? What is the role of the brand in this context, and to what degree does a sly exchange between designer and user create a new kind of brand experience?
Featuring Ze Frank, Steven Heller, and others…Nov 9 in NYC.
Update: Ok, all done. I thought this observation about the two main groups of fans of the show (urban poor and media critics) was canny:
Sometimes the fan base of “The Wire” seems like the demographics of many American cities — mainly the urban poor and the affluent elite, with the middle class hollowed out.
The last bit of the article talks about a new show that Simon’s thinking of doing for HBO about New Orleans musicians.
“For my patients with heavy entertaining schedules, I go over the menus of restaurants they’re expected to attend, say, in the upcoming week and tell them what to order,” says Klauer, also known as the Park Avenue Nutritionist. “That way, there’s no guesswork. Before they even step foot inside a restaurant, they know what they’re going to eat.”
That’s a bit misleading however…it’s only a small part of what Klauer does.
The iPod is an unanswerable repudiation to people who don’t believe design is arrogance; MySpace demonstrates that users prize participation, even at the expense of clarity.
The Darjeeling Limited is the first Wes Anderson movie since Rushmore that I’ve really liked after seeing it for the first time. The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic both took another viewing (and now I love them both).
The result is a large set of tawny luggage and a trio of suits with matching back belts and angled cuffs for the three main characters, played by onscreen brothers Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman. Once again, as in Anderson’s previous films like “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” the cast wears one look throughout the film. “I like actors to have costumes that help them to get into character,” says Anderson. “Whether it’s a good idea or not, I tend to give them uniforms.”
Wow, Vimeo has videos in HD…the best quality I’ve seen from one of the big video sites. You get so used to watching crappy quality stuff on YouTube that you forget how nice it can look.
Update: Yes, yes, I know Al Gore uses Keynote and not Powerpoint. Hence the “essentially”. (thx, everyone in the world)
Update: Amazingly, Al Gore now has an Emmy, an Oscar, and now a Nobel Prize. All he needs is a Grammy for the full Gore. (thx, brent)
Update: Man, you folks are testy today. When I say that Gore won a Nobel Prize for a Powerpoint presentation (again, “essentially”), I’m not being derogatory towards Gore. I like Gore…I’ve written several posts about him. But whatever his other accomplishments regarding the environment, he won the Nobel for An Inconvenient Truth. No movie, no prize. Period. Suppose someone had told you two years ago that someone would win a Nobel Peace Prize for a Hollywood film of a Powerpoint presentation…you’d have laughed in their face and every other part of their body!
Marginal Revolution and CNN (and New York magazine and Reddit and etc.) asked their respective readers: how much did you pay for In Rainbows, Radiohead’s new album which is only available as a pay-what-you-want download. I paid around £8.50 (~ US$17), which splits the difference between a typical album price in the UK and the US. (Actually, what I did was download it from elsewhere because Radiohead’s online store was down yesterday morning and then went back to pay for it just now.)
“The full Ginsburg” is the term for appearing on all five of the big Sunday morning political shows: This Week, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, and Late Edition. The term is named after William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky’s attorney and the first person to complete this political Pokemon collection. According to Wikipedia, four individuals have completed the full circuit: Ginsburg, Dick Cheney, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. Source: Brouhahaha, The New Yorker.
Kevin Kelly has a rave review of a slide/negative scanning company called Scan Cafe. Here’s how it works: send off your slides and negatives to Scan Cafe, they catalog and send them off to India to be scanned, you go online to choose the which negatives/slides you want final scans of, and in a few weeks, you get your originals and a DVD containing 3000 dpi scans of your photos. Kelly says:
Some people are very concerned about sending their precious originals to India — or anywhere for that matter. They should not be. ScanCafe has a very elaborate tracking and shipping system that would work even if you were shipping jewels. Their scanning facilities in Bangalore (description and photos here) are more organized than you are. I have more trust in this system than I would handing them over to any neighborhood scanner.
I’ve been obsessing over this optical illusion ever since I ran across it yesterday.
Is she spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? Or both…and how is that even possible? It’s a left-brain vs. right-brain test…which way she spins for you determines which side of your brain is more dominant. (Tip: if you’re having trouble getting her to switch directions, focus on a point a couple of inches below her feet…that seems to do it for me.)
Update: Neuralogica Blog debunked the left/right-brain explanation in this post.
This news article, like many others, ignores the true source of this optical illusion and instead claims it is a quick test to see if you use more of your right brain or left brain. This is utter nonsense, but the “right-brain/left brain” thing is in the public consciousness and won’t be going away anytime soon. Sure, we have two hemispheres that operate fine independently and have different abilities, but they are massively interconnected and work together as a seamless whole (providing you have never had surgery to cut your corpus callosum).
A feature I would like on my iPhone: every single call gets recorded (at a low bitrate to conserve storage space) and stored on the phone for a short period of time. Playback works like the visual voicemail feature.
Update: I’ve gotten a couple of emails from people saying that this feature is illegal. Which is true in some states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington). My feeling is that the recording of voice communication is a legacy thing that should go away. If you write me a letter, send me an email, IM me a note, or send a SMS, I get to keep a copy of your correspondence. Why the different standard for a phone call? I believe this difference will eventually go away…after all, it’s trivial to record a Skype call.
As dentists push their fees higher and make more money on high-end services like cosmetic dentistry, a growing number of people cannot afford treatment for even minor work like fillings. And even though the dentists won’t treat those patients who can’t pay, the ADA has “fought efforts to use dental hygienists and other non-dentists to provide basic care to people who do not have access to dentists”.
“Most dentists consider themselves to be in the business of dentistry rather than the practice of dentistry,” said Dr. David A. Nash, a professor of pediatric dentistry at the University of Kentucky. “I’m a cynic about my profession, but the data are there. It’s embarrassing.
(Very quickly, Layer Tennis pits two designers against each other. The competitors volley a single Photoshop file back and forth, modifying it in turn in an attempt to outdo one another.)
I will be doing the commentary for the next match, which takes place at 3pm ET on Friday and features Chuck Anderson and Steven Harrington. Come by and watch all the exciting action on Friday!
The story of Tom Murphy, currently homeless and one of the best chess hustlers (and tournament players) in the US.
Never mind that I’d declined his offer of a lesson, Murphy had gone ahead and transformed our discussion into a formal chess tutorial to which a ticking meter was attached. When the talk wound down, he presented me with a verbal invoice for $20, his standard teaching rate. The chess instruction aside, the $20 I spent taught me an even more memorable lesson about Murphy: When you are in his company, there is often a second, invisible chess game taking place, one that can easily conclude with Murphy’s rooks advancing on your wallet.
Tyler Cowen mentioned “green accounting” and William Nordhaus in a post the other day so I went looking for more information on the subject. Here’s one of the more succinct descriptions I found of the problem that green accounting aims to address:
When a majestic, 300-year-old red-wood is cut down and turned into picnic tables, the logging and picnic table-building activities add to the gross domestic product (GDP), while no deduction is made for the loss of that tree and all the nonmarket services it provides. When a paper mill dumps dioxin-laden wastes into a river, the paper-making boosts the GDP, but no deduction is made for the costs associated with the water pollution. Conversely, no addition is made to the GDP for the air and water cleaned by wetlands or old-growth forests.
Hitotoki, short stories about New York…”short narratives describing pivotal moments of elation, confusion, absurdity, love or grief — or anything in between — inseparably tied to a specific place”. Also available in the original Tokyo flavor.
If someone likes an artist, they’re going to buy the CD. The number of those who download and opt against buying the CD is very small. There are plenty of libraries in this country, yet people still buy books. The Napster opponents underestimate the American fascination with ownership.
I like to develop topics, approach them from different, often contradictory angles, and most of all, I like to polish the shit out of them so that the flow and the prose shine and bedazzle. On and offline, I find the internet-driven pressure to make pieces short, data-dense, and crisply opinionated — as opposed to thoughtful, multi-perspectival, and lyrical — rather oppressive, leading to a certain kind of superficial smugness as well as general submission to the forces of reference over reflection. I do enjoy writing 125-word record reviews though!
My favorite aspect of the piece is the interspersed American Apparel ads…they add a little texture to the discussion.
Would it frighten people? Would they run out of the studio screaming? Who could say? I used it for the first time in Fast, cheap and out of control. And it worked like a charm. People loved the Interrotron.
I loved it too, although I probably embarrassed myself by nerding out about it a little too much.
It’s a cruel trick to confront people with the cold reality of the past. Despite that, some enjoy being in the film and claim it as a thing to treasure; others take part under sufferance, persuaded that the films are unique and we should finish what we started. I thank them all for their generosity and courage in making these films possible.
I’m no Yankees fan, but I got a little sad reading this article about Joe Torre’s possible departure from the team after 12 years. It seems like the individual leader gets too much credit for successes and is assigned too much blame for failures these days. Surely the team’s poor hitting and pitching was a big contributing factor that Torre couldn’t do much about?
(Last night’s game was great, BTW. The way those fans almost willed the Yankees back into the game while Cleveland held fast was fascinating to watch.)
The forensic genealogy quiz offers a weekly test of sleuthing skills. The viewer is presented with a single photo and two questions to answer about that photo. This week’s quiz is a photo of a 32-cent stamp about child labor reform and the challenge is to name the girl pictured in the photo along with her photographer. Read more on forensic genealogy. (thx, derrick)
The “uniforms” he outfits his characters in are like a variation on Charlie Brown’s zigzag shirt and Lucy’s blue dress, and there’s an atmosphere of wistful melancholy common to Peanuts cartoons and Anderson’s seriocomedies. A Boy Named Charlie Brown echoes Anderson’s persistent “sic transit gloria” theme, as Charlie Brown blazes through the rounds of a local spelling bee, then washes out at the nationals. When he returns home to a group of friends who accept him as much as they mock him, he might as well be walking in slow motion, while “Ooh La La” plays on the soundtrack.
And today they’re going to run a list of films which were influenced by Anderson…I’ll have that link a bit later.
As on an ordinary aircraft, customers buckle themselves in and watch a safety demonstration. But when they look out of the windows, the landscape never changes. Even if “Captain” Gupta wanted to get off the ground, the plane would not go far: it only has one wing and a large part of the tail is missing.
Season 1 of The Wire is currently showing on HBO OnDemand. I presume seasons 2-4 will follow as the January premiere of season 5 approaches. (thx, michael)
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