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They’re making a fourth Terminator movie with Christian Bale? Although I didn’t actually mind the third one so bring it on, I guess. (via goldenfiddle)
Update: McG is directing? I take it back…put it back in the can. Also, Joseph, isn’t it time to stop using that name?
Since repeatedly spelling out proper names in sign language is time consuming, signers give people “sign names” that are faster to do.
When a sign name is given to you, it’s special. A bit like losing your deaf virginity. It’s thought up after an intense period of observation, when people have worked out firstly whether they like you enough to give you one (a sign name, that is), and they’ve taken all your habits and mannerisms into account to find a name that best sums you up.
(via lone gunman)
The NYC subway system’s unlimited-ride MetroCard turned ten years old this month.
“I think it’s absolutely changed travel habits in the New York region, and it’s been a boon for the economy as well,” said Andrew Albert, who represents transit riders on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “Where once you might have used it more sparingly because you had a finite number of trips, you’re more likely to take a trip during your lunch break, go shopping perhaps or go to dinner somewhere,” he said.
On average, unlimited-ride MetroCard users take 56 trips per month (~$1.45 per trip), although some take many more or less. (via buzzfeed)
Update: Mike Frumin notes that the Times excluded from their graph an important piece of information: the break-even point of the 30-day MetroCard. I used to get a monthly card but now pay by the ride because I don’t take the subway everyday anymore and would therefore find myself in Frumin’s “losing $$$$$” zone.
That string of typographic symbols that substitute for swearing in cartoons? It’s called a grawlix.
The term is grawlix, and it looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as “undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d love to see used more.”
Well, @#$%&?!, that’s cool.
On May 1, 1947, Evelyn McHale leapt to her death from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Photographer Robert Wiles took a photo of McHale a few minutes after her death.
The photo ran a couple of weeks later in Life magazine accompanied by the following caption:
On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. ‘He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody,’ … Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale’s death Wiles got this picture of death’s violence and its composure.
From McHale’s NY Times obituary, Empire State Ends Life of Girl, 20:
At 10:40 A. M., Patrolman John Morrissey of Traffic C, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a swirling white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the Empire State. A moment later he heard a crash that sounded like an explosion. He saw a crowd converge in Thirty-third Street.
Two hundred feet west of Fifth Avenue, Miss McHale’s body landed atop the car. The impact stove in the metal roof and shattered the car’s windows. The driver was in a near-by drug store, thereby escaping death or serious injury.
On the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray of the West Thirtieth Street station, found Miss McHale’s gray cloth coat, her pocketbook with several dollars and the note, and a make-up kit filled with family pictures.
The serenity of McHale’s body amidst the crumpled wreckage it caused is astounding. Years later, Andy Warhol appropriated Wiles’ photography for a print called Suicide (Fallen Body), but I can’t find a copy of it anywhere online. Anyone?
Update: A not-so-great representation of Warhol’s version of this photograph is available at Google Books. (thx, ruben)
Update: Here’s a better photo of Warhol’s print. (thx, lots of people)
Update: Here’s the page as it appeared in Life Magazine.
Update: Codex 99 did some research on McHale and her activities on the day she died.
A cross-country Amtrak travelogue. The trip is not without its charms but overall sounds like torture.
A raspy-voiced woman in her 40s, one of the engineers, calls down from the cab and invites a few of us to come take a look. Without hesitation we clamber up. She tells us that they’re off duty, as her partner, a mustachioed, red-faced man with faded tattoos, nods. When engineers hit their driving quota, apparently, they’re done. It’s an unbendable rule. “They knew, though,” the woman says, speaking of Amtrak. “They should have had someone here.” So this could’ve been prevented? “Oh yeah,” the man says, “but leave it to them and they’ll fuck it up.” And so we wait, in the middle of nowhere, for new engineers. After a couple of hours a truck pulls up with the new drivers.
iPhone 2.0 tip. If you tap-then-hold an image in Safari, an option pops up for you to save the image. Nice way to get new wallpaper or photos for your contacts.
New York Times food critic Frank Bruni tries out the Urbanspoon restaurant-seeking application on the iPhone (shake the phone to find restaurant options near you) and ends up writing a pretty convincing argument for individual expertise over collective wisdom.
I locked in a price of two dollar signs and shook again. Up came the Morgan Dining Room, and off went an alarm in my head. Isn’t the Morgan Dining Room a lunch place that’s closed most nights? I called to make sure, and, sure enough, got a recording.
Urbanspoon is more of a beginning than an end, unable to factor in, for example, whether the restaurant it’s recommending books up a month in advance (Babbo, for example) or often has long waits (Momofuku Ssam Bar). That’s a troublesome shortcoming in New York, where competition for seats in the most popular places is fierce.
Butterfly graffiti directs migrating monarchs to urban food sources.
Monarchs regularly pass through wide swathes of human settlement as they migrate each year from wintering sites in Mexico to summering grounds in the United States and Canada. GFB is the equivalent of a fast-food sign on a highway, advertising rest stops (waystations) to monarchs traveling through the area.
Eschewing all those newfangled diet and fitness trends, Todd Levin tries out Charles Atlas’ Dynamic-Tension fitness course, which Atlas began marketing in 1922.
One thing I definitely hadn’t counted on was Lesson 2: Nutrition. Here, Atlas outlines his mandatory dietary and lifestyle restrictions — no caffeine; no refined sugar; no bleached flour; no white rice; no fatty meats; no pickles, mustards, vinegar or other acidic spices; no soft drinks, coffee or tea; no staying up past midnight, ever. Reading that chapter was like having Charles Atlas ask me to list all my favorite things in the world, then grab the list from my hands, crumple it up and toss it — and some sand — in my face. (Atlas does make one notable exception for candy: “If you must eat candy at times, be sure it is of the very highest quality.” Sounds like someone can’t live without his truffles.)
Neither did Levin exercise in the nude as Atlas advised.
Replacing a car that gets horrible gas mileage with one that gets good gas mileage is preferable to replacing a car that gets good gas mileage with one that gets excellent gas mileage. To that end, kottke.org contributor Cliff Kuang says to the car companies: forget about 100-mpg cars and focus on small, achievable increases in MPG ratings.
My concern is a rhetorical one: What happens when advancements in cars are eternally linked — through marketing and special prizes — with big innovations, rather than tangible results right now? Fuel efficiency gets its urgency sapped: Someone’s working on it, with results TBD. Wait and see.
Kurt Vonnegut shares his tips on how to write with style.
5. Sound like yourself. The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.
(via chris glass)
The Periodic Table of Videos is a collection of videos about all the elements. All your favorites are there…Neon, Rubidium, Lead, Plutonium.
The sales of stock photographs can tell you a surprising amount about what’s going on in the world but they can’t predict the future.
“We had a bad day when Dolly was cloned,” says Denise Waggoner, vice president of creative research at Getty. “We hadn’t been studying biotechnology, and suddenly everyone wanted a shot of 25 sheep on a seamless white background. So now we try to keep our toes dipped in the water in lots of different fields, so we can be ready.”
Lance Arthur deals with an iPhone line-cutter.
“Are you standing in line?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you standing in line behind me outside for three and a half hours.”
“Yeah, I was.” Grin.
He stares at me. I instantly hate him. A lot. I hate everything about his self-congratulatory smart-assed grin and his cheating little heart and his idea of how life should work for him, where he can outsmart us all and get what he wants and get away with it. “No, you weren’t.”
Fairness matters, even when you’ve got something to lose.
In a special Halloween episode of The Simpsons that aired in October 1995, a freak lightning storm brings all of Springfield’s giant advertising statues to life. The advertising monsters begin to destroy the town when Lisa, an advertising executive, and Paul Anka come up with a jingle urging everyone to stop paying attention to the monsters. Here’s the chorus:
Just don’t look. Just don’t look.
Just don’t look. Just don’t look.
Just don’t look. Just don’t look.
The townspeople comply and with no one paying attention, the advertising monsters collapse and die, saving the town.
The “just don’t look” strategy works for more than advertising…it’s effective in any situation where someone or something runs on attention. On the web attention comes in the form of links and pageviews so “just don’t look” translates roughly into “just don’t link or read”. If you don’t like who’s on the cover of Wired, just don’t look. If no one talks about her, she’ll go away. Think media gossip sites are ruining the web? Don’t read them. Leggy blonde conservative got your knickers in a knot? Just don’t look. Commenters ruining the internet? Moderate your comments or close them up. If some Web 2.0 blowhard says something stupid, just don’t look. Hate blonde socialites? Just. Don’t. Look.
The folks behind the excellent Baseball Reference have launched a statistics site for the Olympics. Every athlete that’s ever competed in the Games has his/her own page. Announcement here.
Amblin’, Steven Spielberg’s first film shot on 35mm, is available on YouTube (~25 min long). Binary Bonsai has more on the first real movie that Spielberg directed (which the director now dislikes).
Spielberg’s first outing is all about humanity, love, feelings, innocence and all the other softness for which he has since become almost infamous. Whatever tech-lust Spielberg might have, goes on behind the lens, not in front of it. And despite moving on to do some pretty tech-heavy films (Jurassic Park for instance), he almost always keeps the human side of things front and center.
A comparison of the rules for living of writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Republican political operative Roger Stone.
Taleb: “6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.”
Stone: “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.”
On the heels of Michael Bierut’s rave for Mad Men comes William Drenttel’s admission: I Was A Mad Man.
Then the CEO [of Krystal Restaurants] turns to me, ignoring everyone else, and asks me to take out my wallet. He asks me how much money I have. I count about $150, and tell him so. He smiles, looks me squarely in the eye, and asks: “Would you spend your last $150 on this shit?”
The rest of the story involves me telling him to take out his own wallet and me swearing I’d spend not only my money but all of his. And we did. We spent all of Krystal’s money, millions of dollars. We made second-rate advertising, and they had second-rate stores with really second-rate hamburgers. We deserved each other.
You’ve likely seen the wedding photo of the wounded Iraq War soldier and the woman who stuck by him through his recovery. After being married for just over a year, the couple is now divorced.
“Nothing was ever really wrong. It just wasn’t right. Going into the marriage? I’d never been married before. I think we were okay. The wedding - it was so planned. There was this thing… ” He breaks off and gets up to retrieve the framed certificate. It’s from the state of Illinois declaring his wedding a state holiday. “To call something like that off…” He sits back down.
Fontsmith designed the Mencap typeface to be highly readable and legible for those with learning disabilities. See also the Clearview typeface used on the new highway signs in the US. (via ministry of type)
Advice from Patton Oswalt’s commencement speech given at the high school he graduated from.
Reputation, Posterity and Cool are traps. They’ll drain the life from your life. Reputation, Posterity and Cool = Fear.
And:
There Is No Them.
Amen, brother. Although, think about all of the great art we’d be missing out on if 18-year-olds actually took that advice.
I love this painting by Barnaby Furnas but I doubt Meg would let me hang it anywhere in the house. Perhaps if we had a dungeon.
Furnas has done several paintings in this style, including one I saw at the Whitney in aught-four.
Physicists of the 20th Century on Banknotes (5 MB PDF), including Marie & Pierre Curie on a short-lived 500 franc note, Niels Bohr on a Danish 500 kroner note, and Nikola Tesla on several notes from Yugoslavia and Serbia. The author of the article is Steve Feller, physics professor at Coe College and my college advisor. Feller has a keen interest in numismatics and recently published a book about the money used in WWII camps.
Radiohead + Google + data visualization + lasers = I am contractually obligated to post this. Google has the backstory and some code for Radiohead’s new music video, which was “filmed” using lasers instead of cameras. (via jimray)
In an attempt to make Billy Bob Thornton jealous, artist Jillian McDonald pasted herself into movie scenes kissing several well-known actors, including Thornton’s former wife, Angelina Jolie.
The new Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee looks pretty nice.
The museum sits on a twenty-acre reclaimed industrial site directly across the Menomonee River from downtown Milwaukee and has been conceived as an urban factory ready-made for spontaneous motorcycle rallies. The three-building campus includes space for permanent and temporary exhibitions, the company’s archives, a restaurant and cafe, and a retail shop, as well as a generous amount of event and waterfront recreational space. The museum’s indoor and outdoor components were inspired by the spirit of Harley rallies in towns like Sturgis and Laconia, where thousands of riders congregate every year.
Mamihlapinatapai, a most succinct word.
It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…’”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”.
Heartbreaking. I wish we had an English word for that feeling. (via cyn-c)
An amazing collection of abstract satellite photos, demonstrating the “impressionist, cubist and pointillist” side of the earth’s landscape.
The images you see below were taken at the turn of the Millennium, when NASA’s scientists had a brilliant idea: to scan through 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite and display only the most the most beautiful. A handful of the best were painstakingly chosen and then displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000.
You must see these. Bonus: all the images are available in wallpaper size for your computer desktop.
You’ve likely seen Dennis Darzacq’s photos of people who look like they’re falling and about to hit the ground at a high velocity. Lens Culture has a video that shows how Darzacq makes those photos; he plays a clever mind trick on viewers that makes jumping look like falling.
Everything had been prepared in advance. Everything was ready. The models launched themselves into space. There is nothing false in these scenes. These moments really occurred. There is no fiction, no retouching or special effects. Photographed in the courtyards of buildings or in streets in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, in Nanterre and in Biarritz, these young people were just being themselves, simply performing jumps in a modern urban setting. And the photographer shot the images, intervening only to give a few guidelines as to their movements. However, at the moment of the leap, chance and gravity also intervened.
It’s been awhile since I’ve checked in on Nick Veasey’s work. Veasey takes x-ray photos of all sorts of items, from feathers to pens to underwear to people to entire buses. Well worth poking around.
Will videos that bleep out ordinary words to make them seem profane always be funny? I hope so. Jimmy Kimmel’s Unnecessary Censorship was the first one that I saw…here are some others I’ve run across recently: Sesame Street’s The Count sings about how he loves to BLEEP, Barney the dinosaur talks dirty, Spongebob BLEEPing Squarepants, censored cartoons, more censored cartoons, and Cookie Monster BLEEPs the BLEEP.
Update: This commercial for Knorr is pretty good as well. (thx, oscar)
A list of all the times that Steve Jobs has said, “just one more thing” at keynotes and product launches…aka this is the stuff that Apple thought would do well. Among the hits: original iMac, OS X, the iPod, and the iPhone. Only one real miss: the G4 Cube.
Also: did Jobs take that phrase from Columbo?
Update: The video version of “one more thing”. (thx, eric)
A 1964 interview of Ayn Rand from Playboy magazine.
Galt’s statement is a dramatized summation of the Objectivist ethics. Any system of ethics is based on and derived, implicitly or explicitly, from a metaphysics. The ethic derived from the metaphysical base of Objectivism holds that, since reason is man’s basic tool of survival, rationality is his highest virtue. To use his mind, to perceive reality and to act accordingly, is man’s moral imperative. The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics is: man’s life — man’s survival qua man — or that which the nature of a rational being requires for his proper survival. The Objectivist ethics, in essence, hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself. It is this last that Galt’s statement summarizes.
Rand is nothing if not decisive and consistent in her answers…except where she contradicts herself. (Aside: I would love to read a blog written by Fake Ayn Rand where she reviews current movies. Someone start that up, please.)
Videos of David Lynch and folk rocker Donovan talking about the creative process. I tuned in for Lynch but I found Donovan’s thoughts more interesting. The videos are part of a larger Ideas issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
An illustrated tale of two young boys (ages 3 and 7) who love to ride the subway.
A chaperone on one of Arthur’s school trips told me something he overheard when all the kids were neatly lined up in rows of two. The girl holding Arthur’s hand asked him, “Have you heard of Peter Pan?” “No,” he replied, “have you heard of Metro North?”
She said the city was spending $700,000 to create the string of blocklong plazas from 42nd to 35th Streets. That includes painting the bike lane green, buying the chairs, tables, benches, umbrellas and planters and applying a coat of small-grained gravel mixed with epoxy onto the pedestrian areas, which will set them off from both the street and the bicycle path.
Looks like Bloomberg is going ahead with his battle against Manhattan car traffic without Albany’s help. I can think of several more areas that could benefit from a full or partial closure…Bleecker St would make a great pedestrian mall, as would any number of streets in Chinatown. So would St. Mark’s in the East Village. And while we’re at it, close all the streets in Central Park to cars (except the transverses).
Flickr video of the camera operator getting struck by lightning.
From what i understand, it went through my left hand holding the camera, crossed my back and exited out of my right hand holding onto the metal railing. No entry or exit wounds, just a really good zap!
Wow! (via waxy)
Watch the growth of Wal-Mart across the country as time passes. It’s like a viral infection…you know, in a good way! (via migurski)
Time lapse video of a designer laying out an article for a magazine. I could watch stuff like this all day. It’s also the type of video I wish were on Vimeo…sometimes YouTube is like watching a UHF station from 200 miles away with the rabbit ears positioned just so. (via quips)
André Zucca’s color photographs of Paris during the German occupation of WWII have provoked controversy because Zucca worked for a German propaganda magazine. But Richard Brody argues that Zucca’s photographs are true to the Paris of the time and don’t just show the “cheerful ease” of the city’s residents.
Certainly, Zucca couldn’t get the whole story: he photographed Jews wearing the star but couldn’t show the roundups or the deportation to Auschwitz; he could show German soldiers but couldn’t show the arrest, torture, and execution of resisters. He couldn’t, but nobody could; the problem wasn’t that he worked for a propaganda rag: photographers who actively worked for the Resistance couldn’t do it either. But what he did do was to capture the paradoxes of the Occupation, where horror and pleasure coexisted in shockingly close proximity, where the active resistance to Nazi occupation was in fact far less prevalent than the feigned daily oblivion of those who kept their heads down and tried to cope.
More of Zucca’s photos are here.
A book by the proprietor of the Waiter Rant blog is finally due out at the end of July.
According to The Waiter, eighty percent of customers are nice people just looking for something to eat. The remaining twenty percent, however, are socially maladjusted psychopaths. Waiter Rant offers the server’s unique point of view, replete with tales of customer stupidity, arrogant misbehavior, and unseen bits of human grace transpiring in the most unlikely places. Through outrageous stories, The Waiter reveals the secrets to getting good service, proper tipping etiquette, and how to keep him from spitting in your food. The Waiter also shares his ongoing struggle, at age thirty-eight, to figure out if he can finally leave the first job at which he’s truly thrived.
A photo gallery of snack foods that sound a bit naughty. Salted Nut Roll, Dutch Crunch, Double Creme Betweens, etc. (via buzzfeed)
So, what are the cool must-have iPhone Apps? The iTunes Store lists the most popular ones but that’s often not a good indicator. Obvious choices thus far: Twitterific (read and post to Twitter), Remote (control iTunes or Apple TV with your iPhone), and AppEngines’ individual ebooks (like Pride and Prejudice). Let me know what your favorites are in the comments and I’ll compile a list. Bonus points if you actually explain what the app does and why it’s worth the effort.
Once again, digging through Apple’s XML files has revealed the url to the iPhone 2.0 Firmware that is presently available on Apple’s servers.
Here’s the direct download link. Be sure to read all the disclaimers at MacRumors…this is not an official Apple release and should be treated with caution. (Basically, don’t try this at home, kids.) And once again, here’s the link to the App Store so that you can install all the shiny new iPhone apps.
In his latest podcast, Bill Simmons apologizes (sort of) for his stupid article on why tennis is sucky and boring, calling it “maybe the dumbest column I’ve ever written”. But then he goes on to say that what Wimbledon needs is a retractable roof on Centre Court and lights so that matches can proceed without fear of rain or night. Both of which are totally happening next year, unbeknowst to Simmons.
If you’re a sports columnist, it helps if you’re, you know, interested in sports. Many columnists are only interested in the big three sports — football, basketball, baseball — and treat other sports with a not-so-veiled disinterest or even distain. Competition, both against others and with the self, is at the base of all sports and if, as a so-called “sports fan”, you can’t find something of that to love about tennis or badminton or NASCAR, maybe you need to look elsewhere for work. Simmons needs to bring himself up to speed on tennis; he’s missed a lot.
And if you’re writing about a sport you don’t know much about and argue that it needs to be changed in such a way that makes it more exciting for the short attention span generation, you should also be prepared to advocate for the 35-game NBA season, the 60-game MLB season, moving the pitcher’s mound back to 65 feet, eliminating charging in the NBA, and 11-on-10 in NFL games.
iTunes 7.7 became available last night and with it, the capability to buy applications to put on your iPhone. Well, you can’t actually put them on your phone yet, but you can buy/download them. Here’s a link to all iPhone Apps and here’s a link to just the free ones. I can’t seem to get the link for the main store’s page, but the easiest way to get there is to click on “Applications” in your iTunes Library and click “Get More Applications”.
The new iPhone software will likely be out later today so that you can actually install and use these apps.
Update: Here’s the link for the iPhone Apps Store. (thx, carl)
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