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Tarantino’s latest film is about Nazi-killing American soldiers and stars Brad Pitt. I can’t decide if this movie is going to completely suck or be really great. Vampire movies notwithstanding, Quentin always gets the benefit of the doubt from me so great it is.
Myostatin is a protein that, along with its associated gene, limits the growth of muscle tissue in some mammals. The Belgian Blue cattle breed has a natural mutation of the gene associated with myostatin that supresses the protein, resulting in lean and heavily muscled cattle.
A myostatin inhibiting drug called Stamulumab is currently undergoing testing for treating those with muscular dystrophy. If approved, use and abuse by human athletes will surely follow. (via siege)
Update: Stamulumab is no longer undergoing testing. But a pharmaceutical company called Acceleron is developing a similar drug called ACE-031. (thx, stephen)
The School of Visual Arts has published a list of recommended reading for their MFA in Interaction Design program.
The Virginia Quarterly Review has made available their entire archive of articles, poems, essays, and book reviews from 1975 to 2003…all online and free to read for all. These two articles called out in the announcement caught my eye:
A mind-blowingly prescient prediction of Wikipedia, e-book readers, and political blogs from sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz back in 1983. This article will have to get a blog entry dedicated to it at some point.
David Wyatt looks forward to the Star Wars franchise from back in 1982, when A New Hope (Episode IV) and The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V) were the only two movies, and he seems awfully excited.
An archive to add to the list.
Howling Fantods has published an old interview of David Foster Wallace from 1993. The interview was conducted by Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk and ran in The Whiskey Island Magazine. A generous excerpt appears below:
Wallace: […] The writers I know, there’s a certain self-consciousness about them, and a critical awareness of themselves and other people that helps their work. But that sort of sensibility makes it very hard to be with people, and not sort of be hovering near the ceiling, watching what’s going on. One of the things you two will discover, in the years after you get out of school, is that managing to really be an alive human being, and also do good work and be as obsessive as you have to be, is really tricky. It’s not an accident when you see writers either become obsessed with the whole pop stardom thing or get into drugs or alcohol, or have terrible marriages. Or they simply disappear from the whole scene in their thirties or forties. It’s very tricky.
Geoffrey Polk: I think you have to sacrifice a lot.
Wallace: I don’t know if it’s that voluntary or a conscious decision. In most of the writers I know, there’s a self-centeredness, not in terms of preening in front of the mirror, but a tendency not only toward introspection but toward a terrible self-consciousness. Writing, you’re having to worry about your effect on an audience all the time. Are you being too subtle or not subtle enough? You’re always trying to communicate in a unique way, and so it makes it very hard, at least for me, to communicate in a way that I see ordinary, apple-cheeked Clevelanders communicating with each other on street corners.
My answer for myself would be no; it’s not a sacrifice; it’s simply the way that I am, and I don’t think I’d be happy doing anything else. I think people who congenitally drawn to this sort of profession are savants in certain ways and sort of retarded in certain other ways. Go to a writers’ conference sometime and you’ll see. People go to meet people who on paper are just gorgeous, and they’re absolute geeks in person. They have no idea what to say or do. Everything they say is edited and undercut by some sort of editor in themselves. That’s been true of my experience. I’ve spent a lot more of my energy teaching the last two years, really sort of working on how to be a human being.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk shares a kinship with what Wallace is getting at here.
Amazon’s mp3 deal of the day: Daft Punk’s greatest hits album for $1.99, today only.
I had no idea people were swimming across the entire Atlantic Ocean now. The first woman, a 56-year-old from Colorado named Jennifer Figge, just completed the trip from the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa to Trinidad. But she made the trip in only 29 days, which has raised some questions as to how far she swam vs. floated via boat.
At the Shibuya Pink Girl’s Club in Tokyo, men pay upwards of $130 to grope the girl of their choice on a simulated subway train.
The connoisseur picks out from the menu the girl of his choice, dressed either as a schoolgirl or office receptionist. This girl then beckons him through the window of a mock-up train carriage, which not only broadcasts station announcements, but even shakes and rattles.
Real-life incidents of subway train groping are on the decline, in part because more women are reporting them and the subway offering women-only cars during peak times.
Andrew Anker warns against companies having more than one “flashlight”.
This is a term I learned from a banker I worked for 20 years ago, people who shine brightly in one direction, but don’t let off too much light otherwise. Flashlights are kind of useless as board members, despite big reputations and good resumes — they’re just not lateral thinkers and don’t really want to dig in. Every company is allowed one flashlight, but it better be the CEO. It’s hard to know where to go when the light is shining in two (or more) different directions.
(thx, djacobs)
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It’s gotta be weird for Roger Federer. Last year at this time, people were saying that he was the best tennis player of all time. Now, near the top of his game and height of his powers, he might not even be the best current tennis player. And if you look at the statistics, Rafael Nadal may turn out to be the best tennis player ever.
Federer won his first Grand Slam title at age 21 and, by his 23rd birthday, had won two more. Sampras had won four by that age. Nadal is well ahead of that pace, having won his first Grand Slam at the precocious age of 18. The Australian was Nadal’s sixth and he will be a prohibitive favorite to capture his fifth consecutive French Open just a few days after he turns 23 in June.
The Book Design Review has collected a number of book covers that feature books on them. An addition to the list: Penguin’s paperback cover of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.
Bob Woodward offers ten lessons that the Obama administration can learn from the eight long years that George W. Bush held office. The advice basically boils down to “keep your head out of the sand and your ass”.
[Bush] made probably the most important decision of his presidency — whether to invade Iraq — without directly asking either Powell, Rumsfeld or Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet for their bottom-line recommendations. (Instead of consulting his own father, former president George H.W. Bush, who had gone to war in 1991 to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, the younger Bush told me that he had appealed to a “higher father” for strength.)
(via lined & unlined)
Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge.
That’s Maud Newton remembering her father. (via clusterflock)
The Trough of No Value is the period in the lifetime of most objects between when they are new (and therefore valuable) and when they are old, rare, and collectable (and therefore valuable).
Who wanted to keep old lunchboxes around? They weren’t useful any more. They weren’t worth anything. And, since they were almost all used for their intended purpose, many were damaged or worn by use (I vaguely remember owning one that was rusty and had a dent). People naturally threw them away. The “trough of no value” for lunchboxes was long and harsh. That’s why they’re not so common today as you might guess — because not that many made it through the trough.
My unsharpened NeXT pencil is still very much stuck in the trough, but I have endless patience. I hope to sell it for 75 cents someday. (thx, danny)
Just what has Eminem been doing for the past three years? According to this profile of the now-reclusive artist: recording.
As a result - and this is critical when considering the potential impact of Relapse — Eminem’s so-called “missing years” have actually been surprisingly productive. “He’s never stopped recording. Ever,” adds Simaan. “I hear they’ve got over 300 songs in the can from what he’s produced in the last three years. I’ve seen him write. He’s a fast worker. He’ll write one line, then three lines, then four lines, in all separate parts of the page. Then he’ll come back to it, and say this is a sweet line, or that’s working for him, and just pull everything together almost instantly. The guy’s a total genius.”
His new album, Relapse, is due out sometime in the next month or two.
Elizabeh Gilbert talks about how to keep being creative in the face of success. In particular, she mentions erecting a “protective pyschological construct to protect you from the results of your work”.
And just so you don’t end up wondering about it for half the talk like I did, Melissa Gilbert played Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie. Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer. (via john hodgman)
Amazon announces the second version of the Kindle, their e-ink reading device. The price is $359.
Order Kindle now to RESERVE YOUR PLACE IN LINE. We prioritize orders on a first come, first served basis. If you have previously placed an order for Kindle 1, and have not yet received it, your order will automatically be upgraded to Kindle 2. You need to do nothing.
Also, those who own the original version of the Kindle will be given priority for ordering. The device itself is slimmer, has text-to-speech, better e-ink display, more storage (~1500 books), and doesn’t look like a Pontiac Aztek anymore. From the NY Times coverage of the announcement:
Mr. Bezos concludes with some high-level thinking: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language , all available in less than 60 seconds.
Which makes Bezos’ aim pretty clear: Amazon : Apple :: Kindle/amazon.com : iPod/iTunes Store :: Bezos : Jobs.
In the NY Times, Michael Bierut talks about the differences in graphic design when he started work in the early 80s and now. In a word: computers.
Still, I wonder if we haven’t lost something in the process: the deliberation that comes with a slower pace, the attention to detail required when mistakes can’t be undone with the click of a mouse. Younger designers hearing me talk this way react as if I’m getting sentimental about the days when we all used to churn our own butter.
Dan Lyons, who wrote and tried to monetize the now-defunct Fake Steve Jobs blog, on the business of blogging:
Blogs can do many wonderful things [but] generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.
As businesses go, blogging is a lot like shining shoes. There are going to be very few folks who own chains of shoe shining places which make a lot of money and a bunch of other people who can (maybe) make a living at it if they bust their ass 24/7/365. But for many, shining shoes is something that will be done at home for themselves because it feels good to walk around with a shiny pair of shoes. Everyone else will switch to sandals (i.e. Twitter) or sneakers (i.e. Facebook) and not worry about shining at all. (via fimoculous)
The entire collection of Kim’s Video in the East Village, all 55,000+ hard-to-find films, is now headed to a formerly abandoned town in Italy that is now run entirely by artists.
In a notice pasted on a wall inside the front door [of his video store], he wrote, “We hope to find a sponsor who can make this collection available to those who have loved Kim’s over the past two decades.” He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others.
(thx, cliff)
Another photo of Lincoln taken a couple months before he died, featuring a surprisingly contemporary hairstyle.
Abe looks downright rebellious in that photo. (via flickr blog)
Gothamist reports that a small memorial service was held for beloved NYC veggie peeler salesman Joe Ades on Saturday afternoon in Union Square.
As an answer to questions of how Joe’s legacy of unique salesmanship would be carried on, Ruth answered “My father always told me that my inheritance would be forty cartons of peelers, and it was. He left them all to me. I’m going to go home and practice on some potatoes, and then come out to his old spot on 17th and Union Square West and show all of you.”
His children also said that two days before he died, Joe received his US Citizenship.
I added a new feature to kottke.org over the weekend: live updating on the home page. If you leave kottke.org open in your browser (with JavaScript on) and I post a new link, the page will display a message urging you to refresh to view some new posts. The page title changes too, so if you have it up in a tab, you can tell at a glance if something’s new. Right now the page checks for new posts every ten minutes, but that could change depending on server load, etc. Thanks to Twitter Search and Tumblr for the inspiration.
The Complete New Yorker DVD set is on sale at the NYer’s site for $20 or for as low as $15 (used) or $21 (new) on Amazon. Of course, the whole thing is available for free online, but if you need the discs, now’s the time. (via the millions)
In a 10-minute video, Randy Nelson, the Dean of Pixar University, talks about how Pixar hires. One thing they look for is people who are interested rather than interesting.
smarthistory is a fantastic substitute for that art history class you never took in college.
smARThistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art history textbook.
This looks like a great resource.
Making cheese: how to turn five gallons of milk into six pounds of cheese.
This recipe for a basic hard cheese works for any kind of milk. I primarily use my own fresh goats’ milk, but have made it quite successfully with cow’s milk purchased from the grocery as well as raw cow’s milk from a local farmer.
(thx, grant)
Update: No rennet? Just use lemon juice. (thx, nathan)
Slugging is a self-organized carpooling system in the Washington D.C. area that developed in the early 70s.
The system of slugging is quite simple. A car needing additional passengers to meet the required 3-person high occupancy vehicle (HOV) minimum pulls up to one of the known slug lines. The driver usually positions the car so that the slugs are on the passenger side. The driver either displays a sign with the destination or simply lowers the passenger window, to call out the destination, such as “Pentagon,” “L’Enfant Plaza,” or “14th & New York.” The slugs first in line for that particular destination then hop into the car, normally confirming the destination, and off they go.
No money changes hands and an implicit rule of silence is followed, unless conversation is initiated by the driver. (thx, askedrelic)
Update: This practice is also called casual carpooling in the Bay Area. (thx, adam)
Update: Michael Sippey shares a serendipitous casual carpool story.
Football season is over but if you still want your fix, Mark Bowden wrote an interesting piece for The Atlantic about how NFL games are presented on TV. The camera operators and directors seem as talented and under pressure as the players on the field.
The television crews don’t just broadcast games, they inhabit them. They know the players, the teams, the stats, and the strategies. They interview players and coaches the day before the game. They brainstorm, anticipate, plot likely story lines, prepare graphic packages of important stats, and bundle replays from previous contests to bring a sense of history and context to the event. They are not just pointing cameras and broadcasting the feed, they are telling the story of the game as it happens.
Just this morning I was thinking about how successful the instant replay rule has been for NFL broadcasts. TV instant replay predated its use by the referees, but now the review process has some weight behind it and provides extra drama, particularly in exciting moments of the game. The Santonio Holmes touchdown catch in the final moments of the Super Bowl is the perfect example. From the perspective of “telling the story of the game”, the catch was amazing. But what the review process does is delay the release of tension for a minute or two…it’s a mini-cliffhanger inserted into a sport that doesn’t have any natural cliffhanging moments. Showing the replays over and over while the ref makes his decision also brings the viewer into the story itself, as though he is playing the part of the reviewing referee. (thx, john)
Steven Heller asks why Tropicana redesigned the packaging for their orange juice.
What could Arnell, the agency that did the deed, have been thinking? It’s one thing to change the logo; it’s another to abandon the mnemonic orange with the straw in it. As package imagery goes, it was pretty smart, and decidedly memorable.
He goes on to call the redesign “a big tactical mistake”. I’m a Tropicana drinker and I think the new packaging sucks. It’s impossible to figure out at a glance which juice is which because all the packages look the same, aside from some thin lines at the very top. Horrible.
In lieu of a book review, a writer shares her feelings about Infinite Jest.
Reading IJ is like forging a spiritual connection with a man who expresses my feelings better than I do. As someone who writes, I’ve often felt that language is so poor an instrument for communication or expression. I find it unyieldingly difficult to write an honest sentence. DFW exhibits otherwise. George Saunders, in his remarks at David Foster Wallace’s memorial service, called Wallace “a wake-up artist.” Yes. DFW’s words, beyond creating solid smart sentences and solid smart stories, reach this part of you that you thought no one could reach, saying everything you’ve been wanting to say and hear, everything you’ve been thinking on your own but haven’t been able to share with anyone else.
(thx, julie)
Regarding Berkeley’s class on McNulty & Co., Jason Mittell is teaching a class on The Wire at Middlebury College this spring. More information is available on the class blog, including the course schedule. This class *will* include the underrated season two.
The Kaplan Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln is purported to be the earliest known photo of the 16th President, taken in the early 1840s when he was in his early 30s. The young man in the photo doesn’t bare an obvious resemblance to a photo taken of Lincoln a few years later but the forensic evidence is compelling.
Numerous accounts have revealed that Lincoln underwent a noticeable change in his physical appearance beginning in January 1841 as a result of a grave emotional crisis. This coincides with his reported failure to go through with his scheduled marriage to Mary Todd, leaving her literally waiting for him at the altar. (They were married the following year.) This emotional crisis, just one of a series of such episodes to plague him throughout his life, was the cause of Lincoln losing a considerable amount of weight.
A visualization of the top 10 Hollywood stars from 1936 to 1945.
For three years, from ‘36 to ‘38, Shirley Temple was the country’s top box-office star, and then Mickey Rooney had the title from ‘39 to ‘41. (And then it was Abbott & Costello.) Imagine. Temple and Rooney knew how to entertain, for sure, but the last thing you could call moviegoers back then, to judge by their six-year reign, was urbane or sophisticated.
In Rockefeller Center Ho!, published in the Talk of the Town section of the Feb 11, 1956 issue of the New Yorker, John Updike described the discovery of a path from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center that didn’t make use of 5th or 6th Avenues. Instead he cut through building lobbies, parking lots, and underground passages on his way through the thicket of Midtown’s tall buildings.
Recently a pair of New Yorker staffers set out to discover if Updike’s journey could still be made and brought back photographic evidence.
A stingy parking attendant refused to let us pass through his gate to Fortieth Street. Faced with no other option, we offered to pay the half-hour fee to park a car; his bemused manager finally let us through without charge.
Many who work in Midtown use shortcuts like these on especially cold days (like today) to minimize the time spent outside while walking from the train or bus. I only worked up there for a couple of years, but I still learned a cut-through trick or two.
Keith Mularski spent three years in the darkest corners of the internet and eventually worked his way up to the level of administrator on a online credit card fraud site.
Mularski wasn’t sure how things would play out, but in September 2006 he saw his chance. He started talking with Iceman about joining CardersMarket as a moderator, but soon realized that he the had a better shot with another administrator at DarkMarket, Renu Subramaniam, aka JiLsi. “I basically told him, ‘Hey, I can secure your servers for you,’” Mularski said. JiLsi made him a moderator, but held off granting him administrative access.
Then one Saturday night a month later, DarkMarket started getting hammered with another DDoS attack. “I was talking with JiLsi and I said, ‘Hey I can secure the site? The servers are all set.’”
JiLsi’s reply: “Let’s move it.”
Mularski was now a made man.
The best robots of 2008, including soccer players, humanoid bots, and a self-healing robotic chair.
Mayor Bloomberg held a press conference today to address the mysterious maple syrup smell sporadically experienced by New Yorkers since 2005. The cause? Fenugreek seeds.
The source of the odor was a plant in North Bergen, N.J., which processes seeds of the herb fenugreek to produce fragrances.
Update: Gothamist has more details.
New album called Junior from Royksopp due in late March.
We have a certain schizophrenia — we want to make both energetic and really quiet music.
That’s exactly what I like about them. The group also mentions that they’ll release an album called Senior near the end of 2009.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why do the molecules have a hydrophilic head and a hydrophobic tail?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because the C-O bonds in the head are highly polar, and the C-H bonds in the tail are effectively non-polar.
UC Berkeley is offering a class called What’s so great about The Wire?
Discerning critics and avid fans have agreed that the five-season run of Ed Burns and David Simon’s The Wire was “the best TV show ever broadcast in America”—not the most popular but the best. The 60 hours that comprise this episodic series have been aptly been compared to Dickens, Balzac, Dreiser and Greek Tragedy. These comparisons attempt to get at the richly textured complexity of the work, its depth, its bleak tapestry of an American city and its diverse social stratifications. Yet none of these comparisons quite nails what it is that made this the most compelling “show” on TV and better than many of the best movies. This class will explore these comparisons, analyze episodes from the first, third, fourth and fifth seasons and try to discover what was and is so great about The Wire. We will screen as much of the series as we can during our mandatory screening sessions and approach it through the following lenses: the other writing of David Simon, including his journalism, an exemplary Greek Tragedy, Dickens’ Bleak House and/or parts of Balzac’s Human Comedy. We will also consider the formal tradition of episodic television.
They’re skipping season two? Shameful. (via unlikely words)
I missed this a few days ago: Coca-Cola will finally be removing the “Classic” from their packaging, 24 years after their New Coke fiasco. What took so long?
Now I can’t get the theme song to H.R. Pufnstuf out of my head. (via jak & jil)
Men’s Health has a listing of the 20 worst foods of 2009, all of which fit the description of “calorie bombs”. For instance, the worst “healthy” sandwich is the Blimpie Veggie Supreme, which contains 1100 calories, and 33 grams of saturated fat. And Jesus, the worst food is a shake from Baskin Robbins that has 2600 calories.
We didn’t think anything could be worse than Baskin Robbins’ 2008 bombshell, the Heath Bar Shake. After all, it had more sugar (266 grams) than 20 bowls of Froot Loops, more calories (2,310) than 11 actual Heath Bars, and more ingredients (73) than you’ll find in most chemist labs. Rather than coming to their senses and removing it from the menu, they did themselves one worse and introduced this caloric catastrophe. It’s soiled with more than a day’s worth of calories and three days worth of saturated fat, and, worst of all, usually takes less than 10 minutes to sip through a straw.
Video of The Beatles’ last public performance in three parts: one, two, three. They performed on top of the group’s own building with an audience situated on rooftops and down on the street. (via the year in pictures)
Esquire profiles Paul Thomas Anderson, focusing on the director’s early years and how he came to make Cigarettes and Coffee, Hard Eight, and eventually Boogie Nights, which was based on a film he made as a high schooler called The Dirk Diggler Story.
Although Anderson is one of the most autobiographical filmmakers of his generation, drawing heavily on his childhood in the San Fernando Valley, most stories about him offer some variation on “very little is known about his early years” or “little is known about Paul’s childhood.” He has stopped talking to most of his friends from those years, and none of them can say whether he just moved on naturally or broke with his past for some secret reason.
“When he did Magnolia,” Stevens says, “I sent word through someone who worked with him to tell Paul it would be great if he could come back for a visit. I’d love to see him. And the answer came: ‘Paul doesn’t go back.’”
You can watch The Dirk Diggler Story on Google Video.
The first is a three-part manifesto from 2004 about how he got his start in radio, how to effectively tell stories, and how to realize when your story isn’t working.
Force yourself to do a lot of stories. This is the most important thing you can do. Get yourself in a situation where people are expecting work out of you, or where you simply force yourself to do a certain number of stories every month. Turn the stuff out. Deadlines are your friend.
The Gel Conference just posted a video of Glass speaking at the 2007 conference in which he “describes the elements of a good story”.
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