Okay, when a hurricane is approaching, I know my first thought is to strap myself to a kite surfing apparatus and stand on the beach. Well done. Thank goodness for intrepid news crews filming tropical storm Fay, or this self-correcting problem would not have been caught on tape.
August 19, 2008
Rock You Like a Hurricane
Okay, when a hurricane is approaching, I know my first thought is to strap myself to a kite surfing apparatus and stand on the beach. Well done. Thank goodness for intrepid news crews filming tropical storm Fay, or this self-correcting problem would not have been caught on tape.
May 27, 2008
I made Fleshbot, and I didn't have to get naked
I know, *phew*, right? Anyway, I don't usually blog the porny stuff, so when I found this very WTF (and NSFW) video on YouTube...and then found 18 of the same thing, I sent in a tip to Fleshbot.com. And waddya know, they ran with it. First, BoingBoing, then the New York Times, and now Fleshbot, the number one adult blog on the web. I'm everywhere, folks. Excerpt:
A very confused tipster writes to us asking for an explanation of the following YouTube video. It starts off innocently enough, with footage of a random girl-on-girl makeout session: nothing confusing there, but then things take an abrupt turn when the show is interrupted by footage from late-70s schmaltzfest "Eight Is Enough." Then it's back to the lesbian makeout, accompanied by some adult contemporary/soft rock background music. Then you see the opening credits for CSI: NY. Then back to some more Dick Van Patten, then it abruptly ends. In other words, it's a big heaping spoonful of WTF?When the boss isn't looking, click through to the link to see the clips. You know you want to, especially with that hot Van Patten action going down.
May 22, 2008
Santa Barbara makes CNN news with Cat, Dog, and Rat guy
This guy on State Street has trained a rat, and cat, and a dog to sit on top of each other, in that order (well, the dog stands on the ground, but you get the point.) And now CNN has the video. It's good that we're known for something other than unaffordable rents.
May 13, 2008
All not well in Mordor
Okay, so it's not Mordor, it's Chile's erupting Chaitén volcano, which is blowing its stack after 9,000 of just chillin' out all dormant like. The heat and the ash and the SOULS OF DEAD THETANS have created these amazingly beautiful photos, taken for National Geographic. (However, I found more photos at this site, something about NG's interface is booty.) The morning after: not-so scenic.
May 12, 2008
She comes in colours everywhere
The new, completely crazy Play-doh bunny ad for Sony Bravia. (Thanks, Jon!). I searched about and found the ad with the making-of at the end of it, because you *know* you're gonna want to see this. Seems like a lot of money spent for something meant to sell televisions, but on the other hand, who would fund this if it was "just" a short film? The bunnies are very cute. I especially like the yellow one waiting to cross the road.
April 28, 2008
New Harry Potter Film not going so well...
It was to be one of the biggest science experiments ever seen yet there was not a bunson burner or test tube in sight. Around 1,500 students kitted out in waterproof ponchos discovered exactly what happens when you drop a mint sweet into a bottle of Coca Cola, in an attempt to break a world record. The students, from Belgium, tried to out-fizz the previous record for so-called Mentos fountains by simultaneously putting Mentos mints into bottles of the soft drink.The resultant chemical reaction shot hundreds of streams of carbonated soda into the air.The explosive record-breaking event was held in Ladeuzeplein square in Leuven, Belgium.From the Daily Telegraph
April 25, 2008
The Worst Food in America
A disgusting, high-calorie list from Men's Health:
Outback Steakhouse Aussie Cheese Fries with Ranch Dressing
2,900 calories
182 g fat 240 g carbs
Even if you split this "starter" with three friends, you'll have downed a dinner's worth of calories before your entree arrives. Follow this up with a steak, sides, and a dessert and you could easily break the 3,500 calorie barrier.
April 21, 2008
The Revisionism of Dr. Wertham
A few issues back, the New Yorker had a book review/story about the comic book hearings of the 1950s and how horror comics were blamed for juvenile delinquency. What followed was a "Comics Code" that was even more puritanical than the one that censored Hollywood films in the 1930s. The first half of the article by Louis Menand sums up the history fairly well, the second half dives into David Hajdu's book on the subject (“The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America”) and finds some interesting revisioning of history. Dr. Wertham, for example, seen as somebody's conservative stern uncle, was nothing of the sort. He was, rather, more of a progressive, and saw the relationship of comics to kids as mass consumerism to those least likely to ward it off and the most impressionable.
He was against the code. He did not want to censor comic books, only to restrict their sale so that kids could not buy them without a parent present. He wanted to give them the equivalent of an R rating. Bart Beaty’s “Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture” ($22, paper; University Press of Mississippi) makes a strong case for the revisionist position. As Beaty points out, Wertham was not a philistine; he was a progressive intellectual. His Harlem clinic was named for Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law. He collected modern art, helped produce an anthology of modernist writers, and opposed censorship. He believed that people’s behavior was partly determined by their environment, in this respect dissenting from orthodox Freudianism, and some of his work, on the psychological effects of segregation on African-Americans, was used in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education.Somewhere in this tale is a lesson about getting more than what you wished for, and how a desire to protect can be manipulated by those in power to satisfy their cravings to repress and contain.Wertham thought that representations make a difference—that how people see themselves and others reflected in the media affects the way they think and behave. As Beaty says, racist (particularly concerning Asians) and sexist images and remarks can be found on almost every page of crime and horror comics. What especially strikes a reader today is the fantastic proliferation of images of violence against women, almost always depicted in highly sexualized forms. If one believes that pervasive negative images of black people are harmful, why would one not believe the same thing about images of men beating, torturing, and killing women?
April 20, 2008
WITMOT?
My main homey Jon Crow has a new blog. What's that, you say, a new blog? I didn't know he had an old blog. Well, that's where you're wrong. But I forgive you.
WITMOT deals with: movies, James A. Garfield, traveling, James A. Garfield, kvetching, and for those who don't like James A. Garfield, there's sport. Here's a sample of his writing:
Back in 1998, after I graduated from U of Michigan with a Master’s Degree in Japanese Studies that I knew would prove to be worthless, I panicked. I wanted to go back to Japan, but I really did not want to teach English again. I taught it for two years between 1994 and ‘96 and I felt my brain softening a little more with each day I worked there. The few job leads that I had in Japan fell through and suddenly I had no clue what I was going to do with my life. The future looked confusing and uncertain and I was overwhelmed. So I did what any red-blooded lad hailing from the stout state of Ohio might: I sold my car and traveled around the world. Along the way, I wrote a series of mass emails detailing my adventures with included climbing Himalayas, getting chased by a Rhino and getting naked with a room full of Russians. I thought of them as a sort of proto-blog though blogs were at that point a good five years away. So now, ten years later, I finally have these missives in a blog format. You can read the first entry here.Please do check it out, even though he only paid me $10 to give him a plug. He' s a good guy.
January 06, 2008
Joan Acocella on Kahlil Gibran
Here's a good profile in the New Yorker on Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, a book that continues to sell well into its 8th decade. Gibran turns out to be an odd fellow indeed who luckily hooked up with the right kind of dependent relationship.
Mary Haskell, the headmistress of a girls’ school in Boston, was a New Woman. She believed in long hikes, cold showers, and progressive politics...She was not rich, but by careful thrift—the school’s cook, who also had some wealthy employers, sneaked dinners to her from their kitchens—she managed to put aside enough money to support a number of deserving causes: a Greek immigrant boy who needed boarding-school tuition, and another Greek boy, at Harvard. Then she met Gibran, who would be her most expensive project.Acocella links this way of interpersonal behavior to his writing:
In the beginning, her major benefaction to him was simply financial—she gave him money, she paid his rent. In 1908, she sent him to Paris for a year, to study painting. Before he went abroad, they were “just friends,” but once they were apart the talk of friendship turned to letters of love, and when Gibran returned to Boston they became engaged. It was apparently agreed, though, that they would not marry until he felt he had established himself, and somehow this moment never came. Finally, Haskell offered to be his mistress. He wasn’t interested. In a painful passage in her diary, Haskell records how, one night, he said that she was looking thin. On the pretext of showing him that she was actually well fleshed, she took off her clothes and stood before him naked. He kissed one of her breasts, and that was all. She got dressed again. She knew that he had had affairs with other women, but he claimed that he was not “sexually minded,” and furthermore that what she missed in their relationship was actually there. When they were apart, he said, they were together. They didn’t need to have “intercourse”; their whole friendship was “a continued intercourse.” More than sex or marriage, it seems, what Haskell wanted from Gibran was simply to be acknowledged as the woman in his life. As she told her diary, she wanted people to “know he loved me because it was the greatest honor I had and I wanted credit for it—wanted the fame of his loving me.” But he would not introduce her to his friends. “Poor Mary!” Waterfield says. Amen to that.
Then, there is the pleasing ambiguity of Almustafa’s counsels. In the manner of horoscopes, the statements are so widely applicable (“your creativity,” “your family problems”) that almost anyone could think that they were addressed to him. At times, Almustafa’s vagueness is such that you can’t figure out what he means. If you look closely, though, you will see that much of the time he is saying something specific; namely, that everything is everything else. Freedom is slavery; waking is dreaming; belief is doubt; joy is pain; death is life. So, whatever you’re doing, you needn’t worry, because you’re also doing the opposite. Such paradoxes, which Gibran had used for years to keep Haskell out of his bed, now became his favorite literary device. They appeal not only by their seeming correction of conventional wisdom but also by their hypnotic power, their negation of rational processes.It's well worth a full read. Thanks to Mr. C for the link.
December 29, 2007
Prusakolep!
There's loads of strange Eastern Bloc commercials on YouTube, but this is one of the best/weirdest.
November 22, 2007
Flock, Vector Maker, and a simple Address Book/iCal birthday tip
I spent way too much time today playing around with Flock, a web browser that threatens to supplant Firefox for all-over Web 2.0 goodness. I'm still deciding whether it's too crowded and busy to do so, but as someone who is constantly checking Flickr and Facebook, its incorporation of friends and feeds into a left-hand column is totally ace. Add to that the ability to click-drag-and-drop a web photo onto a friend icon and send that to them...add to that a Flickr uploader...add to that the incorporation of most Firefox extensions...add to that my being able to blog on the browser from within the browser and...well, it's pretty cool. Check it out here.
I also checked out this completely free and versatile web-based Vector Graphic maker at Stanford that will convert a bitmap image to vectors for Illustrator. Crazy. This used to be the domain of Adobe Streamline (remember that?) but this does it within the browser, offers three levels of detail and three export options (png, evs, and svg). I ran one of my cartoons through it and it handled the line and color work nicely. See that here.
And finally, maybe this is just me, but I had no idea that a simple checkbox in iCal's general preferences populated your calendar with birthdays of all that have them listed in Address Book. So I did so.
Tags: web
September 25, 2007
Opening the gates of the NYT, and an early restaurant review
Kottke.org, by way of Chuck Taggart's blog, went nosing about in the recently unlocked New York Times online archive and found the earliest restaurant review. That's worth reading for many reasons, including a list of the types of dinner to be found in New York in 1859 (Stetsonian! Delmonican!). But what tickled me most was the excerpted account of dining at the last on the list, an unnamed "Third-class Eating-house":
The noise in the dining hall is terrific. A guest has no sooner seated himself than a plate is literally flung at him by an irritated and perspiring waiter, loosely habited in an unbuttoned shirt whereof the varying color is, I am given to understand, white on Sunday, and daily darkening until Saturday, when it is mixed white and black -- black predominating. The jerking of the plate is closely followed up by a similar performance with a knife and a steel fork, and immediately succeeding these harmless missiles come a fearful shout from the waiter demanding in hasty tones, "What do you want now?" Having mildly stated what you desire to be served with, the waiter echoes your words in a voice of thunder, goes through the same ceremony with the next man and the next, through an infinite series, and rushes frantically from your presence. Presently returning, he appears with a column of dishes whereof the base is in one hand and the extreme edge of the capital is artfully secured under his chin. He passes down the aisle of guests, and, as he goes, deals out the dishes as he would cards, until the last is served, when he commences again Da Capo. The disgusting manner in which the individuals who dine at this place, thrust their food into their mouths with the blades of their knives, makes you tremble with apprehensions of suicide...Not too different from now, except we can add TVs blasting out cable news and twats on cellphones.
September 24, 2007
Supreme Instruments Tube Testers
A whole page of this stuff! How cool is this? It makes you want to get tubes, just so you can test 'em. And seeings the Internets be a "series of tubes" I guess we could test for 404 errors.
July 06, 2007
Ex Unum, Pluribus!
From the always awesome Strange Maps blog:
Mr Kirkland’s website “is a bit of a grassroots movement, dedicated to breaking the US into smaller, more functional nations”. It provides some extra information on each of the new, smaller American nations, “and a fresh map so that anyone can submit a new proposal.”For myself, I like the idea of a country called "The Boundary Waters" but I think they would soon go to war with The People's Republic of the Plains to claim Chicago. It would be bloody.
Keen not so sharp, Lessig takes him down
I was listening to NPR's blathershow, To The Point, and Warren Olney had on Andrew Keen to promote his worrywort book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. The man is the sort who lumps in some anonymous post on a BBS board somewhere with Daily Kos and then whinges that we're not listening to the mainstream media and those bastions of journalistic ethics, Tim Russert and Judith MIller. (He doesn't mention them, per se, but that's who I think of.)
Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin came on and called Keen the Ann Coulter of Web 2.0 and then after that I had lunch and stopped paying attention. There is so much wrong in Keen's arguments (too much anonymity, not enough authotarianism, I mean credentials) I don't know where to start. Actually, I do know: Lawrence Lessig, who tears Keen a new'un in defending himself against Keen's charges:
But what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. It tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won't know what's true and what's false. But the book itself is riddled with falsity -- from simple errors of fact, to gross misreadings of arguments, to the most basic errors of economics.So many books come out of mainstream publishing houses that are loose with facts and that suffer from basic bad grammar that the existence of the book itself refutes Keen's point.
June 30, 2007
Let Us Spray
While the geeks cream their jeans waiting for the iPhone, I'm waiting (much longer) for PT-141. And that ain't a patrol boat:
“With PT-141, you feel good, not only sexually aroused,” reported anonymous patient 007, a participant in a Phase 2 trial, “you feel younger and more energetic.” Said another patient: “It helped the libido. So you have the urge and the desire. . . . You get this humming feeling; you’re ready to take your pants off and go.”Not that I need any help, mind you...
June 07, 2007
Foxy Baby
I just started using FoxyTunes with my Firefox browser and I kinda like it. It puts a music player controller down at the bottom right of the browser window, which fixed one thing that was bugging me recently: switching from Firefox to iTunes and back again (over and over again). So I went looking and found this.
But it also has oodles of Web 2.0 goodness: you can use whatever is playing and use Foxytunes' portal to return a page of related searches, including YouTube, LyricWiki, Last.fm, Flickr, Google, Hype Machine, Rhapsody, Amazon, and more. It's reedonk.
May 15, 2007
New Face in Hell!
April 13, 2007
Oh no you DINT!
February 17, 2006
YouTube.com = Video Crack
What a lame ass I must be when over the last two weeks I've been at the Santa Barbara Intnl Film Festival with my film "The Night of the Falcon," and instead the entry I bring you is about YouTube. But hey, whatever.
So, YouTube. At first this started as a way to load up fan films and "funny" home videos. Suddenly it's exploded and it full of music videos and tv clips. Thank you internet. Surely this can't last, but in the meantime, this is how TV should be: searchable and immediately viewable. I was up to 2 a.m. last night, thinking 'just one more, it's only 3 minutes."
I signed up for a free account, which now allows you to subscribe to yet another of my RSS feeds. Anything I've marked as 'favorite', you can now see. Here's the feed.
At the moment, there's some Japanese music videos and ones from Thomas Dolby and Talking Heads. More to come soon!
December 27, 2005
Motel Hell
Keith Milford's Motel Hell is a blog that collects postcards of American motels and reststops. If you loved Phaidon's Boring Postcards books (and who doesn't?) you'll love the damp, moldy smell of this site.
December 20, 2005
Some recent blogroll entries + more!!
You may have noticed a few additions to the blog these days. One is the funky list of what I supposedly have at home from Netflix (left hand column). However, it's experiencing some difficulty and telling you some of what I sent back. Don't blame me, blame Netflix's RSS feed.
The other addition is my del.icio.us links on the right hand side, above the BlogRoll. Both of these feeds were made possible by FeedDigest, which I urge you to check out.
So anyway, I just wanted to alert you to some cool sites I've added to the blogroll, as they're worth checking out:
Cute Overload: A blog of nothing but cute animals. Woogiewoogiewoogie, aren't you the cutest???
Same Hat! Same Hat!: a blog about translating experimental Japanese manga and American manga-style artists.
Subject Barred: Linked from K-punk, Irish follower of Zizek and cultural critic. Has yet to really get going, but K-punk vouches for this site.
Twitch Film: Latest news and trailers about all cool films that are not Hollywood poo.
December 16, 2005
Win a Free MacMini!! (or not)
Do those ads offering free MacMinis/iPods/iBooks really work? Is it all just a big scam? Well, yes and no.
Hardy Menagh from LowEndMac.com dives in and tries to surface with a free mini.
Yes, You Can Get a 'Free' Mac mini - but Is It Worth the Hassles?Subtracting the cost of the failed DVD order and adding the music CDs, my total outlay, excluding credit card purchases, was $70. I used the credit cards to purchase items I would have bought anyway. If you want to, you can add $60 to the total for these items.
A Mac mini with the features this one has retails for $499 shipped from The Apple Store. If you can be happy with these features, it's definitely worth the cost.
December 05, 2005
Grow Cube--Puzzle Game as Art
It's a simple idea really. Use logic to figure out the order of 10 disconnected objects. But game creator "ON" (that's his name, not his position) has made this puzzle a beautiful animated work of art. GrowCube is the sequel to the (harder) Grow, but the solution is very much worth it.
Thanks to Robot Action Boy for the link.
October 05, 2005
It's about BEER!
The guy who runs The Cartoonist and his friend have just started a new blog called Beerwise. It's all about beer, pubs, drinking, beer, and beer. Great logo, too.
July 19, 2005
Very Odd Books
Alfred Armstrong collects odd books so you don't have to. He also knows a thing or two about physics, so he is attracted to bad science and new age books, ready for a good debunking. I love the title of the above book.
Found at Creative Generalist.
July 14, 2005
Garrison Keillor's Confessions of a Listener
Keillor weighs in on podcasting and the return of community radio. Everything old is new again and vice-versa. Makes me want to run out and start podcasting my own particular brand o' lunacy...
AlterNet: Confessions of a Listener: "The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel's brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.
After the iPod takes half the radio audience and satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and internet radio gets a third of the rest and Clear Channel has to start cutting its losses and selling off frequencies, good-neighbor radio will come back. People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you."
July 03, 2005
Doctor Dil-dolittle
Proving that you can find pretty much anything on the web, here's an online store that sells recreations of animal penises in dildo form. I'm not sure if some of these things are physically workable, or whether they're used in combo with a furry mascot outfit.
UPDATE: Actually, I should have dug deeper, and discovered the customer mail page. Thanks to Jon for pointing this out.
June 29, 2005
All News All the Time
Newseum is a cool Flash site that allows you to see todays front pages from over 420 newspapers across the globe. Roll over the map and see a thumbnail, click and see a full screen pdf.
June 28, 2005
Waiter Rant: Anonymous NYC Waiter Blogs
Blogs like this, the well written Waiter Rant, make me wish they were available in print. If you liked Anthony Bourdain's writing, you will like this.
I work in a Tuscan restaurant. Like salmon that must swim upstream to spawn, middle-aged Yuppies are genetically programmed to visit Tuscany before they die. The sous chef, who is from Lucca, jokes you can always pick the invading Americans out of the crowd; fat, slow, pasty and patronizing.
Project C-90 Go!
The days of the cassette are past, but the design lives on in this Russian online collection called Project C-90. Ahhhh yehhh. I always hated those mid-90s Maxell Tapes...
June 25, 2005
The Way Things Work
Met my friends Chris and Mr. C_____ for lunch yesterday, and in tow I brought the William S. Burroughs biography I'm currently reading. In passing, Chris mentioned the reclusive author Clark Ashton Smith, who was a fantacist and contemporary of Lovecraft, who Burroughs tried to visit in Mexico (this isn't mentioned in the bio.) Back at work I checked out Smith's Wikipedia entry, then found this gallery of Smith Ballantine Editions. I particularly like the covers by Gervasio Gallardo, who has a sort of Bosch thing going. A search of Gallardo popped up this (nearly) complete gallery of Ballantime Adult Fantasy Series covers. A further search came up with this illustrated bibliography of Lovecraft, from the deluxe to the mimeographed. Gallardo is in there somewhere. The artist doesn't have a website, but there is a gallery representing him.
Pretty good for 15 minutes 'work'.
June 21, 2005
Michael Jackson without the Surgery
Forensic artist S. Mancusi used his skills in aging people from photos (as witnessed on the "lost child" milk carton series) to figure out what Michael Jackson would look like if the pixie-man hadn't lopped off half his face with a knife. The answer: Solomon Burke.
June 10, 2005
Grocery Store Wars
Here's a cute little parody of Star Wars that promotes Organic Farming over the Dark Side of chemical-laden produce. It's interesting that the original movie still stands up to parody, while none of the others have anything to offer in the way of the iconic. People have included the "Luke I am Your Father" scene so much though, that I'm sure there are those out there that are convinced it's from the first film. And nobody parodies the most recent three...because they suck!
June 01, 2005
Sudoku makes Slate
Two weeks ago, Metafilter blogged about Sudoku the number logic game that has conquered the Brits. Now Slate brings it stateside.
My Days Are Numbered - I'm addicted to a Japanese logic puzzle. You will be, too. By Seth Stevenson: "When Slate asked me to write about 'sudoku' the number puzzle that's taken Britain by storm (and seems poised to conquer the United States, too) I thought it might be a pleasant little assignment. After all, I like puzzles. I'm always up for trying a new one.
And now it's 2 a.m., my deadline is looming, and (as you can see) I'm only on my second paragraph. All because, damn it, I can't stop playing sudoku. I'm a full-on sudoku addict. Thanks, Slate. This assignment is like when the New Republic got that dude to try crack."
I'm not very good with logic puzzles, and my own attempts look retarded. Use pencil. Lots of pencil.
May 31, 2005
Pushy Allmusic
I was on my 6th page of allmusic.com browsing and I got this warning:
"Through traffic monitoring of our websites we have identified your IP address accessing allmusic.com at a rate and speed inconsistent with the noncommercial and personal use permitted by our site's Terms of Service. As a result, further access to allmusic.com has been denied. Because IP addresses can be shared by numerous users, your access may be being denied based on the aggregate use of your IP address rather than your own individual use. To ensure that this is not the case, simply create your own individual user account by becoming a Registered Member of allmusic. [Click on the “Register” button in the upper right hand corner of the home page.] Once you’ve become a Registered Member and are logged in, you will once again have full access to allmusic, and will continue to have access, as long as your usage remains consistent with our Terms of Service. If you are already a Registered Member of allmusic, simply ensure that you are logged in when you use the site. Thank you."
Huh? Has anyone else come across this?
May 28, 2005
Our Side Has All the Nudity
Do right wingers ever get naked and protest anything? Of course not, as this visual blog of Naked Protestors around the world proves by example. All the freewheeling gals (and guys) are on our side. And they're naked. Yay!
May 27, 2005
Moo Moo Caw Caw
??????? This collection of Japanese cookie ads made me chuckle. This sort of surrealism-for-kids is something the Japanese do well and the Americans, um, haven't figured out.
May 26, 2005
Urban Adventurers: Hamms Brewing Co.
More fun (and illegal) infiltration as the Minneapolis Urban Adventurers go spelunking in the abandoned Hamms Brewing Co. I wonder if these have been turned into lofts by now?
This just in...
Stories at the top of the hour...
Ordinary attempted home break-in or zombie attack?
Young high schooler puts investigative journalists of the Fourth Estate to shame.
All this and Chuck Hernandez with the weather!
May 25, 2005
The Happiest Death on Earth
Everytime I begin to think that Disney isn't an evil megacorporation they go and do this: Disney Rejects Pleas Against Serving Shark Fin Soup. Argh. I've seen fisherman harvesting shark fin. They pull the live shark out of the water, slice the fin off, and dump the suffering and very much still alive shark back in the water, where it bleeds to death, rudderless. The thought makes me sick and sad. And yes, Disney sucks.
May 24, 2005
Stunt City
An excellent commercial for something or other from Beam TV.
May 22, 2005
Scenes from a passing car
The A9 project is some sort of plan to photograph whole cities from street level, with a camera mounted on top of a slowly driving van. A lot of this will be boring as all get out to look at, but already there are some good curated galleries over at Flickr.
I particularly like this one, an accidental timelapse shot when the van got stuck in traffic.
The Collected Roper
Regular readers of the The Cartoonist blog will have come across Ralf Zeigermann's 'fast fiction', glimpses of an '60s sci-fi narrative starring somebody called The Roper. I don't like most mini-fiction, but Zeigermann gets it right. Now he's collected 50 of his short stories and is making it avalable free as pdf download, now with illustrations. Sorta would like to hold this in my hand, but you can't knock the free stuff.
May 21, 2005
More Maps, Hacks, and Design bashing
What I've been reading this evening:
Mapping Hacks a blog on tweaking Google maps and other online mapping services.
Urban Cartography is a self-explanatory blog of new urbanism.
Made In USA is an essay about how Americans value speed over design and that's why most of our housing sucks. On the other hand, when design is important (like the iPod), America rocks...
All links sprung--I think--from reading the City Comforts blog.
Carpetbombing San Francisco...I mean Baghdad
Artist-thinker-person Paula Levine has created a Flash presentation that combines a map of Baghdad with a similarly sized map of San Francisco and then demonstrates how much we decimated the former city. This is a good way to conceptualize the damage that we inflict on other cities. The next step would be to allow the user to replace his or her own city for San Francisco. "They bombed my favorite bookstore? Waaah!" etc...
Home Arcade Action
I love it when things I dreamed of as a kid come true. Check out this super snazzy home arcade unit this guy made.