The Fine Brothers spoil 100 movies in less than 4 minutes. See also the spoilers t-shirt and an extensive text list of spoilers.
In a segment for the upcoming Deadwood DVD box set, series creator David Milch talks about the abrupt end of the show and some of the plans he'd had for season four:
Milch does say that he had hoped to introduce a couple of new characters in the never-made fourth season, one of which was based on the sojourning father of John D. Rockefeller who passed himself off as a medicine man who was both a fraud (dispensing mostly alcohol as medicine) and bigamist. He'd be accompanied by a native medicine man whose tactictics were about the same. As it was it could only introduce a bit of their stories in season three.
Milch also says that he's currently working on another show for HBO about New York City police in the 70s called Last of the Ninth. (via house next door)
A classic from The Onion in way more than 96 pt. type: HOLY SHIT, MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON.
"Holy living fuck.... Are you fucking believing this? Over," Armstrong radioed back to NASA headquarters nearly 250,000 miles away. "I abso-fucking-lutely am standing on the surface of the fucking moon. I am talking to you from the goddamned fucking moon. Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket."
"Holy mother of fuck," the first man on the moon added.
From a Vanity Fair piece on Bloomberg News, a brief mention of The Bloomberg Way, the style guide used by writers at the financial news and services company (emphasis mine):
Bloomberg News stories, it declared, "have a structure that is as immutable as the rules that govern sonnets and symphonies." Every story needed to include "the Five Fs": first, fastest, factual, final, and future. Leads were to be exactly four paragraphs long, comprising the stating of a theme, a quotation in "plain English from someone who backs up that theme," numbers-based details that further support it, and an explanation of what's at stake. The use of "but" was banned -- it forced readers "to deal with conflicting ideas in the same sentence." Words such as "despite" and "however" were to be avoided for the same reason.
Are there any copies of The Bloomberg Way online? I'd love to check it out. (via surowiecki)
As this video demonstrates, if you move a chicken's body around, its head stays marvelously still. (via waxy)
1863 photo of John L. Burns, War of 1812 veteran and sharpshooter in the Battle of Gettysburg.
Burns, born ca. 1793, was a 70-year-old veteran of the War of 1812 when he was wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg, having volunteered his services as a sharpshooter to the Federal Army. He died of pneumonia in 1872.
And from the comments:
Mr Burns' flintlock is at half-cock with the frizzen down, ready to ready to fire.
The Bank of Oklahoma Building in Tulsa, Oklahoma is (nearly) a half-scale version of the World Trade Center towers. The building was designed by the WTC architect and completed just three years after the Twin Towers.
For the BOk building, Yamasaki reprised the scheme of a Twin Tower at almost exactly half the scale: 52 stories and 667 feet tall, to the Twin Towers' 110 floors (1,362 and 1,368 feet). It has 31 steel perimeter columns per side, to the Twin Towers' 59, producing the same eye-boggling vertical lines on each face. (As Jean Baudrillard noted of the more famous pair, well before its destruction, it is "blind," with no side presenting a facade.) The BOk, too, has a bilevel lobby, whose height is matched by arched windows. But the arches are big and round, like a child's plain wooden building blocks, rather than the Venetian Gothic ogees that, in the World Trade Center, flowed directly into the perimeter columns.
According to Bender's Game (good title!), a direct-to-DVD Futurama movie, the Planet Express HQ is located in Hell's Kitchen right on the Hudson.
The world's highest bridge, the Siduhe Grand Bridge, is nearing completion in China's Hubei province. The bridge is so high off the ground that the Empire State Building could fit under it with over 350 feet to spare. To get the initial cable from one tower to the next, the builders used precisely aimed rockets!
so you've erected the enormous towers on each side of the deep valley, deeper than any valley previously bridged. how do you get a pilot cable from one tower to the next? previous solutions have included: attaching the cable to a kite and flying it over (e.g. niagara falls suspension bridge), carrying one end by helicopter (e.g. akashi kaikyo bridge) and floating one end on a boat (e.g. brooklyn bridge). the brains behind the siduhe bridge decided to ignore all those options and break another record instead. they attached the 3200ft cables to rockets and accurately fired them over the valley, becoming the first people to do so.
A short interview with Michael Lewis about the book he just edited, Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity. In compiling the stories, Lewis was surprised at how little good writing he could find about upcoming financial hard times.
How little there was worth reprinting. I had six interns digging up all kinds of stuff, and I looked at 20 times the amount of material that appeared in the book. I assumed there would be lots of stories predicting each panic before the panics actually struck. But there was very little. Afterwards you'd have a flurry of literary activity, and then everybody was on to the next thing. Still, there was a common thread: You were watching America's growing financial insanity.
The language on this one might offend some, but I thoroughly enjoyed this expletive-laden anti-photographer rant: Photography is for Jerkoffs. Here's how to be a photographer in seven easy steps:
1) Make sure you have a LOT OF FUCKING NATURAL LIGHT.
2) Make sure the natural light SOURCE is behind you
3) Make sure the flash on your camera is OFF. If you need a FLASH, it means you don't have enough NATURAL LIGHT. (step 1)
4) Look through the viewfinder: Make sure that everything in your shot is symmetrical. If a tiny bit of it isn't, like a bird or a queer walking down the street, that's OK because it makes the photo "cool." Go watch every Stanley Kubrick movie ever made if you don't understand this. (Study Alex's fake eyelash as the archetypal stylistic symmetry violator)
5) Take pictures of everyday shit from stupid angles but make sure it's all SYMMETRICAL and that it isn't MOVING.
6) Make sure YOU don't move or have your fat black fingers in front of the lens when you push the button. (priceless tip: push the button down halfway, wait for a clicky sound, and then push it all the way in - this is the BIG photography secret that professionals don't want you to know.)
7) Take TONS of photos of the same thing and then only use the good ones where the bird or the queer wasn't blinking.
You're done. You're a fucking photographer. See how easy that is? That's because it's for JERKOFFS.
(via avenues)
How to charge your iPod using just an onion and some Gatorade. Oh yeah? When we were kids, we ran digital clocks off of potatoes and loved it! Fear the power of the tuber!
Update: It's a myth, busted by Mythbusters no less. Like I said, tubers rule. (thx, everyone)
The impressiveness of the magnetic hard drive:
The dimensions of the head are impressive. With a width of less than a hundred nanometers and a thickness of about ten, it flies above the platter at a speed of up to 15,000 RPM, at a height that's the equivalent of 40 atoms. If you start multiplying these infinitesimally small numbers, you begin to get an idea of their significance.
Consider this little comparison: if the read/write head were a Boeing 747, and the hard-disk platter were the surface of the Earth:
- The head would fly at Mach 800
- At less than one centimeter from the ground
- And count every blade of grass
- Making fewer than 10 unrecoverable counting errors in an area equivalent to all of Ireland.
(via gulfstream)
News to me: Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, has a new book coming out in February called How We Decide.
From the acclaimed author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, a fascinating look at the new science of decision-making-and how it can help us make better choices. Since Plato, philosophers have described the decisionmaking process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate or we "blink" and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they're discovering that this is not how the mind works.Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason -- and the precise mix depends on the situation.When buying a house, for example, it's best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we're picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray.The trick is to determine when to lean on which part of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.
The Criterion Collection just launched their new web site, complete with the option to watch several movies online. It's $5 for a week rental and that's applied toward the cost of the film on DVD or Blu-ray. Not sure about the quality...the excellent intro movie on the home page says "high quality"...not sure if that means HD or what. There are only 17 movies online -- including Au Revoir Les Enfants, Solaris, and Lord of the Flies -- but they'll be adding more as time goes on. (thx, jason, who did the illustration for the intro clip)
The Processing programming language/environment goes 1.0. From the press release:
What is new in Processing 1.0?
The most important aspect of this release is its stability. However, we have added many new features during the last few months. They include a new optimized 2D graphics engine, better integration for working with vector files, and the ability to write tools to enhance the development environment.
Download the newest version here. (thx, dan)
Update: Ben Fry has the press release.
Shaq on Twitter
And thus ends the first full week of Twittering by Shaquille O'Neal. The real Shaquille O'Neal. The NY Times has the details. Apparently Shaq was spurred into tweeting by an imposter posing as him:
"Somebody out there was trying to use my language and trying to speak for me," O'Neal, sounding more amused than offended, said Wednesday night in a telephone interview. "Rather than have that happen, I thought I'd do it myself." O'Neal added: "It's a fun thing. It's a way for fans to connect."
Used to dashing off one-liners to reporters during pre- and post-game interviews, O'Neal is a natural at Twitter's short format. He's already cleared the murky air about his feelings regarding ex-coach Phil Jackson and ex-teammate Kobe Bryant directly to his fans:
This is straight from the shaqs mouth I love phil jackson Kobe bryant is the best palyer in the game And the shaq kobe, kobe shaq was the best one two
One of the biggest uses of Twitter is for namedropping; Shaq picked up on that right away:
I just texted gary payton, one of the greatest point guards ever
He's also urging his teammates to hop on the bandwagon:
Sittin next to steve nash, tryna get hi to join twitter
When Shaq said "it's a way for fans to connect", he wasn't just blowing smoke. After a friend of mine followed THE_REAL_SHAQ early on, Shaq followed him back. My friend then sent him a direct message about something Shaq had said in an interview once and an hour later, a reply from Shaq: "gimme a numba 2 call". And then Shaq called him for a brief chat an hour or two later!
Best of all, he's having fun with it. On Friday, Shaq posted this photo to TwitPic:
That says it all, no? Tweet on, Shaq...we're following you.
Steven Heller spoke with the designer Sol Sender about his iconic Obama "O" logo.
Well, the "O" was the identity for the Obama '08 campaign and the campaign is over. That doesn't mean that the mark will be forgotten; I think the memorabilia from this campaign will have a long shelf life and will stand as a visible symbol of pride for people who supported the candidate and for those who see it as a representation of a watershed moment for our country. As far as having another life, I can't say. Perhaps the 2012 campaign will hark back to it in some way.
Sender's web site has a bit more info on the development of the Obama brand.
New York City beekeeping
Interview with David Graves, NYC beekeeper.
For Berkshire bees, quitting time is about 5 pm. New York City bees, they work harder and longer. And as you can see, we're here before 7 am, and these bees are already starting to work, whereas the country bees won't be opening the doors till about 9 am. And these city bees will still be hard at work at 7 tonight! Maybe it's because it's warmer here or maybe it's the city lights. Whatever it is, they definitely work longer hours.
Graves is one of a number of New York City beekeepers who defy the city health code and risk the $2000 fine levied upon its violation.
But in New York, bees are reprobate and illegal. They appear in the City Health Code's Section 161.01, along with an enormous list of animals "naturally inclined to do harm or capable of inflicting harm," lumped in with the truly ferocious/impractical-polar bear, cougar, alligator, whale-and a menagerie of the truly obscure. Actively encouraged by almost every other self-respecting cultural capital, the common honey bee, according to Health Department logic, must be banished along with binturongs, sea kraits, coatimundis, numbats and zorilles.
Graves has been at this awhile...a NY Times article called him the "Johnny Appleseed of New York beedom" in 1999.
All right, but why beekeeping? "After you do it, everything else in life is calm," said Mr. Solomon, the investment banker. "Let me tell you, 40,000 bees will teach you the power of concentration and patience."
Graves' "Rooftop Magic" Honey is available for purchase online. Some say that eating local honey helps with seasonal allergies but evidence is scarce. Oh and you can order your own package of bees here...three pounds of Buckfast with a queen is just $130. (via clusterflock)
With the Great Depression further removed from today than the Civil War was then, it's difficult to imagine what a contemporary depression might look like.
Much of a modern depression would unfold in the domestic sphere: people driving less, shopping less, and eating in their houses more. They would watch television at home; unemployed parents would watch over their own kids instead of taking them to day care. With online banking, it would even be possible to have a bank run in which no one leaves the comfort of their home.
Also, desuburbanization:
In a deep and sustained downturn, home prices would likely sink further and not rise, dimming the appeal of homeownership, a large part of suburbia's draw. Renting an apartment -- perhaps in a city, where commuting costs are lower -- might be more tempting. And although city crime might increase, the sense of safety that attracted city-dwellers to the suburbs might suffer, too, in a downturn. Many suburban areas have already seen upticks in crime in recent years, which would only get worse as tax-poor towns spent less money on policing and public services.
The story is a bit out-of-date, but this overview of the cause and effects of the Icelandic financial crisis is still worth a read.
Picture a pig trying to balance on a mouse's back and you'll get some idea of the scale of the problem. In a mere seven years since bank deregulation and privatisation, Iceland's financial institutions had managed to rack up $75bn of foreign debt. In his address to the nation, Haarde put the problem in perspective by referring to the $700bn financial rescue package in America: "The huge measures introduced by the US authorities to rescue their banking system represent just under 5 per cent of the US GDP. The total economic debt of the Icelandic banks, however, is many times the GDP of Iceland."
The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway details the use of type in signage, maps, and manuals for the NYC subway. A must-read for type and subway fans.
As if this plethora of signs were not enough, the subway system also had a bewildering variety of other porcelain enamel and hand-painted signs. The porcelain enamel signs, either hung from the ceiling or posted on the walls, were directional as well as informational. The directional signs included those on the outside of the station entrances as well as those intended for the corridors and platforms underground. Many of the informational signs warned against criminal, dangerous or unhealthy behavior: no peddling wares, no leaning over the tracks, no crossing the tracks, no smoking, no spitting. The directional and informational ones were made by Nelke Veribrite Signs and the Baltimore Enamel Company, while the behavioral ones were the product of the Manhattan Dial Company. Most were lettered in some form of sans serif capitals-regular, condensed, square-countered, chamfered, outlined-though some were in bracketed or slab serif roman capitals. They were usually white letters on a colored background (often dark green for the IND and dark blue for the IRT and BMT), yet many were also black on a white background. There was no house style.
What is to modern eyes a beautiful disorder of tiled text and hand-painted enamel became an embarrassing shambles in the 70s and 80s. It was only in late 1989 that Helvetica became the official typeface for New York City subway system signage...about 20 years too late to prevent the current signage from looking dated.
On one of the window ledges of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem sits a wooden ladder that's been there since at least 1835. The purpose of the ladder is unclear but its placement there is due to the Status Quo. When the wood rots, it's replaced. And like many other aspects of the church's ownership arrangement, the continued existence of the ladder is taken very seriously.
Last Monday, chairs, iron bars, and fists flew on the roof of one of the most revered sites in Christianity, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. When the dust cleared, seven Ethiopian Orthodox monks and four Egyptian (Coptic) monks had been injured. The fight started when an Egyptian monk decided to move his chair into the shade -- technically, argued the Ethiopians, encroaching on the latter's jurisdiction.
The linked-to page is on Geocities so it'll likely reach its quota very quickly...maybe bookmark and come back for a look? (thx, phil)
The Netflix Prize and the Case of the Napoleon Dynamite Problem
Clive Thompson writes up the Netflix Prize -- which offers $1 million to the first team to improve upon Netflix's default recommendation algorithm by 10% -- and the vexing Napoleon Dynamite problem that is thwarting all comers.
Bertoni says it's partly because of "Napoleon Dynamite," an indie comedy from 2004 that achieved cult status and went on to become extremely popular on Netflix. It is, Bertoni and others have discovered, maddeningly hard to determine how much people will like it. When Bertoni runs his algorithms on regular hits like "Lethal Weapon" or "Miss Congeniality" and tries to predict how any given Netflix user will rate them, he's usually within eight-tenths of a star. But with films like "Napoleon Dynamite," he's off by an average of 1.2 stars.
The reason, Bertoni says, is that "Napoleon Dynamite" is very weird and very polarizing. It contains a lot of arch, ironic humor, including a famously kooky dance performed by the titular teenage character to help his hapless friend win a student-council election. It's the type of quirky entertainment that tends to be either loved or despised. The movie has been rated more than two million times in the Netflix database, and the ratings are disproportionately one or five stars.
This behavior was flagged as an issue by denizens of the Netflix Prize message board soon after the contest was announced two years ago.
Those are the movies you either loved loved loved or hated hated hated. These are the movies you can argue with your friends about. And good old 'Miss Congeniality' is right up there in the #4 spot. Also not surprising to see up here are: 'Napoleon Dynamite' (I hated it), 'Fahrenheit 9/11' (I loved it), and 'The Passion of the Christ' (didn't see it, but odds are, I'd hate it).
After finding that post, I wrote a little bit about why these movies are so contentious.
The thing that all those kinds of movies have in common is that if you're outside of the intended audience for a particular movie, you probably won't get it. That means that if you hear about a movie that's highly recommended within a certain group and you're not in that group, you're likely to hate it. In some ways, these are movies intended for a narrow audience, were highly regarded within that audience, tried to cross over into wider appeal, and really didn't make it.
The pixel font circa 1567 is cool, but more interesting is Jonathan Hoefler's assertion that the pixel is nearly dead -- except as a design cliche.
The pixel will never go away entirely, but its finite universe of digital watches and winking highway signs is contracting fast. It's likely that the pixel's final and most enduring role will be a shabby one, serving as an out-of-touch visual cliche to connote "the digital age."
Trailer for The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Mickey Rourke.
Back in the late '80s, Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was a headlining professional wrestler. Now, twenty years later, he ekes out a living performing for handfuls of diehard wrestling fans in high school gyms and community centers around New Jersey. Estranged from his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and unable to sustain any real relationships, Randy lives for the thrill of the show and the adoration of his fans.
Rourke looks great in this and Aronofsky appears back on form. I'm not saying that The Fountain was bad...but it probably was. (thx, kabir)
Big thanks to this week's RSS sponsor: Alinea and their new cookbook, the Alinea book (available for $31.50 or $75 for the special slip-covered edition).
Here's how the US restaurant industry works. Despite the existence of many other awards, best-of lists, and food magazines, it falls to Ruth Reichl to annoint the Best Restaurant in America. The previous title holder since 1997 was The French Laundry, but in 2006, Reichl's Gourmet Magazine gave the top honor to Alinea.
A little more than three years after it opened, chef Grant Achatz and his team created the Alinea book, which basically gives away the store. Because the book includes the exact recipes and cooking techniques that they use in the restaurant, you could use it to open your own Alinea, provided you can get everything else right. But for most home cooks, foodies, and other food enthusiasts, owning the Alinea book gives the reader a glimpse into what it takes to run a restaurant at such a high caliber.
P.S. You used to have to buy the book to get access to its companion web site, Alinea Mosaic, but the site is now free for anyone to use.
Best Esquire stories
In celebration of its semisesquicentennial1, Esquire magazine shares the seven greatest stories ever told in the pages of their magazine and has published them online in their entirety. (See also Esquire's 70 greatest sentences.) Get a load of these initial paragraphs.
The School by C.J. Chivers:
Kazbek Misikov stared at the bomb hanging above his family. It was a simple device, a plastic bucket packed with explosive paste, nails, and small metal balls. It weighed perhaps eight pounds. The existence of this bomb had become a central focus of his life. If it exploded, Kazbek knew, it would blast shrapnel into the heads of his wife and two sons, and into him as well, killing them all.
The Falling Man by Tom Junod:
In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.
What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? by Richard Ben Cramer:
Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There's a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says to a Boston writer: "Ain't no one in heaven or earth ever knew more about fishing."
"Sure there is," says the scribe.
"Oh, yeah? Who?"
"Well, God made the fish."
"Yeah, awright," Ted says. "But you have to go pretty far back."
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese:
Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.
M by John Sack:
One, two, three at the most weeks and they would give M company its orders -- they being those dim Olympian entities who reputedly threw cards into an IBM machine or into a hat to determine where each soldier in M would go next, which ones to stay there in the United States, which to live softly in Europe, and which to fight and to die in Vietnam.
The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes! by Tom Wolfe:
Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering north Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!
Superman Comes to the Supermarket by Norman Mailer:
For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one's life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.
[1] That's seventy five years, yo. Quattuordecennial is the anniversarial name for fourteen years. Others. ↩
If the translation to English is to be trusted, Egypt's strongest man generates 240 horsepower, is medically exempt from working because he might hurt someone in the workplace, and, well, it just gets better from there. Oh, and HE'S NEVER SLEPT. (via delicious ghost)
