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John Gruber’s latest piece contains a keen insight on Steve Jobs and his legendary reality distortion field. “Jobs, in my opinion, is a terrible liar and a poor actor. When he’s able to convince people of things that aren’t true, or that are exaggerations of the truth, it’s because he believes what’s he saying. The reality distortion field isn’t something he projects willfully; it’s an extension of his own certainty.”
A positive review of Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s “new” movie, a film that Fox has been loath to release and promote. One to look for on DVD, I guess.
Tutorial on adding surprisingly realistic beards to people with Photoshop. (via photojojo, who’s having a contest for the best bearded woman)
Slate’s Jacob Weisberg on The Wire: “no other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature”.
O students! Pray teachers! Behold: a Shakespeare search engine.
What an honest pre-flight announcement would sound like. “We might as well add that space helmets and anti-gravity belts should also be removed, since even to mention the use of the slides as rafts is to enter the realm of science fiction.” Cutting through institutional rhetoric seems to be a reoccuring theme this week, see also honest advice to incoming college freshman and how design works.
Interview with photographer Michael Wolf, who did the great Architecture of Density and 100x100 projects.
By asking for “for the next sheet of paper that he or she would have written on”, Jonathan Safran Foer collected emtpy sheets of paper from a group of writers, building “a museum of pure potential”. (thx, matt)
Update: Here’s the uncut version of the article as it originally appeared in Playboy. (thx, chris)
Stephen King: big fan of The Wire. “The Wire keeps getting better, and to my mind it has made the final jump from great TV to classic TV.” Warning, some season 4 spoilers. (via crazymonk)
Season four of The Wire just started, but I’ve got a season five wishlist item to share. I’d love to see an entire season that flashes back to Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale establishng their operation, say 5-6 years before the start of season one. Maybe we’d also get to see McNulty’s days in the Western with Bunny, Daniels’ dark days, Bubs getting hooked on the junk, some backstory on The Greek, a bit of the Sobotka clan, and more Omar (there’s never enough Omar). This isn’t unprecendented; The Godfather: Part II followed the first movie’s saga of an aging gangster and his three sons with a look at how Vito Corleone’s operation came to be. With the way they’ve handled The Wire so far, I think the show’s creators could pull off something similar in effect and acclaim.
(Now that I think about it, they’re sort of doing that this season anyway. Marlo is kind of a young Avon and in the young school kids, we get a look at drug dealers in the making. Not related at all, but the best line of the series so far is from Clay Davis in the second episode of the 4th season: “Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiit.” Laughed my ass off.)
George Lucas, having run out of Star Wars movies he wants to make, continues to sell us the same movie we’ve seen 70 times in yet another format. Here’s the original theatrical version of Star Wars on DVD (in quaint Dolby 2.0!) so you can prove to your lesser nerd buddies that Han indeed shoots first. Empire and Jedi are also available.
Jay Fernandez of the LA Times gets his hands on the screenplay for Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, Synecdoche, New York — which Charlie will also be directing (in the absence of Spike Jonze) — and loves it. “No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It’s questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious.” Incidentally, synecdoche.
Turn up the sound because everyone in the office is gonna wanna see this video.
Scans of video game magazine advertisements from 1982. My favorite features George Plimpton in an ad for Intellivision, which John Hodgman parodies in a new ad for his book.
Like a babysitter for your weblog. “blogsitter.net is the platform for bloggers who need caring people to sit their blogs.” (thx, drx)
Ben and Tony are postponing South, their unsupported trek to the South Pole and back again, for a year. I own mile 900 of their journey, so I’m looking forward to it, whenever they go.
For some, a trip to Austria steers their gastronomic attention to wiener schnitzel, but for me, it’s all about the wurst.1 Following the good advice of a reader to ignore the sausages on offer in cafes and restaurants, we hit up every lunchtime sausage stand we could find during our visit for the real deal.
In Salzburg, the typical stand offers 8-10 different kinds of wurst, from the familiar frankfurter to the spicy pusztakrainer. You can get your wurst on a plate with mustard and a piece of bread or as a “hot dog” (in a bun with mustard and ketchup). For my first wurst, I had a kasekrainer, hot dog-style with ketchup, and it turned out to be my favorite of the trip. Melted cheese (kase) filled the sausage and the bun was perfectly crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. Meg sampled a burenwurst. The next day, we hit up another stand; I tried the frankfurter while Meg had a delicately flavored weisswurst (her favorite of the trip). She speculated they didn’t grill the weisswurst because it would interfere with mild flavor; the spicer wursts seemed to be grilled.
From thence to Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. At 10,000 feet above sea level, we had an unspecifed wurst (the restaurant called it, basically, “the sausage of the day”) that ranks among the best food I’ve ever tasted, but that assessment may have been colored by the fact that we’d hiked up a glacier to get it. On our last day in Innsbruck, we surrendered to the comfort of cafe chairs and had bratwurst (mit sauerkraut und mustard) at a small place in the old town. After a hard day of walking, it beats eating standing up, which is how it works at the wurst stand.
Our final link in the sausage trail was Zurich, which is not in Austria but in the section of Switzerland near Austria and Germany. From a stand by the lake, we shared a pork-based sausage I forget the name of and another beloved weisswurst. Based on the relative unavailability of the wurst there, I get the feeling that the Swiss don’t take their sausages as seriously as the Austrians, at least in cosmopolitan Zurich. Not that the Swiss wurst wasn’t good; they just have other things to worry about…like fondue.2
But to focus entirely on the wurst is to ignore the equally fantastic brot (bread) that accompanies it and many other Austrian dishes. My favorite bread growing up in Wisconsin was called “Vienna bread” and I had always assumed that the cheap loaves we got at the local chain supermarket approximated something found in the Austrian capital. We didn’t get to Vienna, but the Austrian bread we had was indeed like the bread of my childhood…except about 1000 times better. The small, crisp roll we got with our wurst, called a semmel, was not unlike what’s called a roll or kaiser roll at an NYC deli. These rolls, accompanied by some richly flavorful butter, were also available at the complementary breakfast served at our hotel and I was tempted to violate the no-taking-food-from-the-breakfast-area rule and cram my bag full of them. If the bread at our hotel was that good, I can’t imagine what the best bakeries of the region have to offer. The French, whom I’ve always considered the champions of all things bread, might have something to worry about from Austria. Clearly, more delicious research is called for.
[1] Not that the rest of Austrian cuisine wasn’t uniformly excellent. I had a pork dish with spatzle in a creamy mushroom sauce at a Salzburg restaurant that I will crave for months to come. And that garlic soup at Ottoburg in Innsbruck! ↩
[2] I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for the title of this post (the other option was “It was the wurst of times”). But count your blessings that you’re not reading an article on the yummy fondue we had in Zurich entitled “You’re damned if you fondue, and you’re damned if you fondon’t”. (I know what you’re thinking: “oh no, he fondidn’t…”) ↩
The Guardian has a nice profile/interview of David Remnick. Incidentally, Remnick has a monster 25-page profile of Bill Clinton in this week’s New Yorker…well worth reading if you can track down a copy of the magazine; consider this Q&A with Remnick about the article a tasty snack.
David Sedaris, plagued as usual by language problems, has a taxing time at a French doctor’s office. “It’s funny the things that run through your mind when you’re sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers.”
EarthWallpapers is a collection of desktop wallpaper taken from Google Maps satellite photos. This one’s my new desktop.
Oh, rejoice and be glad…there will be a season five of The Wire. “Balancing small audiences again critical acclaim, HBO has picked up a fifth season of drama The Wire.” The season may focus on the media’s role in politics. (thx, mark)
I didn’t see this one in the FAQ, so I’ll ask the question here: Can someone explain to me why the just-released Series3 TiVo (aka TiVo HD) costs $800? (!!) I’ve been waiting for this damn thing for months/years now, but I just can’t justify spending that much money when Time Warner’s (admittedly inferior in many ways) HD DVR is $7/mo. Hell, we only get ~12 HD channels in this backwater burg anyway, so downgrading to a regular cable box and hooking up the old TiVo is an option as well.
TiVo’s next priciest box is the 180-hour Series2 for $130.1 What’s in that box that’s worth the extra $670? Is it the dual HD tuners? The THX? (Maybe Lucas charges exorbitant sums of money for THX certification?) The extra hard drive space for the additional 170 hours of programming? The CableCard inputs? The backlit remote? What?
[1] Although the Series2’s service fee is $20/mo versus $13/mo for the Series3, based on a 1-year contract. On a three-year contract, the S2’s service drops to $17/mo while the S# would still be $13/mo. Over three years, that brings the total price of the S3 to
~$1270 compared to ~$740 for the S2, a difference of $530. ↩
Old news, but the copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream stolen two years ago from an Oslo museum has been recovered. M&M’s will honor their offer of 2 million M&M’s for the safe recovery of the painting. No word on whether the reward was responsible for the recovery.
What happens to a blog when its editor goes on vacation? Glenn Reynolds: “I need a vacation more than I care about the traffic.”
The National Park Service has made some of their map symbols and patterns (lava/reef, sand, swamp, and tree) freely available for download in PDF and Illustrator formats. (via peterme)
MacRumors has live coverage of the “September 12th Apple Media Event” (exciting name!). Announced so far: new smaller iPods (but with more storage), iTunes 7, and games for sale at the iTunes Music Store.
Bill Simmons, who writes at ESPN and is one of my favorite sports writers, recently penned a rave review of The Wire (scroll all the way down at the bottom). “Omar might be my favorite HBO villain since Adebici. And that’s saying something.” He also sings the praises of David Foster Wallace’s article on Roger Federer.
Todd Deutsch’s photo gallery, Gamers, contains photos of video game enthusiasts and the (non-virtual) world they inhabit.
Honest advice to incoming college freshman from a former college president. “After paying (and receiving) all this money, please finish up and get out. Colleges like Laudable are escalators; even if you stand still, they will move you upward toward greater economic opportunity. Once you leave us, you’ll have a better chance for a good job and a way to pay off your debt and to give us more money when we call on you as alumni.”
I’m currently testing out this rule for filtering image spam messages with Mail.app. I’m hoping it works because all of the unfiltered image spam clogging my inbox is slowly killing me. Not sure it’s going to work though…because of kottke.org, I get a lot of email from people who have not previously contacted me. (via matt)
The oh, don’t forget site offers an easy way to send yourself (and other people) reminders to a mobile phone. An API for this would be great…you could (theoretically) send all your iCal appointment alarms to the service.
Michael Bierut on his design process, written in plain language that the client never gets to hear (but maybe they should):
When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people - at least the ones I’ve told you about - have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?
It is like magic. Reminds me of something Jeff Veen wrote last year on his process:
And I sort of realized that I do design that way. I build up a tremendous amount of background data, let it synthesize, then “blink” it out as a fully-formed solution. It typically works like this:
- Talk to everybody I possibly can about the problem.
- Read everything that would even be remotely related to what I’m doing. Hang charts, graphs, diagrams, and screenshots all over my office.
- Observe user research; recall past research.
- Stew in it all, panic as deadline approaches, stop sleeping, stop eating.
- Be struck with an epiphany. Instantly see the solution. Curse my tools for being too slow as I frantically get it all down in a document.
- Sleep for three days.
Like I said when I first read Jeff’s piece, in my experience, a designer gets the job done in any way she can and then figures out how to sell it to the client, typically by coming up with an effective (and hopefully at least partially truthful) backstory that’s crammed into a 5-step iterative process, charts of which are ubiquitous in design firm pitches.
Bill Stumpf, designer of the Aeron chair, passed away late last month at age 70. “I work best when I’m pushed to the edge, when I’m at the point where my pride is subdued, where I’m an innocent again.” (via matt)
Great video explaining how to turn a Britney Spears song into a Bach-style fugue. (via waxy)
Lonely Planet is releasing a book on the micronations of the world. Not Andorra or Liechtenstein, but more like Molossia, a micronation based in Nevada whose currency is “pegged to the value of the Pillsbury cookie dough”. The book is available on Amazon. More on Molossia from Wikipedia.
State of Emergency photo shoot from the September 2006 issue of Vogue Italia. The editorial of these fashion photos exceeds that of much photography found in more conventional US news media. (via bb)
Chart by Ben Schott (of Schott’s Original Miscellany) detailing the 5 years since 9/11.
Bed Jumping: photos of people jumping on hotel beds. More on Flickr. (thx, joshua)
The Wire influenced a Baltimore hip-hop producer to make a mix tape called Hampsterdam and now season four of the show will be featuring more of the local music scene there. (thx, doug)
A video tour of all the “on a stick” foods available at the Minnesota State Fair. Photos of fair foods here. Mmmm, deep-fried Twinkie. And hot dish on a sitck! (thx, michael and lia)
Update: More food on a stick photos from the 2006 fair.
Wal-Mart wants to sell 100 million CFLs (compact fluorescent lightbulbs) in the next 12 months. “Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.” Between this and the organic food, Wal-Mart is agressively pursuing green initiatives. (thx, brock)
Fun list of typical blog posts from some well-known blogs. The kottke.org one is pretty spot on.
Documentary on hacking: The Secret History of Hacking. Features Woz, Capt. Crunch, and Kevin Mitnick.
Adrian Holovaty, who works at the Washington Post, has some advice for how the news media should function: “newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview”. Holovaty argues for more structured data to be offered, not just the typical written story. Matt Thompson previously argued that the press needs a new paradigm, a shift from searching for hidden information (a la Watergate) to interpreting the massive amounts of publicly available data for patterns and stories (a la Enron/WorldCom/etc).
This is old news, but I missed it while I was gone, so apologies if you’ve seen this. Banksy replaced copies of Paris Hilton’s new CD in stores around the UK with his own copies containing doctored album art and a 40-minute song by Gnarls Barkley’s Danger Mouse. Banksy made a video of himself pulling off the stunt. Copies of the CD are on eBay for $180-1,300. An mp3 of the song contained on the doctored CD is available.
The “fondue” tag on Flickr has a surprising amount of entries. Our fondue in Switzerland. See also: the “wurst” tag.
It’s difficult to talk about The Wire without wanting to reveal all sorts of plot details, character developments, and other spoilers, so instead I’ll tell you how excited I am about the season four premiere tonight on HBO. (It’s been available on HBO On Demand for a week or so now, but I’ve been out of the country so Meg and I are watching it tonight the old fashioned way: live.) Before we left for Austria, we burned through all 37 hours of the first three seasons in about four weeks, and in my opinion, The Wire is one of the very best television shows ever.
Despite being critically acclaimed, The Wire is also unfortunately one of HBO’s less appreciated shows audience-wise. So, a little plug: get the season one DVDs from Netflix (or Amazon), park your ass in front of the television, and watch it. All the seasons tend to start a little slow but stick with it and ye shall be rewarded. (I was almost bored watching the first 3-4 episodes of season three, but the the payoff in the later episodes…oh man.) Alright, get to it.
Andy on some recent baiting of people looking for sex on Craigslist. “In a staggering move, he then published every single response, unedited and uncensored, with all photos and personal information to [the web].”
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