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Entries for October 2006
The Yakov Smirnoff joke — In Soviet
The Yakov Smirnoff joke — In Soviet Russia, television watches you! — is more formally called the “Russian reversal”.
The new
A brief history of ten minutes from now, courtesy of ten minutes ago (and Google (Google is the new Yahoo? Google is the new Microsoft? Google is the new Borg? Google is the new Yellow Pages? Google is the new library?)):
Breast-feeding is the new labor
Dumb is the new smart
Cobain is the new Elvis
Fundamentalists are the new avant-garde
Black is the new Jewish
SnowJoggers are the new Uggs
Square watermelons are the new round watermelons
Negative publicity is the new hot hype
Small is the new big
Yellow is the new black
Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism
Armand De Brignac is the new Cristal
Vertical stripes are the new horizontal stripes
Awake is the new sleep
Cell phones are the new cigarettes
Pale is the new tan
JSON Serialization is the new XML Serialization
Sincerity is the new irony
Black is the new gay
Anti-terrorism is the new terrorism
Non-fiction is the new Fiction
RVs are the new homes
Gay cowboys are the new penguins
Oral is the new second base
Libertarians are the new swing vote
Green is the new Black
Bamboo is the new cotton
Cripples are the new Gay
Searing pretension is the new punk rock
Mannies are the new Mary Poppins
Referrer spam is the new Amway
Videogames are the new graffiti
Eco-apocalypticism is the new religion
Colspan is the new
Because nothing is new (“seen it” is the new creativity), this has been done before: Things that are the new black, This Is The New That, Cliches are the new cliche, In with the new…, and Something is the new something.
If you’re curious as to how this particular snowclone (snowclones are the new cliches) came about, Wikipedia (Wikipedia is the new Google) tells us (we are the new network):
The phrase is commonly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt, who upon visiting India in the 1960s noted the prevalence of pink in the native garb. She declared that “Pink is the new black”, meaning that the color pink seemed to be the foundation of the attire there, much like black was the base color of most ensembles in New York.
India is the new pink.
In his book, Urban Sprawl and Public
In his book, Urban Sprawl and Public Health, public-health advocate Richard Jackson says that “our car-dependent suburban environment is killing us”. “If that poor woman had collapsed from heat stroke, we docs would have written the cause of death as heat stroke and not lack of trees and public transportation, poor urban form, and heat-island effects. If she had been killed by a truck going by, the cause of death would have been ‘motor-vehicle trauma,’ and not lack of sidewalks and transit, poor urban planning, and failed political leadership.”
Woo, NASA finally decides to fix the
Woo, NASA finally decides to fix the Hubble, repairs that will keep it working until at least 2013. “Scientists expect an upgraded Hubble to continue to make groundbreaking discoveries.”
Review of a book celebrating Spy magazine. “
Review of a book celebrating Spy magazine. “You can’t overflow with young, reckless rage forever.” (thx, emily)
More on the craptacular “Our Country” Chevrolet
More on the craptacular “Our Country” Chevrolet commercials. The new ones, not mentioned in this article or on Slate, with images of exclusively white, male, heterosexual truck lovers, are possibly even worse. “This is our country…no chicks, homos, Mexicans, or black people welcome.”
Sports fans: “It seems to me if
Sports fans: “It seems to me if you are willing to stick around and watch your team win you should be willing to stick around and watch your team lose.”
A list of 20 works of art you
A list of 20 works of art you need to see before you die. They want to make a list of 50…suggest your favorites in the comments.
Short review of New Partridge Dictionary of
Short review of New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. “‘I like the cut of his jib’ resonates a lot differently than ‘shizzle my mizzle fizzle dizzle!’”
Looks like a good issue of the
Looks like a good issue of the New Yorker this week, including a profile of Will Wright and a review of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map.
Hair coloring for your “betty”…you know,
Hair coloring for your “betty”…you know, pubic hair dye, so you can match your cuffs to your collars. (via dethroner)
Alan Smithee is an official pseudonym used
Alan Smithee is an official pseudonym used for directorial credit when directors don’t want their name associated with a movie because “the film had been wrestled from his or her creative control”. As you can see from Mr. Smithee’s IMDB profile, he’s a fairly prolific director.
Transcript of a recent interview of Barack
Transcript of a recent interview of Barack Obama by David Remnick. An 45-minute audio version is also available.
Scott Rosenberg interviews Steven Johnson about The Ghost Map.
Scott Rosenberg interviews Steven Johnson about The Ghost Map.
Search, always dead
Via Tim O’Reilly comes this comment from Bill Burnham:
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at TIECon on the Search Industry. Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, made one comment in particular that stood out in my mind at the time. In response to a question about the prospects for the myriad of search start-ups looking for funding Peter basically said, and I am paraphrasing somewhat, that search start-ups, in the vein of Google, Yahoo Ask, etc. are dead. Not because search isn’t a great place to be or because they can’t create innovative technologies, but because the investment required to build and operate an Internet-scale, high performance crawling, indexing, and query serving farm were now so great that only the largest Internet companies had a chance of competing.
For Norvig to say what he did seems a little crazy, given the company he works for. The first time that search died was back in 1998. Yahoo, Altavista, Hotbot, Webcrawler, and other sites had the search game all sewn up. They were all about the same in terms of quality and people found what they were looking for much of the time. No one needed another search engine, and starting a search company in such a mature market seemed like folly. Around that time, Google became a company and eventually the world figured out it really did need another search engine.
Turtle with a wheel! A turtle with
Turtle with a wheel! A turtle with one missing back leg has been fitted with a wheel to help get around…a turtle/RC car mashup.
Michael Lewis profile of Cowboys coach Bill
Michael Lewis profile of Cowboys coach Bill Parcells. I don’t know if this is a typical situation, but the Cowboys seem like a pretty dysfunctional organization.
Pixies fans, this is the news you’re
Pixies fans, this is the news you’re all been waiting for: new album in 2007. (via plastcibag)
Suroweicki explans why ever-rising housing prices may
Suroweicki explans why ever-rising housing prices may be deceiving. “If you control for inflation and quality…real home prices barely budged between the eighteen-nineties and the nineteen-nineties. The idea that housing prices have nowhere to go but up is, in other words, a statistical illusion.”
Love it or hate it movies
Netflix, the online DVD rental company, recently released a bunch of their ratings data with the offer of a $1 million prize to anyone who could use that data to make a better movie recommendation system. On the forum for the prize, someone noted that the top 5 most frequently rated movies on Netflix were not particularly popular or critically acclaimed (via fakeisthenewreal):
1. Miss Congeniality
2. Independence Day
3. The Patriot
4. The Day After Tomorrow
5. Pirates of the Caribbean
That led another forum participant to analyze the data and he found some interesting things. The most intriguing result is a list of the movies that Netflix users either really love or really hate:
1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. Lost in Translation
3. Pearl Harbor
4. Miss Congeniality
5. Napoleon Dynamite
6. Fahrenheit 9/11
7. The Patriot
8. The Day After Tomorrow
9. Sister Act
10. Armageddon
11. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
12. Independence Day
13. Sweet Home Alabama
14. Titanic
15. Gone in 60 Seconds
16. Twister
17. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
18. Con Air
19. The Fast and the Furious
20. Dirty Dancing
21. Troy
22. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
23. The Passion of the Christ
24. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
25. Pretty Woman
So what makes these movies so contentious? Generalizing slightly (*cough*), the list is populated with three basic kinds of movies:
Misunderstood masterpieces / cult favorites (Royal Tenenbaums, Kill Bill, Eternal Sunshine)
Action movies (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Fast and the Furious)
Chick flicks (Sister Act, Sweet Home Alabama, Miss Congeniality)
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.
Titanic is really the only outlier on the list…massively popular among several different groups of people and critically well-regarded as well. But I know quite a few people who absolutely hate this movie — the usual complaints are a) chick flick, b) James Cameron’s heavy-handedness, and c) reaction to the huge success of what is perceived to be a marginally entertaining, middling quality film.
BTW, here are the movies on that list that fit into my “love it” category:
The Royal Tenenbaums
Lost in Translation
Napoleon Dynamite
The Day After Tomorrow
Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Titanic
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
By subjecting ordinary water to extremely high
By subjecting ordinary water to extremely high pressure and bombarding it with x-rays, scientists at Los Alamos have formed a new hydrogen-oxygen alloy. “Given high enough pressures, even hydrogen will behave as a metal. All the other heavier elements in hydrogen’s group of the periodic table are metals.”
Hot on the heels of Muhammad Yunus
Hot on the heels of Muhammad Yunus receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006, the New Yorker has an overview of the various approaches to microfinance and microcredit.
NHL ‘94
A confession: I just spent a little while watching NHL ‘94 highlight videos on YouTube and consider it time well spent. After all, it is one of the greatest video games ever made. I noticed quite a few of the featured goals in this video were what my little cadre of gamers in college referred to as “cheater” goals where you go across the goal and slapshot hard to the far side. We outlawed them because it was a guaranteed goal and made playing a whole lot less fun. The goal I didn’t notice so much of was the “rock the cradle” goal, a beautiful goal and my bread and butter as an NHL ‘94 player. It happens on the break where you dribble the puck very quickly back and forth from left to right and, when it works, juke the goalie completely. The best part is that after much practice, you can do it with even the slowest players in the game against the best goalies.
Update: Some crazy souls have made a multiplayer version of NHL ‘94 that works over the internet. You just login to a server, find an opponent, and away you go. There are even leagues!
Robert Birnbaum interviews Michael Lewis about The Blind Side.
Robert Birnbaum interviews Michael Lewis about The Blind Side.
There’s a new Scrabble world record: 830 points,
There’s a new Scrabble world record: 830 points, including a play of quixotry on a triple-triple for a record score of 365. “Looking at the game as a whole, it’s clear that a lack of expertise created the conditions for the record.”
An organization called Scholarships Around the US
An organization called Scholarships Around the US is offering a $5000 scholarship to a college student who blogs. It’s free to apply…all you need to do is write a 300-word essay (and meet a few requirements).
Fascinating story of an amateur cyclist who
Fascinating story of an amateur cyclist who starts taking various performancing enhancing drugs to see how they affect his performance. “I had a life once, and now I’m standing in the Easton WaWa in the middle of the night, looking like a cyborg, with thousands of dollars of drugs coursing through my veins. I started looking forward to the moment when the whole thing would be over.”
The cheapness and small footprint of flat
The cheapness and small footprint of flat panel TVs has made it much easier for restaurants and bars to just hang them up any old where…and spurred on by the recent World Cup festivities, that’s exactly what’s happened in NYC.
Profile of Felicia Pearson, who came off
Profile of Felicia Pearson, who came off the streets of Baltimore to play Snoop on The Wire.
Line Rider
Line Rider is not quite a game but not quite a toy or drawing tool either. But judging by the 6,000,000 views its gotten since it was posted a month ago, Line Rider certainly is compelling. I don’t even like playing it all that much, but I spent a solid hour a few weeks ago watching videos of other people’s tracks on YouTube; it’s just so fascinating to see how much can be done with simple lines and rules. Here’s one of the better tracks I’ve seen (c/o clusterflock). This little non-game has even shown up in Time magazine. Go, little Line Rider, go.
Update: A new version of Line Rider is to be released soon. New features will include an eraser, new types of lines, line snapping, etc.
If you’re looking to record your Line Rider creation and post it to YouTube, you can use CamStudio (Win), Super Screen Recorder (Win), oRipa Screen Recorder (Win), Screen Movie Recorder (Mac), iShowU (Mac), Snapz Pro (Mac), and ScreenRecord (Mac).
For information on how to play Line Rider more effectively, check out the Line Rider Forums.
Richard Dawkins is keeping a journal while
Richard Dawkins is keeping a journal while he tours around in support of The God Delusion. “This Washington signing was remarkable for the number who bought not just one copy of The God Delusion but up to half a dozen. ‘Christmas presents?’ I inquired of one man. ‘Winter solstice’, he instantly corrected me.”
Video of a Steven Levitt talk on
Video of a Steven Levitt talk on the economics of gangs and why gangbanger is not such a good vocation (for one thing, the job pays less than McDonald’s). The board of directors stuff made me think of the co-op on The Wire.
The Royal Institution of London has named
The Royal Institution of London has named Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table the best science book ever written. Other authors in the running: Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins.
Gary Wolf talks to three prominent atheists (
Gary Wolf talks to three prominent atheists (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett) and concludes that “the irony of the New Atheism — this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism — is too much for me”.
It’s sad that the Silicon Valley tech
It’s sad that the Silicon Valley tech scene and press is so fixated on building companies to flip that people need to write about sustainable companies as “a new and better model for Internet startups”. Good luck, Ev and company, in finding success on your own terms.
Phil Gyford has written a great beginner’s guide to freelancing.
Phil Gyford has written a great beginner’s guide to freelancing.
The Enron Explorer lets you search through
The Enron Explorer lets you search through the emails and social networks of Enron, circa 1999-2002. Even kottke.org made it in there. (thx, dylan)
Now that you’ve installed the new version
Now that you’ve installed the new version of Firefox, here’s all the tweaks you need to make it work right.
The story of Tetris
The following is a great 2004 BBC documentary about Tetris, the man who created it, and the lengths that several companies went to in order to procure the rights to distribute it. Tetris - From Russia With Love:
Alexey Pazhitnov, a computer programmer from Moscow, created Tetris in 1985 but as the Soviet Union was Communist and all, the state owned the game and any rights to it. Who procured the rights from whom on the other side of the Iron Curtain became the basis of legal wranglings and lawsuits; the Atari/Nintendo battle over Tetris wasn’t settled until 1993. There’s an abbreviated version of the story, but the documentary is a lot more fun. A rare copy of the Tengen version of Tetris, which was pulled from the shelves due to legal troubles, is available on eBay for around $50.
Alphabetical lists of jobs that Homer Simpson
Alphabetical lists of jobs that Homer Simpson has held. (via cyn-c)
A new book called They Never Said
A new book called They Never Said That debunks some famous phrases that were never actually said by those that supposedly coined them. “Hundreds of pithy remarks from ‘Let them eat cake’ to ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, turn out to be adaptations of comments that were more clumsy or more boring — or which were never said by those thought to have coined them.”
Story of a dog that was addicted
Story of a dog that was addicted to licking toads for the hallucinogenic effect. Listen to the audio version if you can. “Winter was going to come and we were going to have a dog without toad.” (via bb)
Five great movie monologues. #1 is Merkin Muffley
Five great movie monologues. #1 is Merkin Muffley talking to Dmitri on the phone in Dr. Strangelove…one of my favorite scenes of any movie ever.
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