Entries for December 2007
Eyewitness account of pimply teen absolutely killing the most difficult song on Guitar Hero 3 in the midst of holiday shopping at Best Buy.
There is complete silence. Even my son is staring slackjawed, like he does in church during communion, not understanding the content of the ritual but understanding the tone and sacredness of the space. At just over 6 minutes, the song becomes even more ludicrous. While actually playing it will ever remain for me an uncrossable gap, I am enough a student of the form to recognize the crux. He is Lance Armstrong approaching the bottom of Alpe D’Huez: Will he attack? Kyle has yet to use the Star Power crutch he has carried throughout his meditation. He continues to ignore it.
Here’s a video of someone else playing the same song. In. San. Ity.
Director File has put out its list of Ten Best Music Videos of 2007. Of particular note on the list is a sweet and heartwarming video for The Bees “Listening Man” directed by Dominic Leung.
Leung began his career as a part of hammer & tongs, the creative team behind many influential music videos as well as the movies Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, on which he acted as 2nd unit director and title sequence director, and the upcoming Son of Rambow, which he edited. (via antville)
Diane Arbus’ archives were recently gifted to the Met in NYC.
Unlike the belongings of artists who fade gradually from view, which are sometimes scattered, pilfered or lost, Arbus’s effects were in some ways frozen in time when she committed suicide at 48. Quickly her life began to acquire a cult status paralleling that of her photography.
(via sippey)
I enjoyed reading the AV Club’s The Year in Film 2007. Their hands-down best of the year was No Country For Old Men. (BTW, the term “hands-down” comes from horse racing.)
Some advice from Michael J. Fox.
No matter how much fame you have, it’s not something that belongs to you. If I’m famous, that doesn’t belong to me — that belongs to you. If you can’t remember who I am, I’m no longer famous.
And a bunch of other stuff that’s surprisingly candid and good.
Good news: Alinea’s Grant Achatz announces that his cancer is in remission. Achatz found out earlier this year that he had cancer of the mouth and instead of the traditional surgery route, he worked with his doctors on a treatment that would allow him to continue to cook, his profession and passion.
The US Air Force Research Lab has come up with an idea for refueling tiny spy planes on long missions: recharging its electric motor by stealing energy while hanging from power lines.
It could even temporarily change its shape to look more like innocuous piece of trash hanging from the cable.
Why can’t I stop reading these long stories about Theresa Duncan’s and Jeremy Blake’s suicides? Here’s the latest one from Vanity Fair.
When Theresa Duncan, 40, took her own life on July 10, followed a week later by her boyfriend, Jeremy Blake, 35, their friends were stunned and the press was fascinated: what had destroyed this glamorous couple, stars of New York’s multi-media art world, still madly in love after 12 years?
Previously: NY mag, Newsweek, and LA Weekly.
Looks like there will indeed be a Hobbit film and Peter Jackson is in (although not as director, at least not yet). The deal includes another film to be made that takes place between the end of The Hobbit but before LOTR. (via crazymonk)
Update: The NY Times says that Jackson will not direct as he is already booked for the period in question.
Anyone in a coining mood? If one doesn’t already exist, there needs to be a term for writing a blog comment or Twitter update, thinking better of it, and then discarding it by closing the browser tab without clicking “Post”. As in: “Jason, I would have responded to this post in the comments, but I ________ it instead.” Any ideas?
Pixar has released a new trailer for Wall-E (HD version available). I want this movie and a robot now please.
The 25 best rock posters of all time, according to Billboard. A hit-or-miss list at best. (via quipsologies)
The “lost intro” to Star Wars, a scene featuring Luke pining for adventure on Tatooine. I’m glad it got lost. (via cyn-c)
Signs of progress and setbacks in addressing climate change at the conclusion of Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s annus mirabilis. From Al Gore’s Nobel lecture:
However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”
So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.
The full text of Gore’s lecture is here.
Good Magazine is keeping track of Big Ideas!, one a day until all the letters of the alphabet are done. Did you know that coin flipping isn’t exactly fair?
How America Lost the War on Drugs, a history of the United States government’s efforts to stop its citizens from using illegal substances, primarily crack, heroin, and methamphetamines. Quite long but worth the read.
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic.
It’s not that hard to see how things got off the rails here. Dealing with the supply of drugs is ineffective (it’s too lucrative for people to stop selling and too easy to find countries which seek to profit from it) but provides the illusion of action while attacking the problem from the demand side, which appears to be more effective, comes with messy and complex social problems. What a waste. The bits about meth & the lobbying efforts by the pharmaceutical industry and the medical marijuana crackdowns are particularly maddening.
Somewhat related is a 9-part series from VBS about scopolamine, one of the world’s scariest drugs (via fimoculous). Just blowing the powder into someone’s face is sufficient for them to enter a wakeful zombie state and become the perfect rape or crime victim.
The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus. Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone.
The description of the effect of scopolamine on people reminds me of what the Ampulex compressa wasp does to cockroaches:
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it — in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex — like a dog on a leash.
I wonder if the chemical reactions are similar in both cases.
Big feature in the NY Times Magazine about online craftsters, specifically Etsy. Thought that this bit about the downside of the site was especially interesting:
Others grouse about another side effect, price pressure: The competition is so intense on the site that new crafters can’t break out, and some established ones feel they cannot raise their prices. That’s a particularly thorny problem if part of your sales pitch is that you’ve made a thing yourself; a careful artisan can’t respond to lower prices with greater volume.
Artisanship doesn’t scale, apprentices take time to train, and people buy products based on price. How do artisans compete?
Radio interview with Felicia Pearson, who plays Snoop on The Wire. It’s apparent from the interview that she doesn’t so much act in The Wire as play herself. “I have patience.” (thx, adam)
The last episode of Ricky Gervais’ Extras has a message concerning celebrity and television:
“The Victorian freak show never went away,” Millman rails in a soliloquy that serves as a climax of the “Extras” final episode and a moment of redemption for the character, whose life and friendships have been corrupted by fame. “Now it’s called ‘Big Brother’ or ‘American Idol,’ where in the preliminary rounds we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multimillionaires.”
To the networks, he says: “You can’t wash your hands of this. You can’t keep going, ‘Oh, it’s exploitation, but it’s what the public wants.’ No.”
To the audience watching at home, he says: “Shame on you. And shame on me. I’m the worst of all. Cause I’m one of these people that goes, ‘I’m an entertainer, it’s in my blood.’ Yeah, it’s in my blood because a real job’s too hard.”
Wow, The Simpsons did a parody of Noah Kalina’s Everyday video. Noah, you just graduated summa cum laude from Pop Culture University.
Update: But apparently the background music was used without permission.
A few months back a producer from the Simpsons contacted Carly about using her song ‘everyday’ for an upcoming episode in which they were going to parody my video. She was negotiating a rate for the song, until they never got back to her. No fee was agreed on, no contracts signed.
Maybe they decided since it was parody they didn’t need permission? I don’t find that likely since what little I know about Hollywood/TV is that they’re really concerned about clearing rights. (thx, slava)
Update: The song rights mixup was an accidental oversight and is currently being corrected.
God’s Eye View presents four important Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth, including The Crucifixion, Noah’s Ark, and Moses parting the Red Sea.
In light of the Mitchell Report, Yanksfan vs Soxfan has proposed a record book annotation system so that sports fans can tell which records were set under the influence of which substances. The asterisk is for straight-up steroids and some of the other marks are as follows:
! = Amphetamines
$ = Gambling
|| = Cocaine
~ = Alcohol
. = Dead ball era
∞ = Wore glasses
† = Crazy religious freak
X = General douchebag
A fundamental rule of the internet:
Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of [Perl or PHP] hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don’t overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.
The current state of pigeon racing in NYC.
New York’s pigeon clubs, loosely organized by geography and custom, are a cross between an urban sportsman’s lodge and a time capsule of immigrant, working-class New York. Even as recently as a generation back, fleets of racing pigeons swirled above New York like pulsing gray clouds, but the numbers of racers and birds have thinned, with not enough new fliers to replace the old.
A list of anthropomorphized online video players.
YouTube - Paris Hilton. Fast, a little out of control, used by every fifteen year old in town, looks alright but you get kinda tired of seeing it everywhere.
On the origin of the Earth’s moon and how our planet would be different if we didn’t have a moon.
The Moon has been a stabilizing factor for the axis of rotation of the Earth. If you look at Mars, for instance, that planet has wobbled quite dramatically on its axis over time due to the gravitational influence of all the other planets in the solar system. Because of this obliquity change, the ice that is now at the poles on Mars would sometimes drift to the equator. But the Earth’s moon has helped stabilize our planet so that its axis of rotation stays in the same direction. For this reason, we had much less climatic change than if the Earth had been alone. And this has changed the way life evolved on Earth, allowing for the emergence of more complex multi-cellular organisms compared to a planet where drastic climatic change would allow only small, robust organisms to survive.
This photo of lower Manhattan taken from the Statue of Liberty in 1901 is plenty interesting, especially what I believe is the beginnings of the Manhattan Bridge under construction behind the Brooklyn Bridge.
Update: The bridge under construction is most likely the Williamsburg Bridge, not the Manhattan Bridge. (thx, jake)
The opening title sequence of The Kingdom is a nice 3.5 minute overview of the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia.
The Goodie Bag podcast has an entertaining little video on Trajan, the font used ubiquitously in movie credits and posters:
Like indoor plumbing and toga parties, Trajan hails from Rome. Matter of fact, you can find almost 2,000-year-old inscriptions on Trajan’s column, where they have totally off-the-leash keggers on Saturdays… Russell Crowe has co-starred with Trajan three times now.
This reminds me of Red is Not Funny, J. Tyler Helms’ illustration of the wide use of bold red letters in distinctly unfunny comedies. (via cameron hunt)
Photo of Steve Jobs at his home in 1982.
This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.
This was right in the thick of Lisa/Macintosh development; I bet Jobs didn’t spend a whole lot of time at home. Note: there’s some bad Exif data that prevents the display of this photo in Safari (ironic, eh?)…try Firefox instead. (thx, mark)
Update: Exif data fixed, Safari away.
I still miss Leslie. Sadly it seems like all of her web sites are offline now. :( Check out Internet Archive if you’d like to read and remember.
The pace of human evolution has accelerated greatly over the last 40,000 years, partially due to our population growth.
The brisk rate of human selection occurred for two reasons, Dr. Moyzis’ team says. One was that the population started to grow, first in Africa and then in the rest of the world after the first modern humans left Africa. The larger size of the population meant that there were more mutations for natural selection to work on. The second reason for the accelerated evolution was that the expanding human populations in Africa and Eurasia were encountering climates and diseases to which they had to adapt genetically. The extra mutations in their growing populations allowed them to do so.
Dr. Moyzis said it was widely assumed that once people developed culture, they protected themselves from the environment and from the forces of natural selection. But people also had to adapt to the environments that their culture created, and the new analysis shows that evolution continued even faster than before.
Looks like this study answers the “Is Evolution Over?” question.
Jessica Dimmock’s The Ninth Floor is a series of photos taken of heroin addicts living in a ninth floor Manhattan apartment. The NY Times and New York magazine have slideshows with a little more context. Also available in book form. NSFW. (via clusterflock)
Liquidated Logos by French street artist Zevs.
Re-painting the logos in their own colours, the artist pours paint over them, liquidating one logo after another.
I am a sucker for dripping paint.
According to their web site and TV Guide, last night’s episode of Mythbusters was supposed to address the airplane on a treadmill question. They didn’t and nerds everywhere are upset. According to an email from the executive producer of the show, the segment got rescheduled:
First up, for those concerned that this story has been cancelled, don’t worry, planes on a conveyer belt has been filmed, is spectacular, and will be part of what us Mythbusters refer to as ‘episode 97’. Currently that is due to air on January 30th.
Secondly, for those very aggrieved fans feeling “duped” into watching tonight’s show, I can only apologise. I’m not sure why the listings / internet advertised that tonight’s show contained POCB. I will endeavour to find out an answer but for those conspiracy theorists amongst you, I can assure you that it will have just been an honest mistake.
Not sure that’s going to quench the nerdfury, but I’m glad the piece will air in January.
Tyler Cowen has taken a look at a lot of this year’s “best of” lists and has some meta-recommendations for you.
The Moby Quotient determines the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies.
The equation factors in the artist, how “underground” they are, the social character of the company, and how wealthy the artist is. (via snarkmarket)
Regret the Error’s annual list of media errors and corrections is one of my favorites…the 2007 installment doesn’t disappoint. The corrections in the UK newspapers are awesome:
An article about Lord Lambton (“Lord Louche, sex king of Chiantishire”, News Review, January 7) falsely stated that his son Ned (now Lord Durham) and daughter Catherine held a party at Lord Lambton’s villa, Cetinale, in 1997, which degenerated into such an orgy that Lord Lambton banned them from Cetinale for years. In fact, Lord Durham does not have a sister called Catherine (that is the name of his former wife), there has not been any orgiastic party of any kind and Lord Lambton did not ban him (or Catherine) from Cetinale at all.
What did Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost in Translation? Someone did a bit of audio analysis and posted their findings as a video. (via avenues)
Duelity is a split-screen movie with one half of the screen showing the six-day creation of the earth & man in scientific terms and the other half showing the Big Bang/evolution origin of the universe as it might have been written in the Bible. (Click on “watch” then “duelity” to get the full effect.) Nice use of infographics and illustration. (thx, slava)
Some clever drawings by Russell Weekes. The fig 1 fig 2 one make me chuckle every time I see it.
Oobject has collected several photos of planetarium projectors, which are wonderfully elaborate machines.
Their purpose is a bizarre reversal of a large optical telescope, taking an internal view of the the universe and projecting it on a dome, rather than creating a view from peering outside of one, but the aesthetic is somewhat similar. Another curious similarity is how much they look like some early satellites.
Some of these look like huge drills.
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