Fenway as scale model
A fake tilt-shift photo of Fenway Park in Boston makes the ballpark look like a scale model. I seemingly will never tire of this gimmick. (via let’s go mets)
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Entries for October 2008
Banjo used in brain surgery
Due to a hand tremor, musician Eddie Adcock was having trouble playing the banjo. During the surgery to fix the problem, the doctors had Adcock play his banjo to isolate the problem in his brain and then they made the repair. Video here. (via delicious ghost)
10 reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news
A list of reasons that newspapers won’t (can’t?) reinvent news.
The culture of newspaper management is a dysfunctional relic of a low-bandwidth, monopoly era. It still hasn’t adapted to the lessons of Web 2.0, it’s generally beholden to a short-term stock price instead of a long-term re-investment strategy and it simply refuses to accept that you can’t expect 20 profit margins in a competitive market. Instead of leading, it is a legacy anchor.
An overly harsh list, but good food for thought.
The eyeballing game
The eyeballing game tests how good you are at lining things up. I got a 4.46 on my first try, but my hand slipped on one of them so I’m going to try again… Leave your best (or worst) score in the comments. (via core77)
Update: 4.34. I suck at parallelograms and triangle centers.
kottke.org on Facebook
kottke.org now has a Facebook page. I don’t know what this is good for exactly, but there it is. Become a fan! (kottke.org also has a Twitter account if you’d like to read the site that way.)
Old MacBook Pros, $700 off
Amazon is selling old MacBook Pros for $700 less than they were going for just two days ago. If you’ve ever wanted Apple hardware at a good value, now’s your chance. (via daringfireball)
Finding good stuff on the web
Learn how designer Michael Surtees finds good stuff on the web without having to use an RSS reader.
Writing term papers for money
This guy used to write term papers for money…and it partially financed his first house.
The term paper biz is managed by brokers who take financial risks by accepting credit card payments and psychological risks by actually talking to the clients. Most of the customers just aren’t very bright. One of my brokers would even mark assignments with the code words DUMB CLIENT. That meant to use simple English; nothing’s worse than a client calling back to ask a broker — most of whom had no particular academic training — what certain words in the paper meant. One time a client actually asked to talk to me personally and lamented that he just didn’t “know a lot about Plah-toe.” Distance learning meant that he’d never heard anyone say the name.
I’m curious…have you used term paper writing services in the past? I’ve whipped up a little poll: Have you ever bought a term paper? It’s anonymous so please be honest. (via clusterflock)
Best news photos
Vanity Fair has a list of the 25 best news photographs. Many are familar but I had never seen the photo of Roman Polanski sitting outside his house after his wife’s murder. (Quite a few of these photos are disturbing. Viewer beware.)
Modulex: Legos for grown-ups
In the 1960s, the designer of the modern Lego brick formed a new company to make a product for adults called Modulex.
In the early 1960’s Godtfred was building a new house and, naturally, he tried to model the structure with Lego bricks. The problem was that the Lego brick, with an aspect ratio of 6:5, was different than standard European construction modules of 1:1. Rather than contend with the problems of using regular Lego bricks he simply had new, special bricks molded for him. Bricks that would allow him to more closely copy his architectural plans.
The blocks were intended for use by architects. Reference Library has another look at these Legos for grown-ups. (via things)
The blogging houseplant
When houseplants start blogging, you know the trend is on its way out.
The plant interface system, which is built around technology developed by Satoshi Kuribayashi at the Keio University Hiroya Tanaka Laboratory, uses surface potential sensors to read the weak bioelectric current flowing across the surface of the leaves. This natural current fluctuates in response to changes in the immediate environment, such as temperature, humidity, vibration, electromagnetic waves and nearby human activity. A specially developed algorithm translates this data into Japanese sentences, which are used as fodder for the plant’s daily blog posts.
(via waxy)
When Obama wins…
According to the latest polls, we might be close to finding out what happens When Obama Wins…
Haruki Murakami reading report
The Millions has a brief report on a Haruki Murakami reading that took place recently in Berkeley, CA.
Writing a story for me is just like playing a video game. I start with a word or idea, then I stick out my hand to catch what’s coming next. I’m a player, and at the same time, I’m a programmer. It’s kind of like playing chess by yourself. When you’re the white player, you don’t think about the black player. It’s possible, but it’s hard. It’s kind of schizophrenic.
Murakami sounds like a cool cat. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of my favorite novels, one of those books I read at exactly the right moment in my life, like I needed it.
The women of parkour
The NY Times reports that a growing number of women are taking up parkour.
“There are certain disadvantages to doing parkour as a woman,” Zanevsky said. “The most annoying is if you’re training alone, as I do in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the unwelcome attention from guys. You get catcalls, because you’re doing these weird movements.
And there’s a video! (via fimoculous)
Seeking kottke.org RSS feed sponsors
Hear ye! I’m trying something new on kottke.org. Sponsorships of kottke.org’s RSS feed are now available on a weekly basis. Sponsorships are exclusive and begin next week. If you’re interested, check out the sponsorship page for details and get in touch.
P.S. The feed sponsorship idea was borrowed from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. I’d urge you to head on over to check out his sponsorship opportunities, but the DF feed is fully booked through the end of the year. (!!)
P.S.2. Advertising on the site proper continues to be handled expertly by The Deck. If you’d like to advertise on the site, read up on your options there.
New Apple MacBooks
Apple announced new MacBooks and MacBooks Pro today and as Apple’s new releases always seem to do, the new models make the old ones look like a pile of puke. (My year-old MacBook Pro suddenly looks like an antique.) To show off their new lineup and manufacturing process, they’ve produced a little video. Jonathan Ive is one earnest dude.
Brand posters for movies
Movie posters that list all the product placements in the films. (via quips)
Gladwell on early- and late-blooming geniuses
Now that he has a book coming out on the subject of genius and high achievement, the New Yorker finally lets Malcolm Gladwell write about David Galenson’s work on age and innovation. (A previous effort was Gladwell’s first article to be rejected by The New Yorker.) For an overview of Galenson’s work, check out my post from August.
The most interesting bit of Gladwell’s piece is his discussion of the economics of the two different types of artist. The conceptual artist’s talent is noticed and rewarded immediately. But conceptual innovators need more help to reach their full potential.
Sharie was Ben’s wife. But she was also-to borrow a term from long ago-his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career, or Picasso, whose talent was so blindingly obvious that an art dealer offered him a hundred-and-fifty-franc-a-month stipend the minute he got to Paris, at age twenty. If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.
Gladwell discusses the article in a podcast and will be answering reader questions about it later in the week.
Hitchens: vote for Obama
Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama for President.
To summarize what little I learned from all this: A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia. But he or she cannot change the fact — if it happens to be a fact — that he or she is a pathological liar, or a dimwit, or a proud ignoramus. And even in the short run, this must and will tell.
To hammer home his point, Hitchens compares McCain to Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s running mate in 1992. Oh yes, he went there.
The Elements of [programming] Style
Read in the right way, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style becomes an important reference for software development.
5.21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat
Young writersInexperienced programmers will be draw at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of newvocabulariesabstractions, the exciting rhythms of special segments of theirsocietyindustry, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.
Quirky maps and charts for NYC wayfinding
Christoph Niemann shares a series of his New York City cheatsheets, including tips for getting on and off the subway at the proper points, muffin poking (you know, for checking freshness), and a door opening maneuver called “The Northside Eagle”.
Whenever I rode the subway with my two older boys, I tried to hold on to their hands at all times. In the process, I developed a special move. I think anyone who saw it must have been impressed.
I would hold the boys’ hands as we briskly made our way out of the station, then, just as we reached the turnstiles, I would let go. We would pass through the turnstiles simultaneously, and so smoothly that the boys’ hands would still be up in the air when we got to the other side, where I would grab their little fingers again in one fluid motion. (Requires practice.)
These are great fun.
Muji Chronotebook
The Muji Chronotebook combines the flexibility of a plain paper notebook with the utility of a daily planner.
For each function or feature you add, you lose a purpose. A blank sheet that could’ve been used in a million different ways can now only be used for a few. Artists aren’t going to buy a calendar if they’re looking for something to sketch on. Writers aren’t going to pick up to-do lists to use as a journal. This isn’t a bad thing per se — by narrowing down on a purpose, a blank sheet of paper can become more useful and relevant to certain people.
Each page of the Chronotebook has a analog clock in the middle, around which you can freely form appointments (just draw a line to the time for the meeting), sketch, make lists, or anything else the mostly blank page beckons you to do. Fantastic idea.
Update: Here’s the same idea in whiteboard form. (thx, michael)
Meeting in-between
Need to find a central meeting spot between two locations? Try MeetWays. It’ll even find you a restaurant for a coffee or bite. (thx, kristen)
Useful black holes
A list of 15 uses of tiny black holes, including hazardous waste disposal, cheap transport, and hanging posters without tacks.
Kennedy’s catchy jingle
From The Living Room Candidate, a site which houses presidential campaign commercials from 1952-present, comes a 1960 commercial for John F. Kennedy. How the ad positions Kennedy reminds me of the delicate fusion that Barack Obama is attempting with his relative newness to politics and readiness for the job.
Do you want a man for President who’s seasoned through and through but not so doggoned seasoned that he won’t try something new? A man who’s old enough to know and young enough to do…
What a great ad…I wish they still made ‘em like this. You may remember seeing this on Mad Men.
Photos of the Sun
The Big Picture collects photos of the Sun. I’ve featured a number of these on kottke.org before but it never hurts to look often at the Sun.
The Atlantic redesign
The Atlantic is getting a redesign. Changes are already afoot over at the web site and Pentagram’s blog has an extensive look at the magazine’s new look, designed by Michael Bierut, Luke Hayman, and their team. I love the proposed Helvetica cover. The inspiration for the throw-back logo came in part from an appearance of an old issue of the magazine on Mad Men (Bierut is a fan).
BTW, the new cover tells of an article on blogs — Will Blogs Kill Writing? — that you will likely be hearing about from all corners of the web when the issue is released next week.
Here is New York
This slim booklet has been sitting on my bookshelf for ages, and I finally decided to give it a shot yesterday. Here is New York is amazing book, perhaps the most succinct and apt description of New York City ever put on paper. In the hands of E.B. White, NYC is at once a city of inches and multitudes, of loneliness and excitement, of riches and squalor, of permanence and transience. The particulars of the city have changed, as White himself admits, but the first half of the book could well have been written yesterday instead of 1949. With apologies to Mr. White and his publishers, an extended excerpt:
New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute. Since I have been sitting in this miasmic air shaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest air show ever staged in all the world took place in town. I didn’t attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn’t even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this airshaft to fly over. The biggest ocean-going ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn’t notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers. I am told this is the greatest seaport in the world, with six hundred and fifty miles of water front, and ships calling here from many exotic lands, but the only boat I’ve happened to notice since my arrival was a small sloop tacking out of the East River night before last on the ebb tide when I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss. The Lions have been in convention. I’ve not seen one Lion. A friend of mine saw one and told me about him. (He was lame, and was wearing a bolero.) At the ballgrounds and horse parks the greatest sporting spectacles have been enacted. I saw no ballplayer, no race horse. The governor came to town. I heard the siren scream, but that was all there was to that — an eighteen-inch margin again. A man was killed by a falling cornice. I was not a party to the tragedy, and again the inches counted heavily.
I mention these merely to show that New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that ever event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul. In most metropolises, small and large, the choice is often not with the individual at all. He is thrown to the Lions. The Lions are overwhelming; the event is unavoidable. A cornice falls, and it hits ever citizen on the head, every last man in town. I sometimes think the only event that hits every New Yorker on the head is the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, which is fairly penetrating — the Irish are a hard race to tune out, and they have the police force right in the family.
And a smaller bit from near the end of the piece:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of the jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
White was referring to the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union but he could easily have been talking about 9/11, or even the current financial crisis threatening to take down one of the city’s most prominent institutions.
This American Life on the financial crisis
This radio program made the rounds last week, but I finally got caught up this weekend so I’ll add my voice to the chorus urging you to listen to This American Life’s episode on the financial crisis, Another Frightening Show About the Economy. Paired with The Giant Pool of Money from back in May, this is an excellent overview of what’s going on in the financial markets right now. The hosts of the two shows are also doing a daily blog/podcast thing at Planet Money In addition, the last half of this week’s TAL concerns the political angle of the financial mess. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.
Molecular gastronomy for four-year-olds
Slate writer Sara Dickerman’s 4-year-old son won’t eat his vegetables so she decided to try some molecular gastronomy to fool the kid into eating his broccoli in little spheres.
The tomato water doesn’t really transform into spheres so much as blobs with little tails of clear gelatin. And here my son begins to get really nervous; realizing that he will have to eat not only something tomato-flavored but something that in shape and overall texture most closely resembles a tadpole.
Star Wars A to Z
A set of nicely illustrated Star Wars ABC cards. A is for Ackbar, S is for Sarlacc, etc.
Stock market charts, in context
Phil Gyford, wearing his finest pair of Tufte trousers, takes a chart of the FTSE that the Guardian ran on Saturday and places it on a scale that shows the fluctuations of Friday’s market compared to the full value of the index.
This particular annoyance is the graphs of share prices in the press and on TV. It is standard practice to start the y-axis at a number much higher than zero, in order to magnify the ups and downs of the market.
Best sports journalism
In a recent column, ESPN sports writer Bill Simmons shared his list of best sports pieces ever written. Max from The Millions took Simmons’ list and found many of the articles were available online for your complementary reading pleasure. Authors include Gay Talese, Roger Angell, George Plimton, and David Foster Wallace.
Beyond Flash
Jonathan Harris recently gave a talk at a Flash conference, attended by a community of people that pride themselves on producing amazing work, and his constructive criticism didn’t go over too well.
With a number of notable exceptions, most of the work I see coming from the Flash community is largely devoid of ideas. There is great obsession with slickness, surface, speed, technology, and language, but very little soul at the core, very little being said. I believe that in the long run, ideas are the only things that survive.
That seems about right.
Letters from Norman Mailer
This collection of letters written by Norman Mailer over the course of the last 60 years is a revealing portrait of the author and an interesting look at the history of the last half of the 20th century.
I’m rather depressed these days. It’s been years since anything I’ve done has turned out successfully — with a few rare exceptions — and I’m falling into the thing which afflicted you a couple of years ago — a failure of the will, shall we say. My ambitions seem far beyond my talents, and light-years beyond the vicissitudes of my character, and I think of this enormous novel I’m now starting, which could well take ten years, and if done properly, it must be unpublishable except in green-backed French “dirty” editions, and I’ll be middle-aged when it’s done, and somehow I just don’t believe in myself the way I used to, and indeed, worst of all, it doesn’t even seem terribly important. I’m beginning to have the tolerance of the defeated — people I would have despised a few years ago now seem bearable — after all, I say to myself, I haven’t done very well with all the luck I had, and perhaps I do wrong to judge them.
I particularly like the letters written to William F. Buckley, Jr., a man whom Mailer called a friend but with whom he disagreed vehemently on political issues. Don’t see much of that today, publicly at least.
Death by kisses, an unusual tombstone
After posting about the Metropolitan Life Tower the other day, I was looking through some recent email and discovered one from a week ago that by chance contained a very unusual story about the building. Filmmaker Pes was researching for a film in Woodlawn Cemetery when he came across the odd tombstone of a 15-year-old boy who had died on his birthday:
LOST LIFE BY STAB IN FALLING ON
INK ERASER, EVADING SIX YOUNG
WOMEN TRYING TO GIVE HIM
BIRTHDAY KISSES IN OFFICE
METROPOLITAN LIFE BUILDING
A NY Times story from February 16, 1909, Stabbed to Death in Office Frolic, reveals how George Millitt died.
Yesterday he came down and remarked that it was the anniversary of the wreck of the Maine. He explained that he knew it because the ship had been blown up on his birthday and that he was 15 yesterday.
At once the girls began to tease him. They told him that on such an occasion he desereved a kiss, and every one of them vowed that as soon as office hours were over she would kiss him once for every year that he had lived. He laughingly declared that not a girl should get near him, and was teased about it all day.
As 4:30 o’clock came, and the boy’s work was over, the girls made a rush for him. They tried to hem him in, and he tried to break their line. Suddenly he reeled and fell, crying as he did so.
“I’m stabbed!”
A blade used for scraping ink was in Millitt’s breast pocket and caused the mortal wound. (thx, amid)
The Shopsin’s philosophy
This NY Times article about Shopsin’s is full of wisdom and bullshit (sometimes both at the same time) from owner Kenny Shopsin.
“I dedicate myself to consuming all sorts of ideas,” says Shopsin, an avid reader and Internet crawler. “Eventually something inside me, probably skewed by my erotic feelings about breasts and things like that, assembles a product and just shoots it up.” For example, a recent item on the food blog Serious Eats about foods on a stick led to the State Fair combo plate: corn-dog sausage, s’mores pancakes and chicken-fried eggs. New dishes are printed on the menu the same day: “I spent almost $3,000 on toner in the last three months,” Shopsin says.
Love it. Check out the video of Shopsin cooking his mac ‘n’ cheese pancakes.
The Dark Knight, Wall-E, and complete The Wire out on DVD/Blu-ray
If kottke.org had a movies and TV store, here’s what I’d be selling today:
- The Dark Knight on Blu-ray or DVD. Out Dec 9.
- Wall-E on Blu-ray or DVD. Out Nov 18.
- The Wire: The Complete Series on DVD. Out Dec 9.
Megamovies, TV shows as days-long movies
In a 1999 essay about The Sopranos written after its first season, Vincent Canby suggested that the show was an example of a relatively new form of television, the megamovie.
“Berlin Alexanderplatz,” “The Singing Detective” and “The Sopranos” are something more than mini-series. Packed with characters and events of Dickensian dimension and color, their time and place observed with satiric exactitude, each has the kind of cohesive dramatic arc that defines a work complete unto itself. No matter what they are labeled or what they become, they are not open-ended series, or even mini-series.
They are megamovies.
That is, they are films on a scale imagined by the big-thinking, obsessive, fatally unrealistic Erich von Stroheim when, in 1924, he shot “Greed,” virtually a page-by-page adaptation of Frank Norris’s Zola-esque novel, “McTeague.” Stroheim intended it to be an exemplar of cinematic realism.
Megamovies take television seriously as a medium. They have dramatic arcs that last longer than single episodes or seasons. Megamovies often explore themes and ideas relevant to contemporary society — there’s more going on than just the plot — without resorting to very special episodes. Repeat viewing and close scrutiny is rewarded with a deeper understanding of the material and its themes. They’re shot cinematically and utilize good actors. Plot details sprawl out over multiple episodes, with viewers sometimes having to wait weeks to fit what might have seemed a throwaway line into the larger narrative puzzle.
Episodes of these megamovies, Canby argued presciently, are best watched in bunches, so that the parts more easily make the whole in the viewer’s mind. For many, bingeing on entire seasons on DVD or downloaded via iTunes has become the preferred way to watch these shows. If stamina and non-televisual responsibilities weren’t an issue, it would be preferable to watch these shows in one sitting, as one does with a movie.
Since The Sopranos kick-started things in 1999, the megamovie has become a far more common occurrence on TV. Virginia Heffernan recently stated that the creators of nearly all hour-long dramatic series are aiming to make megamovies. I’ve collected a few examples of megamovies accompanied by their total running times below. The list is incomplete but represents several of the best-known and -appreciated megamovies out there.
The Sopranos, 81 hours 46 minutes
Lost*, 61 hours 59 minutes
Mad Men*, 18 hours 6 minutes
Six Feet Under 57 hours 45 minutes
Deadwood*, 36 hours
The Wire, 60 hours 45 minutes
The West Wing, 111 hours 56 minutes
For The West Wing, that’s 4 days and 16 hours of continuous watching. An asterisk marks megamovies that are as-yet incomplete. In the case of Deadwood, it’s as if the film projector broke about halfway through the movie, only no one got their money back and eveyone left the theater pissed.
Update: In his review of the third episode of Mad Men this season, Andrew Johnston talks about the two dominant forms of TV drama and how The Sopranos and Mad Men fit in. (thx, stephen)
The Ambition of the Independent Video Game
By substituting “independent video game” for “short story” in The Ambition of the Short Story, (mashedmarket) turned the essay into a manifesto of sorts for indie game developers.
The Triple-A game is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the Triple-A game, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The independent video game by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the independent video game can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the Triple-A game — after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that’s left.
Kate Moss art
A collection of artworks featuring Kate Moss, including a self-portrait drawn with lipstick.
Manny being Manny
Conventional wisdom and prevailing opinion among hardcore Boston Red Sox fans is that LA Dodgers left fielder Manny Ramirez finally sulked his way out of a Boston Red Sox uniform by basically phoning it in and causing trouble for his team for a couple of months earlier in the season, which phoning and trouble resulted in a trade of Ramirez to LA for very little in return. Two rebuttals have surfaced recently that seem more plausible to me. The first is Facts About Manny Ramirez by Joe Sheehan. Sheehan uses some of those pesky facts to illustrate that on the field, Manny played as well or better during the supposed phoning-it-in period than he has in the past.
When he played, Ramirez killed the league. He hit .347/.473/.587 in July. His OBP led the team, and his SLG led all Red Sox with at least 25 AB. The Sox, somewhat famously, went 11-13 in July. Lots of people want you to believe that was because Manny Ramirez is a bad guy. I’ll throw out the wildly implausible idea that the Sox went 11-13 because Ortiz played in six games and because veterans Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek has sub-600 OPSs for the month.
Four days before he was traded, Manny Ramirez just about single-handedly saved the Red Sox from getting swept by the Yankees, with doubles in the first and third innings that helped the Sox get out to a 5-0 lead in a game they had to win to stay ahead of the Yankees in the wild-card race.
In Manny Being Manipulated, Bill Simmons attempts to answer the question, Ok, so why did Manny suddenly want to be traded and, more importantly, why did the Red Sox actually oblige? Simmons’ answer: Scott Boras, Ramirez’s agent and “one of the worst human beings in America who hasn’t actually committed a crime”. According to Simmons, it all boiled down to mismatched incentives and following the money.
Manny’s contract was set to expire after the 2008 season, with Boston holding $20 million options for 2009 and 2010. Boras couldn’t earn a commission on the option years because those fees belonged to Manny’s previous agents. He could only get paid when he negotiated Manny’s next contract. And Scott Boras always gets paid.
Boras could only get paid for representing Ramirez if Manny signed a new contract. Which he will next year because as part of the trade, the Dodgers agreed to waive his 2009 option and allow him to become a free agent. And the Red Sox went along because they decided they’d rather have a good relationship with Scott Boras going forward instead of a weird relationship with Ramirez. As for Manny, he gets paid either way, rarely appreciated the weird pressure/adulation put on him and every other Red Sox player by Boston fans, and, I get the feeling, likes swinging a bat, no matter what team he plays for.
Tongans invade Texas town
The NY Times picks up the story of the high school football team with a number of Tongan players covered a couple of days ago on kottke.org.
City officials have patiently assisted Tongan residents acclimate to a new culture, Faiva-Siale said. Compromises have been reached to accommodate large family gatherings at funeral rituals that last for days. And the city has promoted alternatives to the slaughtering of pigs at home for open-pit cooking. A mobile health unit helps to provide free flu shots and medical checkups.
Theft with help from craigslist
A man dressed as a road maintenance worker robbed an armored car in Washington State. As part of his getaway plan, he hired some people via Seattle craigslist to also dress up as road maintenance workers and mill around where the armored car was located.
“I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” one of the unwitting decoys, named Mike, said to the NBC station. As it turns out, they were simply placed there to confuse cops who were looking for a guy wearing a virtually identical outfit.
The thief then escaped down a river on an inner tube. (thx, greg)
$1 food in NYC
You can still get food for $1 at some eating establishments in NYC, even outside of the McDonald’s Dollar Menu.
The Metropolitan Life Tower
The Metropolitan Life Tower is located on the east side of Madison Square Park at 1 Madison Avenue. It has quietly become one of my favorite buildings in the city; I find myself peering up at it whenever I’m in the area. (I took a photo of the building while in line at the Shake Shack last spring…it’s a lovely color in the late afternoon light.) Inspired by a photo posted recently to Shorpy that shows the tower under construction — and before the addition of the building’s iconic clock — I did some research and discovered three things.
One. Modeled after the bell tower of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the Metropolitan Life Tower was completed in 1909 and at 700 feet, it was the tallest building in the world until the Woolworth Building was completed four years later.
Two. The NY Times ran a story in December 1907 about the eventual completion of the structure and how it would take over as the world’s tallest building, surpassing another then-unfinished building, the Singer Tower. In the era before widely available air travel, the building’s vantage point was remarkable.
The view from the top was of a new New York. No other skyscrapers obstructed the vista in either direction. Passing the green roof of the Flatiron Building, the gaze literally spanned the Jersey City Heights and rested on Newark and towns on the Orange Mountains, fifteen miles away.
To the southward the skyscrapers bulked like a range of hills in steel and mortar, the Singer tower rising in the midst, a solitary watch tower on a peak. This hid the harbor, but to the left beyond the bridges, reduced at this height to gray cobwebs, the eye caught the sunlight on the sea — a long strip of shimmering silver beyond Coney Island and the Rockaways.
Three. Star architect Daniel Libeskind is allegedly working on an addition to the Metropolitan Life Building, an addition that by some accounts would reach 70 stories. You can guess how I feel about the prospect of one of those residential glass monstrosities literally and emotionally dwarfing the existing 50-story clock tower, Libeskind or no. Of course, the Metropolitan Life Tower may never have become so iconic had Metropolitan Life’s plans for a 100-story tower one block north not been scrapped because of the Great Depression. They only finished 32 floors of that building, which today houses the celebrated restaurant, Eleven Madison Park.
The financial crisis, a Pokemon parable
This is perhaps the most succinct explanation of the current financial crisis I had read: The Financial Crisis, as Explained to My Fourteen-Year-Old Sister.
Kevin: Imagine that I let you borrow $50, but in exchange for my generosity, you promise to pay me back the $50 with an extra $10 in interest. To make sure you pay me back, I take your Charizard Pokémon card as collateral.
Olivia: Kevin, I don’t play Pokémon anymore.
Kevin: I’m getting to that. Let’s say that the Charizard is worth $50, so in case you decide to not return my money, at least I’ll have something that’s worth what I loaned out.
Olivia: Okay.
Kevin: But one day, people realize that Pokémon is stupid and everyone decides that the cards are overvalued. That’s right — everybody turned twelve on the same day! Now your Charizard is only worth, say, $25.
The only thing that’s missing is the part of the explanation where the parents swoop in and pay Kevin full value for that Pokémon card, which allows him to keep lending money in exchange for cardboard rectangles.
Starship Troopers
Hulu has added Starship Troopers to the lineup. (Not available outside the US, sorry.)
Update: Perhaps those outside of the US would like to use something like this to watch movies and TV on Hulu? (thx, stewart)
Can helium balloons carry off a child?
In the opening credits of the 80s TV show Webster, the title character is shown lifted into the sky by a dozen helium balloons. Mena Trott recently enlisted her young daughter in an attempt to prove, a la Mythbusters, that a few balloons won’t actually lift anyone anywhere.
Update: Mythbusters actually tackled this question in 2004. (thx, javier)
Suburban mom’s duet with Sting
Seattle mom Jessica Ketola recently got to go up on stage for a soundcheck with Sting and The Police. Sting was so impressed with her voice that he invited her to sing with him during the concert.
The stage manager didn’t help. “Sting never shares a microphone,” he muttered to Ketola as she waited in the wings before the concert. “So don’t [expletive] up.” But in true fairy-tale tradition, a white knight swept in with a bottle of water and a few reassuring words. “He says that to me every night, too,” Sting confided.
Here’s a video of the soundcheck and one of Ketola killing it on Don’t Stand So Close to Me. (via girlhacker)
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