The Wire: The Musical
This is amazing…a trailer for a musical version of The Wire done by Funny or Die. Featuring real cast members from the show like Michael K. Williams as Omar, Felicia Pearson as Snoop, and Andre Royo as Bubbles.
(via @monstro)
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Entries for June 2012
Frida Kahlo rocking Daft Punk
Fabian Ciraolo does illustrations that mash up old and new pop culture. My favorite is Frida Kahlo rocking a Daft Punk t-shirt:
Here are a few others I particularly like:
Poisonous spiders swarm Indian town
A festival in Sadiya, a town in northeastern India, was swarmed by an unknown species of aggressive spiders resulting in several bites and the deaths of two residents. The spiders had never been seen in the area, and scientists still don’t know why there was a swarm of them.
Scientists from Dibrugarh University and Gauhati University have not been able to identify the spiders, which resemble tarantulas but may be a new species altogether. Ratul Rajkhowa, a professor of zoology at Cotton College in the city of Guwahati, told the Times that the spiders could be black wishbones, a species native to Southern Australia. If that’s the case, the spiders’ venom would not be deadly but could, in some individuals, cause severe allergic reactions that may result in death. The individuals who died after being bitten by the mysterious spiders were reportedly cremated before autopsies could be performed, and scientists have yet to test the toxicity of the spiders’ venom.
The Times of India article, upon which the Time.com post is based, is amazingly sensationalistic, and worth a click just to see how this type of story should be written.
This was the exact best blog post to write right before bed. (via, well, @LanceBass, who states aptly, “I. Die.”)
Updates on previous entries for Jun 4, 2012*
The world’s worst password requirements list orig. from Jun 04, 2012
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Bill Murray interview in Esquire
If you’re like me, you can read interviews with Bill Murray all day long. Here, go nuts.
When I work, my first relationship with people is professional. There are people who want to be your friend right away. I say, “We’re not gonna be friends until we get this done. If we don’t get this done, we’re never going to be friends, because if we don’t get the job done, then the one thing we did together that we had to do together we failed.” People confuse friendship and relaxation. It’s incredibly important to be relaxed — you don’t have a chance if you’re not relaxed. So I try very hard to relax any kind of tension. But friendship is different.
And when you’re done with that, Aaron Cohen dug up a dozen more Murray longreads.
New Dave Eggers novel: A Hologram for the King
Dave Eggers’ new novel, A Hologram for the King, is due out later this month and Stephen Elliott has an interview with the author over at The Rumpus.
He’s trying to sell IT to the King of Saudi Arabia, with telepresence technology as a lure. It’s basically a way to have long-distance meetings using holograms. And Alan really doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s like a lot of men of his generation, who were trained to sell things, to make deals over dinner, golf courses, all that. But now things are very different, and he’s adrift. I have a lot of friends who work in management and consulting and manufacturing, and they talk a lot about men like Alan, and what to do with them. Their modes of working are sometimes outdated, and they’re hard to hire because they’re very expensive. Alan’s surrounded by young people who know more about IT than he does, who work cheaper, and who assume all things are made in China. They would never see it as fiscally plausible to hire someone like Alan. He costs too much and in Alan’s case, comes with a lot of baggage.
The Impostor
The Nicholas Barclay/Frédéric Bourdin case, which David Grann covered in a 2008 article for the New Yorker, has now inspired a documentary film coming out in July.
As I wrote about Grann’s piece:
At some point, Bourdin’s story gets intertwined with that of Nicholas Barclay, a teen who went missing in Texas in 1994. After that, the story proceeds like the craziest episode of Law and Order you’ve ever seen.
(via @aaroncoleman0)
The world’s worst password requirements list
I tweeted about this but wanted to document it here for posterity. The Attorney General of Texas Child Support website has the worst set of password requirements I’ve ever seen.
Exactly eight characters? No consecutive repeating characters? This is the internet equivalent of everyone throwing their supposedly dangerous 3+ oz. liquid containers into one giant barrel where hundreds of people are queuing up for “security”. Makes you wonder how non-user-friendly the state’s actual child support process is.
Update: Here’s another bad password policy, courtesy of TechRepublic:
Can’t contain two separated numbers? I don’t even. If you’ve run across other examples like these, tweet at me.
Update: Troy Hunt has a list of bad password practices…for example, here’s ING’s 4-digit PIN login:
Four digits, numbers only…FOR A BANK! He also has a screenshot of American Express’ case insensitive password rule.
Update: Jonathan Cogley signed up to access the web site of a “major credit card company” (AmEx?) and ran into the case insensitivity as well.
Update: BTW, there are many resources out there about choosing good passwords, but I found this one particularly helpful.
Update: This one from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services site is very similar to the Texas one.
Is there a consultant somewhere telling state and federal governments how not to do passwords? (via @kelseyfrost)
Update: I’ve gotten several notes about ING…their PINs are 6+ digits but still only numbers, which seems trivial to hack, even with their ever-shifting numeric keypad (readily OCR-able) and image verification (isn’t foolproof).
Update: Suncorp Bank requires that passwords be 6-8 characters and can’t contain consecutive numbers or special characters.
Chase requires a password for your password so you can log in while you log in. Or something.
But the best one so far might be for Sabre Red, a booking system used by travel agents.
7-8 characters in length, no special characters, no more than two repeating characters, and you cannot use the letters Z or Q (presumably a holdover from the days when phone keypads didn’t have Qs or Zs). Wow. (via @SteveD503, @albedoa & @TheLoneCuber)
Update: Here’s another one, from some unspecified site:
(via @toepoke_co_uk)
Neutral Milk Hotel + hip hop = whoa!
This is great so far: Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea mashed up with hip hop. (via av club)
Super slow motion video of skateboarding tricks
Lovely video of skateboarding tricks in super slow motion. It was filmed at 1000fps.
Uncommon skateboarding tricks in super slow motion. Filmed at 1,000 frames per second with a Redlake N3 high speed camera. Since skateboarding trick names are defined by common usage and these tricks are not very common, some of them don’t have well-established names. So here are my best guesses as to what they should be called:
Kyle McPherson — nollie dolphin flip (AKA nollie forward flip)
Cameron Carmichael — backside 180 casper flip (?) (or bs 180 hospital flip)
Jerrod Skorupski — nollie heelflip bs body varial
David Case - nollie 360 shuv underflip (AKA nerd flip)
David Case - frontside shuv underflip (AKA kiwi flip)
Dustin Blauvelt - hardflip pretzel
Dustin Blauvelt - Merlin twist (switch front foot impossible fs 180)
Dustin Blauvelt - nollie heelflip indy grab
Shane Anderson - early grab frontside 180 fingerflip (?)
Jovan Pierson - pressure hardflip (?)
Jovan Pierson - ?? I don’t know what this is, I just call it a Jovan flip
Erick Schaefer - backside pop shuv underflip
Tim Hamp - Nollie pressure hardflip (?)
(thx, jay)
Food trucks in Paris and they going gorillas
The food truck trend has invaded Paris, where young people use the phrase “très Brooklyn” to denote food that combines “informality, creativity and quality”.
On a bright morning last month at the Marché St.-Honoré, a weekly market in an elegant residential section of Paris, several sleekly dressed women struggled to lift the thick burgers to their mouths gracefully. (In French restaurants, and sometimes even fast-food joints, burgers are eaten with utensils, not hands.) A few brave souls were trying to eat tacos with a knife and fork. “C’est pas trop épicé,” said one, encouraging a tentative friend — “It’s not too spicy,” high praise from the chile-fearing French.
Street food itself isn’t new to France. At outdoor markets like this one, there is often a truck selling snacks like pizza, crepes or spicy Moroccan merguez sausages, cooked on griddles and stuffed into baguettes.
But the idea of street food made by chefs, using restaurant-grade ingredients, technique and technology, is very new indeed.
Updates on previous entries for Jun 3, 2012*
The Chameleon, Frederic Bourdin orig. from Aug 04, 2008
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
NY Times Magazine Innovation issue
I kinda hafta link to this, don’t I? From the NY Times Magazine, 32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow…the actual or spiritual successor to their Year in Ideas issue.
The electric light was a failure.
Invented by the British chemist Humphry Davy in the early 1800s, it spent nearly 80 years being passed from one initially hopeful researcher to another, like some not-quite-housebroken puppy. In 1879, Thomas Edison finally figured out how to make an incandescent light bulb that people would buy. But that didn’t mean the technology immediately became successful. It took another 40 years, into the 1920s, for electric utilities to become stable, profitable businesses. And even then, success happened only because the utilities created other reasons to consume electricity. They invented the electric toaster and the electric curling iron and found lots of uses for electric motors. They built Coney Island. They installed electric streetcar lines in any place large enough to call itself a town. All of this, these frivolous gadgets and pleasurable diversions, gave us the light bulb.
DeShawn Stevenson’s ATM
Jason’s covered the rise of the NBA nerd, so maybe you look at this picture posted to the Instagram of Brooklyn Nets guard DeShawn Stevenson and see a hat at a jaunty angle, banana colored pants, a twee bow tie, and-RECORD SCRATCH-is that an ATM behind him? Yes. Yes it is.
Seems that Stevenson was inspired by skateboarder Rob Dyrdek, who had one installed during filming of his MTV reality show Rob and Big. According to TMZ, Stevenson shelled out $3,500 for the installation, charges a ridiculous $4.50 transaction fee, and refills it with $20,000 in cash a few times a year. Seems like a good move to install one in-house, especially if he’s got wealthy NBA teammates stopping over on occasion before they go out for the night.
Curators gonna curate
Former kottke.org guest curator Choire Sicha rails against the dirty filthy c-word. That’s right, “curator”.
Your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you’re a low-grade collector, not a curator. You’re buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling — and you’re then reselling it on your blog. You’re nothing but a secondary market for someone else’s work.
I got fresh Sicha content. Anyone buying Sicha? 2-for-1 Sicha for the next hour only. Free embedded tweets! I’m also selling links to @curateordie for a limited time only, act now!
Movie with Bill Murray as FDR?!
Saw this trailer in front of Moonrise Kingdom last night…Bill Murray plays Franklin Roosevelt in an upcoming movie called Hyde Park on Hudson.
I’m interested in seeing it, but Hyde Park on Hudson is a terrible name.
An oral history of The Wire
The Wire premiered on HBO 10 years ago tomorrow so Maxim (what really?) is out with a long oral history. It’s all worth reading (and finally proof for the ‘I read it for the articles’ argument), but the more interesting bits to me were towards the end, and I wish there were a few more comments from superfans. Marc Spitz did an amazing job wrangling interviews from the majority of the cast.
New to me was the cop actors and crook actors not hanging out together, and Prop Joe mentoring the kids from Season 4.
Tristan Wilds (Michael Lee, student, Stanfield gang enforcer): Every time we’d get a script all four of us would sit down with Robert Chew go over the script and make sure we had it down.
Robert F. Chew (Joseph “Proposition Joe” Stewart, drug kingpin): A couple of them were not from Baltimore so they did not have the lingo and the dialect, so I’d give them hints on that and just understanding the emotion of the scene.
I also liked this bit about Snoop.
Tristan Wilds: I remember when I first read the script, I was like “Noooo! Why do I gotta do it?” Snoop became like my big sister to me; she was everything. I was actually with my niece a couple months ago and she was watching iCarly -and there was a scene where Sam takes paint ball gun and shoots Gib, but he looks at her before she does and says, ‘How’s my hair look?’ And she says, “You look good, Gib.”
Method Man: I always went online to see the reactions that people would have after someone got killed. Snoop, when she got killed, oh you should’ve seen it. You would’ve thought somebody really died. Like it was a funeral happening: “RIP Snoop, we gon’ miss you,” and all this craziness. They were just two lines short of making “In Memory Of” T-Shirts. Same thing with Omar. Stringer, same thing. Then when I die, it’s like “good for him. They should’ve killed his ass sooner.”
Also on the 10th Anniversary tip, here’s Details on 10 Ways the Wire changed TV and The Atlantic says The Wire feels dated. (via @groveatlantic)
More living still lifes from Alexa Meade
Just got a note from Alexa Meade, whose work I featured on kottke.org two years ago. Since then, she’s been around the world working on her art; she’ll soon be in DC for an event at the National Portrait Gallery. I thought it would be fun to circle back and look at some of her work from the past two years.
Keep in mind that these are photographs of real people painted to look like paintings. In some ways, it’s more like sculpture than painting. This is Meade standing next to one of her subjects/objects:
You can see more of her work on her site or at Flickr.
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