Google Ig launched earlier today - puts my Gmail, Weather, Slashdot, NY Times, BBC News and Directions all in one place.
It’s amazing how little Google actually has to do anymore to come up with something really cool… guess this is a bit of the long tail everyone’s always talking about.
For those of you who are too lazy to bother to come back to my blog to read me in the future (you know who you are), waddle on over to my shiny new e-mail subscription page and you can get new posts by e-mail.
Someone named Alastair, who is currently something akin to the internet fairy to me at this point, flittered across the internet to leave me a comment on this earlier post, to let me know that yes, my spidey-sense was indeed correct, pantsketch was referring to the infamous voicemail, but not from the This American Life segment but rather from a sample on “If Not Now, Whenever” by The Books.
For those keeping score at home, the voicemail Fred Schultz’s mother left on his answering machine at Columbia in the early nineties first travelled from voicemail to voicemail attaining cult status among columbia cognoscenti. Then someone told a This American Life producer who tracked down Fred in question, obtained a recording and did a 15 minute segment on it that aired on NPR. Now it gets sampled by The Books, which Pantsketch is listening to and references in a blog post, one of the readers of which (me) notices it, posts a mention on his own blog. Then Alastair, who is aware of both posts, answers the question posed in my post - is this really what pantsketch is referencing here - in the comments and tells me yes, same origin, but different path… so freakin’ six degreesish my head just popped….
So that’s cool & all, but here’s the real upside… I’d never heard of The Books before, but I just checked out their website and now I’m thinking why the heck haven’t I hear of The Books before? This is killer shite… so I bought it off Amazon. (iTunes struck out on this one) and I get to thinking about Pantsketch and I mosey on over there for a second and read about this documentary called the Devil’s Playground and so I think that sounds cool. I just found out about some really cool music and a documentary that will give me something to do tonight. Seriously, before the internet, what did people do? Just talk to each other?!?!?!? God bless you Alastair, whoever you are.
Just happened upon this exceptionally bizzare interesting post on Ebay selling a leather satchel. And I quote….
Following is a series of questions. Answer each honestly and remember, your first response is usually the most accurate one.
* Will your grandkids fight over your present bag when you’re dead?
* Would you ask to be buried with the other bag you are considering?
* Would Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford or Indiana Jones ask where you bought your bag if they saw you with it?
* Have you ever told someone that you love your bag?
* Have you ever strategically placed your bag where people could admire it?
* Are you getting ready to declare bankruptcy and one more charge really won’t matter that much? That reminds me, did you know that Paypal accepts credit cards? Just thought I’d pass that on.
If you answered yes or no to any one of these questions, then you and I both know that you need this bag. You will never be content with any other bag in your life once you have read this description and admired this bag. If you miss it, you will forever kick yourself.
And later… “You’ll be known as “The one with the cool bag” wherever you frequent.” and “I don’t have a big name or a crack marketing team. It’s just me, Dave, and my dog Blue, but he doesn’t really do that much. I don’t have massive warehouses around the country to stack my pallets of products in. The space between the sofa and the wall is just right for my needs.”
It does look rather nice, by the way, though perhaps not $600 nice. The post is going into my copywriters hall of fame file, however. Well, maybe not fame, hall of significance, perhaps. If you happen to have $600 to blow on a bag or are considering bancruptcy (I can’t imagine why) why not give old Dave and Blue a break.
I generally avoid posting on political matters, but I couldn’t resist this one. I dedicate this one to all the my Houston friends who have drunk the Republican Party kool-aid… the Cato Institute ’s latest Federal budget analysis, The Grand Old Spending Party
President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn’t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term.
I just finished reading Donald Miller’s secondthird relatively recent book, Searching for God Knows What and liked it even better than Blue Like Jazz. Miller tends to be somewhat polarizing. You either love him or you hate him, which to me is the mark of any good writer that’s still living (everybody loves the dead ones; though who reads them). Miller’s deceptively simple prose belies a savvy curiosity that renders some tricky theological issues approachable, engaging and thought-provoking, though I suspect many armchair theologians would find them lacking the intellectual rigor they are used to seeing them dressed up in. Easily more rewarding and enjoyable than the twaddle that typically passes for insight in the Christian book market.
My favorite part though, something I will shamelessly copy if when I get around to writing something of my own, is in the acknowledgements where he lists the mood music, the many musicians under whose influence the book was written — “Patty Griffin, Lou Reed, The Shins, The Smiths, Derek Web, Robert Keen, Steve Earle, Andrew Peterson, The Indigo Girls, Beck, Sinead O’Connor, David Wilcox, Joseph Arthur, Bebo Norman, Pedro the Lion, Soundgarden, The Trash Can Sinatras, Pat Green, The Rolling Stones, Nickel Creek, Climber, Damien Rice, The Frames and The Be Good Tanyas.” It took me a little while to realize he mean Robert Earl Keen, but all in all, a damn fine list. Every good bit of fiction needs a set list. Thanks Jessie for letting me borrow it. Sorry Don I’ll get around to buying a copy for myself one of these days. So many books; such little paycheck.
In a recent interview in Toronto, Martin asserted that real value creation now comes from using the designer’s foremost competitive weapon, his imagination, to peer into a mystery – a problem that we recognize but don’t understand – and to devise a rough solution that explains it. “For any company that chooses to innovate, the foremost challenge is this,” Martin says. “Are you willing to step back and ask, ‘What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?’ Well, that’s what designers do: They take on a mystery, some abstract challenge, and they try to create a solution.”
for my new copy of Photoshop CS2 to get here. As usual, I had to finagle the upgrade. For some reason Management takes the cynical view of upgrades, assuming that the new features are tricks to get weak minded people to buy something they don’t really need. Too used to dealing with Microsoft, I guess. Ironically, I finagled it as part of the $1500 Adobe Video Collection Professional. Whew, sure glad we saved that 150 bucks for the upgrade. So that also means I now have a bunch of meta-cool goodies like Premier, Aftereffects, Audition & Encore but that’s a separate happy dance.
As usual, the hoi palloi are myopically obsessed with Photoshop’s ability to mess with reality, but for those of us whose work generally takes place outside the intelligence or conspiracy theory communities, this is a minor amusement for after hours.
So what has me salivating? The easy batch processing built into Bridge for one. This is perfect for those perfectiony jobs like contrast tweaks where you don’t want to mess with a batch. Along a similar vein but even more useful is the multiple layer control. I’ve long dreamt of the ability to perform the same task on a bunch of different layers all at the same time. As usual there are a bunch of really neat features that I’ll probably never have a valid use for, but are nice to have nonetheless - vanishing point and image warp. I’m going to have to wait and see what this SmartObject thing is all about - sounds pretty amazing, but I want to see it in action.
I finally got around to posting an essay, a work in progress that releases (hopefully) all the pent up anxiety over my Freudian (if not slightly Oedipal) relationship with books. [this is what happens when you’re the only child of a psychologist - everything you do has an explanation based in a neurosis] With that, I present Hot Wet Book Love a tawdry, salacious tale of the most pathetic kind.
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has announced he is undertaking some research into the economics of BBQ, seemingly oblivious to the furor he is courting by delving into so sensitive a subject. The Carolinians will predictably start squealing about their pulled pork, and on down the sea coast it will go, a vast cacophony of footstomping and chestbeating, until it finally comes back to Texas, the land in which BBQ found its perfection.
On an tenuously related note, has anyone else noticed that Unagi tastes an awful lot like BBQ?
Fruita, Colorado is home to quite probably the weirdest of the weirdly strange annual celebrations - the Mike the Headless Chicken Festival. The festival celebrates the hapless tale of Mike the Chicken, who might have languished in obscurity if not for a botched butchering that left poor Mike headless but alive.
A more complete tale of the unfortunate Mike is available on this Lovecraftian Wikipedia post. Impossibly, Mike’s brief show business career is even weirder:
Mike was on display to the public for an admission cost of 25 cents, and at the height of his popularity was earning a princely $4,500 per month. A pickled chicken head was also on display with Mike, but it was not Mike’s original head as that had already been eaten by a cat.
This has probably been there the whole time and I just missed it, but KCRW’s ever-wonderful show Morning Becomes Eclectic has an RSS Feed! [copy link feed here] RSS continues to blow up. It’s only a matter of time before it tips…
