December 01, 2005
November 28, 2005
In which I repurpose content
In late '82, I was already a denizen of the remainder table at the local booksellers, and picked up a copy of Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year (1981 Edition). Fantastic stuff lay within: not only had Reagan trounced Carter in the recent national election, but all sorts of exciting governmental shenanigans, both on the federal stage (Stockman was getting worked over in Congress about his fantastic supply-side economics proposals) and local (Californians feared the medfly) provided cartoonists with fodder. I began to read editorial cartoons avidly, and looked forward to the brief chrestomathy presented each Sunday in the New York Times' Week in Review. rss feeds of various editorial cartoonists, such as Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World, satisfy but a small stretch of itch. Happily, isnoop comes to the rescue. The comic-strip snagger even allows a zoom level, so mine tired eyes can see the venerable drawings of Charles Schulz and Al Capp double-size!... Read more
November 19, 2005
In which we get no dessert (as we ate not our vegetables)
Although I doubt that David "Ketchup is a vegetable" Stockman would agree with the accuracy of this cartoon, the sentiment is true.... Read more
November 12, 2005
In which these are a few of my favourite things
Queen, air-guitar, MIDI, and come together to form a truly horrible piece of Flash animation. And while I was enumerating the web widgets that make me chuckle, how, how could I omit the Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu, The Prime Number Shitting Bear?... Read more
November 01, 2005
In which I jump the turnstile and you have to pay the fee
Some of the tit-bits wot make me larf: HarMar Superstar; All Your Base; Rather Good's animation for "Gay Bar"; Camper's Hate Blog; the much-missed suck (bless that Mr Terry Colon), the first site, afaik, that hyperlinked to mine (!!). I am thinking about things which make me chuckl because I have a nascent bad attitude. California.... Read more
October 28, 2005
In which Ich bin ein Wasserkopf
Two calculators to estimate one's emissions, and environmenal impact, at airhead and Caltrain.... Read more
October 24, 2005
In which graffiti jumps the shark
Street art has been on the cusp of mainstream media recognition for some time now. (can't fool me: that picture is from Barcelona. Note the distinctive street sign, the BCNeta bin, and the two grinning fish from Pez. Barca has glorious street art: I suspect that city, not subway taggers in New York, is what sparked my love of graf.). And I ask myself: hath ye shark been jumped? The rhetorical answer is, "Whatever. So long as people continue tagging and pasting-up and acid-splashing, and as long as fancy hair salons contract street artists to decorate their windows, then all is good in God's world."... Read more
October 20, 2005
In which it is Welsh, of course
llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf.org.uk lays claim to the World's Longest URL. Charming, wot.... Read more
October 12, 2005
In which there's someone who knows and trips you when you fall
The San Francisco Museum of History screened Trina Lopez's short documentary, A Second Final Rest: The History of San Francisco's Cemeteries. The film garnered awards at the Womens Film Festival and at the Documentary Film Fest. Afterwards the film-maker answered questions -- she has great poise, and the Q&A session was as informative as the film itself. Beginning in '01 with a Health Ordinance, San Francisco city fathers began pushing the various burial grounds: first westwards, and then south'ards. The public rejected the first official edict, in '14, to clear out completely, but by the mid-century all the interred had been moved to Colma ("City of the Dead"), a necropolis with its own BART stop. Several years ago, I began writing a story in which the citizen of Colma, some 2 million strong, rose up and persecuted the grey-bearded city fathers, and especially "Sunny Jim" Rolph, who worked the hardest to shoo all them bones. San Francisco still has bodies in The Presidio, a military graveyard; in the church-yard at Mission Dolores; in the Columbarium; and a one-off, Thomas Starr King, interred at the church on Franklin and Geary. Jim Blackett's San Francisco Cemeteries is a handy reference site; Ms Lopez drew her inspiration from Dr Weirde's Weirde Guide to San Francisco, now online at sfgate.com.... Read more
October 11, 2005
In which the infrastructure is built anew
A new Edward Burtynsky exhibition arrived at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco. Edward Burtynsky's photography continues to amaze me with its powerful details of the man-made landscape in industry and urban renewal. The Chinese series has some breath-taking portraits of cities teeming with factory workers, seemingly stripped of their individuality, just as his earlier landscapes of mining areas showed a denuded earth without its once-proud trees, hills, and rocks. Burtynsky's first solo retrospective, Manufactured Landscapes, runs at the Brooklyn Museum through January; it showed at Stanford University earlier this year, and had a marvelous exhibit catalog, Yale University Press.... Read more
October 08, 2005
In which it is like a violet
From Bob the Angry Flower to Frazz, it's all about my favourite piece of English punctuation.... Read more
October 06, 2005
In which we count up to sixty-six
As evidenced by the mixture of joy and rage when reading (of all things!) the beer menu at the outstanding Porterhouse bar, I cherish the unflattering memories of Ronald Reagan. Aram turned up this list when I muttered something about James Watt, and I figure that it is just the sort of convenient one-sheet to start printing on various networked printers around the globe. Lest we forget. As for the menu at the Porterhouse: it contains a delightful invective (not reproduced in the online version) railing against American politics and beer. I read it after a few glasses of their (delicious!) XXXX stout.... Read more
September 25, 2005
In which we are stranded in Waterloo with nothing to do but eat and drink
Giles Coren's writing in The Times is beginning to crack me up. His writing reminds me of the frustration of Nobu, cast and re-cast at the gastro pub-of-the-moment, The Anchor And Hope (or has its moment already past?). His writing is effusive, and his tendency to ramble often undermines the fact that he is writing about food, but then again so much of a restaurant is not whether the bacon-and-warm-snail salad is "like teenage sex" so much as the fancy and famous people one bumps up against at the workmanlike butcher-block tables in front of the open kitchen. And he makes a case against opening a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. This must be why Thomas Keller buggered off to New York City for Per Se. $210 my arse.... Read more
September 06, 2005
In which it comes in three flavours!
bhs pointed out that chicken now comes in three flavors, thanks to a popular fast-food restaurant. Better yet, learn how to fold your t-shirts. Do'n't click here.... Read more
September 02, 2005
In which cold pizza, like the earth, has no ownership
If there's one thing I learned from reading comix -- specifically, Sam Hurt's magnificent Eyebeam series -- it is that cold pizza has no ownership. Much to his chagrin, the fellow in the online story (videlicet) found that taking leftover pizza led to his termination: I had been working for a mortgage company as a developer for 18 months and things were going well. Then, one day I saw that a different group in my company had just finished up a pot-luck and had some pizza left over. I thought they would probably end up throwing it away and I was kind of hungry so I went for it ... I took a slice of pizza. Apparently the employees who threw this pot luck were planning to take it home and were offended by my action. Now I thought we were all basically on the same team and if someone didn't like what I did they would tell me so and I would apologize and maybe offer to pay for the pizza. These employees ended up telling their manager, who told her vice president about what I did. The worst part about this is that I wasn't told about any of this until a month after the incident. No warning, no second chance. I know that I left an impression because to this day my former coworkers refer to unattended pizza as "programmer bait".... Read more
August 29, 2005
In which we play catch-up
I cleansed the past few years of half-written journal ("blog") entries recently, and posted one which will no doubt appeal to Greg, and one for Anna about Critical Mass. I also corrected the title in the post on yo; and realised that I really like Adam's photograph of an MBTA sticker and accompanying exegesis.... Read more
August 27, 2005
In which Duboce Park hits the big-time.
A film production will build a set in our very own Dogshit Duboce Park. Filming instructions include the filmmakers saying that they "respectfully request that [residents] park [their] cars in the garage". Unless I missed something major in the past six years, street parking is often the only parking in a neighbourhood of Victorian buildings. Film production in the area has waned of late; one of my favourite films (The Lineup) and many others have filmed here. I for one am excited to see a BART station built at the corner of Duboce and Steiner. Hell, if the café-formerly-known-as-Coopers ever opens again, this might infuse good business. Especially if a parking garage opened underneath the park.... Read more
July 20, 2005
In which he had an interview with TIME magazine
At times I would forget where I was. Cairo? Jakarta? Mexico City? Everywhere there are those same islands of wealth amid the poverty, like the green areas of Manila that are private golf clubs instead of public parks. More of Salgado's photoessay at TIME magazine.... Read more
June 27, 2005
In which we preserve the environment for innovation
This afternoon I attended a talk by Wendy Seltzer of Electronic Frontier Foundation and Chilling Effects Clearinghouse fame. She spoke about endangered gizmos and other abjecta of intellectual-property law; about cease-and-desists notices, which are archived and available for analysis through Chilling Effects; about the anti-technology tendency of US law (well, she did not phrase it like that, but that is what I heard); and about brand dilution, or why I cannot, for example, sell Intel-branded chewing gum, or Levi-Strauss-branded microprocessors ... unless I move to Italy. She did not explicitly discuss today's SCOTUS decision against Grokster.... Read more
May 15, 2005
A public telephone
The IMDb biography of Lawrence Tierney really impresses me. Drunken brawling, tough-guy attitude on- and off-screen, and impressions of his throaty, growling voice make for an interesting write-up. Not to mention that he had the best line in Reservoir Dogs, and the last line in Hill Street Blues. When he guest-starred on "Seinfeld" in "The Jacket" episode as Elaine's father, he scared the cast so badly that they never had him back on. "He stole a butcher knife from Jerry's TV kitchen & hid it under his jacket. When Seinfeld asked him about it, Tierney pulled out the knife & started making the 'Psycho' slashing-violins sound."... Read more
May 06, 2005
Search for my family history
The Scotsman has made their entire archive available online.... Read more
May 01, 2005
To eat, under the sea
A restaurant that would entice Captain Nemo: the first ever all-glass undersea restaurant in the world opens its doors for business at the Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa. Ithaa* will sit five meters below the waves of the Indian Ocean, surrounded by a vibrant coral reef and encased in clear acrylic offering diners 270-degrees of panoramic underwater views. No word on whether the restaurant features a "dive-through" window.... Read more
Bridgewater's brave new world
Bridgewater state college will make its students full-time learners: It was a few years ago that the lab entered the brave new world of WiFi (shorthand for wireless fidelity standards), but great strides have already been made toward making Bridgewater the only completely WiFi college and town in America. The placement of antennae around campus means that students can use their laptops on the college's buses. This will turn downtime into productive time, Mr. Harman said. Must we do everything all of the time? May in San Francisco is mural awareness month -- and we have many, many beautiful murals, on shop buildings and alley walls and derelict warehouses -- but I cannot find any current information about it.... Read more
April 30, 2005
The Girl From Monday
Hal Hartley introduced his latest project, The Girl from Monday at The Roxie. After the screening, he cheerfully fielded questions, discussing his methods when filming film stock vs. digital video, on which TGFM was shot; his approach to music composition and film scoring ("I wrote the music first, then shot"); and whether he and Martin Donovan, one of his frequent collaborators, will work together again ("Yes." I was quite glad that someone asked). The film was evocative, the plot funny, and the music a good complement. Bill Sage, carving the handsome, do-good profile of a latter-day Cary Grant, plays an adman caught up in the new economy he helped create, where citizens are stockholders in the corporate machine of consumerism. Disposable income is a driving force behind the market, until The Company (known as Triple M) develops a method for using sex to increase shareholder value. Many of the grainy exterior scenes were shot in Lower Manhattan and the Lower East Side, and evoke the timeless business of a city. In an interview with Green Cine, Hartley remarked that he draws inspiration from the textures of Sonic Youth. And before the show, Greg treated us to a rendition of the dance from Hartley's Simple Men, set to Kim Gordon's crooning of "Kool Thing". I'm posting this for Joseph, who had to bail at the last minute in order to save the world from stale search results (his heroics succeeded! hurrah!).... Read more
April 26, 2005
Punk rock in the Holy Land
Liz Nord's documentary on punk rock in the Holy Land, Jericho's Echo, had its San Francisco premiere last month. Punk historians quibble about the exact origins of punk music, but for more than 30 years it has surfaced across the world, from the United States and Great Britain to the People's Republic of China. In Israel, a vibrant punk scene has emerged in a society torn apart by the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. In these four candid video interviews, FRONTLINE/World reporter and filmmaker Liz Nord talks to the musicians driving the movement. Like other young Israelis, the punk rockers have been affected personally by the conflict. They have fought as soldiers and lost friends and fans killed by suicide bombers. Bands from both ends of the political spectrum use their music to comment on Israeli society. Others make music just to have fun. But all of them agree that punk rock represents freedom.... Read more
April 07, 2005
Oh no, Mr Yuk!
Childhood favourite Mr Yuk has jumped on the trendy silcone wristband bandwagon. The adorable and effective stickers punctuated my childhood.... Read more
March 27, 2005
I loves Alien Loves Predator
High-larious. A photo-realistic comic comic strip which features Alien (of Alien) and Predator (ditto) as room-mates.... Read more
March 17, 2005
like a cop loves his donut
I'm so glad that Ivan Brunetti has a web site. I anxiously awaited "Misery Loves Company" and "Biff Bang Pow!" editions when I was in college, and was cheered to see some of his work in a Cartoon Art Museum (or was it Yerba Buena?) retrospective in San Francisco a few years ago.... Read more
March 09, 2005
Meine schwesterchen hat ein blog
My sister has a blog. I also realized that, because it's so expensive here, I also have not had broccoli in almost four months. It’s one of my favorite vegetables; I can eat a head for dinner. I heard someone asking about it at the vegetable stand today, which is what reminded me that I haven't eaten broccoli in a long time; its name in Arabic translates as ‘foreign cauliflower’.... Read more
February 24, 2005
a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun
I miss suck. Aside from being the first web site to link to me (!!), it had great graphics by Terry Colon, witty pre-pomo cut-up commentary, and a snarky attitude that presaged everything. Everything.... Read more
February 14, 2005
February 10, 2005
The ouija anaconda
I was late to work this morning because I was in line for the Ronald Reagan commemorative stamp. I found out that there really wasn't any need for haste, as the Post Office (which Reagan sought to privatize) has 170 million of these stamps at hand. A nice counterpart to another relic of that time, "We Jam Econo". While Aram was buying tickets to the film's San Pedro premiere (at the beautiful Warner Grand, which I've only seen from the outside), I was belly-aching about how we'll be paying off the cost of these stamps for generations to come. Or how the fatcats who make money off the stamps will trickle down their profits to the masses. Et cetera.... Read more
February 09, 2005
Rogue photographers
Photo Rogue assigns photographers to snap snaps of scenes that users request ("squirrels ravaging a rabbit shaped cake", "a picture of any of the street performers in the main square. Especially the guy that dresses as a Cossack on a horse."), and publishes the results through Gallery.... Read more
February 06, 2005
Sit tight and await the cavalry
Your name alone strikes fear into others; but maybe, just maybe, there's a little vulnerability and weakness beneath that stoic, fierce exterior of yours. Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.... Read more
February 03, 2005
January 24, 2005
Snowflake jamz
This record-playing hippie bus is scooting around an image of Floquet de Neu -- wonder which record it is?!... Read more
January 20, 2005
Is that possible?
Will Toni finally ditch Dirk, her abusive, controlling boyfriend? I'm on tenter hooks! (Really!)... Read more
January 14, 2005
Your message here
St Claire's online Sign Builder application produces OSHA- and ANSI-compliant signs in several languages. Endless fun, and practical too.... Read more
January 05, 2005
I want to know whose name is on the handle!
What better way to understand how a professional works? I'm watching Reservoir Dogs to pick up tips on team-work. It was raining in the Lower Haight, so I took a bus to work.... Read more
December 28, 2004
Donate to the Red Cross
Amidst all this disaster, I was again cheered yesterday when I realised that my employer matches my charitable donations.... Read more
December 24, 2004
Jesus don't cry, Or, Where Are the Satanists?
After your local newspaper inserts "advertisement" New Testament editions into your daily delivery, you want a sticker that says "God is on my shit list". You'll find it at Unamerican, celebrating their tenth irreverent anniversary. Most national newspapers allow religious advertising on their religion pages, but it's unusual to see a Bible giveaway, said Aly Colón, a teacher at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school and think tank. If newspapers are going to accept that type of advertising campaign, they must also make sure that the newspaper maintains impartiality in its news section, he said. Editors might want to place a disclaimer in the news portion of the paper to let readers know that the Bible they are receiving is an advertisement, not an editorial endorsement of a religion. "The key thing is how the newspaper maintains its independence from their product and pays attention to their readership and how it maintains that clear separation," Colón said. Messages left with the Colorado Springs Gazette for comment about the issue were not returned late Thursday. Theoretically, members of a another group, such as Satanists, could seek to raise money and distribute copies of the Satanic Bible in newspapers, and publishers who deny them the advertising opportunity could be accused of discrimination.... Read more
December 12, 2004
"Let the slaughtered take a bow ..."
A group calling itself "Audiences in Action" has asked San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to proclaim December 18th "Anita Monga Day" and identify with the Castro Theatre's recently-dismissed program director. The Castro Theatre is a local treasure (and historic landmark). As a result of the turmoil, Eddie Muller is moving his fabulous, four-year-old Noir City festival to the Balboa Theatre. The text of the letter follows.... Read more
November 18, 2004
Note to Turin
Dear Turin: You can have your blessed shroud. We've got a grilled cheese sandwich. Signed, Miami. Aujourd'hui, j'ai reçu une télègramme: TURIN TO MIAMI RESEMBLANCE HEDY LAMARR POSSIBLE LILLIAN GISH STOP DEFINITELY NOT VIRGIN MARY STOP USE SPELLCHECK WHEN POSTING TO EBAY... Read more
November 13, 2004
Where ye be shopping, matey?
Worth1000's photoshop contest "If Pirates Ruled".... Read more
November 10, 2004
He drinks a whiskey drink
Something to keep your eyes on, especially if: you have kids, you like kids, you are a kid, you cherish freedom, you enjoy having all your limbs, you enjoy not killing other people, or you value not being shot at by other people. Note that sentence contains clauses conjoined with an option. And the 'e' in whisk(e)y is for Canada, eh, you dodgers.... Read more
Urban post-mortems
Exercises in Forensic Archaeology, but really they're just really nice pictures by Julia Solis.... Read more
November 04, 2004
Els Quatre Gats
barça. It's also available via Atom/RSS. I'm in heaven. I gotta figger out how to feed this in to my screensaver, and then I can run three monitors' worth of barceloca while I daydream. I'm glad that I'm not the only one who snaps photos of stray cats in Barcelona.... Read more
October 28, 2004
flickr del sol
1001 is an OSX client for flickr ... but it crashes, which uploadr, flickr's own tool, doesn't. I really like that flickr put the OSX tool at the top of the page.... Read more
October 27, 2004
Scruitinize every word
Greg, as excited and mysterious as I've ever seen him, showed me Eminem's new video yesterday. Download the video or get the torrent.... Read more
October 25, 2004
Photographing your city block
Heard a talk by Marc Levoy et al. from Stanford today, presenting their CityBlock project. Some other sites which present panoramic city views: Cambridge Live; and Seamless City, in which the photographs are manually stitched together.... Read more
Selling secondhand tobacco?
Phillip Torrone posted about Jeffrey Early's gpsphotolinker, which uses a GPX file to stitch lat/lon information into your photograph's EXIF data. This is exactly what I wanted. Well, ideally I'd have the GPS embedded in the camera. Soon.... Read more
October 17, 2004
An argument carried out by other means
Saw Walter Salles' romantic adaptation of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's early diary (the Motorcycle Diaries). Che and a friend rode a dilapidated beast of a Norton around South America, tramping, working, and learning about leprosy. The 1952 journey was one which Guevara undertook expecting it to change his outlook on life, and it did: it opened his eyes to the plight of the proletariat, and he decided that the mass of them live lives of quiet desperation. Of futility. The adaptation doesn't hide much, but certainly glosses incidents (Che doesn't eat empanadas in his memoir, although in the film two pretty Chilean girls treat him and his hungry traveling companion to a dozen of the savouries. They also give him the nick-name "Che", an apparently common term in Chile for Argentinians; et cetera). The film shows South America harshly: a continent of hard-working people beaten down by Spanish imperialism and subsequent brutal colonialism. Rather than dwelling on past injustice, the diary and the movie focus on vignettes: an old waitress dying of asthma; day-labourers looking for work in the mines; a festive evening party in Chile. The cinematography is beautiful, and Che's bosom-friend Alberto Granada dances beautifully.... Read more
October 15, 2004
Everybody stop moving.
What's going on at LAX? I'm heading out of the United terminal, and first TSA personnel and now LAPD are combing through the area. We've been asked to stop moving and stand where we are, but I fancy sitting.... Read more
October 10, 2004
Collect them all!
The Zoomorphs web site is now in full Flash effect!... Read more
October 08, 2004
Two scoops!
The San Francisco Chronicle lamely picked up a story featured in yesterday's Examiner. It's a good 'un, though. The original story, from the Examiner: Reached at her Miami studio Wednesday by The Associated Press, Maria Alquilar said she was willing to fix the brightly colored 16-foot-wide circular work, but offered no apologizes for the 11 misspellings among the 175 names. "The importance of this work is that it is supposed to unite people," Alquilar said. "They are denigrating my work and the purpose of this work." but then, the follow-up in the Chronicle: The artist who misspelled the names of famous people in world history on a large ceramic mosaic outside Livermore's new library can spell one word with ease: N-O. That's Maria Alquilar's new position on fixing the typos. She had planned to fly to California and put the missing "n" back in Einstein and remove the extra "a" in Michelangelo, among other fixes. But after receiving a barrage of what she called "vile hate mail," Alquilar said Livermore is off her travel itinerary and there'll be no changes by her artistic hand. Silver lining: perhaps she was giving a shout out to San Francisco's postmaster, Charles H. Gough.... Read more
October 05, 2004
The fight in the dog
Today, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three American scientists, one of whom commented on education: "Dr. Wilczek used the Nobel occasion to put in a plug for reviving the commitment to excellence in American schools. "I want to thank the U.S.," he said, "for supplying the system of public education that did so well by me." Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. I'm not mad at Dwight D Eisenhower any longer. I found that quotation -- his, apparently -- at the Cost of War site, which features dismal accounting for the current US military involvement: "we could have hired 275,837 additional public school teachers in California for one year."... Read more
See me got photo photo
After about 30,000 shutter clicks, my trusty camerastarted to register errors. So I got a new one. And here, of course, is the inaugural photograph: I was a little upset about the old camera bugging because I saw a beautiful chopper outside the Toronado: a bicycle in the shape of the Golden Gate Bridge! Nico finds the words. And a picture is worth a thousand words.... Read more
September 25, 2004
It's in the can.
The Future of Food will play two nights at the The Castro; Bikes Against Bush: video shorts will play as part of the 2004 Bicycle Film Festival in San Francisco. How many clowns can you fit onto a conference bike?... Read more
September 16, 2004
Story-telling
I Found Some of Your Life, a Auster(e) chronology through pictures.... Read more
September 15, 2004
Let's have Carter our President!
Jimmy Carter told us about how he saw a UFO in 1968. He also spoke today about his programs to eradicate common parasitic diseases, promote democracy and human rights. The cadence of his speech is wonderful, and he's a very witty speaker -- sharp, incisive, and thoughtful. And he loves his wife. Afterwards someone pointed out that I was wearing an old Habitat for Humanity t-shirt.... Read more
September 14, 2004
I think I know my geography pretty damn well
This map of Springfield even has my office, just a wee bit southwest of the Mall.... Read more
September 08, 2004
It is an art thing!!!
Pinball machines, roller-coasters, and making art with other boardwalk amusements. Fiore's own roots, as demonstrated in past projects, never stray far from this notion of collaboration with the machine. In 2000, she removed the glass from an Evel Knievel pinball machine, overlaid cut vellum around the bumpers of the "playboard" (1,000 points when lit!), and played a full game with three balls she had doused in red, white, and blue oil paint, respectively. The resulting painting, a lavender oblong that looks like a hallucinated skull, testifies to Fiore's ability to excavate or "see" the buried image within the machine, almost as if it was written in invisible ink. In the same way that Michelangelo envisioned David's sensuous curves within the notoriously busted Duccio stone, Fiore anticipated a painting that would conjure the first celebrity superhero made flesh: a daredevil who motorcycle-jumped over a tank of live sharks and is listed in the Guinness Book of World's Records for having broken thirty-five bones. I love Pokey comics. How nutty!!!... Read more
September 04, 2004
One Tree
According to FraudFrond, There are 130,000 cel towers in the USA alone. A whopping 25% of these are "stealth" towers -- i.e. Lying Lumber -- so that's over 32,000 fake trees.... Read more
August 31, 2004
No Man's Land
Edward Burtynsky in Charleston, as part of a three-man exhibit, "No Man's Land".... Read more
August 15, 2004
Unnecessary interface
Surely most ATM users would understand if these two ATM screens became one.... Read more
August 14, 2004
For more information on Grand Funk, consult your school library!
Technorati searches blogs (XML? RSS?) in something close to real time. That's how I found Travis' blog, and how I discovered another salim. Aside: Was the Alan Parsons Project really "some sort of hovercraft"?... Read more
August 09, 2004
Lewis Carroll, blogger
The Library of Congress have posted Lewis Carroll's collection of clippings. The historian Edward Wakeling contribues an essay on the significance of this scrapbook: Scrapbooks were, without doubt, a source of anecdotes and ideas that Carroll could weave into his conversations and literary works. It is fortunate that this scrapbook has survived intact, and in the state that Lewis Carroll left it. It is incomplete as there still are loose items waiting to be pasted in. The scrapbook was put aside sometime in the 1870s ... The clippings, pasted over 70-some leaves, include poetry, obituaries, notes on linguistics, and Victorian ephemera.... Read more
July 27, 2004
July 23, 2004
Safety in numbers
On the hourlong trip from Mountain View to San Francisco yesterday evening, I was multi-tasking: using an AT&T GPRS modem (in the form of a PCMCIA card), I was doing some work, while watching video clips from yesterday's breath-taking Tour de France time trial, and watching the fog roll over San Bruno Mountain. A fellow sitting across from me started talking about Macs, and free wireless access points in San Francisco, and sent me a white paper from the Bay Area Wireless Research Network.... Read more
July 22, 2004
Still on the payroll?
A few months after the Chronicle ditched Zippy the Pinhead (again), my father pointed out this comic: I've written the Chron (again and again), only to receive in response semi-literate boilerplate about how periodic reader surveys determine which comics run in the 'paper. Do these same myopic readers suggest the microscopic size at which the Chron crams several dozen strips onto a single page? Even more so that most local newspapers in this day and age, they dishonour comic strips and artists by pushing the reproductions towards illegibility. Bill Watterson, champion of the art-form, refused to cave in to this practice a decade ago; now he no longer produces serial comics.... Read more
July 15, 2004
Tomorrow's man and me
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts opens a new exhibit, featuring Twist. His one-man show at Brandeis was written up in the New York Times earlier this week. He's been written up in lots of fun places. Although I haven't yet been to The Independent, the successor to the Justice League, word is that the beautiful Twist murals have vanished. Alas!... Read more
July 13, 2004
Reduce, reuse, and ...
Today is a five-newspaper day: The Wall Street Journal (courtesy Aram), The New York Times, the San Francisco Independent, the venerated San Francisco Examiner, and the suitable-for-puppy-training San Francisco Chronicle. If I jump on CalTrain, I can also pick up a copy of the San Mateo Daily News. And what of all this newsprint? Almost two pounds that I'll haul back and forth, and then dump into a recycling bin. Why do I prefer the newsprint editions of these 'papers, all of which are available (in some form) on-line? And why do I contribute to the consumption of our limited paper resources?... Read more
July 12, 2004
2005 Sunrise
From C|Net or the New York Times, come reports that American hegemony of the bar code is slipping away with the adoption of new international standards. Global trade depends on uniform identification of products, and the UPC symbol -- developed half a century ago -- forms the basis of a robust system for tracking inventory and prices. However, the U.S. has stuck to its 12-digit UPC code, How much instant-recgonition and automated tracking does our world need? Do bar-code concepts extend to fingerprinting human faces?... Read more
July 10, 2004
The Future of Food
How does one eliminate seed that becomes genetically-intertwined with one's own crops? Can multinational conglomerates push the world's 1.2+ billion subsistence farmers out of their traditional farming roles, and into poverty at the edge of ever-growing urban areas? Deborah Koons Garcia's documentary The Future of Food addresses these issues, through a history of humanity's interaction with farming, and a thorough dressing-down of the large companies that are privatizing genes. And in protecting their patents, they are suing family farmers whose seed has become polluted with patented (and sometimes) experimental stock from these corporations, whose tactics are shamelessly profit-oriented ("buy the herbicide that kills everything! then buy the plant that is genetically resistant to the herbicide! and oh yes, we own the herbicide. And we own the seeds."); when subsequent generations of their patented corps mutate and are no longer uniformly pesticide- and herbicide-resistant, farmers end up using increasingly toxic sprays on their crops. Nosireebob. One of many reasons I'm glad that farmer's markets are enjoying a resurgence in popularity, that markets and retailers are labelling foods (well, at least in the EU) ... but what about countries outside of the "First World"? The film did not touch on many of the public-health problems raised by genetically-engineered foods: what of the addictive properties of corn syrup? Sara invited me to the San Francisco premiere of the film. Hooray! Hearing her dulcet tones in the narration was a pleasant surprise.... Read more
July 09, 2004
And like that, *poof*, it's gone.
Beginning in October 2003, solar storms of unprecedented vigor have pummelled the Earth. The solar eruptions were so powerful that billions of tons of electrified gas shot into space at speeds of up to five million miles per hour, the fastest ever measured from the Sun, scientists said. The blast waves from the series of explosions merged as they moved out, creating a front that is now moving toward the edge of the solar system at about 1.5 million miles per hour, they said. I think they're responsible for the sudden disappearance of my Keychain and the almost concurrent iSync vaporization of my iPod.... Read more
July 05, 2004
... and not a drop to drink
The Center for Land Use Intepretation in Los Angeles conducted a bus tour of the Owens Valley, subvertings its subtexts.... Read more
June 30, 2004
June 13, 2004
Good for the dIeT
A trade publication ran a story on story on Iceland's drive to bring fiber to all 65,000 residences in the capital, Reykjavik. Wonder if this means that GarageBand files will transfer easily amongst the budding indie-rock bands.... Read more
June 09, 2004
Something I hope to understand in a few days
Took in a screening of Lars von Trier's latest, The Five Obstructions. This pits the idiosyncratic Danish director against Jørgen Leth, whom he cudgels into directing short films. Each film is a permutation of Leth's early short, The Perfect Human, with constraints imposed by Trier. Permutation of music, film, and painting intrigues me: as Mark E. Smith records many versions of the same song, changing the pace, wording, instrumentation (Slang King#2), so did Michelangelo sculpt many slaves, so did El Greco paint many gentlemen of quality.... Read more
May 15, 2004
The demand for their real happiness
Published: May 15, 2004 To the Editor: The Mormon student at the University of Utah who was forced out of a theater program after refusing to read a script containing profanity is wrong to suggest that the university violated her constitutional right of free exercise of religion (Religion Journal, May 8). The student could have dropped the class if she was offended by it, or she could have gone to a private school organized around her religious beliefs. Public universities have a constitutional duty not to tailor their curriculums to religious dogma. A student who takes a geology class and writes on the final exam that the earth is only 6,000 years old is probably going to fail the class, even if the student insists that being compelled to give any other answer would force her to renounce her religious beliefs. DAVID R. DOW Houston, May 8, 2004 The writer is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.... Read more
May 09, 2004
The Lake Project
Some sculptors (photographers?) have an obsession with interpreting the implications of environmental degradation. Like the Spiral Jetty, the physical evolution of the piece is important; as with Andy Goldsworthy, photography is integral.... Read more
April 27, 2004
April 26, 2004
Where my peeps at?
You can see where my friends (at least, people who have acknowledged me through Google's social-networking project) are.... Read more
April 14, 2004
If you can't say anything nice about someone ...
The best way of losing a cause is to abuse your opponent and to trade upon his weakness. You assist an administration most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil administration never deserves such allegiance. -- M K Gandhi, Mahatma, the Great Soul Some of the debate really centers around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing or free. I'd strongly disagree with that. -- Geo. W. Bush, President of the United States of America, 13 April 2004... Read more
April 11, 2004
... is for death, said she;
Today is (yet another) Easter Sunday, as my neighbour Mark pointed out, by way of explaining why the 'hood was so eerily quiet. Does this mean that sales of bauhaus' "Stigmata Martyr" are going up on eBay? Don't kid youself.... Read more
April 04, 2004
Three words that changed my world, (times two)
Proudhon's anarchist statement that " ... ownership is theft" has been ringing between my ears. Curiously, the first hit from a Google search resulted in a recent column from the vaguely fascist and often inaccurate Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. And the rabble-rousing motto "Qui Tacet Consentit", perhaps adapted from Goldsmith, makes a spendid caption for a poster by David Lance Goines. I first saw this powerful grainy image in Laura Slatkin's garret office somewhere at the College of the University of Chicago.... Read more
April 01, 2004
Lies, damn lies, and the Chronicle.
Don Asmussen'sBad Reporter makes the Chronicle worth buying. Since my comrade Mark and I can no longer commiserate over the local print media while downing crumb donuts (me) and blueberry muffins (him) at Bob's Donuts, it's up to me to belly-ache about how his comic ("The LIES behind the TRUTH, and the TRUTH behind those LIES that are behind that TRUTH") amusingly underscores all the crap that is the Chronicle. Both the L.A.Times (frustratingly not available for home delivery in my 'hood) and the Examiner ("Since 1865") have more solid regional coverage.... Read more
March 29, 2004
March 18, 2004
Catch, Twenty-two!
Stanford University, amongst others, refuse blood donations from people who have spent more than three months in the UK over the past two decades (!!) . This is because of variant Creuzfeld-Jacob ("mad cow") disease, for which there is no blood test. ... but there isn't a blood test because vCJD is transmitted through spinal matter, not the bloodstream (-- insert gag about blood sausage here --).... Read more
March 11, 2004
Filet of soul.
Dave Blood committed suicide yesterday. Punk rock is what we make it.... Read more
February 27, 2004
Bless this Old Tub.
The New York Times' Obituaries section always evinces a bittersweet smile: I enjoy reading about the unusual and strong people on these pages, people who have, perhaps quietly, made a difference in our understanding of the way we live. Under the headline Master Bourbon Distiller, today I read that Frederick Booker Noe, whose name I first encountered on a bottle of bourbon, died. The 6'4" Booker said: "A respectable amount of bourbon to pour in a glass is about two fingers' worth. Lucky for me I have big fingers." (sound clip at the Small Batch bourbon site).... Read more
February 26, 2004
... silver screen, can't tell 'em apart at all ...
Listening to Bowie this morning, thinking about a painter from Pittsburgh. Scott Blake's digital pointillism might be making a weighty statement about how we have trapped ourself in the measured black-and-white of the automated world, or he might be making cool collages. Or both.... Read more
February 25, 2004
History Lesson Pt. II
Thanks to aram, we have something else to argue about: The Real Top 100 Albums of All time... Interesting Facts The appearance of two Sonic Youth Albums, Slint's Spiderland, and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless in the top ten illustrates the strong influence of thirty-something indie-rockers. Bands with the most appearances on the list The Beatles - 5 Albums David Bowie - 4 Albums Radiohead - 4 Albums Talking Heads - 3 Albums Velvet Underground - 3 Albums... Read more
February 21, 2004
Marsh Arabs
This picture appeared on the front page of today's New York Times. A few months ago, the Week in Review section had a heartbreaking series of photographs on a similar theme.... Read more
February 20, 2004
Slave to the turntables
Who thinks these are candidates for worst album covers ever? I need to find and scan the beautiful cover of Las Limonadas Verdes, the polyester-suited crooners from south of the border.... Read more
February 17, 2004
Don't you know how time zones work?
If only this Flash applet took an argument. So many puerile jokes ensue ...... Read more
February 12, 2004
I prefer men to cauliflowers.
Began reading the much-acclaimed novel The Hours. I was lost by the second word ("hurries") in the Prologue; I've a prejudice against fiction written in the present tense. It's difficult to accomplish, because the immediacy it conveys is muted or contradicted by the fact that the action is obviously in the past (the Prologue describes a death; the second chapter helpfully declares "It is Los Angeles. It is 1949." within a few sentences). I hoped that Michael Cunningham would abandon the conceit after the Prologue, for which I could have forgiven him. I have read, quite recently, a novel which pulled off the present-tense quite surprisingly, but now I can't remember which.... Read more
February 11, 2004
Book of Illusions, Nr. 2
I perused Oracle Night yesterday, but was disappointed. The book-within-a-book1, and the book within that, was brilliant, but everything tapered off so suddenly that I couldn't but think, as I approached the last few pages, that I had a truncated copy of the book. Perhaps this printing left out a hundred pages? I wondered hopefully as the antagonist became clear. But no. 1 The multi-page footnotes quickly irritated me. The digressions might have been more effectively worked into the narrative; Auster has shown that he's good with quick asides. The amount of detail worked into the footnotes was unnecessary and disrupted the succinct flow of the narration.... Read more
February 10, 2004
Tic-tic-tow.
I'm re-reading Motherless Brooklyn. The action of this book takes place almost entirely in New York City, in the Boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, in a two-day period. Towards the end of the narrative, the protagonist (and narrator) takes his first trip outside of the city limits.... Read more
February 09, 2004
Where iTunes end and you begin.
From this morning's Business Day (which on Mondays for the past decade has carried the unnerving subtitle, "The Information Industries"): Steve Halberstadt of Raleigh, N.C., made such a purchase last week after discovering that Apple's iTunes store, the Web's leading downloadable music outlet, had added "The Whitey Album," a 1995 release by Ciccone Youth, a jokey side project of the rock band Sonic Youth. The album's second track album, "Silence," consists of 63 seconds of exactly that. (The band has said, with tongue in cheek, that the track is a version of John Cage's famous silent composition "4'33"," only speeded up.) After checking out the 30-second preview, which "seemed to be very representative of the rest of the song," Mr. Halberstadt said he could not help but make the purchase. He described it as "the best 99 cents I've ever spent'' Using the readers' suggestions, Mr. Miller compiled a playlist of "nine tracks of professionally encoded silence, a total of 6 minutes and 44 seconds of the yawning void," downloadable from iTunes for just $8.91. He noted that as with all iTunes purchases, antipiracy measures allow the silence to be enjoyed on no more than three computers.... Read more
February 07, 2004
Do you have any room in that hand-basket?
While playing the Boggle Deluxe smackdown at Chez Shumavon-Riley, Aram could not be stopped from putting on the Ritz.... Read more
January 30, 2004
Strip-mining the city.
Racine Port, Montréal, Québec 2001"> The photography of Edward Burtynsky grabbed my eye when an announcement of an upcoming (well, 2005) retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art appeared in the New York Times. His photography explores the displacement of nature through the works of man: highway interchanges, landfills, cargo commerce.... Read more
January 22, 2004
All my troubles seemed so far() away ...
Trying to algorithmically determine when "yesterday" was.... Read more
January 16, 2004
Slang King Nr. 2
SPAM filters are failing against the latest round of randomly-generated Subject: headers. Some recent favourites: "cyclades manic repairman motherland" "portage operating ineducable magnitude" it's like poetry. "imprompty amnesia falcon" "explicable bullet scold" AND: radian frescoes bobcat alsatian expositor (sounds like a Fall song) fascinate pontiff antipasto ineradicable coalition but "magneto snoshage links" was from aram :-) February 5, 2004 UPDATE: The New York Times has a nice article on this phenomenon in today's Circuits section... Read more
January 12, 2004
What time is it?
While German police are investigating for fraud a man who sold potatoes as computers, even more enterprising youth are installing sound systems run by russets and building a tuber-powered web server, which feature a 220uF capacitor which " ... can power the server for about 10 seconds, long enough to swap in a new potato or simply stab one of the nails or copper wires into a fresh, juicy area." So much for my gags about a potato clock. UPDATE: Down at the pub, Aram set up a full-scale potato clock while we quaffed whiskey and ate tiramisu with a bar spoon. Reading found the scientific explanation for all this tomfoolery.... Read more
January 08, 2004
January 04, 2004
The year of the monkey.
Toddler triumphs in National Monkey Face Championship A 2-year-old boy has won the National Monkey Face Championship held at the Yomiuriland amusement park in suburban Tokyo to commemorate 2004 as the Year of the Monkey. The boy, whose parents did not want to be identified, won for the face he pulled as he screeched, "I love bananas. I eat five bananas a day." He was awarded with one month's supply of bananas for his victory and appeared delighted to have won the prize. Competitors ranged from infants to high school students.... Read more
December 24, 2003
Everything in its right place.
From my phone to the internet in two clicks: I've started a photoblog. The first entry was, naturally, a photo of sprout.... Read more
December 20, 2003
My list of things to do today.
Movies with Scottish characters and thick talk: Gosford Park (Mary Macheachern) Rushmore (Magnus Buchan) Trainspotting... Read more
December 18, 2003
For cribbin' out loud.
The thoroughly enjoyable Charlie LeDuff article on the Los Angeles River may have been plagiarised. Consarnit.... Read more
December 12, 2003
Adventures in number portability.
After a few weeks of using different mobile services (and myriad phones), I decided to switch my phone number, oh that remote yet vital part of my identity, to a new carrier. The trouble arose when I mentioned that I'd like to switch two existing accounts back and forth, swapping between t-mobile and SprintPCS. But I wanted to keep both accounts. I balked at having to provide the password to my Sprint account to the t mobile representative, and she agreed that it was stupid ("why don't we just use one-time confirmation numbers?" she asked, sensibly).... Read more
November 26, 2003
The answer, my friend ...
I'm glad I'm not the only one this happens to.... Read more
November 24, 2003
November 09, 2003
Meat is a felony.
Drinking scotch and wandering through the Mug Shots section of The Smoking Gun (motto: "Paving the paper trail"), I found this unappealing mugshot and amusing vingette: Meet Lindsey Blackledge .... arrested in July 2002 for possession of a stolen, 14-ounce tri-tip steak ... a 38-year-old San Andreas woman ... called cops after discovering her meat was missing ... a trail of "meat juice" leading from King's grill to an upstairs apartment ... where they found the purloined sirloin hidden in a cabinet below the sink. Blackledge--who was found in the apartment--was charged with a felony.... Read more
November 05, 2003
His name was Stampy, you loved him very much.
After 20 years at the Baltimore Zoo, Dolly and Anna are becoming orphans. As a result of budget difficulties, the two African elephants must seek new homes -- or new mates.... Read more
October 22, 2003
Cereal, pen, and ink.
Rob Rogers' amusing take on Pittsburgh is Da Burgh to the core. I'm glad that he found better things to do than stick Cheerios up his nose. UPDATE: Other cartoonists are getting into trouble in their treatment of Da Burgh. Me, I've long found "Get Fuzzy" to be teetering on the edge of funny. I want to laugh, but then I realise, "Oh, this isn't actually comical." Worse now that the Chronicle is now fiddycent, right where we were three years ago.... Read more
October 11, 2003
It could be closer than you think.
Running errands earlier this morning, I stopped in the record store on a lark. A colourful display marked "Classic Goth" caught my eye, and I laughed aloud at the name. But I stopped laughing when I noticed some of the on-sale titles: Bauhaus' Mask; Love & Rockets' Express: remastered and with the excellent bonus tracks, including a cover of Syd Barrett's Lucifer Sam. Hey, Bauhaus had already covered T. Rex's "Telegram Sam", and this song logically followed. After hearing "Double Dare" at the jukebox at the Edinburgh Castle on Weds., I've had bauhaus and related on my mind. It's all in my mind. In addition to the L&R, of which I have a vinyl copy gathering dust, I got a copy of the new Killing Joke album with Mr Dave Grohl, and a copy of Rough Trade's Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before anthology, with young bucks covering old toons by the likes of Cardiff's favourite brawlers, The Young Marble Giants and The Fall (no hyperlink; who'd put together a web site for these punters?). And Elizabeth Fraser singing Robert Wyatt.... Read more
October 07, 2003
The polls are now closed!
The town crier just rode by, bellowing "The polls are now closed" at the top of his lungs. I'm sitting on the stoop, drinking the dregs of a case of Miller High Life (The Champagne of Beers, available $8.99 from the New Santa Clara Market on the corner) with Aram, who's on the phone for a legal hearing. At 8 o'clock in the pip emma. Everyone's trying to claim the short short spot in front of the house; some idiot parked poorly, and took up two good spots with one ugly Subaru. And some clown driving a pimped-out late-model Camaro convertible parked across the sidewalk, blocking pedestrian right-of-way. After about half an hour, a kid suddenly charged at the car and rolled capably across the hood. The annoying car alarm went off, and the enraged car driver had to interrupt his Scott St. booty call to turn off the alarm.... Read more
