“It is a vast energy package”
I particularly love the “midnight buffet”. At midnight the doors to a vast restaurant open and passengers stream in to gorge themselves on elaborate food sculptures, while one of the staff stands above them with a microphone telling them over the speakers the amazing statistics of how much they are consuming on a voyage.
All that’s left here are the remnants of what was
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the directors of the documentary Jesus Camp, produced a short video at The New York Times about the dismantling of Detroit.
One freezing evening we happened upon the young men in this film, who were illegally dismantling a former Cadillac repair shop. They worked recklessly to tear down the steel beams and copper fasteners. They were in a hurry to make it to the scrap yard before it closed at 10 p.m., sell their spoils and head to the bar.
Surprisingly, these guys, who all lacked high school diplomas, seemed to have a better understanding of their place in the global food chain than many educated American 20-somethings. The young men regularly checked the fluctuating price of metals before they determined their next scrap hunt, and they had a clear view of where these resources were going and why.
headline of the day
Did Purell Pay to Appear in the ‘Dragon Tattoo’ Torture Scene?
not all bad news
Hostess filed for bankruptcy protection today. But don’t worry, you should still be able to get deep fried Twinkies at the state fair:
The company said that it does not anticipate any disruptions in the making of or delivery of its breads or cake products and reassured that its popular brands, which also include Drake’s, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos, will still be available.
Dateline: Dallas
From my friend Susan W:
Jehovah’s Witnesses made their annual visit to our house. They ended up asking for investment advice from Scott, but left a copy of the Watchtower for our consideration.
Vizio laptops and all-in-ones
Vizio plans to enter the laptop and all-in-one market and undercut competitors’ prices while they’re at it. While the design certainly falls within the current Apple aesthetic, if I were looking for a non-Apple PC, I’d definitely consider one.
headline of the day
The Lake, The Hood & The Golf Course
After we’d talked for a while, we got in my rental car and went for a drive around his ward. “It’s beautiful, but it’s not for us,” Knowles said, as we rode through Harbor Shores. “It’s not for poor people.” I had asked Knowles if he slept at City Hall, and he took me by his house, which he said he rents for about $250 a month. “I don’t sell dope,” he volunteered, explaining how he pays his rent. “I come out and hustle — electrical jobs, cutting grass, whatever.” […]
When I dropped him back at City Hall, Knowles got out of the car and said goodbye, then poked his head back in the passenger window. “Hey,” he said, “can you spare a couple of bucks so I can get myself a bag of chips and a pop?”
This is an excerpt from Jonathan Mahler’s Simon-esque piece on Benton Harbor, Michigan, for the NYT Magazine a few weeks back. The bit above is from a conversation Mahler has with an unemployed Benton Harbor resident who is also a city commissioner for one of the city’s poorest wards.
For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in the area and my family has lived there for a few generations. The article is a longer piece focusing on the city’s socio-economic problems and new divisions over a golf course and property development on Lake Michigan called Harbor Shores, which is hoped to improve the impoverished city’s attractiveness for future investment. The only problem is that most of the developers and proponents for Harbor Shores are affluent and white, while most of Benton Harbor is impoverished and black – oh, and the golf course was built on a chunk of the city’s one nice park at the lakefront.
It’s a feature worth reading and not just because it’s about the clashes between a city’s residents and a group of well-intentioned (if not woefully ignorant) outsiders that believe they can solve deeply-rooted problems of poverty and crime by introducing the game of golf. I like to think it’s also because Mahler turned my old stomping grounds into a moral fable for today’s social, cultural and economic divisions.
Mistletoe Shortage
There’s a mistletoe shortage in Texas, due to drought. But some people don’t care.
“In 1901 you needed to be under the mistletoe to steal a kiss in public,” said Mr. George. “In 2011, you can do just about anything you want in public and it goes unnoticed.” When asked about the shortage, Mr. George was confident there would be no love lost.
from the comments
Amish mullets are all ordnung in the front, rumspringa in the back.
spam name
Claudine Hoskins.
Rhein II
Andreas Gursky’s “Rhein II” set a new record for the highest selling price for a photograph ($4.3 million) yesterday. I must say I rather like it, though I do wonder how these things happen.
from the spam
Exactly what underwear business is better for expecting a baby ladies ?
quote out of context
We’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well positioned to exceed expectations with an I.P.O. baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.
The wait continues
Nikon had been rumored to be working on a mirrorless camera for the last couple years. The hope was they were developing a full frame digital camera small enough to slip into a coat pocket to rival the digital and film range finders immortalized by Leica. What they ended up producing was a well crafted, replaceable lens camera with a really small digital sensor. The analyses I’ve read suggests Nikon didn’t want to cut into the high end full frame digital SLR market. They make some of the most highly regarded, and bulkiest, cameras in that segment. I guess the thinking went, if we introduce a full frame interchangeable lens camera, and price it competitively, it will undercut our really expensive SLRs. So, once again, if you want the benefits of a full frame camera you can carry relatively inconspicuously, you’re left with the six to eight thousand dollar Leica, or any number of film-based range finders.
Doubt is our product
How climate change denial equates to the tobacco industry.
quote out of context
Behind its flower box framed windows, hidden away from mourners, is an automated storage system. It stores and chills encoffined corpses, delivering them through hatches and into a viewing room, day or night, whenever friends and family come to pay their respects.
(via marginal revolution)
@Walmartlabs
You think of large tech companies like Google or Apple having extensive R&D labs, but Wal-Mart opened one after its low-cost advantage began to disappear.
In one experimental project expected to debut for the holiday season, @Walmartlabs has been recruiting people to test Shopycat, a Facebook and web app that uses people’s social-media profiles and comments to generate gift ideas.
“Most of the recommendation systems you see today in online shopping are based on prior transactions,” said Mr. Harinarayan, who worked for Amazon in the late 1990s when its system was developed. The system works well for books, where people tend to buy in the same genres, he said, but so much not elsewhere.
“It’s our belief that more than past transactions, your interests and what interests of yours are trending are better predictors of what you’d be interested in buying,” he said.
(via @tcarmody)
He could have set the Guinness World Record for people who wanted to kill him
The story of Edgar Valdez, aka La Barbie, an American citizen who rose to the top of one of Mexico’s prominent drug cartels.
Like many Texans, Barbie grew up right across the border from Mexico, in the city of Laredo. The place feels like something from a Mexican postcard, with cobblestone plazas and picturesque waterfalls – except for the massive, multilane bridge to Mexico that cuts straight through town. Until the drug war, everyone in Laredo saw the two sides of the border as one; many families, after all, had blood ties in both Mexico and the States. As a kid, Barbie loved to visit Nuevo Laredo, a border town bustling with donkeys, food carts, girls in little embroidered dresses, shoeshine boys and the smell of roasting corn. It was like stepping into another world, and all you had to do was cross the bridge.
In high school, Barbie was in the popular crowd, horsing around in the breezeways outside of class and waging egg wars after school. On weekends, he went to keggers on ranches, played elaborate scavenger games and hung out with his steady sweetheart, Virginia Perez, a bubbly, blue-eyed blonde. He grew up in a middle-class development on the outskirts of Laredo, a kind of no man’s land where Burger Kings didn’t begin to sprout up until the Nineties. Even the people of Laredo considered it “Indian territory,” an area rife with dope and illegal immigrants. Barbie’s parents raised him and his five siblings in a tidy, orange-trimmed home with palm trees in the front. “They’re regular Ozzie and Harriets,” says Jose Baeza, a spokesman for the Laredo police department. “They’re business owners, PTA, morning-jog people.”
Here’s a link to the printer friendly version.
(via the browser)
from the comments
This seems a good place to say I’ve been singing “Tyrone” ever since yesterday afternoon. Y’all should hear me. I’m singing it right now in my office.
I’m gettin tired of yo shit
You don’t never buy me nothin
Toilet Paper History: How America Convinced the World to Wipe
The first products designed specifically to wipe one’s nethers were aloe-infused sheets of manila hemp dispensed from Kleenex-like boxes. They were invented in 1857 by a New York entrepreneur named Joseph Gayetty, who claimed his sheets prevented hemorrhoids. Gayetty was so proud of his therapeutic bathroom paper that he had his name printed on each sheet. But his success was limited. Americans soon grew accustomed to wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog, and they saw no need to spend money on something that came in the mail for free.
via @stevesilberman
Is this something?
Software or (solar-powered) hardware modifications for hybrid/electric cars that offer the purchaser a selection of motor and/or muffler noises appropriately synchronized with accelerator use.
Artifice and foam rubber
In fact, so much artifice and foam rubber is often used to create the sexually alluring woman that it’s sometimes difficult to know where the lady ends and the foam rubber begins.
Via dangerous minds by way of Roger Ebert.
On the redemption of physical reality
“This is, of course, what (film theorist) Siegfried Kracauer meant when he spoke of the ‘redemption of physical reality.’ It’s also at the heart of Werner Herzog’s new documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011), in which he attempts to retrieve the ‘now’ of prehistoric cave painters flickering into life – the analogy often used to explain the psychological power of film.”
In the same way that cutting ourselves off from any older aspect of our culture diminishes us by dimming our awareness of who we were and how that made us who we are, there is something lost when we turn away from the gray ones.
It’s quite a long piece, but it is worth reading. Bill Mesce’s The “Gray Ones” Fade To Black, brought to attention by Ebert.
Milton Glaser on the fear of failure
(via Ali Douglass)
