June 29, 2006
Black Friday for cycling
Doping scandal rocks Tour de France the eve before the Prologue: favorites Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich among the riders suspended. I'm in China for a wedding so I haven't been online much this week, but I saw this headline and nearly choked on my breakfast congee. Very sad. We may have seen the last of Ullrich.
June 23, 2006
Bone marrow
In this interview, Anthony Bourdain lists Fergus Henderson's roast bone marrow with parsley salad as his "last meal before you die." I saw that in another article also, maybe it was in GQ. Here is the recipe.
If you're in NYC, perhaps the closest you'll come to trying this dish (without cooking it yourself, of course) is at Blue Ribbon Manhattan with their beef marrow and oxtail marmalade appetizer. Spread it over some crostini, sprinkle on some sea salt...soooo delicious. It's my favorite late night post going-out munchy cure.
Henderson has written a book titled The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, the first edition of which is a treasured tome among foodies and chefs.
The Bourdain interview is a hoot, by the way. On vegetarians: "Joyless, angry, frightened, anti-human, and just plain rude. How can you travel and be a vegetarian? I don't like my grandma's cooking, but at least I try it."
On amuse bouches: "I think I've had enough amuses. I'm not amused anymore."
On non-smoking laws: "I'll stand out in the cold and smoke until I drop. All the cool people are outside anyway. In New York, there are people who actually pretend to smoke, because that's where all the cool women are."
On Rachael Ray: "A bad tipper. Come on -- ``$40 a Day''? I find her relentless good cheer terrifying and distrust anyone who could stand in front of a camera and eat mediocre food and say it's good. Be honest and say it sucks."
June 22, 2006
Clemens-Liriano
On tap for tonight: Roger Clemens vs. Francisco Liriano, aging vs. young gunslinger.
Stream clips from Thom Yorke's upcoming album The Eraser, which releases July 11 in the US.
The White Sox are a good team, but Ozzie Guillen is a punk. Someone put a pacifier in his mouth. Can we get Jack Nicholson to order the code red? Of course, his efforts to defend his use of a homosexual slur have the entertainment value of a car accident:
[Guillen] also said that he has gay friends, goes to WNBA games, went to the Madonna concert and plans to attend the Gay Games in Chicago.
WNBA games and a Madonna concert! Gay friends! Pin a rainbow medal on him. Of course, no one really likes Jay Mariotti, either, so this is either a win-win or a lose-lose situation, I can't tell which.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
I attended the taping of The Daily Show yesterday. I'd tried to get tix a few times before, to no avail, but this time I included a sob story about how I'm leaving New York in the fall (true story) and perhaps that melted the heart of the person on the other end of my e-mail. The show is taped at a fairly nondescript studio out on 11th Ave. between 51st and 52nd St. A sign hangs over the entrance: "Abandon news all ye who enter here."
I arrived a bit after 2pm and was fifth in line. Hmm, maybe I was a bit too early, but since no one is guaranteed a seat, I thought I'd better be safe than sorry. Thank goodness it was one of the cooler days in recent memory. I stood as still as possible, trying not to sweat. They finally opened the doors to us between 5:30 and 6:00pm.
I always enjoy when various young folks come out to greet us in line with phrases like, "Jon is very excited to see all of you." It sounds so odd, and yet people get excited upon hearing it. The next time I have people over for a party, I'm going to hide in my bedroom and send out a few greeters.
"Eugene is very excited to see you. He'll be out shortly. Now remember, turn off all your cell phones and make lots of noise. Lots of noise! Eugene does not use a laugh track."
The studio seated 200 according to my rough scan. A warmup guy, the audience fluffer, so to speak, came out and made comedic banter and led us in rehearsals of wild applause and screaming. If you're the type of person who turns his nose up at such behavior, preferring to stand with hands in your pockets or arms folded, the warmup guy will single you out and force you to rehearse in front of everyone else, so if you're such a person, best to stay home and watch on TV. If, like me, you've wondered why the audience of The Daily Show sounds like a mob of drunken frat boys, know that they encourage that. The audience actually consists of a fairly normal cross-section of society, but the warm-up guy and the ear-thumping soundtrack they pipe in the studio gets everyone worked up to a froth.
The studio consists of Jon's chair and desk in the center and three large screens arranged in a semicircle behind him. Jon came out to field a few questions before the show. Among them:
Who is more vile, Ann Coulter or Karl Rove?
Ann Coulter, because she has succeeded in dehumanizing those who disagree with her. I honestly don't think she'd feel a thing if they were killed in front of her. But someday, she'll learn the true meaning of Christmas.
When is Rob Corddry getting his own show?
I believe we have him through October, then he moves over to his own show on Fox(?). His brother is already gone. You have to watch out for those Corddry's, they'll f*** you. When we found him, he was just an orphan, emaciated, abandoned. I found him behind a dumpster, fed him, raised him, and what do I get? A knife in the back.
What size are your shoes?
[beat] Size 14.
On somewhat of a slow news day, the field report was from Samantha Bee, reporting from San Andreas (the Grand Theft Auto neighborhood). They shoot those segments right next to Jon Stewart, in front of a greenscreen, so the studio audience can see Bee or Corddry or whoever is the field reporter. The guest this evening was Anderson Cooper, fresh off a two hour interview with Angelina Jolie, who Stewart referred to as the "Bono of hotness."
Before recording the usual check-in with Stephen Colbert, Stewart and Colbert chatted for a bit. Stewart complained about fatigue from raising his two kids, and Colbert responded, "It's like wrestling inexhaustible midgets." As with many of these live tapings, most of the funniest moments are the ones not shown on TV, when hosts like Conan O'Brien or Stewart just ad lib and chat with the audience.
Colbert screwed up the punchline of the check-in segment so they had to record it a second time. Then Stewart recorded the lead-in for the international edition of The Daily Show which airs on CNN International. I saw that a few times while on vacation in E. Europe. It packages a week's worth of Daily Shows into one long Daily Show.
One more item to cross off the NY checklist.
June 21, 2006
Doubt, the movie
After the performance of Neil Labute's Some Girl(s) at the Lucille Lortel Theatre last night, John Patrick Shanley came on-stage for a talkback (fancy word for mini-interview and Q&A) with one of the MCC Theater's resident playwrights. I didn't realize Shanley had won the lifetime triple crown: an Oscar for best screenplay Moonstruck, a Tony and a Pulitzer, both for Doubt. He also wrote and directed Joe Versus the Volcano. Shanley mentioned that just yesterday, he closed a deal to adapt and direct Doubt as a movie.
"People who are utterly certain are vulnerable to a brand of foolishness that people who maintain a level of doubt are not," Shanley has said. It's clear that he was referring in part to a certain sitting President, especially as compared to said President's most recent electoral opponent who was crucified for changing his mind about the Iraq war.
Da Da Da
When they come out with that list of 10 worst jobs next year, I think being a defense lawyer for Saddam Hussein has to make the cut.
Why do U.S. doctors continue to misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20% of the time? Perhaps because the current medical system offers no incentives to improve.
A deadly flu from Asia strikes America. There is no cure, and if you catch it, and you have a 10% chance of dying. If you take a vaccine, it will protect you, but there' s a 5% chance the vaccine will kill you. What do you do? The correct answer is to take the vaccine, of course, but patients choose correctly more often if choosing for someone else than for themselves. Not entirely surprising. It's tough to think big picture when you're smack dab in the frame.
UPDATE: Sorry, as one of my readers John points out, I should have said you have a 10% chance of dying. That's not conditional on catching the flu or not. Otherwise you'd need to know what the chances of catching the flu are.
Using similarity scores, Richard Lu rates the NBA prospects coming out from the NCAA this year. At the top of the list? Ronnie Brewer. LaMarcus Aldridge ranked 6, Brandon Roy 8, and Tyrus Thomas 11. Overall, the similarity scores confirm what most people have said, that this is a weak draft.
Yes, Dan Brown is a terrible writer. But one popular indictment of his mega-bestseller is unfair. Referring to Leonardo as "da Vinci" in the title is not the same as referring to Jesus as "of Nazareth" (as explained here by Geoff Nunberg of The Language Log). You don't need a linguistics PhD to know this, though. People refer to me as "da man" all the time, and I'm totally cool with that.
The top 10 ultimate grills. At number one on the list is the gorgeous specimen pictured below:
This backyard set from Lynx Professional Grills has a 42" grill with access doors, double burner, storage drawers, warming drawer, beverage area with outdoor refrigerator, ice machine, and cocktail pro (a bar area with sink and faucet).
Now they've got the dong
Yes, that's right, the Taepodong, which is pronounced type-o-dong. I've heard of world leaders and their nuclear weapons discussed as boys comparing penis sizes on the playground of the world, but this is too literal for comfort.
Well, at least Hawaii is still safe.
Shaken, not stirred
Apple has lowered the price of Shake, its video compositing and effects software, from $2,999 to $499. It's most well-known for being used for some of the effects in The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King. Very cool.
June 20, 2006
A few sports notes
Wait for it, wait for it....boom. The officiating in the NBA is atrocious (that play in OT of Game 5, with Dwayne Wade running around against the entire Dallas team and drawing a foul with 1.9 seconds left was like something from a local pickup game, when the one guy everyone knows is a ballhog misses badly and bails himself out by calling a foul), but I confess to taking some perverse pleasure in seeing Mark Cuban blow his stack. Anyone who could sell a company like Broadcast.com for a billion dollars has more than a lifetime of karmic surplus to work off.
Of course, having said that, I'd rejoice to high heaven if Mark Cuban bought the Cubs, because he'd hire some smart people to run the team. You can absolutely tell that he cares about a winning team, and as a fan you can't ask for much more than that. The current Cubs team is one of the worst I've seen. I can't even read the boxscores anymore, it's so depressing.
***
Lost in translation:
Ukraine 7-footer Kyrylo Fesenko was asked by Bucks assistant Brian James in a drill to "come off a screen and put the ball on the floor." So Fesenko, 19, did and just laid the ball down and left it there. "The coaches just looked at one another," James said. "He did do exactly what I told him. But then I said, `You must dribble.' "
***
A lot of columnists have written that baseball is unfairly beaten up over the steroids issue b/c they have more stringent testing than football or basketball. That's irrelevant even if true. By that measure, cycling is unfairly beaten up because they have even stricter testing than baseball. As your mother always said when you pointed to other kids as counter examples, "Oh, so if they ate poo..."
The economic success of baseball is dependent to some degree on the uncertainty that arises from competition between teams operating on a credible level playing field (yes, there's some economic imbalance, but it's been around since the beginning of the sport and hasn't deterred the fans from coming out).
Steroids may or may not alter the competitive balance among players and teams, but the perception is that they do. My impression is that the average baseball fan finds the idea of steroid use morally repugnant, and all the arguments to the contrary--for example, (1) steroids are not proven to improve a players performance, (2) things like Lasik surgery are also enhancements, and no one protests those, (3) cheating has been around in baseball forever--are in vain.
I know certain analysts profess an ability to look at the performances of Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, and their ilk with complete objectivity, but I myself fund that the luster of their accomplishments has been coated with a surface of grime, whether that's fair or not.
June 19, 2006
Mixed nuts
"Happy Mornings" is a commercial for Folgers, though it's difficult to see how.
The winner of Bruce Schneier's Movie-Plot Threat Contest involves the destruction of Grand Coulee Dam, triggering a chain reaction that knocks out the rest of the dams on the Columbia River and leaves the West Coast without power for months, taking down the U.S. economy in the process.
Well, if the terrorists do go after Hoover Dam, perhaps our best hope is to send in the Transformers, who are already doing work at Hoover Dam. On that note, is this test footage of Optimus Prime from the new Transformers movie?
As for terrorist plots, the one that's scaring New Yorkers right now is the aborted plot to gas NY subways (as described by Ron Suskind in his new book The One Percent Doctrine, excerpted in the latest issue of Time).
Not new, but still cool music video: man juggles in time to Fatboy Slim's "That Old Pair of Jeans" (thx Ken). That's one of the two new tracks on Fatboy Slim's greatest hits album Why Try Harder, releasing tomorrow.
The new Apple "I'm a Mac" ads are clever and funny. But are they all that effective in moving Windows users over to Macs, or do they just preach to the converted? I'm with Stevenson, I think it's the latter.
Raising children doesn't make one happy. In fact, when children finally leave the next, parents experience an uptick in happiness. So writes Daniel Gilbert in an essay for Time. But, he notes, that capacity for humans to sacrifice for the good of their children is why we have holidays like Father's Day. At his weblog, Gilbert includes footnotes for those interested in delving more deeply into the research cited. Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, a fascinating book I've just started reading this past week.
At Winged Foot this weekend, a score of 5 over par won the U.S. Open. That's not entirely surprising as the U.S. Open always has the toughest setup of the four golf majors. As long as the course is equally tough for everyone, the final score relative to par doesn't matter. But Matthew Rudy of GolfDigest.com feels this year's setup rewarded robotic play, with little decision-making required, and punished the world's true best players. Ron Sirak of Golf World disagrees.
June 16, 2006
United 93
In a year devoid of memorable movies so far, here, then, is the early favorite for Best Picture. United 93 is a movie that exists solely within that moment, unfolding in near real time on the morning of September 11, 2001, like a short story written in the present tense. The movie begins with the terrorists praying and ends with flight United 93 plunging into the earth. The political context is left out, most characters are not given names, and the camera never pulls back to permit a lead actor to primp for Best Actor by delivering a speech to the swelling chords of a momentous soundtrack.
But for everyone who was lived through that day, such context is not necessary. The movie has the gravitational pull of a historical supernova, pulling from our memories every fact about that fateful morning. The suspense is Hitchcockian but in a unique way. The context we as the audience have and which the characters on-screen lack is that of real-life history. When Air Traffic Control fails to get a response from American Airlines flight 77, we know what has happened, but the air traffic controllers on screen remain calm. When the first plane disappears completely off of the radar over Manhattan, the people at air traffic control don't know where the plane has gone, even after they see smoke billowing from the North Tower. We remember, for a brief moment, a time when the idea of what had happened seemed so improbable as to be incomprehensible, and we understand their inability to put two and two together.
The choice to shoot almost entirely handheld and to use no well-known actors is, of course, the right one, preserving the movie's documentary feel. Fiction feels inadequate in the face of an event like 9/11, which is one reason September 11 was so disappointing (the best of the shorts, incidentally, was the one that simply remixed video and audio from 9/11 itself). Many of the characters are played by themselves, and when the credits roll and you see so many names in the cast listed as "As Herself" or "As Himself," your mind jumps back to moments in the movie, and you know that the tears were real. Contrast that with Oliver Stone's upcoming World Trade Center, which will star known actors like Nicolas Cage, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal. It may very well be a fantastic movie, but what those recognizable faces add is a layer of abstraction.
As with The Bourne Supremacy, Paul Greengrass's previous film, the editing seems to keep tempo to the pace of the characters' hearts and minds. Or is it the other way around? At one point, while watching The Bourne Supremacy, I kept count of the number of edits during action sequences. They came at the rate of about one per second and put you in Bourne's head, the thousands of quick decisions his mind was churning through. United 93 has an editing pace just as frantic, mirroring the bewildered panic of our nation that morning and the tempo of my heart rate for most of the movie.
And yet, despite all this skill, fiction still feels inadequate to the task of resolving 9/11. At best, the movie can stir up the immediacy of that day, rouse us from our day-to-day stupor to leave us alone with our memories of that day, but it presents no solutions and is so tasteful in its choices as to be almost neutral. It is a riveting chronicle before which other horror movies seem meaningless, but as the daily news reminds us, we've yet to come close to resolving the conflict revealed to so much of the world that day. It's not "too soon" to make a movie about 9/11, as some NY filmgoers shouted during trailers for this movie, but it may be that only time, and not art, can bring closure to the tragedy of 9/11.
Tiny bubbles
How can best put $1 to use? The author's conclusion is to lend it via a microfinance organization.
Interactive population growth map. Covers the world from 1955 through 2015, helping to visualize the growth in urbanisation.
Man jokingly rents out tree house for $150/mo in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and receives 30 offers. Do you count as a rural or urban dweller if you live there?
As seen on the Chappelle Show, perhaps: the pre-sexual agreement.
Not happy with comments from Frederic Rouzaud, managing director of Louis Roederer, about hip-hop's long association with Cristal, Jay-Z has switched his allegiance to Krug and Dom Perignon. As a show of allegiance to my Man, I'm switching to Krug and Dom to fill my hot tub.
Google Browser Stync
Bill Gates to transition out of full-time role at Microsoft in July 2008.
Google Browser Sync--umm, not show ready. It disabled my SessionSaver add-on, and now I lose my tabs whenever I close out of Firefox. I thought Google Browser Sync was supposed to preserve your browser tabs, but it just plain doesn't work. Sometimes it asks me if I want to reopen some tabs from my previous session, but they're never the tabs I had open when I closed out of Firefox. I was excited when I first heard about Google Browser Sync, but after a few days of use, I'm going to remove it. There was a time when every Google release was a pleasant surprise, but the bar has been lowered.
And speaking of tab preservation, why isn't that functionality just built into Firefox and Safari?
Superman Returns tix are available online now from sites like Fandango. I recommend seeing it in IMAX 3D, if there's such a theater near you.
An estimated 16% of FEMA funds for Hurricane Katrina victims was misspent. Con men used false identities to obtain assistance checks to spend on anything from sex-change operations, Girls Gone Wild videos, vacations, and season tickets to the New Orleans Saints. Yes, some of that FEMA money went to waste. I'm referring, of course, to the person who purchased the Saints' season tickets.
In tribute of Father's Day, Nike is airing a commercial Sunday featuring Tiger Woods and his father. You can watch it online now.
Be careful when you get a haircut during World Cup. I was a barber shop getting a haircut when Peter Crouch scored for England today, and the guy cutting my hair was so excited he nearly gave me the Michael Madsen Reservoir Dogs special with his clippers.
Every time I see Dwayne Wade go by a defender to finish at the hoop, I wonder what Michael Jordan would have done in this "no hand check" era. Goodness gracious.
Can't Mark Cuban hire a copy editor for his blog? Isn't he a billionaire?
This modern art anecdote reminds me of the piece of modern art that was thrown out by the janitor at a museum because he thought it was trash. The artist couldn't have been more pleased with the outcome.
June 14, 2006
He Poos Clouds
Listen to clips from the new album from Final Fantasy He Poos Clouds, featuring vocals from Arcade Fire's violinist Owen Pallett over a string quartet. Pallett is an unabashed nerd--son of two entomologists, he scored a videogame at the age of twelve and two operas by the age of twenty-one--and this album is an attempt to modernize each of the eight Dungeons & Dragons schools of magic. Yep.
iToors sounds cool in concept--Podcasts for travelers to various cities--though the content on the site is still skimpy. For now there are podcasts for Paris, Prague, London, Glasgow, and Santa Monica(?!). The site also has a search engine for suggesting books, movies, and music to accompany a trip to each city, though again the cupboards are still quite bare. I'll withhold judgment until I hear their NYC podcasts, releasing sometime this next month. In general, though, I think the podcast market for travelers is underserved right now, especially having just returned from a month long trip in which my iPod was a permanent fixture. No podcast can replace a seasoned guide who can answer questions that pop into your head as you stroll around town, but a podcast is sure to be cheaper.
Handy list of useful Mac OS X freeware.
The Flock web browser beta is now available. It's a Mozilla-based browser with built-in features to simplify common web activities like bookmarking, blogging, newsreading, and photo-browsing.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times, which I saw the NYFF in 2005, is playing in a few theaters around the country. The movie comprises three shorts, each starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen as lovers, in 1966, 1911, and 2005. Though the overall movie is uneven (the second segment was a bit inert), the first segment, "A Time For Love," is romantic, gorgeous, and unforgettable. The movie's trailer is here (Quicktime). You can get a flavor of Hou's tranquil lyricism from his commercial for Air France also (click "Voir les films TV" and then "Le Ponton"), a commercial I saw more than a few times while traveling through E. Europe.
A glitzy annual benefit to sponsor breast cancer research is titled What A Pair! We may not have found the cure yet, but there's no shortage of cringe-inducing puns.
Nike + iPod
The Nike + iPod Sport Kit is available for pre-order for $29 and works with iPod Nanos. The website says you have to own or purchase a pair of Nike+ shoes, and Nike's just don't fit my flat, wide feet. They're made for people with skinny feet and normal to high arches. But since the only distinguishing feature of the Nike+ shoes seems to be a pocket under the insole to hold the wireless sensor, it certainly seems possible to hack another pair of running shoes to hold the sensor. I'll need to study a pair of these Nike+ shoes to see what's so special about the sub-insole notch.
June 13, 2006
Revisiting 2 Nov 2004
Reserve your pair of Blu Fom sneakers commemorating Core77's eleventh anniversary. A collaboration between Fila and Core77, the limited run of 300 sneakers is available from Core77.
Google Sketchup is now available for Mac OS X. Google Earth Release 4 is now in beta.
Did Bush steal the 2004 election? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks so. Cat Power, after her concert Friday night, told the audience to go out and read this article. Farhad Manjoo of Salon thinks Kennedy is off base. Then Kennedy and Manjoo traded another series of verbal parries.
Brushed chrome kitchen appliances are so yesterday. Give me a cast-iron range (really, because I can't afford it).
Looks like Sutton Foster is finally getting her own domain name to replace the Geocities page that was the top Google result for her name. She deserves the upgrade, Geocities being the trailer park of the Internet. I saw her in The Drowsy Chaperone Sunday and in Thoroughly Modern Millie a few years back. She's a charmer, and her story is the stuff of movies: unknown pulled out of the chorus to play the lead.
June 12, 2006
Cat Power at Town Hall (June 9, 2006)
I took friends to see Cat Power last Friday night at Town Hall. I'd seen her once before, a long time ago, opening for Liz Phair, and I braced my friends for the worst. Cat Power, real name Chan (pronounced Shawn) Marshall, is notorious for her sometimes jumbled concerts and jittery onstage persona. When her Memphis Rhythm Band appeared on stage and began playing, the microphone standing there alone at the center of the stage, I tensed. Maybe Marshall had decided not to come onstage? Maybe, like Eminem in 8 Mile, she was throwing up in a backstage bathroom, overcome with stage fright?
The band consisted of two guitars, a bass, two violins, a cello, drums, two backup vocalists, a piano, saxophone, and trumpet/coronet(?). I may even be leaving someone out. After an overture or two from the band, they jumped into the opening bars of "The Greatest." Still no Cat.
And then she appeared from stage right, barefoot, dressed in a sleeveless black top and black capri-like pants, dancing around like the crazy alternative girl you see on the dance floor grooving, doing her own thing, the one you think might be crazy but who is also unsettlingly alluring. She jumped into "The Greatest," flashing a smile and flexing her biceps after the opening line: "Once, I wanted to be the greatest." We had a perfect view from our seats in the sixth row, center Orchestra.
That voice. It seems to carry a built-in reverb, a raw purr that, like its owner, seems sexy, wistful, and fragile all at once. Having heard her mostly on CD up until now, it was clear during this concert that her voice is best appreciated live, in performance, when its warm density gives it a texture that seems palpable. On a cold night you could wrap it around yourself like a blanket of smoke.
For most of the concert, she seemed happy and at ease on stage, prowling back and forth on the stage, standing on her tiptoes, gesturing with her arms like Q’Orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas in The New World. Whispered speculations and the requisite drug use jokes could be heard from time to time in the seats nearby us, but I think she was much more at ease on stage than I remembered her being the last time I saw her. Her band and her fans seemed to be encouraging her, cushioning her, trying to blanket her with their love like they would a newborn infant.
Mid-concert, she disappeared midway through the ballad "Where Is My Love," leaving the band to carry the tune for an extended series of reprises. Finally, after everyone in the band had done their turn, a few members of the band could be seen peering towards stage right. "Where is my love?" sang one of the backup vocalists, and she shrugged as the audience realized that even the band had no idea where Marshall had disappeared to.
When she finally reappeared, I almost didn't recognize her. She had changed into a white strapless dress, and she'd pulled her hair back, allowing her attractive face to come out from behind her bangs. I was aware of a new train of thought disrupting my focus on the music. Cat Power was hot.
It's like revisiting an old high school buddy years later and discovering that his little sister has grown up to become a knockout. Perhaps the bangs are a security blanket, or a defense mechanism, but with her hair pulled back, Marshall was like a gangly but lovely swan. She sang the refrain one last time and brought the song to a close, and then the band left her alone on stage. She proceeded to sing a few songs alone, on guitar or the keyboard, and for the first time the fidgety Cat Power returned.
She started one song, and while strumming the guitar just ended it abruptly, saying, "Anyway." She started another tune, stopped and asked someone to remove a rolling snare, started the song again, then stopped to complain about a buzzing monitor. She fiddled with her guitar strap. Later, the keyboardist Rick Steff(?) gave her a smooch on her lips, and when he had his back to her, she wiped her lips as if grossed out (Steff, or whoever it was, seemed very touchy-feely with Cat Power, adding a creepy subtext to their interplay).
But Marshall never seemed at risk of falling over the edge. At one point, after moving her cup of water back and forth a few times like someone with OCD, she joked about herself, "Whatever keeps you sane!" At another point, she smiled between songs and proclaimed, "Sober!" From time to time she'd wave at friends in the crowd, and that voice. She covered The Animals "House of the Rising Sun" by herself, just a guitar to accompany her voice. It was lovely. Her voice needs little adornment, and using it she not only covers songs but makes them all her own.
She came back onstage for one encore, and then she was gone. As I filed out, I felt relaxed, all the tension having drained out of me. Our little baby had grown up.
HDR
Nathan Myhrvold on the future of digital camera technology. A while back at a wedding, Jeff mentioned to me that he'd returned from a conference at MIT where he'd seen demos of a camera that would take three exposures of every photo, basically automatically bracketing every photo to address exposure problems with scenes of high dynamic range (HDR). That technology hasn't even launched yet, but impatient photographers have leaped ahead with a partial solution, taking multiple exposures manually at different exposures, then blending them in Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix, or both, to create HDR photos. This is despite the fact that HDR displays are too expensive for mass-production.
Having a camera that could bracket shots near simultaneously would solve the issue of trying to handhold for multiple exposures, though you couldn't do it by varying the shutter speed given that you only have one lens. What you'd have to do is have multiple sensors, each with a differing sensitivity. Or you could just have one sensor with a much wider dynamic range. Being able to capture HDR with just one photo would solve the problem with creating HDR pics right now, which is that your subject has to be, for the most part, stationary.
One area where this type of technology would be particularly useful is wedding photography. Trying to capture the brilliant white of a wedding dress and the ebony black of a tuxedo side by side is a photographic challenge. Expose properly for the dress and the groom's tux looks like a solid block of black. Expose for the tux and the bride looks like a face nestled in a blinding explosion of white. Most wedding photographers have switched to shooting digital, and the speed of the digital workflow certainly benefits the photographer. But to my eye, black and white film still does a superior job of capturing the dynamic range of most wedding portraits. If one was to be married this year, I'd recommend asking one of the wedding photographers to shoot medium format film, especially for bride-groom portraits.
I have not played around with HDR much, but last last weekend while in DC visiting my sister I came across some dramatic cloud formations moving with urgency over the Mall. I bracketed a few shots so I could experiment with HDR in Photoshop CS2, clouds being perhaps the most popular element that drives photographers to turn to HDR processing (the texture of clouds disappears when photos are overexposed which is almost always in single exposures since landscapes below tend to be darker). I didn't have a tripod, unfortunately, and so I had to handhold. Not ideal, but I don't enjoy hauling a tripod around when sightseeing.
This one I shot out a window of the Hirshhorn seemed to come out the best, though I still need to play around with the settings in Photoshop and Photomatix to learn how each affects the final output.
Photoshop seems to produce more natural-looking images, while Photomatix can leave you with more saturated and dramatic HDR but also more artificial-looking images. Do a tag search on "HDR" in Flickr (over 25,000 results and rising) and you'll find some truly bizarre-looking HDR photos of images that don't require the effect. The end result often resembles some garish, digitally drawn watercolor.
Here's another one from this past weekend, when I took a visitor out to see The Statue of Liberty.
ScarJo, Shiloh, and the Mosquito
I finally started trying to plow through the two-feet-high stack of magazines that accumulated while I was in E. Europe. One of the first things I noticed was that Esquire was running its annual Sexiest Woman Alive mystery feature. That has to be Scarlett Johansson, though I don't mean to imply that I recognized her solely from that photo. Ahem. The current poll to guess the mystery woman shows Renee Zellweger in the lead with 60% of the vote, ScarJo in second at 28%. Without even looking at the photo you'd think the average Esquire reader could see how absurd those figures are.
Rumors have Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt selling the rights to their new baby Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt (which, by the way, sounds like a champagne I paired with oysters at dinner last week) to People magazine for $4.1 million and to Hello! magazine in Britain for $3.5 million. The Jolie-Pitts plan to donate the money to various charities. What's intriguing about the selling price is how it compares to the selling price of other pieces of art. You couldn't have purchased Roy Lichtenstein's Sinking Sun for that price, but you could have snagged Mark Rothko's White, Orange and Yellow. It says something about the world we live in when a celebrity couple can raise $7.6 million merely by selling off their baby photos. Not necessarily something bad or good, but something interesting about our culture. If only Andy Warhol were still alive. In the meantime, the social imperative for Brad and Angelina is clear. They must procreate like rabbits; with the funds their baby pics would generate, they'll cure world hunger within a decade, and in the meantime, they'd be raising the world's sexiness quotient.
Good overview on how to deal with mosquitos. I am one of those people that mosquitos love, and their bites leave huge, swollen welts on my skin. The sound of a mosquito buzzing near my ear late at night will rouse me from the deepest sleep, sending huge pulses of adrenaline through my system. At that point, I can't sleep until I've crushed the damn bugger with my palm.
June 9, 2006
Tonight, his journey ends
Tuesday morning, parts of Spiderman 3 were shot in Manhattan at the Broadhurst Theater (slideshow).
Deadspin has an anonymous source that claims that one of the people named in Jason Grimsley's affidavit as a person who referred him to an amphetamine source is Chris Mihlfeld who happens to be Albert Pujols' personal trainer. No one wants to find out that Pujols was on any illegal substance. It's bad enough thinking back to the Sosa-McGwire home run battle of 1998 that supposedly saved baseball and thinking that both of them were more artificially enhanced than Joan Rivers.
That short Samantha Bee American Idol-esque video retrospective on al-Zarqawi on The Daily Show last night caused me to laugh water out my nose. "Tonight, his journey ends. Let's take one last look back." It was set to that cheesy pop tune; I'm not sure of the name or artist. I wish the video was online to link to; perhaps it will be in a day or two.
UPDATE I: The tune accompanying shots from al-Zarqawi's terrorist training clip montage, a helpful reader informs me, was Daniel Powter's "Bad Day."
UPDATE II: Here we go, the Samantha Bee clip is in the middle of this clip.
June 8, 2006
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Google Browser Sync is a Firefox plugin that syncs your Firefox browser settings across all your computers. Useful to me because I'm always bouncing between my desktop and laptop.
Al Qaeda leader Zarqawi is dead, killed in an air strike north of Baghdad.
Jon Stewart vs. Bill Bennett on gay marriage. If you wanted to send someone from the right to match wits with Jon Stewart on this issue, Bill Bennett probably isn't on the shortlist.
The Yoda backpack makes it seem as if Yoda is hanging on your back so you can look like Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. Pair this with a Force FX lightsaber and, well, you might as well lop off your manhood and put it in that backpack because it won't be getting any use.
Speaking of Star Wars, the DVDs for the original, unaltered Star Wars trilogy, Eps IV through VI, are being released in September, and the fans are already killing them with customer reviews on Amazon.com. All three DVDs currently average about 2 out of 5 stars in customer ratings. It's not just that fans are being forced to buy yet another set of Star Wars DVDs but that the original, unaltered movies will be released in non-anamorphic widescreen and will not have a new Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix. Some fans say it's just the original laserdisc transfer (I own those laserdiscs, by the way). Oh, the horror.
An online strategy guide to rock, paper, scissors. There's even a book in print called The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide. I went to a book reading/signing by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner today. It was fun to finally meet them in person. They mentioned that they're going to write a sequel to Freakonomics to be titled SuperFreakonomics. Their talk strayed to the topic of rock, paper, scissors. Phil Gordon is going to throw a $50,000 rock, paper, scissors tournament so Levitt can study the play. It just so happens that Levitt is studying the human ability or inability to randomize. He mentioned some initial studies that indicated that football (I think he meant European football) players are superior strategy randomizers. He's not sure why. If given 4 strategies to employ against each other, the optimal mix is something like 40/20/20/20 (or so Levitt said), and football players do that naturally. Rock, paper, scissors is a good test of that human ability. Gordon believes that some people are gifted randomizers and can consistently win at rock, paper, scissors, but it sounds like Levitt's skeptical since different people make the rock, paper, scissors finals each year.
Chip Kidd is the guest blogger at PowellsBooks this week. Among the his to-do's for the week:
- Design a cover for Christina Garcia's forthcoming novel, A Handbook to Luck.
- Construct and photograph a miniature set for Martin Amis's new novel, House of Meetings. By Thursday morning.
- Redesign a poster for a Pedro Almodovar film festival.
- Do the mechanical for Robert Hughes's Goya, newly in paperback.
- Get an approval on a jacket for a book on the history of relations between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle East (by Zachary Karabell).
- Do research on a poster for Sofia Coppola's upcoming film, Marie Antoinette (I'm so, so behind on this and Sony's being very patient).
- Design a cover for a play by Cormac McCarthy, entitled Sunset Limited.
- Do same for Kim Deitch's new graphic novel, Alias The Cat, which I am also editing. And which rules.
- Reconfigure my design for the Surprise CD by Paul Simon in order to adapt it to, of all things, vinyl.
Even Danny Meyer's wife and kids have to wait in line at the Shake Shack.
June 7, 2006
This day online
A copy (PDF) of the affidavit from the investigation into Human Growth Hormone use by Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley. He names lots of other players who use steroids, but those names are blacked out. If MLB believes that the taint of steroids needs to be removed from the sport, they will need tougher policies, otherwise the hits will just keep on coming.
Royals hire Tom Emanski to teach then the fundamentals of baseball. I love those Tom Emanski commercials, from the wooden endorsement from that paragon of defense, Fred McGriff, to the hypnotic video of 14 year olds with perfect fundamentals executing relays and pivots at second base.
At long last, Google releases the Google Video Player for the Mac.
Slate compares and rates photo websites on their self-published photo album services and judges Shutterfly the winner. Flickr wasn't even mentioned, an odd omission considering its popularity as a poster child for Web 2.0. Flickr doesn't allow you to print hardcovers, but through a partnership with Qoop you can print glossy Photobooks.
Microsoft pooh-poohs Google Spreadsheets' functionality, as expected. Most people I know who use spreadsheets use a fraction of Excel's functionality. Excel is super expensive, and now those folks have a free alternative. A few years back at Amazon we tried sharing an Excel spreadsheet over our network, and it was a disaster. I'm not saying Google Spreadsheets' collaborative features are superior (the invite they sent me yesterday didn't work until just this morning), but I can see using it to share spreadsheets with lots of people who don't have a copy of Excel from work. Just in the next week I'm going to test it to figure out travel expenses with a friend and to analyze a potential fantasy baseball trade. Google Spreadsheets isn't going to replace Excel for corporate users. If you have to build a sophisticated model, you're not going to use Google Spreadsheets. Frankly, I'm looking forward to more of these web service apps to fill the basic home user's needs, ones which have been overserved by expensive, bloated applications like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office.
Speaking of online spreadsheets, an alternative to Google Spreadsheets is EditGrid. Here's their product comparison, built in their own product. Looks pretty nifty, but facing off against Google and then Microsoft, they'll be a bit like the Devil Rays trying to catch the Red Sox and Yankees.
Implanting a magnet in your fingertip provides a sixth sense, an ability to detect strong electromagnetic fields. The magnet was implanted in the author's ring finger because it was deemed least valuable of the fingers. The procedure sounds sketchy; body mod practitioners just use ice as the anesthetic.
Extra crispy
Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Dry-Touch Sunblock, SPF 55 (2-pack)
Neutrogena Age Shield Sunblock, SPF 45 (2-pack)
The article also notes that a dry t-shirt only provides, on average, SPF 7 worth of sun protection (darker shirts are superior in this regard). When I worked a summer internship at P&G way back in the day, my roommate spent the summer testing sunscreens, and the common mistake, he told me, was that people don't slather enough sunscreen on.
American and European cultures hold a golden tan in high regard, but in Asia, fair skin is the holy grail. That may have cultural roots. My mother told me that in olden times, dark skin was an indication that you were a farmer or other worker who had to be in the sun all day. Fair skin was the province of the nobility. In American and Europe, a tan hints at yachts and vacation homes in St. Tropez, and perhaps somewhere along the line wires crossed and the tan became an indicator of health instead of (in addition to?) wealth.
June 6, 2006
Review: X3, the Last Stand
In X-Men III: The Last Stand, the mutant heroes take on an unexpected foe, the most powerful and destructive force they've ever encountered. Yes, you guessed it: Brett Ratner. The outcome, needless to say, is tragic for the X-Men. I should probably insert a standard spoiler warning here, but can you spoil something that's already rotten? I will give away plot details, but if they should prevent you from seeing the movie, I expect a share of the admissions you'd be saving.
Mike and I had read the comic book as teenage dorks (well, that would describe me; I won't presume to speak for Mike), but the script, by Simon Kinberg (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) and Zak Penn (X2, The Fantastic Four, Elektra), simply picks at established mythology like a picky eater peeling pepperoni off a slice of pizza, leaving round craters of grease in the mozzarella landscape. The two main plotlines are these: (1) a cure is discovered for the mutant X gene, harvested from the young boy Leech, played by the same boy who convinced Nicole Kidman to take a bath with him in Birth (a power worth harvesting in its own right), and (2) Jean Grey returns in the guise of the Phoenix. The U.S. government, wary of the mutants, decide to impose the cure on the mutants, while Magneto (Ian McKellen), again playing the Malcolm X to Charles Xavier's Martin Luther King, Jr., recruits Phoenix to his brotherhood in an effort to kill the young boy and neutralize the cure.
There are a half dozen other plotlines, all treated with about as much attention as the average male devotes to wedding planning. We see a young Angel trying to remove his wings with a Microplane grater (as any experienced cook knows, if a Microplane won't do the trick, then surely the situation is dire). Rogue, still with that ridiculous white streak in her hair, is tempted by the cure, but she's on screen so little as to be a footnote. Numerous new mutants are introduced for no reason other than to show off their powers before they die, including one who throws horns out of his wrists and another who is either a porcupine or a pufferfish but is most certainly superfluous.
Bryan Singer gave the first two X-Men movies a sleek metallic sheen and tapped into the one of the charms of the comic book. Mutants represented every prosecuted minority, but their mutations were, for the most part, highly appealing. The movies extend that visually by casting attractive or at least interesting-looking actors in every part. Rebecca Romijn's slinky and nude blue Mystique gave shape-shifters an erotic female spark. Ian McKellen gave voice, and what a voice it is, to Magneto, playing him as a sort of mischievous hardline aristocrat, one who undoubtedly has accepted that some cruelty to ducks and geese is necessary to cultivate that divine food that is foie gras. When Storm (Halle Berry) invokes her powers, her head tilts back and her eyes go milky white; the expression is that of sexual release.
For a movie with such a large budget, the movie is curiously devoid of awe-inspiring moments. The Dark Phoenix re-appears off-screen. We see water swirling, the camera cuts to Cyclops' reaction, and then we cut back to Jean Grey standing on the shore, sporting an awful wig (a good plot for the next X-Men film would be the fight to discover a cure for the cheap hairpieces the actors are forced to wear). What good are all the special FX budgets if grand appearances can't be visualized? Cyclops dies off-screen; it's not entirely clear why or how, but I chalk it up to lazy plotting, and it reminded me of how in MI:III, Ethan Hunt disappears into an office building and then appears a few minutes later with the Rabbit's Foot. Apparently the interior security consisted of a ferocious Shih Tzu named Ling Ling.
When the movie does reach for the grand visual gesture, it falls short. When Magneto needs to transport his army over to Alcatraz, he doesn't ask Dark Phoenix to fly them over, nor does he think to levitate his army over on a sheet of tin foil. No, Magneto is a man of style, and so he decides to tear off one end of the Golden Gate Bridge and swing that end over to Alcatraz. Overkill, perhaps, but also an opportunity for a visual centerpiece, and yet the shots of the cars on the bridge look artificial, cartoonish. The climactic battle is a mess, a sort of playground brawl that had my head rolling back into my seat, my eyes milking over like Storm's.
The funniest moment in the movie comes from Vinnie Jones's Juggernaut and references this popular and offensive X-men cartoon remix. If only the rest of the movie had been so light on its feet. Universal handed the keys of a goldmine of a franchise to Ratner and he drove it into a tree. Jean Grey and Cyclops are dead, Xavier on life support, and Mystique is merely human. The second week box office grosses tumbled 67%, perhaps reflecting weak word-of-mouth from disappointed first weekend loyalists. The history of franchises that careen off course is not good; they usually don't recover, and if they do, it's usually only after the incoming director is allowed to hit the reset button.
My sister thought it delivered the expected dose of mindless entertainment, but then again, she admitted that during the climactic scene when Wolverine is staggering towards Phoenix, his skin struggling to regenerate itself in the face of the Phoenix's destructive glare, she was wondering (hoping?) that Hugh Jackman's pants would disintegrate.
"I wonder why they didn't?" she said with some disappointment as we walked out of the theater into the parking lot. I added it to the long tally of letdowns for the evening.
Poof
In the end, the Geniuses at the Apple store couldn't get my hard drive to function enough to recover any data. Being the Geniuses that they were, they also failed to call me to inform me of this fact before they tossed out my old hard drive and replaced it with a new one. I spent a few happy days last week thinking all my data could be recovered, then was hit with the horrific realization that it was all gone when I booted up my computer to find a pristine hard drive.
It turned out that the piece of crap backup program that came with my Lacie Firewire drive hadn't been backing up properly for at least half a year, so a good chunk of my e-mail, music, and photos just evaporated. In this day and age, losing the data on your hard drive is like having a couple robbers walk out with your furniture and music collection. Very depressing. Living in the digital era, it's almost as if nothing happened if it wasn't documented and digitized into pictures, e-mail.
After a week, I've almost gotten my computer back the way it was. After almost five years using a computer, it fits as comfortably as your favorite pair of jeans. If I've failed to return your e-mail recently, know that it's probably because I don't have it anymore. I can't wait until all my data is stored on some remote server and backed up daily by some third party.
If there is any benefit to this, it's that my computer was cleared of the clutter that tends to occur through regular use. I tend to be a packrat in the physical world, and I'm no different with digital assets. If someone stole all my clothing, I'd be devastated, not to mention naked, but in some shadowy corner of my mind I'd be thrilled at the opportunity to rebuild my wardrobe from scratch.
Nicole is blowing up
Last year, I caught some of her U.S. Open matches on the outer courts (pics here, here, and here), even chatted with her after a mixed doubles win. That's not going to happen again.
Drive-in Movies at the Rock (Rockefeller Center) return tonight through Friday evening. Tonight they're showing I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, followed by Air Guitar Nation tomorrow, Once In A Lifetime Thursday, and Kettle of Fish on Friday.
June 5, 2006
Google Spreadsheet
Google is releasing a web-based spreadsheet tomorrow. Here's a sneak peek, and a page to sign up to test it out. I'm quite curious to see how this first version performs. Some of Google's most recent releases have failed to live up to lofty expectations, and Excel is my favorite MS Office app.
More ado, please
If you're worthy of it, then by all means, further ado.
June 1, 2006
Faith Healer, and my Tony-nominated friend
One of the things I hope to recover when my desktop computer returns is my iCal calendar. I spent a good part of yesterday trying to recall big upcoming events in my life by looking over credit card receipts. To my surprise, I had two tickets to a matinee showing of Brian Friel's Faith Healer this afternoon. Who buys two tickets to a Wednesday matinee?
I spent a futile day trying to find someone to attend an afternoon matinee of serious theater with me, to no avail. Fortunately, a series of glowing reviews, and perhaps the presence of Ralph Fiennes as the lead, had attracted a huge audience this gorgeous afternoon day. I found a taker for my extra ticket in the cancellation queue, a man who handed over a tattered $100 bill with a furtive glance over both shoulders, a gesture that left me feeling like a drug dealer.
Faith Healer is not a conventional play. Rather, it is a series of four monologues or soliloquys. Frank Hardy (Fiennes) delivers the first and last, and in between we hear from Grace Hardy (Cherry Jones) and Teddy (Ian McDiarmid). They each tell stories about the same events, but their recollections differ in revealing ways.
Frank is an Irish faith healer, Grace his wife or mistress, depending on who you believe, and Ted is Frank's manager. They recall a time when they drifted about the Scottish and Welsh countryside staging "performances," as Frank refers to his healing performances.
Frank's healing ability comes and goes. He carries with him a press clipping about one of his triumphs, a time when he healed all ten people who came to him in a Welsh town. Those triumphs surprise even himself, and yet he is haunted by his failures. "I always knew when nothing was going to happen." Frank represents every artist who has prostrated himself at the foot of his Muse in desperation, anger, and incomprehension. For the most part, he paints his past in such grand and overly theatrical prose that one suspects him of artistic vanity and insecurity, but Fiennes manages to flash enough of his self-loathing at the audience to earn its pity.
Grace is both transfixed by Frank's gift and disgusted by his abusive treatment of her. She was a lawyer once but ran off with Frank, drawn to the his magnetism and the allure of the arts. Ted's soliloquy begins the second act and begins with a welcome comic embrace, what with Ian McDiarmid's Cockney accent and ghastly combover.
As the monologues unfold, a sense of dread creeps through the theater. Frank Hardy is a maelstrom into which Grace and Ted have been drawn, and that they are not on stage together augurs badly.
The acting is first-rate. Though I found myself yearning for a close-up shot of some of the actors during their intimate confessions, all three were skilled enough on the stage that their emotions registered with me in row L. Fiennes gives one of the best performances on Broadway by a silver screen star that I've seen in my time in NYC, and I've seen quite a few, and Cherry Jones gives a strong followup to her Tony-winning performance in Doubt. Ian McDiarmid proves that he was no fluke as the best actor in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.
The play requires the viewer to pay close attention. At times my thoughts wandered into reverie, and I'd struggle to catch up with the narrative sudoku, trying to balance three competing recounts of various events. It's no simple task for my hyperlink-addicted mind to remain focused on a single storyteller for nearly 3 hours, nor was it a cinch for many of the middle-aged to older audience in attendance this night. At times, the play left me yearning to see the three actors on stage together interacting in a more dramatic situation.
And yet, to structure the play any other way would be to undermine one of the play's more haunting messages, and that is the loneliness of human existence. How could three people who cared so deeply for each other offer such varying accounts of events they were the only people to experience? As each of them twists and kneads their memories on stage, they come to seem like, each of them, a ghost, doomed to forever struggle to communicate to each other across scenes, but doomed to forever appear on stage alone. Only the audience hears all of their stories, and yet the task of weaving them together into a single coherent narrative is like trying to visually resolve an optical illusion.
The old woman next to me dozed in and out, occasionally waking with a start before drifting slowly off again. At the end of the play, she proclaimed grumpily, "I didn't understand that."
"I guess you had to be there," I said.
Happy footnote: Along with the regular Playbill, I was given a special Playbill focused on the 2006 Tonys. I'd already heard the good news from Peter, but seeing it in print was still a thrill. Klara had been nominated for a Tony in the category of Best Scenic Design of a Musical for her work on Jersey Boys. I'll be watching and rooting for her on TV on June 11.
From the Tony website:
Prior to Jersey Boys, Klara Zieglerova designed the set for the Broadway revival of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner's The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. This is her first Tony nomination.
Cover up
A list of exceptional cover songs, complete with MP3 downloads of the originals and the covers, so you can judge for yourself.
If, like me, you love seafood, especially fish, you'll find this updated list of guilt-free fish a handy reference. All these types of seafood are low in contaminants and not overfished. Here's an accompanying article. Put your fork down, your hands up, and back away from the Chilean sea bass.
If you go to the Nacho Libre website and navigate to the Nacho Libre Confessional, you can watch video clips from the set, starring Jack Black. Some of the episode titles of this video podcast include "Prelude to a waxing" and "Montezuma's Revenge." Just seeing Jack Black in costume, with the mustache, acts as sort of a comedic colonic.
Samples of the 6 new Microsoft typefaces.
A super score returns
SoundtrackNet reviews the new Superman Returns soundtrack by John Ottoman and offers sample clips from each track. I don't have high expectations for the movie as a whole, but two aspects of it really excite me. One is that 20 minutes of the movie, mostly action sequences, will be shown in IMAX 3D. The other is hearing some of John Williams' classic Superman cues revived for the big screen.
Use Javascript to add sidenotes to your web page. Awesome. I'll have to implement this since I'm so parenthetical happy.
It's not always better to buy than rent. Chris offers this rule of thumb: For every $100 you spend in rent a month, you’d be better off buying up to $12,500 in property instead. Tim Harford discussed the rent vs. buy decision recently and noted that renting has many hidden benefits.
8 special edition new flavors of M&M's, all with cutesy puns for names like Eat, Drink, & Be Cherry or Orange-U-Glad. I'm a sucker for limited edition candies, but $49.99 for a tin?
The folks behind the book The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport apply their metrics to Michael Jordan and confirm the popular opinion: he was the best ever.