Remains of the Day

Mentos + Coke

~1,500 students in Belgium set a new record for Mentos-Coke fizz-fountains.

Smoking

David Sedaris on smoking in this week's New Yorker.

When I started smoking myself, I realized that a lit cigarette acted as a kind of beacon, drawing in any freeloader who happened to see or smell it. It was like standing on a street corner and jiggling a palmful of quarters. “Spare change?” someone might ask. And what could you say?

...

Given my reputation as a strident non-smoker, it was funny how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life were a play, and the prop mistress had finally showed up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.

Speaking of smoking, season one of Mad Men comes out on DVD July 1. I've tried to kick the DVD-buying habit this past year, but hot diggity that is some tempting product packaging.

Disappointing that the Blu-Ray box art for the same box set is purely conventional.

Recommended

Chris Rock's latest standup tour - Last night I caught Chris Rock's latest standup show with some coworkers. I have to let it soak in over a few weeks (during which I will dutifully, as a male, repeat his jokes to many of my coworkers and friends with a substantially substandard delivery that will deflate 85% of the humor of the routines), but with the performance fresh in my mind I'm convinced it's his best standup performance yet. I was in tears a couple of times. The Presidential election, race relations, differences between men and women, marriage, sex, steroids...he ranged over all the topics I was hoping he'd hit. If he's coming to your town, get yourself a ticket.

There's nothing like seeing good standup live; you can watch the inevitable HBO special, but you won't have the energy from thousands of people laughing to feed off of (the flipside is probably also true, that seeing bad standup live is exponentially more uncomfortable than seeing it on TV).

I last saw him live in Seattle some four years ago, during his Never Scared tour. Of all the standup comedians I've seen live (not a huge list, but includes folks like Dennis Miller, Seinfeld, Russell Peters), Chris Rock is my favorite. I saw Seinfeld twice in a four year span, and he repeated a great deal of his material. Though Rock covers similar themes in each show, I've never heard him use the same joke twice.

***

Lays ketchup flavored potato chips - one of my coworkers brought a bag back from Toronto. Apparently this flavor is a specialty north of the border. In America we love ketchup with our french fries, so why hasn't this flavor of chips caught on here? Whatever the reason, to satiate my fix I may have to resort to bidding on eBay.

***

State of Play - the British just seem to be able to crank out great political thrillers and police procedurals (I'm still a huge fan of Spooks, or MI-5 as they rebrand it for BBC America). This six-part miniseries stars the always fantastic Bill Nighy and a young Kelly MacDonald and James McAvoy, to name a few actors more recognized this side of the pond. It starts, as these things often do, with a dead body. When the press, government, industry, and police all tug on the thread, the plot unravels at a healthy clip.

eBay sues Craigslist

eBay owns a 25% stake in Craigslist, so perhaps this qualifies as a domestic squabble? eBay claims Craigslist has done something to dilute eBay's stake by over 10%, so they slapped them with a lawsuit.

After the indigestion from an entree of Skype, maybe this is like finding a strand of the chef's hair in the creme brulee?

Radiohead

Radiohead performing "House of Cards" for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

I'm still fuming over my recent attempt to get tickets off of Ticketmaster for the Radiohead concert at the Hollywood Bowl in LA this summer. It was half hour of trying to get through the phone lines - do de di....all circuits are busy - while simultaneously going through the Ticketmaster.com checkout process online about 450 times and getting denied at the end each time (they should just post a little video of Dikembe Mutombo at the end, wagging his index finger, cackling evilly). A perfect way to launch into your weekend feeling angry and homicidal.

In Rainbows was really damn good.

Applying diminishing returns

Arnold Kling offers some life advice based on broader application of the law of diminishing returns.

My tip is to pay attention to the law of diminishing returns. For example, the number of authors who write two books that are worth reading is at least two orders of magnitude less than the number who write one book worth reading. Most of the time, you should assume that if you've read one book by a given author then you do not need to read another. Too many people follow the opposite strategy--reading more books by authors they like.

Staying in the same organization for more than few years also puts you on the wrong side of the point of diminishing returns. Working in an organization is a learning experience. But, as with going to college, there comes a time when you need to stop taking their courses and proceed to graduate.

Teachstreet launches

Big congratulations to my friend Dave and his team for launching Teachstreet yesterday morning. Teachstreet is a service that connects people who want to learn something with local teachers. In its beta incarnation, the site lists over 25,000 classes in Seattle.

I worked briefly for Dave at Amazon, and he was my roommate here in Santa Monica my first year in LA when he was helping his friends with JibJab. Everyone knows him as, first and foremost, one of the all around good guys. He has a very genuine enthusiasm and honesty that is rare in the corporate world. It's a combination of qualities more common in entrepreneurs, so it's only fitting that he's now launched his own company. I'll bet anything that his team and colleagues love working with him.

It's good to see a new generation of startup companies spawning out of the Amazon.com alumni network.

More current songs

I wish Rock Band would add some more genres of music to its downloadable song lineups. There are too many heavy metal and classic rock tunes for my taste. Judas Priest? Boston? Do people in Rock Band's core demographic really know how to sing these tunes? I sure don't, and neither do my friends.

Elevators

Nick Paumarten's article "The lives of elevators" in last week's New Yorker offered a useful education on the basics of "elevatoring":

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset. In a residential building or a hotel, the tolerance goes up, but only by ten or twenty seconds. In the nineteen-sixties, many builders cheated a little—accepting, say, a thirty-four-second interval, and 11.5 per cent handling capacity—and came to regret it. Generally, England is over-elevatored; India is under-elevatored.

Fortune carries a “probable stop” table, which applies probability to the vexation that boils up when each passenger presses a button for a different floor. If there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make 6.5 stops. Ten people, thirty floors: 9.5 stops. (The table does not account for the exasperating phantom stop, when no one gets on or off.) Other factors are door open and close time, loading and unloading time, acceleration rate, and deceleration rate, which must be swift but gentle. You hear that interfloor traffic kills—something to mutter, perhaps, when a co-worker boards the elevator to travel one flight, especially if that co-worker is planning, at day’s end, to spend half an hour on a StairMaster. It’s also disastrous to have a cafeteria on anything but the ground floor, or one floor above or below it, accessible via escalator.

An over-elevatored building wastes space and deprives a landlord of revenue. An under-elevatored building suffers on the rental or resale market, and drives its tenants nuts.

Confirming something I read somewhere else a long time ago:

In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power.

And then, an illuminating discussion of the science of personal space:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.

Bodies need to fit. Designers of public spaces have devised a maximum average unit size—that is, they’ve figured out how much space a person takes up, and how little of it he or she can abide. The master fitter is John J. Fruin, the author of “Pedestrian Planning and Design,” which was published in 1971 and reprinted, in 1987, by Elevator World, the publisher of the leading industry magazine, Elevator World. Fruin introduced the concept of the “body ellipse,” a bird’s-eye graphic representation of an individual’s personal space. It’s essentially a shoulder-width oval with a head in the middle. He employed a standard set of near-maximum human dimensions: twenty-four inches wide (at the shoulders) and eighteen inches deep. If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

The standard elevator measure is about two square feet per passenger—intimate, disturbing. “Elevators represent a special circumstance in which pedestrians are willing to submit to closer spacing than they would normally accept,” Fruin wrote, without much parsing the question of willingness.

I thought of this issue of personal space on my Virgin America flight back from NYC to LA this past Sunday. I was in the aisle seat of my row. The man in the middle seat was large, his waist flowing over the armrest into my negligible personal space. He wore only a tank top undershirt, and wore it a bit too comfortably for my taste. He coughed and cleared his throat and groaned incessantly, an audio tour of bodily function.

But the most horrifying realization, coming as it did at the start of a six and a half hour flight, was that my neighbor was, uh, malodorous, and the amplitude of his scent rose and fell in accordance with the raising and lowering of the arm closest to me. I donned my noise-canceling headphones but longed for equivalent technology for my nose.

I wonder, though, if some of NYC's energy isn't simply the result of its sheer human density. Just as taking a volume of gas at a constant temperature and decreasing the volume increases pressure, so does the difference in human density between LA and NYC explain much of the difference in the personalities of the residents of each city.

Extra extra

Interesting rumor: 24.4MP Nikon D3 replacement on the way? Or are some D3s 24.4MP cameras in waiting?

Unused script by Michael Chabon for Spiderman 2. (UPDATE: link to the full script PDF was removed, sadly)

New York state passes bill forcing Amazon.com to start charging New Yorkers sales tax. Ouch.

Steven Spielberg acquires the rights to make a 3-D live action version of Ghost in the Shell.

Saturdays = Youth

M83's new album Saturdays = Youth is really good. If you're looking for one of their albums to try, I'd start with Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts which is still my favorite M83 album and a classic of the shoegazer genre.

Saturdays=Youth

Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

Feed Our Kids Well?

The long lost first episode of The Dana Carvey Show is now available on Hulu, featuring, yes, the infamous "Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies" sketch. Timely satire, perhaps, given this election season?

In one of those inadvertent and bizarre coincidences, the ad campaign on this skit happened to be Ragu's Feed Our Kids Well campaign, leading to the the unplanned visual convergence below (click for a larger view; you won't fully understand unless you've seen the skit).

The Office and 30 Rock, back

Last night, The Office and 30 Rock came back from the writer's strike with new episodes. And laughter rang through the kingdom.

The Office - "Dinner Party"

30 Rock - "MILF Island"

What do you see?

One of yesterday's hot Internet stories was this photo from the White House website which appeared to show Dick Cheney leering at a nude female sunbather.

In a bit of PR control, and perhaps as evidence that we see what we want to see, the powers that be released a larger version of the photo which reveals that the reflection in his sunglasses was nothing more than a hand holding a fishing rod. [via popurls]

***

A plug to watch Arrested Development on Hulu via Airbag's Longboard: "Thanks to Hulu, the world no longer has an excuse for not watching Arrested Development. Sometimes the Internet just gives and gives and gives."

Another fun place I found a Hulu embedded video: in Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker blog.

***

PicLens, a cool browser plugin I often use to show people photos on Flickr, has a beta version that supports YouTube video browsing in Firefox, including Firefox 3b5, and IE. I couldn't get any videos to actually start playing, but I saw it working in a demo. Select a video and it starts playing right there within PicLens' 3-D wall.

Dudamania

If you can attract fans from Karen O to Eva Mendes, and you can get a hot dog named after you at Pink's, and you can call Frank Gehry "Pancho," then, well, I'd say you've made it.

This past Sunday, I caught Dudamel's last concert with the LA Philharmonic until Nov. 24, next season. Again, it was a sold out show and we had to wait in a long standby line for tickets to free up via returns. The program consisted of Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, Leila Josefowicz playing Bartok's Second Violin Concerto (with the encore being a piece by "our friend Esa-Pekka" as Josefowicz announced to the delight of the crowd), and finally, Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe which, at its best moments, is my favorite of Ravel's work.

There were only two odd moments. One was awkward, when a French horn player dropped his mute during a quiet moment in the Ravel. As it clattered to a stop, the guilty party hung his head sheepishly.

The second strange moment was the intrusion of a horn from the rear of the concert hall, also in the middle of the Ravel. Was it coming from outside? Through a speaker? Was it supposed to be part of the performance? If someone knows, let me know. Many in the audience looked towards the back of the auditorium, but I never figured out what it was.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on Hulu

If you missed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip the first time around, when it aired on TV, or, if you're like me and never caught up with the accumulated episodes on his DVR before having to return it to DirecTV, you can now catch up on every episode on Hulu, starting with this one...

Iran So Far

Fifa Street 3

Le foot.

Who's the Star?

In this week's New Yorker, Joan Acocella surveys Dancing with the Stars.

What can you learn from “Dancing with the Stars”? First, the difference between a dancer and a non-dancer. The people who partner the stars on the show are not just professional ballroom dancers; in their field they are bigger stars than their partners are in their fields. I don’t know why they’re up there, dragging those klutzes around—the pay must be good—but when you watch them dancing with non-professionals you will see what makes a person a dancer. Contrary to widespread belief, the main difference is not in the feet but in the upper body—the neck, the shoulders, the arms, which are stiff in the amateur and relaxed and eloquent in the professional. The other giveaway is in “line.” You may think you don’t know what that is, but, as with consonance in music, you do know. It is the carriage of the body in a way that seems harmonious and natural, as opposed to awkward and forced. Poor Monica Seles, with every step she took, ended in a position that no human being has ever willingly assumed. She was eliminated in the first round.

Firefox 3 versus Safari 3

John Gruber with a great comparison of Firefox 3 and Safari 3 beta browsers for the Mac. His preference is for Safari 3, though he notes that Firefox has some important advantages.

I've been using these two browsers (Firefox 3 b5) for a few weeks now as well. I prefer Firefox 3, for a few reasons. As Gruber notes, Safari is a memory hog, and given the number of applications I have open at once, Firefox's efficient memory usage makes a difference. I hate that Safari doesn't offer that option to open up with the tabs from your last session. Such a simple fix, I have no idea why they haven't added that after so many generations now.

And, of course, there's Firebug. Indispensable, and even better now that version 1.2 is in alpha. The Web Dev Toolbar is another useful plugin, and I use FoxiPod just about every day.

But Gruber is also right in that both are a step up from the previous generation: faster, more powerful and functional.

UPDATE: According to ZDNet, Firefox 3.0 b5 holds a slight speed edge on Safari 3.1, though both are faster than their previous versions, Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Safari 3.0.4.

Bad Idea Jeans

An old classic.

Misc

Who is Jimmy Carter endorsing? Seems pretty clear it's Obama.

***

Is it possible to go out both with a whimper and a bang? This may be the business equivalent. RIP ATA and your dirt cheap airfares which I've taken advantage of a few times over the years.

***

One of the cooler hacks I've encountered recently: hack your portable Canon digital camera to enable new functionality like RAW file formats, live historgram displays, unlimited interval shooting, high speed shutters, and much more. I'm so going to do this once I can track down a card reader.

"He That Believeth In Me"

I've had so little free time recently that I haven't been able to try out Battlestar Galactica. Season 1 is bubbling up in my Netflix queue, but I've had the same three discs at home for a month now, the weight of the carrying costs outweighed by the (a) ambition, (b) guilt, (c) busy schedule, (d) all of the above (Ikiru? Berlin Alexanderplatz? Anyone?)

But I know how passionate the fans are and wonder if I shouldn't be trying to catch up with a greater sense of urgency. Season 4 tipped off last night...

What the...?

Bizarre moment from the minisode of the pilot of Sheena. It's hard to go wrong with a man in a gorilla suit.

***

Kanye West launches a travel site: Kanye Travel Ventures. It's not clear to me what the Kanye twist on this is, but then I could never figure out what Paul Newman had to do with tomato sauce either. [via Thrillist]

Odds and Ends

Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.

Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.

Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?

Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.

The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.

Believe the hype

Sunday afternoon, Mira grabbed me for the matinee performance by the LA Philharmonic. Classical music fans under the age of 50 are a rare breed, so I'm always glad when I can find a classical music buddy in each new town I move to. We didn't have tickets, the concert having been sold out long ago, and Craigslist prices were out of control, so we headed downtown to see what the classical music scalping scene would be like. I pictured some shady character resembling a homeless bum making eye contact with me, pulling me aside, and turning open one half of his jacket to reveal a thick stack of tickets in his breast pocket.

Having dealt only with those quick-witted scalpers I'd meet outside Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium over the years, I couldn't help but picture classical music scalpers looking and talking the same.

"What you want, brother? I got a pair, orchestra, third row. Face $120. I'll let'em go for a hundy each. Say what? Sixty? Get outta here, we talking Dudamel, man, I ain't no dummy."

We were lucky. The box office had some extras, and we snagged terrace seats. There isn't a bad seat to be had in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel conducted the orchestra in three pieces:

• Salonen's Insomnia
• Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1 (pianist Simon Trpceski)
• Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique

Prior to this concert, I'd only read about Dudamel in the New Yorker profile of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the LA Philharmonic's current music director (whose most visible work is as conductor). This was Dudamel's first visit to Walt Disney Concert Hall since he was announced as Salonen's successor. So my opinion of Dudamel, as I walked out of the concert, was not based on anything other than his work on this afternoon.

And my judgment was this: Dudamel is the most exciting conductor of my lifetime.

In 2009-2010, Dudamel will take over from Salonen as the musical director of the LA Phil. Dudamel is 27. In tapping him, the LA Philharmonic snared the most gifted young conductor of this generation.

The orchestra sounded fantastic in a performance recorded for iTunes. Dudamel's conducting style is infectious, unmistakeable in its verve and passion, and no piece showcased it to greater effect than Symphonie Fantastique which he conducted by heart, without a score.

At times, he leapt off the podium, while at other times, he stood with arms at his side and let the orchestra just run with the music. His gestures are uninhibited and grand; his body appears to literally be a conductor of the music, all of its emotion erupting out through his hair, which from a distance reminded me of a cross between the coifs of Malcolm Gladwell and Sideshow Bob. He would've made a great horse jockey if you substituted a crop for his baton. It was the most electrifying conducting job I've ever witnessed.

It's not just on the podium that his enthusiasm comes through. In rehearsals, he must be able to communicate the emotion and musicality he seeks to musicians two to three times his age, and more than that, he has to extract that performance from them, show after show. Dudamel succeeds on both counts. Lest you think that all classical musicians are a polite and harmonious people, witness the strife in the Seattle Symphony between the musicians and their musical director Gerard Schwarz. Watching the orchestra, you could tell they love him and would follow him anywhere he leads, and video of him leading orchestras around the world seem to confirm that he's a born leader of musicians, a true prodigy in a world that's too quick to throw that term on any young, technically proficient practitioner.

When he's not conducting, Dudamel's body language is humble, boyish, and gracious. After Symphonie Fantastique, the audience erupted in applause, summoning Dudamel back out some four or five times. Each time he insisted on trying to pass the acclaim onto different members of the orchestra, never standing back on the podium but always hiding in amongst the orchestra, shaking hands with various soloists. But there was no doubt who the city had gone crazy for.

[Contrast Dudamel to Simon Trpceski, the Macedonian pianist who walked on stage wearing a cream-colored turtleneck under his sportcoat and who leapt off the piano seat at the end of his performance. Trpceski is good, but his every gesture speaks to his knowing it. Trpceski's favored response to the audience applause was to hold his hands up to either side of his head, about four feet apart, palms facing inward, and shake them forwards and backwards, as if articulating the size of his own ego. Look, you're either the type of artist who takes a promotional photo like the one below, or you aren't. Mira and I thought it was fantastic.]

On the way home, still giddy, I plugged into all the web had to say about Dudamel and realized I was hardly the first to go gaga for Gustavo. There are hints of the predictable backlash, various reviews of his albums citing him as just overhyped, more energy than nuance, and unable to carry an adagio passage to save his life. To those people, I say that we're more than delighted to have him here in LA.

If there is a Dudamel subscription package for the LA Phil next year, I'm buying.

NYTimes Sunday Magazine profile

Gustavo Dudamel on 60 Minutes (especially entertaining is this clip, "There Will Be Blood")

More good video available at the Deutsche Grammophon site for Dudamel

Time Magazine: "Gustavo Dudamel: The Natural"

Newsweek: "Gustavo Dudamel: Wunderkind"