quarterempty

alright, i never downloaded google earth, it just seemed like a lot for something kinda cool, and I doubt my laptop would have done very well with it. but this is awesome. more than awesome in the sense that there is more than just some awe. it’s called flash earth and it provides a completely smooth scrollable interface to google maps, yahoo maps and a bunch of other satellite map hosts. and you don’t have to download anything, it works right in flash.

my neighborhood:
http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=40.72024&lon=-73.984484&z=20&r=0&src=msa
when you zoom out a ways, it’s really bizarre how, out of the entire eastern seaboard, manhattan became the most developed.

my last apartment in Portland:
http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=45.515909&lon=-122.650872&z=20&r=0&src=msa

The best use is to find where you live, zoom all the way in and zoom all the way out. just click and hold on the + and – buttons on the zoom bar. i’d really like to try this on a big screen.

Gothamist : Queens’ Confusing Streets Keep Man Wandering

We bet most anyone who has attempted to follow a map in Queens can empathize with the plight of new immigrant Damon Mootoo. Mootoo, who had just arrived from Guyana, got lost when he left his brother’s home on 152nd Street in South Jamaica and ended up wandering around in the cold for five days. Five days! The Daily News reported that Mootoo, who can speak English but is hard of hearing, “didn’t want to approach a cop because he feared he’d be deported.” He managed to get by by begging for water and sleeping in an abandoned car or under a piece of wood in someone’s yard in the below-freezing temperature.

Finally, over the weekend, Michael Bharath saw Mootoo near his home on 142nd Place and Rockaway Boulevard and brought him in. Bharath’s wife gave him a sandwich and Mootoo showed Bharath his stepmother’s address on Foch Boulevard. Mootoo was reunited with his family; his brother said, “He said he was just walking all over. He was scared. He heard all the stories about New York.”

Seriously, I’m sure this is not the first time this has happened.

Motivational Posters:

Ain’t It Cool News: The Ghostbusters video game?

There are a few demo videos of a potential Ghostbusters game floating around the internet this week [follow the link for a nice compilation]. While it’s unclear if this is a hoax, the videos certainly show the potential of the game. I’m thinking the Wii would be a pretty awesome system to play on. Don’t get your hopes up for another sequel though, according to cinematical, “Rumors of a new Ghostbusters film swirled in and out of popularity for a long time, before Harold Ramis finally revealed that Bill Murray has decided never to fork over his share of the rights — meaning no film will happen.” I remember reading years ago that Bill Murray agreed to do a sequel only if his character died in the first 15 minutes and haunted everyone for the rest of the film. However, this is the current rumor floating around…

In Focus | November 2005 | Ramis On ‘Ice’:

What Danny had originally conceived was sending us to a special-effects Hell — a netherworld full of phenomenal visual environments and boiling pits and all that stuff. But my thought was that what works so well about the first two is the mundane-ness of it all. So my notion was that Hell exists simultaneously, and in the same place as our consensus reality. But it’s like a film shutter — it’s the darkness between the 24 frames. So we blink alternately with this other reality, which is Hell.So all the Ghostbusters would need to do [to go to Hell] is take themselves “out of phase” one beat. And we create a device to do it, and it’s in a warehouse in Brooklyn. And when we step out of the chamber, it looks just like New York — but it’s Hell. Everything’s gridlocked — no cars are moving, no vehicles are moving, and all the drivers are swearing at each other in different foreign languages. It’s all the worst things about modern urban life, just magnified.

And Heaven was across the George Washington Bridge in New Jersey. The Ghostbusters had to make this journey from Lower Manhattan to the George Washington Bridge.

Ah well, we’ll always have the cartoon.

Also, in case you’re ever in New York:
Ironic Sans : The Google Maps Guide to Ghostbusters
A really well done compilation of the locations of the scenes from both of the movies. Ghostbusters HQ is in Tribeca, now one of the most expensive zip codes in the country!

Shortcuts | The Guardian:

It seems there is a new craze flickering into life among anti-establishment types. It’s called Yomango, and it resembles what you’d get if you somehow managed to cross No Logo, Robin Hood, and flash-mobbing. No, not men in green tights running around Waterloo, waving copies of said book: just a lot of giddy activists turning up at a big department store (for example), making off with a £9.50 dress, exhibiting it as a work of art, then replacing it – but in a completely different store.Yomango is, according the manifesto on its website, the “promoting of shoplifting as a form of disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations … Buying is an action based on obedience; [Yomango is] taking to the extreme the free circulation of goods.” It began in Spain in 2002 and has spread to Latin America and Europe. In London, in 2004, a group of activists fare-dodged on to the tube, where they had a party featuring liberated food and drink. In Hamburg, Yomango has co-opted into another group, Vokü, which believes in liberating food from supermarkets for public picnics.

eXile | War Nerd | Saddam Died Beautiful – A Special Eulogy | By Gary Brecher

A lot of office boys like to talk about “old school.” I’ll tell you who was old school: Saddam Hussein. Saddam died beautiful. It’s the truth and you know it. Fact is, the longer we stay in Iraq the better Saddam looks. He never had a tenth of our money or weaponry but he did what we can’t: kept that bag of snakes in order.

And what a way to go! Damn, did you see that cellphone video [follow link to article] of his death? A bunch of Shia monkeys in ski masks woofing at him — safe behind their masks, with Saddam handcuffed and under guard — woofing like cockapoos at a pit bull heading for the Pound’s death cell. And Saddam laughed at them, especially when they chanted the name of their pissant Imam, Moqtada al-Sadr. You can hear him on that jerky cellphone video sneering, “Moqtada?” And Saddam earned the right to laugh; he killed Sadr Sr. and kept Junior so terrified he didn’t dare show his fat face until Saddam was gone and only the wimp occupiers were in charge.

Saddam told the ski-mask monkeys they weren’t real men. And he had the right to say that too. Call him what you want, but Saddam was a man, a real man. One of the last. To me, watching that execution was like watching Planet of the Apes: a bunch of de-evolved primates killing the last man. Saddam looked like the 20th century in that overcoat and hat. He’d lost weight in prison. Never flinched, not once. You try that: going to the gallows with your blood enemies screaming insults at you. See if you can hold your bladder, never mind answer back as fast and calm as he did.
. . .
Sure, Saddam was a killer. Don’t you get it by now? In a place like Iraq, killing is how you run things.
. . .
Until we hooked him out of his burrow, the only thing Saddam had really done to America has hand us our most glorious victory since Inchon, in Gulf War I. He was like a lot of Third-World rulers: great at internal security but hopeless at conventional war. Like a rattler, he was totally harmless to anybody with the brains God gave a stray dog.

Meaning, anybody but Bush and Cheney. Those dudes remind me of this Darwin-Award winner who went to the hereafter on Lake Berryessa. He was fishing, noticed a rattler swimming beside his boat, grabbed it — and when his fishing buddy told him to throw it away, this genius said, “Oh, no, it’s harmless — look!” and held it up to his face to show how harmless it was. The snake did us all a favor and took his genes out of the pool by biting him right on the nose, and he died before his buddy could power back to shore.

That was Saddam’s last favor to us: showing us — the hard way, no denying that — how flat-out stupid our bigwigs really are. Bush is standing up at the podium every press conference with that rattler dangling from his nose like a mega-booger, yelping, “I’m fine, I’m fine!” but one of these days, and none too soon, he’ll pass out and pass on, thanks to Saddam.

We did Saddam an accidental favor in return by giving him a rare old-school death. Maybe that’s not important for some of you moral-types but it would be to my heroes. It would matter to John Paul Jones, it would matter to Alexander, it would matter to Subotai, and it matters to me. I wish I could have a death like that. Instead I’ll die the same way you will, tubes coming out of my fat carcass, leaning over to watch the cardio beeper zig when it’s supposed to zag, scared out of my head and ashamed to look down at this civilian belly hyperventilating its last chickenshit breaths.

thanks poormojo!

I’ve heard this from them before in interviews, that Penn and Teller don’t see each other socially, they don’t hang out at each other’s homes, I don’t think they even live in the same city(?).  It’s an interesting theory though.

Esquire : What I’ve Learned : Penn and Teller

Penn: The trick is not to try to work on the personal relationship at all. Treat it as though it’s a dry-cleaning business. Of course you’re going to become best friends—like in any dry-cleaning business. Your dad’s partner ends up being very good friends with your family. But they didn’t start the dry-cleaning business because they were in love. Lennon and McCartney started because they were in love—so you’re going to get that Let It Be train wreck. Martin and Lewis were probably the biggest train wreck of that sort, in that it lasted two and a half years while they were producing stuff. While Lewis was in love with Martin, Dean seemed incapable of love. Simon and Garfunkel started out as best friends at twelve, but as far as I know they were never really comfortable around each other once they made it. Better to keep it a business.

Teller: Sometimes it’s very intense. Sometimes we get on each other’s nerves or step on each other’s feet. But one thing we’ve learned is not to apologize. That’s a big, big, useful rule for anyone trying to hold together a relationship. When something has been a problem, don’t apologize. Just drop it.

SUPERTOUCH » Blog Archive » Banksy’s “Barely Legal” Show:

“I have just realised what it is that Banksy does. He makes high end, outdoor “The Far Side” comics. Gary Larson is probably kicking himself somewhere. He could have sold a piece to Brad Pitt.” —Bang-jamin

I know this show is old news, but I followed a link to something else and started looking through this set of photos of the show, which included a lot of pieces i hadn’t seen or didn’t recall seeing when it was originally covered. There was also a huge list of comments. I love Banksy, I think his work is clever, interesting, and it’s something i defintiely wish there were more of. Still, I’m fascinated by people who don’t like his work or think it’s derivative or not clever. Many of the negative commentators criticized him for charging so much for his work (~$100,000) and selling it to celebrities (apparently Brad Pitt purchased a number of pieces), both ridicuolus points I won’t even bother to refute, well, except to say (1) presumably he was raising the money to perform even further, more ambitious(!) work and (2) i think these arguments go to “cred”, which really relates to an individual aestheic. Few of the critical arguments go beyond name-calling, though one alleges that some of the art was painted by other people. Unsurprising, inasmuch as many of the subverted traditional works show a fair amount of time and proficiency was required, but even that is forgivable for an artist who refuses to be photographed or identified, he’s hardly self-aggrandizing. it isn’t as if he is out there, proclaiming himself to be a solitary genius, so long as the concept was his own, does it really matter that he has assistants? I don’t imagine he painted the elephant all by himself either. Others complain that his work isn’t as challenging as it once was, that he’s mainstreamed, but I suppose that depends on the individual as well. Some of the images and wordplay would be right at home on a t-shirt at spencer’s gifts, but pert of it is context. How seriously can you take a t-shirt, but put it on a wall and it might change someone’s mind, or at least give them a different perspective.

How the Middle Class Is Getting Screwed – Kurt Andersen – New York Magazine:

It used to be that when the economy thrived and productivity grew, pay for working people rose accordingly. Yet as the Times reported this past summer, the first six years of the 21st century look to be “the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers.” People have put up with all this because it happened so quickly and for the same reason that the great mass of losers in casinos put up with odds that favor the house: The spectacle of a few ecstatic big winners encourages the losers to believe that, hey, they might get lucky and win, too. We have, in effect, turned the U.S. into a winner-take-all casino economy, substituting the gambling hall for the factory floor as our governing economic metaphor, an assembly of individual strangers whose fortunes depend overwhelmingly on random luck rather than collective hard work. And it’s been unwitting synergy, not unrelated coincidence, that actual casino gambling has become ubiquitous in America at the same time.

I don’t know about you, but I find casinos, for all their adrenaline and glitz, pretty depressing places.

This is a call to arms by Kurt Andersen that I am a little surprised hasn’t gotten more play. He attacks CEO pay and the shift of salaries that have been rising for the rich and holding steady or sliding for the middle class. He even offers a solution:

…We could enact de facto compensation caps for top executives, either by limiting the tax deductibility of CEO pay or, as in Britain, by making CEO pay subject to a shareholder vote every year. We can raise—and certainly not further reduce—taxes on the extremely well-to-do.We’ve had a bracing, invigorating run of pedal-to-the-metal hypercapitalism, but now it’s time to ease up and share the wealth some. We can afford to make life a little more fair and a lot less scary for most people.

I think this is a savvy point that is even-wider-ranging that Andersen argues. The massive increase in the amount of media and the rise of celebrity culture since WWII have led to a narcissism and entitlement.  That each of us is special and deserves success and riches.  By seeing those few winners, our hopes are that much more falsely raised.  How else to explain the rise in popularity of jobs that so few manage to succeed in… acting, writing, professional sports, singing, rocking, etc.

i went to see a taping of the colbert report last night, and it was well worthwhile.  The whole process is a bit of a pain in the ass.  I requested tickets back in August, heard nothing until late October, when i got an email saying I had tickets for January 8.  An almost six month wait!  Doors open at 6, they recommend you get there at least an hour and a half early.  I got there an hour and forty minutes early and if i had been fifteen minutes later, I would not have gotten in.  then you wait.  and wait.  they have this covered area, so at least the cold, biting winds that whip up the west side around 11th Avenue aren’t so brutal.  then, about 6, they bring you inside, give you a card with a number, run you through a metal detector, and you wait in this very tiny room with everyone else, but at least there are bathrooms.  and a small television.  playing comedy central.  about 6:30 they let you into the studio in numerical order (note, the higher your number, the more likely you are to sit on the side he high fives on his way to the interview), you listen to really loud music for ten or fifteen minutes, the warm up guy goes around and insults the audience for ten or fifteen minutes, they hand out a couple of t-shirts, teach you how to clap and cheer.  colbert comes out and takes questions for five to ten minutes, then they do the show.  30 minutes later they boot you out on the street.

three hours of waiting for thirty minutes of entertainment isn’t the best ratio, but if it’s what must be done to see colbert then it must be done.  and really it is worth doing once, it’s a surprisingly surreal experience, the stage area is astonishingly small, and the the set is huge within it.  the colbert report is taped in the old daily show studios (oh couch, how i do miss thee), and you could see how the daily show would easily fit in the space, but it took a fair amount of vision to put together the colbert set, and to use with as much versatility as they do.  as i mentioned, tickets are difficult to get, they only take requests at certain times, and after you’ve seen the show, you’re not allowed back for six months.  this is one of those situations where it would be nice to know someone that works there. alas.

I went to see the daily show last summer, and while the process was largely the same (waiting, waiting, loud music, warm up, banter, show, curb), the feeling was not.  the daily show was like going to a museum, or a national monument.  it felt formal and somewhat reverential, and that’s not to say that the staff or host are less engaging, but it just has this feeling, at least in my recollection of “this is a place where comedy that can change the world is made”, it’s also larger, they seat about 120-150 people each taping, and you’re a little further away from the set.  colbert seats about 80-90 and you’re practically on top of the set.  the colbert report felt looser, the warm up guy was great, really great, the director was funny, stephen flubbed a couple lines and had to do second takes, and it just had this, “we’re in it together” feeling.  and maybe it’s that colbert is acting, while stewart is technically hosting, and you feel like you need to help the act come off, while you simply shower the host with your appreciation.  i also hadn;t really realized until last night that stewart has correspondents, while colbert is all on his own and how exhausting that might get.  perhaps i was mistaking the ease of practice, the daily show is in it’s tenth year, for professionalism, but it did feel different.

when i went to the daily show i sat on the dais that camera flys over after the opening titles and you could see my head and my fist pump.  i don’t get comedy central, and the last night’s show hasn’t shown up online yet so i haven’t seen it, but i was on the high-five side and em tells me you could see me, so i guess i better get an agent.  i brought my friend thom as my guest, he has a shaved head and said that colbert pointed at him and swooped his hand over his head, but it all happened really quickly, so who knows.  this time i was sort of stunned and unprepared for it and i think i was making a stupid face, but at least i wasn’t looking at the monitor…

The New Yorker: Big Pictures : David Denby:

But theatrical grosses actually account for less than twenty per cent of total movie revenues. Despite the to-do in the media every weekend over what’s No. 1 and what’s No. 2, and how the take for “Crushed Knees 3” compares with that for “Crushed Knees 2,” the theatres bring in much less money than other revenue streams—sales to television in all its forms (free, cable, pay-per-view) and rentals and sales of DVDs, which make up half of total movie revenues. Not that the theatres are financially unimportant: in general, the more noise made about a movie when it opens, the bigger the eventual return from the ancillary markets, which is one reason the studios still contend to be the weekend box-office champ. In crude terms, the theatres can be seen as a branding device and a stimulant to DVD sales.

This was a point Kevin Smith made in the recently released An Evening with Kevin Smith II: Evening Harder, that one of the reasons he doesn’t worry about the languid performance of his films at the box office is that they (1) rarely cost much (which, in other interviews and commentaries he credits almost exclusively to the efforts of his long-time producer Scott Mosier) and (2) they do really well on DVD. Even if he doesn’t make his budget back on box office, as with Jersey Girl, he does make it up on DVD sales.

In August, when Tom Cruise’s production deal with Paramount Pictures, Viacom’s film division, ended, Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, mentioned Cruise’s controversial public behavior, which, he said, hurt the box-office for Paramount’s summer release of the third “Mission: Impossible” movie. What Redstone didn’t say, as Edward Jay Epstein reported in the Financial Times, was that Cruise had a deal with Paramount which gave him an enormous share of the DVD revenue on the movie. “M:i:III” cost a hundred and fifty million dollars to make, and its worldwide theatrical gross was almost four hundred million. But Paramount realized that after the theatres took their cut, and the production, promotion, and overhead costs were deducted from what was left, it wasn’t going to make much money—maybe none—while Cruise would walk away with seventy million dollars.

YouTube – CSI Miami – Endless Caruso One Liners:

An astonishing collection of David Caruso’s only trick. As the video wears on, you feel the tension building, how can he go on like that? how can he deliver exactly the same cadence each time? will the who ever get to play the full song? finally, in the last opening, release. orgasm. ahhhh….

Future Schlock | 2007 Forecast | Entertainment Weekly:

The highest-grossing film of the year will involve the number 3. In contention: Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Ocean’s Eleven 3, Rush Hour 3, Resident Evil 3, 3:10 to Yuma, 300, The Number 23, and The Bourne Something-or-Another 3.

Future Schlock | 2007 Forecast | Entertainment Weekly:

Jack Bauer will save the world again. But viewers find themselves disenfranchised midway through this season of 24 after it becomes clear that Jack is not even having to try that hard anymore, and is in fact just sort of strolling through the day like Pepe Le Pew, but with a gun.

“the tubes of the intertron.”

thx to Jason Wishnov

What Bizarre IT Setups Have You Seen?:

“The data center was about 5 floors below ground level. No form of wireless communications worked whatsoever–cell phones, pagers, etc. Once I parked my car, I had to go to an unlabeled metal door with a tiny camera on the top. Security guards would buzz me in and require me to sign in at their station. Then I would get buzzed in to the main data center room that contained another room inside of it. From there, I had to enter a password into another security system and place my palm on a palm scanner. Inside this room was another security guard–I would have to sign in with them, too. Then I would enter a different password into another security system, and place my head in front of this retinal scanner. This would buzz me into another room with the cages for each of the clients. There was a padlock on the cage, behind which were our servers. The servers required two separate smart IDs to be placed into an external card reader so that there had to be at least 2 people there to perform any maintenance. The servers themselves were locked down pretty tightly, too. It all seemed pretty insane as far as security goes, but I understood–these computers contained every credit card for the credit card issuer.

Well, after about 3 days of going to this data center, everyone got to know me. They would sign in for me to speed up the process. The security guard behind the door with the palm scanner used to get very hot, so she would often block the door open, thus defeating the palm scanner. The retinal scanner also had problems, often requiring about 3 tries before it would read correctly, so that door was often blocked open, too. Then, one day one of us had forgotten our smart card. We started cursing, as the round trip to pick up the card was about 45 minutes, so we tried it with only one smart card. Bingo. It worked. So then we tried it with no card. Seems the card readers weren’t functioning properly. So, overall, we were able to defeat all of the security measures except for the padlock, and all because the security staff (getting paid 2 bucks above minimum wage, no doubt) all “knew” us. In my humble opinion, it would have been far smarter to *not* have the security guard in the foyer behind the palm scanner. After all, social engineering is probably the most common form of circumventing security.”

–The Mayor

This is the great thing about the business press, they tell it like it is.  Sure, there’s all kinds of spin (look at the interview with the CEO of McDonald’s on the opposite page) but every so often, they do dig deep and tell you what’s behind the facade.  I love the first part in bold.

Sara Lee Jostles for a Breakfast Seat – WSJ.com:

He had Sara Lee’s sensory experts make sure the smell of [the] entrees cooking in a microwave mimicked the smell of those cooked on a stove. Sara Lee packaging engineers tested rectangular, square and circular bowls, concluding that consumers preferred thick circular plastic bowls with handles, so they could pull the dish out of the microwave without burning their fingers.
…
The goal was to develop a “speed scratch” breakfast — something that could be made in tandem with fresh ingredients for a family of four in just 10 minutes. Mr. Wellner says he couldn’t push the creativity needle too far. While Americans may devour tapas and sushi for lunch and dinner, their breakfast habits are change-resistant.
…
‘Sense of Freshness’ In tests, consumers told Jimmy Dean executives that they prefer the speed-scratch approach because they could prepare the breakfast quickly while embellishing it with their own cheeses and eggs. “It gave them a sense of freshness that they did it themselves,” Mr. Wellner says. The company added red and green peppers for coloring and their “appetite appeal,” he says.
…
In developing Breakfast Bowls, Mr. Wellner stuck with hearty basics like ham, sausage, potatoes and pancakes. He tested nearly a dozen flavors of eggs and omitted any eggs that were too rubbery or soft. “Is the texture just about right, in terms of chewiness?” Mr. Wellner recalls asking during tests. He eschewed less popular flavors — like feta cheese — that didn’t appeal to at least 25% of consumers.

The size of Wales – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

“The size of Wales” is a phrase known for its use by the British news media to enable size comparisons of large areas to be made; by quoting the size of unfamiliar areas in terms of a familiar area (for example, “twice the size of Wales”), the listener, reader, or viewer has less brainwork to do than if presented with an area measured in millions of hectares, thousands of square kilometres, etc. The origin of and reasons for the choice of Wales (rather than England, Scotland, etc.) as a unit of measurement is unknown, but its prevalence as a unit probably results from the convenience of its size (neatly 20,000 square km). Equally conveniently, England is the size of 6.5 Waleses, and Scotland is the size of 4 Waleses.

It may also be from memetic founder effects. The only other widely used measure of similar size is the “Belgium” (as in “three times the size of Belgium”) … German media will sometimes use Saarland, the smallest state in Germany.

In the United States, newscasters similarly refer to the sizes of Texas (big) and Rhode Island (small) when discussing geographic areas, as well as an American football field when considering sizes related to structures. Texas is more than 33 times the size of Wales, while Wales is about 5 times the size of Rhode Island.

I’d rather not even go into the chain of links that brought me to this little tidbit, suffice to say, i have plenty of time on my hands at work today.

~stevenf: Wherein I Predict the Future:

To repeat, I am no way suggesting that a Mac Tablet would not be completely awesome. I would buy at least five, possibly eight, so I could use a different one each day of the week with a hot-swappable backup. But, except on rare occasions, business does not run on awesome ideas; it runs on profitable ones. Tablet PCs are a commercial failure, whichever yardstick you measure by. I’ve yet to hear a compelling argument as to why Apple would enter this market.