quarterempty

jamYe waXman : seX matters

South Carolina’s Legislature yesterday approved a bill which requires a woman to pay for an ultrasound, view the picture of the fetus with her doctor, wait an hour after seeing the ultrasound, sign a piece of paper saying she has seen the picture, and then and only then can she decide that she still wants an abortion. There’s no exceptions, not even in cases of rape, health or incest. If the house approves this bill (again) it goes back to the Senate and if they approve it, it will pass. This is totally emotional blackmail and beyond the scope of what is choice.

via mikedaisey.com

Apparently, when the circus comes to New York, they walk the elephants from Queens to MSG through the queens-midtown tunnel.  This photograph is from last year.  This year, the elephants will get to midtown about midnight next Tuesday.  Wasn’t this a scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?

They’ve had the really creepy posters in the subway for the past month.  I guess the theme of the circus this year is “Bellobration” where bello is this crazy-looking vaudeville-style performer.

That would be a great expression for a mugshot, though.

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The Onion A.V. Club Blog

The AV Club digests movies scheduled to be released in 2007.   This could be a very expensive year for those of us in the land of $11 tickets.

*Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s drive-in trash homage Grindhouse
*The Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s existential chase western No Country For Old Men
*Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantastical Stardust
*Tim Burton’s adaptation of Steven Sondheim’s brilliant, chilly musical Sweeney Todd, with Johnny Depp in the lead
*Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s oil epic There Will Be Blood
*Ridley Scott’s ‘70s heroin trade epic American Gangster, starring Denzel
Washington and Russell Crowe
*Wes Anderson’s latest poignant whimsy-fest The Darjeeling Limited, with
Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzmann and Adrien Brody as brothers on a train trip through India, mourning their father
*Noah Baumbach’s Margot At The Wedding, his fist film since the breakthrough The Squid And The Whale
*Francis Ford Coppola’s return to “personal filmmaking,” Youth Without Youth
*Kimberly Peirce’s return to filmmaking period, Stop Loss, an Iraq
War-related domestic melodrama
*Kenneth Lonergan’s return to the director’s chair, Margaret, with Anna
Paquin as a student who witnesses an accident and pesters everyone she knows what she thinks really happened
*Michel Gondry’s Jack Black vehicle Be Kind Rewind, about a video store
clerk who has to remake blockbusters in his backyard when his magnetic brain
destroys all his rental tapes
*James Mangold’s remake of 3:10 To Yuma
*Neil Jordan’s Jodie Foster vehicle, the revenge thriller The Brave One
*David Cronenberg’s Russian mafia thriller Eastern Promises
*Ang Lee’s Chinese spy thriller Lust, Caution
*Andrew Dominik’s reportedly artful and poetic The Assassination Of Jesse
James By The Coward Robert Ford
*Screenwriter Scott Frank’s reportedly corking directorial debut, the twisty
neo-noir The Lookout
*Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s eco-minded sci-fi adventure Sunshine
*Brad Bird’s latest Pixar project, Ratatouille
*Robert Zemeckis’ take on Beowulf
*Steven Soderbergh’s latest installment in the increasingly absurd Ocean’s
series (plus whatever else Soderbergh decides to knock out in a weekend, just
for the exercise)

Plus Spider-Man 3, The Simpsons Movie.

Plus, Charlie Kaufman’s first shot at directing one of his own scripts, Synecdoche, New York.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Extras to bow out with final show

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have decided they will only write one more episode of their TV comedy Extras.

They will end the BBC Two show with a special finale rather than writing a third series – exactly as they did with their earlier hit, The Office.

“We don’t have a date or any details about the cast yet,” said a spokeswoman for Gervais, adding that the idea was in its “very, very early” stages.

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A.Word.A.Day — pogonotrophy

pogonotrophy

(po-guh-NAW-truh-fee)
nounThe growing of a beard.

[From Greek pogon (beard) + -trophy (nourishment, growth).]

pogonology is the study of beards
pogonotomy is a fancy word for shaving.

“Mr. Davis fixed his gaze on the red beard [and said], “Professor Flowers, I must congratulate you on a fine example of pogonotrophy.’” Richard J. Weiss and Duane R. Chartier; Fakebusters II: Scientific Detection of Fakery in Art and Philately; World Scientific Publishing Company; 2004.

While attending a party one evening, Mick Jagger was introduced to jazz singer George Melly. “I didn’t expect you to have so many wrinkles,” Melly remarked. “They’re not wrinkles,” Mick declared. “They’re laughter lines.” “Really?” Melly replied. “Surely nothing could be that funny!”

The Economist: Everyone Copies It, But Does Anyone Translate It? : Tom Scocca : The New York Observer

As Time begins to ride the wave of publicity surrounding their aspirationally “The Economist”-style redesign , The New York Observer (in the midst of a drastic reworking itself) has weighed in with an acid commentary. Tom Scocca lays the groundwork well, quoting a few of the other editors in chiefs over the past few years looking to smarten up their titles. He then dissects a recent issue of the Economist, picking apart jejune turns of phrase, tendentious prose, and brilliantly critiquing the price:

The Economist is priced at $5.99. A magazine for more than $5 is like a sandwich for more than $10: It needs to be appetizing enough to make the sale, and filling enough that you don’t feel ripped off afterward.

My favorite quote (from 1991, by the now-current editor of Time):

“Americans imagine that The Economist is better written,” Mr. Stengel said, “because they impute an English accent to what they read.”

He concludes:

The audience for [The Economist] is not people who care about the world, but people who believe it is important to care about the world. When other magazines say they want to be like The Economist, they do not mean they wish to be serious. They mean they wish, by whatever means, to be taken seriously.

These I really like the way this take-down was written, and I think there is a lot of truth in it. Still, I think one aspect Scocca doesn’t address is, frankly, what I thought editors meant by “more The Economist” was “less lifestyle, more news-news”. There are so many print magazines covering lifestyle now, let alone the Black Angus-style overfed glut of celebrity stalker blogs, does lifestyle or celebrity coverage have any place in a newsweekly? Of course most editors in the news business would like to be taken more seriously. While standing next to the Economist may not be the most scintillating experience, it would certainly be a more interesting, less purile conversation than one might have with most US newsweeklies.

Guidelines for Using a Cellphone Abroad : New York Times

This was the number one most emailed article on nytimes today. And rightfully so. at least four times over the past few years, I have scoured the internet to determine the meanings of some of the terms they describe in this easy-to-read article. GSM vs CDMA, which carriers have each, why tmobile uses sim cards but verizon doesn’t. triband, quadband, all that.

a quick summary:

GSM = cingular & tmobile — 82% of the rest of the world

CDMA = verizon & sprint — only in the US and parts of Asia

If you have a GSM phone, you may be able to use it in a foreign country, but because in the US, GSM phones use 850 and 1900 Mhz and in europe they use 900 and 1800 Mhz. These frequencies are called bands and your phone will have to be triband or quadband to work overseas.

GSM phones store all the particular user’s data (subscriber identity, phone book) on a sim card, which you can swipe out; either to use your phone number in a different phone, or a different phone number with your phone. CDMA phones store that info on the phone itself, so phone numbers have to be offloaded and reloaded once you get a new phone (only $20 at verizon stores).

The article also details options for cheaper sim cards and cell phone rentals abroad, it’s pretty invaluable really. Hopefully, they’ll keep this article free.

Jonah Ray was in new york last week taping a live at gotham, I got to see him twice at other shows. he was the best part of both shows (which wasn’t saying much, really. they weren’t otherwise that great, but he was great, if a little too drunk or hungover to really be polished). This was one of my favorite bits that he did:

I originally found out about him through superdeluxe. His “Freeloaders Guide to Living” is really well produced. They’ve only got two up right now, but more are on the way. “Brunch” is my preference.

superdeluxe.com : Freeloader’s Guide to Easy Living : Drinking

superdeluxe.com : Freeloader’s Guide To Easy Living : Brunch

He has a 7″ coming out (yes, on vinyl) through aspecialthing later this month. Looking forward to the mp3 bootleg.

www.myspace.com/thewhitestripes:

The White Stripes have completed the recording and mixing of their sixth album. It is entitled: “Icky Thump” … We are doing our best to release the album as soon as corporately possible. And though we are tired, worn, weary, hungry, cold, and left without an ounce of nutrition amongst ourselves, we are in the midst of planning performance type shows aroundst the world.

Susan Orlean : The Origami Lab: The New Yorker

Lang kept folding while earning a master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford and a Ph.D. in applied physics at Caltech. As he worked on his dissertation—“Semiconductor Lasers: New Geo-metries and Spectral Properties”—he designed an origami hermit crab, a mouse in a mousetrap, an ant, a skunk, and more than fifty other pieces. They were dense and crisp and precise but also full of character: his mouse conveys something fundamentally mouse-ish, his ant has an essential ant-ness. His insects were especially beautiful. While in Germany for postdoctoral work, he and Diane were taken with Black Forest cuckoo clocks; the carved casings, pinecone-shaped weights, pendulums, and pop-out birds wouldn’t seem to be a natural for origami, but Lang thought otherwise. He started a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, in 1988, shortly after he had finished folding a life-sized cuckoo clock. It had taken him three months to design, and six hours to fold, and it made Lang a sensation in the origami world.
…
He was using large squares of tweedy-looking mauve Hanji paper from Korea, which is sturdy but still slightly translucent, like the flesh of a fish. It is one of his favorite papers; he buys it in bulk from an online supplier. Other papers he likes, which he gets from art stores in San Francisco and Japan, when he visits, are lokta, from Nepal; unryu, from Thailand; and kozo and gampi, from Japan. When he makes his most complex insects, he uses handmade paper from Michael LaFosse’s studio. For a while, in fact, LaFosse had a paper in stock called Robert Lang Insect Paper.

This article made the rounds a couple of weeks ago. I held off reading it because I get put off a little sometimes by the preciousness with which Susan Orlean treats her subjects. I did pick it up a few days ago and it was really interesting. The article follows a former physicist who gave up his hard science career to develop advanced origami pieces, while recounting the history and avant-garde of origami.

Still, as with so many New Yorker pieces (especially on the web) the article suffered for a lack of pictures. And in this case, the descriptions of the pieces are difficult enough to imagine, let alone the pictures.

He put aside the piece he was working on, and took a new sheet of paper from the stack. He creased it, flipped the paper over, creased it again, lined up the edges, smoothed the sides together, pinched it here and there, and tugged on one edge. He did this with quick, meticulous movements, his hands crossing back and forth over the sheet as if they were tracing a melody. Suddenly, the sheet of paper crumpled and then opened into a shape—a tiny violinist, sawing away at a violin.

These are from the site of Robert Lang, the fellow profiled in the article. Each is from a single sheet of paper.

he has posted folding patterns for some of his designs, below is the pattern for the spider above.

Yup, those are circular folds.

“On-going project to collect and organize envelope security patterns from around the world.“

There is actually a story I have that would go well with this post, but it involves a fairly dark time of my life that, for a while, had my parents concerned I would be accused of treason. Their freak out freaked me out and it was a jumpy couple of months. This was some time ago, but I suppose it would still be unwise to share the story in a public forum (however low my visitor stats are)…

I imagine the interestingness of the patterns individually depends upon an individual’s interest, but the collection of them is sublime, if flickr wasn’t designed for such things, it should have been.