The Perfect City
David Byrne is spot on with his thoughts for a perfect city: A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2009 By David Byrne There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way…
Go Malamud
Cory Doctorow writes the following about Carl Malamud: Carl is the beloved “rogue librarian” who has done so much to liberate tax-funded government works, from movies to court rulings to the text of laws themselves, putting these public domain works on the Internet where they belong. By the People is an inspirational and education piece…
Octopi Sophistica
via @pinktentacle
Trent Harris
Trent Harris is great for having made Rubin and Ed, which has been one of my favorite movies ever since my pal, Alec, turned me onto it prolly more than 11 years ago. Trent’s made other stuff, too, and continues to make stuff, such as random video posts @ Fling A Ding: Thanks, Trent
Neil Postman
From Wikipedia: Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who…
Give the gift of…relish
Typically, this is the time of year where I’m only beginning to consider how to share the festive spirit of the season through gift giving. Problem for me is, I’ve read The Gift more than 3 times (thanks, Z) and it’s thrown a bit of monkey in my wrench. Nonetheless, imagine my surprise at having…
Projections on Buildings
I could watch stuff like this endlessly…
Back to the Land
Stop. Click on the image below. Read it. The WHOLE THING
Slide on Gastineau Ave
If we still lived in Juneau, this is where we’d still be parking our Subaru wagon. Last week, the Soobi would have been buried under this:
Local Man Wins Major Award
Zach Falcon, 37, of Iowa City, earned the recognition for his story “The Malamute.” The honor came from the United Kingdom’s Bridport Prize, which will be announced today. The Press-Citizen received an embargoed copy of the announcement and originally posted it (this version has been edited for clarity): “I was delighted. I know writers sometimes…
Pinballistic De-Evolution
Jason Kottke mentioned this post about the economics of pinball, which brings up questions about more than just what our all-time high scores were: Black Knight brought pinball to a new level, literally speaking because it was among the first games with ramps and elevated flippers, but even more importantly because it brought a new…
My New Digs
Above is a pic of the living room in my new apartment in the Born district of Barcelona. El Born is a small village within the city, fashionable but very authentic, where luthiers, glass-makers and designers have their shops and studios and where pensioners play cards, young people hang out and chat at the edge…
Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire
Author Michael Pollan says: The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow…
BEEF
How to handle a whole side of beef: Meat Appreciation: A NYC Restaurant Honors the Whole Animal from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.
Taxing the Artist
The five months of furious short-story writing in 1923-24 had left him with a stake of $7,000. In Great Neck, that would only cover two and a half months of expenses. How could he stretch the $7,000 to gain the time to finish Gatsby? Earlier, as he was struggling to save, a friend wrote from…