John Emsley, author of Elements Of Murder: a history of poisons appeared in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air’{#4769877} earlier today. Those who were fascinated by the morbid details of Devil in the White City should give it a listen. I plan on checking out the book too, though it sounds like Emsley offers more chemical formulae than outright suspense.
Life Magazine Covers
I get a kick out of these 1948 and 1950 Life magazine covers. Take a look and I think you’ll agree that no magazine puts photos like this on their covers today. tags: 1948, 1950, culture, life, life magazine, magazine covers, magazines, retro » about 100 words
Peerflix
Ross Rubin at Engadget just alerted me to Peerflix
…which can be described on a basic level as eBay meets Netflix. Peerflix resembles many online DVD stores, but it neither rents nor sells DVDs. Rather, it depends on a community of users willing to trade DVDs they have for DVDs they want. There are no subscription fees. Peerflix charges a 99-cent transaction fee and senders are responsible for the postage charge of 37 cents for the mailers that the company distributes. Behold the $1.36 DVD.
John Barlycorn Must Die
In a popular antebellum Arkansas story, a backwoodsman bought a 5-gallon barrel of whiskey, only to return a week later for another. “Surely you haven’t drank that whiskey already?” inquired the astonished merchant. “It ain’t so much,” replied the backwoodsman. “There are six of us, counting the kids, and we have no cow.” It’s not […] » about 100 words
Australia’s Rum Jungle
Alan Moorhead, in his 1952 Rum Jungle — a sort of casual ethnography or serious travelogue — explains the uses and attitudes towards alcohol in his native Australia: […] I took it for granted that for all social occasions, at any time of the day or night, beer was the drink. You did not take […] » about 400 words
Braving Home
Jake Halpern’s Braving Home (also in softcover) easily took my interest. Here’s how John Moe described it for Amazon.com: As a cub reporter at The New Republic, Jake Halpern earned the unofficial job title of Bad Homes Correspondent. Braving Home tells his stories of places where people really ought not live and the people who […] » about 500 words
Freight Elevator Quartet
JazzMusique (RSS, stream) treated me to Freight Elevator Quartet‘s So Fragile (from their Becoming Transparent album) not long ago and I liked it enough to take a note to look them up later. The band released five albums between 1997 and 2001, but seems to have disappeared since. Their site is still alive, and most […] » about 200 words
Art Deco Hair
Daniela Turudich knows vintage fashion. Her books include not only hair, but how to recreate a vintage wedding, vintage recipes and candy making, and Beauty Secrets of History’s Most Notorious Courtesans. Here’s the description from Art Deco Hair: Art deco has long been associated with uncompromising style and sophistication, and this guide to recreating the […] » about 200 words
Overheard In The Library
“I want all the books that I’m interested in on one shelf.”
North-Country Drive-Ins
The Fairlee Drive-In Theatre is open with double features on weekends
Details:
1809 Route 5, Fairlee VT 05045 (one mile north of town)
802-333-9192
The usual Hotel/Motel concept of in-room movies is cable TV, this is one of only two Drive-ins in America that have a motel on the premises with a view of a drive-in movie. All rooms have a picture window and speaker, allowing motel guests to watch the movies. The motel has only 12 units, so be sure that you make a reservation well in advance to enjoy this unique drive-in which has been in operation since 1950 in rural Vermont.
But the Meadows Twin Drive-In in Woodsville (NH) appears to have closed at the end of last season (old info at Driveinmovie.com).
Bad Movie, Verboten Subject?
I’m embarrassed to be in the middle of Fantasy Mission Force, a kung fu movie that demonstrates a brand of Asian humor that I haven’t yet learned to appreciate. I’m watching it because I’m a sucker for Jackie Chan flicks and Netflix makes it too easy to queue up bad movies. David Chute wrote the […] » about 400 words
Global Threats, As Seen Through Eyes Of Movie Producers and Insurers
Jonathan Crowe points out this Risks In Global Filmmaking Map by Aon, the entertainment industry insurance company. Go view the PDF or a full-size PNG for all the details. Technorati Tags: aon, industry, entertainment, filmmaking, insurance company, map, risk » about 100 words
Of WordPress Tags, Keywords, XML-RPC, and the MovableType API
WordPress’s XML-RPC support looks pretty good. Heck, it supports a half dozen APIs and works well with ecto … except for tag support, which is my only complaint with it so far.
The Movable Type API supports a “keywords” field that I’m thinking can be hijacked as a “tags” field instead, but while ecto sends the goods — I can see them in the XML-RPC data that gets sent out, WordPress seems to ignore them upon receipt. So I’m looking around the WordPress plugin API docs for a solution, but all I can find is an undocumented mention of xmlrpc_methods in Skippy’s list of plugin hooks.
146 Wasted Minutes
I can now say with the authority of experience that Star Wars Episode III sucked.
Update: Zach’s right, my opinion of the original trilogy has fallen over time. But I stand by the statement that Episode III is worse than it should be.
The real reason for the update, however, is to note a couple pictures of things seen and done while waiting in line: Matt, with an oversized jug of generic cola and this oversized scorpion bowl.
And, related to the Star Wars universe is Grocery Store Wars, by the Organic Trade Association. I don’t think this would be funny if it wasn’t serious.
Markoff, I Wish I Could Trust Thee
Trouble: John Markoff has been doing tech stories for the New York Times since the beginning of days, so it’s likely he’s written something you’ve read and enjoyed. But he’s also written a number of wrong or counterfactual stories that he makes little or no apology for. At the core of the claims against him […] » about 400 words
“Short Head” Vulgarity and Prurience
Chris Anderson at the Long Tail Blog quotes a passage from David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar […] » about 200 words
Jeffrey Veen Gives Presentation Advice
In Seven Steps to Better Presentations, Jeffrey Veen acknowledges the complaints against PowerPoint, but explains that the real problem is “bad content delivered poorly.”
His seven points have a lot more detail that what I’m quoting here:
- Tell stories.
- Show pictures.
- Don’t apologize. Ever.
- Start strong.
- End strong too.
- Stand. Away from the podium.
- Pause.
My own opinion is that Veen and Tufte would agree more than they disagree. Tufte too, for example, suggests using PowerPoint to show pictures. Tufte goes on to suggest presenters should offer their audience hand-outs with detailed information that can’t be represented on a PowerPoint slide, and I wonder what Veen’s thoughts on that are.
Does Size Matter?
A while ago I asked a friend why short sentences were so pleasing to read and write. He had no answers, but agreed that brevity is its own reward. Some (though I can find no reference to it) suggest that technological developments have changed and simplified sentence structure by allowing writers to write and revise […] » about 300 words
Best New Music
Trilok Gurtu and Robert Miles on miles_gurtu Listen in at iTunes or Amazon. Bonobo’s Dial M For Monkey Listen in at iTunes or Amazon. Bonobo’s Animal Magic Listen in at iTunes or Amazon. The Bad Plus Give Listen in at iTunes or Amazon. » about 100 words
Wikipedia vs. Brittannica; Folksonomy vs. Taxonomy
A post on Techdirt notes: You may recall that we somehow got involved in a bizarre battle over Wikipedia, when I got into a discussion with a reporter who told me that Wikipedia was “outrageous,” “repugnant” and “dangerous,” mainly because it’s not reviewed by “professionals.” Despite a valiant effort, I was unable to ever convince […] » about 300 words
Edward Tufte Gives Presentation Advice
Edward Tufte‘s passion is the graphical display of information. But his nemsis the visual lie. So naturally, he has a special dislike for PowerPoint. His poster on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint gave me this line, which I will likely find myself repeating at a time when it is both most accurate and most politically […] » about 400 words
Classic and Independent Movie Theaters
A story in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel Magazine alerted me to Ross Melnick and Andreas Fuchs’s Cinema Treasures. It was an annotated list of seven theaters still operating today: Cape Cinema: This 1930 Dennis, Mass., theater was built to look like a church. The Senator Theatre: A 65-year-old art […] » about 300 words
Cross-country Journeys In Time-Lapse
I feel a tinge of jealousy every time I see something like this: Lacquer Sound’s Road Trip. Similar: I covered Matt Frondorf’s Mile Markers project a while back. (Picture from Mile Markers). » about 100 words
More About Google Print
Prediction: we’ll talk about Google Print until they debut the beta, then we’ll talk about it more. Copyfight posted some followup on Google’s announcement earlier this week. Of note was a quote from Michael Madison: A first thought: It’s one more example, and a pretty important one, of the fading of the lines separating copyright […] » about 400 words
iPod Supplies Tight; Holiday Sales To Exceed Four Million
Summary: four million to be sold this holiday season; adoption rate higher than for Sony’s Walkman. From MacNN: An article in the The Wall Street Journal today says that iPods are becoming scarce at retailers around the country. The report says that Amazon.com, Buy.com, and other online retailers are now out of stock and “Apple […] » about 200 words