Not the Rockefeller Center, at all

This is an amazing series on an ancient Seattle building getting gutted to make way for something vastly more trendy. At first I was bummed that they didn’t show what the site became, but then I decided screw that, the old stuff is way more interesting.
(via A.J.Draplin.)

Rockefeller Center, 1933

What a gorgeous shot. Get the bigger picture at Shorpy.

God’s Top Gun of Deliverance

When I saw that they were actually going to reference “Top Gun,” I worried briefly that they might also do something from “Deliverance."
(via Denver Egotist.)

The spider is the fiercest killer in the insect kingdom

Okay, this is from BoingBoing, so you may have already checked it out, but it’s 19:26 long, so you may have looked at the length and balked. However, if you have 20 minutes to spare, I urge you to watch this hilarious story from Kevin Smith about what happened when he was invited to submit a plot treatment for a new Superman movie to Warner Bros. Dude can really tell a story!

Blue-footed boobies

Wow. I’ve heard of the creatures but never seen one until now. Those feet are really blue.
(via Ffffound!)

Meat Draw

I don’t know if it’s a thing unique to Canada, but a “meat draw” at the local Legion hall is legendary, and always worth a laugh when you’re setting the type for a small-town newspaper. You can work a lot of jokes out of the phrase “meat draw.”

I always said that if I had any musical talent and inclination to start a band, “Meat Draw” would be a great band name.

So I'm happy to hear of the Victoria band MeatDraw, which is large and ramshackle and upbeat and puts on quite a show in these flu-infected times! I love them without ever having met them!

Everybody chill out

A few thoughts:

1. “Pandemic” is the trendy word of the day, replacing good old-fashioned “epidemic.” In this case, it’s actually correct: “pandemic” means spread out over a wide area, whereas “epidemic” means a lot of people are getting sick. So, for now, let’s be grateful that it’s just a pandemic, okay?
2. We’re already in the middle of a pandemic. It’s called AIDS. Look around you. Are there people dying of AIDS on every street corner?
3. 1,500 people die of cancer every day in the United States. Nobody is running around like headless chickens over that number (though maybe they should be).
4. In the last big flu outbreak in 1918, 2.5% of people who got infected ended up dying, which was a lot of people, but still, that’s a 97.5% survival rate, which is pretty darn good, I think you’ll agree.
5. In 1918, 28% of people on the planet caught the flu, which is a lot, I’ll grant you, but it still means 72% didn’t!
6. All of this happened almost 100 years ago. Sure, intercontinental jet travel may allow this flu to spread around the world faster than ever before, but that fact is outweighed by all the other developments in technology and medicine that are going to be deployed against the virus this time around.
7. It’s just the fargin’ flu, people. It’s not a zombie attack. Wash your hands a lot; stay away from crowds if you’re paranoid; stay home in bed if you feel like crap. The odds are excellent that you’ll survive, unless I beat you to death for being a hysterical twit.
8. That last is good advice even if we’re not in a pandemic: whether it’s pig flu or “opposite flu,” it kills thousands every year.
9. Sure, we should take this seriously and stay vigilant, but it’s not the end of the world by any stretch. I think the economic debacle has primed people to think in apocalyptic terms, and this story was perfect for the media (which was perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed for missing the previous “monster” story: the economy).

(Posters and other products with this logo are available here. Originally spotted via Coudal.)

BF's forever!

(I think his sharkskin suit might very well have its own battery pack that enables it to be more shark-skinnier than normal.)

This bright young spark, I think his name is Gadhafi! I like the cut of his jib! He might have a future, if the folks who run his country are willing to consider him. Wouldn’t you agree?
(via Super Punch and the State Department.)

Real life Ghost Busters: thanks for your vigilance

(Hey, I laughed. You might, too.)
(via YesButNoButYes.)

Web 3.0 progress report

I know a lot of you are wondering when Web 2.0 will roll over into Web 3.0. Well, it looks like it got a good start last October, then November kicked it to to the curb. Still, it has that awesome logo, which just screams, uh, Web 2.0.

Say hey

As much as I love Craig Ferguson, I am an old guy with a bunch of kids and a job, so I don’t stay up to watch him, ever, period, end of story.

So I do appreciate it when the internets remind me that he has scored again.
(via Springfield Punx.)

$14 million, well spent indeed

Greetings to the hundreds of fans of Medium Large who clicked through to me based on Francesco Marculiano’s recommendation. I wish Ces had given me a heads-up, so I could have tried to be more funny in the past few days. Ah, well.

Anyway, here’s an awesome tourism video for Cleveland, Ohio, twin city to rubber-scented Akron. In the words of the videographer:

The Cleveland Tourism Board gave me 14 million dollars about 8 months ago to make a promotional video to bring people to Cleveland. As usual, I waited till the last minute and I ended up having to shoot and edit it in about an hour yesterday afternoon. I probably should have invested more time.

Actually, I think it turned out rather well!
(via Coudal.)

B•R•M•C

(via Mick Farren.)

Remember when

Posting light tonight, just housekeeping. Here’s a shot I want to put up before it recedes into the back of a list somewhere. Even though it makes me feel ooooold. Great composition.
(via Ffffound!)

Pneumatic tubes

Before the internet; even before electricity (I think), a few major cities had pneumatic tube systems for sending mail or even larger packages. And that is in addition to the businesses that incorporated them internally.

I’m kind of in love with the idea of a pneumatic tube network, though I’ve never seen one. Here’s a potted history of one by a (nervous) expert on the subject.

She’s nervous because this series of lectures by ignite is clocked at five minutes each, and the slides are programmed to change every 15 seconds, whether the speaker’s ready or not. (Once you add ignite’s coverage of itself, it’s more like 6:27.)

I hate to sound like I have no attention span, but I really have to be sold on clicking through to videos that are more than about three minutes in length. However, this five-minute lecture series is actually kind of appealing, especially if it’s about little-known stuff like this.
(via BoingBoing.)

After 35 years, I bet my lungs look worse than this

It’s not the intent of this ad, which is really good, don’t get me wrong, but it serves to remind me that I am coming up on my second anniversary of quitting smoking. I can't tell you how happy this makes me. And how much healthier I feel.

Since I smoked for 35 years, I think I’m going to wait until I’m 83 before I tell people I’m an ex-smoker.
(via Why Advertising Sucks.)

Milk: the silent killer

Here’s a pretty judgmental PSA from the ’70s. I mean, honestly, is he really a FOOL! or has he just made some bad driving choices? And what of the driver of the milk lorry, who appears to get off completely scot-free for his lack of cargo-securing skills in this tragic tale of lacto-carnage?
(via Robert Popper, who is a comic god.)

I forgot to buy a Diet-Rite trucker shirt in the ’70s!

The smaller print in this ad makes the claim that a butcher’s apron (covered in blood?) is the latest fashion craze in France. So by that logic, American women should buy trucker’s shirts bearing the name of a diet cola.

I’m sure all of you older folks will recall the diet-aid trucker shirt craze of the ’70s, where Diet-Rite’s wildly successful promotion resulted in knock-off lines of lesser quality imitators, such as “Diet-Lite” and “Diet-Rate;” the whole fad imploded when a Southeast Asian sweatshop produced a line that unfortunately read “Date-Rape.”

(You know, looking at this again, there’s the girl on the right, who is maybe a little butchy, and the way she is looking at the girl on the left, I think they’re trying to push an underlying Convoyesque-softcore-lesbian-porn theme here. Just sayin’.)
(via nevver.)

Who is this horrible woman?

Hateful Republican congresswoman tries to insinuate that Al Gore is only out to serve himself. He deftly turns the tables on her by asking if she’s against people making money.
(via The Awl.)

Glark

Sometimes, I actually feel guilty for having Glark in my RSS feed. His website just seems to be so much for friends and family that I feel like I’m a party crasher just by looking in occasionally.

But he is a very cool guy, and I have been a big fan of him, and his partner, and several of their friends, for a long time now since they ran that one website back in the day.

Lately, he’s between jobs, and taking a photography course. He’s got a good eye, and the above diptych is a nice example.

Comments are back!

Wow, Blogspot sure made that particular button hard to find! Thanks a lot, folks!

How it got turned off in the first place is anybody’s guess. It’s in such an obscure place that I don’t think I could have done it, either deliberately or accidentally.

Now it looks like I’m embedding my YouTube vids too wide, so I guess I’ll be working on that. What I would really like to do is widen the template, so I can post even larger videos. We’ll see…

The best social media marketer so far is…

Josh Freese, drummer for Nine Inch Nails! (Except that his site auto-launches a song. But it’s a pretty good song, so I’m conflicted.)

A while back, my Internet friend Bill (one of a very few Internet friends whom I have actually shaken hands with!) posted this cool story about Josh Freese, who was promoting his solo album by offering a range of interactive Josh Freese experiences, starting with buying a CD, and moving up through getting a phone call from Josh, going to lunch with Josh and ultimately up to partying with Josh for a week or having Josh compose and record an album all about you.

Anyway, it’s going swimmingly, as Bill reports in his follow-up. The guy’s reaping a ton of goodwill, and he’s making a couple of hundred thousand dollars on the side.

Good Song

I’m not sure why Blur released this video yesterday, since the song itself has been out for about three years, but I’ll take it. It’s one of their nicest songs.

If you don’t feel like watching it all (although I can‘t imagine why not), just check out the final seven or eight seconds.

Let us not mourn Compugraphics, ever

I entered the world of newspapers just when it was starting to get computerized and, let’s face it, that’s when it started to get boring, as well.

I started at a paper that had just dumped its Compugraphic in favor of a couple of Macintoshes and a laser printer. They were still putting out their copy in long galleys (using Quark Xpress 2, ha!), but at least they didn’t have to go through the rigamarole of doing corrections via the freakin’ Compugraphic.

This is a pretty sweet series showing the production of a college newspaper, which is the equivalent of the small-town newspaper I started at. Even though it’s nearly 40 years old, pretty much every thing is the same as when I started, except the baud rate.

Man of a Thousand (Stupid) Dances

I think this is more surreal and hilarious when viewed out of context, but if you must learn more, AdFreak has the story.

Wall fish

If I’m ever possessed of a big honkin’ cinderblock wall, I just hope I have the presence of mind to commission a beautiful fish on it.
(My Modern Metropolis via Design You Trust.)

True Patriot Love

The new Joel Plaskett album,“Three,” is a work of genius. Not that I’d expect any less at the this point. Went on-line to see if he had any videos to promote, but apparently not yet. We’ll be seeing him live in about two weeks, so I’m trying to get the new album memorized as quickly as possible. But it’s three disks, so it’s going to take some time. I’ve played Disk One three times now; it seems fitting to move on to Disk Two.

The intensity of the three-three-three imagery on this latest Plaskett output is kind of remarkable. There are three disks, each containing 9 songs (three squared) for a total of 27 songs (three to the third!) In addition, 14 of those songs have titles that are triple-word phrases.

But we have to remember that this is the guy who spun an entire album out of a story of a pair of friends who had a band but parted after sparring over a girl. And every song was about the same thing, but also different, and also awesome. It’s hard to describe, unless you have listened to it from beginning to end. But awesome it is.

Ashes of American Flags

Pretty excited - I pre-ordered this several weeks back and it just shipped a couple of days ago. Damn, I love my Wilco.

My cat is snoring

I have so mANY OPen (oops) tabs tonight that I am having a hard time distinguishing between them all.
(via Ow! My Sweet Eyes!)

Street cred for Springsteen

Hey, I don’t actively hate Bruce Springsteen; I just haven’t really cared about him since, oh, 1978 or so. But I have to give him credit for this incredible jam with Social Distortion’s Mike Ness on the latter’s killer song, “Bad Luck.” This really rocks. Nice work, Bruce.
(via [ the sugar sheet ].)

Bebe Buell & Stiv Bators

From the incredible portfolio of Brad Elterman.

Wow, I remember Buell as a groupie adjunct to the early-’80s rock scene – hey, turns out she’s Liv Tyler’s mom! – while Bators passed through town in front of what amounted to a Dead Boys cover band. He whined mightily when the crowd didn’t kiss his ass.

So, to sum up: Bebe Buell, second-rate starfucker; Stiv Bators, self-entitled prick. Good times!

Yet another surfing documentary

Longtime friends (and my wife) know I have a thing for surf documentaries, ever since The Endless Summer, which I saw pretty soon after its release date, as a young and impressionable pre-teen.

I don’t think it’s a terribly odd fascination to have: who wouldn’t want to live on sunny beaches, ride the waves and party with girls in bikinis during their off time?

So now comes High Water (geez, its URL is an e-mail link and nothing more - what the hell is going on there?), a doc by Dana Brown about the final three events; the “triple crown” of the competitive surfing circuit, all held annually on Oahu’s North Shore. (It’s Oahu, right?)
(Higher resolution here.)

I am also still keen to see Surfwise, though I’m sorry to say that, since I fell in love with this trailer, I’ve heard that the father is is a bit more of a totalitarian nutbar than one would hope. There are certainly hints in the trailer:

(view at much higher resolution here.)

A Film Found On A Dump

Week End.

The Symbolical Head

Wow, crazy weekend just finished. I am burned out. That’s not how weekends should be.
(via Peter Nidzgorski.)

I sure do love those crazy foreign game shows

This is long, but it gets better the more you’re willing to watch it, even though it basically involves Japanese guys (dressed as Buzz Lightyear?) running on treadmills that get faster and faster.

Extra points if you can tell me why the host is dressed as an American farmer and the female co-host is a milkmaid.

The guy is trying to run at 24 kilometers per hour (that’s a four minute mile) and now you’re going to start firing hard plastic balls at him? That is some hard-core game show technique right there, pal, but it still has nothing on the weirdest fucking Japanese game show that you could never possibly imagine.
(via @apelad.)

Presenting the 1980 Isuzu Gemini

Wow, there is some pretty serious stunt driving in this long-form commercial. We don’t see stunt driving in car commercials very much any more, especially in these frugal times. Wait, did we ever? Not so much.

Having been produced in 1980, we can safely assume that no CGI was involved in the making of this clip, which makes it even more impressive. That’s some insanely precise driving.

It really starts to go crazy at a little after 2:00, and the finale, about a minute later, is not to be missed.
(via Design You Trust.)

The Playboy Club, Chicago

To judge by the cars, a very early picture, indeed. I’m just digging that Mondrian-inspired entrance.

(via Tsutpen.)

Oh, were you hoping for a bunny?

(via Peter Nidzgorski.)

You catch more flies with honey

I know a photo like this will just be catnip for all the crazed and paranoid haters, but it speaks to a basic truth: there is more potential in having a dialogue than in turning your back on those you disagree with.

Or, to put it in terms the demagogues can understand: keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.
(RodrigoMX via @Glinner.)

Hey , what gives?

Suddenly, we lowly Canadians are allowed to embed video from U.S. networks? Clearly somebody screwed up somewhere.

Enjoy this clip of Michael Emerson cranking up the creepy dial on Jimmy Fallon’s show, courtesy of Why Advertising Sucks.

Leon Russell, neglected genius

Oh man, I haven’t even thought about this, let alone listened to it, in about 35 years. (Wow, when did I get so oooold? Hah! The traditional refrain of the aging trying-to-be-cool guy.)

Okay, whatever. Leon Russell was the sole designated keyboardist at the Concert for Bangladesh, whereas Ringo freakin’ Starr was one of two drummers in a night of overlapping talents and egos. And Leon knocked ’em out with this medley of Stones & Lieber & Stoller (all these years I thought that song was by Doc Pomus. Would have bet money on it).
(Blast of nostalgia via [ the sugar sheet ].)

Young Hunter

Here’s a really nice Ffffound! photo gallery of an extraordinarily young Hunter S. Thompson.

Acidhead New York Times White House photographer

Whooaaa! Let me get my sea legs!

A lot of times, when you click on "Enlarge This Image" in a Times web story, you get a lot more than you expected from viewing the thumbnail. Click that link, people!

Bootleg Ice Cream Warehouse

Tom Gauld is an illustrator whom I have admired for some time. Looking up his name reveals that he does a weekly cartoon for The Guardian (arguably the best newspaper in the world) so I am off to admire his work there any minute now.

Anyway. I love Gauld’s minimalist style and dry humor. Last month, he posted 12 pages of his “sketchbook” to Flickr, and it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

So that’s why I call fake on the idea that this is actually a sketchbook: it’s just too good.

Check out in particular page 6, which features variations on names and words that might be associated with Tom Waits. Like “St. Frank’s Hobo Orphanage.” (Or the title of this post.) Har!
(I’ve been sitting on this SwissMiss link for so long that it was starting to deform my spine.)

Police interrogation

I saw something about Not the Nine O’Clock News today and it reminded me that after NTNON came Alas Smith and Jones. Damn good stuff. All of it.

A Wolf Loves Pork

Amazing stop-action still-photo animation. Maybe the best so far.
(via Pink Tentacle.)

Stunning Ricky Jay card trick

I first heard of Ricky Jay when I somehow bought his book Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, an astonishing history of the incredible tricks and machines people have devised to entertain and deceive the masses. Crazy things like counting horses and Mechanical Turks are only the best-known of some incredibly sophisticated stuff. Damn, I really should dig that book out for my kids.

It was only later that I learned Ricky Jay is primarily an incredibly great magician, and also a pretty good actor, particularly in David Mamet films.

Anyway, it’s not like he’s dead or anything; it’s just that YesButNoButYes featured him doing this utterly incredible card trick recently and it blew me away. Internet fuzz aside, I could probably watch this in hi-def for a year and not figure out a single thing about it.

Wait until about 2:28, when you realize what is about to happen. Wow.

Cool guys make a cool video

I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to buy the Birdhouse app for iPhone (oh, who am I kidding?), but I have to say this is one of the greatest product-introduction videos I have ever seen. Even if you don’t have an iPhone, and/or think that Twitter is the stupidest thing you have ever heard of, check out this hilarious video. It features @lonelysandwich, @scottsimpson and @hotdogsladies, three of the greatest humans on the planet.

I’m going to buy it right now just so Sandwich can make some money. Hey, I just paid five bucks because someone was funny. There’s your micro-economy right there, people.

Here’s a question I bet you’ve never asked yourself

As the parent of three young guys who are in a state of constant motion, I can tell you that the absolute last thing you could expect them to enjoy doing is tracing over someone else’s pre-conceived notion of what a “monster machine” looks like.

There are some seriously crappy kids’ books out there. I know of several within the very walls where I write. Hey! Someone should maybe start some sort of regularly-updated Internet journal of crappy kids’ books he has noted, and that others may have sent him, with humorous asides. It could become a thing!

Trade Show High Jinks!

Oh, yeah!
(via Shorpy.)

I [heart] this TWA poster for NYC!

Wow, this is so beautiful.
(via ICPWAGTBAWLODC.)

A bigger picture

I often wish I could show my children what a full night sky looks like, absent the ambient urban light. When I was their age, I could see The Pleiades from my backyard; now my kids would be lucky to pick out Orion. They have no idea that they are even missing the stars! That totally sucks!

In my youth I was lucky enough to venture out where the urban light was faint, and the true glory of the galaxy, and the universe, become apparent. I really need to do that for my kids. They just have to see that sky.
(via APOD, and totally worth clicking to embiggen.)

Whatever happened to those Banana Splits guys?

I’m quite looking forward to this one, due out April 20 they say. Strangely, it has no listing on IMDb, which puzzles me. I don’t know if it’s going out on the documentary circuit, going straight to DVD, or is perhaps actually a trailer for a fictitious movie.

I do hope that it’s real, and that it’s good.

Picture of an astronaut from the ground

That’s pretty impressive.

Electronic gadgets go at it!

Neatorama says this is by Samsung, but I don’t think so: I think it's just a particularly great fan-vid.

(I don’t think it’s corporate because of the use of a Wall-E robot, and then the later implication that one of their devices might even falter momentarily – even if it were to emerge victorious in the end. That’s too much to bear.)

The Raft of the Medusa

Tonight’s Wikipedia front page features The Raft of the Medusa, one of my favorite crazy classical paintings. And it’s based on a true story, although I’m sure you, clever reader, already knew that.

Also the basis for the cover of the first album by The Pogues! But you probably already knew that as well.

Michigan Theater

I’ve been waiting to see this image ever since I added big-time image aggregator sites like Ffffound! to my RSS reader well over a year ago. It’s Detroit’s Michigan Theater, a beautiful old movie house that was converted into a parking garage.

But strangely, this wasn’t the picture I was looking for. The one I wanted was by Vancouver photographer Stan Douglas, one of Vancouver’s leading “art” photographers, alongside Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham. I had seen it blown up large in a magazine 10 or more years ago and it knocked me out. In fact, the only reason it took me so long to find this is that I thought it was a picture by Graham, not Douglas. I should note here that, unlike Wall, Douglas and Graham are not considered to be strictly photographers, as they work in other media as well.

So I found a couple of versions of the actual Douglas work on the web, but they were small and low-res. You’ll just have to take my word that it is a striking piece, and that this approximation of it for Detroit Yes is almost as beautiful.

(Movie, rap or Detroit fans may also recognize it as the backdrop of a scene in 8 Mile.)

Here’s a cool shot of the lobby, which I found on Wikipedia tonight, while looking for better pics of the above:

Keep clam

I loved the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster when it first appeared. It said a lot about our current fears about potential danger versus what people had to face back when there actually were bombs falling from the sky on a regular basis.

As with any meme, it got picked up and mixed up and sent back out with much hilarity and irony.

But now we have reached this:

(via the Egotist.)

And now I think that we’re done. Don’t you agree?

Oh, you minx

“For plinking or protection.” Yeah, I don’t see a lot of target shooting happening with this one. Strictly for gangsters’ molls.

Ask yourself: am I a moll?
(via this isn’t happiness.™)

Fascist Potato Day

Up here in Canada, we’re not allowed to view streaming video from American network websites, because there’s probably a Canadian network that owns the rights to the show, so we’re supposed to watch it on their freakin’ website, instead. Usually, I just sigh, give up, and move to the next item. So now, from their point of view, everyone loses! I can’t watch the US feed, I won’t watch the Canadian feed, and neither network gets the benefit of my eyeballs. Happy days all around, you morons.

So I’m grateful to my Internet pal Bill for providing a YouTube link to Jon Stewart’s dissection of the paranoia of the hard right. Because normally I would have clicked on a Comedy Central link, and have been told that I was a second-class citizen of the Internet, and I never would have seen this.

Thanks, Bill! Clearly you are a forward-thinking globalist dedicated to providing cool YouTube links to your repressed brethren in, um, Canada.

And so it begins.

Eight disks, covering 1963 through 1972. $120 Canadian. I am glad he’s decided to break it down into manageable amounts. I would have had a hard time explaining to my wife why I dropped $500 on a 32-CD retrospective. This way, I can do it in increments.

Goddamn, I am so excited. I have been waiting for this since I first heard about it, what?, 10 years ago?

Tap!

I’d not heard of Tilly and the Wall before today, when @hotdogsladies referenced them. But I have to love a band whose percussion section is a tap-dancer. That would be a tough gig to sustain over the course of a night.

Space Geek Time

Tonight’s APOD is pretty freaking awesome, showing the International Space Station in full solar-panel regalia.

What struck me about this image was the size of all those solar panels, each of which supports about half a human inside the space station. We’d better get building if we want to support our 6 billion down below.

While looking up the stats on the ISS, I fell in love with the Soyuz capsule. You can see one hanging off the bottom of the ISS in the shot above. It is the space station’s panic room and, ultimately, its lifeboat.

In use since forever, I don’t think Soyuz has ever got the respect it deserved. We can now recognize that the Soviet space program, despite its reputation as a brute-force alternative to the USA’s technological prowess, actually had its strong points, and I think Soyuz was maybe a better idea than Apollo, in terms of cost and simplicity; namely, what needed to be returned to Earth (humans, science experiments), versus what could be abandoned aloft (living quarters, main power supply).

This was and still is a tough little space bug: an insect, stripped clean at reentry time to its middle third: a hard-shell, human-holding, bullet-shaped descent module. And it worked, for the most part.

U. of Arizona marching band does Talking Heads

Wow, I’d go to a football game to see this.

To judge by the affiliated YouTube links, this is a fairly progressive marching band. They’ve got some Radiohead and Zeppelin going on as well.
(Way cool recommendation from @apelad.)

Hilarious animated objects on the street

The Lost Tribes of New York City from Carolyn London on Vimeo.

In the case of animations like this, much depends on the dialogue (of course), and here it’s mildly offbeat soundbites by mildly offbeat New Yorkers. I thought it was funny.
(via Denver Egotist.)

Chick-a-dee-dee-bloody-dee

I love chickadees. They are also, I have discovered, known as “titmice,” or just “tits.” Oh, the hilarity.

Hey, I could really upgrade this page’s hit count if I re-named it “I Love Tits!”

Chickadees are feisty little birds. Some might call them uptight pricks. I had a breeding pair right outside my window one spring and summer and they did it all for me from start to finish: the eggs; the babies; the flying away. Damn, I loved those little birds so much. I really did. I cried at one point. Don’t ask.

Studies have shown that the number of “dee-dees” at the end of a “chick-a-dee-dee” is directly related to the proximity of the danger being tweeted about. I think the record is about 27 “dees.”

Sorry, I have to do it:

Chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.

(beautiful image via Ffffound!)

Spinderella

Just roaming around the web, and found this, for everyone who followed the awesome Spinderella comment thread on Gawker last year (two years ago?) That was a true Web 2.0 moment, for sure. Insanely funny stuff.
(via Seattle Weekly.)

I keep forgetting to plug Layer Tennis

Being a good employee, I wait until I get home and have dinner and put the kids to bed on Fridays before I watch Layer Tennis. Oh sure, I could tune into it every 15 minutes for two hours on a slow Friday afternoon, but I would never deprive my employer of my undivided attention and intensity.

Today’s match was especially good. Featuring Simon Cook of Made in England by Gentleman, one of my favorite design blogs, versus Rex Crowle, whom I have not heard of before but seems worthy to be hearing of.

The scene above is Crowle's blistering return to Cook's leisurely opening serve. I love Crowle’s stuff in this, but I think Cook’s unwavering commitment to quirky simplicity carries the day.
(Thanks to Super Punch for reminding me that this is something worth posting about.)

Quick, get the defibrillator

Holy moley, a four-pound nacho-chili cheeseburger.
(also via Coudal.)

West Side Horror

This is great: the trailer for West Side Story, re-cut as a horror film.
(via Coudal.)

Extraordinarily bad logo

The Denver Rockets of the ABA.
(via Waxin’ & Milkin’)

Moog Beer

Wow, this is about as blip-beep-bloop as it gets! And I love the slogan: “The one beer to have when you’re having more than one!” Oh, I’m going to be having more than one all right, after viewing this.
(via ISO50.)

Not a king

I don’t know who he is, but he was on nevver tonight.

The Girlfriend Experience

Apparently, this is the poster for a new Steven Soderbergh movie. I don’t really care what it’s for. I just like to look at it.

Paris, May 1968

I’ve never heard of Crystal Stilts up until today, but I sure like them now. That sort of droney, atonal stuff is right up my alley. Thanks to The Subtle Rudder!

And this footage is gorgeous. (The YouTube screengrab does it no justice.) Oh, to be young and in love and alive in the courage of your convictions in Paris in May, 1968! The final few seconds, where folks re-link arms after going around the videographer, are particularly striking.

And I think that we should consider that the French, far from being surrender-happy as they are often portrayed, are in fact the only ones left who are willing to take to the barricades against their own government, when need be. That’s courage, baby.

I had a prof in university who just happened to be a young student in Paris in May 1968. He said he had never been so scared or so excited. Of getting in the way of some CS gas, he told us, “It didn’t kill you; it just made you wish you were dead.”

Sea of Hope

I’m just lovin’ this retro Yellow-Submarine-style take on Obama. If I didn’t already have a zillion T-shirts (with another on the way!), I’d totally buy one.
(via Design You Trust.)

Come back, comments!

Someone pointed out a couple of days ago that comments are no longer allowed here. I don’t know how that happened, because I haven’t changed anything. I suspect its been like this since March 2, when some Blogspot glitch took a number of blogs (including mine) temporarily off-line.

I’ve joined a couple of Blogspot forums (I know, fora) to try to resolve this, but I’m starting to feel like a tiny voice crying in the wilderness. Nobody can give me a straightforward answer (hell, any answer), and the powers-that-be won’t deal with me directly, obviously, because I am one of millions who are bitching about their Blogspot accounts.

I don’t get very many comments; only a couple per month – so this shouldn’t bother me as much as it does. But I miss having comments! I’ve made a couple of very good (Internet) friends based on comments left on this blog, and I would hate to lose that.

If I get so frustrated that I decide to go to another platform, does anyone have any recommendations? Can I export this entire blog to, say, WordPress? C’mon smart people, help me out!

IN ADDITION: It looks like my in-line Twitter feed (over there on the right) is also broken. WTF, Blogspot?