Kodachrome

When I first read a couple of years ago that Kodak was planning to stop selling and developing Kodachrome slide film it was one of those news stories that made me realize the world I knew had changed.

Digitization of technology and the Internet were the reason, but it was still a shock to think back about the Kodachrome bricks I bought at B&H Photo at its old West 17th Street location, the rolls stored in the fridge, and then shipped in pre-paid mailers for processing.  The strongest memories were about the days the familiar yellow box of developed slides arrived in the mail, sorted into carousel trays, and then viewed with such anticipation and delight through the Leitz projector on the fold-up Da-Lite screen kept under the living room couch.

Stacked rows of ordered carousels are still in a downstairs closet next to the projector, but it's a rare day we set up the projector table, raise the screen, dim the lights . . . and talk. Pictures are now digital, instantaneous, and online. They still have great power to capture life and create memories, but the experience is different. The drama and storytelling of the family slide show is gone. I learned a lot about the world over many after-dinner slide shows with my grandfather who narrated his travels with my grandmother in the 60s and 70s. It's where I first went wide-eyed with wonder about far-away places like the pyramids in Giza, Loch Ness, Easter Island, and Ankor Wat in Cambodia.

Yesterday's New York Times ran a wistful story about Dwayne's Photo in Kansas, the processor who developed the last rolls of Kodachrome. The byline is from A.G. Sulzberger, the son of the paper's publisher, who began writing for the Times last year.  I think he misses Kodachrome too.

"An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.

"That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.

"In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced here, transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an image from a carousel of vivid slides."

"At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome, but the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left has been Dwayne’s Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the last canister of blue dye.

"Kodak declined to comment for this article."

Postscript –– I worked on the Canon account in the 80s and 90s and helped launch the company's first digital cameras. It was and is about innovation.

Shovel Ready?

New York City Mayor Bloomberg is taking a beating for not getting the city's streets plowed fast enough after Sunday's blizzard, especially in the boroughs.  More than 1,000 comments have been posted on The New York Times' City Room Blog in response to the question "Has your street been plowed?"  To lead Times readers to the only possible answer the paper published photographs of the Mayor's East 79th Street block just hours after the snow ended next to a typical block in Brooklyn more than a day later.

East 79th Street, Manhattan

Himrod Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn.

At a press conference defending the city's response, Bloomberg, ever the plutocrat, didn't miss a beat.  As reported in The New York Times:

“The world has not come to an end,” he said. “The city is going fine. Broadway shows were full last night. There are lots of tourists here enjoying themselves. I think the message is that the city goes on.”

Mr. Mayor, a reporter demanded, do you regret the response to the snowstorm? Mr. Bloomberg’s look went deadpan.  “You know, I regret everything in this world,” he said.

Blizzard

We didn't have a white Christmas this year but the next day and night more than made up for it as this shot of the creche scene at the local First Presbyterian Church attests.

 It snowed even more in New Jersey.

Reason's Greetings

People either cried or laughed when Rupert Murdoch bought Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal.  I fell in between.  Can one conclude that it's the paper's current editorial wisdom, its financial savvy, or both that would solicit holiday op-eds on the subject of faith from the likes of the U.K's The Office funnyman Ricky Gervais and best-selling vampire novelist Anne Rice?

• A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais
• Anne Rice's Christmas Confession  

They each make good arguments, but it's interesting that the Gervais column has just under 6,000 reader comments, while Rice's has just under 100 comments.

Guess which one is the atheist?

Wholehearted

Best twenty minutes I spent in a good while.

Brene Brown at TED. 

CTR - RIP

Merry Christmas Cathy.

Lunar eclipse on winter solstice

372 years in the making . . .

Matryoshka Doll

Yep.

C'mon, Get Happy!

111th Congress - 87 Percent Disapproval

With an historically low approval rating of 13 percent, the 111th Congress shows its contempt for Americans, and last November's voters, by foisting a 1,924-page, $1.2 trillion omnibus spending bill while its members are trying to get out of Dodge.

From today's Wall Street Journal:

"Democrats have had 11 months to write a budget for fiscal 2011, which began on October 1. But Majority Leader Harry Reid and Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye have dumped this trillion-dollar baby on Senators at the very last minute, when everyone is busy and wants to go home for the holidays. No doubt that was the plan. The continuing resolution to fund the government expires on Saturday, so Mr. Reid wants to squeeze Senators against the deadline. And with the press corps preoccupied by the tax debate, the spending bill is greased to slide through with little or no public scrutiny.

"Defenders argue that the bill is restrained because it freezes overall spending for federal agencies at 2010 levels. But 2010 was an inflated budget with a $1.3 trillion deficit. Paul Ryan, soon to be House Budget Chairman, notes that nondefense discretionary spending rose 24% over those two years. Add stimulus funding and federal agency spending soared to $796 billion in 2010 from $434 billion, an 84% spending increase. Republicans have promised to return to 2008 spending levels, and the omnibus will make that much harder."

Senator Bernie Sanders led an unsuccessful eight-hour filibuster last week to block a two-year extension of the current tax cuts.  Greed?

How about spending?

A Year at the Movies

All I Want for Christmas?

What would Freud say?

A picture is worth a thousand words

Standard of Excellence?

On November 29, the 92nd Street Y held a lecture by Steve Martin, the actor and writer, with an art critic from The New York Times.  The lecture was on his new novel about contemporary art, An Object of Beauty, released a week earlier.  It was a sell out with 900 people.  It was also Martin's second such appearance at the 92nd Street Y, and his second lecture facilitated by Deborah Salomon, the Times critic.

What Martin and Solomon didn't know was the event was  telecast via closed circuit, and the audience was solicited for questions.  This led to a Y staffer handing a note to Salomon, on stage and mid-lecture, directing her to ask Martin questions about his career, like what was it like to host the Oscars and appear with Alec Baldwin in the movie It's Complicated.  It was all downhill from there.  The next day the Y's executive director e-mailed the lecture's guests, apologizing for the event that didn't meet the Y's "standard of excellence" along with a full refund.

Martin wrote an op-ed in yesterday's Times, titled The Art of Interruption, where he explained "If the e-mailers could have lived with 'I am unamused' for just a little longer, or had given us some understanding based on past performance, or even a little old-fashioned respect, something worthwhile, unusual or calamitous might have emerged. Who knows, maybe I would have ended up singing my novel."

Or maybe he just should have done his old King Tut routine?

Martin said he's looking forward to returning soon to the 92nd Street Y "to play basketball."  He also quipped, "As for the Y’s standard of excellence, it can’t be that high because this is the second time I’ve appeared there."

And to match digital ire, he tweeted a warning to fellow artists.

Ex-cu-use me!

Lift Thine Eyes

Northfield Mount Hermon School has published a book, Lift Thine Eyes, about the school's history.

"Lift Thine Eyes tells the story of how the Northfield and Mount Hermon schools came into being—how they prospered, met challenges, and evolved into the NMH of today. Eight alumni authors reveal the school in a new light. They explore how the campuses were shaped by D.L. Moody, by the country’s  finest architects and landscape architects, and by the land itself. The book also chronicles how NMH  responded to change, including the complex influences that led to consolidation on the Mount Hermon campus. More than 300 archival photographs, maps, and architectural drawings, plus stunning contemporary images, make this Northfield Mount Hermon document a visual and historical treasure."

Lift Thine Eyes from Northfield Mount Hermon School on Vimeo.

All the lonely people

Roger Ebert, the movie critic, is also a blogger.  He's good at both.

A recent post - All the lonely people - personally and eloquently explores how the internet can bridge loneliness.  To quote:

"When I was a child the mailman came once a day. Now the mail arrives every moment. I used to believe it was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude."

TSA Update

Airport security . . . from the pages of The New Yorker in 1938, 1972 and 2001.

Extra! Vineyard Gazette Sold

Continuously published for 164 years under just 10 publishers, the Vineyard Gazette was sold after today's edition by Dick Reston to Jerry Kohlberg.  Kohlberg is the retired founder of the leveraged buyout firm, Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts, or KKR.

Below are excerpts from Reston's final editorial:

"From the early 1970s to the present, the Vineyard moved from a sleepy Island community sometimes referred to as a civil wilderness to a great resort that today commands attention from across the nation and the world. The Island now draws countless thousands to her never-ending shoreline. They come as ordinary folk from the main streets of America and as power brokers from Wall Street and as presidents from the White House. But they all arrive on Martha’s Vineyard in search of the same thing: the solitude and beauty of the Island, the special sanctuary the Vineyard offers as a quiet refuge far from the clatter of the mainland.

"It is this transformative period in Island history that explains the fierce political battles, legal clashes, the social upheaval and the great debates about proper levels of development that have raged for more than three decades on the Vineyard. The Vineyard Gazette, more often than not during these years, landed at the center of the political and social collisions.

"And while perhaps not always understood, there was but one editorial message from this newspaper, one that has stood for the past thirty-five years, a position first set forth in the early decades before me under the direction of Henry Beetle Hough, the revered old country editor of the Gazette, and continued from 1968 to 1975 by my father, James (Scotty) Reston.

"The case for the Vineyard, as argued by the Gazette, was that the Island had the right to determine its own future, the right to define a plan for thoughtful and orderly growth. At stake was the preservation of the character of the Vineyard and the quality of Island life for her citizens. And so the Gazette through those sometimes tumultuous years often stood against those who pressed for unbridled development, against outside interests that appeared more interested in making money than in preserving the special character of Martha’s Vineyard. It is after all that character that makes the Island a special place and sets it apart from so many other communities now overdeveloped and long forgotten."

And the Fair Land

The Wall Street Journal has been publishing its "And the Fair Land" and "The Desolate Wilderness" editorials every Thanksgiving since 1961.  I read them again every year.  Here is "And the Fair Land" excerpted in full.  With thanks.

"Any one whose labors take him into the far reaches of the country, as ours lately have done, is bound to mark how the years have made the land grow fruitful.

This is indeed a big country, a rich country, in a way no array of figures can measure and so in a way past belief of those who have not seen it. Even those who journey through its Northeastern complex, into the Southern lands, across the central plains and to its Western slopes can only glimpse a measure of the bounty of America.

And a traveler cannot but be struck on his journey by the thought that this country, one day, can be even greater. America, though many know it not, is one of the great underdeveloped countries of the world; what it reaches for exceeds by far what it has grasped.

So the visitor returns thankful for much of what he has seen, and, in spite of everything, an optimist about what his country might be. Yet the visitor, if he is to make an honest report, must also note the air of unease that hangs everywhere.

For the traveler, as travelers have been always, is as much questioned as questioning. And for all the abundance he sees, he finds the questions put to him ask where men may repair for succor from the troubles that beset them.

His countrymen cannot forget the savage face of war. Too often they have been asked to fight in strange and distant places, for no clear purpose they could see and for no accomplishment they can measure. Their spirits are not quieted by the thought that the good and pleasant bounty that surrounds them can be destroyed in an instant by a single bomb. Yet they find no escape, for their survival and comfort now depend on unpredictable strangers in far-off corners of the globe.

How can they turn from melancholy when at home they see young arrayed against old, black against white, neighbor against neighbor, so that they stand in peril of social discord. Or not despair when they see that the cities and countryside are in need of repair, yet find themselves threatened by scarcities of the resources that sustain their way of life. Or when, in the face of these challenges, they turn for leadership to men in high places—only to find those men as frail as any others.

So sometimes the traveler is asked whence will come their succor. What is to preserve their abundance, or even their civility? How can they pass on to their children a nation as strong and free as the one they inherited from their forefathers? How is their country to endure these cruel storms that beset it from without and from within?

Of course the stranger cannot quiet their spirits. For it is true that everywhere men turn their eyes today much of the world has a truly wild and savage hue. No man, if he be truthful, can say that the specter of war is banished. Nor can he say that when men or communities are put upon their own resources they are sure of solace; nor be sure that men of diverse kinds and diverse views can live peaceably together in a time of troubles.

But we can all remind ourselves that the richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth, though they be plentiful, but in the men that took its measure. For that reminder is everywhere—in the cities, towns, farms, roads, factories, homes, hospitals, schools that spread everywhere over that wilderness.

We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators. Being so, we are the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth.

And we might remind ourselves also, that if those men setting out from Delftshaven had been daunted by the troubles they saw around them, then we could not this autumn be thankful for a fair land."

John Cage's 4' 33"

The BBC Symphony Orchestra's performance of John Cage's 1952 composition 4' 33" at the Barbican.

Don't Touch My Junk

I don't know if "Don't touch my junk" will earn the historical significance of the Gadsden flag's credo "Don't tread on me," but in less than a week John Tyner's protest about his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches has brought shame to the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration.  The new "pat down" procedures, arbitrarily administered by TSA officers, have now rightly been challenged as sexual assault.

After the Tyner incident, the TSA's "Blogger Bob" posted on The TSA Blog that it has the "legal authority to levy a civil penalty of up to $11,000.00" on passengers who refuse to submit to its security procedures, even if they choose to cancel their flight and leave the airport.   

Why in the name of security have we allowed our government to go this far, subjecting babies, little girls and boys, and even nuns to humiliating groping when they choose not to be irradiated by body scanners?  The answer?  Political correctness.  Rather than use common sense to profile airline passengers based on real data and experience, our government insists on implementing security measures that ignore reality, impinge on the rights of the many when the security issue is with the few.  This same political correctness got news analyst Juan Williams fired by NPR last month.

Israeli airport security is considered the best in the world.  They profile, use computer databases and ask passengers the questions that reveal answers that lead to intelligent decisions. 

In the movie Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, the frequent flyer played by George Clooney, explained how he queues up at airport security: 

Ryan Bingham: Never get behind old people. Their bodies are littered with hidden metal and they never seem to appreciate how little time they have left. Bingo, Asians. They pack light, travel efficiently, and they have a thing for slip on shoes. Gotta love 'em.
Natalie Keener: That's racist.
Ryan Bingham: I'm like my mother, I stereotype. It's faster.

It's smarter too.

Room with a View

The view from the International Space Station is out of this world.

QE2

More quantitative easing . . .

Dear Sir,
Good day and compliments. I am Dr (Mr) Benjamin Bernanke, Chairman of Federal Reserve of United States of America. This mail will surely come to you as a great surprise, since we never had any previous correspondence. My aim of contacting you is to crave your indulgence to assist us in securing some funds abroad to prosecute a transaction of great magnitude.
Due to poor banking system in America, many subprime borrowers are not paying back mortgages and banks have lost ONE TRILLION TWO HUNDRED BILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS ($1,200bn) so far. This calamity has caused much suffering in my country. To help remedy this situation, our president, Mr Barack Hussein Obama, has authorised to be spent a sum of EIGHT HUNDRED NINETY SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS ($897bn) on stimulus plus many other good deeds like cash for clunkers. Unfortunately, since that time, we are being molested and constantly harassed by bond vigilantes who do not care that their reckless and vicious behaviour could ruin our hopes and plans.
To this effect, last year I authorised the printing of ONE TRILLION TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY BILLION ($1,250bn) of United States currency to purchase government securities. To my great shock, this was not enough so I am now buying another SIX HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS ($600bn).  If you forward a modest sum to purchase Treasury notes then I can buy many more of them with my unlimited printing press and their price will rise. I am absolutely positive that this arrangement will be of mutual benefit to both of us. I can offer you generous interest rate of EIGHT TENTHS OF A PERCENT after taxes.
I want you to immediately inform me of your willingness in assisting and co-operating with us, so that I can send you full details of this transaction and let us make arrangement for a meeting and discuss at length on how to transfer this funds.
Yours Faithfully,
Dr (Mr) Benjamin Bernanke
N.B. Please contact Mr Timothy Geithner on this e-mail address for further briefing and modalities.

I went to a fight . . .

. . . and a hockey game broke out.  Old time hockey at Madison Square Garden.

Leo Cullum, RIP

Leo Cullum, one of my favorite New Yorker magazine cartoonists, passed away last month. 

Cullum drew 819 cartoons for the magazine over 33 years, most of which were done on layovers since his "real" job was as a TWA and American Airlines pilot.

Cullum's fellow New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast wrote a postscript about him in a recent issue, which captured his sense of humor:

"According to his brother, Thomas, 'Leo has been funny since he was a little kid—he was kind of a humor prodigy.' At the dinner table one night during a summer vacation when Leo was seven and Thomas nine, their father complained that his stomach had got a little sunburned. Leo said, 'Well, you know, Dad, things that are closest to the sun burn first.' Fortunately, his father laughed.

After the 9/11/2001 issue, only the second with no cartoons, the first cartoon in the subsequent issue was by Cullum.

Here's another Cullum classic.  Thanks for all the laughs.

Cuckoo for Coconuts

President Obama's three-day state visit to India requires "34 U.S. war ships, including an aircraft carrier, which will patrol the sea lanes off the Mumbai coast."  With the need to cut spending, avert global climate disorder and the like, couldn't an electronic town hall and webcast suffice?  After all, there will be a TelePromptr either way.

According to the Press Trust of India's ndtv.com . . .

• Obama is expected to fly by a helicopter -- Marine One -- from the city airport to the Indian Navy's helibase INS Shikra at Colaba in south Mumbai.
• Two jets, armed with advanced communication and security systems, and a fleet of over 40 cars will be part of Obama's convoy.
• Around 800 rooms have been booked for the President and his entourage in Taj Hotel and Hyatt.
• The President will have a security ring of American elite Secret Service, which are tasked to guard the President, along with National Security Guards (NSG) and personnel from central paramilitary forces and local police in Mumbai and Delhi.
  Similar arrangements will be in place in Delhi, with the Air Force One to be kept in all readiness throughout Obama's stay here from Sunday afternoon to Tuesday morning.
• Maurya Hotel, where the President will stay, has already been swarmed by American security personnel and protective measures have been put in place.
• Security drills have already been carried out at the hotel as well as Rajghat, where he will visit.
• Sources said 13 heavy-lift aircraft with high-tech equipment, three helicopters and 500 US security personnel have arrived in India ahead of Obama's visit.
• The US security has also brought interception and obstruction device, sniffer dogs, rescue gadgets.
• All high-rise buildings in the vicinity of Mumbai's Taj Mahal hotel and Delhi's Maurya Sheraton hotel, where the US President will stay, are being sanitised and security personnel will be positioned on rooftops to prevent any air-borne attack.
• The Ridge area - opposite Delhi's Maurya Sheraton hotel - has been illuminated by floodlights as part of the heightened security drill.

And if those precautions aren't enough, the Telegraph reports that:

"All coconuts around the city's Gandhi museum, one of Mr Obama's stops in the city, are being taken down. Mani Bhavan, where Mahatma Gandhi stayed during his freedom struggle against the British, is among five places the US president is visiting in Mumbai.  'We told the authorities to remove the dry coconuts from trees near the building. Why take a chance?' Mani Bhavan's executive secretary, Meghshyam Ajgaonkar, told the BBC."

November 3

Vote!

I'm going to fix a cup of chamomile and vote tomorrow.

Foraging

A few weekends ago we went foraging with "Wildman" Steve Brill at Millstone Farm in Wilton, Connecticut.  More than 50 people paid $25 (including a yummy and well-timed lunch beforehand) to learn about the kinds of things you can eat from the ground, bushes and trees.  It was a hoot, notwithstanding Brill's overly practiced one-liners . . . and the required "hold harmless" liability waivers we needed to sign in advance.

We foraged for pokeweed, wood sorrel, clover and lamb's quarters, among others.  Most sought after were mushrooms which were nowhere to be found except for some leathery "polypores" growing on tree trunks. 

Today's Wall Street Journal has a report on Evan Strusinski, a forager in Maine who ships mushrooms to chefs at NYC restaurants like Ssam Bar, Momofuku and Vandaag.

"Mr. Strusinski is a food forager, rummaging through woods and rivers from Vermont to the coast of Maine to Portland to gather cattails, pineapple weed, wood sorrel and other offbeat ingredients. He supplies about a dozen restaurants in Maine, but this year he's expanded to New York."

Hereafter

The assembled reviews of Clint Eastwood's new movie, Hereafter, average out to a score of 50 on Rotten Tomatoes. Given the touchy-feely subject, the afterlife, I guess a split decision is to be expected, but it's better than that.

A.O. Scott in The New York Times wrote:

"One of the reasons that “Hereafter” works as well as it does — it has the power to haunt the skeptical, to mystify the credulous and to fascinate everyone in between — may be that its subject matter is so clearly alien to the sensibilities of its makers. Communication with the dead is a risky business, principally because once the door to the beyond opens a tiny crack, all kinds of maudlin nonsense come rushing in. But one of Mr. Eastwood’s great and undersung (sic) strengths as a director is his ability to wade into swamps of sentimental hokum and come out perfectly dry."

David Denby in The New Yorker is less kind, but does report on the scriptwriter Peter Morgan's motive:

" 'We can be so close to somebody, know everything about them, share everything with them, and then they’re gone and suddenly we know nothing,' Morgan said.  The bafflement that comes with loss is certainly a strong enough emotion to get a story moving, but, by turning to spiritualism, visions, and the afterlife, Morgan has wandered into hokum without illuminating grief."

I can relate to the gone part.

Let's cuddle

Happy Halloween . . .

Ouija

Possumtown

I walked the grounds and river banks of my forefathers a couple of weekends ago.  The first was Vincent, a Huguenot from Poitiers, France who some genealogists say sailed from the Channel Island of Jersey to New Jersey in 1665 on the ship Philip with the future colonial governor of East Jersey, Philip Carteret.  On July 17, 1668, in Elizabethtown, N.J., Vincent married Ann Boutcher, from Hartford, England, under license from Carteret:

 "Whereas I have received information of a Mutual Intent and Agreement betweene Vincent Rongnion of Poitiers in France and Ann Boutcher the daughter of John Boutcher of Hartford in England to Solemnise Marriage together, for which they have requested my lycense.  This couple were joyned in Matrimony July 1668 by me James Bollen."

Vincent and Ann settled on 154 1/2 acres along the Raritan River, which is part of Johnson Park today, where they had seven children.

The Raritan probably looks much the same as it did then, though now the surrounding area is mostly the Rutgers University Busch campus and pharmaceutical and biotechnology parks.

 

This mural of Carteret's landing at the mouth of the Elizabeth River can be seen at the Essex County Courthouse in Newark.

Vincent's descendant Benjamin owned this circa 1780 home which today is part of East Jersey Olde Town Village in the River Road Historic District.

Benjamin and other family members are buried at a family plot on the corner of Possumtown Road and Centennial Avenue in Piscataway.

Juan's Extremism?

"First, a critical distinction has been lost in this debate. NPR News analysts have a distinctive role and set of responsibilities. This is a very different role than that of a commentator or columnist. News analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that’s what’s happened in this situation. As you all well know, we offer views of all kinds on your air every day, but those views are expressed by those we interview – not our reporters and analysts." ~ Vivian Schiller, Chief Executive Officer, National Public Radio

Oh really?

 

Signs of the Times

Here are a couple of new ads that say something about today's America.

Chiller Theater

It was a thrill last night to watch the 1925 silent horror film Phantom of the Opera with live organ accompaniment at the 125-year-old Tarrytown Music Hall.

Poor, lovesick Erik (Lon Chaney) had everything over hams like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Meyers.

Yankees 6 - Rangers 5

Another great comeback win.  A five-run 8th inning, fueled by Brett Gardner's head-first slide at first.

Powers of Ten

Before Google Earth . . . there was the 1977 film Powers of Ten, by Charles and Ray Eames, "that takes viewers on a visual journey of scale and magnitude, from the edge of space to a carbon atom in a man's hand. Every 10 seconds, the viewer moves out (and later in), 10 times farther than the point before."  Far out, man.

The Online World

Fascinating.  XKCD's updated map of online communities, where size represents the daily volume of social activity (posts, chat, etc.) based on data gathered in the Spring and Summer of 2010.

Fore!

Just in from The Daily Mail . . .

"This is the moment when Mail on Sunday photographer Mark Pain found himself in the line of fire at the Ryder Cup - and for a brief moment brought the mighty Tiger Woods to a juddering halt.

"The American world No 1 was partnering Steve Stricker and attempting to chip his third shot on the final hole of yesterday morning’s fourball against Europe’s Ian Poulter and Ross Fisher on to the green.

"But Woods hit the ground behind the ball and duffed the shot straight at Pain. The man from The Mail on Sunday didn’t flinch, however, and captured this extraordinary picture just before the ball hit his camera, bounced on to his chest and came to rest at his feet.

"Woods was furious about his blunder, but neither he nor caddie Steve Williams objected to Pain’s position."

Look closely at the crowd to the right behind Tiger.  See the man in the hat with a cigar?  Yes, that one.

Bed Bugs and Beyond

More brilliance from Barry Blitt.

For the kid in all of us

Only $4.99.  Progressives' death threats included.

Mapping Stereotypes

America's Europe.  The geography of prejudice.

FONT YOU!

From the Obama Administration Stimulus files . . .

The Federal Highway Administration's updated Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices requires new signs across the nation that use upper and lower case characters for "improved readability."

According to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, "Safety is this department's top priority. These new and updated standards will help make our nation's roads and bridges safer for drivers, construction workers and pedestrians alike."

New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan illuminated the benefits further: "On the Internet, writing in all caps means you're shouting."
 
The cost for NYC to meet these new federal standards and replace its 250,000 all upper-case signs used for more than a century?  $27.6 million.

No, this report isn't from The Onion, it's real.  And I guess it accounts for the jumble of upper case and initial upper-cased words on these signs that litter the country.

Rated R

When I read Arthur Penn's obit in yesterday's New York Times, I recalled that his 1967 film Bonnie & Clyde was the first R-rated movie I saw, at the tender age of 9, at the now closed Fine Arts theater in Westport.  I remember feeling privvy to an adult world . . . of crime, violence and sex.  While I didn't understand it at the time, years later I came to scorn Hollywood's ability to manipulate audiences' sympathy for the most undeserving characters.

In The New York Times' April 14, 1967 movie review, by Bowsley Crowther, the era's less prurient mores led to this screed:

"A raw and unmitigated campaign of sheer press-agentry has been trying to put across the notion that Warner Brothers' Bonnie and Clyde is a faithful representation of the desperado careers of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, a notorious team of bank robbers and killers who roamed Texas and Oklahoma in the post-Depression years.

"It is nothing of the sort. It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie. And it puts forth Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the leading roles, and Michael J. Pollard as their sidekick, a simpering, nose-picking rube, as though they were striving mightily to be the Beverly Hillbillies of next year."

On further reflection, and after a little digging on Wikpedia which confirmed that the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system wasn't introduced until a year later in 1968, I remembered that my first R movie was actually MASH in 1970, which I saw in NYC with a classmate who's father was divorced and lived in Manhattan.  After the movie his father saw us off at Grand Central, stopping first at a newsstand to get us a magazine to read on the train home, that month's Playboy.  A lot had changed in three years.