The Baby

AUGUST 29, 2008

Ben posted a LOL New Yorker comic and I put a link to one in the comments. That wasn't enough though. Happy weekend.

Posted in Tidbits at 12:28 pm.
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A Fantastic Reason to Vote for Obama

AUGUST 29, 2008

Dude loves tacos. (via zulkey)

Posted in Culture\Politics\Law at 12:14 am.
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Portraits of Divers in Motion

AUGUST 26, 2008

My favorite coverage of the Olympics has been via Vincent Laforet's blog at Newsweek. He's caught some amazing photos and documented the process.

The photos above are from a series of portraits of divers in motion, which I found incredibly striking and odd. It's very funny to see together. Laforet also spent time explaining how he got these bird's eye shots. Talking about the swimming competitions, he explains, "Once you are approved, you gear up an hour before the race and have to follow the following rules: one camera, one lens, one card. Nothing else."

Since he has so many fantastic shots, I'll end with one more photo. This tilt-shift shot makes everything seem more like a video game or toy set.

All photos are by Vincent Laforet for NEWSWEEK

Posted in Sports at 11:28 am.
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This is Not the McFly 2015

JULY 3, 2008

I'm sorry, the new Nike Hyperdunk is nice, but it ain't no McFly 2015. I appreciate the thought Nike, but either do it right or don't do it at all.

Posted in Culture\Politics\Law, Design at 11:33 am.
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Two Baseball Rule Changes

JUNE 30, 2008

These popped in my head over the last 72 hours and seemed like good solutions to two problems in baseball.

1. Instead of using the All-Star game to determine home field advantage in the World Series, use the cumulative record for interleague play. Using one game where the players aren't used to playing together and probably won't be going full force isn't representative and home field is a big deal. This year, the American League would have won handily, having bested the NL with a 149-102 record.

2. It's time to get replays going in baseball. The angles aren't as tough as other sports so replays should be fast. To keep gameplay moving, they should adopt the NFL rules and allow two challenges per team, per game. Not that it would have kept the Cubs from getting swept by the White Sox, but it's frustrating when replays show a clear mistake by the umps. Time to fix it.

Posted in Sports at 3:52 pm.
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Why Those Chicken Wings Were Good

MAY 31, 2008

A month or two ago I tried David Chang's chicken wings at Momofuku Noodle Bar. They were second, and just barely second, to the wings at Dinosaur BBQ but they were far more interesting and complex. I finally got around to reading the profile of David Chang in the 3/24/08 issue of the New Yorker and I got an explanation of what made those wings so delicious.

Take the chicken wings, for instance. All you knew when you were eating them was that they tasted really good. What you didn't know was that they'd been brined in a salt-and-sugar solution for a whole day (but not longer, or they'd be too salty), then dried out and cold-smoked over mesquite for forty-five minutes, then poached in a vat of pork fat for an hour and a half, then browned on the flat-top, then glazed in a chicken-infused soy sauce combined with mirin, garlic, and pickled chili peppers. Each step, executed perfectly, was vital to the dish. This was what the cooks at Noodle Bar understand.

Posted in Food at 3:17 pm.
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Guitar Hero Ad: You Just Blew My Mind

MAY 28, 2008

Normally I'd just stick this in the sidebar as a quick post, but I didn't want to make you click again to see this. Hot damn, this is the worst/best ad I've ever seen. It may be our modern day Wendy's training video rap.

via kotaku

Posted in Video Games at 2:16 pm.
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AirCraft by Jeffrey Milstein

MAY 20, 2008

On Saturday, Jori and I took in the New York Photo Festival. There wasn't a whole lot to get excited about, but we were both curious about Jeffrey Milstein's AirCraft typology.

The photos are much more striking when seem large, but we couldn't help but wonder how he took these photos. A release about another exhibition explains, "Standing with his camera at the end of a runway watching them descend, he freezes their headlong 200 mile per hour motion, capturing all the details of their shapes and construction with absolute precision."

That was my guess, but the photos were so perfectly aligned and photoshopped it was hard to believe. Now, Mr. Milstein, I believe.

Posted in Art at 10:07 pm.
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Favorites from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards

MAY 12, 2008

The winners were announced sometime in the last week or two (based on where these links lived in my tabs) and I tabbed through all of them for some creative inspiration. These were my favorites.

Sanlitun North by Lot-EK

This is a mixed-use building in Central Beijing by Lot-EK and designer Kengo Kuma. I'm a sucker for boxy with a twist.

Title Sequences by Prologue Films

The film stills above are from the title sequence of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a pretty good move with great titles. This team is also responsible for the great Spiderman 2 and 3 title sequences.

Magazine Design by Open

I've long been a fan of Good's design, especially the covers, and I was taken with what I saw of Scott Stowell's (he is the head of Open) work on The Nation.

Posted in Design at 3:47 pm.
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The Beginning of a Blog

MAY 7, 2008

For anyone who has fallen in love with blogging, you remember those early days when writing 5,000 words a week was like breathing. Of course, back when I started, I wasn't nearly as poignant as Roger Ebert.

Ebertt is following a trend I see of established writers who finally get blogging. Their first few months of posts are filled with topics that have been sitting in a large pile — similar to my pile of New Yorkers — of information waiting to be shared. Yesterday's post from Ebert is a good example of something he's probably thought about a lot but hadn't found the right outlet to share.

Frank Bruni's Diner's Journal started the same way. Now that he has gotten all of the long held tidbits off his chest, he's invited other writers to keep up the output.

This is certainly not a revelation, but it is fun seeing well respected writers following the same trends we've seen from bloggers since the beginning. Unfortunately for all of us, Ebert and Bruni have never written blog posts like this.

Posted in Technology\Web at 10:23 am.
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