GracefulFlavor

The NYT has a swell list of buzzwords that define 2007, and I’m only familiar about a third of them, which makes me think either (a) I’m an idiot, or (b) some of them are regionalized to somewhere outside the not-so-dynamic midwest.

However, I like to think I’m not a pop culture idiot because I do, in fact, run this blog and read mountains of feeds on a daily basis, but it could be that I’m reading select news/content sources and I’m missing a great deal.

Words With Which I Am Familiar
bacn
chief sustainability officer
crowdsource
e-mail bankruptcy
forever stamp
FTW
global weirding
lolcat
tumblelog

Words That Are Apparently Popular Somewhere
astronaut diaper
boot camp flu
boom
colony collapse disorder
drama-price
earmarxist
exploding ARM
gorno
-hawk (suffix)
hypermile
I-reporter
kinnear
life-stream
make it rain
maternal profiling
mobisode
mom job
multi-dad
Navy shower
Ninja loan
nose bidet
pap
post-kinetic environment
Super-Duper Tuesday
truther
vegansexual
wide stance, to have a
walkshed

I’m interested to know if most (all?) of these mean something to you, the esteemed GF reader.

I typically don’t like too many shorts, as I think most are overly arty for arty’s sake. But Terminus, an official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival, is excellent.

Basically, a silent, monolithic concrete monster follows an anxious, neurotic businessman around. Other people have similar monsters trailing them. It’s a creepy film with funny moments, although I can’t decide if the monster’s mating dance is funny, scary, or both.

QuiuckTime version (for faster connections, excellent quality)

YouTube version (for slower connections, decent quality)

[Thx Leo]

The irony is too rich for me to ignore:

The brawl apparently began when Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church after the Christmas Day celebrations.

Armenian priests claimed that the ladders encroached on their portion of the church, which led the two sects to exchange angry words which quickly turned to blows.

Witnesses said that the robed and bearded priests scuffled for more than an hour using fists, brooms and iron rods as weapons.

Photographers who came to document the annual cleaning ceremony instead recorded the entire event.

Five priests were lightly injured in the melee, which was eventually broken up by a dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen. Two of the policemen were hurt in ending the brawl.

Jesus is the reason for the beatin’.

Link

This might be enough to turn you off seafood for a while.

Newscast below is in Korean, and it’s reporting on a new hybrid breed of carp with human-like faces. Looks like a form of afterlife torment, if you ask me, but whatever. Creepy.

[Via Boing Boing]

I’m a skier rather than a snowboarder, and quite bluntly, I do understand why resorts such as Deer Valley don’t allow snowboarders on their slopes. Is it the right thing to do? That’s up for debate, but the fact of the matter is that skiers and boarders ride a mountain differently, and there’s often interference between the two. As a skier, it is more enjoyable not to have to worry about boarders harshing my line. I’m sure, from their perspective, they don’t need me stomping theirs, either. It’s a culture clash, and that requires management. It simply does.

(The only physical altercation I’ve ever seen on the slopes was between skiers and four obnoxious snowboarders who were being first-class assholes in a crowded lift line and showing zero regard for anyone other than themselves. Just saying.)

So, all that said, it’s interesting that Burton is offering a $5000 cash purse to the person or crew who submits the best video documenting their poaching experience at one of the four remaining resorts that don’t allow snowboarding (Deer Valley, Mad River Glen, Alta and Taos). It’s more a marketing stunt than anything, and the intro video is, as kottke says, a perfect explanation for why these four areas don’t want snowboarders.

I’m glad to see, however, that Burton was smart enough to put some rules around this, otherwise god only knows what the legions of angst-filled boarders would do to score the five grand.

Serious Eats’ Ed Levine posts his thoughts on food/culinary trends that are welcome to stay and those that could go off a cliff.

I’m especially in favor of restaurants dressing down and continued efforts to promote local food sourcing and sustainable agriculture, but almost everything Levine likes is right up my alley (especially the idea of serious pizza joints opening up across the nation).

I agree with so much of this list that I could have written it myself. If you care, and I’m going to pretend that you do, I nearly applauded at GWB (”You can practically hear the whole nation holding its breath, hoping this guy will just fucking leave come January ‘09 and not declare martial law.”), Tim Russert (”Has held the most visible and secure seat in political media for over 15 years without once mustering the courage to call his guests liars. Impossible to watch him interview any woman on “Meet the Press” without fearing he’ll suddenly waggle his sinewy tongue, Jabba-like, and beslobber her.”), and Mike Huckabee (”What’s worse, a calculating politician pretending to be a devout Christian, or a genuine heartland preacher who didn’t come from no monkey? Huckabee is both — a Southern Baptist who rejects Darwin, wants to give everyone a gun and thinks people with AIDS should be quarantined, and a seedy, corrupt politician who’s never seen a payoff so low he won’t stoop to pick it up.”)

Also among the indicted are Nicole Richie, Carson Daly, Chuck Norris, Halo 3’s Master Chief, Britney Spears, Mormon Jesus, and Hillary Clinton.

But the real gem comes in at #9 — You.

Charges: You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism — it’s nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over. You still think Republicans favor limited government. Your knowledge of politics and government are dwarfed by your concern for Britney Spears’ children. You think buying Chinese goods stimulates our economy. You think you’re going to get universal health care. You tolerate the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques.” You think the government is actually trying to improve education. You think watching CNN makes you smarter. You think two parties is enough. You can’t spell. You think $9 trillion in debt is manageable. You believe in an afterlife for the sole reason that you don’t want to die. You think lowering taxes raises revenue. You think the economy’s doing well. You’re an idiot.

Exhibit A: You couldn’t get enough Anna Nicole Smith coverage.

Sentence: A gradual decline into abject poverty as you continue to vote against your own self-interest. Death by an easily treated disorder that your health insurance doesn’t cover. You deserve it, chump.

[Via kottke]

Design Observer’s Stephen Heller on the cowardice of blogger anonymity:

A rose is a rose, and a real name at the end of a blog post is an indication that the person who authored the statement is taking responsibility, indeed ownership of the words — it is a simple act of honesty. For too long bloggers have been given license that is not tolerated in letters-to-the-editor columns of newspapers and magazines (except in extraordinary circumstances). If one is willing to expound, exclaim, or critique it should be done under a real name and with links to a valid email or website address. If transparency on the web is the new black, then there should be no secrets.

This is why, for better or worse, I use my real name here on GF. I write my posts, hit some good points, make some mistakes, and have disagreements with people regarding my editorials. It’s all in the name of honesty and transparency, and I wouldn’t trade its upsides for the ‘protection’ relative anonymity would grant.

[Via DF]

I’m giving MarsEdit a test drive. I typically use ecto, but I’ve read a lot about Marsedit and decided to give it (another) try.

Some initial thoughts on the latest version (2.0.4):

How can I do an ordered/unordered list? I see no markup options for bullets or numbers. I’d be using bullets here if I could find the option. (And no, I don’t feel like adding custom HTML to the text markup options. Sorry.)

I don’t care how “pure” the raw HTML approach is, I simply don’t understand the lack of WYSISWG editing. This has turned me off of MarsEdit in the past, and I’m doing everything I can do look past it this time around. I’m struggling. In fact, I’d say this is probably Daniel Jalkut’s #1 request, and there’s been little hint that MarsEdit will move in this direction. We’re talking about a Mac application here, and it seems to me that there’s no audience in the world that would expect visual editing more.

I don’t see an easy way to resize pictures (for straight size manipulations or into thumbnails). ecto handles this quite well. As a matter of fact, I’d like to see other image options too: drop shadow, slight rotate, picture frame, watermarking, etc. Blogs are increasingly a media-rich medium and the more options we have here, the better. There is the chance that I’m missing something here, but I don’t think so. I’ve kicked the media functionality around pretty well so far.

On the plus side, the HTML tags MarsEdit generates are sane and clean. I like that. Some of the code ecto generates is wildly incomprehensible. I like knowing that the HTML will arrive at my blog in its proper form.

MarsEdit is less fussy when it comes to creating extended text formatting (you know it as the “More…” link at the bottom of longer articles that fetches the rest of the post). ecto always manages to fuck this up, and I have to go into WordPress’s dashboard and fix the spacing myself. Marsedit handles this perfectly, which again goes back to the clean HTML it generates.

I am not an HTML pro by any means, but I can wade around in it if I have to. It’s just that when it comes to composition, I don’t want to mess with it much. When I want to list some thoughts in a bullet-list format, I shouldn’t have to create new HTML macros. To me, that’s not too user friendly, although I do understand that sort of barrier to entry has a certain level of geek appeal. But me, I’m a WYSIWYG guy.

What I’d really like to see is a flavor of Windows Live Writer for the Mac. In my opinion, WLW is the best blogging tool on the market for any platform, and I absolutely guarantee there’s big money in the wings for someone who creates a clone for OSX. It’s that good. Why is this so hard to do? Quite bluntly, the state of blogging clients on the Mac is horrendous. WLW blows anything on the Mac away by a full order of magnitude. It’s the one app I really enjoy using on a Windows machine.

If you use MarsEdit, I’d love to hear your suggestions. I have mixed feelings about the application now, although I do very much appreciate the (relative) simplicity of the tool, the complaints above notwithstanding. And Daniel Jalkut is a very responsive developer. Granted, I’ve only been using the app for about a half hour, so it stands to reason that I’m missing something huge.

But I’m guessing I’m not. Sigh.

Interesting new class of drugs that target the mitochondria of our cells to help prevent cellular damage and oxidization. The rub is that many age-related diseases are thought to be mitochondrial in nature, so if we can keep the mitochondria healthy, we might dodge a great number of diseases we’ve heretofore been susceptible to.

The drugs target mitochondria, the cellular power generators that provide our bodies with chemical energy. Over time, mitochondria accumulate damage, causing cells and eventually tissues to malfunction and break down. Some scientists believe that such seemingly disparate diseases as cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and heart disease — all of which become more common with age — share a mitochondrial root. Fix the mitochondria, and you might fix aging itself.

This begs the question that if we find a way to interrupt what is largely our mainline death mechanism, how will we die?

Bioethics should be an interesting field in the decades to come.

One guy — a diver, ultramarathoner, swimmer, and all-around athlete — decided to try it on himself.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.

And I understood.

Link to entire discussion

[Via kottke]

“For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all of the horrors of the half-lived life.”

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)

Rarely does a single webpage contain so many life lessons so full of candor and bravery. Selected excerpts:

If I let it affect everything, it’s gonna own everything. I don’t deny it or pretend it’s not there, but if I don’t allow it to be bigger than it is, then I can do everything else.

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.

Acceptance is the key to everything.

If you don’t have someone calling you on your shit, you’re lost.

Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone’s watching or not.

No matter how much fame you have, it’s not something that belongs to you. If I’m famous, that doesn’t belong to me — that belongs to you. If you can’t remember who I am, I’m no longer famous.

Whatever terrible thing is going on, it’s going on until you find out that it’s not. So get to that part as quickly as possible.

It’s impossible not to admire such perspective.

[Via kottke]

I’m going to join John Gruber in a moment of reflection about Steve Ballmer’s not-so-precient quip about the chances for substantial iPhone success:

There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

The beauty here is that the iPhone is outselling all Windows Mobile devices combined.

I know other sites do a better job of tracking silly quotes by bigwig execs and later shoving hot spiced crow down their mouths, but I couldn’t pass this one up.

I’ve been quite busy at work and getting things wrapped up (no pun intended — in fact, I’m a wrapping retard) for the holidays, so I’ve taken a brief break from GF. Nonetheless, I ask you to stay tuned during the holidays, as I’ll have my normal level attention devoted to it.

For serious. Hang around.

Interesting list. He gives top billing to Juno, which I’ve heard is good but haven’t seen. Maybe it’s just bias, but I can’t see it being better than No Country for Old Men. I can see that some — especially this time of year — will appreciate Juno’s whimsy and charm, and perhaps Country’s sense of bleak, hopeless despair and raw illustration that you can’t stop what’s coming is a bit too hard-edged for some. Still, Juno as #1? I’ll have to see it to judge.

I want this.

[Via swissmiss]

I’m more interested in this story not because of the subject matter — the actual phones that most closely resemble the iPhone — but because, from a marketing standpoint, you know you rule the roost when others decide to imitate you.

In other words, without the iPhone, the knock-offs likely wouldn’t exist at all.

There remains something to be said for the original.

Seems T-Mobile is blocking Twitter traffic on its mobile network. Here’s a clip from T-Mobile’s service department, according to Alternageek:

T-Mobile would like to bring to your attention that the Terms and Conditions of service, to which you agreed at activation, indicate “… some Services are not available on third-party networks or while roaming. We may impose credit, usage, or other limits to Service, cancel or suspend Service, or block certain types of calls, messages, or sessions (such as international, 900, or 976 calls) at our discretion.” Therefore, T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation.

I would like to go on a rant about how the American mobile carriers just don’t get it, and how in fact they’re embracing the exact opposite of what their paying customers want. They think they can control what’s coming next, and it’s been pretty obvious in the tech world that you can’t. The harder you try, the quicker it comes.

Instead of elaborating any further, I’ll let DeWitt Clinton bring it home for me:

If you think the rest of Internet needs net neutrality laws, that’s nothing compared with the backward-facing worldview of the established mobile carriers. You guys aren’t going to last long at this rate, and when it is all said and done no one is going to look back and longingly pine for the days of a handful of restricted carriers running closed networks.

It’s flabbergasting how big-dollar executives can’t adjust to this reality.

[Via DF]

It’s amazing how we think our health is being protected and taken care of by establishments that have almost no vested interest in us personally.  The social convention, however, says to trust these hospitable strangers, so we do. 

There are many everyday examples of this — our inherent trust in restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners, gyms — but there’s often not much evidence for the sort of cynicism that suggests that perhaps we should not trust.  Strangely enough, I’ve noticed that anytime someone tries pragmatically to tell others about the reality of public health (side note: that phrase is quickly becoming oxymoronic), rolling eyes are the most common response.  It’s as if people would rather deny certain realities than trouble themselves with the effort of dealing with the potential risks of situation.

Recently, a camera crew went into several major hotels — all part of known, national chains — and used hidden cameras to film what the housekeeping crews do with the drinking glasses that are in every room.

Let’s just put it this way: if I wrote the stories down here for you to read, you’d call bullshit.  So, I suggest you just watch the video and call it a day.

BestViral: Don’t Ever Drink From Hotel Glasses

[Via Leo]

As of this writing, AAPL is down $3.95 (2.03%) on the news that the Fed cut the federal funds rate by a quarter-point to 4.25%.

Hint: buy. This emotional reaction won’t matter a bit to AAPL over the next few weeks.

That is all.

Outstanding 20 minute TED talk by psychologist Barry Schwartz about how we tend to believe that choice equates to personal welfare and happiness.  In reality, all the choices we have — from what salad dressing to buy, to what jeans, to where to live and who and when to marry — are making us miserable.  If you’ve ever found yourself making a decision that you know to be good but still wondering, “What about the choices I didn’t make?  Are they better?”, this video is for you.

Link to Barry Schwartz’s TED talk

[Via DF]

I don’t know why I read these things at work, but here’s a story about a dying boy being granted his final wish of becoming a fireman by selfless, compassionate firefighters.  This is what beauty and grace look like.  If you read any one thing today, you’d be well served to make this it.

Two things can bring brawny, hardened firefighters to tears: Tragedy, and making the final wish of a terminally ill child come true. It explains why a dozen members of the Colonie Fire Department cried Saturday.

Stories like this are an odd thing, as they evoke the extremes of joy and sorrow simultaneously.

Link

Eurotards.  Not exactly the name I would have chosen.  At least not for a clothing line.

Link

[Via clusterflock]

…but your office productivity is your responsibility, not mine.

Inhumanly fun game that involves trying to trap a cat

(There’s a trick to the game, but you won’t need to try to figure it out because you’re not going to click, right?)

Jefferson Perez is a world champion race walker and a former Olympian. The clip below is one of Mr. Perez at the start of a race walking trial. At about 1:50 into the clip, five fake insane samurais break into the stadium and proceed to chase Perez, swords drawn. The idea is simple: to see if Perez would break his walk and start running.

(An aside: for a world-class track and field athlete, you’d figure he could run faster, no?)

(Another aside: Perez quite possibly might be the most good-natured human on the planet.)

[Via BB]

It’s something that, quite by design, Victoria’s Secret will never be:

These are images more invasive than any Victoria’s Secret spread, because they don’t inspire lust. This is a pornography of regret, and the longer you stare, the more seductive it becomes. These sixty pages are a self-pity trap; any sane lonely man would do well to avoid them.

Link

[Via kottke]

Now you can get a visual representation of what foods pair with others. Incredibly handy data, and well-designed to boot.

(click to embiggen)

[Thx Michael]