simon doonan on those cheap bastards -- celebrities
"Celebrities are always on the take," [Simon] Doonan noted. "I am completely appalled... the only ones with any money, a disposable income, who make 8 million dollars a movie, the only people who can afford couture gowns and tchotchkes from Jonathan Adler are the ones who want it for free. So as far as I'm concerned they can all go fuck themselves. They need to open their purses and buy stuff. It's embarrassing! They keep saying 'It's so sad I have to give this dress back.' Well, bitch, if you bought it you could keep it and give it to your grandchildren!"
(Monday, June 30, 2003)

barbie loves sponge bob?
for sixteen ninety-nine she does.
(Saturday, June 28, 2003)

new g5 design (wired)
"There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity," [Jonathan Ive, who heads up Apple's industrial design team] said. "This looks simple, because it really is."

If only Apple's software designers could get on board with that. OS X makes me cringe every time I see it.
(Thursday, June 26, 2003)

obit: verne winchell, donut king (las vegas sun, 11/29/02)
Finally, some history behind the donut store that is very good and has haunted me from a young age. Verne Winchell founded the donut chain, and later merged it with Denny's. One of his sons shares my name, even. I may have to look him up sometime.
(Wednesday, June 25, 2003)

amish country the new hot destination (wsj)
"As Americans embrace a back-to-simplicity movement, they're also discovering a culture that has cherished that very ideal for centuries. That's right: Travel to Amish destinations is booming."

With links to five websites to help you find Amish destinations.
(Wednesday, June 25, 2003)

recipes for alaska halibut
The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute is nice enough to have recipes online. Tonight I'm making the lemon garlic halibut. It sounds pretty yummy.
(Wednesday, June 25, 2003)

"progressive enhancement" &c (webmonkey)
champeon's article makes some very good points, but is both wordy and extremely dogmatic. it's almost like jakob nielsen was cloned. almost.
(Wednesday, June 25, 2003)

it's not the cheese, it's the avocados (nyt)
The NYT explores the wonders of that best of fruits, the avocado. Tastes good and is good for you!
(Wednesday, June 25, 2003)

reinventing liz phair (nyt)
it's too bad. i really liked liz's first record, but it sounds like she's decided to sell out for real instead of making it ironic or something. though she is still hot.
(Monday, June 23, 2003)

drink your local beer! (wsj)
"Jochen Aron used to drink a frothy mug of Iserlohner Pilsener just because he was thirsty. Then, saving the brand from extinction became his mission."
...
"In Iserlohn, the prospect of a brewery closing drove locals to the streets in protest. It also prompted an unusual collective vow to drink more Iserlohn. 'Every liter counts!' became the chant at 'Save Iserlohner' demonstrations and beer festivals. Locals began boycotting restaurants that didn't serve Iserlohner Pils and tossing back extra beers at the ones that did."

It worked; local investors bought the brewery and are keeping it open.
(Saturday, June 21, 2003)

how would your car fare in a crash?
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute have posted tons of crash data on every car they've tested. Fascinating stuff. Combine this with the EPA's Green Vehicle Guide and Edmunds.com and you've got as much information as Consumer Reports, if not more.
(Wednesday, June 18, 2003)

dokidoki yummy chums
apparently sanrio took that helo kitty promotion at mcdonald's a little too seriously.
(Wednesday, June 18, 2003)

the italian job (mini)
the movie was a great ad for what the mini cooper can do. i was swooning for them almost as much as i was swooning for charlize theron. she can drive my car any day.
(Tuesday, June 17, 2003)

feeling lucky? (fast company)
"Q: What are some other ways you found that lucky people's minds operate differently?"

"A: They practice 'counterfactual thinking.' The degree to which you think that something is fortunate or not is the degree to which you generate alternatives that are better or worse.

"Unlucky people say, 'I can't believe I've been in another car accident.' Lucky people go, 'Wonderful. Yes, I had a car accident, but I wasn't killed. And I met the guy in the other car, and we got on really well, and there might be a relationship there.' What's interesting is that both ways of thinking are unconscious and automatic. It would never occur to the unlucky people to see it a different way."
(Tuesday, June 17, 2003)

television, the drug of business travellers (nyt)
"'TV takes you away from how you feel at any given moment,' said Robert Kubey, associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. 'It isn't a huge escape, but it distracts us from ourselves.'

"For business travelers, Dr. Kubey said, what television typically distracts them from is being alone. 'It feels like you're being social with people,' he said, admitting that when he travels for work, his virtual social circle tends to include the characters on 'Seinfeld.'"
(Tuesday, June 17, 2003)

the man on the street (wsj)
"Mr. Packer, 39 years old, describes himself as a highway-maintenance worker for the Long Island town of Huntington, where he lives. It's also possible he is the world's most successful "man on the street," one of the endless parade of regular Joes that reporters love to use to decorate their stories. Both quotable and available, Mr. Packer has insinuated himself into hundreds of subjects... Last Monday, Mr. Packer was quoted in newspapers about a dozen times, once with his name spelled incorrectly, and was interviewed for television."
(Tuesday, June 17, 2003)

coffee chains compared (wsj)
the journal compares the coffee at four chains and one neighborhood place. matrix chart at the bottom.
(Tuesday, June 17, 2003)

matrix reloaded script, abridged

CARRIE-ANNE MOSS
Don't you realize that without any real goal, this scene is utterly without tension, regardless of how cool it is, stylistically?

LAURENCE FISHBURNE
This is a matrix film, there's no point to anything other than style.

yes, i know this is probably everywhere already. this page exists so my bookmarks can stay free of links like this one. (and like anybody reads this page anymore, anyway.)
(Tuesday, June 17, 2003)

no more mac msie (wsj)
"It makes more sense for Mac users to use Apple's Safari Web-browser, [Jessica Sommers, product manager for the software company's Macintosh Business Unit] said. Although still in beta testing, the browser has already gained attention for its speed and some of its features."

A no-brainer from a business perspective.
(Sunday, June 15, 2003)

consultants develop anti-buzzword software. oh, the irony (nyt)
Bullfighter, which Deloitte touts as "taking the bull out of business, is "a tool to help people talk plainly." Ironic, considering how consultants seem unable to speak clearly. Here's Deloitte's spokeswoman talking about Bullfighter: "We envision a center of excellence where our accelerated change agents can maximize their core competencies."

Whatever.
(Saturday, June 14, 2003)

hot in herre (k7 realvideo stream)
the amazing marionette video for tiga's cover of the nelly song.

more info from designinmotion
(Friday, June 13, 2003)

route 666 changed, to route 491 (nyt)
"Whatever the validity of the fears, Route 666 is no more. On May 31, it was changed to 491. It will take up to a year, and untold sums, for the three states to change their signs and maps to reflect the sanitized moniker, and the cowboys and Indians who live along the unassuming road will probably keep calling it Triple Six long afterward. But people who might have feared to make the trek from, say, Yellow Jacket, Colo., to Eastland, Utah, because of the number of the highway that links the two can now hit the road without trepidation.

"Of course, maybe there wasn't all that much to worry about in the first place."
(Friday, June 13, 2003)

behind the scenes of YES and YankeesNets (wsj)
after reading this and the latest batch of weirdness from 'the boss', i can't imagine anyone would want to work in the yankees organization. at least in the front office. how did george costanza manage to do it? i forgot.
(Thursday, June 12, 2003)

michael graves, now in a wheelchair (nyt)
"Paralyzed from the waist down as a result of a recent spinal cord infection, Mr. Graves, the agile architect and designer, has spent the last 10 weeks at the Kessler Institute, relearning how to live and work, and revising his notions of day-to-day functionality."

This is pretty sad in a lot of ways. Though Graves sounds like he's in pretty good spirits, and wanting to continue working. Hopefully he'll get a commission for a rehab facility like the one he's been staying at; he could make a lot of improvements, based on his recent experience.

"'Everyone around here asks me if I'm going to design a wheelchair,' [Graves] said, 'but what about this stupid room?' His list of design abominations is long: the wheelchair arms are too high to slide under the sink; the shelves are so deep he cannot get at anything toward the back. There are only two drawers within his reach. The window blinds are too high and on the wrong side. Ms. Howard turned a strip of gauze into a rope so he can reach the light over his bed. Each night, he has to make a list of things to be retrieved, windows to be operated, drawers to be closed before the last visitor leaves for the night.

"'These are simple things,' he said. 'I'm not even talking about how ugly it is.'"
(Thursday, June 12, 2003)

to bolt or not to bolt? (wsj)
"Whether to bolt or not is a smoldering question in rock climbing these days as the sport comes to grips with growing popularity. Once the domain of a scruffy few who embraced an ethic of self-reliance, conservationism and risk, rock climbing is being overrun by a new generation less connected to its daring past. The result: a culture clash on the rocks."

Personally, I think the idea of drilling holes into rocks and putting bolts into them is unnecessarily intrusive. It's a little like the guided tours of Mount Everest: some things are supposed to be difficult. How lazy can we get?
(Wednesday, June 11, 2003)

how detroit blows selling cars (wsj)
"Mr. Schroer argues that successful marketing in the car business rests on 'Three R's, Reliability, Resale and Residuals,' with the last referring to the estimates of a vehicle's value at the end of a lease. The higher the scores in those three measures, the more likely it is that a car will sell on its merits at something like full price. Detroit is stomping on all three of these values."
(Tuesday, June 10, 2003)

jetblue expanding (wsj)
JetBlue is buying 200 new Embraer regional jets, which "could vault the carrier's total fleet from 42 jets today to 290 by 2011."

"The surprise announcement shows that JetBlue isn't a slave to the strategy of low-fare king Southwest Airlines, which has famously hewed to a single type of plane for three decades. The move by the New York-based start-up also could change the economics of short-hop flying by putting pressure on the commuter affiliates of the major airlines, which now serve many of the smaller routes from the big airlines' hubs with relatively high costs."

This is good news all the way around, though the Street disagrees with me. JBLU's down almost $2 at this writing.
(Tuesday, June 10, 2003)

biggerhand returns
mike's posting again. yay.
(Tuesday, June 10, 2003)

3-year old endorses reebok (slate)
"Reebok had the most interesting response to [Nike]'s teen fixation: a new marketing campaign built around Mark Walker, who may or may not be 'the future of basketball.' Mark Walker is 3 years old."
(Tuesday, June 10, 2003)

so much for the freelance economy (wired news)
"The trend suggests that predictions of an economy run by freelancers -- such as those made by Daniel Pink in his book Free Agent Nation, and by MIT's Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher in their 1998 paper, 'The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy' -- were shortsighted.

"In 2000, research firm EPIC/MRA of Lansing, Michigan, estimated that 41 percent of all Americans would be private contractors by 2010. But today, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that self-employment numbers have not grown at all over the past four years."
(Friday, June 6, 2003)

matrix-xp
what if the matrix ran on windows?
(Thursday, June 5, 2003)

dj101--geezer edition (new yorker)
"[Grandmaster] Lester and seventeen other members of his crew—the Krazy Klub, from Wantagh, Long Island—were gathered at the Scratch DJ Academy, the 'world’s only fully functioning DJ school with a copyrighted curriculum,' for a lesson in scratching records. They ranged in age from sixty-nine to eighty-six, and in hair color from dyed-red to white."
(Monday, June 2, 2003)

haute dogs (wsj)
A nineteen dollar hot dog? Jeez.
(Monday, June 2, 2003)