Daily View, 5/29 (Memorial Day)

Am on holiday today. Am in denial about work hideousness, though I have started my job hunt. Argh.

• Invisibility cloaks just may be possible...


• No, please NO! No camel toes in space!! The Asics space travel shoe


• I am a sucker but these are incredibly simple, use a k8-approved color scheme AND a trusty sans serif (what is that, Arial Rounded MT Bold?): Monday to Friday t-shirts


• PK at BibliOdyssey rocks, as always—this time for featuring the history of infectious disease.


• Murakami is sexy? Apparently, says Playboy's list of 25 sexiest novels.


• Kate Spade is outta control—she has a CD. Granted, it's not by sister-in-law of David Spade herself, but by some (probably fabricated) UK band called "Beaumont" (quotes hers). Why is this necessary??


• More crazy: trade beer for a Crumpler bag.


• Had the misfortune of seeing the DaVinci code. As the trusty Onion AV Club said, "It's destined to make a mint solely by catering to non-readers' curiosity about all the fuss... Howard's glossy version is designed to be taken only slightly more seriously than National Treasure." I had to laugh at that—I loathe Nicolas Cage and yet I enjoyed National Treasure for the big stupid elementary school civics ride of moviemaking disaster that it was. The DaVinci Code, however, failed to entertain on any level. Meanwhile, Gizmodo grumbles about why the GPS in the bar of soap is bollocks.


• Again, why??? The iPod Concerto table


• And again, call me a sucker but this is frickin' awesome (and would have made summer camp a bit more interesting): transparent canoe


• You can camp in Central Park... who knew?


• A nice little eco-disaster video for us all: Humans



• 
  Find your own pose! (I know... wtf??)



• Lestat the Musical is closing. I had no idea it existed in the first place, but the weird little kid deep inside me who went through a vampire phase (and—briefly, in the warped era that was the cusp of the 80s and early years of the 90s—admits to reading Anne Rice) is kind of sad to see it go.


• Um, track yourself online... These things creep me out. I'll just let the government keep doing it for me, thanks.


• If you're going to wear a band-aid, wear a cool band-aid.


• Hey, was the Movie Binge project tailor made for me, or what!?! I kinda sorta really want to do this, only I don't want to waste all that cash (even I have better things to do with $850 this summer).

Daily View, 5/17

• How gay is Superman? Plenty, apparently. I have to say my IGM is in total agreement with this assement of the "cryptohomosexual" references made in the poster. You think those details aren't deliberate? This is DESIGN, people!


• Ok, I'm into nutrition but not even I want plates that spout nutritional statistics at me. What kind of way is this to live, people?


• Personally, I can't wait to see the Williamsburgers and the Park Slopicans rumble. They all suck. Live in Manhattan, people.


• Kiva lets you donate to low-income entrepreneur in the developing world. Sadly, I immediately thought of my various friends who are struggling to maintain their businesses here in the developed world. Help make a difference, people.


• Dude, I wish they had mp3s of the Eurovision Song Contest. Any road that ABBA has walked is sacred. Embrace the cheese, people!


• Brilliant. I laughed aloud, and several times. How hard ass is Yul Brynner!?! I have never been motivated to watch the source film (how'd that happen, christian hippie parents??), but I wish 10 Things I Hate About Commandements were a real movie. And because when this brilliance is finished, you know you'll want it, here it is: Must Love Jaws. Er, people.


• I think if I were 80 I'd get a Do Not Resuscitate tattoo too. Actually, no I wouldn't, but I admire this woman for making the choice. I just can't help wonder if she'll regret it when she accidentally chokes on a chicken nugget or something and heaves towards her death realizing that she royally screwed herself with the body art. I dunno, people. I just dunno.


• My GOD. I think the Clerks 2 trailer is actually real. Rosario, what are you doing?!?! Of course I thought the first Clerks was great (don't get me started on that crap cartoon, though), but considering that Kevin Smith hasn't managed to make a decent film since things don't bode well. The beauty of Jay and Silent Bob was that they were given to us in small doses—oo much of them and it all goes to hell! Come on! Learn the lesson already, Kev! And stop working with Affleck. The people have had quite enough of him.

Daily View, 5/16

Putting the Daily back in Daily View...

• Why, Jodie? Why? Jodie quotes Eminem to a graduating class. I think some corner of the universe just collapsed.


• There is something to be said for the power of the old PBS programming from the 70s, considering that before I even revisited Eleven Twelve on YouTube I was already singing the song. Is children's programming still this effective? Though, truth be told, watch it now and it's a little less fascinating. It actually is kind of confusing. But the bottom line is we learned to count and got entertained in the process.


• Blog Boy (*g, may we never reach this point)


• This is not as cool as the Pigeon Lamp*, but still... it's a lit-up bird, and therefore I am happy.


• For real? People are making their own subway signs again... (read the comments!)


• I'm a dork. I dig these Han Solo & Greedo bookends. Mmmm, Han Solo...


• Feed the birds and get your artsiness on: make a statue of bread. Brilliant.


• Ok, is it me or does the Korean android look a little like a man in drag?


• I don't care if it's not the best movie in the world, I'll support Richard E. Grant doing almost anything (even the crap that was Jack & Sarah).


• Huh? Chocolate Rx??


• Meow is miau is miyav (lol, and bzzzz is universal): animal sounds from around the world.

Daily View, 5/15

Am looking for a new job. This is pretty damn liberating and has elevated my mood considerably. Perhaps that accounts for the new influx of activity on this recently dusty blog...

• Alligators are eating more people lately. Personally, I find all this very interesting. And of course, the action is in the Florida interior, the armpit of the universe—I was adopted into a family of Floridians, and whenever we'd go south for a visit there was the inevitable animal encounter. No one was ever eaten, despite the potentially disasterous combination of citified houseguests and gators underneath the cars parked in the driveways (they'd crawl up from the swamp at the end of the street): "Go out and move that log so we can get to the steakhouse," said one of my unsuspecting out-of-state uncles, etc. I guess in a way I'm fascinated by big predators because we no longer have to use our natural instincts to evade them—we look at them in zoos or hunt them to extinction and think that we're giants in the food chain. So really, how awful that people got eaten, but please, that's nature.


• Usually I would scoff at this sort of thing (twinkly tribal music makes me angry, not relaxed), but I had a good ten minutes of Deep Forest with Chill Radio earlier today and it took me back to a simpler, non-Republican time when environmentalists were hip and it was inevitable that a certain number of birthday and holiday gifts would be purchased from places like the Nature Company. Sigh.


• Ok, let's talk about Wes Anderson. I am started to OD on the Wilsons (Owen especially—blech), and Wes did not help his career by collaborating with the pompous ass hack Noah Baumbach (who further loses points by being married to the grating Jennifer Jason Leigh) on the interesting but ultimately doomed mess that was Zissou, but overall, I still have a soft spot for him. He's got a new Amex ad and is getting some press lately: Slate has both an entire article on the Amex ad itself and a separate article about Anderson as part of the slow-outputting gang of filmmakers known as the American Eccentrics (since when?). With Wes working on The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Spike Jonze on Where the Wild Things Are (not to mention Sophia finally getting off her ass with this Marie Antoinette thing), I'm looking forward to the lit-hip-eccentricity that is going to kick in soon—people like me become cool again for about ten minutes, then go back to being misunderstood by the majority. Always an adventure.


• I dig this solar lamp. I would totally use this.


• Dr. Katz is out on DVD! I used to love Dr. Katz... but of course, that was a different time. These days the Squigglevision might give me a migraine. The Voice blurb about Munich pretty much sums up my feelings about Munich, as well. Eric Bana is a meltingly delicious hottie, but not even I can take Spielberg's climactic shooting metaphor seriously. Is it wrong to want to know less about the Mossad and instead just want another big predator movie? Sigh.


• What a cool website about Washington Square Park... photos, personal stories and a bit of a slick interface and apparently, I'm hooked.


• Yesterday I was helping a friend house-hunt and the broker told us that it was clear to him that we were soulmates. This was a little uncomfortable, seeing as how 1) we've known each other since we were 10 and never been inclined towards a romantic effort and 2) the dude is married. I sang at his damn wedding. Anyway, the broker told him that he should "reconsider" his current choice of wife and take up with me. !! You gotta love how people just speak their minds to total strangers, even when they're wrong.


• "Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate." Poor Von Dutch. Poor all of us, really.

Daily View, 5/11

Heavy on the videos today... who knows.

• 10 character actors that should be in every movie. Not a bad list, actually. Points for Fichtner. Points off for Scott Caan though. Blech. No Caans. Ever.


• Well, the original 13 minute short version of Bottle Rocket is now online. I am still trying to find someone who can explain why this early Anderson-Wilson effort (and the feature it spawned) isn't a pile of crap. I loved Rushmore and the Royal Tenenbaums... hell, I even enjoyed the deeply flawed Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. But Bottle Rocket has never done a damn thing for me. Too much Wilson? Who can say.


• On to better videos—the One Man Evolution of Dance had me giggling throughout. Love that the running man and the lawnmover were worked in.


• The cardboard foldaway bed seems like a great idea... in theory... hmm...


• It has been revealed that John Lennon invented the iPod in 1968 after taking night classes in electronics (he called it the BeatleBox, although Yoko wanted to call it "iPod").


• The urban jungle: Tyger

Daily View, 5/10

• Black toilet paper for $15 a roll. Couldn't make this up if I tried.


• Apologies to my vegetarian reader, but I can't decide if I think these Food for Thought plates, which feature illustrations of the various ways animals are butchered for meat, are brilliant, disgusting, or brilliantly disgusting. They're interesting as info graphics and would certainly be a conversation piece... though I think I'd only use them to serve vegetarian cuisine. I dunno. Maybe I'm just warped.


• The David Blaine slideshow basically sums it all up. The idiocy, the anti-climax, the gross, etc. I love that NYU's graduation happened at Lincoln Center while Blaine was still in the bubble—someone ranted online how Blaine ruined their special day but I think it's hilarious. Suck it up, it's NYC.


• Even though my second adolescence is over and I don't really go out clubbing much anymore, I still think this local cab number club stamp is a great idea.


• Hahaha, go Vatican! A Vatican astronomer has denounced creationism. But what's a hoopy frood?


• Timbuk2 has a store... but not anywhere near me. Probably best, considering I'm addicted to their bags and would certainly overspend. Yes, yes, Timbuk2 is my new Patagonia.


• The Four Day Week is a great idea. Must attempt this. Hmm....


• And speaking of work, apparently these are all common annoying buzzwords (well, from 2002, though Signal vs. Noise featured it today). Thankfully I'm only occasionally guilty of saying COB. And they forgot "bootstrapping". Sigh. My boss throws that out all the time.


• Dig the concept of the Moriyama House, but I think I'd get pissed if I had to get up and go outside to walk to the bathroom in the wee small hours. Though hell, I used to do it at summer camp, and that involved sand dunes and biting insects, so maybe a few hurried steps down a nicely groomed Japanese garden path wouldn't be an issue.


• Come on, we all knew this would happen: Lucas to release the original Star Wars on DVD. Personally, I'm thrilled, and will totally be plunking down my duggets for these in the fall. I thought all the crap he added in was blasphemy, but I'm enough of a film geek to want to compare versions, so these are tailor-made for my nerd purposes.


• The incredibly annoying Brittany Murphy has somehow gotten her claws into Oakenfold and released Faster Kill Pussycat (note, will likely be a dead link soon, so download while you can). Murphy has been bleating about her musical talent for years, but has never stepped up and proven herself... unless you count some singing in the bathroom scene in the travesty of a film that was Little Black Book (one of the most painfully bad movies I've ever seen)... or wait, was it the less-of-a-travesty-but-only-because-Dakota-Fanning-was-acting-circles-around-Murphy Uptown Girls (I see that A Price Above Rubies was a fluke, Boaz)? Sigh. Yes, yes, we all know she really wanted to be Janis Joplin. Too bad she sucks. What is really pissing me off is that this Oakenfold single is starting to grow on me. I can only hope she decides to stop acting altogether and concentrate on her music.

Daily View, 5/08

Note: the abundance of movies titles in this post that begin with the word CAN'T was unintentional.

• Lions and people must learn to get along already. I'm all for it.


• If I were a boy, I'd be the geekiest, because I'd only go out in public wearing video game polos like these. And I liked that whole goggles trend a few years back, a la Seth Green in Can't Hardly Wait (ack, 1998!). So basically I'd be a total dork. I'm okay with that.


• When people do stuff like this murphy desk, why can't they ever get it right? Think I'm putting my computer on that thing, only to have it crash to the floor on a nightly basis? Sigh.


• As a former perfume pusher, I'm flabbergasted by this unifaith fragrance.


• Dan Smith is real? No way.


• This is the most gloriously gay thing I've ever seen in my life. My IGM is drunk with it's fabulousness: Can't Stop The Music


• This article about Mark Mothersbaugh seems about three years late. "Suddenly" he's everywhere?? He's been everywhere for a while now. Come on...


• Origami beer labels would give all us unfortunate twitchsters something to do with ourselves instead of pick the paper off the bottles, that's for sure. I do this totally unconsciously, and it's always mildly embarrassing, especially in situations that resemble dates. Sigh.


• I'm totally expecting to see the pet umbrella on the streets of Manhattan any day now. Now pets can put out the eyes of other pets, just like we get to do with our own species. Woo!


• Am intruiged by these Scott Westerfeld books, though I haven't read any of them. Uglies turning into pretties... isn't that what good drag is for?


• Random musing: I have very mixed feelings about Patrick Dempsey. Loved him in Can't Buy Me Love in the 80s, of course, but damn he's made some bad choices along the way (not even the combined forces of Dempsey's rooster-wielding college DJ, the generally underused Moira Kelly, and a hit Madonna single on the soundtrack could save that Joe Pesci/Brendan Fraser steampile about the Harvard Bum) and is reported to be something of an egotistical asshole (apparently he used his Ivy League education to make his costars on Mobsters feel inferior... haha, like it would really take that much to intimidate poor Richard Grieco...). After a mainstream hit with Sweet Home Alabama, now he's on Gray's Anatomy and his name pops up all over the place, prefaced by inane nicknames like "Dr. McHotness". Much more of this and I'll have to strike him from my watchlist entirely. Sigh.


• Sorry, random Patrick Dempsey item continues, in a way... I just recalled a (pretty awful) movie of his I saw long ago called Some Girls, which also starred a young and still ignored Jennifer Connelly. I bring this up because those girls had a room in their house at the end of the hall that was accessible via a hidden door within a painting of the famous unicorn tapestries. I always thought that was cool. Someday I've got to make enough money to build some sort of hidden door or secret passageway into my residence.


• What the hell is this??? As someone with an interest in dragons (which I rarely admit to and which manifests itself in other ways... ahem, T. Rexes), I am ashamed that this exists.


• I dig the new violent Jetta ads, but then I'm one of those people who never looks away from the screen in the theatres. Do they make me want to buy a Jetta? Not really. But, perversely, they do make me miss driving. I had a twinge of an urge to move back to the Midwest and buy a car. Sure, maybe a VW. Sigh.

Daily View, 5/03

• DIY Drive-In Movies


• Call me crazy, but I love these glow in the dark tattoos!! Though anyone making a living at espionage would be slightly compromised...


• I was once accused of only liking things that look like other things (?? I know, right?). But perhaps it's true—I dig these Livingstones. Besides, what a great idea for kids.


• Random rant: Why the hell are people referring to video podcasts as just plain podcasts??? Adidas is doing it, Fred Flare is doing it. Podcast=listening. Videocast/Video Poscast=seeing. Lumping everything into one category creates a whole new genre of tech-vaguery. Sheesh.


• A transparent toaster! I'm a sucker but this is cool...


• I have to say, this didn't quite live up to my expectations (though Han Solo shakes a mean ass): Starlords


• GameBoy Color Cufflinks! Blissful geek overdose!


• I would totally sit on this and plug right in: the rumble seat.


• A savant goes up in a helicopter for 45 minutes, then comes down and draws—completely from memory— this amazing map of Rome.


• Ghostbusters Map!!!


• WHY do I feel obligated to go down to Lincoln Center at some point this week and witness David Blaine in a bubble? Ah well, it's right next to my gym... might as well. Crazy.


• Make words out of cookies.