Archive for July, 2006

A Peek at IMDb’s New Face?

Monday, July 24th, 2006

A recent search on IMDb turned up a slightly different, more image-intensive look (click for full version):

Then, randomly enough, it was gone.

So maybe we’ll all be seeing a minor IMDb facelift soon enough, though if so I have one recommendation: make the thumbnails zoom when the pointer hovers over them. In the test I saw, they just seemed too small to distinguish…

On My Mind

Saturday, July 22nd, 2006

Here are some of the things blowing my mind this week:

  • “Night Ripper.” This album, which my cousin brought to my attention, is just an assault on the senses. As Pitchfork puts it, “The record’s pacing is astonishing– with more than 150 sample sources (all thanked in the liner notes), it ricochets from Top 40 hits to obscure gems and back again like a cool breeze.” Identifying what sources you can is a fun, audible version of that Motorola movie. Except much, much more difficult. (There’s still this bit in track 8 that’s driving me crazy.)
  • The Oil We Eat“, an old Harper’s article [via]. Sample line: “David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years.”
  • Chicago recycling. Or, more specifically, the appalling lack thereof. There’s a sidebar to that story, not online, that notes that Chicago garbage crews feature three people including a Teamsters driver who gets $29/hr and is not required to handle garbage. And surprise: they still work slower than smaller crews.
  • Tokyo trains. Now this really sounds too good to be true: “I just saw a travel program on Tokyo, Japan, and […] it said that the [bullet] trains are _so_ accurate on time, that if one is actually late, you can get a _note_ from the station for your boss, because otherwise they won’t believe you about the train delay.” (A subsequent comment agrees.) I want bullet trains!
  • Oh, and that Landis thing was pretty good too.

Update [21:50]: Oh, and this is definitely blowing my mind. On so many levels.

Ralph’s ‘A’ Team

Sunday, July 16th, 2006

Ralph Reed is loaded for bear, says NYT (emphasis added):

In addition to endorsements from former Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat who has aligned himself with the conservative Christian movement, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, a presidential hopeful eager to improve his connections to religious conservatives, Mr. Reed claims to have 6,000 volunteers on the ground, including more than 70 home-schooled children from 10 states.

I hope he mentions it in speeches: “My opponent has not even revealed how many home-schooled children volunteer for him! Fellow Georgians, this is an outrage!”

Isn’t That Sort of Implied?

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

From a church a few blocks from me:
church sign with message: 'subject of today's sermon: God'

What a refreshing change for the parishoners!

I love how everyone gets so serious about being the “second” or whatever. Although of course the banks really get out of hand…

(Also, I came back home from the Fourth — and the reunion — to discover the source of my “borrowed” wireless had apparently moved out at the end of the month. So now my Internet usage is severely curtailed until I get something working…)