Category: General Pop Culture

Locksmith Sticker

locksmith

Locks have a fascinating history. As a kid I was on a mailing list for a locksmith school. It’s a good trade and I sort of wish I’d followed up on it. At the time, I was afraid of being under suspicion all the time. When a crime is committed, call the locksmith. Once you get involved in security, you are under surveillance.

A friend of mine has locked herself out of her apartment twice in the last six months and the locksmith made a fortune. Something like $450 a pop for a half hour of work. (Not endorsing this locksmith service. I just saw the sticker on my steps as is and took a photo.)

Spam Attack

One of my posts was getting spammed 50 times a day in the comments and there was nothing on it I could see that would warrant such an attack, not even a dirty innuendo or a cuss word. I changed the name of the post a bit and removed some of the links and tags but that didn’t stop it so I just deleted the post. Another post is still getting spammed three times a day with much dirtier stuff and I changed the title of the post radically so we’ll see if that works. I think the key is: don’t link to anything with dubious spam ads on it (non google sort of) because they get a linkback alert and they find you. I thought by now some superhero antispam hacker would’ve found them and shut them down somehow.

Anyway, I watched Miyazaki’s first major anime feature: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Check out the voiceover cast: Alison Lohman, Patrick Stewart, Uma Thurman, Chris Sarandon, Edward James Olmos, Emily Bauer, Shia LaBeouf, Mark Hamill. Hellz yeah. Great cartoon.

Spieling Around a Dry Fountain; Alice Tully Hall

dry fountain at Lincoln Center

At Lincoln Center yesterday, there was a graduation ceremony for Juilliard students. I found it odd they couldn’t turn the fountain on as part of the festivities — all those snapshots of parents and new graduates in their fine clothes and lint-free graduation gowns made lacklustre by some cost-cutting bureaucrat.

The refurbishing of Alice Tully Hall across the street is magnificently successful. Looking a little dangerous, right on the corner, a public bleacher with glass edges juts out of the sidewalk at a knife-like angle. Presumably, there will be pleasant jazz trios (avoiding hard bop and free jazz) performing at the base for lunchtime enjoyment. The roof that parallels over the outdoor bleacher now houses the new balcony area of the hall inside.

The glassed-in public lobby dovetails nicely with a Slavoj Zizek talk I heard recently. Zizek argues that new architecture for public performance spaces is a bonafide outreaching to different classes for dialogs in high-brow and low-brow culture. They have by necessity become these goofy institutional public/private spaces made special by good architects and well-meaning underwriters for the arts. Unfortunately, the café counter in this lobby only seems to be serving drinks and food directly before performances. (I could be mistaken.)

The hall itself is generally more woodsy than before and the acoustics are superior. I don’t like that the new seats lack a spring to make the seats raise by themselves when letting fellow patrons get to their own seats although the burgundy color works with the wood.

1918 Was 91 Years Ago

silo of band performing at south street seaport

An epidemiologist I know recommended reading up on the 1918 epidemic. While it is a lesson in underreaction, it’s also a lesson in overreaction. Egypt is killing pigs to stop it. In discussing whether it’s better to overreact or underreact, or react just perfectly, please be informed. Wingnuts who say there’s no such thing as overreaction are overreacting.

Update: A friend of a friend is quarantined with this flu and is expected to make a full recovery soon. It seems a bullet was dodged as it was pure happenstance that my immediate friend hadn’t seen the former in a couple weeks.

Terrible Magazine Selection

I don’t know who the manager of this Bank of America is, but he/she is not a go-getter. Do not trust this person to ever go the extra mile.

In Mad Men, the young Don is taught the symbol that tags a house with a “dishonest man.” I say everybody start tagging places the way the hobos do. Someone should invent a tagging system on the internet the way you can tag email as spam. Go for it if you think you can. We have tags and Digg and so on but we could use picture tags for business sites.

Playing the Markets with Fraction Man

Fraction Man Aims for the Fences

Like Duncan, I’m not an economist or a financial analyst but it is useful for people like us to think about these things in metaphors and he made a ton of sense today:

The entire financial system is practically collapsing and they’re [CNBC business pundits] lamenting the possibility of more regulation. I don’t think the sports/referee metaphor is perfect, but it’s probably good enough. People who prattle on about “the free market” are usually too stupid to have a clue how complicated and pervasive the “rules” had to be to to get a well-functioning modern market system: sophisticated concepts of contracts and enforcement, property rights, legal entities, proper accounting, bankruptcy, limited liability, etc… etc…, did not descend from the heavens but were, in fact, created.

Earlier, he likens what’s going on to a building fire:

It might have been the right thing to run down to the river with buckets to collect water to throw on the burning building, but it would have been much better to have better fire codes and a functioning fire department.

You can also infer the situations involving Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA here.

Finally, the sports metaphor linked to at TPM in the first quote goes like this:

…the markets operate like team sports — like say, a football game. Team sports don’t operate well without referees, and that’s exactly what’s happened under the Republicans.

They can blame Clinton all they want — the fact is, the Republicans under leadership of such brain trusts as Phil Gramm have methodically removed the referees from the games, and look what’s happened. One of the primary reasons investors shy away from putting money into third world countries is an ABSENCE OF REGULATION.

Honestly, the free-market whiners who bemoan regulation sound like the corporate welfare socialist pigs they are and I’m here to stuff some punk rock in their ears.