Overheard lawyers talking: “It’s easier to pass the bar if …”
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I’ve always liked cars. Never owned a great one, unless you count an ’85 Camry that ran forever with the fewest possible repairs. I did have a hand in my wife’s purchase of a ’92 Infiniti Q45a — a fabulous piece of work, sadly dulled by the maker in subsequent models. It was sadly repair-prone and finally croaked somewhere north of 200k miles, when the active suspension gave out. Still, for quite a few years it was an exceedingly pleasing car to drive.
These days my aging eyes and slower reflexes caution me against car fantasies that would be too pricey in any case. But I still harbor wishes for a car market not dominated by inefficient manufacturers of cookie-cutter vehicles, but rather populated by an infinite variety of designs that combine the best of invention, engineering, light manufacture and customer input on design — a value constellation rather than a value chain.
One such maker is Iconic Motors. The brightest star in its constellation is Claudio Ballard, an inventor whose obsession with automotive perfection is matched by his commitment to small, high-quality U.S. manufacturers. Together they’re producing the GTR:
Its a beautiful thing, and so hot it’s scary. It packs more than 800 horses in body that barely outweighs a Miata. It will rocket you past 200 miles per hour, and carve around curves on a suspension that’s as close to Formula One as you’ll find off a speedway.
They’re only producing a hundred of them in their first run. They are also interested in input as well as interest from fellow enthusiasts. This is the open source part of the story, and one of the big reasons I’m interested in it. (Besides having gotten to know Claudio over the past few months.) To get that ball rolling they’re hosting a reception at 7pm tomorrow night at the New York Auto Show. Wish I could be there, but I can’t.
They don’t have a link up yet, but will soon. I’ll add it here, soon as they do.
Got some nice pictures of the Cornwall Coast, while still ascending out of Heathrow en route to Washington and Boston.
The shot above is of Padstow Bay, with Trebetherick and the Polzeaths on the right, above Padstow and Daymer Bays. (The latter is the lower, or southern, one.)
Interesting to see how the surf hits the Polzeaths at full force. Some pretty big waves there. You can also see the corduroy surface of the ocean, as the waves advance from a swell coming in from the west.
Often as I fly over eastern Canada, I’ve somehow always missed Newfoundland. It has always been nighttime, or clouded under, or too far from the plane’s route. Well, not this last time. When I flew from London to Boston via Washington (LHR-IAD-BOS) on the first day of March, I could see on the plane’s map that we were headed straight over the southeastern corner Newfoundland — the Avalon Peninsula, where St. John’s lies next to the easternmost point on mainland North America. Then, as we approached, the plane veered slightly left, toward the south, and we missed St. John’s by fifty miles or more. But it was a clear day, so I got a few shots of St. John’s anyway, and then much better shots as we flew just south of the southern capes.
I got some nice shots of Trepassy Bay, Biscay Bay and St. Mary’s bay, all on the “Irish Loop” of Highway 10. The towns along and near the loop — Portugal Cove South, Trepassy, St. Shotts — are fishing villages more akin to settlements. So far I’ve found surprisingly little about them on the Web, most of which I’ve put into links in captions under some of the pictures. Maybe some of ya’ll can fill me in.
Friday’s NewsGang, with Dennis Haarsager, Stephen Hill (of Hearts of Space), host Steve Gillmor and yours truly, is up. It was long (1:25) but very good. Here’s the MP3.
The main topic was Dennis’ new job as iCEO of NPR. I was on a panel with Dennis just a few weeks ago. He’s a great guy, very sharp, extremely aware of the challenges, and much more.
He even seemed to agree with the ten prophesies and one fond wish that I presented during our panel. (That talk was a compression of this post here.) It won’t be easy for him, but I’m extremely encouraged with the prospects.
In my last post I quoted some Doors lyrics. Uncharacteristically, I did not do any linking.
I didn’t link to The Doors’ site because it’s full of Flash and other crap that is not only at stylistic variance from the spare and artful nature of The Doors’ work, but likely to either annoy you or crash something. (My Linux box can’t see or hear the Flash stuff, my Windows box wants to download all kinds of stuff and then fails with it anyway, and my Mac just flat-out crashes on it. I don’t recall any other site recently that actually brings down a computer. But that’s what The Doors site did in this case.)
I didn’t link to any lyrics pages because all of them, far as I can tell, bury what the reader wants — just the lyrics, please — inside walls of advertising. Go do a phrase/keyword search for “When the music’s over” and “doors”, on Google. Click on the top results and you’ll find that every one has a pop-up window, plus lots of other advertising jive. Of course, you can block those in your browser; but still, pop-up windows suck. They break the Web’s social contract, which says (among other things) that the publisher should not abuse the reader’s intentions. Nobody goes to a page saying “I want a pop-up window”.
These lyrics pages exist for a good (though bad) reason: most artists don’t publish their own lyrics. People want to see lyrics, however, so the advertising baiters publish the lyrics anyway. Copyright be damned.
So my advice to artists such as The Doors is to publish their own lyrics, in ways that respect the music and their own artistry — as well as the readers’ good will and good intentions.
And while they’re at it, quit making the sites so damn fancy and complicated. Quit burying text inside graphics (where the type can’t scale up and down). Make the pages into blogs that are live and written, rather than static and built. It’s cheaper, too.
I say this, by the way, as a fan of the Doors since the band was new. At one time or another I’ve bought every album, both in vinyl and CD form. I’d love it if the band (or whoever constitutes them now) would just give us a nice simple site that’s easy on readers and their browsers.
Yesterday we went to visit the De Cordova Museum in Concord Lincoln, where we were looking forward to seeing the museum’s iconic pink pig sculpture along with other exhibits in the museum and its Sculpture Park.
Rounding a curve on the road through the park heading into the museum, we were shocked and saddened to see that a tree from the center of a nearby grove had fallen squarely across the pig, smashing it right in the middle. No expert could have dropped the tree more squarely. It was amazing that, given 360 possible compass degrees that the tree might have fallen, it picked exactly this one.
Later we learned that the tree had fallen just that morning, no doubt because its rooting had been weakened by gound saturated with rain over the past few days.
Then this morning I was surprised to find no mention of the news in blog or the Boston Globe. So I just started uploading a bunch of pictures taken with my pocket camera. The lighting wasn’t good, but there are plenty of shots for anybody to use, should they like, up here at Flickr. If you’re a journalist of any kind, feel free to take and use them.
More about the pig. It is a work of Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades of Actual Size Artworks. Its title is Trojan Piggybank, and it is on loan from the artists. From the writeup two links back:
Originally exhibited in the 2004 Navy Pier Walk: The Chicago International Sculpture Exhibition, Trojan Piggybank comes to DeCordova Museum’s Sculpture Park with a playful warning from its collaborative team of artists, Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades, who caution, “Sometimes things are not what they appear to be.”
From a distance, the large pink wood piggybank appears friendly. A closer look reveals military camouflage colors painted around the snout, suggesting a recent wallow in filth, while imparting an additional and foreboding meaning. The artists intend this familiar military pattern to represent the greed associated with our ever-expanding military industrial complex. This visual stratagem is furthered by grates protecting Trojan Piggybank‘s eyes, and a hatch door on the underbelly hinting at hidden invaders inside. A large silver coin waits at the ready in the piggybank’s slot. As Simpson and Georgiades observe, “The pleasures of consumer culture are accompanied by less desirable social consequences. When we impose one way of life onto another, the bad goes along with the good. The playful piggybank has a hidden agenda.”
No wonder our first thought was that the tree across the pig was itself a sculpture, or an improvisation on the original.
Well, in a way it was, no?
Sorry I won’t be in Santa Barbara to see the premiere of the documentary Citizen McCaw this Friday. The film’s subject is Wendy McCaw and her “war” to keep her paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press, independent of everything but herself (as best I can put it this morning, anyway). There will be a DVD on sale pretty soon. Here’s the trailer. And here’s an FAQ.
The flight from Heathrow to Dulles took more than nine hours, which was long enough to watch parts of seven different movies three times. Since one of those movies was No Country for Old Men, none of the other movies stood a chance. By the time we arrived, I had become a student of the movie. I just hope it isn’t in my dreams tonight.
The central figure, Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, is a psycopathic killer who personifies death and chance in unequal measure. It’s a landmark performance. Every performance in the film is strong, but none of the characters stand out like Chigurh’s.
His motives? His quarry is money, but that’s just a point on a path. There is no doubt that he will get the money, and that people will die along the way. But death itself has no motive. It is merely inevitable. Like Anton Chigurh. The Terminator, the Alien, the guy DiNiro played in Cape Fear… all the relentless bad guys we’ve known… don’t compare easily with Chigurh. Because all the others could be, and were, defeated.
Death can’t be defeated. In Chigurh, it could only be wounded, because he is death in human form. But he is still death.
Which is on my mind more as I get older. The old men in the movie — Tommy Lee Jones and cohorts of his generation — are barely older than me, if they’re older at all.
Being older, if not yet “old”, requires increased acquaintance with the certainty that Your Time Will Come.
I plan to procrastinate. For some things that’s a helpful skill.
Meanwhile, a highly recommended movie.
I just discovered that Google Earth is also useful for astronomy. You go under View and click on Switch to Sky. Suddenly your screen is a planetarium. It’s not quite the equal yet of KStars, Starry Night or Carinasoft’s Voyager (the three programs I know best), but it’s not bad for a start, and with call-outs that integrate well with the Web.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, I’m wondering if there’s an easy one-click way to copy lat/lon from an x/y location on the Earth. Or to copy the geotag.
Another question… Is there an easy way to make Google Earth display the names of mountains and rivers? Seems the only way is by angling down with the tilt slider (the horizontal one above the compass tool), to an elevation barely above that of the mountain — and then using your mouse, keyboard, or that joysticky whatever-that-is in the middle of the compass, to fly like a plane toward the mountain’s crest, hoping that at some point the name of the mountain will appear in blue above it. Any of you geo-hackers know a better way? Hope there is one.
And one more… Is there a way to use normal, non-3D fonts?
Oh, and these questions don’t just apply to Google Earth.
My main purpose is to geotag pictures I put up here. No way to label them all, since there are around 18,000 of them. But I’d like to label a few, at least. Easily.