Art
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Hart Island: a movie we need, about zombies as heroes
As Halloween approaches (and death itself, for all of us, eventually), I find myself thinking, Do zombies always have to be bad? And, What if zombies were good? And, Hey, maybe good zombies are what we call ‘angels’. Then I find myself wondering where one would recruit armies of zombie angels (let’s call them “zangels”), besides your basic… Continue reading
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Now see these
40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World. In Twisted Sifter. My fave: That’s from Deadspin. Continue reading
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The Gospel According to ZZ Top
In mass this morning only two words the priest said during the homily stuck in my mind: it’s alright. Because they called ZZ Top to mind. Specifically, the song Legs. It begins, She’s got legs. She knows how to use them. Then the boys sing a bunch of other stuff over this repetitive throbbing riff that sounds like it’s… Continue reading
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Hot Death from Above
Driving from New York to Boston today, I heard “Summer ‘Heat Tourists’ Sweat With Smiles In Death Valley” — a four-minute feature on NPR, aired on the 100th anniversary of the hottest temperature ever recorded outdoors on Earth, which happened in Death Valley: 134° Fahrenheit, which is around 57° Celsius. The report says Death Valley… Continue reading
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Outlining vs. Formatting
Dave makes a profound distinction in his post this morning titled Outliners and Word Processors. For the first time I not only grok what I already knew about outlining, but why it’s so much better as a way to write than word processing ever was. The distinction is a bit hard to see because Word… Continue reading
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Journalism is outlining
[Updated 1 December to add the addendum below. If you’re new to this post, start here. If you’ve read it already, start down there.] In Journalism as service: Lessons from Sandy, Jeff Jarvis says, “After Sandy, what journalists provided was mostly articles when what I wanted was specifics that those articles only summarized. Don’t give… Continue reading
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Flying into New York at night
The conditions were what pilots call “severe clear” from Charlotte to New York on Thursday night. I made sure (paying $44 to USAirways) that I had a window seat on the left side, and had a perfect view through an imperfect window of nearly every city and town from Charlotte to New York. Rolling by… Continue reading
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Why we have Silicon Valley
My son remembers what I say better than I do. One example is this: I uttered it in some context while wheezing my way up a slope somewhere in the Great Blue Hill Reservation. Except it wasn’t there. Also I didn’t say that. Exactly. Or alone. He tells me it came up while we were… Continue reading
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Music you can’t sit to
Started listening to Bill Clark’s amazing oldies show on WATD/95.9 on the way back from dinner this evening, and continued on the Web after getting back. Talk about deep cuts. Some of those songs I hadn’t heard in 50 years, if ever. All good stuff, familiar or not. One tune, the name of which I… Continue reading
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Writing with Bitly
Markets are conversations, they say. So yesterday I had one with MRoth, head of product for Bitly, the company whose service changes the other day caused a roar of negative buzz, including some from me, here. Users were baffled by complexities where simplicities used to be. Roger Ebert lamented an “incomprehensible and catastrophic redesign” and explained in… Continue reading
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So long, and thanks to the bird
Independent commercial alternative rock radio in Boston is heading to the grave. The Boston Phoenix‘ WFNX has been sold to Clear Channel, which — says the press release — will expand its “footprint” in Boston. (Bambi vs. Godzilla comes to mind.) Boston Business Journal suggests the signal’s fate will be to carry country music or Spanish programming. But it doesn’t… Continue reading
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An AR treat
Enticed by Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald (aka @DutchCowboy) in this tweet, I fired up Layar (an AR — Augmented Reality — browser from the company by that name, which he co-founded), and aimed it at the cover of my new book. What followed is chronicled in this Flickr set. Start here, then follow the links at the… Continue reading
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Aerial map mashing
Thanks to Jeff Warren (also here) of GrassRootsMapping and Public Laboratory, I now know — and am highly turned on by — the possibilities of mapping in the wild. That is, mapping by the 99.xxx+% of us who are not in the mapping business, and are in the best multiple positions to map the world(s)… Continue reading
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Happy to have been there
That’s what many thought when they first saw the poster for Hassle House, in Durham, North Carolina, back in ’76 or so. As soon as any of the posters went up, they disappeared, becoming instant collectors’ items. At the time, all I wanted was to hire the cartoonist who did it, so he could… Continue reading
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What I’d like to say on the subway
When I was young, New York subways were dirty, noisy and with little risk of improvement. But, even if the maps weren’t readable (as with this 1972 example), there were lots of them. Now the subways are much nicer, on the whole, and being improved. But there is now a paucity of maps. In fact,… Continue reading
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No 2 SOPA
Today I’m in solidarity with Web publishers everywhere joining the fight against new laws that are bad for business — and everything else — on the Internet. I made my case in If you hate big government, fight SOPA. A vigorous dialog followed in the comments under that. Here’s the opening paragraph: Nobody who opposes… Continue reading
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Remembering Ray
Ray Simone, my good friend and long-time business partner, died this morning. He was 63 years old. He is survived by his wife Gillian, his daughter Christina, and many good friends for whom he remains an inspiration and a delight. Ray was one of the most creative people I have ever known. Though we originally… Continue reading
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Many years of now
“When I’m Sixty-Four” is 44 years old. I was 20 when it came out, in the summer of 1967, one among thirteen perfect tracks on The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. For all the years since, I’ve thought the song began, “When I get older, losing my head…” But yesterday, on the eve of actually… Continue reading