Day: August 28, 2009

Friday various

  • I haven’t yet been to Manhattan’s new High Line park, but now I see what I’ve been missing:

    Some guests at The Standard Hotel have stripped off to frolic naked in front of their rooms’ floor-to-ceiling windows, which are easily viewed from the newly-opened elevated High Line park.

    I particularly like how the hotel promises “to ‘remind guests of the transparency’ of the windows.” Who knew windows were transparent?!

  • In all the talk about saving Reading Rainbow, which is going off the air after 26 years, I’ve been sort of amazed that no one’s remarked on one simple thing: the show actually went off the air three years ago. At least, that’s when Burton quit, disappointed with the direction the show’s news owners wanted to take it. New episodes haven’t been made since 2006. It’s disappointing there isn’t money in anybody’s pockets to keep repeats on the air — it really was a terrific program — but it’s also a little disingenuous (or only half the story) to call this the show’s end.
  • If you’re really feeling nostalgic for PBS children’s programming, why not check out the original pitch for Sesame Street?

  • I didn’t find TinEye particularly useful myself, but I do kind of like the idea of a “reverse search engine.” [via]

  • And finally, Warren Ellis on the smallness of the future:

    I miss vast, mad underground bases as much as the next person, possibly more, because deep down I feel like I always should have been a James Bond villain – but I adore the fact that the Jet Propulsion Lab appears to control the Mars rovers from a Portakabin somewhere outside Pasadena. And there’s great appeal in the notion that today’s architecture students will be faced with problems involving not great stupid boondoggles like Olympic stadia that in six years’ time will be nothing more than receptacles for the foaming, incandescent urine of meths-drinking tramps, but instead will be asked for solutions to concepts like the intron depot. From rust-prone compression rings and precast concrete sections for a tumour of idiocy, to atomic-scale cathedral stations for organising the blood-borne trajectories of rot-proof buckytube bullet-trains. This is beautiful to me.

Random 10 8/28

Last week. This week:

  1. “Starman” by Dar Williams (orig. David Bowie), guessed by Occupant
    Let all the children boogie
  2. “Feathers in a Bag” by Hera
    She’s been waiting for a storm
  3. “My Before and After” by Cotton Mather
    Said the word for alone is “alone”
  4. “The Charging Sky” by Jenny Lewis (w/ the Watson Twins)
    And it’s a surefire bet I’m gonna die
  5. “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” by the Soggy Bottom Boys, guessed by Victor
    Maybe your friends think I’m just a stranger
  6. “Don’t Forget to Dance” by the Kinks, guessed by Occupant
    And all the young punks whistle at you
  7. “I’ve Loved Enough to Know” by Deana Carter
    I hear what you’re telling me but that don’t make it so
  8. “Beware of Darkness” by George Harrison, guessed by Kim
    And that is not what you are here for
  9. “Shake a Tail Feather” by the Five Du-Tones, guessed by Occupant
    Well I know that the rock and roll is not for shy
  10. “Atomic Dog” by George Clinton, guessed by Occupant
    Futuristic bow-wow

Last one for August. Good luck!