Chock-A-Blog

The most important meal of the day

2008-09-28T23:33:00.009-04:00

Here it is, served up English-style on Flickr.

And if you’re ever looking for lots and lots of Flickr thumbnails dished up all at once, try Comp Fight. It “uses Flickr's API to search the database of photos (including the option to do full-text search on titles and descriptions, and to limit searches to Creative Commons licensed works only) and then feeds back the results as live clickable thumbnails,” according to BoingBoing. “[T]he large quantities of search-result thumbnails per page makes this the ideal choice for playing photo-editor.”

A Muppetastic Comeback?

2008-09-07T19:28:00.014-04:00

The British newspaper The Telegraph writes:

The Jim Henson-created characters may be on their way back thanks to a new Disney Film. In the movie, written by...Jason Segel, the Muppets reunite to save their studio with one last variety show. Should the film go well, it opens up the possibility of a television programme, also written by 28-year-old Segel.

Variety elaborates on how the writer/actor lined up the gig.

In “[Forgetting] Sarah Marshall” Segel’s character writes a “Dracula” musical performed by puppets. Those cloth creatures were custom-made by the Henson puppeteers, and the experience emboldened Segel to pitch his concept for a Muppets movie when he was invited in for a general meeting with exec Kristin Burr. Segel got a deal in the room and enlisted [Nick] Stoller to co-write and direct the project.

Fingers are crossed this project gets done and done right. No word on when production might get underway or when the movie could hit theaters. In the meantime, watch Statler and Waldorf as they bring their balcony curmudgeonliness to the Internet: below, here and here.

UPDATE: The Hollywood Reporter says:

NBC is getting into the holiday spirit with “Letters to Santa -- A Muppets Christmas.” Whoopi Goldberg, “The Sopranos” alums Tony Sirico and Steve Schirripa, “Harry Potter” regular Richard Griffiths and Madison Pettis are set to star in the special alongside Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and the rest of the muppets gang. “Letters” is set on Christmas Eve when Kermit and company mistakenly avert three letters en route to Santa Claus, which triggers a race against time to bring a happy Christmas to the kids whose wishes were lost in the mail.

But why would Disney, which owns both ABC and the Muppets, sell this to NBC? Why, Bob Iger, why?

MUPPDATE: The New York Times on the planned comeback: “[T]his time the Muppets are getting the “Hannah Montana” treatment, being blasted into every pop-culture nook and cranny that the company owns or can dream up.” The Hannah Montana treatment? Uh-oh. Well, at least Statler & Waldorf are weighing in on the Presidential debates. Harrumph.

They’re related? (Vol. 1)

2008-08-31T18:51:00.004-04:00

Introducing a new, periodic featurette entitled: “They're related?” It’s a quick connect-the-dots to show how two or more public figures are related. For the inaugural posting, meet Alan Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell, husband and wife. She’s the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for NBC News (and survivor of a RNC balloon avalanche). He’s the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The two were married in 1997 by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Read their wedding announcement in The New York Times here. Buried at the end of the article are some interesting details about the usually taciturn Greenspan: He studied at the Juilliard School and plays the clarinet and saxophone.

Hamlet: The Facebook Newsfeed Edition

2008-08-17T20:19:00.011-04:00

Sarah Schmelling recently wrote a terribly clever and funny piece for McSweeney’s, condensing Shakespeare’s tragic story about the Prince of Denmark into a series of status updates, apps and group memberships.

How does “to be or not to be” fare? The existential question is reduced to: “Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.” Here’s how the whole thing opens:

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

- - - -

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something's rotten around here.

Hamlet became a fan of daggers.

Read the rest here. For more literal, and funny, takes on Facebook utilities, check out this video from The Idiots of Ants on BBC. For more rottenness in Denmark, there’s Hamlet 2.

Word on the street

2008-07-20T16:29:00.017-04:00

So Sesame Street is gearing up for its 39th season, which starts on August 11. (Who knew the show even had a season, right?) And from the looks of this trailer – who knew it had trailers? – it’s going to be a very clever, entertaining and fresh season. (This blogger’s optimism might just be a side effect of the detritus passing as “original” and margin-managed programming this summer.) According to its press kit – who knew it had a press kit? – this season will feature: Will Arnett, Feist, Jessica Alba, David Beckham, Heidi Klum, Brian Williams, Neil Patrick Harris, Sandra Oh, Jack Black and Jenny McCarthy.

Also lined up is a parody of NBC sitcom 30 Rock entitled: 30 Rocks. Its leading lady? A lemon named Liz Lemon. There’s a game-show spoof called: Are You Smarter Than an Egg Layer? (Its host looks a lot like this guy.) And beating the Disney Channel at its own game, there’s – wait for it, wait for it – Pre-School Musical. Rounding out the offering, the Children’s Television Workshop is debuting a redesigned sesamestreet.org on August 11 as well.

Also making the rounds is a musical number from the upcoming season. Leslie Feist reworks “1-2-3-4,” for the pre-school crowd. The Sesame Street version even pays homage to the choreography and the one, long camera take of the original video, directed by Patrick Daughters. (No sequined jumpsuit, though.) The lyrics might even be better than the original. “It’s one less than five and one more than three. Whoa-oa-oa. Counting to four. Whoa-oa-oa. Let’s cou-ount some more.”

Seeing all these chipper muppets twisting pop culture into something fun and useful, makes this blogger wonder if it’s time to bring back The Muppet Show in some shape or form. Probably not a full 22-episode season. Maybe just a 30-minute episode once or twice a month – to keep the content sharp and the concept special. The property is owned by Disney, which has plenty of broadcast and rebroadcast outlets – its namesake channel, ABC or even ABC Family. Think about it, Bob Iger. Just think about it.

Fun with inflation

2008-07-16T22:03:00.012-04:00

Artist Joshua Allen Harris turns plastic bags and subway ventilation into delightfully animated street art. New York magazine tracks down Harris in the well-executed video piece below. A cursory Internet search doesn't yield any gallery affiliation for Harris. (Are you paying attention, Marianne Boesky?) But work like this deserves a much bigger, er, platform.

And last month, Conan O'Brien got into the inflatable act, albeit for more commercial – and comedic – purposes. Supposedly, the owners of 30 Rockefeller Center won't put his name on the marquee. So he borrows a tactic from car dealers around the country.

And somewhere in France inflatable tentacles are emerging from a building, courtesy of Filthy Luker and Pedro Estrellas.

Tous les memes

2008-06-04T08:59:00.008-04:00

So Weezer packed their latest video with some of the Internet’s biggest memes. Making the greatest hits list are: Diet Coke & Mentos, the Numa Numa kid, Chris “Leave Britney Alone” Crocker, Dramatic Chipmunk, Will It Blend?, Chocolate Rain, the Evolution of Dance shoe-obsessed Kelly and even “All your bases are belong to us.” Matthew Cullen of Motion Theory directed this video equivalent of a stuffed burrito. And Weezer has posted some super-casual behind-the-scenes clips on its YouTube page.

UPDATE: In an oddly unsportsmanlike move, Weezer's official YouTube channel disabled the embed function for this video. Talk about a meta buzzkiller.

Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks. Kinda. Sorta.

2008-06-03T21:00:00.003-04:00

Today Starbucks launched free wireless at its coffeehouses. Like most things that are free, there’s a catch. Actually, there are several catches. First, you need to buy a Starbucks card with at least $5 on it and then register the card at this AT&T site. You need to use the card to buy something at least once a month. And your free wireless is capped at two consecutive hours per day. Get the full FAQ here.

This is a major change from the exceedingly annoying service operated by T-Mobile, which required $9.99 day passes, monthly plans or pre-paid cards (which never seemed to be available).

Surprisingly there hasn’t been any noticeable marketing behind this gesture of goodwill. Certainly, technical rollouts are prone to glitches. Perhaps SBUX is running the system in a nationwide beta before it goes public, not wanting to risk any ill will if there are any IT issues. But the coffee roaster did make a big deal back in March about its new Web site slash suggestion box: My Starbucks Idea. And free wireless had to be the most frequently suggested idea.

So why now? USA Today explains: “[T]he move is an attempt to entice its shrinking customer base — cutting back on pricey treats during the economic downturn — to return. Traffic and sales have been shrinking for months as founder Howard Schultz searches for a way to revive the brand.” Sure, the hoops (buying a pre-loaded card, registering online, using once a month) are a bit of a hassle, but the new wireless set-up is an improvement. Hopefully, in the near future Schultz & Co. can figure out how to make free, unlimited wireless pay for itself.

Teaching an old phone new tricks

2008-05-31T21:03:00.004-04:00

Let’s say you don’t have the latest smart phone and the data plan to go with it. And let’s say you don’t like calling 411 for phone numbers or locations. Just text a name and a ZIP code to Google at G-O-O-G-L (46645). In seconds, text messages will start hitting your phone with the phone number and address.

Text the name of a movie and a ZIP code, and showtimes as well as locations appear. Got a hankering for nearby sushi or pizza? Just type the kind of food and the ZIP. Of course, you have to pay for the text message. But it’s definitely less than the cost of directory assistance.

But that’s not all, people. Get weather reports by keying in the word “weather” and your city. Check flight arrivals and departures by typing in the word “flight” and the two-letter airline code and flight number. Type “stock” and the ticker symbol to get market quotes. Additional mobile functions include: currency conversions, sports scores, simple translations, calculators and even a dictionary. Now why is Google providing this nice app, for free? Are they collecting data? Are they still figuring out how to monetize SMS? Who knows? In the meantime, start answering questions with your phone.

UPDATE: David Pogue just wrote about a few more freebies that’ll make any cell phone smarter. Call ChaCha (800-2CHACHA), ask a question and you’ll get the answer in a text message. Dial 800-GOOG-411 and you get free directory assistance, connecting automatically. Jott is a 21st century dictaphone. After pre-registering, call 866-JOTT123 and leave a message. A transcription of your message lands in your phone’s inbox moments later. Reqall (888-9REQALL) works in a similar fashion.

London calling, Gotham answering

2008-05-30T22:03:00.005-04:00

There’s a new way for folks in New York City and London to communicate with each other, at least through June 15. “Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel has finally been completed. An extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope has been installed at both ends which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York.” Well, that’s what the official Web site says. And the whole set-up has a definite 19th century, Jules Verne, retrotech look to it.

In reality, the installation is the work of artist Paul St. George with able assists from fiber-optic cable and the übercreative production company Artichoke. The official Telectroscope site describes St. George’s m.o.: “His practice as an artist has always been concerned with questioning the relationship between the viewer and what is being viewed. His work is also often associated with different realities, spectacle and viewer participation.”

The New York Times elaborates further: “Mr. St. George hopes that people will use his device in surprising ways — to hold dance-offs, say, or propose marriage via placards. (The Telectroscope has no audio component ‘because I thought then people would just stand still and use it like a telephone,’ he said.)” His production partner Artichoke is the supertalented bunch of people who produced the Sultan’s Elephant spectacular on the streets of London two summers ago. Grants from the British government and private-sector sponsorships are footing most of the bill, which is running about $787,000. Viewings are free in Brooklyn. But in London, where everything is always more expensive, it costs £1.

An evening with Philip Glass

2008-04-28T08:02:00.010-04:00

Just an evening? Well, seven performances actually. The Metropolitan Opera is currently staging Glass’s opera Satyagraha, which depicts Mahatma Gandhi’s life in South Africa from 1893 to 1914. The title means “truth force” and describes Gandhi’s early efforts at non-violent resistance and civil disobedience that he would later use in India. Audio clips are a little tricky to track down, but a piano version of the finale plays here. And the Met has posted “Evening Song” here.

Like Glass’s other bio-opera, Einstein at the Beach, the narrative is incidental. And in this case, it’s actually passages from the Bhagavad Ghita – sung in Sanskrit. The production is a beautiful and surprising piece of theater filled with unexpected elements. A jail created in real time from packing tape, for example. Or a human assembly line functioning as a newspaper’s printing press.

The production is an import from the English National Opera and is directed Phelim McDermott with a big assist from designer Julian Crouch. Key to the whole production is talented troupe of performers from a group aptly called Improbable. On stage, they turned baskets into monsters and newspaper effigies into an out-of-touch elite. The New York Times provides a good look behind the scenes below.

The creative team explains their choice of media for props and scenery: “We decided we wanted to use very humble material in the making of the opera...Mostly what you'll see is baskets and newspaper and corrugated iron...We wanted to take the materials associated with poverty and turn them into something beautiful.”

Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times gives the production a generally favorable review. “Ultimately, despite its formulaic elements, “Satyagraha” emerges here as a work of nobility, seriousness, even purity.” The Guardian was more generous when reviewing the original production at the ENO last year.

Phelim McDermott's staging, undertaken in collaboration with the theatre company Improbable, is also a thing of wonder. The gods of the Hindu pantheon rub shoulders with ordinary humanity. Hope is born from deprivation as sheets of corrugated iron and vast quantities of newsprint are transformed into the symbols of a new order...[T]he whole thing serves as a monumental affirmation of human dignity at a time when many have begun to question its very existence - and for that, we must be infinitely grateful.

Glass describes the impetus for writing the opera in 1980 here. Meanwhile, a new documentary profiling the composer – Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts – is playing in New York and preparing to hit theaters in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington soon.

Badges of honor

2008-04-27T16:39:00.026-04:00

A thoroughly fun, new cartoon debuted on Nickelodeon this weekend – The Mighty B. Each episode follows the hyperactive adventures of Bessie Higginbottom, who is nine and three-quarters and an enthusiastic member of her Honeybee scout troop. Bessie’s m.o. is to earn every badge possible, thinking that’ll give her the power to become a superhero, the Mighty B. See video clips here.

If the show looks a little like SpongeBob Squarepants and Fairly Odd Parents, that’s because two of its three creators – Erik Wiese and Cynthia True, respectively – worked on those shows. The third co-creator is Amy Poehler, who also is the voice behind Bessie. Certainly, Bessie is reminiscent of Kaitlin, the reoccurring pre-teen character Poehler plays on Saturday Night Live. (“Rick! Rick! Rick! Watch this, Rick!”). But Poehler tells Entertainment Weekly, it goes back even further.

I’ve been doing that kind of kid character for a long time. I did that character at Upright Citizens Brigade before I came to SNL, the Brownie kid named Cassie McMadison. [Bessie] was an amalgamation of a lot of different voices and things that I had done. I really liked the idea of playing that kind of optimistic, super-intense, go-get-’em spirit combined with being a little bit of an outsider. I am really drawn to girls of that age in general, who believe they can be a waitress, scientist, actress, a dentist, a zookeeper...and who really aren’t boy-crazy.

Visually, the show is incredibly engaging. Set in San Francisco, the cartoon makes ample use of the city’s acute angles and steep streets and, to a certain extent, evokes the beautiful and sharply drawn children’s books by Miroslav Sasek. Straight out of the Haight, there’s even a resident hippie who calls to mind Captain Caveman. And Bessie’s dog and cohort, Happy, looks like he could be a grandpuppy of Hanna-Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound.

The show doesn’t reinvent the format; each episode is still two 15-minute stories. But the episodes are relevant to kids without being preachy. In “Sweet Sixteenth,” Bessie gets all worked up to ride the grown-up roller coaster – even readying a bucket in case there’s a “vomiting incident” – only to learn that she’s too short for the ride. Welcome to disappointment, kids. Of course, being a cartoon, she finds a loophole. In “Bee Afraid,” Bessie realizes during an overnight camping trip that she’s more afraid of being afraid than anything that’s actually worth being afraid about. (Does FDR get a co-writing credit?) Not to mention she makes smoothies for woodland creatures. There must be a badge for that, right?

Tweet spot

2008-04-25T20:52:00.006-04:00

This is a post about a cartoon. It’s not an editorial. (Just want to make that clear for any readers who love to twitter.) The cartoon is from Hugh MacLeod and his blog Gaping Void. Last year, he stopped twittering to draw more cartoons – on the back of business cards – and write more. But the news hit the blogosphere, and he got hundreds of e-mails about going cold twitter. So he picked the habit up again. Read his tweets here. MacLeod used to live in Manhattan, working as a copywriter. Now he lives Texas and uses the Web as a marketing tool for his clients, including a Saville Row tailor and a South African wine seller. And when he’s not twittering, he continues to blog. One of his most popular posts: How to be creative.

Getting out front with an Infront?

2008-04-08T21:39:00.018-04:00

Last week NBC announced a full year’s worth – 65 weeks actually – of programming at an event dubbed an “Infront.” Traditionally, NBC has unveiled its fall line-up in glitzy Upfront presentation at Radio City Music Hall during the same week in May when the other networks announce their programming. (CBS is usually at Carnegie Hall. ABC at Lincoln Center.)

So why the toned-down presentation? The writers’ strike basically kill e d the pilot season. And NBC is in last place.

But is a 12-month slate of programming really anything new? Not really. In the past few years, networks have been serving up new programming during the summer months. The operative word here is new, not quality. A quick look at the proposed summer schedule, and there’s more of the same: America’s Got Talent, Last Comic Standing, two hours of Dateline and some shows that seem like they escaped from the Discovery Channel (Shark Taggers and America’s Toughest Jobs).

However, the way the network pitched the schedule is interesting. NBC bills the 8 o’clock hour as family fare. “Blockbusters” are reserved for 9. (Full disclosure: NBC considers Deal or No Deal a blockbuster.) And at 10 are the dramas for grown-ups. (Noah Wyle’s coming back to ER for the final season.)
NBC caveated that it might still shuffle some specific shows, but said it would stick with certain genres for certain time periods, i.e. action-adventure on Wednesdays at 8. That certainly makes it easier swap out duds, and advertisers will like that.

What about the shows? There’s a spin-off from The Office in the works. To NBC’s credit, network co-chair Ben Silverman says, “We're only going to bring [the spinoff] to market if it's ready for market and up to the quality of the original.” The Office Executive Producer Greg Daniels will also be in charge of this one, so its in capable hands. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, blogger Televisionary suggests an advertiser-ready title and a location: That Was Easy and a Staples store.

The best drama on television, Friday Night Lights, will be back, in an unusual cost-sharing arrangement with DirecTV. The dish network gets first dibs on the episodes which will air four months later on NBC. The best sitcom on television, 30 Rock, will also be be back for a third season. The network ordered to series My Own Worst Enemy, headlining Christian Slater without even shooting a pilot. And far-too-often underutilized Molly Shannon will co-star in Kath & Kim with Selma Blair. Get Variety’s detailed wrap-up here.

Attention Zach Braff fan(s): Scrubs is not on NBC’s schedule. Says NBC’s Silverman, “I don't know where Scrubs is going. It's finished its run on NBC, though.” There’s a chance ABC might pick up the hospital laffer since it’s actually produced by ABC’s TV production arm, the former Touchstone Studios. As they say on 30 Rock, there’s probably a way to synergize backward overflow in that.

Post-it notes on the fridge

2008-03-31T20:16:00.026-04:00

In the opening lines of an article about new chat-room interfaces, New York Times reporter Brad Stone makes a very succinct comparison.

People visit each other’s MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator.

The “notes on the fridge” analogy is spot-on. Not so sure about the party part. Right now, it’s more like the afterparty. It’s where the mementos of real life – photos, video and even anecdotes – set up house.

But sometimes social-media spaces are more like board games. Some days it’s checkers. Other times it’s chess. A new conversation is akin to the opening move of a new game. A reply is a response to someone else’s move. And for anyone who plays Scrabulous, Facebook literally is a board game.

The main piece of news in Stone’s article is a new 3D chat application called Vivaty. It looks curiously like Second Life, but it’s a platform-agnostic app. And i t’s backed by some deep V.C. pockets. Whether or not it will bring some life to the aforementioned party, that’ll depend on its functionality and how users respond to it.

Honk, honk. Beep, beep.

2008-03-28T19:29:00.005-04:00

Pardon the noise. Just a little congratulatory horn tooting going on here. Friend of the blog, Supergeekery, said some very nice things about Chock-a-Blog in a recent post.

Supergeekery is a great source of news for all things digital. Ever wondered how to back up everything the right way with an external hard drive? How do you download a YouTube video? What’s the Web news from SXSW? What went down at the PSFK conference? Does anyone have a Kindle? How is YouTube influencing the election? Can you make a video go viral? Enquiring minds want to know. Be sure to check it all out at Supergeekery.

Follow the money

2008-03-11T21:45:00.003-04:00

The folks at the Huffington Post have come up with a terribly interesting – albeit slightly invasive – widget bringing a lot of financial transparency to this year’s Presidential election.

Dubbed FundRace 2008, it’s a mash-up of Federal Election Commission filings and Google maps. Curious about who in your neighborhood donated to whom? Want to know how much Republicans raised, compared to Democrats, in Beverly Hills 90210 or Manhattan’s tony 10022? Just enter an address or a ZIP code and connect the dots.

You can even search by last and first name, if you’re dying to know how much Jennifer Aniston donated to whom. (Let’s just say, yes, she can to the fullest extent allowable by law.) FundRace was originally created by the smart people at Eyebeam.

If it’s showtime, it’s Trajan.

2008-02-18T20:28:00.004-05:00

Go to the movies, and there’s usually one typeface getting more than its share of screentime. The folks at Goodiebag put the Trajan mania in perspective.
However, if this year’s crop of best picture nominees for an Oscar are any indication, the tide may be turning. Juno uses hand-drawn lettering that matches its animated title sequence. There Will Be Blood features a calligraphic font that, well, bleeds. The original theatrical poster for Michael Clayton uses Eurostile Bold Extended to spell out the title character’s name. Atonement goes retro with a typewritten font, a generously kerned, all-caps Prestige Elite. The folks at Linotype take a look at other movie fonts here.

It’s hularrefic!

2008-02-12T22:43:00.005-05:00

Some infomercials are funny and don't even know it. “Hawaii Chair while answering phones, using the computer, balancing books or filing paperwork.” How about while performing Lasik surgery? Even Ellen gets into the hot seat with this one.

What to expect when you’re expecting an end to the writers’ strike

2008-02-05T19:05:00.000-05:00

It’s only been three months, but it seems so much longer. Finally, an end to the writers’ strike appears imminent. (Even Cindy Adams has written about it, kids.) No word yet on what was the tipping point. Fatigue? The upcoming Oscars? The DGA settlement?

So what’s changed? Of course there’s a potential new deal, which may or may not resemble the package the Directors’ Guild ratified a few weeks ago. And The New York Times speculates writers may experience some grudges when they return to the set. In fact, several high-profile development deals (Joan of Arcadia producer Barbara Hall, Brothers & Sisters creator Jon Robin Baitz, among others) have already been axed, with studios citing force majeure.

When are existing shows coming back? Some ABC titles – Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty – expect to crank out scripts for four to five episodes which would then air in April and May. Newer shows, like Pushing Daisies, will likely send its writers back to the table but won’t have new shows on air until the fall. (Sigh.) The handful of multi-camera sitcoms on the air nowadays (Back to You, Two and Half Men and The Big Bang Theory) could be on the air sooner, thanks to shorter production schedules. Mindless reality programming will continue to be a staple until scripted content is available. And maybe even longer, as long as episodes of American Gladiators pull in twice as many viewers as Friday Night Lights. (Double sigh.)

CBS is bringing back living-room voyeurism this month with another edition of Big Brother. However, Black Rock execs are borrowing from premium-cable sibling Showtime for Dexter, which will make a sanitized debut on CBS on Sunday, February 17.

Daily comedy shows – The Daily Show, Colbert Report, Late Night with Conan O’Brien – have been trooping along admirably, mocking the fact that they’re officially writerless yet still churning out an entertaining product every night. Those shows should see an uptick in both laughs and general tenor once they’re reunited with their writers. And hopefully it’s not too late for an Andy Samberg digital short on Saturday Night Live about Chuck Norris’ support for Mike Huckabee. (Goodness knows we've been denied the comedic stylings of Kristen Wiig for too long, while off-the-air Amy Poehler has gone stir crazy.)

As far as the business of show business goes, the pilot season has changed forever. Traditionally, networks would sink millions of dollars into filming pilots that programming execs would use to determine their slate of shows for the fall. Only a handful of those shows ever saw the light of day. Expect more “backdoor” pilots spun off of existing programs, much the way Private Practice emerged from the, er, loins of Grey’s Anatomy. And get ready for pilots masquerading as TV movies. Cue the Knight Rider music. And expect just fewer pilots in general. The three-hour extravaganzas in April that unveil the fall schedules – the Upfronts – will change. Probably smaller and less puffy.

And last but not least, fingers are crossed and double crossed that we’ll still get a few more episodes of 30 Rock – “the best show on TV” according to NBC’s Co-Chairman of Entertainment Ben Silverman – this season.

Huckabee Grudge Match

2008-02-05T18:32:00.000-05:00

This blog isn’t typically a forum for antics reminiscent of the Three Stooges. There are, however, notable exceptions.

It’s a Macworld...

2008-01-18T08:03:00.000-05:00

...and we get to live in it. Apple unveiled the ultra-thin MacBook Air at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Tuesday. Watch the keynote address here. (Or read Engadget’s live play-by-play.) New York Times’ columnist and CNBC contributor David Pogue sums up the major announcements here.

1) A one-terabyte, wireless back-up drive called Time Capsule that sells for $500
2) New software for the iPhone that pinpoints your location using cell towers and wireless hotspots
3) Movie rentals from iTunes for $4; movies last 24 hours but can be started on one platform – such as a laptop – paused and then picked up on another – such as an iPhone
4) A 23% price drop to $230 on Apple TV and software enhancements
5) the three-pound, super-slim $1800 MacBook Air

“One of the most significant things in this MacBook Air was that they’re introducing a lot of gesture-based user interface,” says Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal.

“If you have a picture...you can do what they call pinching. You do it on the touch pad, not on the screen...That in some ways may end up being the biggest legacy,” Mossberg adds. ”All thin notebooks have compromises...It only has one way to get on the Internet – wirelessly. It doesn’t have an ethernet jack...Now that may be okay. Sometimes Apple moves ahead of the industry dropping features.”

The slenderella laptop won’t hit the stores for another two weeks. And Mossberg hasn’t taken the laptop for a test drive yet, so it’ll take a few weeks before he writes his first review. But the machine already has one grumbler. A hrrumph from Slate, natch. However, MacBook Air already has some third-party accessories, namely a vinyl laptop sleeve that looks just like an inter-office envelope.

Pogue further reports on the hypnotic charms of a Steve Jobs keynote here. (Sorry, the Grey Lady doesn’t do embedable video yet.) But somebody did catch Pogue’s, uh, cabaret act at Macworld, posted above. It’s one part Mark Russell, one part Roberta Flack and two parts Cupertino.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo wonders if design cues to future Apple products can b e fou nd in Braun electronics from the ’60s. In a side-by-side comparison of Apple and Braun products, Gizmodo proposes that past performance will predict future results. But one could also argue that Braun’s Dieter Rams and Apple’s Jonathan Ive just share a great eye for clean, simple design with a purpose, no matter the decade. However, everybody can get the signature Steve Jobs look here.

Splitsville for One Laptop Per Child & Intel

2008-01-05T14:22:00.000-05:00

So much for staying together for the sake of the children. The unusual collaboration between non-profit One Laptop Per Child and for-profit Intel has fallen apart. The “frail partnership...was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs,” according to The New York Times.

“They played another dirty trick in Peru,” OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte told The Times. “It’s a little bit like McDonald’s competing with the World Food Program.”

In Peru, where One Laptop has begun shipping the first 40,000 PCs of a 270,000 system order, Isabelle Lama, an Intel saleswoman, tried to persuade Peru’s vice minister of education...that the Intel Classmate PC was a better choice for his primary school students. Unfortunately for Intel, the vice minister is a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Negroponte...The education minister took notes on his contacts with the Intel saleswoman and sent them to One Laptop officials... Until Intel surprised him by quitting on Thursday, Mr. Negroponte said he had still held out some hope that the relationship could be saved. The Intel XO was supposed to be introduced next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in keynote speeches to be made by Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Otellini, but the prototype will now be set aside.

Intel told the Wall Street Journal it was breaking up with OLPC and pulling its representative from the OLPC board. “We've reached a philosophical impasse with OLPC,” said an Intel spokesman. Intel favors offering many solutions to developing countries, not just the OLPC laptop, according to the spokesman. Intel markets a competitive product called the Classmate.

Negroponte remains optimistic that OLPC can sell two to thre million PCs this year. In its recent holiday promotion, the foundation raised $35 million and sold 167,000 units. But for Negroponte sometimes geography outranks the numbers. “If I can sell 1.5 million computers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, I will feel a lot better than other sales we might make.”

Meanwhile over at CNET, Tom Krazit offers up a “teach a man to fish” approach. “Perhaps the best way to help developing countries get in on the technology revolution is to teach them how to design--not merely assemble--their own products, rather than coming to them from lofty perches in Cambridge and Santa Clara saying, ‘Don't worry, we know best.’”

A new museum for the New Museum

2007-12-15T17:16:00.000-05:00

“[T]he New Museum of Contemporary Art, on the Bowery at Prince Street on the Lower East Side, is the kind of building that renews your faith in New York as a place where culture is lived, not just bought and sold,” writes Nicolai Ouroussoff in The New York Times. The (recently renewed) critic points out a few architectural highlights in an interactive piece here.

The architects behind the space are Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA. “The Bowery was very gritty when we first visited it,” the architects explain. “We were a bit shocked, but we were also impressed that a contemporary art museum wanted to be there...The New Museum is a combination of elegant and urban. We were determined to make a building that felt like that.”

Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker hearts the building, too – for the structure and how it relates to its location. “Sejima and Nishizawa have designed a building that is just right for this moment of the Bowery’s existence. It is a pile of six boxes, stacked unevenly, like a child’s blocks. Sometimes the blocks mount up in a pattern of setbacks like that of a traditional New York building; sometimes they jut out over open space in a way that suggests the architects had something more radical in mind. The building is original, but doesn’t strain to reinvent the idea of a museum.”

For this blogger, one of the most striking features was the glass curtainwall at the street level. It allows the sidewalk to extend into the museum, and outside foot traffic is visible even all the way back in the rear gallery, near the café. The narrow staircase that connects the third and fourth floors is an intriguing passageway between galleries, and even affords room for a confessional-like exhibition space. And of course the building’s stacked-box silhouette lends itself to becoming an icon, like Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling ramp for the Guggenheim. In fact, advertising created by Droga5 for the New Museum already uses the New Museum’s distinctive profile.

UPDATE: Nishizawa and Sejima give The Japan Times an interview here. They talk about how their partnership started – at first he (Nishizawa) was working for her (Sejima). And they elaborate on how the building got its distinctive shape. “First, with a plot of land as small as that 740 sq. meters, there was no alternative but to stack the galleries on top of each other. But when you put galleries on top of each other, you end up with a high-rise building, right? ...[A]ll the floors end up the same and...the building ends up looking more like an office tower than a museum. So we decided that each floor needed to look different from the others, and to achieve that we needed to vary their sizes,” says Nishizawa.

Konichiwa, Muji

2007-11-17T14:03:00.000-05:00

Japanese retailer Muji opened its first U.S. store yesterday, bringing its practical yet well-designed line of housewares, stationery and clothing to New York City. The first store is in SoHo on Broadway, just a few blocks away from another Japanese retailer, Uniqlo. A second Muji store reportedly opens next month in the office tower Renzo Piano designed for the New York Times. Gothamist and Racked weigh in with their takes on – and pics of – the downtown outpost.

Muji’s products are free of logos; the company’s name is a shortened version of “mujirushi ryohin” which translates as no-brand, quality goods. Catering to a well-traveled, international crowd, the store has just about every size of vial for all your emollients, collapsable travel bags, slippers as well as shirts and socks made of recycled yarn. (It’s not as gross as it sounds. They’re made from scraps.)

Prices on dishes, kitchen utensils and paper goods were reasonable while clothing seemed more expensive than what one would expect. (Perhaps a result of the w e ak dollar?) One curious item: a pair of men’s corduroy pants that seemed perfectly normal, except around the waist. Where beltloops would normally be, there was a large piece – about three inches tall – of forgiving elastic, like you’d find in a pair of pregnancy jeans. The price for these “Thanksgiving Dinner” pants? $89.50. (Write your own MasterCard “priceless” punchline in the comment section.) They’re probably just some comfortable pants for a long-haul flight.

Philanthropnology

2007-11-14T08:02:00.000-05:00

Last year, this blog covered the expected specs for the XO computer developed by the One Laptop Per Child foundation. Well, the price has gone up a little, and it's not solely for export anymore. This week the XO hit the U.S. and Canadian markets in a special give-one-get-one offer that runs through November 26.

“For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution,” according to OLPC's web site. And for the laptop you keep, T-Mobile is providing free wi-fi service at its HotSpots for a year. Or, if you'd prefer to just make a donation, $200 will pay for one laptop.

Check out Leslie Stahl's excellent 60 Minutes interview with OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte and visits to children using the laptop here. (Sorry, there's pre-roll and CBS doesn't release embedable code. But the piece is good, so hang in there.) Masi Oka of Heroes introduces the reverse B.O.G.O. offer in this commercial that's on the air now. Watch it here.

Best Inventions of 2007

2007-11-08T19:34:00.000-05:00

The Halloween candy isn't even stale yet, and Time has already published a “Best of 2007” list. The magazine ranks the best inventions of the past, er, current year, and at the top is the iPhone. (Yes, it's an obvious pick, but thankfully less quirky than last year's choice for Person o f the Year.) Staff writer Lev Grossman explains how the magazine makes its selects in this video.

Not so surprisingly, many of the innovations involve transportation and ways to make it more efficient and eco-friendly. The Venturi Electric car runs on sun and wind power, while MIT's electric City Car stacks up like luggage carts at the airport. A gas-steam hybrid engine, which makes use of the heat it generates, improves fuel economy 40%. A dual-mode vehicle from HJR Hokkaido R ailway Company runs on rails to the end of the line and then the tires take over. A bioethanol concept car from Sweden doesn't have doors but does have a 3-D dash.

French and Indian companies have teamed up to build a car that runs on compressed air. (The same Indian company is also launching a $2,500 car that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman pr e dict s will wreak even more havoc on infrastructure and the environment. So – just thinking aloud here – how about working on dropping the price of the compressed-air model?) Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, which uses composite materials to lighten its load, also made the list.

Elsewhere on the newsstand, I.D. magazine included the iPhone in its current New + Noteworthy issue. (Sorry, no link available yet.) Other highlights include: some fancy New Balance kicks designed by DDC; Catherine Hammerton's ginko-inspired wallpaper; and Sebastian Wrong's font clocks from Established & Sons. The magazine is also giving away 19 of their picks in a very classy sweepstakes.

Need an album? (Part 2)

2007-11-07T07:48:00.000-05:00

Some numbers are trickling in for Radiohead's pay-what-you-want experiment. According to the British version of PaidContent.org, just 38% of downloaders paid for the album. The other 62% took the album as a freebie, paying only the handling charge. PaidContent crunches the numbers further:

The average price paid was $6 (£2.88) [globally] but Americans were more generous, coughing up $8.05 (£3.87)...factor in the freeloaders, however, and it’s more like an average $2.26 (£1.08) on a worldwide basis and $3.23 (£1.55) from Americans. The most common amount offered was below $4 (£1.92), but 12 percent were willing to pay between $8 (£3.84) and $12 (£5.77), around the typical cost of an album from iTunes.

So how much did the group pull in? Well, the band hasn't released any official numbers yet. But Gigwise reports that just a few days after the release, Radiohead moved 1.2 million albums at an average of £4 each, for a total of £4.8 million.

Now, this is money earned with just basic overhead costs but without a label. How much did the band take in when Yorke & Co. were with EMI? CNET did some digging and spoke with an attorney who worked for A&M and has repped Sheryl Crow.

Chris Castle…offered an educated guess about what the British band was earning at the label…He guessed that when royalties were combined with money earned from publishing, Radiohead saw between $3 and $5 for every album sale…Castle also estimates that the band typically sold between 3 and 4 million units worldwide. That would mean Radiohead hauled in between $9 million and $20 million per album.

But Castle cautions that “it's way too early to try and assess whether Radiohead's experiment has failed or not.”

Monster Mashup

2007-11-01T19:35:00.000-04:00

At the corner of Smith and Pacific Streets in Brooklyn last night, anyone with a cell phone was a screenwriter, thanks to TXT of the Living Dead. It’s a condensed version of the zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, projected onto a blank wall with dialogue supplied via text messaging.

The brains behind the operation is Paul Notzold, who took about 500 frames from the thriller (relax, it’s in the public domain) and then created speech bubbles for about 150 of those frames. As Notzold explains on his web site, “Text messages sent in from participants show up in those frames in the order that they are received. The movie moves forward when a new message is received. The other frames are action frames that play through automatically until they hit a speech frame. Once all the speech frames have been filled the movie can then be viewed from beginning to end with the new audience generated dialogue.”

The project is part drive-in, part comic book, part Lichtenstein pop-art, part Mad Libs, part New Yorker caption contest and part flash mob. Although the project is uncensored, texters kept it relatively – and surprisingly – clean. There were the made-in-jest marriage proposals, variations on “all your bases are belong to us” and generic greetings (“Hi, Joe”). But there were also plenty of pop culture references (Geico, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah) out of sync with the narrative, upping the comic effect.

Gothamist.com gave the Halloween-night project its seal of approval. And Wired recently detailed a showing outside Paris. “Notzold's road kit is deceptively simple: a Mac, a projector (and something to stand it on), a camera and a generator. Helpers distribute a cell phone number on pieces of paper -- Notzold always gets a number for the country he is in, making it easy for locals to participate.” Below is footage from the event in France.

What’s next for Notzold and his SMS project? That bastion of inane banter: the 30-minute local news broadcast. Back to you, Bob.

What to expect when you’re expecting a writers’ strike

2007-10-28T16:45:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, a federal mediator joins the talks between the Writers’ Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers. Time's ticking, and it's not looking rosy. “Writers could walk out as early as Thursday if their union can't hammer out a new three-year employment contract with the studios to replace one that expires at midnight on Wednesday,”according to the Los Angeles Times.

So why is everyone at loggerheads? “This showdown between writers and producers is the result of a long-brewing fight over payment for online distribution of TV shows, movies, Webisodes and other new-media content,” explains Maureen Ryan in the Chicago Tribune. “In Hollywood, the WGA-AMPTP battle is widely regarded as a defining moment in the entertainment industry's digital coming-of-age...The guild wants jurisdiction over such works and it wants agreed-upon payment rates for new-media content; it wants an increase in the DVD compensation rate; and it wants a percentage of revenue derived from content sold over the Internet or delivered with advertising.”

And what would TV look like during a strike? Daily, late-night shows will be hit first. In primetime, “Long-running shows like NBC's ‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’ are likely to stay in original episodes longer because they are further ahead in production than new programs like ABC's ‘Pushing Daisies,’” writes Brooke Barnes in The New York Times.

Animated series like ''The Simpsons'' and ''Family Guy,'' completed up to a year in advance, are strike-proof for this season at least. Much more problematic are complicated serial dramas like ''Lost,'' which networks typically broadcast without repeats...Networks have been stockpiling reality material in the event of a strike. The CW network alone has five completed reality series ready to go: the returning shows ''America's Next Top Model,'' ''Beauty and the Geek'' and ''Pussycat Dolls Present,'' and the new entries ''Farmer Wants a Wife'' and ''Crowned,'' about beauty pageants.

ABC has two reality shows from Oprah lined up: “Oprah Winfrey's The Big Give” and “Your Money or Your Life.” CBS has ordered up episodes of game show “Million Dollar Password” with Regis Philbin. “Dateline” might even make a comeback on NBC. The Peacock has also floated the idea of running the British version of “The Office.” The networks could possibly dip into their cable offerings for rebroadcast on primetime. FX's “Damages” could air on Fox. Past episodes of USA's “Monk” or the new season of Bravo's “Project Runway” could air on NBC while ABC could replay Lifetime's “Army Wives” or even ABC Family's “Kyle XY” or “Greek.”

Taxi design, redux

2007-10-25T18:02:00.000-04:00

A previous post in this blog discussed the new logo gracing the sides of taxis all over New York City. Well, The New York Times has been moderating a very smart discussion about the merits and weaknesses of the logo in its City Room blog. And in the spirit of "if you don't like it, why don't you do it?" they've asked for alternative ideas from design professionals and readers.

Michael Bierut of Pentagram says, "that attempt to combine the NYC logo which is being used elsewhere with T in a circle (why?) and that (again) bluntly rounded off and oddly-spaced A-X-I just seems a little ham handed. Maybe it looked good on paper, but I don’t find it convincing on the side of a cab."

A graphics editor at The Times, Jonathan Corum, goes for the practical and suggests highlighting “the most important piece of information: the medallion number. Encouraging riders to remember (or at least notice) the number of their cab is a simple and cheap public safety measure, and would likely speed the return of lost property.”

For Oscar Bjarnson of Systm, X marks the spot. He borrows iconography from a treasure map for some of the typography. "I’d go with something simple. Maybe a typographic solution with some hint of the new NYC logo embedded."

Readers are weighing in, too. Scott Schwebel asks: What would the t-shirt look like? Well, it gets the Lady Liberty treatment. "New York City represents to the world all that is America and the dream of a better life...Why not try and have that message reinforced everyday on the street with one of our highest profile city experiences/icons?” says Schwebel. The huddled masses yearning to, er, move crosstown.

And Michael Condouris turns the checker pattern into a piece of type. “Make it easy to read, incorporate the checker pattern into the X for a little designiness, and you’ve got something fun, obvious and clear.”

And the partially anonymous reader Amanda P. succinctly incorporates into the logo the action of hailing a cab. Hmm. Perhaps NYC's Taxi & Limousine Commission should have held a contest for the new logo. Smart Design, which pro bono spearheaded the effort behind the current design, could have set up the parameters and shared some of their insight with potential contestants. And a contest might have even eliminated some of the suggested "tweaks" that probably came from the the Commission.

What happened to the jingle?

2007-10-10T08:32:00.000-04:00

When’s the last time you heard a jingle on a TV commercial? Recently it seems that jingles are relegated to low-budget spots for local mattress stores. Instead, the big advertisers are going for two kinds of music, depending on their budget. Option one: Real, existing rock/pop songs that use some borrowed interest to lend some cool to the products they're selling. Option two: very catchy tracks by emerging artists. On the airwaves right now is one of the the later, an Old Navy commercial with a track by unsigned artist Ingrid Michaelson. "If you are chilly, here, take my sweater..."

Michaelson's MySpace page was discovered by Secret Road Music, a "management company that specializes in finding little-known acts and placing their works in soundtracks for TV shows, commercials, movies and videogames," according to this story in The Wall Street Journal. As a result, Michaelson had three songs featured on Grey's Anatomy last season. But with success comes some angry fans. On her blog Michaelson writes, "it makes me a bit upset because it seems that some people love knowing about an indie artist, but as soon as they garner some attention, these people get mad! But you have to understand that this is how we make a living!"

Target's "Hello Good Buy" campaign relied on an existing hit and reworked the Beatles'classic "Hello Good-bye." But the retailer also uses new music to soundtrack its spots. Running now is a commercial with music from a group called the Icicles. Maybe you've had the la-ti-da refrain running through your head.

But wait, it doesn't seem the jingle is completely gone. Leave it to reality show producer Mark Burnett to resurrect it. CBS has ordered eight episodes – probably stockpiling for a WGA strike – of a new series tentatively titled "Jingle." According to Variety,

teams of players will be given weekly jingle-writing assignments -- coming up with, say, the next Oscar Mayer wiener song or a new pitch for Coke -- and will then have to perform them in front of a studio audience. Viewer votes will determine a weekly winner (whose ditty will end up in a real ad) and loser (who will go home)...The ultimate winner will likely get a large cash prize and a job at a major ad agency.

A job at an ad agency? In-sourcing music? Maybe the jingle's not dead yet.

Need an album? Take an album.

2007-10-03T13:48:00.000-04:00

Can an honor system work when it comes to business? Or art? Admission to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a suggested – not manadatory – $20. A few restaurants and cafés have experimented with a pay-what-you-wish plan. Freakonomist Stephen Dubner has examined the trend among musicians. For example, indie singer/songwriter Jane Siberry has been letting fans decide what's a fair price for her songs. (On average, people are paying her $1.18 per track, with 99 cents as the suggested price.) And on SongSlide, musicians’ songs are available for download on sliding scale, starting at 59 cents.

And now a really, really big band is doing the same thing. Downloads of Radiohead’s new album, "In Rainbows," go on sale on October 10 for whatever you want to pay.

The Wall Street Journal does the math in this piece. “Consider the economics of the average CD. It retails for about $16 and costs about $6.40 to manufacture, distribute and sell in a store, research outfit Almighty Institute of Music Retail says...The band pulled the ripcord on EMI, so it doesn't have to share profits or help pay the label's overhead. As a well-known band it's also able to take the knives out on marketing and promotion costs, cutting these by as much as two-thirds. Subtract these expenses and Radiohead may be able to distribute an album for as little as $3.40 a copy.”

CNET calls the deal a "watershed." And the folks at Boing Boing say, “it's such a slap in the record industry's face. An unsigned superband, treating loyal fans and customers like loyal fans and customers instead of thieves -- what a revolutionary concept.”

And are those loyal fans interested? Well, overwhelming demand caused the album's site to crash shortly after details were announced. Word is that Radiohead isn’t making any advance copies available for review, but Rolling Stone has posted some concert versions of the new tracks. Or listen to a classic here.

powered by ODEO

UPDATE: How much are fans paying so far? According to NME, about £5 or $10. And a poll by Idolator.com says about 40% plan to pay between $2 and $10 while 18% plan to pay more than $10.

Moving violation?

2007-09-30T19:32:00.000-04:00

You might have seen this on the side of taxis driving around the city: a new logo. While the pattern on the side of the trunk is a nice nod to checkered cabs of the past, you have to wonder what's going on with that type. (What's a t-axi? What's with the superbold heavy treatment on the NYC?) Admittedly, what used to be on the doors was a mishmash of stencils and decals. But you can't help but wonder if a really, really great opportunity was squandered. Just imagine the t-shirt sales. Even the old logo for the TV show Taxi had some style.

Designing with multiple partners is never easy. Like they say, a camel is a horse designed by committee. The boldfaced NYC logo comes from Wolff Olins, the firm that also designed the symbol for London's 2012 Olympic games. Smart Design led a team that included Antenna Design and Birsel + Seck to create the decals for the Taxi & Limousine Commission. To be fair, the project also included some changes inside the cab. Still one can't help but wonder what the logo would have looked like if Pentagram or Milton Glaser had gotten their hands on it. Unbeige weighs in with some criticism here.

And if you recently noticed some flowers on the tops of taxis, they're part of a projects called "Gardens in Transit" which runs through December. Kids from schools, youth programs and hospitals painted the stained-glass looking flowers on decals as a creative and/or therapeutic outlet.

Mr. Murdoch, tear down this wall.

2007-09-24T09:55:00.000-04:00

Will Rupert Murdoch remove the subscription firewall in front of most of the stories on the Wall Street Journal’s site? At a Goldman Sachs conference last week, the mogul explained that "it's certainly on the front burner to decide what to do there." Last year wsj.com pulled in about $50 million in subscriptions.

No decision has been made but a free site "looks like the way we are going," Murdoch said. "Would you lose $50 million in revenue? I don't think so…But you'd lose some tens of millions to start with. Then, if the site is good, I think you'd get much more than that back just in textual search. And I think you'd get not one million paying customers, but, around the world, you'd get 10 to 15 million regular daily hits on it, and that would be the most affluent, the most influential people in the world...And I think that could grow."

Just last week The New York Times dropped its TimesSelect subscription service for some of its online content. The feature produced less revenue than wsj.com, pulling in about $10 million annually, although The Times said that number met its expectations.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of nytimes.com. According to an article in the paper, “These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.” Get the story from Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and CNN. (Graphic courtesy of wsj.com.)

The Emmys on Fox

2007-09-19T10:15:00.001-04:00

Lost amid all the hullabaloo about the expletives and clumsy, censoring cutaways on Sunday’s Emmy telecast was Stewie & Brian’s salute to TV. And by salute, they mean a song about the “wide selection of trash” on the tube today.

Not surprisingly, Fox made it through unscathed. The section about that network was limited to a few lines about Sanjaya’s performance on American Idol. The other networks got a poke in the eye. Here’s the rundown of insults.

NBC
Scrubs “reminds us that a sitcom doesn’t have to make you laugh.”
“So I hear they’re bringing Seinfeld back to save a little face…And I hear Isaiah Washington is taking Kramer’s place.”

ABC
“They’re always brewing up some brand-new primetime swill…like the Geico cavemen.”
“…With its hits like Desperate Housewives continuing to thrive…And those women look sensational for being 65.”

CBS
“Today they’ve got some shows that are remarkably obscene. Like the show about the little boy who lives with Charlie Sheen.”

Probably the best bit of the song was for HBO. “The Sopranos is a show I’d recommend. Because you never know just how it’s gonna…” Then the audio drops out and they cut to black. Even James Gandolfini laughed at that one.

Interestingly, the song – with different lyrics – appeared on the Family Guy as a rant against the FCC. The same party that made Fox so jittery about all those four-letter words.

And what a nice surprise it was when 30 Rock won for best comedy. Finally, a decent speech from someone. Thank you, Tina Fey.

Pushing Daisies

2007-09-09T22:03:00.000-04:00

If you like TV, the new fall season is always a bit like Christmas morning. There are things you’ve been counting down the days for. And things that are just taking up space under the tree like gift-wrapped socks and underwear. Here’s to the new ABC/Warner Bros. show Pushing Daisies being a big, red, shiny new Schwinn.

This past Saturday, the New York Television Festival had a special sneak preview of the show, followed by even more special Q&A with the show’s creator/executive producer Bryan Fuller, director/executive producer Barry Sonnenfeld and one of the leads, Lee Pace. Fuller, who wrote for Heroes last year, explained that the idea came from a story arc he’d considered on another show he’d created: Dead Like Me.

The show delivers so well on so many levels. It’s part fairy tale, part science fiction, part romantic comedy, part criminal procedural. Sonnenfeld and his DP have dialed up the colors to a candy-coated goodness for a story that’s actually quite dark. And he has the cast move through Fuller's smart dialogue at a good clip (like a screwball comedy from the 30's.)

The pilot covers a lot of ground and sets up a unique framework exceptionally well. And Jim Dale – yes, he of the Harry Potter audiobooks – has a great turn as the show’s narrator. Ellen Greene – yes, she of the original Little Shop of Horrors – plays one half of the retired synchronized swimming act, the Darling Sisters. Swoosie Kurtz is the other half. Anna Friel & Lee Pace actually have chemistry. And much of it takes place in a bakery/café that's the shape of a pie. If all of this keeps this up, it looks like every Wednesday at 8 will be like a very good Christmas present. Like a Snoopy Snow Cone Machine.

Pushing Daisies makes its broadcast debut on ABC October 3. Watch it. TiVO it. DVR it.

Hello, Hulu

2007-08-30T09:31:00.000-04:00

The joint venture between NBC/Universal and News Corp. finally has a name: Hulu.

"Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we're building," says Jason Kilar, Hulu's CEO (formerly of Amazon). Not to mention it is a couple letters shorter than YouTube (YuTu?), sounds vaguely Hawaiian (hula) and a little Star Trekky (Sulu). And this report from Reuters explains that Hulu is the Chinese word for a kind of gourd.

Hulu's beta version isn't scheduled to launch until October, providing some on-demand traction – and revenue – for the networks' new season of shows. More on Hulu from BusinessWeek and Adweek. And get the Wired take on the other video newcomer Joost here .

UPDATE: Now NBC/Universal says it won't renew its contract with Apple to sell TV shows through the iTunes store. Is it one of Jeff Zucker's negotiation tactics or...ba buh bum...or will Hulu sell shows for NBC?

FURTHER UPDATE: Apple says "oh no you didn't" and decides it won't sell any new episodes of NBC shows currently for sale. So NBC teams up with Amazon.com to sell them through it Unbox platform. One problem. Downloads won't play on iPods. Say whuh? Fix it fast. Please.

Mahalo for searching

2007-08-29T12:58:00.001-04:00

If it's not an algorithm doing your search, what else is there? How about people. Mahalo bills itself as "human-powered search." It's from Webrepreneur Jason Calacanis and, according to this Fast Company article, is backed by "...$20 million in venture capital from a bevy of blue-chip investors--Sequoia Capital (original backer of Yahoo and Google); News Corp.; CBS; maverick Mark Cuban; and Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal..." Basically Mahalo is a series of hand-culled directories for popular search terms. If they haven't put together a page for your term yet, they politely reroute you to Google. Mahalo even accepts -- and pays for -- user-created directories via the Mahalo Greenhouse.

And just what does "Mahalo" mean? It's Hawaiian for thank you. The Hawaiian lexicon also gave the Web the word wiki, which means fast. (The tram at the Honolulu airport is called a wikiwiki.) Now only if someone would come up with the online equivalent of the pu-pu platter.

Light fantastic

2007-07-29T16:13:00.000-04:00

Let there be light. Some interesting things are going on with light nowadays. One technique uses flashlights and a long exposure to paint images, and it's currently being used by a few folks right now. There's an engaging, new commercial for Sprint on the air. There's the work by the Japanese performance group Pika Pika. And light illustrates the lyrics in a video by The Willowz.

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the Sprint commercial, which was directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris (of Little Miss Sunshine) and shot in L.A.'s MacArthur Park. Post house Brickyard explains what was tweaked, "The spot, shot entirely in-camera, was created from a series of still images linked together to achieve a live action effect...some compositing to bring the various layers of imagery together."

Below are several projects that Pika Pika put together in 2006 and the first couple months of 2007.

The Willowz video for "Jubilee," directed by Toben Seymour and released January 2007.

And of course, Picasso painted with light nearly 60 years ago. More images from a light graffitista in Germany here.

Meanwhile, Graffiti Research Lab brings together taggers, hackers, geeks and gawkers with open-source code and tips for light-projected graffiti on office buildings and bridges. Get the how-to here. Or just watch below.

In France, two VJs (known collectively as Uruk Videomachine) project images onto buildings and bring the architecture to life. Below is a clip from a performance they put together in Dijon. (It gets really good at 3:32 in.)

And back in Paris, Diesel used holograms in the runway show for its Spring/Summer 2008 line.

Who's driving a hybrid?

2007-07-28T19:20:00.000-04:00

A recent study conducted by Autobytel reports on who's buying hybrid cars. The statistics are surprising. The buyers aren't just young Blue State drivers on the two coasts. (And they're not all like Ed Begley, Jr. and Laurie David, either.)

40% are Republicans.
36% are Democrats.
12% are Independents, and another 12% consider themselves unaffiliated.

31% are in the Northeast.
16% call the West Coast home.
21% live in the Midwest.
20% are from the Southeast, while 12% are from the Southwest.

57% are over age 45.
16% are 65 or older.

48.5% don’t have a college degree.
24.5% have a college degree.
27% have a graduate degree.

52% have a household income of $60,000.
35% make less than $40,000 a year.

(Courtesy of the What's Offline column in The New York Times, which cites a Reader's Digest article that quotes from the Autobytel study linked above.) In related news, Toyota announced it's testing a hybrid that can be re-charged in a regular outlet and will run for much longer than previous plug-in engines. Meanwhile, Porsche is developing a hybrid version of its Cayenne SUV.

An era of Serra

2007-07-22T12:32:00.000-04:00

How do you move the 550 tons of steel that's part of the Richard Serra retrospective at the MoMA up and into the second story of a mid-town building? Randy Kennedy of The New York Times details the choreography to do just that in this article.

"Plate by curved plate, workers from Mr. [Joe] Vilardi’s Long Island company, Budco Enterprises, hoisted each piece from an empty lot on the museum’s west side to a makeshift two-story-high platform, slowly lowering it onto three humble hunks of metal with rollers, called skates. A forklift then nudged the plate, roller-skating it into the building to its next appointment, with the gantry. Dangling from the gantry’s cross beam were cables with two crablike steel claws that grabbed the plate and hoisted it into the air. The gantry then glided down the room with the plate, which appeared strangely weightless, like a velvety orange sail being wafted by a breeze."

As Michael Kimmelman exlains in his review, "That second floor at the Modern, by the way, is the show’s tour de force. A high, huge and like so much of this museum, totally unlovable space, it was conceived for housing Mr. Serra’s sculptures." Certainly Serra's pieces just can't be parked anywhere. Frank Gehry specifically designed a space large enough to hold Serra's sculptures in the Guggenheim in Bilbao. It took an old Nabisco factory -- now the Dia Beacon -- hold more of Serra's torqued ellipses. And the Gagosian Gallery, which played host to more spiral, toruses and spheres in 2001, has to be one of the largest gallery spaces in Manhattan.

A slightly less complicated installation in the garden of the MoMA is below.

The retrospective is, of course, incredible (despite what this guy at the Washington Post says.) The newest pieces continue to engage the visitors. Some people walk the perimeter as if they were in a labyrinth while others go straight to the center of the ellipses. Two works in particular, Band and Sequence, add serpentine elements and surprise to the bending of balance and perspective that Serra does so well.

Kwik-E-Marketing

2007-07-15T10:43:00.000-04:00

You've probably seen advertising for it on TV and online, but not in a commercial. To promote the Simpsons movie, 20th Century Fox has been partnering with companies like 7-Eleven and JetBlue. Mr. Burns hijacked the blog of JetBlue's David Neeleman for a few days this month. Twelve 7-11 stores have been converted to Kwik-E-Marts through the end of July. And in a clever reverse product placement, the stores sell Springfield-worthy products such as Buzz Cola, Krusty-O's cereal and Radioactive Man comics that are "flying off the shelves." One lucky fan ran into an incognito Matt Groening while visiting the Burbank store and got an autographed box of Krusty O's.

A ubiquitous, unnamed "source close to the movie's promotions" told Brandweek, "It wasn't really about lining up as many partners as possible, it was about having the right partners in the right context and the right message." It appears that the efforts for 7-Eleven were spearheaded by agency Tracy Locke with some serious input from Groening and his team at Gracie Films.

In addition, the movie studio paired with USA Today for a contest to see which Springfield would play host to the movie's premiere. (Springfield, Vermont gets the honors.) Fox also got on the YouTube bandwagon with this 9-second video.

And now Haaper's Bazaar has even gotten into the game. The August issue has the Simpson family and a cartoon version of Linda Evangelista in Paris wearing the latest from Versace, Chanel, Marc Jacobs and more. Get your cartoon couture here. The current issue of Vanity Fair asks Conan O'Brien what it was like to work on The Simpsons. More writers, the voices, other funny people and even Murdoch provide VF with the inside skinny and color commentary here.

Of course, you can create your own Simpsons avatar here. There will probably be a few more surprises before the movie opens on July 27. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Burger King has launched SimpsonizeMe.com while Leo Burnett says, "Hey, we pitched that to you!" in this NPR report (courtesy of Agency Spy).

Next big things?

2007-07-11T20:00:00.000-04:00

At the 54th annual Advertising Festival in Cannes, Leo Burnett and Contagious magazine ran a seminar called Wildfire 2007. Ninety-five percent of the seminar was highlighting a lot of things that have already received a lot of attention. (Club Penguin. JetBlue's story booth. The spoiled brat $9.99 g immick for Domino's Pizza.) However, in the last few minutes of their presentation, they listed a few things worth watching in the coming year. Life Cake is purporting itself to be a combination of YouTube, Wiki and Facebook that will launch soon. Stikfas is -- surprise -- a stick-figure toy. B lyk is an ad-supported free mobile service in Europe. Photosynth is from Microsoft. If you're looking for photos of an object or place, it will search multiple sources online. Then it collects those images and creates a 3-D model. Will these be the next big things? Check back in a year.

Dramatic chipmunk & friends

2007-07-08T20:19:00.000-04:00

Five perfect seconds. Does anyone know what the soundtrack is? Here's a link for the original clip. (The chipmunk was an animal segment on a Japanese TV show.) Now there's even a t-shirt and a Facebook application.

French D.J. combo Justice serves up some great CGI on t-shirts in this video to their catchy single. It seems even the Old Grey Lady has a bit of crush on them in this profile. (The NYT has moved the article behind a paid firewall. Click here for the same article republished in a Scottish newspaper.)

Some clever performance art with the iPhone. There's a company behind it that sells software for "electronic" magicians.

Time for Uniqlo

2007-06-27T18:57:00.000-04:00

Japanese retailer Uniqlo is running a contest for bloggers. If you post this clock of theirs, you might win a G-Shock watch. See what happens when you're polite and well-designed? Your advertising is free, and people might even buy a shirt.

Judd & Jerry

2007-06-03T17:57:00.000-04:00

This interview between a teenage Judd Apatow and a not-yet-famous Jerry Seinfeld is nothing short of prophetic. Seinfeld lays out his plan for success, while Apatow proves himself an astute student of comedy -- at an age when most kids still struggle to write a decent essay. The interview is one of the online features that accompany the profile on Apatow in a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine as part of the publicity for his new comedy Knocked Up. (Which by the way, recouped its production costs the opening weekend, pulling in nearly $30 million.) Meanwhile, Seinfeld plans a mini-comeback to NBC primetime via one-to-two minute shorts (tinytainment, in his words) that promote his upcoming animated feature Bee Movie. Seinfeld debuted two minisodes last month in front of advertisers at the network's upfront session. One was a fictionalized tour of the Dreamworks animation studios -- complete with overworked animators crashing on cots in the hallways. In a second minsode, a writers' assistant offers up coffee and script ideas to Jerry and his crew. Jerry is critical of the suggestions until he learns the assistant's last name is...Spielberg.

30 Rock Rocks

2007-04-29T07:20:00.000-04:00

The NBC sitcom 30 Rock just finished its 21-episode, first season on Thursday. Good news is that it'll be back for a second season. The troubling news is that it's been in third place and, sometimes, fourth -- behind CSI, Grey's Anatomy and (gasp) Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Along with The Office (yes, the American version), it's the best written comedy on TV right now. So how can you as a non-Nielsen household show 30 Rock some love? Watch the episodes for free (with limited commercial sponsorship) here. Or even better, buy episodes -- or the whole season -- at iTunes. (NBC will be watching both of those numbers.) If you haven't seen the show, the clip above does a great job of explaining the premise.

Some episodes that were real highlights this season include: Blind Date, Jack the Writer, Up All Night, Hard Ball, The Fighting Irish and Fireworks. And just a note on the music written by Jeff Richmond, who happens to be married to Tina Fey. It's the perfect acccompaniment for the show's shenanigans in and around Rockefeller Center. For fans of Kenneth the Page, here's a video interview with Jack McBrayer on The Sound of Young America. Oh, and keep your fingers crossed that Alec Baldwin comes back next season.

Nora & Conan

2007-04-28T07:47:00.000-04:00

You may have seen Nora, the piano-playing cat on YouTube. (One clip has had more than 3 million views.) Well, Nora made a "guest" appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien this week, as shown in the clip above. The sketch didn't go exactly as planned. Herding cats -- or getting them to play the piano -- is never easy, but it can be funny.

The Art Depot

2007-03-25T17:31:00.000-04:00

Last month The Armory Show set up its tent at Pier 94 on the west side of Manhattan for a fun, eclectic, unpretentious mix of artwork. One highlight (pictured at left) was Mierle Laderman Ukeles' reflective garbage truck slash "Social Mirror." She was an artist-in-residence for the New York City sanitation department in the 1980s. More looking-glass images here.

Glenn Kaino created an oversized chess board with metal hands as pieces. Its official title? "Learn to win or you will take losing for granted." His dealer? The Project. Doug Aitken (repped by Victoria Miro) used simple letter-shaped lightboxes to communicate his message: Disappear. Aitken is fresh off his Sleepwalkers project that appeared on walls of the MoMA. The exterior walls. For a slide show from The New York Times with their picks from The Armory Show go here. Get a critical wrap-up here.

Lightbox as magnifying glass

2007-03-08T21:18:00.000-05:00

Photographer Jeff Wall presents his visual narratives on jumbo, wall-mounted lightboxes. (The image above, Restoration, is nearly 47 feet by 17 feet.) A recent cover story in The New York Times Magazine on Wall detailed the genesis of his oversized, luminscent style. Like many good things, it began in Spain. "[T]he impression made on him by the Velázquez paintings in the Prado reverberated with the advertising light boxes that he encountered on the side of bus kiosks as he traveled, setting off an explosive artistic reaction when he got back to Vancouver. 'I saw the Velázquez, Goya, Titian — I loved it and wanted to be part of it somehow,' he told me. 'Every time the bus stopped, you were looking out the window, and there was a sign in a light box. I began to think, It’s luminous, Velázquez was luminous, I’ll try it. I thought, It has a certain vulgar quality, a rough quality, a slightly uncivilized air they brought to high painting.'" Forty of Wall's photos are at the MoMA through May 14. Particularly interesting is Wall's recreation of a Japanese woodblock print by Hokusai.

Double takes for U2

2007-01-20T10:25:00.000-05:00

One song. Two incredible videos. Director Jonas Odell (with skilled assistance from Nexus Produ ctions and FilmTecknarna) turns flat photographs into a three-dimensional journey through iconic landscapes reminiscent of the group's early album art. Watch Odell & Co.'s video for U2's "Window in the Skies" here.

Now for something completely different, Gary Kroepke and his crew at ad agency Modernista! (their exlamation point, not mine) team up with post-production and effects house The Mill. The result? Other musicians -- from Frank Sinatra to Jimi Hendrix to Nina Simone to Thom Yorke -- bring the song to life. Watch their video. (An ambitious blogger breaks it down scene by scene, guest star by guest star, here.)

What can you buy for $1.2 trillion?

2007-01-20T09:07:00.000-05:00

A "doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives...universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds...The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur," according to this piece by David Leonhardt in The New York Times. Leonhardt continues, "All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another: The war in Iraq." Links to the economic studies and number crunching here and here.

The Sound of (Gwen Stefani's) Music

2007-01-05T22:36:00.000-05:00

Ran across this video of the Gwen Stefani track "Wind It Up" and was struck with the number of references to "The Sound of Music." The song, produced by the Neptunes, opens with a sample from "The Lonely Goatherd" and even has some yodeling. Director Sophie Muller reinterprets Alpine skies, a nun's habit, the von Trapp estate, scary thunderstorms and playclothes made from drapes. Watch the original goatherd puppet show from the 1965 Robert Wise film here. This isn't Stefani's first foray into borrowing from musicals. Earlier, she teamed up with Eve to rework a "Fiddler on the Roof" song as "Rich Girl."

The $150 Laptop

2006-12-31T16:25:00.000-05:00

It's not coming to a store near you. But millions will be shipped next year to schoolchildren in developing countries, including Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Thailand and Libya. The computer, known as the XO, is the brainchild of the One Laptop per Child foundation, a spin-off of MIT Media Lab. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte outlines the program in this Q&A. It's Linux-based, and you won't find standard office software on it. "[C]hildren are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint...I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools." Read more about the specs here or take a video tour here.

Jon Stewart, unscripted

2006-12-02T21:17:00.000-05:00

On October 8, 2006, Jon Stewart stepped out from behind his desk on "The Daily Show" and spoke with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. In this audio clip of the conversation, Stewart talks about: the similarities between politics and show business; Fox News; and the perception that his show is a news source. (Stewart's interview starts at 12:05.) A few transcribed quotes are below.

On Washington vs. Hollywood: "We traffic in government and Hollywood, for the most part. And the similarities between the two cultures are so stunning that it's hard to imagine they are ever at odds with each other...They always used to say that politics is show business for ugly people, but I believe that show business is politics for the powerless."

Stewart on the "rudderless protoplasm" of news today: "In the media atmosphere, you either bring clarity or noise. And for the most part, the people that have overtaken the business have the biggest noisemakers...I think Fox knows what they're doing and CNN doesn't...They don't know why they exist...There's no editorial point of view...Fox News is actively pursuing something. They are actively pursuing what they feel is an editorial slant in the other media that they need to correct. So they believe that they are a corrective...a salve to whatever they thought is festering in the media culture. They're wrong...We are reactive in the same way, except we just think that what's wrong is that most of it is theater and very little is authentic. So, the reason that you have to be reactive is government and corporations work non-stop, incessantly, 24 hours a day to create noise. And if you're just reporting...what you're reporting is the smoke from the machine."

On his show as a news source: "People put up our show as a news show because they feel underserved by news shows. It says nothing about our show's news ability...We're not journalists. We have one guy with a TiVO...We're cranky people, like, that would sit in a bar and yell at the TV. Only somebody gave us a show. But the reason people keep presenting us in that manner is because they feel sad about what they're being served with."

In a related story, Ben Karlin, the executive producer and former head writer for Stewart's show, is stepping down. (No punchline to follow. But here's an NPR interview with Karlin from April 2006.)

Happy fifth birthday, iPod!

2006-10-29T20:19:00.000-05:00

On October 22, 2001 Apple introduced a pocket-sized, portable device that held 1,000 songs. In the original press release, Steve Jobs said, “With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.” What might have seemed like marketing hyperbole at the time has proven itself quite true. However, the beginning was bumpy. Apple's rip, mix, burn philosophy drew the ire of the music industry. So, to create a marketplace for legitimate digital downloads, Apple began to talk to record labels. (Some news organizations even mistakenly reported that Apple was buying Vivendi Universal's music division.) What the Cupertino-based company came up with was the iTunes Music Store. A revolution for both the computer and music industries. Over 60 million iPods have been sold over the past 5 years, and the latest incarnation is a matchbook-sized iPod shuffle. But what's next?

Big Yellow Taxi

2006-10-28T23:23:00.000-04:00

What if you hopped in a cab and ended up a contestant on a quiz show? That's the premise of the Discovery Channel's show, "Cash Cab." In the clip above, a contestant/passenger gets some help from a pedestrian. Volkswagen does their own version in a Rabbit (minus the cash) in the Gypsy Cab Project. But for those of us who have to pay for our cab rides in New York, fares have just doubled when stuck in traffic. Good news is that there are 11 different hybrid vehicles in the city's fleet, including a Lexus RX.

Underdog Chefs

2006-10-28T22:48:00.000-04:00

British food can be peculiar, insular, of questionable nutritional value and, at times, a disgrace. Bubble and squeak. Aspic. Marmite. The bacon butty. So why is it that Britain produces so many chefs who find an international following? Do they have more obstacles to overcome when they start out and therefore try harder? Do they purposely look for a platform outside their homeland because they know their countrymen's tastes? Below are a few of them who've created a wider appeal.

Jamie Oliver cooks with a conscience. His restaurant Fifteen employs young people whom other places wouldn't even think of hiring. Now, he's crusading for better school lunches, as seen in the promo above. And not everyone is happy about it. Gordon Ramsay's eponymous restaurant in London has three stars from Michelin and a price tag to match. And his eagerly anticipated new eatery across the Atlantic opens at the London NYC Hotel next month. On TV he dishes out some tough love to hapless chefs and restauranteurs on "Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares." Nigella Lawson remains the queen of comfort food that's still far more sophisticated than anything Paula Deen would whip up. While Tom Parker-Bowles isn't quite a household name yet, his mother Camilla is. The stepson of the future king of England cooks and has assembled recipes from around the world in his new book.

Reinventing the wheel. Or the rocking chair.

2006-09-23T19:40:00.000-04:00

Stumbled onto the 100% Design show in London, and a few pieces really jumped out as smart, inventive and entertaining. The picture is of a rocker called Ku-Dir-Ka by Lithuanian designer Paulius Vitkauskas. The floor model was bright green, but it's also available in black and red according to its manufacturer, Contraforma. Designer Anthony Dickens takes a whole new look at time with clocks that scroll in a linear fashion while others rotate like a carousel. Andrew Lang has created something that looks like a flower pot screwed to the wall. Instead, you lock your bike to it. No need for big bike racks. A design group called Asobi from Slovenia crushes all sense of scale with their XXL suggestion for public seating, the Isle Lounge. Dead Good brings cool Britannia to a mirror. The London office of ad agency Wieden & Kennedy even got in on the act, sponsoring a design contest for a new product that reprepresents them . It's very democratic. Vote here.

Five years later

2006-09-11T21:11:00.000-04:00

A tribute in light, through 2008 at least. A renewed effort to build a physical memorial. What if that morning had never happened? Rounding out a neighborhood by building up. And Santiago Calatrava's designs for the new transit hub.

Everybody's crazy

2006-09-09T09:36:00.000-04:00

Jody Rosen of Slate.com has a great piece on the large number of covers out there for the Gnarls Barkley track "Crazy." It seems to be the lingua franca on this summer's music circuit for groups like the Raconteurs, Of Montreal and the Kooks. Even better, Rosen unearths the Ennio Morricone track that's the basis for the song's main riff.

Six years of every day

2006-09-09T09:09:00.000-04:00

Photographer Noah Kalina has been taking one picture of himself every day for the past six years. And he's strung all the photos together into a video. Music by Carly Comando. Listen on her My Space here. Two more similar projects (by different photographers) are here and here. And what would a trend be without a spoof?