Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs

By DAVID SEGAL
Published: September 18, 2010

IMAGINE you are a venture capitalist. One day a man comes to you and says, “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”

You don’t know what “the game layer” is, let alone whether it should be built atop the world. But he has a passionate speech about a business plan, conceived when he was a college freshman, that he says will change the planet — making it more entertaining, more engaging, and giving humans a new way to interact with businesses and one another.

If you give him $750,000, he says, you can have a stake in what he believes will be a $1-billion-a-year company.

Interested? Before you answer, consider that the man displays many of the symptoms of a person having what psychologists call a hypomanic episode. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — the occupation’s bible of mental disorders — these symptoms include grandiosity, an elevated and expansive mood, racing thoughts and little need for sleep. ...

Click the post's title to read the entire, interesting article at The New York Times.

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Guy Deutscher has published an interesting article in The New York Times, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?"

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think. ...

BUT, SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?

Let’s take genders again. ...

Clicking on the post's title will take you to the complete article at The New York Times.

Chinese missile could shift Pacific power balance

By ERIC TALMADGE, Associated Press Writer – Thu Aug 5, 5:43 pm ET

ABOARD THE USS GEORGE WASHINGTON – Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than supercarriers. Bristling with fighter jets that can reach deep into even landlocked trouble zones, America's virtually invincible carrier fleet has long enforced its dominance of the high seas.

China may soon put an end to that.

U.S. naval planners are scrambling to deal with what analysts say is a game-changing weapon being developed by China — an unprecedented carrier-killing missile called the Dong Feng 21D that could be launched from land with enough accuracy to penetrate the defenses of even the most advanced moving aircraft carrier at a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles).

... Beijing has grown increasingly vocal in its demands for the U.S. to stay away from the wide swaths of ocean — covering much of the Yellow, East and South China seas — where it claims exclusivity.

It strongly opposed plans to hold U.S.-South Korean war games in the Yellow Sea off the northeastern Chinese coast, saying the participation of the USS George Washington supercarrier, with its 1,092-foot (333-meter) flight deck and 6,250 personnel, would be a provocation because it put Beijing within striking range of U.S. F-18 warplanes.

The carrier instead took part in maneuvers held farther away in the Sea of Japan.

U.S. officials deny Chinese pressure kept it away, and say they will not be told by Beijing where they can operate.

"We reserve the right to exercise in international waters anywhere in the world," Rear Adm. Daniel Cloyd, who headed the U.S. side of the exercises, said aboard the carrier during the maneuvers, which ended last week. ...

... Questions remain over when — and if — China will perfect the technology; hitting a moving carrier is no mean feat, requiring state-of-the-art guidance systems, and some experts believe it will take China a decade or so to field a reliable threat. Others, however, say final tests of the missile could come in the next year or two. ...

---

A Chinese weather satellite — the FY-1C polar orbit satellite of the Fengyun series, at an altitude of 865 kilometres (537 mi), with a mass of 750 kg — was destroyed by a kinetic kill vehicle traveling with a speed of 8 km/s in the opposite direction. It was launched with a multistage solid-fuel missile from Xichang Satellite Launch Center or nearby.

Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine first reported the test. The report was confirmed on January 18, 2007 by a United States National Security Council spokesman. -- 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test

Web Photos That Reveal Secrets, Like Where You Live

By KATE MURPHY
Published: August 11, 2010

When Adam Savage, host of the popular science program “MythBusters,” posted a picture on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, he let his fans know much more than that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Embedded in the image was a geotag, a bit of data providing the longitude and latitude of where the photo was taken. Hence, he revealed exactly where he lived. And since the accompanying text was “Now it’s off to work,” potential thieves knew he would not be at home. ...

... The Web site ICanStalkU.com provides step-by-step instructions for disabling the photo geotagging function on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Palm devices. A person’s location is also revealed while using services like Foursquare and Gowalla as well as when posting to Twitter from a GPS-enabled mobile device, but the geographical data is not hidden as it is when posting photos. ...

... By downloading free browser plug-ins like the Exif Viewer for Firefox (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3905/) or Opanda IExif for Internet Explorer (opanda.com/en/iexif/), anyone can pinpoint the location where the photo was taken and create a Google map. Moreover, since multimedia sites like Twitter and YouTube have user-friendly application programming interfaces, or A.P.I.’s, someone with a little knowledge about writing computer code can create a program to search for geotagged photos in a systematic way. For example, they can search for those accompanied with text like “on vacation” or those taken in a specified neighborhood. ...

... Protecting your privacy is not just a matter of being aware and personally responsible, said Mr. Sommer, the researcher. A friend may take a geotagged photo at your house and post it. ...

Click the post's title to read the entire article at The New York Times.

Ringo at 70: 'I'm Not Hiding From It, You Know'

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: July 5, 2010

Ever since Ringo Starr vowed, on a well-known cover of Buck Owens’s hit “Act Naturally,” that he’d become “the biggest fool to ever hit the big time,” the renowned rock ’n’ roll drummer has done all right for himself. As a member of the Beatles and as a solo artist, Mr. Starr has sold more than a few records, won some Grammy Awards and even had a minor planet named for him. But on Wednesday Mr. Starr will reach a very special milestone: he turns 70 years old.

As you’d expect, he plans to mark the occasion with a little help from his friends, and anyone else he can round up. Finding himself in New York on the big day, he is celebrating with a private event in the morning at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square; Hard Rock International is honoring the day at locations around the world. (Details are at ringostarr.com.) ...

... Mr. Starr spoke recently with Dave Itzkoff about hitting the big seven-O and some other recent accomplishments. Here are excerpts from the conversation. ...

Q. How are you feeling about the number 70?

A. As far as I’m concerned, in my head, I’m 24. That’s just how it is. The number, yeah, it’s high. But I just felt I’ve got to celebrate it. I’m on my feet and I’m doing what I love to do, and I’m in a profession, as a musician, where we can go on for as long as we can go on. I’m not hiding from it, you know. ...

Q. You’re using the occasion of your birthday to give a message back to your fans.

A. Yes, I want to spread the word that at noon, wherever you are — in New York, in L.A., in Paris, in London — I just pray that you’ll put your fingers up and say, “Peace and love.” I did it two years ago, it was the first time, and I did it out of Chicago because I was on tour. This year, we’re playing Radio City, so we’re doing it in New York. In Japan there were little get-togethers and it went worldwide, so that was great

Q. Do you think we’ve got a good chance at getting peace and love this year?

A. I think the more we promote it, the more chance we have of getting it.

Click the photo for an enlargement. Click the post's title to read the entire NY Times article.

At Yahoo, Using Searches to Steer News Coverage

By Jeremy W. Peters
Published July 4, 2010

Welcome to the era of the algorithm as editor.

For as long as hot lead has been used to make metal type, the model for generating news has been top-down: editors determined what information was important and then shared it with the masses.

But with the advent of technology that allows media companies to identify what kind of content readers want, that model is becoming inverted.

The latest and perhaps broadest effort yet in democratizing the news is under way at Yahoo, which on Tuesday will introduce a news blog that will rely on search queries to help guide its reporting and writing on national affairs, politics and the media. ...

... Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to Yahoo’s news staff of two editors and six bloggers. ...

... The Yahoo model, which flies in the face of a centuries-old approach to disseminating the news, is certain to be viewed suspiciously by journalism purists. ...

Click the post's title to read the complete article at The NY Times.

Whom Goes There?

May 4, 2010
By Philip B. Corbett

Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style. (Some frequently asked questions are here.)

We try, but we still haven’t quite mastered the whole who/whom situation.

At the risk of stating the obvious yet again, “who” is used as the subject of a relative clause; “whom” is used for an object.

For many speakers and writers, the common mistake is using “who” as an object, when traditional usage calls for “whom”: “I told her who I had invited.” Since this colloquial use of “who” is common in speech, it tends to slip into writing as well.

But for us, it seems that the opposite error is just as common — using “whom” when “who” is correct. This often occurs when an intervening attribution phrase throws us off track, or when the relative pronoun follows a preposition. Some recent examples, with help from a careful reader: ...

Click the post's title to read all of NY Times' article.

Who should I give the keys to? To whom should I give the keys?

The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain

In "The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain." Tara Parker-Rope, begins,

After we hit 40, many of us begin to worry about our aging brains. Will we spend our middle years searching for car keys and forgetting names?

Parker-Rope then asks the book's author, Barbara Strach, several questions, among them:

Q. So what’s the bad news about the middle-aged brain?

Q. So what kinds of things does a middle-aged brain do better than a younger brain?

Q. What about activities like learning to play an instrument or learning a foreign language?

Q. What was the most surprising thing you learned about the middle-aged brain?

Click the post's title to read the entire NY Times article.

Twenty Most Visited Nat'l Monuments - Slideshow

Click the post's title to see the slideshow

Big Brother Is Watching!

From an Amazon.com webpage, "Most popular Kindle hightlights:"

(click to enlarge)

And from that webpage's What's this? link:

The Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad each provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights. Every month, Kindle customers highlight millions of book passages that are meaningful to them.

We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights.

The Most Highlighted of All Time passages have been highlighted by the most distinct customers. The Most Highlighted of All Time books are ranked based on a combination of number of highlighting customers and number of highlights. For Heavily Highlighted Recently passages and books the ranking is done in a similar fashion, but with a much greater emphasis on highlighting that was done recently over highlighting that was done a longer time ago.

Does the information gathered help Amazon sell more books? If so, how?

All the Picassos in the Cupboard

By Holland Carter
Published April 29, 2010

When in doubt, haul the Picassos out. There have already been several such haulings-out this year, and now comes the biggest of all, “Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a display of nearly every scrap in the Met’s scrappy Picasso collection: 34 paintings, 58 drawings, a dozen sculptures and ceramics, along with 200 of the museum’s 400 prints. ...

... In the long run the museum is doing a smart thing by going public with its deficiencies. The results make for a disappointing exhibition, but they also serve as an open call to collectors to pony up with gifts, fill in those blanks, be another Gertrude Stein. If the ploy works, maybe the next time the museum hauls out its Picassos, it will have not just a popular hit, which this show is sure to be, but also a great event.

“Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” remains on view through Aug. 1 at the Met; metmuseum.org.

Click on the post's title to read the entire review at The New York Times.

Walking in Holden Caulfield's footsteps through Manhattan

Nearly 60 years after the publication of 'The Catcher in the Rye' you can still see much of the New York that he saw.

By David L. Ulin
April 24, 2010 | 4:02 p.m.

Reporting from New York

Holden Caulfield was a flâneur. That's not generally how we think of him, this archetype of adolescent alienation, this detester of phonies, this poor little lost boy whose voice — by turns knowing, childlike, cynical and bereft — drives J.D. Salinger's iconic 1951 novel, "The Catcher in the Rye." Yet, from the moment, about a quarter of the way through the book, he arrives by train at Manhattan's now-demolished original Pennsylvania Station building, he is our guide on one of the 20th century's great literary walking tours. ...

... You can walk Holden's Manhattan in one long afternoon, starting at Penn Station (or perhaps I should say the new Penn Station) and working your way north up Broadway through the theater district to the park. From there, you can check on the ducks in the lagoon, then wander over to the museums, before heading south, past the Central Park Zoo, and down through midtown to Grand Central Station. There are a few hidden landmarks, but for the most part, it's a city saunter, New York as New Yorkers know it, an insider's take on the streets. ...

Click the title to read the article, which includes a map and a slideshow.

Can't Stand to Sit Too Long? There's a Desk for That

Click the post's title to read the entire NY Times article.

Plan for Greener, Pedestrian-Friendly 34th Street

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: April 22, 2010

From the city that has banned cars from broad swaths of Broadway and put picnic tables in Times Square, here comes another great reshaping of New York’s streetscape.

The Bloomberg administration is moving ahead with what amounts to a radical, river-to-river reimagining of another major corridor: 34th Street, the Midtown thoroughfare that is home to Macy’s — and some of the city’s most congested traffic.

Automobiles would be banned on the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, creating a pedestrian plaza bookended by Herald Square and the Empire State Building.

The result would be a street effectively split in two.

On the west side of the pedestrian plaza, all car traffic would flow west, toward the Hudson River. On the east side, all car traffic would move east, toward the East River. Buses would still operate in both directions, and through the pedestrian plaza as well, but in dedicated lanes separated from passenger cars by a concrete barrier.

Click on the post's title to read the entire article.

Making a BMW commercial

The commercial (From BMWBlog):




The camera platform:

Click on the post's title to read the story at BMWBlog.

A New $100 Bill

In a bid to make counterfeiting of the bill more difficult, a new $100 bill goes into circulation next February.

The coming bill's new security features include, according to The Wall Street Journal, "a blue 3-D Security Ribbon on the front of the note that contains images of bells and 100s, which move and change from one to the other as you tilt the note, according to joint release from the agencies. Another security feature is the 'Bell in the Inkwell' image that changes color from copper to green when the note is tilted, an effect that makes it appear and disappear within the inkwell. "

The New $100 Note: Know Its Features. Know It's Real is an informative website with video and interactive features.

Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley

By Claire Cain Miller
Published April 16, 2010

CANDACE FLEMING’S résumé boasts a double major in industrial engineering and English from Stanford, an M.B.A. from Harvard, a management position at Hewlett-Packard and experience as president of a small software company.

But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.”

Read the entire, interesting, informative article by clicking the post's title.

Drawn To A Larger Scale

By Alex Williams
Published April 14, 2010

HOW did a 32-year-old college dropout from the bayou of Louisiana, with no formal training in art — well, to be frank, no training at all — end up with a one-man show in a New York gallery and a client list that includes Robert Downey Jr. and Orlando Bloom?

For Scott Campbell, it all started at a tattoo studio in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco. “I’m just the dirty kid who snuck in the back door,” said Mr. Campbell, who said that he got the bulk of his art education tattooing teenage gang members in San Francisco in the 1990s. ...

... Last April, Mr. Campbell’s solo show at OHWOW, a gallery in Miami, sold out, said Al Moran, its director. It was evidence that Mr. Campbell had the stature needed to carry a solo show on April 29 at the gallery’s new space in Manhattan, on Crosby Street — its first since moving to the city. “All sorts of people were coming” to the Miami show, Mr. Moran said. “Tattoo kids were coming in, and museums were coming in.”

Mr. Campbell said he is nervous to show in New York. But added, philosophically, “If the art world shuns me, I can still do tattoos.”

Scott Campbell's show in New York.

Click on the post's title to read the entire article at The New York Times.

Richard Wagner's cycle has made its mark on comic books

David Ng, writing in the LA Times, says,

... Los Angeles Opera is producing the complete "Ring" for the first time beginning in May. Although this avant-garde staging isn't for neophytes, its emphasis on spectacle and visual effects (light sabers play an important role) could make it the ideal "Ring" for superhero geeks. ...

... Richard Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung" is regarded by many as an important genetic mother ship for today's fleet of action heroes. ...

... Even those who have never experienced Wagner's epic should have little trouble recognizing the names of some of its chief protagonists such as Wotan and Brünnhilde and her fellow Valkyries. That's partly because Wagner himself borrowed from a number of well-known myths and legends -- the 12th century Germanic poem the "Nibelungenlied" was his primary source. But it's also because pop culture has taken Wagner's creations over the years and liberally repurposed them into a multitude of hit incarnations.

Perhaps the most popular of the "Ring" characters are the Valkyries -- the airborne female warriors of the cycle's second opera, "Die Walküre," who carry slain soldiers from the battlefields to their final resting places in Valhalla. ...

... On TV, the most recognizable offspring of Wagner's Valkyries was the title character in the cult series "Xena: Warrior Princess." In the sixth and final season, which aired in 2000-2001, viewers learned that Xena ( Lucy Lawless) was once an evil Valkyrie who presided over a reign of terror in the show's pan-mythological universe. ...

Click on the post's title to read the entire article.

A promotion for LA Opera's production -- with audio and photos -- is here.

Alas, poor Shakespeare

Conspiracy theories about the authorship of his plays has gone mainstream.

By James Shapiro
April 11, 2010

Film director Roland Emmerich, whose last effort was the apocalyptic "2012," has begun shooting "Anonymous." It won't be another disaster movie -- except perhaps for English professors. According to Emmerich, the film is "about how it came to be that William Shakespeare was not the author of his plays," which, he says, turn out to have been written by the "Earl of Oxford." ...

... In a literary culture swamped by memoirs, many now take it for granted that most writing -- of the past no less than the present -- is confessional or at least experiential, and that you had to live it to describe it. (The Elizabethans would have found such notions bizarre.) By that logic, the Earl of Oxford, who in reality was captured by pirates and had three daughters, has a stronger claim to have written "Hamlet" and "King Lear" than a professional playwright from Stratford who never set sail and only had two daughters.

Since no external documents link the Earl of Oxford to the plays (in contrast to Shakespeare himself, for whom there is plenty of contemporary linking evidence), those convinced that he wrote them are stuck arguing, in circular fashion, that circumstantial evidence is to be found in the works, and that these works are necessarily autobiographical, a portrait of an aristocratic author's life, loves and thwarted political ambitions.

"Anonymous" capitalizes on the desire for a more exciting story than one in which a young man from the provinces moves to the big city and fashions out of old stories and a powerful imagination great plays and poems. And the democratization of knowledge on the Internet, a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, has been a boon for those who believe that Shakespeare didn't write the plays. It certainly hasn't helped that literary scholars have mostly dodged this fight, even as they've lost their cultural authority. ...

Click on the post's title to read the complete article at The Los Angeles Times.

Cowboys of the Silver Screen

On April 17, 2010, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Postal Service™ will issue a 44–cent, Cowboys of the Silver Screen commemorative stamp in four designs in a pane of 20 stamps and a booklet of 20 stamped postal cards, both designed by Carl T. Herrman of North Las Vegas, Nevada.

With the issuance of the Cowboys of the Silver Screen stamps, the U.S. Postal Service® honors four extraordinary performers who helped make the American Western a popular form of entertainment. Film stars from the silent era through the singing era are featured on the stamps: William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers.


Images and text courtesy of the USPS.


Hat tip to The Los Angeles Times, which made mention of The Autry National Center.

When Half a V-8 Is Enough

By RICHARD S. CHANG
Published: April 8, 2010

SCARSDALE, N.Y.


JACKIE SARIL’S nickname is Marisa Tomei, not that the two look much alike. For starters, Ms. Saril, who co-owns a public relations firm, has red hair. But her broad knowledge of vintage American cars reminds her friends of Mona Lisa Vito, Ms. Tomei’s caricature of a fast-talking, gum-chewing, surprisingly car-smart New Yorker in the 1992 film “My Cousin Vinny.” [more ...]

Henri Cartier-Bresson - The Modern Century

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: April 8, 2010

Rarely has the phrase “man of the world” been more aptly applied than to the protean photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the subject of a handsome and large — though surely not anywhere near large enough — retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday. ...

... “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century” runs from Sunday through June 28 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. It travels to the Art Institute of Chicago (July 24 to Oct. 3); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 30 to Jan. 30); and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (Feb. 19 to May 15).

Click on the post's title to read the entire article at The NY Times.

The exhibit will also appear in Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta.

Call of the Small

From a New York Times report: CHRISTINE FERRARA, a 39-year-old public affairs director for the Institute for Advanced Study, a research center in Princeton, N.J., has a passion for modern architecture and design. It began in 2008, when her husband, Steven Birnbaum, a technology consultant, bought her an airy modern home with floor-to-ceiling windows. [more ...]

Ms. Ferrara's blog is Call of the Small.

Glenn Beck Doesn't 'Give a flying crap'

Forbes magazine has posted an article, "Glenn Beck Inc," which quotes Beck: "I could give a flying crap about the political process." Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. "We're an entertainment company."

Yes, he's an entertainer, but he's doing incredible damage to the country because many in his audience take him seriously.

Hat tips to Immoral Minority and Think Progress.

Digging up a piece of Hollywood history

Guadalupe is the Zelig of the Central Coast -- a speck on California Highway 1 that has had more than its share of brushes with history. Portola's expedition passed through in the 1700s. Father Junipero Serra brought the first cattle. Lt. Col. John Fremont and his troops camped in town in the mid-1800s and accidentally torched its oldest adobe.

In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille came to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes on California's Central Coast and built a movie set that still captures the imagination -- a colossal Egyptian dreamscape for the silent movie version of "The Ten Commandments."

"If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe," DeMille wrote, "I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization . . . extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America." ...

Slideshow

... Peter Brosnan was a 30-year-old New York University film school graduate when he first heard the story in 1982. ...

... Captivated, Brosnan embarked on a journey that has yet to end -- a quest to find DeMille's set, exhume it and produce a documentary about this unusual piece of Hollywood history. ...

... Brosnan also collected stories from locals about the dozens of films shot outside Guadalupe from the silent era to the 1940s -- a time when the dunes were Hollywood's backlot for desert movies and ranch hands had fleeting encounters with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich.

... A steady trickle of film buffs find their way to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, where chunks of DeMille's set are on display, including a bas-relief of a pharaoh's head reassembled by Brosnan's team.

The center recently put out a news release announcing that Brosnan's documentary would be released this summer. This made Brosnan nervous, since he is still talking to Paramount about getting permission to use clips from "The Ten Commandments." ...

Digging up a piece of Hollywood history, by Mike Anton of The Los Angeles Times.

Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

By RONI CARYN RABIN

Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?

It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject. ...

... “It’s not that easy, like taking a pill once a day,” Dr. Mehl said. “But this has always intrigued me. Can we make people happier by asking them, for the next five days, to have one extra substantive conversation every day?” [more ...]

The Ides of March

Today! March 15.

From The New York Times' "Et Tu, British Museum? Coin Commemorating Caesar's Murder Goes on Display"

... On Monday — the Ides of March, naturally — the British Museum put on display a gold coin given to one of Caesar’s assassins, which may have been worn as a memento by the boastful killer, The Guardian reported. ...

NY Times' Photo

The Guardian's article uses a photo of a different coin, also attributed to the British Museum, which makes it clear how the coin could have been "worn":

The Guardian's Photo

The Times' story indicates that the coin they have depicted is believed by experts to be a fake. The Guardian's story makes clear that such coins existed:

The swaggering imagery displayed on the coin was already famous in antiquity. In the second century AD, the Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote: "Brutus stamped upon the coins which were being minted in his own likeness and a cap and two daggers, indicating by this and by the inscription that he and Cassius had liberated the fatherland."

The Times' story does state: "The Guardian said that some 60 silver versions of the coin have survived, but only two were believed to exist in gold — one of which is now believed by experts to be a fake." So, we have photos of all the gold versions, if the experts are correct.

Interestingly, in The Guardian's photo, the coin's image is cropped. Was that to make it difficult for counterfeiters?

COINLINK's "Possibly Unique 'Ides Of March' Gold Coin to be Displayed at British Museum" has another interesting story.

Driving Dioramas -- Redo

Car & House

The Set

Michael Paul Smith builds scale models. His collection of 1/24 scale scenes from mid-20th century America can be seen at his Flickr, where he wrote:

Our past is a powerful draw and in so many ways we try to capture it in order to explain it to ourselves.

What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in. It's not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood of my memories.

And like a dream, many of the buildings show up in different configurations throughout the photos. Or sometimes, the buildings stay put and the backgrounds change.

There is also a New York Times' story, "Lots of Web Traffic in such a Tiny Town," about his work.

A Jackson Pollack for 44 cents?

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On March 11, 2010, in Buffalo, New York, the Postal Service™ issued a 44–cent, Abstract Expressionists commemorative stamp in ten designs, designed by Ethel Kessler of Bethesda, Maryland

In celebration of the abstract expressionist artists of the 20th Century, Art Director Ethel Kessler and noted Art Historian Jonathan Fineberg (Gutgsell Professor Art History, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) selected ten paintings to feature on this colorful pane of self–adhesive stamps. Kessler used elements from Barnett Newman’s Achilles (1952) to frame the stamps. The arrangement of the stamps suggests paintings hanging on a gallery wall. For design purposes, the sizes of the stamp are not in relative proportion to the paintings. The pane also features selvage text and a quotation by Robert Motherwell. Each stamp includes the artist’s name and verso text that identifies the painting and briefly tells something about the artist.

List of Stamp Artwork

• The Golden Wall (1961) — Hans Hofmann (1880–1966)
• Romanesque Façade (1949) — Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974)
• Orange and Yellow (1956) — Mark Rothko (1903–1970)
• The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944) — Arshile Gorky (1904–1948)
• 1948–C (1948) — Clyfford Still (1904–1980)
• Asheville (1948) — Willem de Kooning (1904–1997)
• Achilles (1952) — Barnett Newman (1905–1970)
• Convergence (1952) — Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)
• Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34 (1953–1954) — Robert Motherwell (1915–1991)
• La Grande Vallée 0 (1983) — Joan Mitchell (1925–1992)

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A Jackson Pollack for 44 Cents?

No! The whole pane of stamps has to be purchased for $4.40 at a post office or online.


The image of the Jackson Pollack stamp was obtained from The Los Angeles Times.

A New York Times article, with an enlargement of Adolph Gottlieb’s “Romanesque Facade.”

An ARTINFO article, with an enlargement of Hans Hofmann's "The Golden Wall."

The image of the pane and the text was obtained from USPS.

The USPS press release

A New York magazine article

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Photos from Paris - Outside and Inside a Restaurant

Nomiya is a temporary installation atop the Palais de Tokyo contemporary-art museum. Like an exhibition, the restaurant has a corporate sponsor and a limited run, ending in December.

Photo: Laurent Grasso

Floor-to-ceiling windows display a view of the Eiffel Tower.
Photo: Ed Alcock for The New York Times

From The New York Times' "Where Art and Haute Cuisine Meet in Paris"

Ansel Adams Photos at the Interior Department

The Los Angeles Times informs us, in Ansel Adams, from the wilderness to the corridors of power, that the Interior Department has installed an exhibit of photos by Ansel Adams in its halls, in Washingtion, D.C. The photos were taken as part of a project commissioned in 1941 by then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes.

The article states, "Adams was paid $22 per day to work on the project, and he only charged the government for the days when he actually shot. He took more than 200 photos over about a month, but with the onset of World War II, the project stalled."

"Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has since revived the project and -- at a cost of $17,000 -- had 26 of the images permanently installed in the halls of the Interior building at 1849 C St., NW."

The exhibit at the Interior Department is the first time the photos have been viewable by the public.

A slideshow of twenty-six images, with a high-resolution of each available, can be seen at the Interior Department's website, here.

The photo included with this post is of Canyon de Chelly, a national monument, in northeast Arizona.

Zamboni Machines

Zamboni Off The Ice

An article in this yesterday's New York Times, Zamboni Driving Lessons, reminded me of the earlier article about Zamboni machines, from which the photo, above, was taken, and which contains a nine-photo slideshow.

From parts of some of the slideshow captions:

The Zamboni machine's hypnotic mission and captivating name have made it a cultural icon, something the Zamboni family finds both gratifying and a bit puzzling. The first ice-resurfacing machine was built in 1949 and its form, function and sales output have remained consistent for decades. ...

... Richard Zamboni, who now runs the company, says it consistently sells 200 to 250 machines a year, 30 years after his father [Frank Zamboni] began worrying that the market was nearly saturated. ...

... The second and third machines built by Zamboni were bought by the Olympic star Sonja Henie for use in her ice shows. ...

... The original Zamboni machine is parked in the skating rink that the family still owns, just down the street from the factory. ...

... Frank Zamboni spent most of a decade building his first machine. These days it takes about six months to produce a machine, each of which is still made to order. ...

Cool.

Book Deals: Washington Lawyer Bob Barnett

By David Montgomery
Sunday, March 7, 2010

In "I, Alex Cross," the new bestseller set in Washington by James Patterson, fictional detective Alex Cross scans the ego wall in the office of a senator he's investigating:

The senator has hung photos of himself "with the president . . . the vice president. Tiger Woods. Bono. Arnold and Maria. Bob Woodward. Robert Barnett."

Robert Barnett?

"The senator," muses Cross, "was obviously a well-connected man, and he wanted everyone who walked into his office to know it right away." ...

... Barnett's rate of $975 an hour is a lot of money, but his transformational insight was to apply a lawyer's fee structure to the work of an agent. Then it's not necessarily so much money

A traditional literary agent charges 15 percent of an advance. Barnett helped Bill Clinton sell "My Life" for a record $15 million. Clinton would have paid an agent $2.25 million; Barnett says he put in far fewer hours than the 2,308 he would have needed to work to bill $2.25 million. (more ...)

When Politicians Debate Fictional Characters, It's Time for a Reality Check

Sarah Palin's recent problem with "Family Guy" is not without historical precedent. It was in the early 1990s that politicians began having problems distinguishing between reality and fiction: they began attacking fictional television characters. In Michiko Kakutani's Fiction and Reality, Blurring the Edges, we're reminded:

... Vice President Dan Quayle attacks Murphy Brown, the fictional anchorwoman played by Candice Bergen, for undermining traditional family values by deciding to become a single mother, and in this week's season premier of the show [week of September 25, 1992], Murphy Brown strikes back, having already elicited even further condemnations from Mr. Quayle.

President Bush [The Elder] speaks of wanting to see an America that looks a lot more "like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons," and in a subsequent episode of the popular television show, Bart Simpson retorts, "We're just like the Waltons. We're praying for the Depression to end, too."

Even Ross Perot, who mocked Mr. Quayle's remarks about Murphy Brown, has gone on the record as condemning the television character Doogie Howser for having sex with his girlfriend ...

And Ms. Kakutani concludes:

In the end, it's dangerous to mistake fictional representations for the real thing. To do so is to ignore one of the most basic impulses behind art -- the impulse to order the chaos of regular life, to transform it into something more perfect, more shapely and more satisfying, to turn it into something with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Worse, to erase the boundaries between reality and fiction means forsaking our ability to make distinctions. It means living in a dimly lit world of shadows, mirrors and self-delusions, content with approximations and soothing mispresentations, instead of continuing to try to discern the truth. One ends up like Don Quixote, Cervantes's would-be knight whose sense of reality was shaped by popular chivalric romances -- a hapless, if well-meaning fellow who believed he could model his own life on that of his favorite literary heroes and who ended up tilting at windmills.

The New York Times has published three articles about Sarah Palin's dust-up with "Family Guy," here, here, and here. Sarah Palin, of course, took confusing reality with fiction to a whole new level.

Michiko Kakutani is a Pulitzer Prize winning critic for the New York Times.

Hartland: A Las Vegas Mansion, Glue-Gunned to Perfection

A HOUSE with 32 chandeliers, twin spiral staircases and so much rococo plasterwork that Marie Antoinette, were she planning a weekend in Vegas, would say, “The heck with the Bellagio, I want to stay with the Hart family in that rundown neighborhood where Liberace used to live,” may not be for you. ...

... The entrance hall has a dramatic black-and-white checkerboard floor and a 35-foot dome. Stair rails are swagged with stiffly wired gold lamé, white silk roses and ivory velvet. The living room measures 33 by 57 feet — so big, they were able to shoot a scene for the film “Casino” there. Ms. Hart’s bedroom has a velvet bedspread, made by her son Larry, which is ornamented with cabochon pearls and weighs 34 pounds. The house itself takes up some 25,500 square feet. ...

... The only family member who still lives at Hartland full time is Garry, in a suite off limits to reporters and reportedly utterly free of pearls.

A Las Vegas Mansion, Glue-Gunned to Perfection, from the New York Times.