Pretty much my favorite book when I was a kid: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWIdkYk9fQM]
According to Wikipedia:
The original concept for the book featured horses instead of monsters. Sendak said he switched when he discovered that he could not draw horses.
The Wild Things (except "Goat Boy", of course) were named after (and are presumably caricatures of) Maurice's aunts and uncles.
Show your support for Barack Obama and his historic candidacy with this free bumper sticker from MoveOn.org.
Moron uses an example of a banana-- "the atheists' nightmare" --to prove the existence of God, because a banana perfectly conforms to the human hand, indicators that signal that it's ready to eat, and a tab (I think it's called a stem) that permit easy peeling for consumption. Ergo, GOD. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A]
Of course, there are more of God's creations that puts the fear of His religiosity into the heart and minds of atheists:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daD9pVB4YcI]
The point about bananas also being shaped like a handy gun, for self protection against the heathens, is another compelling piece of evidence. He left out another feature of the banana that is so naturally useful: It can also work as a PHONE! The banana phone gets crystal clear reception and comes with unlimited minutes for the true believers.
Check out this highlight clip from ESPN of a Devil Rays and Rangers major league baseball game where a heavyweight fan sitting alongside the third baseline dives overboard chasing after a foul ball and instead landing on top of the cute ball girl. Ah, I could watch candid videos of people falling onto others all day. [Thanks Paul! You're batting 2 fer 2 today!]
Just watch this ridiculous commercial with sound on, especially for the satisfying pay off in the end which is how I wish all local car commercials would end. When did local car dealerships corner the market in obnoxious, loud, and annoying TV and radio commercials? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnF6i0b9Ux8]
[Thanks Paul!]
- Franz Wright
An amazing New York Times article: Kyle Hausmann, a 24-year-old Bed Stuy resident and paralegal found himself recently trapped at the Trophy Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn after employees not realizing he was still there (he had imbibed more than a few) locked up for the night. One would think it would be a simple matter of making a couple phone calls, but it was a bit more complicated than that.
Calling the police seemed extreme, so instead he dialed up friends on his cellphone. But no one picked up — it was 6 a.m. Finally, a friend who was staying at his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant answered and tried to shake Mr. Hausmann’s roommate awake. “Kyle’s stuck somewhere; he needs your help,” the friend mumbled. But the roommate slept on and the friend fell back asleep.[...]
So he tried another round of phone calls. Finally, he reached a friend who agreed to come to the bar. The plan was for Mr. Hausmann to slip the keys under the security gate, and for the friend to open the padlock. The friend showed up, and began calling Mr. Hausmann’s cellphone and banging on the security gate. But by that time Mr. Hausmann had fallen asleep on a bench out back.
Mr. Hausmann eventually woke up and again called his friend, who agreed to come back. It was around 8:30 a.m., 12 ½ hours after his night at the bar began.
An experience like this really defines the definition of a true friendship. Which of your friends would do this for you? Maybe I should start sleeping with my phone on just in case one of my buddies becomes trapped in a bar or elevator. At the least, Hausmann owes his buddy a beer or two.
Read more here and check out the bar's own blog coverage of the incident, including a note Hausmann wrote them.
Guess who wrote the foreward to David Halberstam's seminal and definitive study of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest? This exhaustive book explores the tragic and disastrous policies formulated by the "best and the brightest'' that is the social and academic elites of the country that led to and guided the US involvement and conflict in Vietnam where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians died as a direct result. John McCain wrote the foreward:
It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.
Yea, but innit weird how similar Obama's name is to Osama?
Curbed linked to scans of a New York Magazine article from May 28, 1984 examining the gentrification of the Lower East Side where in 1984: the "Christodora," a derelict 16 floor building on “Ave B facing Tompkins Square Park” that was “boarded up, ripped out, and flooded” and purchased for $62,500 in 1975 was sold eight years later for $1.3 million to Harry Skydell, a 26-year-old lawyer-cum-inchoate real estate developer of just four months.
In the context of today's and well, since 1984, real estate market in NYC, the article's naivety is downright quaint and almost charming if it wasn't so darn depressing to read in retrospect (and altogether predictable)! Here are a couple choice excerpts from the article:
Some people who have lived there for years are understandably unhappy, particularly many of the shop keepers who are unprotected by rent control. Others are mostly bemused. “I've lived in my rent-controlled apartment for years and pay $115 a month,” says one man. “I live on the Lower East Side. The young kids who just moved in upstairs and pay $700 a month for the same space -- they live in the East Village.”
[...]
The rents for redone apartments in bombed-out sections of Avenue B soared—sometimes even topping prices for equivalent space on the UES. On lower Second Avenue, a 1200-square-foot two-bedroom apartment was recently put on the market for $2,000 a month. On First Avenue and 1st Street, an 850-square-foot loft rents for $1,200.
And of course only one year and and a week after owning the Christodora, Skydell and his partners doubled their $1.3 million investment when they sold it to another developer for $3 million.
Today, apartments in the Christodora building are really fucking expensive.
Read more here.
Previously. One of the benefits of a true free market system is that it allows for and rewards creativity, ingenuity, and risk-taking. In this framework as outlined by Adam Smith, the process of "creative destruction," a term popularized by economist Joseph Schumpeter, is inevitable and the permanence of the status quo (e.g. corporate monopolies, outdated skills, etc ) ultimately unsustainable.
If you make a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door; if you make the old mousetrap, it is time to start firing people.
Creative destruction rewards the nimble, adaptable and the innovative. Of course, in the short term creative destruction may result in growing pains that arise from situations for instance where workers with skills that are now obsolete find themselves unemployed or marginalized. No one volunteers to be the proverbial dinosaur, so this advancement is fought and resisted by many (e.g. The Luddites) with various mechanisms (e.g. Burning down mechanized looms). Those that stand in the way can seek shelter and protection from the government via a variety of means, such as "trade protection, government bailout, favorable tax considerations, limitations on competing technology, or some other special treatment." Propagandistic or xenophobic rhetoric, wrapped up in nationalistic mythos ("Made in America"), is also often employed to gain sympathy and exclude the emerging competitor. Thus creative destruction can be impeded, obstructed, and delayed. However, the conclusion is not only inevitable, but a good thing. As Werner Sombart famously wrote in Krieg und Kapitalismus (War and Capitalism): "...again out of destruction a new spirit of creativity arises." That said, Sombart was also a Nazi kook. So...
And you probably just finished reading this and thought, "What the fuck is MRod talking about?!? Post more YouTube videos of things like this!" My only answer is that it's amazing how you can apply lessons from one discipline to a seemingly unrelated one.
[Quotes and inspiration for this entry from Charles Wheelan's amazing book "Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science."]
Eater's readers have voted and overwhelmingly chosen Mill Korean for having the worst seat in all of New York City. As if eating alone in a restaurant isn't lonely enough, Mill is determined to emphasize, underline, highlight this point with this table for one. Not only is the table just big enough for your plates with no room for a book or magazine, but you face the brick wall.
...RZA, holder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation belt — a trophy he picked up last fall at a tournament in San Francisco that featured rappers and martial-arts experts — is turning his interest into a business. On Monday he started WuChess (wuchess.com), a Web site where fans can play chess online, chat, see scores of their games and other personal information, and get news about RZA and Wu-Tang.
Check out the video at the story to watch the reporter and RZA play a round of chess. The fist bump between the two after the game is a nice scene.
Read more here.
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You can play chess (and other awesomely fun multiplayer online games for free) at MySpace Games! You just need to login to your MySpace account to play!
- Adam Smith (Allegedly)
Time Magazine has more on the fist bump heard around the world, including a look back at the hazy history of the fist bump, which is also known as the ""power five," "fist pound," "knuckle bump," "Quarter Pounder" and "dap.""
For his part, Obama...said the fist bump reflects a marriage that keeps him grounded. "It captures what I love about my wife," he later explained to NBC's Brian Williams. "That for all the hoopla I'm her husband and sometimes we'll do silly things."
Read more here.
Thanks to Adam Smith for knocking a bit of sense into my head.
Krispy Kreme is giving away one free donut per customer at its Penn Station location today. I went and they were definitely keeping that information on the hush-hush. Randy and I gave our fellow donut compatriots the heads up about the free donut situation.
