1 Comment

LAST NIGHT'S PARTY: DAVE & BUSTERS

After work on Thursday I went to Dave and Busters in Times Square for a work outing. On a side note, following the law that requires chain restaurants to list calorie counts, it is shocking how many calories are in 99 percent of the items on the D&B menu. Wow. This photo cracks me up, mainly due to the combination that Lorenzo has going here: Funny Transformers t-shirt, huge glass of beer, and a plastic orange uzi. It's almost art.

Here I am with Dana gettin' our ethnically ambiguous terrorist hurtin' on! I freakin' loved this game. I like the assault rifle style controller, which is more comfortable over a sustained period of play, as well as the single-semi-auto fire switch located near the trigger. Added a nice depth to the game play. [Photo credit: Lorenzo]

Gina and Oliver with some serious Gatling shooting action. These games are a good distraction and stress reliever from a busy work week!

I won a crapload of tickets!!! Okay, maybe not. This machine was undergoing some maintenance or something.

A jumping...game. Perfect for...jumping photos. Although this game is surprisingly more difficult that it seemed! So I just went for some style points here. [Photo credit: Lorenzo]

Skee ball! My future penthouse apartment loft in Soho is going to have a couple of these machines.

This was one of those "fully immersive" games... It just made me motion sick. [Photo credit: Lorenzo]

The End.

1 Comment

Comment

MYTHBUSTERS BUSTS MOON LANDING CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JbaM1xNIis] Conspiracy theorists (CT) believe that the NASA moon landing didn't actually take place and was instead a huge hoax created in some secret sound stage. CTs point to various supposed discrepancies as evidence of a grand NASA and government hoax. It's so asinine and yet it has persisted (sort of like the "we should teach creationism, er intelligent design in our science classes!"). Mythbusters decides to resolve this once and for all.

Faked photographs!

The shadows in the NASA photographs of the landing shows non-parallel shadows that suggests multiple light sources instead of just one: THE SUN! Right?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wym04J_3Ls0] Myth BUSTED!

CTs point to this photo of Neil Armstrong who appears WAY too lit, especially when it appears that he is standing in...a shadow! It must be a studio "fill" light. Right?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtWMz51eL0Y] Myth BUSTED!

Moonwalk!

Astronauts can't leave distinct footprints on the moon in the vacuum of the moon's surface which lacks moisture that is required, CTs claim, for a boot imprint.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5taIxlNA_Lw] Myth BUSTED!

The flag waves!

The flag hoisted onto the surface of the moon waves! Flags aren't suppose to have movement in the vacuum of space. That is from a breeze in the "studio." Right?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMBCfuKs9i8] Myth BUSTED!

Comment

1 Comment

WHAT A BREAK UP LOOKS LIKE

This music video for Gnarls Barkley's "Who's Gonna Save My Soul?" is a brutal literal recreation of what relationship breakups can feel like for some. Although that heart sort of reminds me of the California Raisins which is kind of distracting. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTVSygNKAsg]

What say you?

1 Comment

Comment

NEW SHOW: NO HEROICS!

I can't wait to watch this new UK sitcom No Heroics centered around the various city superheroes who hang out in a bar. I'm stoked about the casting of Patrick Baladi ("Neil" from BBC's The Office ) as the resident jackass superhero. And also, the guy who can look 60 seconds into the future has a hysterical super power. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3zpMTKvvgk]

[Via]

Comment

1 Comment

JT CLAIMS HE STARTED TRUCKER HAT THING

All the goodwill Justin Timberlake has earned in my book with his consistent dance pop hit making abilities just got flushed down the drain after I read this claim from him in the new Fashion Rocks supplement to GQ.

It's funny, I keep hearing Ashton Kutcher say how he was responsible for trucker caps. I've heard him make that statement before. Trace [his childhood friend] and I were wearing them when we were seventeen.

Terrible.

1 Comment

2 Comments

THOUGHTS ON MCCAIN VP CHOICE

My thoughts: After news of McCain's VP pick hit the wires, my immediate thought was "How odd for McCain, whose central campaign tenant emphasized the issue of experience, to choose someone with the least amount of experience of anyone on the national or international stage." I must admit that while I am indeed a son of the state of Alaska, it has been years since I've been back and relatively estranged from my home state. So in many sense like many of you, I'm just as in the dark about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, self described as an "average hockey mom." So what do we know about her? In addition to as Krunky Munky pointed out dealing with her own troopergate scandal, and being ardently Big Oil, "militantly anti choice and evangelical," Palin's experience and record hardly suggests relevancy to the current national and international stage. This is particularly glaring again in a contest in which McCain has highlighted that very sort of broad experience as a hallmark trait needed in the next administration.

So lets quickly recap Palin's resume:

Palin has been in higher office as Governor of Alaska for exactly half the time Obama has been in the Senate. Before that, she served only two full terms in the City Council, from 1992 to 1996, before running for mayor of Wasilla.

To put this in perspective, Wasilla had a population of only 7,738 people as of 2004. By contrast, as TPM's Eric Kleefeld calculates, Obama's State Senate district had roughly 210,000 people -- about 27 times the number Palin repped in lower office.

And oh right, the elephant in the room: she's a woman. In addition to having zero foreign policy experience, this is whom McCain is proposing be his second-in-command.

In contrast consider Joe Biden's body of experience:

Biden trained as a lawyer and became a senator in 1973 at age 30, the fifth-youngest senator in U.S. history. He has served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, dealing with issues related to drug policy, crime prevention, and civil liberties. He is a long-time member and current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and has worked on resolutions concerning the Yugoslav wars and Iraq War.

This leads to my second thought, which is would McCain have chosen the governor of Alaska if she was a he? I think we all know the answer to that one. And with this pick, what does it suggest about McCain's judgment?

So, what we have is a transparent gambit based on novelty and gender pandering in another classic divide and conquer maneuver, which is frankly insulting.

And the notion of a female vice president isn't quite as ground-breaking as it seems. As my friend and regular reader Brian pointed out: "The McCain move is a bold one....and only 24 years after Geraldine Ferraro was the democratic VP pick."

As an Alaskan, I want to feel proud of this moment for my humble state, but I'm not. I would have been much prouder if she had stood up in the moment of McCain's offer, eschewed the me-first politics of Alaska and declined the offer.

Update: Oh yea, and she thinks creationism--you know, that origin story that discounts hundreds of years of proven science--should be taught in our schools. On a personal level this is a fucking insult to all the GOOD real hard science that is actually taking place at the universities and research centers in Alaska.

2 Comments

1 Comment

LAST NIGHT'S PARTY: EA TIGER WOODS 09 LAUNCH PARTY

On Wednesday night I went to the launch party for the latest updated version of Tiger Woods golf from EA. According to People, Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps were there as well. I didn't see them. I did however see some dude from SNL. It was crowded when we got there.

N and his friend Sarah.

Camera crews were all over the place.

They had XBox 360s lined up so people could demo the game.

After enjoying the top shelf open bar and food, I hopped over the velvet rope to hang out in an empty VIP area on our way out. Afterwards I asked a nearby bouncer to not hit me. He was good natured about it, as bouncers typically consider the red rope as something holy. Stepping over it or removing it usually results in that person's death. Or in Kzar's case, getting kicked out the club.

N on the phone doing quasi-boyfriend duties. And giving the camera a middle finger. [Side note: Noticed that the Canon SD1000...doesn't do very well in evening settings. I'm getting a lot of bad unfocused shots--My old SD was much better...]

While N was on the phone I took a photo of the empty entrance and red green carpet.

We still wanted to party so we walked down to the Belmont Lounge. There are...a lot of fingers in the air in this photo. Haha.

N's friend Jo.

Then some dude came over to me, pointed at Jo and asked, "She's your girl right?" When I said no, he said, "Well, I just want to DANCE!" Jo good-naturedly allowed him to spin her around.

A bit later I said goodbye, and walked to McDonalds in Union Square for some cheeseburger, 4 piece nugget, and fries combination, which was followed by an ice cream drumstick when I got home.

The End.

1 Comment

2 Comments

WE SHALL OVERCOME: BARACK OBAMA ACCEPTS DEM PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION

Yesterday at exactly 10:14 in the evening, Barack Obama, in front of nearly 80,000 people, formally accepted the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

Remarkable.

Exactly 45 years ago on the same date, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired a nation, people, and generations when he stood overlooking Lincoln Memorial and said "I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation" and he shared his dreams:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

It is not hyperbole to say that this week and the events that took place in Denver, Colorado, has been a historic and momentous one. However Dr King's words continue to ring true today as he cautioned that "This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."

Tonight we celebrate, but the urgency and the fight continues. We will not be satisfied!

Even while McCain acknowledged the seminal significance of the moment in his congratulatory message to Obama, McCain's campaign distributed a statement, as Obama still stood on stage and fireworks exploded in the sky, with the following (mis)interpretation of the evening:

Tonight, Americans witnessed a misleading speech that was so fundamentally at odds with the meager record of Barack Obama,” said Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain..

That did not take long.

What I do know is that America has witnessed over the past eight years is our precipitous decline, thanks to a misleading administration and party. During this same period McCain's record shows that he voted with Bush "90 percent of the time." If that's the sort of experience and leadership the Republican nominee is offering, then...thanks but no thanks Senator McCain.

2 Comments

Comment

NEW YORKER PROFILE ON MARC JACOBS

The New Yorker has an interesting (although what isn't interesting in the New Yorker...?) profile piece on uber-designer Marc Jacobs and chronicling his ascension in both fashion and popular culture, as well as his "super-heroesque" physical metamorphosis.

Jacobs used to be a chubby Jewish guy with long hair and glasses who made his name—and got fired—by designing a “grunge” collection (of very expensive silk shirts printed to look like flannel, and fine cashmere sweaters with the appearance of thermal underwear) in 1993, as the head of womenswear at Perry Ellis. Five years later, he was hired as the creative director of Louis Vuitton, France’s premier luxury-goods house, where he was seen as an enfant terrible, and nobody was quite sure if he would make it work. But, in the decade since Jacobs arrived at Vuitton, he has quadrupled its business and, with the company’s backing, watched his own Marc Jacobs Collection and his less expensive secondary line, Marc by Marc Jacobs, grow into a global business, with a hundred and sixty stores, in nineteen countries. You see his handbags, with their quilting and clunky hardware, on every other girl in Manhattan—like flip-flops, except that they cost thousands of dollars.

Jacobs’s physical appearance has come to reflect his success. At the age of forty-five, he is no longer remotely plump. His hair is cut short (and was, briefly, bright blue), and he has started wearing contact lenses. He looks like a cartoon superhero: muscular, bronzed, shining with diamonds. And he has accomplished the comic-book feat of transforming himself from hardworking Everyman (Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, Peter Parker) into something elevated and different and not merely human. But this is fashion, not crime-fighting, so the goal isn’t to fly or to leap tall buildings or—God forbid—become invisible. No. What one wants is to be a cultural touchstone, to represent and embody a life style, the way Karl Lagerfeld does, or Donatella Versace, or Carrie Bradshaw.

Read more here.

Comment

3 Comments

FOX NEWS ASKS STUPID QUESTION

Note the bottom-screen text in this screen capture from Fox News.  It may be the stupidest thing I've ever seen...and I really hesitate to use "stupid" because it makes the word "stupid" look bad. I don't care what end of the political spectrum you subscribe to, because the idiocy presented there onscreen is plainly obvious. Otherwise, anyone that buys into this should really not be allowed to breed.

If anything, this is what I see:

OSAMA/BIDEN

AWESOME BID!

COINCIDENCE?

[Thanks N]

3 Comments

1 Comment

BANKERS VERSUS CONSULTANTS

Bankers and consultants go head to head in this autotune heavy rap video, Damn It Feels Good to be a Banker. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROlDmux7Tk4]

Of course it is also a publicity video for the ridiculous book Damn, it Feels Good to Be a Banker: And Other Baller Things You Only Get to Say If You Work On Wall Street. My next novel I'm tackling is Murray Bail's long awaited new novel "The Pages," but I kind of also really want to read this inane Banker book.

[Via]

1 Comment

3 Comments

QUOTE

“I say to you: Barack Obama is ready to lead America and restore American leadership in the world,” Mr. Clinton said. “Barack Obama is ready to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States.” - Bill Clinton

3 Comments

Comment

LOST IN THE CAUCASUS

In the latest issue of The Economist, the Bagehot column (which focuses on British matters and topics), to describe British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's "attitude to, and aptitude for, foreign relations," referenced a line King George V was once alleged to have remarked:

I don't like abroad...I've been there.

Read the rest of the interesting analysis of Britain's involvement or lack thereof in the Caucasus crisis between Georgia and Russia here.

Side note: I wonder how much this specific and recent event, Middle East conflicts aside, influenced the pick of foreign policy wonk Joe Biden as Obama's VP.

Comment