June 2010
22 posts
“I prefer to live in a universe full of inexhaustible mysteries, and to belong to...”
– Errol Morris, in Part 5 of “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma”.
Architecture
“Huge, drab buildings suddenly started to pop up like mushrooms all over the place. It was if nobody had created them, as if they multiplied by themselves. Sometimes, when we visit other cities and countries, we ask ourselves where the beauty of the olden days has gone. In some places we get the impression that all buildings have been designed by structural glass manufacturers”; all...
Hollywood is Worthless
Freya and I had a bit of a discussion recently about what she calls my “movie snobbery.” She claims I have officially crossed over from having high standards to being untrustworthy because I outright dismiss most Hollywood films. She may be right.
Last Friday we went and saw Toy Story 3 in a theater. We caught the last showing before 5, which in the old days meant we caught the last...
The Oil Spill is Not Obama's Katrina
From Anne Applebaum at the Washington Post:
Here is the hard truth: The U.S. government does not possess a secret method for capping oil leaks. Even the combined wisdom of the Obama inner circle — all of those Harvard economists, silver-tongued spin doctors and hardened politicos — cannot prevent tens of thousands of tons of oil from pouring out of hole a mile beneath the ocean...
“My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the...”
– John Gruber
Just how deep is the oil well that is spilling... →
Your Options for Boycotting BP
Newsweek lays out your best options for boycotting BP because of the Gulf Oil Spill.
First, Exxon:
Drive right on by the BP station and pull up to the pumps from Exxon, the company responsible for the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 and, more recently, one of the biggest corporate funders of the movement to tar the science of climate change. Exxon also managed to reduce the $5 billion in...
This American Life's Ira Glass on Being Wrong →
Rather than cutting out the parts that stuck out to me and making a nearly identical post, I’ll just reblog Austin.
austinkleon:
First rule: make a lot of work, and throw a lot of it out:
being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you...
A Nice Dose of Common Sense
Some people from Alabama have realized that if they don’t do something to protect their coast from the oil, nothing may be done at all.
James Hinton looked over a barge jutting into the mouth of a 6,000-acre estuary last weekend and said, “If we can make this work, if the oil don’t get in here, 1,275 miles of bay and river coastline will be protected.”
A day later, Mr. Hinton said: “I...
Want to Have a Good Brand?
The man behind @BPGlobalPR tells you how:
So what is the point of all this? The point is, FORGET YOUR BRAND. You don’t own it because it is literally nothing. You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it?
You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a...
Light Beer Sales are Sinking
From the Wall Street Journal:
Taking notes in my blind tasting I quickly found myself running out of ways to describe vapid nothingness. Natural Light was “flavorless”; Michelob Ultra was simply “bland”; Coors Light was “blah”—though it did have the slightest hint of sweetness, as if an ounce of (bad) ginger ale had been diluted with pint of club soda. Miller...
More on the Cost of Oil
From the Guardian UK:
More oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last month.
That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11...
Why We Haven't Replaced Oil
And why it won’t happen for awhile, unless you are willing for everything in life to cost a lot more and for you to have to reduce the level of luxury you can afford on the salary you get:
Oil’s direct role in American lives goes far beyond fuel. Plastic is made from oil - a fact that 72 percent of Americans in 2007 didn’t know, according to an online survey - and our world...
