King Kong Long
Peter Jackson’s King Kong , his first movie since the Lord of the Rings trilogy, will clock in at three hours in length. Doesn’t he realize that the LOTR movies could be that long because of their convoluted storylines? It probably won’t flop, but I sense that this will be a bloated film. I think Jackson has too many yes-men.
35 Failures
USA Today: “Of the 156 nominations that presidents have made for the Supreme Court since 1789, 35 have failed for one reason or another, including Harriet Miers…” Since he can make the excuse that he tried to elevate a woman, I wonder if it’s now possible for Bush to push through a man. (via pw)
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PDF: Jeffrey Toobin’s article in the New Yorker about Justice Stephen Breyer and his “Active Liberty” approach (as opposed to Scalia’s originalism). Very little on abortion, so the article’s not as contentious as it could be. (via SCOTUSblog)
(0) #10/26/2005
High-stakes tables
Vegas isn’t a restaurant city yet, but there’s plenty of high-end restaurants with celebrity chefs. I’ve only been to one nice restaurant so far in Vegas – thankfully not on my dime and unusually located outside of a casino – and it was excellent. I’ve also found some top-notch cheap eats, but not nearly as many as in LA, NY, or Boston. (via kottke)
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tigertea’s eye:hand project on flickr. Take a picture of yourself and then make a drawing of the photo. Send in your results and watch it go up on this flickr space.
(0) #10/26/2005
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A neat optical illusion called Mr. Angry and Mr. Smiles (you may need to scroll down). When viewed close up, you see one pair of faces, but when you look at the image from far enough, the faces swap. It vaguely reminds me of the spy glasses I worked on at Mitsubishi Electric.
(0) #10/26/2005
A Vengeful God
Fred Phelps, leader of the cultish Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, was recorded praising the London bombings as the manifestation of God’s wrath against the prominence of homosexuality in Britain. For those familiar with Phelps, this was not a surprising nor unusual statement.
No, taxes aren’t voluntary
Irwin Schiff, the author of The Federal Mafia: How the Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes , was found guilty on 13 counts in a Vegas court for not paying his taxes. It turns out the theory that taxes are voluntary doesn’t really work in practice in a federal court. Said a friend of his at the trial, “The people with the tax honesty movement aren’t a bunch of wackos who are just trying to twist the law in their favor.”
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Addictive puzzle game done in Flash that will make you nostalgic for the days of Dragon Warrior. It’s one of those games where half the fun is figuring out what to do. The basic concept becomes intuitive after you play a couple times. (via pastemob)
(0) #10/25/2005
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The brutal murder of Pamela Vitale is a terrible thing, but the conspiracy theorist in me noted something interesting: her name is very close to being an anagram of Valerie Plame – if only the t was an r and the a an e.
(0) #10/25/2005
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The Bush administration is poised to nominate Ben Bernanke as Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve Chair replacement. Greenspan has held the post for eighteen years. Let’s just hope Bernanke isn’t as obsessed with Ayn Rand as Greenspan was.
(0) #10/24/2005
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One star amazon.com reviews of several books that were listed among the Top 100 Novels in Time magazine. E.g., The Great Gatsby : “It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops.”
(0) #10/24/2005
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Check out this proposal for a glass skywalk that juts out 70 feet over the part of the Grand Canyon in the Hualapai Indian Reservation. It’s on the western rim of the canyon, only 120 miles east of Las Vegas. I wish I knew a little more about the architectural properties of cantilevers.
(0) #10/24/2005
solution: that that that that that
Here are David Foster Wallace’s solutions to the “that that that that that” puzzle. If you want to play along, you might want to click the preceding link and read the puzzle before viewing the solutions below.
Video Art by KFW
Neat stop-motion video art by Keith Fullerton Whitman (a former neighbor of mine). He played the third one, Phase , when he opened for The Books in Boston this past Spring. Once you get past the first few minutes, you’ll begin to see what he describes as “short motion studies.” (via mmillions)
Really Big Photos
Ethan Zuckerman talks about Graham Flint, who takes photos with such high-resolution that a panorama of a cityscape can be zoomed in to see the details of a hotel room. The technology consists of a massive film camera. Now you can no longer laugh at those ridiciulous zoom-in scenes you often see in spy movies.
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New York Changing: Photographer Douglas Levere rephotographs Berenice Abbott’s pictures of 1930’s New York City. Some amazing before-and-after revelations. There’s also a brief interview with Levere. (via kottke)
(1) #10/21/2005
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Steven D. Levitt of Freakonomics fame posts his remembrances of taking a class with game theorist Thomas Schelling. Schelling was one of the recent winners of Nobel Prize in Economics. (via robot wisdom)
(0) #10/21/2005
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Who is JT Leroy? I read a Leroy short story in McSweeney ‘s a few years ago, but I didn’t know about Leroy’s mysterious persona.
(0) #10/21/2005
