Best of 2008 lists
The New Yorker issues its best of lists for 2008:
- Sasha Frere Jones best of the year in music.
- John Lahr's ten best plays.
- Alex Ross's ten best performances.
- Anthony Lane's ten best films.
- David Denby's ten best films.
Blagojevich = Clay Davis
Most fans of The Wire can't help but connect newly arrested Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich with the HBO show's corrupt politician Clay Davis.
But the similarities may be more uncanny than you thought. Davis's patented "sh*********t"? Blagojevich may have used it himself!
Farewell to a sports genius
Greg Maddux is announcing his retirement Monday. One of the more tragic among many tragic of my days as a Cubs fan was when Larry Himes got cheap with the greatest homegrown pitching talent in Cubs history and let Maddux leave to go to the Braves after he'd just won a Cy Young in 1992. If I ever ran into Himes on the street I'd punch him in the face.
There was no pitcher I enjoyed watching more; he elevated pitching to an art. He never threw extremely hard, and his effortless motion and small frame left it easy for any amateur to picture himself as Maddux on the mound, taking on hulking batters at the plate. There is an elegance to sports genius that draws more heavily on the mind than raw physical talent. Not that it isn't physically impressive for Maddux to be able to make locate a fastball with such accuracy, or to make it move so much, or to field his position so well. It's just that even before he threw a single pitch to a batter, you felt he was ahead strategically.
I hope he'll come back to be a pitching coach or advisor for the Cubs someday, or that he'll write a book about how he broke down each batter in his head.
Two links to the NYTimes
Oh, now the U.A.W decides to offer some concessions to the Big 3, when the Big 3's potential demise might drag the U.A.W. down with them. As Superman said at the end of Superman II, "Too late, Luthor! Too late."
In economic terms, the demise of the U.A.W. would be a good thing for the Big 3. In the U.S. auto industry, as in the airline industry, labor unions have long left those companies incapable of profitability, which is hard enough when the Big 3 can't make a car anyone wants to buy.
***
Six habits of highly respectful physicians.
...medical schools may be underemphasizing a much simpler virtue: good manners.
I agree, many doctors behave like asses, but how do I resolve that with my favorite doctor, Gregory House?
Untitled 1
Oh, now the U.A.W decides to offer some concessions to the Big 3, when the Big 3's potential demise might drag the U.A.W. down with them. As Superman said at the end of Superman II, "Too late, Luthor! Too late."
In economic terms, the demise of the U.A.W. would be a good thing for the Big 3. In the U.S. auto industry, as in the airline industry, labor unions have long left those companies incapable of profitability, which is hard enough when the Big 3 can't make a car anyone wants to buy.
***
Six habits of highly respectful physicians.
...medical schools may be underemphasizing a much simpler virtue: good manners.
I agree, many doctors behave like asses, but how do I resolve that with my favorite doctor, Gregory House?
Morning Becomes more, or less, Eclectic
Nic Harcourt has left Morning Becomes Eclectic. It will be strange to not hear his voice on the radio each morning on KCRW.
Currently, Harcourt is serving as a music supervisor on The CW's "90210."
"It’s expanded my musical palate, to be honest with you," Harcourt says. "You can sort of get known as the cool guy at KCRW, but at '90210,' you have to find songs that will turn on an 18-year-old girl. So what we’re doing with that show is featuring artists like Rihanna, Pink, Lady Gaga and people like that. At the same time, we’re putting cool stuff in where we can. We had Stereolab in last week’s show."
Hah. Aw, Nic, Rihanna is not cool stuff?
Google Calendar finally supports iCal
Google now supports the CalDAV protocol, so you can more easily sync Apple iCal with Google Calendar.
Now if only iCal would sync with Exchange. Stupid protocol incompatibilities.
The risks of being an early adopter
Great, my assistant is quitting on Dec. 8. You'd think in a recession she'd be grateful for the work. I guess I wasn't paying her enough. The truth is, I never paid her a dime, but then again, she never asked. Well, it was fun, and useful, while it lasted. Maybe someone can revive the service as iwantjoanholloway.com?
Pownce is closing shop, too, and this before I ever posted a single thing to my account. Aping Twitter's service and adding some just midly useful accoutrements didn't do it for them, no surprise.
Yes, in times of recession, some sort of revenue model matters.
Michael Pollan's letter to Obama
This is hardly a new article, but I'm so busy that I don't ever get to reading issues of the New Yorker or NYTimes until weeks, sometimes months later.
In the food issue of the NYTimes Magazine from Oct 9, Michael Pollan pens an open letter to the President-Elect urging for a reform in U.S. food policy. It is one of the best articles I've read all year, appropriate for both those already familiar with food policy and those who don't know the first thing about where the food on their dinner plate comes from.
Pollan's thesis:
There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.
The most fascinating part of the article is Pollan's history of how our current food production system came to be.
After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row
One think I do thank Dubya for
Maybe the only thing: recently he signed into law the Alternative Minimum Tax Relief Act of 2008. Years too late, for my taste, but better late than never. I'm not sure what the old AMT tax was intended to do, but what it did to me was tax me on exercised stock option value even if I hadn't sold them. Way back in the day of the old Internet stock bubble, that meant paying a ton in taxes on Amazon.com stock that I couldn't sell as an employee.
Of course, later, the stock came back down to earth, conveniently when the window for employee selling opened back up and after the government had bled me dry. Instead of getting my AMT taxes back as a refund, the government kept it all and only allowed me to apply the credit as an offset against capital gains of which I never had enough in the subsequent years to claim much of the credit.
So for some ten years, the government has had a big interest free loan from yours truly. So forgive me if I'm not feeling so generous about funding bailouts of mismanaged banks and those dinosaurs in Detroit.
The relevant clauses of the next tax act, for those dot-commers affected:
• Increase of AMT Refundable Credit Amount for Individuals with Long-Term Unused Credits for Prior Minimum Tax Liability. The Extenders Act changes the way in which the refundable portion of the "long-term unused minimum tax credit" for a particular tax year is computed, and eliminates the previously applicable phaseout of the credit based on adjusted gross income, potentially increasing the credit available in that year. Individuals with long-term unused minimum tax credits in a tax year ending on or before December 31, 2012 now may receive a refundable credit equal to the greater of (i) 50 percent of the long-term unused minimum tax credit or (ii) the amount, if any, of the long-term unused minimum tax credit determined for the preceding tax year.
• Specific Relief for AMT Attributable to an Incentive Stock Option Exercise. The Extenders Act eliminates any otherwise outstanding liability for tax, penalties and interest attributable to an AMT liability arising from the exercise of any incentive stock option before 2008. In addition, the amount of a taxpayer's long-term unused minimum tax credit described above that is allowed as a refund in each of 2008 and 2009 is increased by 50 percent of any interest or penalty paid by a taxpayer that would have been abated by the Extenders Act if it had not already been paid.
Design matters
Gregg Rapp is a menu engineer. He designs menus to increase restaurant profitability.
The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. "This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get wrong," he explains. "If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheapest thing." It's better to have the digits and dollar signs discreetly tagged on at the end of each food description. That way, the customer's appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whetted before he sees its cost.
Also important is placement. On the basis of his own research and existing studies of how people read, Rapp says the most valuable real estate on a two-panel menu (one that opens like a magazine) is the upper-right-hand corner. That area, he says, should be reserved for more profitable dishes since it is the best place to catch--and retain--the reader's gaze.
Cheap, popular staples--like a grilled-chicken sandwich or a burger--should be harder to locate. Rapp likes to make the customer read through a mouthwatering description of seared ahi tuna before he finds them. "This is akin to the grocery store putting the milk in the back," he says. "You have to walk by all sorts of tempting, high-priced items to get to it."
The adjectives lavished on a dish can be as important as the names of the ingredients. What would you rather eatplain grilled chicken or flame-broiled chicken with a garlic rub? Scrambled eggs or farm-fresh eggs scrambled in butter? "Think 'flavors and tastes,'" Rapp says, repeating a favorite mantra. "Words like crunchy and spicy give the customer a better idea of what something will be like." Longer, effusive descriptions should be reserved for signature items. Especially the profitable ones.
From the studio that needs no introduction
Pixar is great, we all love Pixar. But their past several trailers have all started with a long vanity reel: "Over the years..."
If there is one studio that needs no introduction, it is Pixar. They could flash the company logo and Luxo at the start and go straight into the trailer and people would be sufficiently thrilled for a new Pixar production. There's a hint of flashing the bling with their intro reels that seems unnecessary.
Marathon Man
I was in NYC the first weekend of November to watch my brother James run his first marathon. It was a true family affair as James ran for Fred's Team to raise money for Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where my other brother Alan works. James raised something like $13,000, just an amazing amount.
I flew in late Thursday night. The next day, while James was off at work, I got up and just walked around. New York City is still my favorite among all the cities I've lived in, and I suspect it's because it's the one city where I can feel both alone and among people at the same time.
I stopped for lunch at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, one of the outlets in the David Chang empire. Back when I lived in NYC, I came here on its first day open, when they still didn't have a menu. It was like a burrito bar back then, and when I walked in the one guy behind the kitchen counter looked surprised to see anyone. Now it's transformed into a fairly chic sit-down joint with a menu and prix fixe lunch. I had crispy pork belly buns...
...and spicy rice cakes.
It was Friday, Halloween, but more importantly, it was the last day of the Banksy exhibit in the West Village, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill. I managed to get there just about a half hour before it closed.
Banksy is to the art world as Michel Gondry is to music videos, just conceptually brilliant. This faux pet store wasn't populated with the real animals. Instead, there was a depressed and caged Tweety...
...a caged animatronic monkey wearing headphones, clicking on a remote control, and watching a TV playing a documentary about monkeys free in the wild...
...a rabbit looking in a mirror and applying lipstick...
...animatronic fish fingers swimming in fishbowl...
...and animatronic sausages squirming around like earthworms.
A leopard fur coat basked in a tree branch, its "tail" hanging down and swaying lazily. A rooster watched over its children, little Chicken McNuggets with legs bobbing for food.
Not Banksy's most subtle social commentary, but a humorous conceit executed simply. According to the security guard, the exhibit was on its way to London next.
That night I caught a production of David Mamet's Speed the Plow at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway. This three person meditation on the conflict between art and commerce in Hollywood starred Jeremy Piven, Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson on Mad Men), and Raul Esparza.
Bashing Hollywood for favoring money over art is hardly an original form of cynicism, but the underrated Piven is always fun to watch on stage. He plays a character not so unlike his Ari Gold from Entourage: Bobby Gould is a studio exec tasked with making commercial hits. When Elizabeth Moss, a temp secretary, playing someone not unlike her Peggy Olson in Season One of Mad Men, appeals to his conscience to push for an adaptation of a dense and decidedly depressing novel (for some reason I thought of Blindness by Saramago), the battle for his soul is on, with Raul Esparza playing the devil on his shoulder, having brought Gould a made-to-order action script with a big star attached.
Piven has a way of making greed warm and fuzzy. His Ari Gold and Bobby Gould both talk a game of mindless materialism, but the body language conveys a person not entirely comfortable with all the bravado. We see in Piven our own greedy nature, but because we sense his chance for redemption is our own, and so we root for him. Tony Soprano and Don Draper are part of a recently crowded stable of antiheroes, and Piven is like their comedic brother.
After the play, I set off to my old neighborhood haunt of Union Square. I'd read that there would be a flash mob of Sarah Palin look-a-likes this Halloween night, but only a few materialized. Dagmar and Alex, two other folks from UCLA Film School were in town for a thesis shoot, so I met up with them and followed them around, taking pics of Dagmar with costumes that struck her fancy. We snapped a lot Palins, among others. But the most popular costume, by far, perhaps for ease of creation, was Heath Ledger's smudged-lipstick-and-white-face-paint Joker.
The night ended, as many busy social days in NYC end, with my sister Karen hobbling in pain alongside me at 3am in her Audrey Hepburn circa Breakfast at Tiffany's high heels, the two of us trying and failing to find a single unoccupied taxi in Greenwich Village.
The night before the marathon, we all stayed at the Westin in Times Square as James and all the Fred's Team runners were put up there for their fundraising efforts. They got their own transportation to the start line.
The family met up to watch him at the Fred's Team viewing bleachers on 1st Ave., near 67th St, around mile 17. We saw the wheelchair division fly by. One man in a wheelchair stopped across the street, attached a pair of artificial legs below his knees, and ran. The competitive women and then the competitive men flew by, and we saw both eventual winners in those groups.
Thanks to the marathon's e-mail alerts, we knew when James was approaching. As he ran by, giving Alan and the kids a quick hug, I shouted out to him to "Drop the hammer!" He looked back, then down at the street, puzzled, thinking I'd said that he'd dropped something.
We tried to make it across town to the finish line to catch him, but he was too fast. He'd already finished in an impressive 3:57 by the time we waded through the Central Park mob.
Congrats, on both the great time and the amazing fundraising haul! Each speaks volumes, one to his obsessive nature, the other to his likability.
My favorite Sarah Silverman joke from her show tonight
So, we have a new President. Yes, isn't it great? I got to attend a fundraiser recently, and afterwards, I went over to talk to him, and I wanted to ask him a question, but I didn't want to look stupid, so I said, "Senator Obama, when you were at school at Harvard, did you encounter any racism?"
He took a long look at me, and then he said, "I'm Kanye West."
There's more, and it's darker, and I'm too much of a prude to print it here.
NYTimes shutters Play magazine
Too bad. Play had become one of my favorite quarterly publications in the NYTimes. I'd rather have Play than their quarterly Fashion or Travel magazines. That they couldn't round up enough advertisers to justify a quarterly publication is surprising to me.
Which is why it saddens me to tell you that Play is closing shop, a victim of the ailing economy crippling all businesses these days. We had such grand plans for Play in 2009, and the regret runs deep; Play has been the kind of publication one doesn't get to create much anymore. But we're grateful to have had the chance to make this magazine, and to have had such a rich relationship with so many devoted readers. Believe me, you'll be missed.
John Ziegler
Here's a transcript of an interview between Nate Silver and right wing kook John Ziegler about a Zogby poll that Ziegler commissioned. Ziegler uses a lot of foul language, a lot of it daring Silver to post the transcript. So Silver did.
Ziegler was the subject of a David Foster Wallace essay that ran in The Atlantic and that was anthologized in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. On hearing that DFW had committed suicide, Ziegler posted an entry at his website that confirms the sunny personality that comes through in the Silver transcript.
I know that it is considered bad form, or worse, to speak ill of the newly dead, but to me all bets are off when one commits suicide, especially when that person is a husband and a father (speaking of bad form, when did the news media change their rule about not reporting extensively on the suicides of marginally famous people?). I strongly believe that a large ingredient of the toxic mix that ended up forming Wallace’s self-inflicted poison was the pressure he felt of living up to the hype surrounding his writing and the guilt he must have felt for not really having the true talent to back up his formidable reputation.
While I have absolutely no evidence to back up this assertion, I also think it is quite possible that he knew that killing himself in his “prime
Buffalo
Wikipedia entry on an odd but grammatically correct sentence:
Buffalo buffalo, Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are
* c. the city of Buffalo, New York (or any other place named "Buffalo"), which is used as an adjective in the sentence and is followed by the animal;
* a. the animal buffalo, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes" or "buffalos"), in order to avoid articles (a noun);
* v. the verb "buffalo" meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.
Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives
Buffalo (c) buffalo (a) Buffalo (c) buffalo (a) buffalo (v) buffalo (v) Buffalo (c) buffalo (a).
Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo:
[Those] (Buffalo buffalo) [whom] (Buffalo buffalo buffalo) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).
[Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo.
Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.
THE buffalo FROM Buffalo WHO ARE buffaloed BY buffalo FROM Buffalo ALSO buffalo THE buffalo FROM Buffalo.
Malcolm Gladwell on The Colbert Report
Here's the interview. Gladwell tolerates Colbert's usual constructed preening with a bemused detachment.
Let bygones be bygones
The Guardian reports that Hillary Clinton will accept Obama's offer for her to be the Secretary of State.
Nate Silver doesn't think it makes sense for Clinton to accept if she wants to use it as a stepping stone to the Presidency. The important question to me is whether she's make a good Secretary of State.
Obama's surrounded himself with an intriguing staff. It is said of him that he likes to surround himself with varied and often dissenting thinkers, so as to help him clarify his thinking on issues. It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall at his staff meetings.