May 2008

I hate Bill O’Reilly and his toddler temper. Nice to see folks having some fun with his more classic moments over at College Humor. I feel my inner child being expressed every time the producer speaks in the video.

I know it’s a ways off (july 25th) but I find myself irresistibly drawn to this reminder of what it was like to be in High School.

This morning, it appears that Google has decided to honor the invention of the laser with another one of their nifty logo tributes.

On May 16th, 1960, Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first laser. At the time, he was quoted as saying, “A laser is a solution seeking a problem.” He had no idea that it would eventually be used for brain imaging, measurement, burning, etc.

Are they at least ill-tempered sea bass?

P.S. I always love these Google tributes. Last year I wrote a post one the Valentines Day logo that looked like it said “Googe”. That post melted down my server until I installed caching. I guess everyone else likes these things too.

Resources:

• Maiman’ s obituary article in the International Herald Tribune is the source of some of the info in this post. It’s worth a read.

The above video is a short documentary about the back-end of the clothing lifecycle, the part where US citizens donate their out of style, or functionally lacking clothing to the purveyors of secondhand goods. It focuses specifically on the US market’s hand-me-downs to Haiti. Haitians call these clothing goods “pepe” and have adapted to it’s pervasiveness in the market by learning to customize the clothing and emulate the most current styles they see on TV. This cheap clothing, however, comes at the expense of producing their own goods. Haitians are literally awash in a sea of clothing that is continuously thrust upon them.

When I was in Bolivia a few years ago, I also saw much US clothing merchandise available in the La Paz street markets, generally faddish stuff that probably ran out of steam between their manufacturing point and the market in the US. In that particular case, I remembered thinking that it seemed like that was the place all non-selling Spongebob Squarepants merchandise went to die.

Anyways, take a looky-loo at that video.

Have you ever traveled anywhere awash in mass-produced, poppy American trash? Let me know in the comments.

[Pointer to Tomorrow Museum where I originally found links to the video. They have a nice interview with the filmmakers.]

Thank you to the folks who provided feedback regarding what you wanted to see in the site redesign. I dove in really thinking that I wanted to get back to the simple look of a two-column layout but ended up settling on the Thesis Theme from Pearsonified. I think that it gives the initial simple appearance i was going for while also providing some flexibility to layout widgets in two columns. Based on feedback, I also wanted to get away from the black background and use highly readable fonts. I think that the theme gives a great starting point on that front.

Please give the new comments fields a workout and let me know any feedback or suggestions that you might have. I’d love to hear it!

I removed a bunch of crufty content and uploaded some starter images for the blog. The images are bit “wintery” but they can be updated fairly simply now that things are up and running. If you have any great photos you think would go well, feel free to send them to me. I’d like to build up a deck of maybe 20 or 30 to cycle through randomly and keep things fresh.

Thanks to Ross for coming over and drinking wine while helping me explore and play with these new templates! Now if we can just figure out how to get the Faves widget to fit in with things and play nice (we spent an hour last night trying to figure out why the “unstyled” widget was overwriting our CSS attributes), we’ll be golden.

So color me impressed, a bit excited, and perhaps slightly concerned. Scarlett Johansson’s debut EP, a collaboration with Dave Situ of “TV on the Radio” and a collection of assorted other music heavies, is a set of 10 Tom Waits covers and 1 original song. Whoa.

You can check out the samples of the tracks just below (even though the album isn’t due out until May 20th):

Pitchfork Media has posted a nice interview with Scarlett where she goes into detail on the process of picking the music, crossing over from film to other creative endeavors, and following your muse, regardless of where it takes you.

Here’s a look at the video for the first single off of the album (with David Bowie doing some backup vocal work). As a die-hard Tom Waits fan, I’ve got to say, I love that Scarlett re-interprets the song without mangling the original. It’s surprisingly good.

I’m particularly impressed that this project is something she chose to do for herself and that it ended up taking on such a life of its own. That, in a nutshell, is what creativity is all about and I’m excited to give the album a full listen when it comes out (next Tuesday).

Other links to interesting bits:

• Amazon has a 3 minute video of Scarlett and Dave explaining the project.
• Audio podcast of Scarlett and Dave discussing the project, particularly the first single, “Falling Down.”

Guy Ritchie’s new Nike-spot is a stylish first-person recreation of what it’s like to be a soccer star. It’s a fantastic piece that’s going to get a bunch of kids out on the practice field.

Hi there all! I’ve been taking a look at doing some things to make The Puget News better. While I have a few ideas (and more frequent content is still the TOP priority!), I’d really like to hear from any of you that are passionate about design to give me ideas on changes you’d like to see here. I’ve got my friend Ross coming over to help me with some template design stuff tomorrow so I’d like to get a sense if we’re working on the right things.

So please, if you have an idea on how you’d like to see this blog’s design change so that it would be more useful to you, let me know via the comments below. Do you hate my color scheme? Want larger print?

The design ideas I’m looking at:

1. Switching from a 3-column to a 2-column layout, giving more room to the posts and possibly expanding the size of the remaining sidebar as well
2. Adding tag-based post-navigation via Wordpress widget

The content ideas I’m exploring are as follows:

1. Getting a larger group of writers to post content for the site. If you’ve got ideas for interesting original content on art, architecture, design, literature, politics, whatever, I’d like to have you writing here. Please feel free to contact me via email at eric [at] thepugetnews [dot] com!
2. Continuing to expand the focus of this site well beyond the current focus on the literary.
3. Getting to at least one original content post per day, preferably two…

That’s all I’ve got so far but I’m open to all suggestions on making this a more useful and fun place to discuss and debate ideas.