I’m (mostly?) pausing veryness while I work on liecount.com (a catalogue of the lies the presidential campaigns tell from the conventions to the polls) and continue with my handwritten word project (transcribing the whole Bible, one chapter a day).Bests.
I’m astonished; A dSLR that shoots 720p video, with adjustable DOF and high ISO capabilities. I know this is a promotional video, but I have nothing to say but… wow.
A beautiful reminder that even the most inane components of sports can make for good advertising.
Man achieves personal flight, again and in some ways less in less impressive fashion that in other recent successes. Head over to Europe and the same goals are achieved in a more spectacular fashion. This seems to harken back to the minor controversy over who really invented the airplane. The Wright Brothers original invention required a catapult for take-off, whereas Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont built the first airplane that didn’t require assistance for take-off, documented and verified by impartial observers. While no one argues that the Wright brothers flew, there are questions about what constitutes enough of a flight to win the accolade of first airplane. By some definitions we’ve achieved time travel already, but there’s a question of substance on precisely what will eventually determine what “time travel” is.
Regardless of where the credit will fall, it seems that we are in a window of time where some decree of personal flight may become a reality. And if history is a dependable teacher, what qualifies as personal flight now and what personal flight will become in the not-too-distant future will be vastly different.
Oddee.com has put together a list of the 10 most amazing ghost towns. Amazing is certainly the right word; the abandoned dwellings cover all sorts of terrain and socio-economic areas and the page is certainly worth a glance. There’s nothing going on quite like The World Without Us describes, though there are apparently a few trees growing in buildings.
In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Maliki embraced Obama’s plan, saying: “That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.” Maliki said he was not making an endorsement in the presidential race.
The endorsement of the Iraqi Prime Minister for a plan that calls for combat withdrawal - an effective end to the Iraq War - is enormous news. Ironically only the LA Times fronted the story, owing to pressure exerted from the White House for the Iraqi government to issue a retractment, which they (vaguely) did. When the New York Times ran the story they ran it as a story focused on the implications for al-Maliki given the disapproval his comments generated with senior White House and US military leaders. Even so, this offers the most real possibility of an actual conclusion to the Iraq War we’ve had since it began. The lead of Iraq, Prime Minister Maliki, effectively supports presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s 16-month time-table for withdrawal, and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain has repeatedly stated that he would respect Iraq’s sovereignty on the issue of withdrawal (though his plan calls for no immediate withdrawal and indefinite military presence). It’s unlikely that McCain would actually advocate such a speedy withdrawal since it would be near political suicide, but this is the clearest hope the American public has had yet for an actual termination to the War. A full rundown with the official responses of the candidates is here.
Related: While the mainstream press was slow to run this story, The White House press corps inadvertantly emailed this story to their entire list (instead of the intended internal list) immediately after Der Speigel, the source of the Maliki interview, ran the story on the wire.
Can you judge a book by its cover? Well, how about a movie? It seems that every few years a trend develops where great posters strongly correlate to great film, but without fail a movie like Smokin Aces comes along with excellent visual design and proves to be terrible. Take a run down /film’s list of the best posters of 2007 and excepting Smokin Aces which was terrible and horror films which are always, well, horror-ble. The only poster missing is the brilliant work for Funny Games, perhaps 2007’s best movie poster.
Will this hold for 2008? Check Internet Movie Poster Awards’ list of 2008 posters and judge for yourself. But based on this rational, I’ll be first in line to see Choke and City of Ember when they hit theaters.
I thought, ‘Well, you know, this guy seems to be saying the things that that Richard Nixon would like to hear, so let’s see if we can’t set up a meeting’. So I wrote a memo to the president suggesting some talking points and, and Dwight Chapin wrote a memo to then-Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, to get approval for this meeting. And it came back approved.
But anyway, we walked in a half an hour later into the Oval Office and the president got up. It was a little bit awkward at first, because I’m not sure that Elvis really believed that he was there. They had a really weird discussion about a lot of things that had nothing to do with the talking points I had written. Elvis was telling the president how difficult it was to play in Las Vegas. The president said, ‘I understand, Las Vegas is a tough town’. And then Elvis said, ‘And you know, the Beatles came over here and made a lot of money and said some un-American things’. And the president looked at me, like, ‘Well, what’s this about the Beatles?’
And then the real reason for the trip finally came out as Elvis said, ‘Mr. President, can you get me a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs?’ And the president looked and he said, ‘Bud, can we get him a badge?’ And I said, ‘Well, Mr. President, if you want to get him a badge, we can do that’. He said, ‘Well, get him a badge’.
The whole article is worth a read. This is also a good time to revisit the best use of Elvis music in the last decade.
The Big Picture has been generating buzz and adoration since its launch May 21. But until today I didn’t realize that the site was more than just a blurb and a giant photo. Clicking into any of the link and you get a deep resource of large photos - the kind newspaper can’t afford to make room for.
This isn’t just valuable for aesthetic reasons, though there’s irrefutable beauty in these images. It’s also valuable for the context it provides, and the balance in reported; Newspapers are very limited in the coverage they can offer, and if a picture is worth a thousand words then no column would ever have the room do fully do justice to the Ethopian food crisis, the present situation in Sadr City or the Euro Cup.
Photo of a boy carrying plastic toy weapons, approaching a U.S. Soldier of 1-6 battalion, 2nd brigade, 1st Armored Division patroling in the Shiite enclave of Sadr city, Baghdad, Iraq, on Monday, June 16, 2008. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
