Thanks for coming to this blog. If you like my blog, please come and see my new blog at:
http://smartpeopleIknow.blogspot.com
Different domain name, same good contents.
Thanks for coming to this blog. If you like my blog, please come and see my new blog at:
http://smartpeopleIknow.blogspot.com
Different domain name, same good contents.
Over at the excellent food blog, Jaden’s Steamy Kitchen, is a review of the No Knead Bread recipe that was featured in the nytimes.com a while ago. Better still, Jaden provides instructions so simple to follow, even a 4 year old can do it (and she has photos to prove it). If nothing else, have a good read of the recipe:
P.S. This article: How to Turn Cheap “Choice” Steaks into Gucci “Prime” Steaks is also highly recommended. Heck, just sample the entire blog. 🙂
Posted in food, nytimes.com
Amazon has quite a good collection of Richter books, including this one, which I quite like:
and this one, which is a fine little collection:
and this one, which covered the MoMA’s retrospective of Richter.
For this entire list, go here:
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Posted in art
lifehack.org had a pointer to this great collection of people who failed or were considered failures: They Did Not Give Up
Anyone suffering from one of life’s many setbacks can take comfort from this.
Comments Off on You don’t fail until you say you do…or Never, Never, Never, Never give up
Posted in advice
WiReD’s compiler blog has the story here
The music is poppy, the lyrics are anything but. Transbuddha has Kate Nash singing Foundations here
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Posted in music
Jim Jaramusch’s “Coffee an Cigarettes” has alot of great scenes, but this one of Iggy Pop and Tom Waits is my favourite. It helps to know something of the two singers, but it is still funny.
I really enjoy Pavorotti and James Brown’s singing. While not everyone will like the idea of singing together, I do, and if you do too, check this out:
The Addiction Research Unit from the University of Buffalo has a fascinating page on how
The prohibition of psychoactive substances has evolved gradually in the United States and in Europe. The opium-containing preparation laudanum had been widely available since the 18th century. Morphine, cocaine, and even heroin were seen as miracle cures when they were first discovered. During the mid to late 19th century, many manufacturers proudly proclaimed that their products contained cocaine or opium. A few, like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for infants which contained morphine, were more guarded in divulging their principal ingredients. By the beginning of the 20th century, problems with habitual use of cocaine and opiates was becoming increasingly apparent. This led to the removal of these substances from some products (e.g., Coca Cola) and to the introduction of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) in the United States which required the listing of ingredients on product labels. Nonetheless, standard narcotic remedies like paregoric remained readily available into the early 20th century, and Benzedrine inhalers were marketed without prescription until the early 1950s. Codeine wasn’t removed from most over-the-counter cough suppressants until the early 1980s.
Before Prohibition: Images from the preprohibition era
Thanks to Jean-Francois for this one!
Comments Off on The history of getting heroin, cocaine and opium from the corner store
Posted in quirky
Stephen Hawking – who appeared on the Simpsons – talks about being on the Simpsons.
First Star Trek, then the Simpsons: Hawking gets on all the best shows. 🙂
Over at lifehack.org is a good article on how to fail and why it is important. Some of the points are:
Go see How to Fail at Practically Anything and start failing today!
Comments Off on Go on. Fail. Alot. :)
Posted in advice
CNN has cribbed some material from Real Simple and the FlyLady to help you get your home cleaned in a flash. I don’t know if you can do it in 19 minutes, but it can be close. 🙂
How to clean your home in 19 minutes – CNN.com
Also, if you have kids (or a sloppy spouse/roommate who won’t clean up), get some baskets and keep them nearby. Then go around the house, scoop up some stuff and put it in their room. Time = 1-2 minutes.
Hey, smart people don’t spend all day cleaning…they have better things to do! 🙂
Image: James Worrell at realsimple.com
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Posted in advice
…that there is no limit to what you can blog about. This blog has a fascinating collection of old photos, including this one, which is the Portico at the ruins of Hypostyle Hall, Temple of Karnak at Luxor, Egypt, circa 1858 taken from the original albumen print by Francis Frith.
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Posted in cool
If you are looking for the very best (or at least the most expensive), then you must visit Delud Luxury Blog. For example, the truffle you see in the photo is the Knipschildt’s “La Madeline au Truffe” with a price of $250 for a dark chocolate.
Me, I’ll be happy to eat the wonderful truffles at Simone Marie Belgian Chocolate here in Toronto. 🙂
Over at The Morning News – Still Life
is a feature on an amazing artist, Martin Klimas, who as the artlcle says,
destroys a lot of clay to make his art. Combining the silence of Eadweard Muybridge’s horse pictures with the association-rich composition of a still life, Klimas breaks recognizable objects so they become something else, and stops us just at the moment of transformation.
(Thanks to andrewsullivan.com for this one)
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Posted in art
There seems to be a common idea going around, at least in North America. People who may have once been interested in hacking computers are looking past them to other areas. MAKE magazine is just one example of this need being addressed. Then there is this article in nytimes.com about people hacking IKEA. As the article puts it:
Ms. Lam, Mr. Csiky and Ms. Domanic have never met but they are nonetheless related, connected by a global (and totally unofficial) collective known as the Ikea Hackers. Do-it-yourselfers and technogeeks, tinkerers, artists, crafters and product and furniture designers, the hackers are united only by their perspective, which looks upon an Ikea Billy bookcase or Lack table and sees not a finished object but raw material: a clean palette yearning to be embellished or repurposed. They make a subset of an expanding global D.I.Y. movement, itself a huge tent of philosophies and manifestoes including but not confined to anticonsumerism, antiglobalism, environmentalism and all-purpose iconoclasm.
For the article, surf over to Romancing the Flat Pack: Ikea, Repurposed – New York Times
Comments Off on MAKE magazine, IKEA hackers, or the rise of craft in North America
Posted in design
If you are serious about cooking, or want to know the definitive way to cook something, I highly recommend Cook’s Illustrated.
It’s a great magazine about cooking as opposed to a collection of recipes. You will get recipes, too, but you will discover a whole lot more about the process of transforming food.
Plus they have reviews of cooking tools, premade sauces, menus, and much more.
When I first saw that URL, I thought: what?! I am happy to say the site is not about hacking in charities. Instead, it is:
about proving that hackers have amazing skills that can transform charitable organizations.
So if you know of some budding hackers who want to save the world and come up with some worthwhile hacks, send them
here.
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Posted in hackers
For vegans looking for some creative cooking ideas, check out VeganYumYum
And for those non-vegans who may have preconceived ideas of a vegan diet being bland, you really should check this out. Does this look bland? 🙂
Comments Off on For the Vegan and nonVegan alike
Posted in food
This is such a simple and smart idea: if you want to fix someone’s coffee for them, let them pick out the right colour on the mug before hand (“I prefer mine milky” for example). See Color + Design Blog / Color Inspiraton from Coffee and Tea by COLOURlovers
for this and a spectrum (pun intended) of colour ideas. 🙂
In 2008, The Art Institute of Chicago will be putting on an exhibit of Edward Hopper (with a bonus exhibit of Winslow Homer going on as well). Here’s an idea of what you will see regarding Hopper:
The exhibition will be arranged chronologically and thematically, focusing on the work he executed in Gloucester and Truro, Massachusetts, Maine, and New York. Approximately 50 oils and 30 watercolors, together with literature and history of the artist’s own time, will show Hopper’s place in the tradition of American realism and modernism. Edward Hopper and its companion exhibition, Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light, will provide a survey of the American realist tradition and chart the growth of modern subject matter—from Homer, America’s first modernist, to Hopper, the nation’s best known 20th-century realist.
The blog Your Daily Awesome often has some great posting. A recent one is The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries
The libraries are stunning. You have to go see.
Posted in architecture, culture
The globeandmail.com has been good enough to set up a searchable database of wine recommendations based on Beppi Crossariol’s wine columns found regularly in their paper. You can search the database in a number of ways, including wines under $10 (you will find around 20 bottles). Some of them are wines I mentioned earlier (like Corten from Moldova) but others are new to me (including some tetra pak ones, no less).
The other nice thing about this is that you can find the wine, and then go to the article. Beppi’s a good writer with good and varied taste: the articles are worth a read, too.
Check outThe Wine Butler
There are lots of great ideas and fantastic drawings over at gapingvoid. I really liked this section: how to be creative
Touchgraph can do a very interesting visual representation of your social network ala Facebook. For example:
To try this yourself, go their web site TouchGraph | Products: Facebook Browser
The good folks @ do a great job of presenting information on Web 2.0. They have presentations on RSS, wikis, blogs, social networking, and other topics. If you want a nice example of how to explain this information, go to their site:
Common Craft – In Plain English
P.S. Here is a YouTube version of one of their presentations.
James Fallows over at the Atlantic.com reviews and recommends: “A Flat World, A Level Playing Field, a Small World After All, or None of the Above?” by Edward Leamer of UCLA. There is a link to the article, as well as a summation of it, as well as a critique of Friedman. Quote:
* When I asked Friedman on the show why he said on virtually every page of the book that the world was “flat,” when he knew very well all the reasons it wasn’t, he disarmingly said: In the columnist game, you don’t sell things 51-49. You decide what you think is right, and you push that all the way. So, he could have more accurately said that the world is “flattening,” but that wouldn’t have had the ooomph.
For more, see James Fallows (September 07, 2007) – Golden Oldies: the world is not flat
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Posted in ideas
This page CSS from the Ground Up | Web Page Design for Designers © is a great tutorial on CSS for people like me: new-to-the-topic (I hate the terms “dummies” or “noobies”…ugh.)
If you are going to make web pages and blogs and wikis, now you can make them attractive and easy to read. 🙂
Some of them don’t seem so bad now, while others are STILL ugly. Actually, the comments make you realize that the cars weren’t just ugly, but dangerous and deficient. Perhaps the article should be titled: The World’s Worst Cars.
It’s a fun read, and if you had one of these cars, you might cringe a little. 🙂
I blogged about this site before: HassleMe
It’s a great idea, but I think they need to make it more timely. Until then, based on my experience, I would recommend others ways to be reminded to do things.
Sadly, Luciano Pavorotti died today. A fine appraisal can be found in at nytimes.com, including this quote (I added the bold):
By natural endowment Mr. Pavarotti was essentially a lyric tenor, ideally suited to lighter roles in Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi requiring lyrical grace and agile passagework. Yet his voice, like everything about him, was uncommonly large. With that big throbbing sound, he was tempted into weightier repertory requiring dramatic power and heft, like Calaf in Puccini’s “Turandot.” Some opera purists maintain that Mr. Pavarotti erred by straying from the lyric terrain. Don’t tell that to anyone lucky enough to have heard him sing “Nessun dorma” in his prime, not just as a signature aria for televised stadium concerts, but in the context of a full production of “Turandot.” Wow!
See: Italian Operatic Artistry at Its Finest – New York Times
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Posted in music, nytimes.com, opera
If you are like me, you like your books lean and concise (and good, of course). But if you are also like me and you find it hard to get such books, then consider: LazyLibrary. They have the goods.
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Posted in culture
I love this movie: great direction, story, actors, and without a doubt, great music.
As the actor says: that’s some mighty fine pickin’ and a singin’!
You can find out more about the movie here
Robbie Dingo has produced this fantastic video using Machinima software and Second Life to recreate Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting. It is impressive.
Thanks to Aaron Kim to pointing this out!
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Posted in art, cool, secondlife, youtube
…is the title of this web site, and it’s true. You can learn to design cool stuff at Before & After magazine. What’s more, if you read enough of their articles, you will learn how to communicate more effectively, and not just from a typographical point of view. B&A have a way of clearly describing how to make things better. If more sites were like this one, the web (and print) would be FAR better.