This is a great set of portraits of artists associated with / from the 1980s. I like this one of John Lurie, but there is everyone here from Cindy Sherman to Robert Mapplethorpe to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

This chart is getting alot of publicity on blogs that I read:

But as this post points out, Why a [U.S.] Big Mac costs less than a salad : Contrarian, it is “chart junk”. Specifically, why is a pyramid used? At best it should be a bar. But using a pyramid, you can overemphasize subsidies to meat and dairy and visually distort the actual subsidy. That isn’t to deny that meat and daily don’t get alot of subsidies. But there should be no need to change the chart to represent that.

I would also argue that a salad in Burger King — where I eat salads — does not cost more than a Whopper (roughly equivalent to a Big Mac). So I don’t know if the comparison holds. A salad in a restaurant other than a fast food restaurant will cost more than a Big Mac. But that has to do with alot more than meat and dairy subsidies.

That all said, I think it would be ideal if people ate more vegetables.

This: Featured Recipe: Spare Ribs With Olives, Lemon and Rosemary – Bitten Blog – NYTimes.com, is delicious. It seems quintessentially Mediterranean to me, with lemons, olives, and garlic. It’s simple to make, but the result is sophisticated. It’s the kind of recipe that you make over and over again.

I agree with Mark Bittman: you want to use good olives, as well as good olive oil. When I made it, I used a combination of the black oil-cured olives and the big and fat calamata olives.  Use your favourite, as long as they are fresh and tasty. I used dried rosemary — rosemary dries well — and I went with a teaspoon of chili flakes (use more if you like more heat). I also used water instead of wine: the flavour from the lemon is quite strong and most wines may be overpowered. That said, a wine that would compliment the lemon could provide a very rich sauce. I drank a richer, golden chardonnay with this dish to counterbalance the acid from the lemon. A good reisling or a Soave or even a fuller rose might go well with it. For that matter, a really good cold glass of water would be a perfect accompaniment.

Another thing I did was substitute some of the ribs with smaller pieces of chicken. I am glad I did this. The combination of chicken and ribs on my plate made the dish even better. I had chicken legs, but I think the next time I would go with chicken thighs (because they are smaller and richer in flavour). The chicken is thoroughly infused with the flavour of the sauce: the left over chicken would make a superb sandwich or a great addition to a salad with a lemon or creamy dressing. Plus I think the chicken adds to the wonderful sauce that results. If you wanted a real stew, you could poach some fish or shellfish towards the end of cooking and end up with a paella-like dish. But part of the charm of this dish is its simplicity, so less may be more.

I also took some of the liquid, added some water, and used it as the base for some couscous that I had along side the meat. I would recommend you make the couscous on the dry side: there was lots of sauce at the end of cooking the ribs and chicken, and a drier couscous could soak that up. That said, I think a nice bowl of rice or even bread would be a great way to use up all that lemony good sauce.

Needless to say, I recommend you make this. Another great thing about this recipe is that come spring or fall, or anytime in between, this will be a good dish to prepare and enjoy.

(Great shot of olives from jurvetson’s photostream on flickr.com).

Regardless of who the leading official is and what the scandal is, one way of a leader spinning it in their favour is to take a number of approaches at the same time. One approach is to aggressive attack the accusers, to go on the offensive, rather than be on the defensive. Another approach is to dilute your accusers attack by attempting to minimize it with big numbers and a broader perspective. (As in,  “it is terrible that that incident occurred, but we dealt with thousands of other incidents successfully”).

That was what I thought when I read this: Vatican Sees Campaign Against the Pope in the NYTimes.com

I also thought this: parties that engage in such activities are usually in bigger trouble than we know (yet).

Now, that does not mean the Pope is in trouble. But it is starting to look like it.

She & Him give “You Really Got a Hold on Me” a soft indie/C&W spin on the classic, “You Really Got a Hold on Me” here:

And I must say I like this version. That said, I like this version best. 🙂

Smokey can do no wrong.

As media becomes increasingly digital, it’s becomes very difficult to have scarcity when it comes to artistic creations. And without that scarcity, the amount creators and producers can charge for their work is limited. Which leads me to the story of this play in the NYTimes.com: ‘The Demons’ – 12-Hour Play, and Endless Bragging Rights. Notice how the play is discribed:

“Every theater season has its must-must-must-see show, the snob hit that separates the true sophisticates (at least in their own minds) from the cultural chaff. New York will have a doozy of a contender this July: a 12-hour production of a grim Dostoyevsky novel that will be performed only twice, in Italian (with English supertitles), in a warehouse on Governors Island, reachable only after a ferry trip and a 20-minute walk.”

The lack of shows, the length of the play, the location of the play, the language of the play: all of it points to a degree of scarcity. This is not the Metropolitan Opera, broadcasting to the world and over big screens in public places. This is a play that will be very difficult to get to and get through. That is part of it’s charm, at least for a certain audience. And for that, they will be able to charge top dollar, I believe.

Then consider this: Yum Printable Home Cooked Meal Gift Coupon by empapers on Etsy.  It looks like this:

You just print it and give it to the person who could use a well cooked meal (e.g., students, people moving or renovating, folks having a difficult time, parents of new borns, and every day people you love to spend time with!). Of course you have to spend a few more bucks on the food, but hey, even a simple meal given freely and generously should be appreciated by good family and friends. All you needed before was the invite…now you have it.

What do you get if you use the work of Vermeer as the basis for a photo essay set in Vietnam? If you go to jan banning‘s web site, you will see. Banning has taken the composition and other aspects of famous Vermeer painting and set his Vietnamese subject matter to it. I recommend you go see the site for that, but really, he has some other great photo essays as well, including one on Bureaucrats and another on the survivors of force labour on the Burma and Sumatra railways.

All the photographs are well done, and the essays are strong. I’d include a sample here, but it’s all locked down in Flash.

Easy! Throw the output of my Yahoo Pipe: Toronto Grocery Deals from Toronto on the Cheap into your RSS reader. The URL is http://pipes.yahoo.com/bernie_michalik/weeklytorontogrocerydeals and is extracted from the feed of the excellent web site, Toronto on the Cheap.

From the great blog, Iconic Photos, here is a photo of Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s:

And this one is over 50 years later:

Coincidence?

It seems odd to state that Michelangelo is declining, since it is relative to the ascent of Caravaggio, at least according to this article in the NYTmes.com. It’s also not true that Caravaggio has suddenly come out of nowhere. But it is interesting to see how a certain fatigue has likely set in when it comes to Michelangelo and how likely it is that Caravaggio is the beneficiary of that.

I have always thought it fascinating how the reputation and interest in artists waxes and wanes over time. This is an opportunity to see one develop.

(A photo of one of Caravaggio’s works from Virginia Della Rosa’s photostream on flickr.com)

I like how this story in Advertising Age starts:

“Last week, a client told me that they don’t allow employees to access YouTube at work. “Do your employees carry cellphones?” I asked. The answer was yes, of course. Well then, most of them already have access to YouTube – right in their pockets.”

Very true. And so I would add this additional reason to the five very good reasons listed in the article:

• Providing social networks to employees can be a competitive advantage to employers. You can attractive people more easily if they know you allow employees to use social networks and your employees will spend less time accessing them on things like their cell phones and therefore be more productive.

Check out the article in Advertising Age, especially if you are blocking or considering block social networks at your work location.

This clonal mojave yucca:

According to wikipedia, such plants originate from one single ancestor, so one plant can essentially clone itself and live on and on. (Clonal colonies are fascinating in themselves.)

Rachel Sussman has a portfolio of the oldest living things, such as the yucca pictured here and may other things, including 2000 year old trees and much more. Well worth checking out. (Found via Swiss Miss).

That President Obama has appointed Edward Tufte “to the independent panel that advises the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (i.e., the team of inspectors general who track how stimulus funds are spent)” may not seem like a big deal. But if they listen to him, it could make a big difference in how organizations communicate in general. That may seem like hyperbole, but many companies and organizations looked at how Obama ran his election campaign in 2008 and the tools and technologies and approaches he used, and made that a model for how they themselves should use these things. With any luck, the work Tufte does could be another model for people to use. Here’s hoping!

For more on this, see this good post: How Legendary Information Designer Edward Tufte Can Help Obama Govern from The Gaggle Blog at Newsweek.com.

There are a few artists: Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, among others, who can write and sing love songs that someone other than teens can associate with. There’s a complexity to their music and the relationships that they sing about. I think of them as love songs for grownups. There’s nothing wrong with love songs aimed at teens: it’s just not something I can relate to. But songs like this, Sheryl Crow’ s My Favorite Mistake, I can relate to. Here it is:

Can be seen here:

It’s an automated dashboard displayed on a Sumsung 460UXN-2 for the team at Panic to glance at for the latest and greatest info on their work and things related to it (like transit information!). This post describes all the information on the screen, as well as how they went about building it. Anyone who works on IT projects should consider building one of these.

Two good things:

1. a very substantial write up of Joanna Newsom in the NYTimes.com
2. a number of tracks of her music, including “Sprout and the Bean”

I am a big believer in the Couch Potato investment approach, and I highly recommend it everyone who finds money a) useful to have b) boring to think about. Now there is an ethical investment option. You can find out more about both here: The Ethical Couch Potato « Canadian Couch Potato.

If you want to aggressively manage your investments, then this is not for you. For everyone else, I highly recommend it.

It happens to the best of people, like John C. Dvorak.

If it does, don’t panic. Go to twitter, click on “Settings” on the top right of the page and look for “Password”. Go in there and change your password to something more difficult. Also, see “Connections”? Go in there and revoke any applications you don’t recognize or want.

You can find more tips here and here.

According to the site, English Russia,

In the end of 2009 the Uzbekistan Agency on Press and Information has initiated a criminal proceeding against a talented documentarian photographer and the first camerawoman in the country – Umida Akhmedova. She was charged with the “slander and outrage against the Uzbek people” in her photos. She is threatened to be sentenced to 2-3 years of correctional works or to 6 months imprisonment.

This is a shame: her photographs appear to be anything but slanderous and outrageous. Here’s a great shot of an old woman

and another of a young girl

There’s more at the English Russia site (as well as all sorts of fascinating stories from that side of the world).

If you liked the great job that was done in reanimating a scene from the Matrix, then you will love this video, The Force Unleashed. Equally well done.

As a side note, there is a site Bricks in Motion that looks to bring together Lego animators. Here’s hoping the result is more great legomation.

This article, Using a three-folder system to keep e-mail under control in Unclutterer is a good approach to simplying the time it takes to process email. I use this approach and have been for some time. Before I used to try and file my email in different folders, but it just took too much time and it didn’t help me much in locating lost emails. Having less folders is better.

However, before you file it, ask yourself: can I delete this? If you can, do it. That will save you even more time, now and in the future.

I think this explains itself: Israeli Raid Canceled After Facebook Leak from The Lede Blog on NYTimes.com.

Awesome. The author of this blog, in an attempt to better understand women, decided to watch 30 Chick Flicks in 30 Days and write about the experiment. As he says:

“How far would you go to understand the opposite sex?

That question has helped to fuel the idea behind this site, “30 Chick Flicks in 30 Days: One Guy’s Exploration of Romance Through Movies Loved by Women”.

First, you should know that I’m that “guy” exploring these films. Second, my name is Nick. I’m a husband, and have been for seven years. Third, no one put me up to this. And fourth, I’m not some professional film critic. I live in a small town in southern Oklahoma. I work in communications.

This little experiment will begin Friday, Jan. 15, 2010, and conclude on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2010—the day before Valentine’s Day. That’s 30-straight days; 30-straight chick flicks.”

I think there could be a book or movie here. Certainly it’s a good looking blog. Go see. C’mon….you know you are intrigued.  🙂

There’s a good article here talking about how JP Morgan thinks China has a huge labor problem. The article is worth reading, but a chart says a thousand words, so here it is:

Clearly labour costs are rising greatly. But is it a problem? That depends. It’s not like Chinese wages were high to begin with: if you are a Chinese worker, this is not a “problem” at all, at least in the short term. In the longer term, though, it will create some interesting dynamics both in China and outside when it comes to labour and capital worldwide.

Found at Andrew Sullivan’s site.

This is the teux deux web site: What deux yeux have teux deux teuxday? It’s associated with Swiss Miss, as you can see.

Now check out this site: TeuxDeux Clone

Can you see much of a difference (other than the word “Clone” appearing?). Nope, me either. But if you hadn’t heard of the original, you might overlook the clone part (“clone” being a fancy way of saying “rip-off”, I guess.) I’d like to think there is a good reason for ripping off the original site, but I can’t think of one right now.

Sad.

Now if you think the site is a great idea, then go to the original.

In this Funny or Die.com video (made by Ron Howard, no less), we see Will Ferrell, Chevy Chase, Ron Howard, Jim Carrey, Fred Armisen, Darrell Hammond, Dan Aykroyd, and Dana Carvey team up in one video, all playing the U.S. Presidents they did so well. It’s like a Beatles reunion! Well, not quite, but it is still remarkable (and funny, too). It’s for a good cause, but even the most rapacious of bankers will enjoy this video.

Great stuff.

There are all kinds of great thing you can get at 20×200, include great art for $20. Check it out. (Found via Swiss Miss).

It could end up with bad things being downloaded and run on your Windows PC. See Lifehacker if you want the details. In general, if a web site asks you to do something unusual, pass on it until you do some investigation.

With so many coffee shops offering cappuccinos and other old world coffees, it’s hard to imagine that once only places like Seb’s Cappuccino would have been selling them. The great thing is that places like Seb’s still exist and still offer great cappuccinos, according to BlogTO. So head over and enjoy. (The canolis look amazing too).

Related to the “Glow” post below, Kevin Kelly at The Technium has a post on the Game-ified Life. What does that mean? In a nutshell:

“It’s the last third of his talk where Schell really gets going. He offers a vision where ordinary life is gameified. Cheap tracking technology turns whatever you do into a “game” that accumulates points. As the gameification of life becomes ubiquitous, you go through your day racking up points and “getting to the next level.” Instead of getting grades in school you graduate to the next level. It’s a head spinning scenario, with lots to love and hate, but well worth considering.”

We all do this in a limited way now: I play “Punch Buggy” with my kids, people on the subway try to stand in the proper place on the platform to get on the train faster and get a seat easier, drivers try to find the fastest way home. What our new technology allows us to do is to play more sophisticated versions of those games. For example, it would be interesting to have a game that allowed you to track your carbon footprint for the day, week and month, and provide you with suggestions on how you could lower it. To make it more interesting, you could compete with out people who have the game. I can imagine all sorts of games like this. To people who don’t like games or bets, it may sound stupid. But for people who do like games and bets, it is a way to make the mundane more interesting. I can see it taking off.

RWW has a review of Glow: Location-Based “Feelings” for iPhone. Essentially you can enter your feelings on your iPhone, and Glow will somehow aggregate them with the feelings of others and put them on a map. It’s an interesting idea, and like Twitter or other augmented reality software, this one could end up taking off. If….and here’s the thing…it could take off if you could get more from it then you put in. One of the things I thing any such app should do is provide I high benefit/cost ratio. Users should think: wow, I want to use this, and even take the time to submit my status, because it provides me with alot of value. For example, with Glow, if enough people go to a place and report positive feelings, others might want to go and check it out. (Likewise with negative feelings).

I also think that iPhones and other devices should be able to gather some of this information automatically. Either through better sensors or through even faster inputs (e.g. if I had a bluetooth device I could quickly tap to send a signal).

Regardless of where this technology goes, I expect to see alot more of it in the future.

According to The New Republic and others, we now know who Carly Simon was singing about in “You’re So Vain”. Turns out it was David Geffen, the head of her record label at the time. Apparently Simon “resented the effort he put into promoting rival Joni Mitchell”. As it turns out, Joni Mitchell also wrote a song about David Geffen: A Free Man in Paris.

Here’s the latter:

To me it’s sad that Americans are latching onto Danny Williams going to the U.S. for heart surgery as some sort of proof that the Canadian health care system is deficient compared to the U.S. system. Indeed, at the Health Care Summit that the President recently held, Obama indirectly mentioned him.

To me,  Danny Williams actions prove nothing about the Canadian health system. Indeed, this article by Andre Picard, Williams’s heart surgery choice was based on ignorance in the Globe and Mail, argues that much better and more conclusively than I can. I highly recommend it.

Rather than pull down the Canadian system, Americans should focus on shoring up their own system, with its excess costs and millions of uninsured, and not pay attention to the likes of Danny Williams. I was going to say more about him, but the less said about him, the better.

Don’t believe me? See Your Mom Is On Facebook. Which gives me an excuse to post this:

The more I read about Facebook and the more I use it, the more I wish there was something else that did what they did but alot better. I believe alot of people feel the same way. So where is the competition?

I didn’t think so, until I read this at the Torontoist blog, which said that:

District 9 was directed, written, edited, and scored by Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell, Julian Clarke, and Clinton Shorter, respectively—all Canadians. (Blomkamp was born in South Africa but moved to Canada as a teenager.) The film, however, was produced by Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films (New Zealand) and financed by QED International (USA).

I think it is a great film, period. It’s good to see so many Canadians on it.

Erykah Badu needed to get Paul McCartney’s permission to sample from one of his songs. What could have taken days or weeks traditionally was done in hours, most by using twitter.

Now, it’s not all magic, of course. Badu who contacted Lenny Kravity, who connected her with Paul’s famous daughter, Stella McCartney. Those are likely not people who are going to respond to just anyone’s tweets. But the directness and quickness and connectedness of twitter is something that everyone can experience. This is just one famous example of it. Expect more to come.