Not just an app for iPhone or iPod Touch, but BlackBerry and other smartphones too. It from  Natalie MacLean, and the feedback on iTunes has been very positive. It also looks great and seems to have a comprehensive listing of wines. The perfect thing for those times when you get to the store and you think: should I get the same thing I always buy, or should I go for something different and if so, what?

Did I mention the app is Free? A free app that also will save you from buying bad wine you hate and helping you find great value you didn’t know was there. Sounds great! I’m looking forward to trying it on my Touch.

For more details, see Mobile App | Natalie MacLean

Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was attacked again, and as you can see, it is terribly damaged:

Kyle Chayka at Hyperallergic.com raises a good question:

Will the attacked print be like Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors” and become a new piece of art with the broken glass? It almost looks like a halo.

I think this is a great idea.

This idea also got me thinking that perhaps Serrano should make copies of the image, put sharp tools and hammers in front of it, and invite religious groups on a regular basis to come down and destroy the copy, thereby turning the copy and themselves into a form of performance art. Even as they are attacking a work of art, they become another one.

I am a big fan of the NYTimes.com Lens blog. The photographs are always great, including Julie Platner’s photos of American Neo-nazis. But when I look at what she writes here, Julie Platner Describes Her Coverage of Jeff Hall, the Slain National Socialist Movement Leader – NYTimes.com, it makes my skin crawl.

While the circumstances of their lives may be difficult, what they turn to is terrible and what they hope to achieve is just as terrible. They may seem pitiable because of their size and their means, but the same can be said about scorpions. And they would just as soon deny the human voices of the people they hate and would put down and make suffer.

I’d be very interested in hearing the voices of others in similar circumstances that either turn away from or ultimately reject the beliefs of neo-Nazis. Those are the people whose voices we should hear and who are deserving of a photo spread in the NYTimes.com LENS blog. Not these people.

Talk about taking the lemons life gives you and making lemonade! Coke converts a traffic jam into a drive-in movie! Brilliant.

Sure, it is marketing, but it is also something that got me (and likely many more people) thinking. Why should problems like traffic jams be treated as something that has to be suffered through? It would be best not to have them, but if you are are going to have problems like traffic, why not think of ways to make the situation pleasant?

The great philosopher David Hume was born in 1711, 300 years ago, and he is birth is being celebrated everywhere. You can find out a summary of who he was here (David Hume in 3 Minutes … For His 300th Birthday, at Open Culture) or you can look him up in Wikipedia, but much more fun is watching this 3 minute cartoon on him:

And if you go to this link (YouTube – Three Minute Philosophy – David Hume) you can find a number of other three minute philosophy videos that can get you some basic and fun knowledge. Epistomology FTW!

It’s fresh Coke in the first bottle Coca-Cola used 125 years ago! As the Selfridges web site says:

In celebration of Coca–Cola’s 125th year anniversary, the very first vintage Coca–Cola bottle–the Hutchinson–has been reproduced. This collector’s item comes in a special anniversary box.

More details here. Not bad for £1.99.

A short film about love that looks something like this:

Found here at Open Culture, where you can find more information about it.

Taken from the film 100 x 100: IBM Centennial Film which can be found here (along with this poster) at the blog, The Casual Optimist

I hadn’t heard of Flash Graffiti before as a term, though I have seen other artists project onto walls and embassies. (I remember in particular there was an artist during the apartheid era who flashed images at night on the South African embassy in London.) It is quite subversive, and though it is harmless as a ghost, still, it makes its mark, as this article, shows: Chinese Army Unhappy Over Ai Weiwei ‘Flash Graffiti’ from ANIMAL:

As if Chinese authorities weren’t angered enough by the rash of pro-Ai Weiwei stencils popping up all over Hong Kong, someone is now projecting the same message on unauthorized locations around the city, including the barracks of the People’s Liberation Army.

(Discovered via Andrew Sullivan.)

…can be found here in Slate Magazine. He sums up Chomsky’s statements scathingly at the end of his article like this:

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn’t even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

If you were persuaded by Chomsky and his line of thinking, you should also read this by Hitchens. His argument against  Chomsky and others critical of the attack on the Osama bin Laden is robust and persuasive. A must read.

If you want to create a KML file of your Google Maps, do this:

1. Go to your map
2. Right click on the hyperlink “View in Google Earth”
3. Select “Copy Link Location” from the menu
4. Open a new tab in your browser and paste the link into your address bar
5. Before pressing the ENTER key, change part of the URL from “Output=nl” to “Output=kml” and leave everything else the same and press ENTER
6. Save the file.

At a minimum, this makes a good backup file for your map. But better still, you can edit it in a text editor and import it later. Google Maps is great and very usable, but sometimes only a text editor (or some custom code) can change the file the way you want.

Have fun!

P.S. I learned this from another page, but I lost the link! Thanks to whomever blogged about this before. Great tip!

Over at Techlicious is a good run down on Five Tech Products that Will Be Dead in Five Years.

It seems reasonable, if by “dead” the author means “they will no longer be a mainstream product”. In truth, what happens is that products get displaced or absorbed, rather than die. You could argue, for example, that PDAs like Palm Pilots are “dead”. But really, they were displaced by other products. I know people who still use them, and I’d argue that the iPod Touch I have is simply a PDA+.

For example, I think tablet computers will displace eReaders, but if the price of eReaders dive, there may still be a market/use of them. Kids may get them in schools, for example. Likewise, DVD/CD-ROMs may be going extinct, but separate media, be it 5.25″ soft floppies, 3.5″ hard floppies, etc, will always be with us. I also think that the fragility of such devices might mean that they eventually get displaced by something as well.

It’s a good article, and a good example of where technology is heading. In the long run, all technology becomes extinct, be it 5 years or 50 or more. Predicting it’s demise is fun, but looking at what displaces and absorbs it is much more useful.

Namely, ask questions first and follow the law. Case in point: Mozilla. Recently Homeland Security requested Mozilla to take down the MafiaaFire Add-on. What did they do? (See here.) Rather than automatically comply, they took some extra time and proceeded as follows:

Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants, and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order. Thus, to evaluate Homeland Security’s request, we asked them several questions similar to those below to understand the legal justification:

* Have any courts determined that the Mafiaafire add-on is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings)
* Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify.
* Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down the Mafiaafire add-on is based?

Having received neither a response or a court order, they did nothing.

Was this so hard? Did it require alot of legal resources to do this? It appears not. The question I have is: why don’t more IT companies do this?

I hope you like this: you can expect to hear it all summer, blasting out of every car filled with young people as they drive by going “boom…” 🙂

P.S. I knew Nikki Minaj could rap (and she is superb here) but I hadn’t realized how “pop” she is. Then I went looking at other videos by her and she does pop really well. No wonder her views on YouTube are so high: she’s a cross over giant.

YouTube – Nicki Minaj – Super Bass

You can read it here: Guernica / Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death. One thing that struck me was this:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

I am really surprised Chomsky would make such a poor comparison. First off, bin Laden was not the former head of Pakistan, so the comparison is not apt. Secondly, there is a better comparison, and that is with Orlando Letelier. Similar to bin Laden, Letelier was a (Chilean) refugee living in another country (the U.S. in the 1970s). A foreign country (Chile) sent agents who killed him with an explosive planted in a car. The end result of that was that one of the assassins, Michael Townley, was extradicted, and instead of a death sentence or life in prison, he ended up getting placed under the Witness Protection Program. There is suspicion that the C.I.A. withheld evidence (see ASSASSINS AND SLEUTHS – NYTimes.com) in the case. Perhaps that is how Americans would react, which, I suspect, is how Pakistan will react.

So that would be a much better comparison, and it is based on something that actually happened. Also it is one that Chomsky would certainly be aware of. Why he didn’t make it I will leave to you to decide.

Sandra Boynton makes great kids books. Now they have been turned into apps for your iPhone/Touch/iPad! And at a very good price, too. I think this is great: more kids and parents should know about these great works and enjoy them.

What I don’t think is great is how I see this child interacting with the “book”:

What I loved about the books of Sandra Boynton is that they are books: I spent many a time reading them to my kids, and then having my kids read them. In the video, the book is turned into a toy, and the reading aspect seems to be downplayed. This is not to fault the app, and it is certainly not the only way to enjoy the book, Moo Baa La La La! from Loud Crow Interactive Inc. But it would be a terrible shame if parents, instead of reading the books to their child, just handed the iPad to them instead. And it would be worse if the child played with the app rather than practiced their reading skills.

Parents, read to your kids, and make sure your kids read too.

Is now on sale for a great price, here: Amazon.com: The Ultimate Collection – Sade. Only $9.99 for 29 great songs. It is hard, looking at this photo, to think that I have been listening to Sade since the early 1980s. Her music, like her appearance, is timeless.

P.S. What’s remarkable for me is that this is 9.99 here, but 14.99 on Amazon.ca, even though the Canadian dollar is on par or better than the U.S. dollar. And on iTunes, it costs me 17.99! Maddening! (The pricing, not the collection or the artist. :))

David Hicks has taken the results of the Canada’s 41st Election as mapped out by the CBC, and has given it a humourous twist!

Great stuff! You can see his photostream here: Flickr: ALL_CAPS’ Photostream.

Is this print from 20×200:

There’s 600 prints, going for $100 each. And there are others as well. It is certified, numbered and signed by the artist. Check it out.

 Roots of War in Popular Song (forest of no return), by David Byrne

In order to print that page and not the one they were going with, the New York Times literally had to stop the presses. (Something they rarely do.)  FishbowlNY has the details on it.

It is easy to overlook Stephen Brunt’s essay on boxing in this weekend’s Globe and Mail (Requiem for boxing: the decline of the Sweet Science). You’d be missing out on very fine writing if you did. Brunt is one of the top writers at the Globe as it is, and he is never better than when he is writing about boxing. What makes it better still is that he is writing about the decline of something he clearly loves. Even if you are uninterested in boxing, you can appreciate it for the thought and feel and craft he brings to it.

As for me, I remember being very young and watching the three Ali-Frasier fights. I saw most of Ali’s bouts, and lots of other boxing as well, but nothing left as big an impression on me as watching those fights did. When Brunt describes how Frasier literally wanted to kill Ali in the ring, that does not surprise me. The toughness, the ferocity, and the excellence that both men brought to each fight was breathtaking. Arguably some of the greatest sporting events of the 20th century.

Brunt reference a great painting by Bellows of the Dempsey vs Firpo fight. Here it is:

No doubt a photo capable of shaking all sorts of preconceived notions. 🙂 From George Bernard Shaw | This Is Not Porn – Rare and beautiful celebrity photos

I lived in the St. Clair area of Toronto in the 1990s when there were two movie theatres and three big book stores. Sadly, they all closed down in the next decade (although a Book City opened in that area recently). I always felt it was an undervalued neighborhood, overshadowed by the more bustling Yonge and Eglinton area just north of it.

Along St. Clair are a number of corporate offices, including one of my favorites: the Imperial Oil building.

Located at 111 St. Clair Avenue West,  it is going to be converted into a condo, the Imperial Plaza. It’s a beautiful 20th century modernist structure with an interesting history.
Here’s the wikipedia entry on it:

The Imperial Oil Building, designed by Alvan Mathers, is a skyscraper outside the downtown financial core of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Located at 111 St. Clair Avenue West, the 21-storey building was built in 1957 as the headquarters of Imperial Oil, Canada’s largest oil company.

The architectural model for this building was the original design for the Toronto City Hall. Nathan Phillips, Toronto’s mayor in 1955, rejected the Mathers and Haldenby design for city hall and opened the commission to an international competition that was eventually won by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. Imperial Oil, in search of a design for their Toronto head office, bought the design from Mathers and Haldenby.

During construction, catering to the wealthy local residents, welding rather than the then-customary and much noisier riveting technique, was used. The building, on completion, was the largest all-welded steel frame building in the world.

When Imperial Oil assembled the residential properties for the site, Isabel Massie, owner of a house on Foxbar Road, at the rear of the site, refused to sell, despite being offered what was, at the time, a princely sum for her house. Until she died, her property jutted into the Imperial Oil parking lot, an icon of a citizen’s refusal to give in to a corporation. Her estate sold the house to Imperial Oil, which demolished it.

The interior layout is based on the ‘core’ concept, with most offices having windows and with the various service elements (elevators and meeting rooms) clustered in the centre.

With its thick walls, relatively small windows, a built-in cafeteria, a location separated from major targets, and large offices that could be converted to wards, the IOB was designed to be used, in the event of nuclear attack, as an alternative hospital.
The Imperial Oil Building from the west, giving a better view of the observation deck at its top.

The building sits atop a high escarpment with a commanding view to the south, and before the construction of the downtown banking towers, in the late 1960s, the top floor observation deck was, at almost 800 feet (244 metres) above sea level, the highest point in Toronto; on a clear day visitors could see the rising spray from Niagara Falls, across Lake Ontario.

The ground floor lobby features a famous mural, “The Story of Oil”, executed by York Wilson in 1957. Three years in the planning and construction, the two panels of the diptych are each 25 feet by 32 feet; the left-hand side of the mural depicts the nature of oil from its prehistoric origins, while the right-hand panel portrays the modern benefits of its exploitation.

The mural is made of vinyl acetate and is mounted to the wall in such a way that vibrations in the building will not be transmitted to the artwork, possibly causing it to crack. In addition, a ventilation system behind the same wall prevents moisture collecting on the material. Crawley Films of Ottawa was engaged to document the artwork’s realization.

As announced in a press conference on September 29, 2004, the company has re-located to Calgary, Alberta (some corporate operations moved to the Esso Building at 90 Wynford Drive in Don Mills, Ontario). The building has been unoccupied for some years and is listed for sale. Soil testing before the property was listed found that sand about 40 feet below the parking lot was contaminated with heating oil that had leaked from an underground storage tank. The soil was excavated and taken away for cleaning.

In preparation for the sale, the owners told Deer Park United Church next door that they would no longer supply building heat to the church, effective July, 2008. This led the dwindling congregation to leave the church and share space with a nearby Presbyterian church. The Deer Park church building also remains vacant as of January, 2010.

The building was sold in the summer of 2010 to condominium developer Camrost-Felcorp.[1]

The converted condo will now be known as Imperial Plaza.[2]

Over at BlogTo, they had a chance to wander around the building before work started on it, and you can see that here.

If you do get a chance, you must see the mural. It is fantastic. People who live in this condo should be quite fortunate indeed.

Here’s to the growth of St. Clair, and the appreciation and new development of the buildings along the way.

In this article, Secret Fears of the Super-Rich – Magazine, The Atlantic points to a big study that shows it doesn’t (no surprise), but it shows why.

For the first time, researchers prompted the very rich—people with fortunes in excess of $25 million—to speak candidly about their lives. The result is a surprising litany of anxieties: their sense of isolation, their worries about work and love, and most of all, their fears for their children.

An aside: once being a millionaire meant you were rich. Now it seems you need to have $25 million dollars to be rich.

I read this article in 1995:

PLANNING A CAREER IN A WORLD WITHOUT MANAGERS THE OLD CAREER TRACK? OBLITERATED, AS YOU KNOW. BUT VISIBLE IN THE RUBBLE IS A NEW WAY TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL CAREER. HERE’S HOW IT WORKS–AND HOW TO MAKE IT WORK FOR YOU. – March 20, 1995

Back then, this was all new, or seemed to for me, even though I had been working over 10 years at the time. When I first started working, you had the staff and the staff had a manager (boss). It was highly hierarchical and not very fluid. Then the new “world without managers” came along, and it has been that way since.

There are still people who don’t see this is how the world of large organizations work (or should work). But when you look at people who work in big business, the article says you have four roles: top executives, followed by resource providers, project managers, and the talent. I would add a fifth role: sales person. The execs set the direction, the sales people sell the talent, the resource providers and project managers care and feed the talent. That’s it. If you work for a large company, you are one of these. You might say: oh no, I am the manager/director/associate VP of XYZ. But if you look at what you are doing, chances are you focused mostly on doing one of those roles.

It’s easy: type in the business word you use and unsuck it will give you the proper word. One of the terms I hate is “socialize”. I typed it in here:
Socialize | Unsuck It . What is your overused jargon? Type it in here: Unsuck It and unsuck it actually allows you to email it to someone if you want.

(H/T to Andrew Sullivan for this).

You have important things to do? So did Churchill. You might not be very good at it? I don’t think Churchill thought that he was either. You are too old? Churchill was over 40 when he started, and as far as I know, did not stop (though he did take breaks from it from time to time.) Regardless, the lesson is: you are not too old to start, you are not too busy either, and you will find it rewarding, regardless of how good you are. Just like Churchill.
If Churchill could do it, so could you.
Churchill as an Painter « Iconic Photos

Sounds crazy, yes? If anything, it’s a strong argument for doing some form of exercise everyday, even if it is a short brisk walk or skipping the elevators and escalators and taking the stairs. I think you should do more than that, but in the meantime, check out:
Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week? – NYTimes.com

As this NYTimes.com essays argues in The Case for Memorizing Poetry, there are lots of benefits to it. And before you write the idea off, consider these two mythbusters:

Myth No. 1: Poetry is painful to memorize. It is not at all painful. Just do a line or two a day.

Myth No. 2: There isn’t enough room in your memory to store a lot of poetry. Bad analogy. Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar.

A good and cheap way to improve your life. Shakespearean actors do it all the time. Why not you?

Sadly, not categorically against it, at least not in 2006. I don’t think he has changed his opinion either. Closer to September 11, 2001, this would have made him popular. Also very sad.

See If torture works… « Prospect Magazine

Can be seen here (from the great blog, Thought for Food)

Can likely be seen in this chart:

No doubt the Republicans will argue it another way, but if you are Obama, I am guessing he is going to argue for dropping the Bush tax cuts for people making over $250K, adding some sort of surtax for the Affordable Care Act, and try to shut down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For more on this, and the graph, see: The 3-Word Phrase That Signals Obama’s Intentions on Taxes – Joshua Green – Politics – The Atlantic

Why should you make your own? Easy:

“50% more sauce, 50% of the cost, 100% more pleasure.”

Make something simple and delicious. Make this.

(Delicious photo of tomato sauce from the photostream of Aelle
(See photo for Creative Commons rights)

Over at zenhabits.net are the Four Laws of Simplicity, and How to Apply Them to Life.
First, the laws themselves:

1. Collect everything in one place.
2. Choose the essential.
3. Eliminate the rest.
4. Organize the remaining stuff neatly and nicely.

Second, you can see how to apply them the zenhabits way by reading their article.
Third, you may find after reading that that it is harder than it appears. If so, here are some approaches to deal with this.

One approach to the “almost everything is essential” problem: get rid of big items. For example:

1. Collect everything in one place but do it on a piece of paper. Group essential things together. You can sketch this out: don’t try to list everything.
2. Choose the essential. Since everything is essential (you think), work hard at putting some big things in the non-essential pile. Go for things that take up alot of space, or take alot of time to manage. It may not be many things, but it could make a big difference.
3. Eliminate the rest. You know what to do.
4. Organize the remaining stuff neatly and nicely. Having gotten rid of those big items, you should have room now.

Another approach to the “almost everything is essential” problem: get rid of duplicate items. For every item you have multiples of, pick one of them to be essential and get rid of the rest.

A third approach is to either deep store or lend out items. When you do, write down on a list somewhere what you dealt with this way. You will likely find in six months or a year you haven’t missed them.

A fourth approach is keep like things together. That way, if you cannot get rid of things this time, at least when you eventually have to, you have already achieved the first step of having everything in one place. Also, you likely will find from the way you use things that some things you use all the time are essential and other things are not since you never use them.

A fifth approach to eliminating things is to say: how hard/expensive would it be to replace a certain item? If the cost is negligible for you, get rid of it. Better yet, lend it out, give it as a gift, recycle it into something else.

One great performance and something that you want to experience.

Here’s Julie-O.

YouTube – The KO Hip-Hop Cello-Beatbox Experience: Julie-O

Then you might want to read this: How to Keep Dropbox Employees’ Hands Off Your Data – ReadWriteCloud.  There’s some limitations there that you should be aware of. If you have serious concerns after reading this, the article also has alternative solutions/services for you to consider.

Worth a look.

Speaking of side projects, here’s a great example of artist collaboration featuring the work of Micah Lexier + Christian Bok side by side (from  BOOOOOOOM!)

Brilliant.

I am a big fan of Micah Lexier, and given the bike rack and the telephone pole, I am sure this is taken in Toronto.