November 10th, 2009, No Comments »
Andy linked to this delightful alternative time line for the last forty years of popular music. It imagines what might have happened if the Beatles stayed together:
February 11th, 1978. Eventually is released simultaneously in the American and British markets. Some critics find significance in the fact that the first single off the album, “Blow Away,” is not a Lennon/McCartney collaboration but instead a George Harrison song; others find themselves underwhelmed and suggest that the Lennon/McCartney “Free As A Bird” should have been the first single instead. (”Free As A Bird” is released as the second single six weeks later.) Harrison, for his part, says that “Blow Away” was “a lot less of a rocker” before Lennon suggested an increase in tempo and “letting Ringo go nuts.” No music videos are produced for the album: Lennon says “no, that would be too much bother. We want to have fun with this. Work’s for our own stuff.”
I’m sure these have been done before, but there are a number of creative projects that extend naturally from this kind of ‘what if’ exercise. A book-length version, maybe, or writing songs that the still-together Beatles might have written.
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February 3rd, 2009, 7 Comments »
It’s been my impression that, at least in West Van and downtown Vancouver, there are fewer gas stations than there used to be? Is this true? Did a lot of the gas stations move out to the suburbs?
I rarely drive, so it’s not really a pressing concern for me, but I think I’ve observed this trend over the past fifteen years. I’m particularly aware of it because former gas station land has to lie fallow for a long time, so you become familiar with these weed-choked cement lots waiting for redevelopment.
Hang on. I did some further searching, and came up with some data courtesy of UBC. It’s not particularly current, but it confirms my observation:
The table below shows the number of gas stations in Vancouver in 1970 and 1998. There has been a reduction of 209 gas stations in this time period. However, there are 39 new sites, so the number of abandoned sites since 1970 is 248.
I also found this article about disappearing gas stations in Manhattan:
Since 1999, the number of gas stations in Manhattan has declined by 18 percent, to 207, according to the Fire Department, which maintains a record of gas stations in the city. Cropping up in their places are everything from condos to clothing stores.
It’s not surprising, really. If you have ten gas stations in a city, and get rid of five, you get more efficient and the number of possible customers remains the same.
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April 4th, 2008, 6 Comments »
We just moved into a heritage house that was built in 1912. I recently noticed something carved into the glass of one of the windows in our living room. It’s a signature and a date–May 25, 1941 1914:
I can’t make out the signature. But if it is indeed from 1914, it’s a charming footnote of the house.
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February 21st, 2008, 3 Comments »
Today I was walking and listening to a song performed live. I think it was Neil Young’s “See The Sky About To Rain” from 1971 (from a fabulous live album–he’s never sounded better). There was a long stretch of applause at the end of the song.
I was suddenly reminded that, in my childhood, I had a sound effects audio tape which included a bunch of recorded laughs and applause. How did I get this, and why did I have it?
Then I remembered. From the age of, I don’t know, 13 to 15, I rented a boatload of music CDs from an independent video store in a strip mall in North Vancouver. It was called Flicker’s Video (yes, with an ‘e’), and for a few years they had a sizable music section.
After my Dad’s extensive rock and jazz collection of LPs, Flicker’s was probably the most formative influence on my early musical taste. I’d often rent two or three CDs at random, just to see what they sounded like. I think it cost 99 cents per CD to rent them for two nights. I’m certain that I rented the sound effects album, mostly out of curiosity.
At some point in the nineties, Canadian law must have changed, preventing stores from renting music CDs. Flicker’s closed down in the late nineties. I could only find a single reference to the store on the Web–a business license application on the City of North Vancouver website. Their address is now occupied, oddly, by Clarke’s Family Martial Arts Centres Inc.
Now I’m wondering two things:
- Did the Vancouver-based founders of Flickr know about Flicker’s? Maybe the store left a germ of an idea for a name in the back of their minds?
- Did you ever rent CDs from a video store? Nowadays, renting a CD counts as an obsolete skill, I guess.
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December 26th, 2007, 8 Comments »
First off, what’s the correct term for those kind of ribbed carrot slices? Is there a charmingly-named cutting technique? You know, something like ‘julienned’.
You often see these serrated carrots in bags of frozen vegetables. I was looking at one the other day in my chicken pot pie and wondering “what possessed someone to give this carrot a serrated edge?” It feels like a very 1950s, Good Housekeeping kind of innovation, but that’s mere speculation.
And, come to think of it, why is the carrot unique (is it?) in this treatment? I can’t think of any other vegetables which regularly get serrated.
I did some quick web searches, but drew a blank. Anyone?
UPDATE: You know you’ve hit the big-time when the curator of the World Carrot Museum drops by to comment. That’s three kinds of awesome.
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July 15th, 2007, 11 Comments »
Here’s a little thought experiment for you. What if, in the early days of the Web, it became a uniform, standard practice for websites to include metadata about their designers? Here’s one way it might have looked:
The designer’s name wouldn’t be visible on the site, but would be accessible to anybody who knew how to click ‘View Source’ in their browser. The most natural analogy that I can think of is tags on clothing. You can always ‘view source’ by flipping up someone’s tag to see if their shirt came from Mexx or Tommy Hilfiger.
I still occasionally see a design credit in the footer of a site, or in the CSS file, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
How would the world of web design be different? Here are my initial thoughts:
- It would be incredibly useful for web designers for word of mouth promotion. If I see a site I like, I can find out who built it, and contact them to build my site.
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- There would be a greater general awareness of boutique designers, much the way there are boutique ad agencies today. There would be a certain cache for a company to be able to publicly advertise that their site was by, I don’t know, Jeffrey Zeldman. In short, more people might know who Jeffrey Zeldman is.
- It might change the business of web design a little. Companies might hire more designers in-house, because they’re reluctant to admit that they outsourced the work. Or it might have made outsourcing the work all the more common.
- The average web design would be a little better, and less cookie-cutter. If a designer puts their name on every site, they might be reluctant to use the same wire frames over and over again.
- People could build cool tools and browser plug-ins to, for example, generate an ad hoc portfolio of all the sites by a particular designer.
I’m a mere hack of a web designer, and I only built my first site back in 1999. I wonder if this practice was more common in the early days of the web, and went the way of all time?
How do you think designer labels would impact the world of web design?
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June 21st, 2007, 3 Comments »
A while ago I wrote about the story of Faith, Hope and Charity, three bi-planes who protected Malta from the Italian air force in the early days of World War II. Bob came by to point me toward a machinima film of the same name:
This film highlights the early phase of that conflict as it follows the lives of three RAF pilots: George Burges, John Waters and Timber Woods. These pilots flew Gloster Sea Gladiator biplanes in the heroic defense of the island against more modern Italian fighters and bombers. In all, about six Gladiators were involved in the fighting–some were cannibalized for parts–but only three could ever be scrambled for a single sortie.
I watched some of the hour-long film, and it’s really quite good. In particular, I was really impressed by the cinematography and sound work. The voice acting wasn’t terrific, but I’ve heard much worse in amateur and fan-made projects.
Does anybody know what game they used? I asked Bob, but I haven’t heard back.
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May 7th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Because I’m living in his neck of the woods (more or less), I’ve been reading some of The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Today I ran into an interesting couple of paragraphs (mine is a different translation, but the gist is the same) about the Scythians and their affection for the ganja:
Now they have a wild hemp in their country like flax, except that the hemp grows taller and stouter by far [goes on to explain how it makes good cloth].
The Scythians, then, take the seed of this hemp, and creeping under the felt covering of the tent they throw the seed on the stones glowing with the heat from the fire, and there it smoulders and makes usch a steam as no vapour-bath in Greece could surpass, and the steam makes the Scythians howl for joy. And hungry for hummus and pita.
All right, I added that last bit about the hummus, but the rest is pure Herodotus.
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March 21st, 2007, 2 Comments »
Mark points to an interesting CNet article which investigates the question “who wrote the first blog?”:
Barger, a programmer, futurist and James Joyce scholar, is not afraid to say, indeed, he’s the guy who invented the term “Web log.” In December 1997, he created RobotWisdom.com to feature entirely bloggy collections of links to articles about politics, culture, books and technology that he found interesting.
I’ve been reading RobotWisdom on and off for years, but I didn’t realize it was quite so venerable. The article goes on to describe .plan files, which I’d never heard of.
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