For several weeks it seemed the Shaker thang going down around here was just another flash-in-the-pan San Francisco quirk:
But now our correspondents are chiming in about similar happenings from the sidewalks of Milan:
…to the boutiques of Shibuya:
Now the pattern is clear. For Spring 2007, woodcut is the new black. You heard it here first.
Hemingway wrote a classic 6-word story, supposedly on a bet: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” (In my book, just one supershort story tops that: Julius Caesar’s classic “Veni, vidi, vici.”)
Flickr’s Caterina Fake sent out a call for new 6-word stories. What fun! I threw these into the mix:
Vogue announces: police brutality is sexy. The new black is black-and-blue.
And here I was, hoping it was passe.
Lilia Manguy busted arse with three teammates for nine months to create a cleverly-designed, well-implemented tool that won an award for outstanding final Masters’ project this year at my alma mater, Berkeley’s iSchool.
What they built has the potential for plenty of social good. The software’s called “iBuyRight” [Web site, Master’s project report] and it helps people make purchases aligned with their personal values. When you’re out shopping, you can scan a product’s UPC code using your camera phone, and iBuyRight will display on your phone’s screen information about the product and the firms behind it, how they treat their workers, associated environmental and health concerns, etc.
Now Lilia claims that Dara O’Rourke, a Berkeley assistant professor who suggested that the team implement this idea, is attempting to remove Lilia from the project and take it over. Lilia says O’Rourke’s core justification for this is that he came up with the idea behind the project. She says that, months into the students’ work building iBuyRight, he filed a draft patent application listing himself as sole inventor.
Today David at Boingboing pointed out this series of Garfield comic strips from 1989. It’s remarkable for a Garfield story because it’s dark and depressing, and it’s not trying to be funny.
Here’s why this strip blew me away: Jim Davis clearly took the idea from one of my favorite cartoons, a magnificent Italian short from 1977 called “Valse Triste.” There are just way too many strong similarities. (It’s just 7 minutes long and I highly recommend viewing it: see the YouTube box at the bottom of this post.)
In the cartoon a cat awakens to find himself abandoned in his vacant, dilapidated ruin of a house. The starving feline sees visions of the people he loved offering him food, but the hallucinations disappear whenever he approaches them. That’s precisely what happens to Garfield, and Davis uses the same visual past/present layering technique used in the 1977 cartoon. (“Feline Fantasies” appears in Bruno Bozzetto’s film “Allegro Non Troppo“, a decidedly un-Disney homage to Disney’s “Fantasia.”)
This is not the darkest Garfield story. When I was little I found what are still two of the most disturbing comic strips I’ve ever read. They appear in the 1984 book “Garfield: His 9 Lives” which tells stories of Garfield’s past and future. In “Primal Self,” Garfield appears to viciously murder a doddering old lady. The other is a photorealistic strip entitled “Lab Animal.” (I wish I still had this book! If you know where I can find these strips online please point me to them.)
March 2006 – Dunkin’ Donuts is acquired by the Carlyle Group and two other buyout firms. The Carlyle Group, headquartered on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol Hill, pays George’s daddy for public speeches promoting Carlyle interests.
The firm has many strong ties to the Washington establishment as well as to the Bin Ladens and to powerful politicians and businesspeople in Asia and the Middle East.
Carlyle’s massive investments in a range of weapons firms, oil corporations and media companies ensure it handsome profits from U.S. military incursions in the Middle East.
June 2006 – Dunkin’ Donuts publicizes a new plan to “rapidly expand to nearly 15,000 US locations by 2020,” according to the Boston Globe.
July 2006 – George W. Bush’s handlers arrange a photo opp at a Virginia Dunkin’ Donuts, where George passes out Dunkin’ Donuts products to reporters and carefully poses with the Dunkin’ Donuts logo in plain view.
Unkind Donuts, indeed. Webloggers are writing about this; I’d say it’s time for the old-school media to point it out.
Arthur spotted this ad last week in a Stockholm subway station.
Just when I thought I could stop writing about flash mobs, more strange news emerges.
For the record: it seems I wasn’t the first person to use the words “flash” and “mob” together. Apparently “flash mob” was a name used in the 1800s to describe an Australian subculture of female prisoners, based on the term “flash language” for the jargon these women used. For whatever it’s worth, the 1800s Australian term “flash mob” referred to a segment of society, not an event, and had no other similarities to the modern “flash mob” term.
Details at Boing Boing and at Derek Lackaff’s weblog. (Note that the postcard image at the top of these entries was created in 2004, not in the 1800s.) More about the 1800s “flash mob” subculture in Tasmania here.
My dear friends Mie and Dav Yaginuma are parents as of 9:20 this morning. Tesla Rhea Yaginuma weighed in at 7 pounds. Welcome Tesla, and congratulations. You must have won the baby lottery to have these parents.
Above: Dav lactates in a demonstration of solidarity with Mie and love for Tesla. More photos: 1, 2. Details and even more photos: kokochi.com.
Tesla is healthy and beautiful, and her Mom’s happy and recovering well. They named her after Nikola Tesla. Experts confirmed that Tesla is not, as originally feared, the reincarnation of Kenneth Lay.
Update: Patrick Roddie took much better photos.
“Put the ‘D’ at the end, you get ‘Unkind Donuts,’ which I’ve had a few of in my day.”
– Merl Reagle, in Wordplay
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