Month: June 2014

Kid Icarus.

“In the pundit rush to assign a ‘why’ and a ‘how’ to Eric Cantor’s surprising loss in Tuesday night’s primary, there have been a lot of theories thrown about…[T]he more convincing explanations are the ones that, trite as it may seem, are based on some variation of Cantor having gone Washington/gotten too big for his britches/lost sight of the little people back home.”

Examining the various reasons for Eric Cantor’s unexpected fall last Tuesday — like many, I spent the evening mainlining the sweet, sweet schadenfreude via Twitter — DKos’s David Jarman argues it all comes down to hubris. “The climb through the ranks through treachery and intimidation, and then the sudden realization when you’re at the top that you’ve burned through all your allies, is almost allegorical.”

For my part, I’d argue the primary reason for Cantor’s petard-hoisting was best explained back in 2007 by August J. Pollak (which I also posted in 2010.) Play with matches, eventually you’ll get burned.

Teach a Fisher, Man…

“The Knicks’ particular big-market pathology has historically been the acquisition of players whose names look great on the building marquee…The James Dolan era took this existing predilection, distilled it down to its essence, and smoked it in a crack pipe using lit $100 bills. While previous Knicks regimes chased name players, they also seemed to know some details about those players beyond just their names.”

Upon the signing of journeyman guard, former Laker, and Jackson disciple Derek Fisher as the new Knicks coach, Grantland‘s Netw3rk evaluates what it means for the troubled franchise and concludes it’s probably a good thing: Phil’s taking over. “If you’re a Zen Master trying to reform a soul-dead wasteland, you don’t need high priests; you need acolytes. And if Jackson’s freedom to make moves translates to on-court success, who knows, maybe it even lasts.”

Birth of Diana.

“Worth1000 hosts a variety of photo-editing and illustrative contests. One of their contest series, Superhero ModRen, challenges users to incorporate superheroes into fine art pieces. It’s fun to see the contrast of modern characters we know and love placed in classic painting styles and poses.”“

Superheroes added to classic art — click through for many more.

The Idaho Way To Treat You.

“[C]yclists are probably in the right here. While it’s obviously reckless for them to blow through an intersection when they don’t have the right of way, research and common sense say that slowly rolling through a stop sign on a bike shouldn’t be illegal in the first place. Some places in the US already allow cyclists to treat stop signs as yields, and red lights as stop signs, and these rules are no more dangerous — and perhaps even a little safer — than the status quo.”

In Vox, Joseph Stromberg makes the case for “the Idaho stop” — i.e. bikers treating red lights like stop signs, etc. As a frequent bike commuter (who, like most, does this anyway), I’m all for it. “There are even a few reasons why the Idaho stop might even make the roads safer than the status quo…[It] could funnel bikes on to safer, slower roads…[and] if legalized and widely adopted, would also make bikes more predictable.”

Midichlorians? Garmonbozia… | Leland ’14.


He’s more machine now than man, twisted and evil. David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi. (Hey, it almost happened.) I’ll admit, the Sy Snootles gag cracked me up.

“You’ve been dead for around 25 years now.” Also in the Lynch department: For the new Blu-Ray collection Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery (take my money!), David Lynch interviews the Palmer family, in character. The Leland/Ray Wise one is below. It’s, er, weird…but you already knew that.

Many Words. Such Modifying.

“Of course, since none of the five main doge modifiers (much, many, so, very, such) are ever found with verbs in canonical English, all of them are candidates to modify verbs in doge: for example, much eat, many eat, so eat, very eat, and such eat would all work for doge speak. Other modifiers such as quite, rather, and even lotsa are also found more rarely in doge, under similar principles of mismatch.”

Wow. Such knowledge. Many Smarts: Linguist Gretchen McCulloch explains the grammatical principles of Doge. “What light. So breaks. Such east. Very sun. Wow, Juliet. What Romeo. Such why. Very rose. Still rose. Very balcony. Such climb.”

The Grifter Prince.

“Geithner is at heart a grifter, a petty con artist with the right manners and breeding to lie at the top echelons of American finance at a moment when the government and financial services industry needed someone to be the face of their multi-trillion dollar three card monte…After reading this book and documenting lie after lie after lie, I’m convinced that there’s more here than just a self-serving corrupt official. There’s an entire culture, of figures at Treasury, the Federal Reserve, in the entire Democratic Party elite structure, and in the world of journalism, a culture in which Geithner is seen as some sort of role model.”

A late addition to this recent and well-deserved pile-on: Friend and fellow congressional staffer Matt Stoller writes in Vice on Geithner’s Stress Test and the “Con-Artist Wing of the Democratic Party.” “The task of reclaiming democratic power will involve making work at Geithner’s Treasury a black mark on a resume, an embarrassment and a shameful episode…Americans are not stupid, and they saw what Geithner, as the head economic official in a Democratic administration, did.”

Wounded Giselle.

“[T]he fundamental key to embodying Giselle is to radiate purity and sensitivity. In the first act, she glows with an inner joy and with her love for dance and for Albrecht. She is so honest, and her feelings for Albrecht so wholehearted, that she cannot reconcile his betrayal with her soulful belief in the goodness of the world.”

In Pointe Magazine, my sister Gill explains her process for embodying (and mastering) the psychology of Giselle. (Hint: Dancing well helps too.) “[E]ven death pales in the face of her eternal compassion…Her inner joy is now a quiet sadness, but more than ever she exudes love.”

Backstream Color.

“Typically one might think of a ‘colorized photo’ as being kind of garish and tasteless, with broad one-color strokes with no regard to detail or any attempt at subtlety or nuance…But a newer generation of colorizers, such as the community of artists at r/ColorizedHistory, approach colorizing with a real reverence towards history, using their skills to eliminate the distraction of the “colorization,” ultimately bringing these scenes to life with a natural realism that hopefully connects the viewer to the past in a new way.”

A follow-up to this post: Paleofuture‘s Matt Novak discusses the art and craft of colorizing historical photos with colorizer Dana Keller. “If done well, the addition of color can help “connect” people to history. It can bridge the gap from a seemingly distant event and make it more immediate and relevant.”