Typealyzer

I have no feelings or ideals.

ISTP - The Mechanics

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generelly prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Pyrotechnic Imagination

Arthur Lubow has a nice piece on Cai Guo-Qiang in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine.

For those that don't know, my blogger avatar is from Cai's piece Inopportune: Stage One when it was at MassMOCA.

No Title [a poem]

I’ve struggled with waltzes.
unable to block out
the iambs of heartbeats
or depart from
hurried spondaic steps
stepping on feet, and then
tripping over anapests

---

Hurray! Norm returned to the blogosphere, dropping a bunch of posts like peanut shells.

Being Drawn Out

For whatever reason, I've not wanted to post things. There's been a lot of thoughts, some great experiences, but no desire to share.

Until today. I stumbled back to the Drawing Center's site, and spent a good 20 minutes drawing. So simple, so appropriate, so satisfying.

It's not the guy next to you looking, but...

It's been awhile since there was a potty themed post but this clip from coohunting was too good to pass up (yes, it's midterms!). Greeting the gentlemen at the Sofitel in Queenstown, New Zealand. It certainly beats lame urinal advertising and is definitely popular with the guests. Even without the gawkers the urinals themselves are pretty nice.

Environments Are Landscapes When Manufactured

Mary Fugle, my warrior abs instructor gave me the heads up on the new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Only today did I find out that the title shares an uncanny resemblence to my friends Daniel and Faust.

Dan and Faust run the relatively popular blog at Manufactured Environments. The new BMA exhibit is Manufactured Landscapes, photography by Edward Burtynsky. From the press release:

Burtynsky, a modern-day counterpart to nineteenth-century landscape photographers, examines the intersection between land and technology, creating images of unorthodox beauty. His subjects include locations that have been changed by modern industrial activity such as mining, quarrying, rail cutting, recycling, and oil refining.

This seems right up Dan's alley, so perhaps there will be a convergence of Environments and Landscapes in Brooklyn before the show closes in mid January. You can see more samples at Space & Culture.

Waiting for Buffalo and Other Musical Notes

I got a pleasant suprise last Wednesday. My good friend, and NYC welcome party (back in '98), Bennett called to say that Pyramid was going on tour and would come to NY for two shows. Thursday night they're playing at Arlene's Grocery and Saturday they'll be at Scenic. I plan to be at both. Waiting for Buffalo is one my favorite songs from the album The First American (also available on iTunes!) By the way, I really like their splash screen, it has an effect of blowing a frosted glass clear.

----



Last Saturday, my friend Peter celebrated his 50th in style. He threw at party at Sin-é and had his favorite band Antibalas play. It was great political Malian music with requisit shout outs Fela.

Peter actually spent his birthday getting arrested at the White House on Monday, along with Cindy Sheehan. The coup de gras was when women activists in Turkey referenced the arrests when she went to talk about the treatment of women in Iraq. Way to give Karen Hughes hell Peter! His son Rob did the excellent card.

----
Lastly Ratzlow and Jean have launched a music blog, This is Cool, Check it Out. Jean was the one that got me turned on to them as a way of discovering new music last January. So far I really like Au Revoir Simone and Bettye LaVette (which looks to be a gem comperable to Solomon Burke's Don't Give Up On Me).

What's in a name, or an area code? 917press explained

My faithful friend, inspiration and reader Steve gave me a generous shout out, but inquires to the origin of this blog's name.

917 is an overlay area code assigned to New York City. Back in the day, all of New York City was 212. NYC always had a high concentration of phones, so when dialing, by definition on a rotary, 212 was the quickest area code to dial, as compared to 800. As numbers kept accumulating, the outer boroughs (Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and ShaoLin) were exiled to 718 (a much longer dial, no?). Since Manhattan has so many letters, I now often refer to it as the 212. Then, as mobile phones emerged, they were given the area code 917. There is now 212, 718, 646, 347, and 917 in the Five.

As some of you know, I resisted the mobile lifestyle until 2003 when I moved to the Heights (Brooklyn that is)and gave up having a landline. In fact I used a rotary phone, and really felt the pain of 718. Nonetheless, when, in 1999, I moved up to the Heights (in this case Washington) my landline number had a 917 exchange, which always led to assumptions that this was my mobile number. No no, no no no... though I lived in Manhattan, I was denied the 212. This kind of slight would happen again in a few months when Manhattan, north of 135th Street, blacked out in July. Above 125 gets no love, and yes, I've gone through two blackouts in New York.

So anyway, I started feeling a bit disconnected from Manhattan, though present all over, well at least throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. So later that summer, I embraced my nomadic area code when I made a chapbook of poetry published by 917press. Thus is the tale.

More on the history of area codes. And here's the mess we have now ever since they abandoned area codes having either a one or zero in the middle.

Pencil Revolution

Cnet of all places, linked to this gem: Pencil Revolution: Pencil Philosophy: wooden wisdom, product reviews, ephemera, etc"

The first piece I read about the Blackwing 602, was so loving that I want to go to an art supply store after work.

"I began using Blackwing 602 pencils as an art student years ago and have never found another pencil to compare with the richness of the lead. They give a deep dark black without being overly smudgy, and all the silvery range of greys are there too. The feeling that comes to mind is 'smooth' and it is a pleasure to put this pencil to paper."

For all the talk about digital futurism, the internet has done wonders to connect folks to kindred geeks obsessed with the non-digital.

----

In a separate note, I was very interest in how Podcasting has found it's way into museum tours and church sermons. The Times had this on "godcasting" I'm hoping that Clint takes a stab, and maybe I'll start listening to Lutheran sermons again. Then MoMA got in the act two-fold. First there was this spring's emergence of Art Mob's audio tours of MoMA, now MoMA has made their own audio tours available as podcasts. Download it here, or through iTunes before your next visit.

Octopods in Action! , or, Pulpy Pulp!

I'm fond of descriptive phrases such as "foody with goodness"; here quite rightly, this is all pulpy with pulp...

Many of you know my fondness for octopods and squid... so I was also excited that Boing Boing had this link to a gallery of Octopus related pulp magazine covers. Too much fun.

The gallery explains, "The octopus, known as poulpe in French, polip in Hungarian, and polypous in Classical Greek, is justifiably the essence of pulp."

Engadget 1985

Summer issues so often suck. But Engadget pulled a rabbit out today. Let's blast back to the cutting edge of 1985, and see what the buzz was about. Among the gems are Apple's $7000 laserwriter, and Windows 1.0.

I'm going home to refold laundry

I needed this tip yesterday. How to fold fitted sheets. Seeing it here, it looks so easy. Thanks Lifehacker.

Y292,271,023.045K Compliant

Boing Boing had this tip from Kevin Kelly's COOL TOOLS on making your Mac Y10K Compliant. Unfortunately the hack doesn't really work, but the commentary is stellar and much more interesting than the original post.

I didn't check the math but all 64-bit computers should be able to calculate the date for 292 billion years. Mali, can you double check this in finite math? That's peace of mind for you lucky G5-ers, and at least a consolation to the XP-64 crowd (way to go Joe!).

The rest of us need to make sure we have 64-bit machine by 2038 or else the computers will think it's 1970 all over...again...

Tasty Strips from the Bacon Tree

My friend Steve, Lomnes that is, has picked back up on the blog roll. On Thursday he posted some jokes that then led to a little jokography. Sunday he wrote about wireless connectivity with a gem of a factoid on the origin of bluetooth, and Monday was a great run down on rechargable batteries.

Steve and Judie are going to be in India, so I'm hoping they post some travel musing too. To quote another Steve, "Great stuff from a fine man."

Digital Sainthood for Norman Teigen

The Seattle Post Intelligencer cartoonist David Horsey reports the results of their burning question of what the new Pope should do. Honorable mention at the end is my dad's suggestion:

There were plenty of other suggestions for what a new pope should do ranging from less fancy clothes for the curia to a new gym for St. George School on Beacon Hill (all politics is local, even church politics). E-mailing all the way from Hopkins, Minn., Norman Teigen offered this very novel idea: sainthood for Martin Luther.

Read it.

[Update: 23.04.05: I didn't see this complation of responses]

Goodbye Plunger

It's been a while since there's been something new in the toilet world to report on. But the NYTimes has a piece on American Standards' new Champion Series toilet. It creates a higher pressure flush with less water, thus doing away with a plunger, while being smaller than the compressed tanks you find in restaurants. But "Champion"? I like a good bowel movement too, but it's really not a competition.

Also of note is this great site: Toilets of the World, a much more dedicated site for all things toilet.

A "Man Date" is not a directive

Discussed all over the city yesterday was the NYTimes' article on "man dates." The idea is that straight men going on outings that would otherwise, or ideally be with a woman are on a man date, and thus have some social navigating to work out. Though the concept was new to Times readers, followers of Kick.Ball.Action got a primer on Friday.

So my pals Joe, Jason, and I went on a guy outing Sunday: we saw Frank Miller's Sin City. It was good old fashion adolescent male fantasy pulp action. We saw bloody action, naked chicks, and all sorts of proper delinquency to disqualify us from a "man date."

Despite the dudity of Sunday, on Mondays, the three of us are taking a men's session of Pilates... no escaping the man date label here. It's held a private gym, where at the same time--as if to purposely turn up the gender irony, some ladies are taking boxing lessons as we are pilating. Any one who thinks Pilates isn't as taxing hasn't tried it.

We're going to keep it up for a few more weeks at least. In the mean time, we'll try to balance this out with some mean time: hit a few in the cage, muse about the NBA playoffs, discuss power tools.... (in truth, none of us swing a bat too well, and Whitney's a bigger fan of hoops than Joe and more enthusiastic about power tools than Jason).

Pension Fund For Artists

Wired has an interesting piece on the Artist Pension Trust. The concept:

Create a pension plan for artists by gathering a collection of their works and gradually selling them off to build a cash account. Over the course of their careers, some artists would succeed wildly; most would fail miserably. By spreading that risk of failure among a large pool of artists, Shniberg figured he could provide financial security to a group of workers unaccustomed to a safety net.

Mashups + Search Engines = More efficient searches?

YaGoohoo!gle!

Relatedly, there is also the annotated NYTimes, all the news that's fit to link.

[update] if you didn't know, here is a description of a mashup.

Stick Up, New York!

I like urban art, graffiti and such (though not so much the scratchiti in the subway) and I'm going through a grafedia phase as you know. But I'm also fascinated by stickiti. This is a great intro and gallery of NY Stickers. And Boing Boing had a blurb too.