Does anyone know which musician created the music for the new Swatch commercial? It’s gets me all dancy and stuff.
Found it: It’s Five for Fighting’s Something About You (.wav) (iTunes). Whew.
Category: Flavors of the One Love
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Elevators demand poems
The The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms is a compilation from the journal that asserts “reading is the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. To that end, the selections gathered here are grouped by how long they offer escape from real time: waiting rooms need long stories, for example, while elevators demand poems.”
Brilliant user experience-oriented organization.
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Beers and Carbs
The beer wars are cracking me up, as product design meets marketing, awkwardly. Bud light, feeling out-marketed in a category they already designed for, runs ads that remind us ‘All light beers are low in carbs.’ Miller Light responds, ‘That’s right, so choose on taste.’ Here’s the beer carb chart if you’re curious. Interesting that the beer designed to be low in carbs — Michelob Ultra — is described as watery. I guess Michelob discovered water is low in carbs.
Like the author, if I’m in the mood for a beer I’ll drink a beer, even a Guinness that has twice the carbs of anything else. If I want something lighter, my Summer choice is gin and tonic (0 carbs) and in the Winter it’s red wine (lower in carbs than light beer).
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Ending with a preposition is O.K.
Chatting with some IAs recently, we wondered into grammatical territory where to my relief everyone felt passionately that it’s alright to end sentences with a preposition. One or two people said that was a rule carried over from Latin that shouldn’t apply to English. Winston Churchill illustrated the preference of comfortable convention over artificial rule:
When an editor dared to change a sentence of Churchill’s that appeared to end inappropriately with a preposition, Churchill responded by writing to the editor, “This is the kind of impertinence up with which I shall not put.”
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Baked Asparagus Wrapped in Prosciutto
Quite possibly the most delicious way to prepare asparagus. Easy too.
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Storm King
Really, it’s how museums should be. The Storm King Art Center, situated on the mountain of the same name, is 500 acres of gorgeous former farm land, now creatively farmed with long grasses and devoted to the display of sculpture. We visited on a perfect Spring day and I can’t imagine a more beautiful place. It’s about an hour north of New York City and for me will lessen all other museum experiences. Wear comforable shoes and pack a picnic lunch.
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The wisdom of crowds
James Surowiecki’s Financial Page in the New Yorker has become a must read, a one-page column connecting topics such as macro-economic statistics, currency policy, and Argentina’s promptness policy in clear, concise, enlightening language. He’s coming out with his first book next week, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Kirkus Reviews says,
Multitudes are generally smarter than their smartest members, declares New Yorker writer Surowiecki. With his theory of the inherent sagacity of large groups, Surowiecki seems to differ with Scottish journalist Charles Mackay’s 1841 classic, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which dealt with such stupidities as the South Sea Bubble, tulip-mania, odd styles of whiskers, and dueling. Our 21st-century author admits that there are impediments and constraints to the intelligence of large groups, usually problems of cognition, coordination, and cooperation. A group must have knowledge, Surowiecki states: not extensive knowledge, but rudimentary comprehension of basic fact with harmonized behavior by individual members. Finally, individuals must go beyond self-interest for the good of all. That’s how capital markets and Google’s algorithm work, and how science isolated the SARS virus.
Also see his article in Wired.
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Anita O’Day
Tea for Two (560K mp3)
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Costing not less than everything
I’m rather tired of every amateur scientist weighing in with his or her opinion of the Space Shuttle Columbia’s destruction or the entire space program, so I’m reluctant to do the same here. But tonight I walked onto the subway, sat down, and in front of my eyes was this passage from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot that moved me enough that I must remember it…
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are infolded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. -
The Fred Astaire of Cartooning
Al Hirschfeld died yesterday.
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Contract vs. Status writing
An attack on postmodern literature by Jonathan Franzen, which equates difficulty with high art. I see an analogy to design.
The original article is offline in the New Yorker, an interview is online.
‘…I think it’s kind of a natural idea. As a student, you’re handed Milton or Shakespeare, you’re told that it’s great literature, and you find it difficult to read – at least, at first. Or you’re in gym class, trying to pole vault, and the bar keeps getting raised, and you learn that the more difficult the jump the better it is. If you think of a novel as a contract between the reader and the writer, an agreement to entertain and be entertained, difficulty doesn’t make much sense…’
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The Times Sports Section
Only in the New York Times, in a story about Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France, would a sports article end with four paragraphs about wine…
‘…Leaving the red-wine district, the road headed toward Mâcon and its whites, including St. Véran, Pouilly-Fuissé, Mâcon itself and the deservedly little-known Beaujolais white…’