Author: Jeff

humor

Eighteen People You're Scared Of on Facebook

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GQ magazine has a great humor piece on the eighteen different types of people on Facebook that absolutely frighten you. We all know these people (and if we have an FB account have a few of them as friends):

  1. The Relentless, Disingenulously Humble Self-Promoter
  2. TheNew Parent Represented, Creepily, by a Picture of Their New Baby
  3. The Person Who Never Met a FB Quiz He Didn’t Like

These are just three of the eighteen. I’m sure you’ll recognize, and chuckle at, all of them. I sure did.

ramblings

Happiness

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Happiness – what it means to be and the pursuit of this blissful state – has fixated me from the beginning of my time here on Planet Earth. I love how in the Declaration of Independence only “the pursuit of happiness” is promised, not happiness itself. It’s not something inherited, but it can be given, or earned, or never achieved. It is a magical state. It is a kaleidoscope, a cornucopia, it embraces and mocks, and the list goes on and on.
I’ve especially been thinking about happiness lately because its the holiday season which always makes me take stock of my “happiness.” It’s a trip to be bombarded by “happy” imagery for a month straight while potentially “unhappy” events, say like your company laying off another 10% of its staff (which happened last week) swirl about the air.
Earlier this week, I read an article in the 11/16/09 edition of the New Yorker (in an article titled “Slow Fade”) about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s time as a screenwriter in Hollywood and I didn’t know that “happiness” would be a central theme of the article but it was – Fitzgerald started out a huge literary success and then that success dwindled and was never duplicated again leaving him despondent, vain and embittered. In the article, Fitzgerald is quoted as saying,

“life is essentially a cheat…and that the redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

That to me that type of sentiment comes from the “it’s not the destination but the journey” school of thought. Is it true? Sometimes yes actually for nothing gives you greater pleasure than knowing you accomplished what you thought was an insurmountable goal but always? That is an answer about which I am not so sure. I do not deal well with absolutes.
My “journey” right now is geolocated in NYC and the Gray Lady yesterday had an article today about how Science Magazine has rated New York the most unhappy state in the union. Super!
One part towards the end of the article sums up the study and the city best:

Seriously, isn’t restlessness, even outright discontent, often a catalyst for creativity? We’re from the Harry Lime school. If you’ve seen the film classic “The Third Man,” you will remember that character’s admonition: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

W. B. Yeats’ output would not have been possible without his desire for unrequited love. I get it. Difficult circumstances can act as a fulcrum and allow greatness to be squeezed into existence. NYC’s tides ebb and flow over and over again and every generation has (no disrepect to da Vinci for I’m about to focus on one micro-microcosm of what goes around and while it is great to throw a great party, I know it’s not timeless like a statue) their Copacabana, or Max’s Kansas City, or Studio 54, or Marquee, or Beatrice Inn, or Bungalow 8, or TenJune, or Pink Elephant, or Santos Party House. Reach for the moon with those unhappy hands for while you very well might miss, you’ll still end up in the stars.
Note: I take no small comfort in knowing that NJ and CT were better than NY because they ranked 49 and 50 in the study. Yes, NYC did not even rank 50, it ranked 51. In the District of Columbia, which was counted in the study and ended up at 37, people are happier than in the Big Apple. Go figure.

art

12,000-Faceted Diamond

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The NY Times has all sorts of specialty blogs devoted to different topics and their Lens Blog – which features photography, video and journalism – just had a great post which tells the story of the Yankees recent World Series victory in time lapse photography – 12,000 shots to be exact. Sick.
Mr. Caplin, who is just 26, said he wanted the montage to seem as if it had been made a hundred years ago — “You know when you look back at old movie footage and they were cranking it? And it was really jumpy and slightly faster than normal?” The game is played to Chopin’s Waltz No. 5, a score Mr. Caplin chose to complement the antique sensibility of the piece.
I love the punny way that diamond – baseball and jewels – has been used. I love the movie and itself. Hopefully you will too. Happy Friday.

humor

Christmas Hero

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By now, as I’m a little late to the game in posting this video, you may have seen the video of how former Disney Imagineer and special effects wizard Ric Turner installed 21,268 lights and LEDs and turned his entire front yard into a game of Guitar Hero. To start the game, you ring the doorbell. I love when people pull off hacks like this – I just wish I was handy enough to do it (and the thing is I probably am, I’m just too lazy to learn).
The demo in the video below shows a kid rocking out to Eric Johnson’s Cliffs of Dover which I too have played GH style:

Sick. Love it.
Via Sara

ramblings

Not That Bad of a Place

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Today I became a landowner in our nation’s third state which is what my friend Adam refers to as “The Great State of New Jersey.” At some point in 2010, my family and I will head west across the Hudson and this lifelong New York resident (first Long Island for my formative years, then Binghamton for college and then NYC for the last decade) will be forced to gets a Jersey license. This exodus is not happening immediately though so I’ll save my thoughts about what this move means, first from a leaving Manhattan for the Burbs point of view and then from a leaving New York for New Jersey point of view, for a future post. Let’s just say I’ll probably be writing that one late at night, full of scotch, listening to Ryan Adam’s “New York, New York” along with Sinatra’s “New York, New York” on repeat. It’s not going to be pretty.
This post’s title came from a title – agent that is – at today’s closing. Once I had signed the final piece of paperwork, the seller said to me with a twinkle in his eye, “Welcome to the highest taxed and most corrupt state in the Union.”
< Insert your salt-in-the-wounds metaphor here >
After I made a few jokes about how I’m from Long Island and therefore (as the Daily Show put it a few months back) a conjoined twin of the aforementioned corrupt land, the representative from the title company said, “Its actually not that bad of a place. And the town you are moving to is one of my favorites.”
Not that bad of a place. That should be the new state motto for New Jersey. Seriously, if Borough President Marty Markowitz can make all sorts of fun slogans up for Brooklyn (see below), then why can’t Corzine as one of his last acts in office put up signs up and down the Turnpike saying “Welcome to NJ: Not that bad of a place!”
Sign 1:

Sign 2:

Sign 3:

This could be my first contribution to my eventual new home. It’s the least I could do.

ramblings

On Being Thankful

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It’s Thanksgiving, our national holiday of overeating mixed with family agita, and the Gray Lady has a good op-ed about it. It says in part:

It’s worth raising a glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who’ve gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning. What would our lives look like if they held only what we’d planned? Where would our wisdom or patience — or our hope — come from?

From the last Turkey Day to this one, a lot has changed in both my personal and professional lives. It’s true: the one constrant in life is change. While this change may often bring sadness and unhappiness, it can also brings delight and joy. The op-ed closes with:

Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.

Gobble gobble.

music

Roc de Blak

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Nobody usually likes to wait but today the adage “good things comes to those who wait” is an apt one for me. While awaiting my lunch order’s completion, I grabbed the latest issue of the Village Voice and in skimming through it, I learned about Blakroc, a collaboration between The Black Keys and 11 rappers (such as the RZA, Raekwon, Mos Def, Q-Tip, etc) who were gathered together by Damon Dash.
The Black Keys play music that sounds “old.” By that I mean that I thought they were a late 60’s / early 70’s band that I somehow did not know when I first listened to their tunes a few years back. The last time I made a mistake like that was when I heard Lenny Kravitz for the first time. While I haven’t gone to a Black Keys show yet, I would definitely say I’m a fan.
I’ve just spent the past 30 odd minutes on the Blakroc site listening to and watching various smokey recording (and other) sessions and boy oh boy would I have loved to have been present while these tunes were being crafted. I love the idea of cross discipline collaboration and it was amazing to see classic Midwest bluesy rock mixing with strong New York styled (Wu-Tang inflected in particular) rhymes.
The Village Voice article about Blakroc mentions “Judgment Night” as an example of a Rock / Rap crossover which made me think both of that soundtrack and movie, something I haven’t done in a long time. I believe that this crossover example will be more critically and commercially successful. It’s probably not going to ascend to the Aerosmith / Run DMC “Walk this Way” level but who knows.
My favorite part of the VV article is when Dan Auerbach, the singer/guitarist of The Black Keys, compares watching Raekwon record to “watching Bob Dylan – just someone who has such a command of their art form.” Raekwon himself says that the Blakroc project “is like brilliant acid.”
The album drops officially on Black Friday (aka the day after T-Day or 11/27) and I can’t wait to listen to all 11 of the tracks. I’m betting that the album is going to make me a huge fan of some rapper I haven’t heard of before and as new music is always good music, I’m excited for that possibility as well.

humor

Batman owns Superman

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Recently it was called to my attention that this blog hasn’t had a picture attached to a post in quite some time and after doing some digging, it turns out that the last time that I actually posted a photo was back in February. It’s time and boy do I have the pic.
You’ll need to click on it to see it in all of its beautiful late 90’s animated gif style glory.

Thoughts on super heroes
Thoughts on super heroes

Let’s just say that if you love super heroes and/or find Christian Bale’s intensity assuming or just flat out love to laugh, then this pic is especially for you. It’s time consuming but worth it.
Via Chris

space

The Moon is Alive!

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A giddy sort of excitement swept through me today when I heard that significant amounts of water has been found on the moon. A NASA mission that plunged a rocket into the moon’s surface last month on purpose to possibly detect water in fact detected about 25 gallons of water in the form of vapor and ice.
“The moon is alive,” a mission scientist says. What a groovy thing to say about the lifeless rock that controls our tides.
While this is not the first time that water has been found on the moon, previously water was found in such an insignificant amount that it did not really matter at all.
This time around though things are different: this amount of water is enough to start one dreaming about setting up moon bases and then having them drill for water to survive. Carrying water is a heavy proposition – any who has hiked a decent distance will agree with that statement – and flying hundreds of gallons to the moon would be super expensive. The long time dream / fantasy for all moon explorers is that you wouldn’t need to transport water to the moon, rather you could just drill for water when you get there. Now, that seems to be at least a real possibility. Moon tourism in my lifetime? That has moved into the possible but not probable category, which is definitely better than “No way Jose.”
Via ma femme

movies

Too Many Holiday Movies 2009

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Just in time for the holiday season is my list of movies that I will hopefully see either in the theatre or much more likely on my television screen at home. This is the third time I’ve made such a list and its been helpful in remembering what movies I at least at some point wanted to see. I add “at some point” because Speed Racer was on my “Too Many Summer Movies 2008” list and I do not think that I will ever watch that drek.
So, here in no particular order are the 11 films I would like to watch this coming holiday season: The Fourth Kind, The Men Who Stare At Goats, Precious, Pirate Radio, Up in the Air, The Slammin’ Salmon, Avatar, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Sherlock Holmes, Me and Orson Welles, The Book of Eli.
The two that I’m most excited are Avatar because I just cannot wait to see if/how James Cameron transformed the movie experience (which is something some critics are saying he did – I mean, he did make Aliens, T2 and Titanic) and The Slammin’ Salmon because its from the “Broken Lizard” comedy troupe who also made Super Troopers, Club Dread and Beerfest, some of the funniest movies that have been made over the last decade.
Like how I’ve done it in the past, when I see a movie, I’ll cross it off the list and possibly write a review blurb as well.
UPDATE: I went to see an Avatar 3D IMAX showing back over the holidays and it just blew my mind. I literally needed about a day to recover. Ever come in from the backyard into a house on a really bright, sunny day and feel that everything in the house is just washed out colorwise? Things look faded, not as sharp, and it takes your eyes a few minutes to adjust to the dimmer indoor light before you see that the couch is still the same, the carpet is still the same, etc. Well, after witnessing this 3D extravaganza, I looked at the real world for about 24 hours the same way – it felt washed out and faded. I basically had to strong arm my buddy Erik to come along with me (and boy was he glad he did) and while the movie had been out for weeks already, when we got there about 45 min early there already was a ridiculously long line. After seeing the movie, I could understand why and I feel that the hype, and ticket sales, were justified. James Cameron is responsible for about 12 billion dollars of movie ticket sales with just two movies – Avatar and Titanic. Sick.