Covered this week; Columbus Day fades in relevance… 2019 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees… Facebook unveils ‘The Portal’, a video chat camera for people who still trust Facebook… Will Vinton dies at 70… Tex Winter dies at 96… A map of every building in America… How The Beatles logo came to be… The design behind Uber and Lyft…
October 8, 2018
The arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 to the Americas inevitably led to a genocide of the indigenous people already there. Simply, this is a fact that cannot be denied. So I understand how the traditional American observance of this holiday is beginning to fade in the cultural climate of our times.
The city of Columbus, Ohio, will not observe the controversial federal holiday honoring its namesake, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, for the first time this year.
October 9, 2018
Let the debate for this season commence… who was nominated, who got snubbed… and does any of it really matter at all?
Stevie Nicks (already an inductee as a member of Fleetwood Mac), Def Leppard, John Prine, Roxy Music, Devo and Todd Rundgren are the first-time nominees for the 2019 class, it was announced on Tuesday, joining a more diverse selection of returning acts who have not been inducted, including Janet Jackson, Radiohead and Rage Against the Machine.
October 10, 2018
Are you kidding me? Not sure if I’m going out on a limb or not in predicting this little piece of consumer electronics will bomb in epic fashion… if I’m wrong, anyone who buys one has the common sense of a pet rock.
On Monday, Facebook unveiled the $200 Portal, the first-ever consumer hardware from the world’s largest social network. The toaster-size gadget, along with a larger $350 version called Portal+, is a cross between a smart speaker, video camera and digital photo frame. But at a time when CEO Zuckerberg’s privacy and security decisions are a matter of congressional inquiry, how many people will trust one in their living room?
October 11, 2018
A pair of notable deaths to report today sadly…
Most won’t know the name Will Vinton… he was a pioneer of the animation technique known as Claymation which he held the trademark for until losing it to Nike founder Phil Knight in 2003… interesting story, read on…
Will Vinton, who used his and a partner’s revolutionary stop-motion animation process, Claymation, to win an Academy Award with an early cartoon and to create memorable commercial characters like the California Raisins, died on Thursday in Portland, Ore. He was 70.
Second, was a man near and dear to my heart as he was instrumental in helping my beloved Chicago Bulls to 6 world championships in the 90’s… along with Johnny Bach and head coach Phil Jackson, it was Tex Winter’s ‘triangle-offense’ often credited as the vehicle that allowed Jordan and Pippen to do their thing.
Tex Winter, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011, spent 60 years in the sport. He played for Southern California as a senior, coached five college teams and had a stint as head coach of the Houston Rockets before reaching the pinnacle of his career, when his offensive blueprints helped propel Jackson’s Bulls to six N.B.A. titles in the 1990s and his Lakers to three consecutive championships, from 2000 to 2002.
October 12, 2018
This is one of those New York Times pieces that I’d push forward as a great reason to subscribe. Absolutely fantastic, allows your mind to wander back in history considering all the wheeling and dealing that took place moving forward from the origin, when all this now urban land was nothing more than a blank slate. Be aware, the interactive map does not load in Safari for whatever reason… it works great in Firefox… as far as Chrome goes, I wouldn’t know because I do not patronize Google.
Most of the time, The New York Times asks you to read something. Today we are inviting you, simply, to look. On this page you will find maps showing almost every building in the United States.
Why did we make such a thing? We did it as an opportunity for you to connect with the country’s cities and explore them in detail. To find the familiar, and to discover the unfamiliar.
So … look. Every black speck on the map below is a building, reflecting the built legacy of the United States.
October 13, 2018
I’d figure that the logo origin story for any of the world’s most popular bands would be an interesting tale… the happenstance nature of the Beatles logo coming into being though is pretty unique.
Starr got this Ludwig set from a shop, Drum City, on Shaftesbury Avenue in London. Founded by a guy called Ivor Arbiter in 1929, the shop was a popular destination for jazz drummers. Arbiter later recalled the encounter with a certain “Ringo, Schmingo, whatever his name was, at that time I certainly hadn’t heard of The Beatles.”
October 14, 2018
An interesting perspective on the influence of ‘design’ over the suggested flaws and shortcomings of the Uber and Lyft platforms…
The massive disruption that ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft have visited on the taxi industry stirs up so many conflicting feelings. I use these services all the time but the larger impact of my patronage has been weighing on my conscience more lately. Not least because, from a certain perspective, it’s clear that design lies at the heart of both the genuine innovation and the disturbing dissonance of this transformation in transportation.
