Covered this week; All the 2019 Super Bowl ads collected in one nice and tidy place… Westbeth in NYC’s West Village is turning 50 soon, a profile… A Rickett’s family on the wrong side of history… Apple tells app developers to disclose or remove screen recording code… Some Prince on a Saturday afternoon… Spotify acquires Gimlet Media and Anchor…
February 4, 2019
So, to catch you up, the New England Patriots beat the Los Angeles Rams 13-3 to win Super Bowl LIII and tie the Pittsburgh Steelers for the most Titles by any one franchise at 6. But as is our custom, a Monday morning quarterback assembly of all the ads that ran during the broadcast provided by our friends at Superbowl-Ads.com…
February 5, 2019
Turns out a friend of mine from college here in Chicago, took up residence in the community described in this article upon returning to New York in the late 90’s… just thought this was an interesting piece about a community you probably hadn’t heard of before. Also seems like one of those places where it would have been cool to have followed along. Many an interesting human being inhabiting a dwelling like this over the years… I know because my friend is one of them.
When it opened in January 1970, Westbeth became the first and largest federally subsidized artists’ colony in the country. It was born during a moment of exceptionally liberal thinking in the late 1960s, when the National Endowment for the Arts and the J.M. Kaplan Fund tasked a young, up-and-coming architect named Richard Meier—who would go on to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize—with an extraordinary creative reuse project. Meier was asked to transform the massive, abandoned Bell Telephone Laboratories—where major modern technologies like the transistor radio and color TV were invented—into flexible, affordable live-work spaces for artists working in a range of creative disciplines.
February 6, 2019
Those who know me, know that I’ve been a diehard Chicago Cubs fan since 1975… I’ve watched pretty much every game, season in, season out… and I’ve very much enjoyed the path the team has traveled in the Ricketts era and often praised them for having a plan in Wrigleyville and executing it to near perfection… That said, here’s the fly in the buttermilk… and it’s not just the Dad, the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree for son Todd Ricketts either… and it’s bothersome to me that supporting the Cubs with actual dollars also indirectly supports this bullshit.
Major League Baseball and the Chicago Cubs moved to distance themselves from one of their own Tuesday, after the news outlet Splinter published a cache of racist emails sent and received by Joe Ricketts, the billionaire whose family owns the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field.
Many of the published emails, sent between 2009 to 2013, focused on a fear of Muslims and contained conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama. The false assertion that Obama, who identifies as Protestant, was Muslim and born outside the United States were prevalent in right-wing politics during his presidency.
February 7, 2019
Frank Robinson’s heyday was going on right about the time I was born, but I caught the tail-end of his playing career and then knew him as a Manager once I reached an age to get me into the game. He’s a Hall of Famer and one of the best to ever play the game. Read about some of his singular achievements here in his Times obit. Godspeed Frank Robinson.
Frank Robinson, the Hall of Fame outfielder who hit 586 home runs and became a racial pioneer as the first black manager in the major leagues, nearly three decades after Jackie Robinson broke modern baseball’s color barrier playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.
February 8, 2019
I like to draw attention to updates such as this one because I’m genuinely invested in the premise the Apple as a company, values and protects its users privacy. Not to say that some point may come in the future where I’m proven wrong, but let’s hope that day never comes. One thing I’m absolutely sure of here in early 2019 though is… my trust in Apple is complete when compared to how much I trust Facebook, Amazon, Google or any other company that derives so much of their income from how well they can commandeer the data of us.
Apple is telling app developers to remove or properly disclose their use of analytics code that allows them to record how a user interacts with their iPhone apps — or face removal from the app store, TechCrunch can confirm.
In an email, an Apple spokesperson said: “Protecting user privacy is paramount in the Apple ecosystem. Our App Store Review Guidelines require that apps request explicit user consent and provide a clear visual indication when recording, logging, or otherwise making a record of user activity.”
February 9, 2019
So let’s hit on a little Prince for a Saturday this week… through today’s post you’ll find a link to bounce over to a Spotify playlist from Jamie West that’s a compilation of Prince’s party mix (details below in the pq).
An entire mixtape of Prince tunes would do right by any party, but what would the man himself put on? Surely he didn’t just play his own music, although… why not? We do know he kept it raw and funky for Paisley Park gatherings. In a playlist he provided to the TV show The New Girl in 2013 for an episode featuring a fictional Prince party, he opens with the mid-tempo stomp of The Staples Singers’ 1974 Stax Recording “City in the Sky.” Before long we’re onto the stone cold groove of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” and the dirty funk of Ohio Player’s “Skin Tight” a song about a “bad, bad missus” in “skin tight britches.”
February 10, 2019
So, I’ve really gotten into podcasts big time here over the last couple years and one of the content creators that has really caught on with me is Gimlet Media… I’ve listened to and enjoyed ‘Reply All’, ‘Homecoming’, ‘Without Fail’, ‘Start Up’… and my favorite, ‘Heavyweight’, with Jonathon Goldstein… it’s just a great podcast about the host going back in time to right a wrong… a regret that someone has from something that happened in their past. Give it a try… Anyway, just read that Gimlet was acquired by Spotify. Interesting turn of events… shouldn’t affect anything, but still curious to see podcasts beginning to ascend as a profit center. Hoping things never go sideways.
That’s why we announced today the strategic acquisitions of two podcasting companies, Gimlet and Anchor. These companies serve two different, distinct roles in the industry. Gimlet is one of the best content creators in the world, with unique, celebrated podcast shows like Homecoming, which was recently adapted into a critically acclaimed show on Amazon Prime, and the internet culture hit Reply All. And Anchor has completely reimagined the path to audio creation, enabling creation for the next generation of podcasters worldwide — 15 billion hours of content on the platform during Q4. These companies are best-in-class and together we will offer differentiated and original content. Gimlet and Anchor will position us to become the leading platform for podcast creators around the world and the leading producer of podcasts.
