If you get invited to The French Laundry for dinner, you probably better go
Chef Anthony Bourdain and a cavalcade of culinary all-stars get blown away by America’s Greatest Chef, Thomas Keller of The French Laundry.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as “intelligent risk”
My sister has been scanning in family slides and I have been crazy busy, working on our Taste the Passion and Traverse City Wine & Art Festival Winter Wine Wonderland events closing our office in Leland (where we’d been piling up stuff for 12 years) and opening an office at the Village at Grand Traverse Commons aka Building 50. Here’s my porch.
I believe that my dad is explaining to me the finer points of being a stock broker.
Super Bowl Snack Tips from Chad Vader
Has it really been 3 weeks since I posted something? In my defense I’ve been working on a lot of fun projects including the winter edition of the Traverse City Wine & Art Festival (Feb 14 at the Grand Traverse Resort).
Still. Sorry about that.
Here’s Darth Vader’s less evil brother Chad Vader with some tips for Super Bowl snacking as you watch the Jets v Vikings. (I’d rather see Indy but I have a feeling about the Jets):
mauled by wolverines
If “Avoiding wolverine mauling” is one of your resolutions for 2010, I urge you to check out 10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling from the hilarious webcomic The Oatmeal.
Read the other nine and/or buy the poster. (via Kathy)
tiny islands are people too
Via the Michigan Land Use Institute blog:
One of the most inspiring developments this week is the way the small, underdeveloped island nations now stand up for themselves in the global climate talks. It’s a big change: At previous climate talks, smaller countries were often pushed aside and forgotten by the superpowers.
…In a speech today, at a press conference here in Copenhagen, the president of Tuvalu explained how tough it’s been to hold their ground:
“There are some countries, like Australia, who have been trying to arrange a meeting with us to probably water down our position on 1.5 degrees Celsius. We did not attend that meeting, but I heard from other small islands that Australia was trying to tell them if they agree to the 2 degrees limit, money would be on the table for adaptation process. That’s their choice to accept the money and back down. But Tuvalu will not. As I said in my speech, 1.5 degrees Celsius is our bottom line… As a human being, I feel that the leaders that are pushing their countries to adopt this 2 degrees should know from science that that will be killing a lot of people around the world. That should change their position. I will not sign anything less than 1.5.
We just have to prepare ourselves for the worst. We have nowhere to run to. We must prepare ourselves individually, family-wise, so that we know what to do when a cyclone comes or the hurricane blows. There is no mountain we can climb up, no inland we can run to. We just have the face it. And that’s why we’re making noises around the world … We don’t want to disappear from this Earth. We want to exist as a nation. Because we have a fundamental right to exist alongside yourselves.”
The fact that the lives, livelihoods and homes of millions upon millions of people of this earth are treated with such casual disregard is simply appalling.
The picture above is one of a number of photos from Tuvalu by Leigh.
Get your Christmas mambo on…
Update: I felt kind of guilty about this so here’s 20 ways to give back this holiday season.
There’s cruelty TO animals and then there’s cruelty WITH animals. (you’ll have to click to YouTube to watch it)
Supersize my YouTube
Apparently YouTube has been showing full-length movies for some time. They don’t have a ton online but it’s got to be enough to give NetFlix the heebie-jeebies.
Here’s Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me, but you might prefer the original fan-fic The Hunt for Gollum or a horror film like cult classics Dracula vs Frankenstein or The Blob. They’re featuring some Bollywood films as well!
2012, Monument Six, Bolon Yokte & using the End of the World to sell a movie
In 2012 Isn’t The End Of The World, Mayans Insist, the AP’s Mark Stevenson took a look at mounting 2012 hysteria:
It may sound all too much like other doomsday scenarios of recent decades — the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the Jupiter Effect or “Planet X.” But this one has some grains of archaeological basis.
One of them is Monument Six.
Found at an obscure ruin in southern Mexico during highway construction in the 1960s, the stone tablet almost didn’t survive; the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted.
It’s unique in that the remaining parts contain the equivalent of the date 2012. The inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.
However — shades of Indiana Jones — erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible.
Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico’s National Autonomous University interprets the last eroded glyphs as maybe saying, “He will descend from the sky.”
Spooky, perhaps, but Bernal notes there are other inscriptions at Mayan sites for dates far beyond 2012 — including one that roughly translates into the year 4772.
You can go a lot deeper into the hysteria – including that manufactured (this site for one) by the 2012 movie promoters – along with the actual archaeology at Monument Six on the Toltec I Ching Blog.
Be sure and check this out bigger in Mananetwork’s Mexico slideshow and see a lot more of his travel photography on his blog.
A long time ago … when special effects were really hard
Computer Graphics From a Long, Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away from Topless Robot:
Oh man. /Film started my day with this 10-minute documentary from Larry Cuba about how he made the computer graphics for Star Wars, specifically, the Death Star assault video Dodonna plays for the Rebel pilots, and it is so, so awesome. Cuba is obviously so proud when he says he’s moving his Death Star model in real time, and he should be, since back in 1976 that probably needed 400 computers glued together and the blood sacrifice of a white calf. Anyways, it’s fun for Star Wars fans and a neat look back for computer nerds alike.
Imagine the movie industry doing what they do now without the plastic reality offered by oceans of computing power and unbelievable software.
Topless Robot is a kickin’ site that features geek chum like Teenage Mutant Reservoir Turtles and The 10 Best ’60s Batman TV Villains Who Should Make the Leap to Comic Books (10 villains, 10 videos including Vincent Price as the Egghead).
Home from the War
Welcome Home, War from Mother Jones talks about how the technologies pioneered in overseas military action seem to always find their way home. From centralized data, covert penetration, and disinformation developed during the first counter-insurgency campaign in the Philippines up to the present day, it’s a chilling look at what a democracy doesn’t want coming home from the war.
Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day technology can do, by early 2008, US forces were also collecting facial images accessible by portable data labs called Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facilities, linked by satellite to a biometric database in West Virginia. “A war fighter needs to know one of three things,” explained the inventor of this lab-in-a-box. “Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?”
A future is already imaginable in which a US sniper could take a bead on the eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a nanosecond to transmit the target’s iris or retinal data via backpack-sized laboratory to a computer in West Virginia, and then, after instantaneous feedback, pull the trigger.
This kind of stuff creeps the crap right out of me, especially when I read that the Obama Administration is expanding (rather than rolling back) a lot of the national security measures developed during the Bush administration.
The photo is Warrior Spirit by country_boy_shane. Shane has some amazing photoshop & photography skillz – check his work out via Flickriver.
