Archive for January 2012
Putting vegetables to exquisite use…
Long-time readers will know of your correspondent’s affection for Charles and Ray Eames, and especially for their cinematic meditation on scale, Powers of Ten. (See, e.g., here and here.) It is a pleasure to report that there’s now a version available that is suitable for vegetarians…
click the image above, of here, for video
[TotH to Co-Design, where readers will find the backstory.]
As marvel at the menu, we might recall that it was on this date in 1790 that Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin demonstrated his invention, the guillotine, for the first time, in Paris. An opponent of capital punishment, Guillotin believed his device, at least, the most humane way to dispatch the punished. Exactly three years later, on this date in 1793, his device removed the head of King Louis the XVI.
The execution of Louis XVI (source)
I’d like to thank…
(logo designed by our friends at Coudal Partners)
Once again, it’s that time of year when otherwise mature adults paint their faces in the palettes of their favorite book jacket designers, and all across Facebook college kids post pictures of themselves Nabokoving. Yes, we’re talking about book awards season.
We are excited this morning to announce the books, judges, brackets, and Zombie poll that will become The Morning News 2012 Tournament of Books…
Whether it’s your first time or your eighth time, here’s the deal. A ridiculously small and poorly informed group of TMN editors and contributors have chosen 16 of the most cherished, hyped, ignored, and/or enthusiastically praised books of the year to enter into a month-long tournament, NCAA-basketball-madness style, beginning March 7, 2012.
To create that list, we drew from a body of titles that we started building last January, and also consulted our TMN readers, where people like you, maybe even actually you, suggested their top reads of the year. Still, these are not the best 16 books of the year. You could produce another list of 16 books that would be every bit as deserving. Some books were dismissed for petty reasons. Some books were no doubt included for arbitrarily aesthetic ones. And there’s no getting around any of that, as far as we can tell…
More on “the other March Madness” here. Download the brackets (PDF) here.
As we page Evelyn Wood, we might recall that it was on this date in 1943 that Existentialist philosopher, playwright (and first-cousin-once-removed of Albert Schweitzer) Jean-Paul Sartre published Being and Nothingness. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature… but refused it in protest of “the bourgeois values of society.”
Sizzlin’ for the Superbowl…
The boys at San Francisco’s food-truck-of-choice, Bacon Bacon, have created a special treat for Superbowl Sunday, the Bacon Log:
The artery-clogging begins with a tight weave of natural thick-cut bacon strips to create a porcine blanket that’s then wrapped snugly around a savory cylinder of housemade bacon jam, ground pork & California Prairie Pastures grass-fed ground beef…
Logs are available in two sizes: six-pounds–“feeds 20” reputedly; sounds a bit thin to your correspondent, who opts for the fifteen-pounder. They can be had (by special order, via the link above, from February 2, through Game Day) cooked or uncooked…
As we carefully remove the crust from the bread that we’re serving, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,” was arrested in Bolivia for his crimes against humanity four decades earlier. Gestapo chief in Occupied France, Barbie oversaw the torture, abuse, or execution of thousands of French Jews and Resistance members, and sent thousands more to their deaths in concentration camps.
As France fell, Barbie retreated to Germany, where he joined other Nazi officers to form a secret anti-Communist organization– that was recruited and ultimately annexed by the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC). Barbie was a U.S. agent in Germany for two years, then in 1949 was smuggled to Bolivia, where he took the name of “Klaus Altmann” and worked both for the U.S. and for a series of military regimes.
Nazi hunters found Barbie in the early 1970s, but the military leader, Hugo “El Petiso” Banzer, refused extradition. But in the early 80s, a more liberal regime acceded, agreeing to extradition in return for foreign aid.
Finally, in 1987, Barbie stood trial for 177 crimes against humanity. Ironically, Barbie was defended by three minority lawyers–an Asian, an African, and an Arab–who made the impassioned case that the French and the Jews were as guilty of crimes against humanity as Barbie or any other Nazi. But as these advocates were more interested in putting France and Israel on trial than in actually proving their client’s innocence, Barbie was promptly found guilty– and sentenced to France’s most severe punishment, life in prison without parole. He died in confinement in 1991, at the age of 77.
Open Sesame…
“Mechanical security researcher” Schuyler Townes picks locks. Now you can too:
click image above, or here, for video
“Lockpicking: The Basic Idea” is #12 in Schuyler’s 24-video course, “Locks: Basic Operation and Manipulation,” which starts here. The impatient can download a PDF “Lockpicking Quick Reference” here. But those who, like your correspondent, want even more will enjoy Schuyler’s blog.
As we move beyond the “jiggle and bump,” we might send sub rosa birthday greetings to novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian, and self-described agnostic mystic Robert Anton Wilson; he was born on this date in 1932. Bob, as he was widely known, wrote prolifically; he’s probably best remembered for The Illuminatus! Trilogy and for Schrödinger’s Cat. But he was also recognized as an episkopos, pope, and saint of Discordianism, and as Pope Bob in the Church of the Subgenius.
“If voting could change the system it would be illegal.”
“I suspect or intuit that, as Lenin said, ‘the machine is running the engineers.’ We can’t dismount, even if the horse seems to have gotten out of control. Information will continue to double faster all the time, leading to new technologies, and the new technologies will unleash Chaos (in the mathematical sense), and society will change in unpredictable and unexpected ways. I suspect or intuit that this ever-accelerating info-techno-sociological rev-and-ev-olution follows the laws of organic systems and continually re-organizes on higher and higher levels of coherence, until something kills it.”
Bob at the National Theatre, London, for the 10-hour stage version of Illuminatus! in 1977 (source)
Speed!
There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.
– Mahatma Gandhi
I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
– Woody Allen
There’s lots of skepticism about the virtue of speed. Still, when demand is high, “time is money”… a lesson not lost on The Broad Group, a Chinese company that has long been successful in manufacturing and selling ingenious environmentally-friendly central air conditioning systems powered by natural gas and/or waste heat, and that has now moved onto “sustainable building.”
Broad’s approach to construction involves careful planning, the use of prefabricated elements– and speed. Broad Sustainable Buildings erected the 6-story Broad Pavilion in Shanghai Expo 2010 in 1 day, the 14-story New Ark’s Hotel near Broad’s headquarters in 6 days, and the Broad Pavilion at 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in 8 days.
But their most recent feat is surely their most audacious: a 30-story tall hotel prototype, raised in 360 hours– accomplished a week after the same team built a 15-story building.
click to see a time-lapse video of the hotel going up
Read Jim Fallow’s Atlantic piece on Broad and its leader in pdf here.
As we watch the skyline change before our eyes, we might recall that it was on this date in 2001 that California used rolling blackouts to cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people. Gov. Grey Davis declared a state of emergency and ordered the Dept. of Water Resources to buy and sell electricity to help alleviate the crises; PG&E defaulted on $76 million in short term debt.
Exactly one year later, on this date in 2002, Enron, whose trading arm had manipulated the energy market and contributed mightily to the power shortages in California (and elsewhere), “fired” accounting firm Arthur Andersen, citing its destruction of thousands of documents and its accounting advice. (For its part, Andersen said its relationship with Enron ended in early December, 2001, when the company slid into the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history.)
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