Elsewhere

$250,000 and Middle-Class?
from slate.com
Deluded wealthy business pundits and conservative think-tank wonks argue that Americans earning $250,000 are not rich. more
PLUS: a video excerpt from a CNBC debate on the subject.


Olympic Design
from colourlovers.com
A design blog features Olympic games posters since 1896; altogether a strange collection; some are great, some are, well simply ugly. My favorite: Tokyo 1965, minimal, modern, elegant. And then there is Los Angeles 1984, simply hideous. more


A Good Blog?
from 43folders.com
A blogger wonders what make a blog good and comes up with a list of criteria. I’d like to think Sandwich Cake accomplishes a majority of these… more


Graves of a Green Sahara
from uchicago.edu
Scientists have discovered graves in the Sahara that clearly evidence a time when the area was verdant and very much alive with plant and animal life. more


Fake Crime
from nytimes.com
When she hit rock-bottom, living in a filthy apartment with a dead cat, biographer Lee Israel went on a crime spree forging literary and collectable letters and selling them for profit. She has written books about Tullulah Bankhead and Estee Lauder, and now one about herself. more


The Obama of Autos
from theatlantic.com
GM has taken a bold attempt to deliver the first fully electric car which will be marketed as a Chevy; can the dinosaur of automobiles become a media darling? more


Planet of the Apes
from slate.com
The Spanish Parliament has passed legislation giving ape primates “human” rights and protections from unnecessary violence and degrading life conditions. more


Auto-Correction
from thecarpetbaggerreport.com
A conservative Web site uses an auto-replace function to make a global switch of the word gay to homosexual…but quickly ran into trouble with an article about a person with the last name Gay. more


Keeping Up With the Gates's
from harvardmagazine.com
As income inequality in the U.S. broadens, it is easy to believe the notion that individual wealth is due to individual accomplishment; but, those at the bottom are loosing to the benefit of those at the top. more


Geek Alert
from roughlydraftercom
Apple’s next version of the OS X operating system, Snow Leopard, will offer less as more. Sure, Snow Leopard will offer Enterprise integration, and a few other small little gains, but the main gain? A small footprint. Yep, Apple once again will innovate and the proof will be the company’s software engineering ability to reduce the file size of the operating system. Fascinating. more


Vero Possimus!
from nytimes.com
The Obama campaign has offered the most sophisticated graphic design in years: not just in choice of typefaces, but in their use and contrast, line spacing and letter kerning; as well as FDR New Deal populist imagery. Now the campaign offers an “Obama Seal,” including the Latin translation of his “Yes We Can” slogan as “Vero Possimus!” more


By the Letter
from marksimonson.com
What is a 1970s typeface doing in a 1930s movie? Mark Simonson simply asks for typographic accuracy in the graphic design of movies. more


Hillary Steps Aside

Cardboard Hillary
Diehard supporters hoist a cardboard Hillary

From her initial announcement as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has been my choice. I am disappointed that she is neither our candidate for president or vice president.

Three Years of Cake

“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said–half laughing through her tears–”I shouldn’t be able to cry.” “I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
-Alice Through the Looking Glass

Genovese Spaghetti

This combination of freshly made pesto, green beans, potatoes and spaghetti is indigenous to Genoa. The simple method, boiling the vegetables with the pasta makes it a one pot preparation. It is good when made with the pesto you can buy in the refrigerated section at the supermarket, but when your garden is steps away with fresh basil begging to be eaten, whip up this recipe and savor the intensity that only your own freshly ground pesto will have. It serves six as a pasta course, follow it with a roasted pork loin, finish with a salad. Wash everything down with a Pinot Grigio

Of Sashimi and Semen

custard

Our first course was astounding; the traditional Japanese custard is a small porcelain pot of savory egg pudding garnished with gingko nuts, but here it had been enlivened with avocado puree and was topped with tuna belly and sea urchin sashimi, garnished with perfect star shaped slices of okra and drizzled with a salty roasted tomato essence. Each little pot was served covered with a fresh green leaf

A Canto of Companionship

It hadn’t occurred to us while it was happening that we were spending a night much like the one we did 15 years ago in Central Park, the two of us on an outcropping of rock, this time above the tree line, surrounded by snow, with the moon crossing above, lying next to each other and sharing the thing we both are so willing to give the other: honesty about ourselves, about our fears and loves and as the night wore on, and the cold rattled our tent we zipped up its opening and said good night, without any of the confusing drama of 15 years before.

Ovaltine Ice Cream

Meals like this one are hard to remember because they skirt around culinary virtuosity and instead offer up flavors that provide succor and an oddly unmemorable contentment. But these are the meals I find myself wanting to replicate, with their experiences of homey pleasure and uncompromising honesty. I would eat more ambitious meals in my three weeks in Japan, but turning over my food memories, it is that scoop of ice cream that I keep tasting in the back of my mind, unexpected and honorary, offered to me because I was a guest from a distant country, and in an attempt to quench my culinary confusion.

Lost in Translation

The majority of my coworkers in the New York office, and nearly all of those in China, speak Chinese and Tibetan. They express their needs, their tasks and even their names in a kind of pretend English that presents concepts, ideas and situations to me in a language I need to communicate. But, in the end, I always feel more trouble to them than useful.

Love in the Shadows

During my trip, I often said to Demian that I felt Japan was stuck somewhere in the cultural situation that the U.S. faced before the sexual and political revolutions of the 1960s. And nothing exemplified this opinion more than the roles that women in Japan seem limited to play.

Peace, Flowers, Freedom, Happiness

Hair, Act I finale

I don’t remember how I spent the summer of 1967. I would have been seven years old. Did I sit with my family watching the nightly news on the TV in the den as hippies declared the summer of love? What did I think of the adage, “turn on, tune in, drop out?” Did I comprehend the dawning of the age of Aquarius? What were my emotional responses to the hundreds of dead American soldiers who returned weekly in body bags from Vietnam?

Funky Little Shack

tent in the snow

And there we were, two friends of 15 years, separated from any other human by miles, isolated on a snow capped mountainside, with few of the natural guarantees of comfort, astray from the marked hiking path, uncertain what the morning would bring, zipped up in the warm comfort provided only by our 98.6 degree bodies laughing and singing and smoking, without a worry in our minds.



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