A few interesting links for December 19th through December 26th:
- Bugs & Fixes: Delete files to prevent crashes in OS X 10.5.6 | Mac 911 | Macworld – “deletion of the “dynamic loader shared cache” in the /var/db/dyld directory. A corrupt cache here turns out to be one cause of a blue screen crash. “
- The War on Christmas: The Early Years – “During the Reformation, some Puritans condemned Christmas celebration as “trappings of popery” and the “rags of the Beast.” The Roman Catholic Church responded by promoting the festival in a more religiously oriented form. Following the Parliamentarian victory over King Charles I during the English Civil War, England’s Puritan rulers banned Christmas, in 1647. Pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities, and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 ended the ban, but many clergymen still disapproved of Christmas celebration.”
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- Is Condo Board sabotaging Marina City Landmarking? – “As we’ve written before, one of the world’s finest buildings, Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City, is burdened with one of the worst condo boards, one that has repeatedly expressed contempt for the First Amendment, not to mention basic human intelligence, and deployed its lawyer, former progressive legislator Ellis Levin, to harass anyone who doesn’t buy into their delusions of grandeur.”
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Bundled Up Beautifully | Mrs. O – “On December 5, the temperature in Chicago topped out at 18 degrees. So it is no wonder that this glimpse of Mrs. O that day revealed her sporting a casual but winter-ready look. The occasion was a lunch with two friends and she didn’t have far to go as she left the restaurant Blackbird in the West Loop (located around the corner from Maria Pinto’s boutique) and walked to the car driven by the Secret Service. ”
Re: my photo of Ms. O at Blackbird that caused a minor kerfluffle
- Matthew Yglesias » The New Moderate – “Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. “
- BULLS: Sam Smith: Bulls fans want a trade for Christmas… but not yet – Smith must be talking about John McCain here, because even Smith doesn’t think he’s smarter than Obama:
“Even for NBA GM’s. Look, most aren’t that much smarter than you. Did you watch the presidential debates? Tell me you didn’t sit there going, “Hey, I’m smarter than that guy!”” -
JonathanRosenbaum.com – THE STRANGER’S RETURN (1933) – Why isn’t this film on DVD? Criterion Collection?
“What a pleasurable experience it is to pass directly from a slew of end-of-the-year screeners, most of which I can’t watch to the end, to a 1933 King Vidor opus that still isn’t commercially available on DVD”
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In the meadow, we can pan a snowman – Roger Ebert’s Journal – Ah Mr. Ebert, you have a way with words. From a entire column built upon one-liners cribbed from previous columns:
“I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny. — Response to Vincent Gallo’s hex to give me colon cancer”
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- Black and White Fine-Tuning in Photoshop CS3 | Layers Magazine – From the print version:
“A black-and-white photograph is all about the subtle matrix of tonal values that give shape and form to the image. Knowing how to precisely apply modifications to light and shadow is key to fine-tuning a black-and-white photo. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at some ways to shape and enhance the tonality of a black-and-white image with some quick and simple techniques.”