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Absurd NYT blog post on WikiLeaks more interested in “leaing and spinning” which somehow “are not about uncovering the truth.” Writer ignores evidence to contrary in his own story.
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Baldwin began the conversation by asking Liman, the director of “Fair Game” and “The Bourne Identity” and the producer of “The O.C.” and “Covert Affairs,” how he got started in film. An innocent story about being handed a camera and projector as a child somehow transitioned into Liman admitting he’s known for “stealing takes.” Asked to elaborate, the director said when he was filming “The Bourne Identity” with Matt Damon in Paris, he would shoot scenes without the required permits, necessitating scampering in the dark to avoid getting caught. The dashing-around accounted for the unsteady cinematography, he joked. “So your art is more about theft is what you’re saying,” Baldwin deadpanned.
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Because of these changes, the USPS does not accept bulk mail that has address labels that contain POSTNET bar codes that are generated by Word. These bulk mailings no longer qualify for a bulk mailing discount.
Even though I don’t bulk mail, found the bar code useful
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Exxon Mobil Corp. will lead a strong first-quarter earnings season for energy companies this week, with the largest U.S.-based oil and gas producer’s balance sheet fueled by $100-a-barrel oil.
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Whoa, what’s happening?Sorry if we’ve caught you by surprise. Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS. Here are a few links to catch you up to date on the latest news regarding Delicious
Author: swanksalot
Always good to have a second user look at things
Cry A River in Flesh and Blues
Merchandise Mart, modestly altered via PictureShow app. Originally taken with Hipstamatic 201, Kodot XGrizzled film, John S lens.
since there wasn’t much sun, I embellished.
Mysteries of time
Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: John S
Flash: Off
Film: Kodot XGrizzled
Damen stop of the O’Hare Blue line CTA train.
The End of the World Is Nigh
Those silly Mayans were wrong after all – the world is ending this May (according to these four identical vans cruising down Halsted).
Their website is predictable, in the Westboro Baptist Church model (gay pride is a sign of End Times, etc.) You can Google them if you want a good chuckle.
I don’t actually have anything on my calendar for May 21, yet, but it is a Saturday at least.
Is there a money-back guarantee involved?
May 21 is only a few days away…
links for 2011-04-25
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In order to reach the carbon emission goals laid out in the Chicago Climate Action Plan, Chicago just unveiled a new program where it could help taxi companies around the city purchase hybrid and "alternative fuel" vehicles, excluding electric cars.
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Nudie took the popular Western style of dress, already a bit loud, and sent it to a whole new level of flamboyancy – rhinestones, wagon wheels and pastel colors, cacti, critters and crosses. And of course, in addition to designing some ridiculous automobiles for those who could afford to buy them (or those who could cheat their way to winning them at cards, as Buck Owens allegedly did his), Nudie designed both Elvis Presley's $10,000 gold lamé suit, worn on the cover of the 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong album, and Gram Parsons' ominously foretelling white suit featuring pills, poppies, marijuana leaves, naked women and a cross, worn for the cover of the Flying Burrito Brothers' album The Gilded Palace of Sin.
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too funny:
A series of pictures last Sunday of covers of the magazine Tiger Beat, with an article about how the original teen-girl tabloid has remained virtually unchanged since its inception in 1965, erroneously included a parody cover, produced by the satiric newspaper The Onion, that featured a picture of President Obama.
Don’t Pretend
Hubbard Street Street Art Annex.
Artist: nautilus
Actual title unknown.
Reads:
don’t pretend
you are under no responsibility
to care
but then don’t wonder why the world is as it is
subtitled: his easy marriage
What Are We Supposed To Do?
Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: Chunky
Flash: Off
Film: Kodot XGrizzled
walking home from my office a couple of days ago
Solemn and serene
Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: Chunky
Flash: Off
Film: BlacKeys SuperGrain
April showers continue, and continue, and continue
Better when viewed in Lightbox
links for 2011-04-16
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Santorum by and large stayed on message but was tripped up a bit when a student asked him if he knew that the choice of his slogan, “Fighting to make America America again,” was borrowed from the “pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes.””No I had nothing to do with that,” Santorum said. “I didn’t know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn’t inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that.”
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Though walking down lower Broadway near Wall Street, I did see a not uncommon New York City street scene with a man pulling down his pants and underwear and adjusting his clothing naked while everyone just hurried by. Given it was so close to Wall Street, I also took it for a metaphor for what the country’s financial center has done to the average person.
links for 2011-04-14
That pill-popping, boy-crazy nincompoop Ayn Rand has got a lot to answer for. Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that we owe at least part of the recent economic crisis to her and her philosophy of Objectivism, since former Fed chief Alan Greenspan was a lifelong disciple of both. The two first met in the ’50s. Back then, a gang of acolytes, calling themselves the Collective, used to gather at Rand’s apartment on East 36th Street every Saturday night so they could tell each other how smart they all were. Along came Greenspan one evening, shy and somber.
America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.
Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?
Most Americans know about that budget. What they don’t know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the “official” budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.
The budget plan that Budget Committee Chair Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has put forward for the House Republicans is truly stunning. It takes the war on America’s middle class not to the next level but about three levels down the road.
There’s something we should start with, though, when we think about this budget. And that’s where we are now. Mark Sumner points us to this graph:
That’s the deficit, and that big orange stripe, the one getting wider by the year, is how much of the deficit the Bush tax cuts are creating.
Apple Inc. has added a do-not-track privacy tool to a test version of its latest Web browser for keeping customers’ online activities from being monitored by marketers.
The tool is included within the latest test release of Lion, a version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system that is currently available only to developers. The final version of the operating system is scheduled to be released to the public this summer. Mentions of the do-not-track feature in Apple’s Safari browser began to appear recently in online discussion forums and on Twitter.
The move by the Cupertino, Calif., company leaves Google Inc. as the only major browser provider that hasn’t yet committed to supporting a do-no-track capability in its browser, called Chrome. Microsoft Corp. and Mozilla Corp. both offer do-not-track features in their latest browsers.
The Other Writers: “We did all of that writing for free, and now that you made a bunch of money, we’re entitled to some of it!”
AOLHuffPo: “LOL!”
Add Drums to the Tumult
links for 2011-04-04
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Well, the deal has been closed, and it sounds like there’s not a ton to worry about in the short term, at the very least. Weiner has signed a deal for two more seasons, which would be the show’s fifth and sixth, and has extended his deal with the Lionsgate studio, so that if AMC decides they want a seventh season, Weiner will be the one running it. As for the various contentious issues (which I discussed on Tuesday night), here’s what I’ve been told from a source close to the show:
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With all the fear of radiation fallout, I thought it might be useful to tell you about a cheap, effective, homemade radiation tester you can easily assemble and rely upon. Follow these simple instructions, IT REALLY WORKS!!OPEN A BAG OF POPCORN
JUST LEAVE ON YOUR TABLE
IF IT STARTS POPPING, YOU’RE FUCKED
Drive Towards the Sun
links for 2011-03-29
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7 now-hidden hot spots from Chicago’s rock ’n’ roll historyChicago Rocks tour guide Phil Rockrohr takes The A.V. Club back into the windy city’s punk and industrial past
links for 2011-03-28
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The Transportation Security Administration is reanalyzing the radiation levels of X-ray body scanners installed in airports nationwide, after testing produced dramatically higher-than-expected results. The TSA, which has deployed at least 500 body scanners to at least 78 airports, said Tuesday the machines meet all safety standards and would remain in operation despite a “calculation error” in safety studies. The flawed results showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.
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The American right is trapped in a hyperbolic and dysfunctional worldTo have credibility within the Republican party is to have none outside it. They act as if all their Kool-Aid has been spiked Polls suggest there are between one in three and one in four Americans who would believe anything. More than a third thought President George Bush did a good job during Hurricane Katrina; half of those thought he was excellent.
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Eminem sued his record label, the Universal Music Group, over the way royalties are computed for digital music, which boils down to whether an individual song sold online should be considered a license or a sale. The difference is far from academic because, as with most artists, Eminem’s contract stipulates that he gets 50 percent of the royalties for a license but only 12 percent for a sale. “As of now it’s worth $17 million or $20 million, but on a future accounting basis, five or 10 years from now, it could easily be a $40 million to $50 million issue,” said Joel Martin, the manager of F.B.T. Productions in Detroit, which first signed Eminem
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By now, you may have heard of the little app that could(n’t), Color. Funded to the tune of $41M pre-launch, co-founded by a prestigious Silicon Valley entprepreneur and already brimming with 27 employees, you’d expect the product to be decent if not extraordinary. And you’d be wrong.
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In the wake of the demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the city produced a white wash entitled “What Trees Did They Plant?” TV Stations that broadcast the film had to offer equal time to those speaking in opposition. One group was the Youth International Party or Yippies who produced this film. Paul Krassner wrote the script. Some classic film footage was re-mixed with footage shot during the demonstrations. There is some missing audio from this copy.