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This blog covers everything except sports and gardening, unless we find a really good link about using dead professional bowlers for mulch. The author is a StarTribune columnist, has been passing off fiction and hyperbole as insight since 1997, has run his own website since the Jurassic era of AOL, and was online when today’s college sophomores were a year away from being born. So get off his lawn.
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Posts about Minnesota History
The Lost Ending to Kubrick's "Shining"
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: January 24, 2013 - 4:28 PM
One week left of January. No one’s sad to see it go. February’s brisk - then the long slog of March, but there’s spring at the end of that. This is the end of the beginning, as Churchill put it. State Fair’s practically around the corner.
MOVIES Lee Unkrich, “Toy Story 3” director and “Shining” enthusiast, has posted the Lost Ending to Kubrick’s masterpiece. Does it change everything? Was his wise to lop it off? You decide. Sounds like it still ends with the long track to the picture of the 20s photograph, and that probably means it had that marvelously languid song, "Midnight With the Stars and You," sung by the peerless Al Bowlly. He was killed in the Blitz: a door blew off and hit him in the head.
Well, I'm really starting to ramble early. Onward:
ICONIC is the overused buzzword deployed whenever someone starts talking about “rebranding” something. Well: here’s
a look at 7-11’s attempts to look fun, at least in Europe. Apparently American tastes would balk at the bold new look. And here’s Paul Goldberger in Vanity Fair eviscerating American Airline’s ugly new look. I always liked the Northwest logo, back when the airline, you know, existed. Its Seventies version was ugly, because it was the Seventies. Before that, there was . . . Herman the Duck.
You can find an account of all the North Central livery here. Just gorgeous.
Speaking of Northwest: you can tell you’re middle-aged if you hear this jingle and know just where the gong comes in.
As long as we’re on the subject:
ADVERTISING Hire this firm. They’re covered with awesomesauce! And they probably use “amazeballs” in conversation, albeit with a hesitant inflection so if anyone thought they were using it ironically, they’d be covered.
They really don’t think that. But unicorns! So hire them. There’s an entire site devoted to advertising auto-puffery, here - it’s amusing. Everyone’s trying to be hip in that modern, desperate, over-contorted fashion: hip must be effortless to be truly hip, but clients can be so thick you have to hit them over the head with your hipness - or at least speak a language they think is hip to the people clients want to reach. It’s a dance of the damned, I tell you.
Related: Buzzfeed had an account of someone who worked as a Social Media Consultant, where people pay you money to be told that a Facebook button on their site would be just a grand idea.
You have no idea how much of my life I've spent so far trying to show people what button to press for setting up Facebook. I spent a whole afternoon teaching a woman how to set a Facebook cover photo. She didn't know what it meant to upload a photo. It's a waste of my time.
I absolutely refuse to attend industry events.
And so on. The fellow is complaining about a job he got on Craigslist that involves no physical work or peril of any sort. Best part is the end: “As Told to Hillary Reinsberg” Because the guy can’t even gin up the enthusiasm to write the thing himself.
TECH The “Apple is Doomed” stories continue. Here’s more doom. Lots of companies could use a little of this doom.
On Wednesday, Apple revealed that it’s signed up 250 million users of its consumer cloud service in its first 15 months. That’s up from 190 million users announced during the previous quarter — Apple added more new users to iCloud (60 million) between October and December, than it sold iPhones (about 48 million). Whether everyone knows how to use iCloud and understands exactly what it does is mostly up in the air.
Iirrelevant. Most customers don’t care, any more than they care how the radio in the car picks invisible signals out of the air and turns them into KS95. You flip the ON switch for iCloud, and the pictures you take with your phone end up on your laptop, and the webpage you opened on the tablet opens on your phone, if you wish, and so on. One consistent seamless digital experience.
The problem with iCloud is the same problem Apple had in all other web-based services. It stinks. It’s probably the best version yet, but it’s still maddening for people who are either A) stuck in old paradigms, or B) unable to relinquish control of their data. Dropbox, for example, gives you files and folders. Amazon and Google give you “drives” you can access in several ways. Apple’s iCloud lets you save documents, but only a certain kind. For working on a word-processing doc on multiple machines, it’s fine. For moving stuff around or storing data, it’s not. But that’s not what it wants to be. This is for people who don’t care where their data is, as long as it’s somewhere and they can get it fast. It drives me crazy: I ask my daughter where, exactly, are you keeping that long story you’re writing? That online program you signed up to use, eh. Well. Where is it? Do you have a copy?
This is the digital equivalent of a parent shouting “wear your rubbers or you’ll catch your death of cold” in 1937, I suppose. We will be mocked in the future for insisting on “backing up” and other archaic forms of data management.
Also, please disregard any analyst who says Apple needs to make a TV. I may be wrong; they could surprise everyone and come up with an $5,000, high-margin set with the DVR and tuner and everything else built right in They could shock everyone by announcing that they’d cut deals with all the nets and had a la carte pricing. But I don’t see the point. TVs are a miserable market, and they can sell a lot more AppleTV units that gather in all the non-cable streams you can get now. (In fact, that's just what they did: sales up 60%) The same people who say Apple needs to do something Revolutionary, Again, Now are the same people who say it’s a television set. As opposed to, say, a device which eventually makes the phone obsolete - some sort of low-profile wearable device that works for calls and messages, and connects to a tablet if you want to do mail or apps. I’m not saying that’s in the works; what do I know. But I’ll bet in five years you’ll be at Starbucks, and you’ll see people take a call or listen to music by looking at a band on their wrist, scrolling with a finger along its surface, then tapping a thing in their ear. Or, Google Glasses, Apple-style.
No, you’re right. Not revolutionary enough. A TV, that’s the future.
The Battle of Dinkytown
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: January 22, 2013 - 12:06 PMAnother day of “dangerous cold,” according to the Good Neighbor’s page. Not that they use the phrase; why would they? It only has half a century of built-up good will, and what people really want is a generic page forced on them by the network so it looks like every other page in the country.
ARCHITECTURE This story on a proposed development in Dinkytown deserves a column, so I’ll hold my fire here. But let’s just say we would not lose a building of any particular architectural interest.
This piece talks about the police clash in Dtown in 1970, when developers wanted to build a Red Barn. There was an occupation. There were slogans and signs and a People’s Park. Eventually everything was demolished, but the Red Barn was never built. The People’s Park went untended, and turned to weeds, because people lost interest and summer break meant a lot of people went home. The placard in the picture indicated people wanted a boycott of the Red Barn on Oak Street. It looked like this:
It died eventually, along with the rest in the chain. I believe there was one on Snelling, but I’m not sure. This wikipedia entry is mystifying:
n the late 1960s, Servomation bought the company followed by Motel 6 in the late 1970s. The new owners ceased advertising for the chain and the franchise leases were allowed to expire with the last of the leases expiring around 1986.
So they bought it to let it die? Odd.
An ad from the era, with NOT A MUPPET NO NOT AT ALL:
NOT NEWS But that never stopped the press of Great Britain. “Tipsy Mum” gets wedged in kid’s chair, calls cops, friend takes pictures on cell phone, and it all ends up in the Scottish Sun because no one has any shame whatsoever and acts like a high-school idiot with a bottle of Boone's Farm well into her aduthood. Bonus: photos of Tipsy Mum having a smoke break between attempts to escape the chair.
SCIENCE! Every day we find something new around which our small brains cannot wrap:
Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe - a group of quasars so large it would take 4 billion years to cross it while traveling at speed of light. The immense scale also challenges Albert Einstein's Cosmological Principle, the assumption that the universe looks the same from every point of view, researchers said.
Never bought that assumption. Never understood it, which might be the problem. Anyway: you’re wondering how these Large Quasar Groups can be bigger than galactic superclusters. I was wondering the exact same thing. Quasars are stars, right? And galaxies are made up of billions of stars, and galactic clusters are made up of galaxies, and superclusters are made up of clusters of galaxies which each contain billions of stars, so . . . unless those quasars are huge, how could they possibly exceed the size of the Sloan Great Wall, which is officially the Biggest Thing?
It’s not the biggest thing anymore. Quasars are galactic nuclei, not stars. The very name is a clue: quasi-stellar. I grew up thinking they were stars, but now the science says they’re galactic centers covering the rich delicious nougat of the supermassive black hole, aka, Sauron. So the newly discovered thing - which has 73 quasars - can indeed be the Biggest Thing Ever. It looks like this.
You’ll have to take their word for it.
Speaking of growing up with an incomplete knowledge of quasars:
Yes, plug-in modules! The problem with TV ads: the New Improved Picture you’re showing people is only as good as the picture they get.
That's it; stay warm out there, which goes without saying. But we have to say it so we can feel like we're doing a Public Service. Or being a Good Neighbor.
Kate Middleton's Awful New Portrait
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: January 15, 2013 - 12:33 PMControversy over Kate Middeltone’s new official portrait. How bad could it be, you wonder? This bad?
No, this bad.
The artist caught her at the moment when she’s tired of your excuses and is just waiting for you to finish embarrassing yourself before she unloads. That’s what you’d paint if you’d been married to her for ten years and it hadn’t been working out for the last four.
PRISON BLUES Police in Australia were looking for four Smurfs, wanted on assault charges.
It is believed a 37-year-old Pascoe Vale man entered a 7-Eleven on the corner of West and Pascoe streets about 1am to buy cigarettes.As he left the store he was approached by a man dressed as a Smurf who asked for a cigarette.
The man offered him a cigarette, but the Smurf demanded that the victim light the smoke before handing it over.
He refused and noticed the Smurf was in the company of three other Smurfs, who were trying to jump start and steal a white VS Commodore sedan.
Notice how the “man dressed as a Smurf” quickly becomes a Smurf himself. That’s all it takes? You smear yourself cerulean, and suddenly you’re a fictional Euro-gnome? Noted.
Lest you find the story suspicious, we have security camera footage from the store.
After the video was released to the public, they came forward and were arrested. (h/t: a commenter in the Time.com story on the Smurf problem; he had the embed code and the movie, which Time declined to provide. Odd.)
URBAN STUDIES New Urbanists don’t like highways, and they don’t like what they did to the core cities.
About 50 years ago, Minneapolis St. Paul, then a city of 1.6 million people, opened I-94 and I-35, freeways connecting the city to its suburbs and to other cities in the US. (There are also many good histories.)Unfortunately, Greater MSP learned nothing from history and did not go underground in the core cities, and we see the result today, downtowns disconnected from the rest of the region by highways. People close enough to walk to the core who cannot.
Well, that’s not true. You can. It’s just not as easy as it was when every surface street connected to the core. It could have been worse: this was a proposal for ramming a freeway into downtown, in the old Gateway district:
What a vibrant, bustling wonderland that would have been, eh? Well, the article proposes something novel: covering up the freeways, and using the space for retail, parks, and so on. It would seem impractical to build structures on the spot, but imagine a long greensward stretching from downtown to the Crosstown: it would be gorgeous, and would instantly tie the communities back together.
It won’t happen soon, but it’s not a bad idea to keep in our back pocket. Or course, that’s where I keep the coupons I intend to use at Cub, and I always find them a week later after washday in a useless wad.
Am I making sense today? It’s hard to tell. Which brings us to the next story:
SPY BOTTLES Drug thieves might be nabbed by a new proposal.
Police in New York City plan to combat the theft of painkillers and other highly addictive prescription medicines by asking pharmacies around the city to hide fake pill bottles fitted with GPS devices amid the legitimate supplies on their shelves.The New York Police Department believes the so-called "bait bottles" could help investigators track stolen drugs and locate suspects.
Or just remove all controls on them and let anyone buy them off the shelf. Otherwise, it’s prohibition, right? If the idea of “legalization” includes the big-time painkillers, then get ready for Gummy Oxycodone in Flintstones shapes because that market will be so huge they’ll invent every possible competitive advantage they can. Excuse me, I was looking for the Oxycodone with calcium. Are you out?
After four days on Vicodin - yes, this nonsense is being written Under the Influence - I don’t know why people want to be on this stuff if they don’t have to be. I can’t wait to be done with it. Imagine being wide awake AND incredibly sleepy AND your blood has been replaced with cement. It’s better than pain, but I can’t imagine anyone volunteering for a sensation this banal. According to the dentist, today is Maximum Discomfort Day. Tomorrow, no more of this stuff. If it hurts I’ll go full Cowboy, and chew on a leather strap soaked in whiskey.
Anyway, some people are complaining about the fake bottles, as if the government will use them to spy on people who have legitimate uses for the pills. No. If the Feds were putting pills that had tiny GPS devices into regular prescriptions, the critics might have a point, but that would be stupid. Sir, I’m getting some peculiar readings. The target appears to have stopped at a McDonald’s restaurant, but now I’m showing that he’s heading west at 14 MPH towards the municipal waste treatment facility. Should we send someone to intercept him at the front gate?
VIDEO Making the rounds today is a deaf bulldog named - all together now - WINSTON, whose owner has combined his scooting with a blues song. The owner appears in the comments to assure all the scolds that he is not wormy, doesn’t have gland problems, isn’t having a seizure, and is collar is just fine honestly you people I swear. It’s like 17% of the Internet consists of people who troll home videos so they can point out their superior awareness of animal needs and behavior.
Best comment, by someone who has just listened to someone sing a blues song about a dog rubbing himself repeatedly on the carpet:
what song are you singing?
Oh, an old classic blues tune about a deaf dog scooting on a rug. Robert Johnson wrote it. Amazing how it fits the stuation just perfectly.
Is that a rattlesnake in your pocket . . .
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: January 9, 2013 - 2:20 PM. . . Or are you glad to see me? You know how it goes - you’re reading a 108-year-old trade journal for druggists, and you run across an interesting story from Minneapolis in the early days of the previous century.
The amount of stuff buried in the Google archives is amazing - and largely unread, I’d guess. Probably for a reason.
TV Oh, great. This stuff again.
Based on the best-selling novel Pines by Blake Crouch, Wayward Pines is an intense, mind-bending thriller evocative of the classic cult hit Twin Peaks. Secret Service agent Ethan Burke arrives in the bucolic town of Wayward Pines, ID, on a mission to find two missing federal agents. But instead of answers, Ethan’s investigation only turns up more questions.
It’s a miniseries with a guaranteed 10-12 parts, so they won’t cancel it after four episodes like all the network shows with high-concept arcs, but they won’t finish the mystery in the first season. If ever. Also, it’s by M. Night Shyamalan, which may mean the town is (SPOILERS) being menaced by angry shrubbery.
FOLLOW-UP Icelandair is a wonderful airline: the food’s great and the music selection will make you ditch your iPod. When you land, you're in Iceland, which is only six hours away from here. Just don't hit the Reyka and start screaming. Or:
Possibly the only justifiable use of Vertical Video Syndrome.
Is that a rattlesnake in your pocket . . .
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: January 9, 2013 - 12:11 PM. . . Or are you glad to see me? You know how it goes - you’re reading a 108-year-old trade journal for druggists, and you run across an interesting story from Minneapolis in the early days of the previous century.
The amount of stuff buried in the Google archives is amazing - and largely unread, I’d guess. Probably for a reason.
TV Oh, great. This stuff again.
Based on the best-selling novel Pines by Blake Crouch, Wayward Pines is an intense, mind-bending thriller evocative of the classic cult hit Twin Peaks. Secret Service agent Ethan Burke arrives in the bucolic town of Wayward Pines, ID, on a mission to find two missing federal agents. But instead of answers, Ethan’s investigation only turns up more questions.
It’s a miniseries with a guaranteed 10-12 parts, so they won’t cancel it after four episodes like all the network shows with high-concept arcs, but they won’t finish the mystery in the first season. If ever. Also, it’s by M. Night Shyamalan, which may mean the town is (SPOILERS) being menaced by angry shrubbery.
FOLLOW-UP Icelandair is a wonderful airline: the food’s great and the music selection will make you ditch your iPod. When you land, you're in Iceland, which is only six hours away from here. Just don't hit the Reyka and start screaming. Or:
Possibly the only justifiable use of Vertical Video Syndrome.
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