The photo above is from an “interactive video” called “The Wilderness Downtown,” and it’s actually as technologically interesting as it is emotionally-provocative. (It’s especially emo if the Google Maps satellite imagery from your home looks appropriately old and nostalgic; see image above). Anyway, it’s referred to as an “experiment” with Google’s Chrome browser, which is probably why, at times, it started to feel like a showcase of whizzy HTML5 elements — windows get launched and shuffled around; you’re asked to scribble on the screen; graphics are animated and layered. I don’t know, maybe I’m just the right mix of cheeseball and geek, but it kind of worked for me.

About the life of an artist, he says: “The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory ... as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.”

Kirk Douglas had a son, the little-remembered Eric Douglas, who was an actor and stand-up comedian. He once came over to the UK to do some gigs and inadvertently created one of British comedy’s finest legends. Eric wasn’t having a great gig at a London club; he was going down the pan. His opening line, I seem to remember, focused on the fact that he lacked the cleft in his chin possessed by both his father and brother. The audience was not in the least interested. Their indifference eventually overwhelmed him and he finally shouted: “Do you know who I am? I’m Kirk Douglas’s son!” The room looked on in silence, then someone in the audience stood up and said: “No, I’m Kirk Douglas’s son.” He was swiftly followed by several more. Within seconds, the entire audience was on their feet, all claiming to be Kirk Douglas’s son, in a pitch-perfect parody of the scene in Spartacus. That, by anyone’s standards, is a tough gig.

Read on: A nice discussion of the dark side of heckling going on at The Guardian.

There’s an intimacy in this that so resonates with me. I mean, it’s impossible to imagine that I wouldn’t be charmed by the subject matter alone — a President I greatly admire, plus two NBA players. But this moment is especially great, because I love Derrick Rose’s game and I will always appreciate that he OD’d on candy before the 2008 NCAA Final with Kansas. And I admire Joakim Noah’s gritty post play and his serious media game. And I love that there’s genuine emotion in this shot. It has got a little bit of stagey-ness, but it also feels, like I said, intimate, like the photographer took this photo and emailed it to me, and said: “You’d appreciate this.”

All this time, I thought the best thing about Oscar Gamble was his epic afro. But now I’ve learned that the title of this post is said to have originated from Gamble during a discussion of the 1975 Yankees; those were the early days of George Steinbrenner’s tenure, and the first of Billy Martin’s five managerial stints. And yeah, Gamble’s assessment sounds about right to me. (I first saw it in the comments section of an excellent post by Joe Posnanski, which is worth reading for the wealth of sports quotes).

Dang, that Grain Belt sweater in the upper right corner is HOT. via AJ Fosik

My old friend Michael Ramage has a hand in this installation in the Yerba Buena Center for Art’s Sculpture Garden. He’s designing and building a pair of domes, made from layers of bricks and mortar and styled on ancient techniques. The artist behind it is Jewlia Eisenberg & Charming Hostess, and the vision is that the domes will be an outdoor venue for music, contemplation, and mind-expanding activities throughout the summer. I visited on Tuesday, and I was struck by the ways that each dome’s oculus (fancy word for the open, circular window at the top of the dome) framed the surrounding sky and buildings. That perspective actually kind of made the generic buildings at 3rd and Howard appear to be somewhat cool. Didn’t think that would be possible.

At this point, I have an intimacy with the Marriott Courtyard that is likely registered in my DNA. I could be blindfolded and tossed into the lobby of a Courtyard, and I’d be in my room, ironing my shirts, and drinking a Coors Light from the mini-bar within 5 minutes. Every once in a while the business travel stars align, and we get to stay in a place like the Ames Hotel in Boston. Not only are the rooms deeluxe (pictured above), but the building itself is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the doorman told me that it was Boston’s “first skyscraper.” And Wikipedia agrees. Not pictured here is the nicest component of my room: A huge arched window that looked south over the Old City Hall, the Old South Meeting House, and no doubt lots of other old things. No Coors Light, of course, but pretty killer otherwise.

I’m one episode from the finale of Deadwood, and I’m feeling prematurely nostalgic for the pantomime conversations between the Cantonese-speaking Wu and English-speaking Al Swearengen. These “conversations” generally involve frantic sketching with charcoal, oaths unprintable in a family blog, and very little English. They tend to conclude with the declaration “hang dai!” (literally: 兄弟) which means “brothers,” and reciprocal gestures of intertwined index and middle fingers, as shown above. Hang dai, Mr. Wu. I will miss you.

From the April 1972 edition of Popular Science — available in Google Books!

I wonder how many earnest, science-minded readers sent away for a Stephenson’s catalog? Total Internet awesomeness, anyway.

The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, Fall 1968. From Arts & Ecology.

Steve Jobs once referred to the WEC as “the bible” of his generation, and it’s no wonder that he admired it: Each issue of the catalog was sprawling, ambitious, smart, lovingly crafted, and very much in keeping with the best of Northern California’s innovative spirit — progressive, irreverent, and (in its own way) ruthless.

The title of this post refers to a (perhaps apocryphal) account of the user experience considerations of the WEC. Reportedly, the catalog’s design editor, J. Baldwin, said that the catalog was an attempt to bring everything (of value) in the world to within two¹ phone calls for any reader. Which was undoubtedly great at the time, but not quite good enough to escape the development of the one-call solution — the dial-up modem. Doh! And the no-call solution — broadband!

And yet, when you compare the infinite variety of the web to the refined encapsulation of the WEC, it’s easy to see the value of expert curation. Doesn’t it seem like the great opportunities for progress in web content is to become more like the WEC — reliable, readable, smart? And even reader-supported? (After all, the WEC cost $5 in the 60s; $31.85 today. As one of the Whole Earth editors wrote, people will pay for authenticity and findability).

¹ For the record, I’m not exactly sure what the significance of “two” is, rather than “six” or “three.” Would the first call would be the Whole Earth Catalog, and the second would be to ... the product creator? Or the first would be to the product creator, and the second would be to ... someone else?

From the outstanding satirical Twitter feed, @BPGlobalPR. T-shirts here; book deal to follow, I assume.

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its lines, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.

It’s a quote from Emerson, delivered in a lecture on the divine in the mid-19th century. You gotta wonder if he’d reconsider his position if he saw the world today.

I really geek out out on glimpses of the marked-up copy of other writers, so I was pretty fascinated to see a page of a Presidential speech-in-progress. If you click through to the zoomed-in page, you’ll see that all of Obama’s notes are all copy-edits; there are no developmental “what I’m trying to say here”-style edits. Not sure what that means, but I thought it was interesting. The Flickr caption indicates that the photo was taken “in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress.” Cool.

I’ll start by not wasting anyone’s time complaining about this year’s tournament pairings. That path is well-traveled.¹ And well it should be! The pairings are outrageous! Kansas was punished! Kentucky, Duke, and Syracuse — they’ve all got golden tickets to Indianapolis. Right? Right?

For starters, I’m glad I’m not Kentucky

For so many reasons. Let’s look at the round two match-ups. Texas and Wake Forest have been terrible — horrible — over the past couple of months. But, they’re talented, and each could gel for just long enough to beat anyone in the country, including Kentucky. Is this unlikely? Highly. Is it more likely that Cornell will grind their way past Temple, Wisconsin and Kentucky? Perhaps. But indulge me: Texas actually matches up pretty well with Kentucky, size-wise and talent-wise. I think that it’s possible that they could get motivated (ever so briefly) to not be embarrassed by them. Am I picking Texas over Kentucky? Maybe not. Texas coach Rick Barnes is never in danger of out-gameplanning anyone. He’s never been accused of having his team ready to play, and his teams are always threatening to underperform. Let’s not forget this. Still, I wouldn’t want to be a Kentucky fan, not in this tournament, or in any lifetime. Because let me be frank: I don’t think I could face a world without reading, without literacy. I just don’t think I could do it.

Which reminds me, did you hear that Coach K was born in the year of the Ratfaced Bastard?

Eerie, right? Not sure what his astrological sign is, but I’m relatively sure that all the major media figures kiss its ass.

But Duke didn’t get an easy road, either

I know, most people say that Duke has the easiest path: a #4 seed in free-fall after its star blew out his knee (Purdue), and a #2 seed that lost six of its last ten (Villanova). I say: Thank you for noticing, world, but look at the #3 seed: Baylor. This team got punished for playing cupcakes early — Hardin Simmons? Texas Arlington? Southern? Hartford? Coach Scott Drew, c’mon. You asked for your cruddy seed. But then Baylor played a tough conference schedule, didn’t lose a game by more than 7 points, and they absolutely light it up (119 points per 100 possessions — 5th in the country). Enough about Baylor; Duke may not even get there. Louisville will give Duke everything they can handle in round 2; perhaps more. Rick Pitino v Coach K, in the second round? Fans’ brains might explode. Which coach do I hate more? Minds will boggle.

Back to the Wildcats

Kansas State. Are they good enough to reach the Final Four. Yes. Can they beat Syracuse? Quite possibly. How do you beat Syracuse? You punish the zone. And K-State has two guys who can do this — Pullen and Clemente. What about the glass? Two more guys: Wally Judge and Curtis Kelly. They can hold their own underneath. KenPom has K-State ranked 5th in the country in offensive rebounding percentage at 40%. They gather 40% of the rebounds on their offensive glass. That’s huge. And they play great defense. Did I mention I wouldn’t want to be Syracuse? I wouldn’t. Especially because a big guy might be hurt. Or, he might not be. March madness, baybee!

The team that will break my heart: Cornell

Every year I pick a team like this. They’re good. They play under control. They’ve got a system. All the ingredients are there for surprise. Subtext: They played very well against Kansas. Okay, let’s face it, they out-played Kansas for 20–25 minutes in the hallowed hall of Lawrence, and they came up short (barely). Texas A&M, Baylor, Colorado, Kansas State and Memphis also played very well against the Hawks, and lost. Subtext: I also have these teams doing well in the tournament. Caveat! Anyway, every year, I pick a team like this to get out of the first round, and they lay an egg. I’m looking at you, Butler team of 2008. This year’s heartbreaker is especially obvious to avoid because Temple is a good team who could easily ... force the aforementioned egg? To emerge? Anyway, Temple is a great defensive team, though you wouldn’t have been able to see any evidence of that against ... Kansas! Yes, they lost to the Jayhawks at home. By 32 points.

Did I mention that this bracket breakdown was from the point of view who has watched 34 Kansas games, and roughly 20 total other games. Caveat!

¹ I will offer one suggestion: Why not just factor their media desirability into the RPI? Your team’s winning percentage x their opponent’s winning percentage x their opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage x the likelihood that your team will draw a large, rich audience to the Final Four weekend equals their seed. It’s obviously a factor in every year’s bracket. Last year, North Carolina was invited to do the Tennessee Waltz all the way to Detroit. In other words, they had it easy. In other news, the nation loves them some Tar Heels. It’s worth mentioning that advertisers tend to pay more when the Heels are playing. And of course CBS is for-profit enterprise. You get the point. We all do. It’s time to be up-front about it.

Okay, wait. One more thing. I will post something about the absurd lopsidedness of the pairings:

You want to make marginal No. 1 Duke’s road that easy? Seeding the bracket is tough, but come on. The South reeks of a committee that lost the forest for the trees, and Kentucky, Syracuse and Kansas — especially Kansas — will suffer. So much for being the overall No. 1. If we can’t reward Kansas for its excellence with something better than this, then the anti-expansion folks’ main point is officially moot. The regular season doesn’t matter.

More here.

New York’s blizzard of 1977 makes a riveting cameo appearance in “El Super,” an indie (before the term was formalized) film about the hard adjustments that immigrants make in coming to New York. The movie is great for many reasons, but the blizzard steals a few scenes as the main character — a Cuban super — walks around town. Snow is massed on cars, piled high in the streets, and pedestrians stumble through snow-walled sidewalk canyons. Quite a scene, especially in the 70s, when New York looked crumbly and decrepit.

Amidst the blizzard, the film is a melancholy document of the lives of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants as they reckon with the immensity of New York City and their dismal prospects for work in the bad old days of New York. The dialogue is great, often funny, just as often poignant. Good stuff. I had to resort to extreme measures to find it, but you can buy it on VHS from Amazon. Or you can let me know, and I’ll hook you up.

Speaking of the blizzard, there’s an amazing Barney Miller episode about the blizzard? There is. Worth watching just to hear the theme song again.

This clustercuss is the redesign. (I can’t find a picture of the “before,” but it wasn’t really too different, to the casual observer).

The real problem: The redesign isn’t radical enough.

It simply shifted content around — a sure-fire bet to piss off regular readers. The redesign doesn’t address bigger problems around findability, readability, navigability, whatever you want to call a lingering sense of not being able to get around easily. It also breaks from a common blog convention: homepages that includes lengthy content for each post (UPDATE: they’ve changed this). The biggest change is that they’ve moved away from individual blogs as linear, ever-expanding solo narratives, which I think is interesting. What they’re moving toward is less clear.

According to spirited commentary by the Atlantic writers, the redesign was driven by the arcane calculus of advertising. I won’t pretend to know how online ad placement works in a place like The Atlantic, but what I do know is that someone told them to spread their fresh content around, and it’s kinda half-spread.

I am a big Atlantic reader. I subscribe to the print edition, and I regularly read three of its bloggers — Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows and Andrew Sullivan. I subscribe to their feeds, so I don’t go to theatlantic.com unless I want to comment on Coates’ blog, or read comments, which means I’ll head there a couple of times a week, but when I get there I’ll be deeply immersed in a thread.

To me, the true opportunity was to leverage the sprawling, smart conversations that these writers continually create — to create a sort of salon among the readers and writers. To Klein’s point above, you’d think a virtual salon would be exactly the kind of thing that would “re-center” the brand. Breaking out of the conventional blog model is a reasonable first step. Blogs are long threads, and maintaining individual threads needlessly inhibits wider-scale conversation. So they’ve taken that half-step away from threads (which are a helpful organizing principle for readers), but the salon is nowhere in sight. And this is a problem.

Wordle seems sort of perfect for representing James Brown lyrics. I used Internet lyrics, which don’t appear to be a true transcription of the version on In the Jungle Groove, which is 8+ minutes of “huh!” and “hey!” and “Good God!” and “smokin!” Still, good enough. While you’re considering James Brown as a lyricist, you should check out Eddie Murphy’s theme song for “James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party” — the video; and in Wordle, which is an interesting way of visualizing one element of the satire.