Is Europe bringing back the Automat? No; it never really left

photo by Lucio Tonina/SITOS

We, as humans, have just taken a huge step towards the utopia that the Jetsons live in*: vending machines that make fresh pizza. I know its not a foodarackacycle (i'm appalled that I can't find a picture of this to link to) but we're getting there.
From the NY Times:

Over the last decade, Mr. Torghele, 56, an entrepreneur in this northern Italian city who first made money selling pasta in California, has developed a vending machine that cooks pizza. The machine does not just slip a frozen pizza into a microwave. It actually whips up flour, water, tomato sauce and fresh ingredients to produce a piping hot pizza in about three minutes.

The machine, which Mr. Torghele calls Let’s Pizza, is only the spearhead of a trend. Restaurants reminiscent of the old Horn & Hardart chain in the United States, which are fully automatic, are also showing up around the Continent.

Unlike the old automats (the last Horn & Hardart closed in 1991), which were staffed with workers who refilled the machines with creamed spinach and baked beans as fast as customers pulled them out, these restaurants consist entirely of vending machines.

While Horn & Hardart may have closed down, there are still automats to be had, and right here in New York, at Bamn! at St. Mark's Place - though be warned, human hands still make the food before shoving it into the little warm food-cubbyholes. Also, if you find yourself in Amsterdam, you can always hit up Febo (its grosser than the commercial lets on):




*claims of utopia are debatable, but will be saved for a future post, as The Jetsons are to me what Hamlet is to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses

If there's anything better than Super-Villainy, its real villainy

After Super-Villains, some of my favorite people are bank robbers/jewelry/art thieves.

In the latest issue of Wired Magazine, super-villain (not really) Leonardo Notarbartolo relates his tale of relieving the Antwerp Diamond Center of at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils in 2003. True to form, his cronies have nicknames: Speedy, The Genius, The Monster, and the King of Keys.

So yes, they rob this safe and make off with the loot. Its not a spoiler to tell you that they got caught, because Notarbartolo is telling the story from prison, but I'm still amazed by HOW they were caught. (I guess Super-Villains always get caught. Still, you plan a job like this and THAT'S how you get caught?)

The Door 1. Combination dial (0-99) 2. Keyed lock 3. Seismic sensor (built-in) 4. Locked steel grate 5. Magnetic sensor 6. External security camera

The Vault 7. Keypad for disarming sensors 8. Light sensor 9. Internal security camera 10. Heat/motion sensor (approximate location)

Illustration: Joe McKendry

Super-Villainy and Super-Heroism

I am always a big fan of supervillains, and an even bigger fan of supervillain parodies. I once went to a 'Superhero Party' dressed as a supervillain (mad scientist-type), but only after having sent a threatening videotape demanding a ransom for the other guests to watch before I arrived.

"Lex Luthor Bailout" with Jon Hamm from Jon Hamm

Speaking of Superman, this is a classic, too:

Good News

This is great.
You can see the front page of any newspaper in the country (catch 'em while you can!)
It can also be used to watch the demise of the newspaper industry in real-time (or almost-real-time).


The Houston Chronicle is still in business.

Complex Conservatism Complex

Andrew Sullivan, who's blog was one of the first that I began reading on a regular basis (not only for his insights, but for his ability to gather lots and lots of interesting things from all over the internet), has put up a little reflection on the things conflicting him right now. Think what you may of him (I know that his post-9/11 and pre-Iraq writings rub a lot of people, myself included, the wrong way; and I know he now rubs a lot of conservatives the wrong way) but he is one of the more open and honest operators out there, always serious about the positions he holds, and willing to be persuaded, whether by argument or by the unfolding of events.

I just wanted to note that I found his discourse below to be inspiring: its nice to see people openly confronting themselves and their beliefs, and addressing their lives and surroundings and beliefs critically.

As a conservative, English, Catholic, gay, HIV-positive man, I can only imagine that life must often be trying for him in these times:

Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it's a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do? You read me flounder every day; and you can find many less conflicted bloggers to read. Maybe I should take a break and live a less examined life for a while. Or maybe I should do what I am still doing: trying to make sense of where I belong, stay praying in a church that has sealed itself off from modernity, cling to a conservatism that begins to feel like a form of solipsism, hang on in the hope that America can reform itself and repair the world a little. I think, in fact, that this is obviously the right and only serious choice. Life is always a temporary and losing battle, an engagement with the deadliness of doing. It just feels deadlier than usual in these past few years of brutally unsentimental education.

Or maybe I should laugh more.

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice still got it

Its great to see two guys still doing what they love after all these years.

For any and all haters out there, I present a rebuttal from Stanley Burrell (MC Hammer) himself; he's got nothing to be ashamed of:

"I'm not the least bit self-conscious," says Hammer, now 46, his tone steeled with defiance before the show. "I'm the guy who went to the Tokyo Dome and sold out five nights. Who's the other rapper who sold out five nights at the Tokyo Dome? Oh, that's right, there isn't one. You don't have to add anything to my résumé, just read it like it is."

Vanilla Ice saved his choice lines for the audience:

After a few songs, he starts speaking their language: "How about I take it back to the old school?" The crowd goes nuts. "Ice Ice Baby" brings down the house. He follows with "Play That Funky Music," and even plays "Ninja Rap," the song he penned for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze."

Ninja Rap! (plus some awesome interview clips with Vanilla: "ice ice baby's in full effect - yep, yep")

Detroit: City of the Future, cont'd

Apparently Cold Emphasis has been noticed by the outside world (because I sent it a link to the coffee posting (also known as Judd-bait)). A reader wanted to post this back (I guess there is some problem with the comments section- that may explain the dearth of comments to this point):

Detroit is amazing. Have you seen this?

Is there anything coffee can't do?

Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra and Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno have been doing research into whether used coffee grounds can be used to create diesel fuel.

If you look closely at your cup of fresh coffee, you may notice a thin film of oil on the top. Looks like there's more where that came from.

From the last issue of The Economist:

Dr Misra says that a litre of biodiesel requires 5-7kg of coffee grounds, depending on the oil content of the coffee in question. In their laboratory his team has set up a one-gallon-a-day production facility, which uses between 19kg and 26kg of coffee grounds. The biofuel should cost about $1 per gallon to make in a medium-sized installation, the researchers estimate.

Commercial production could be carried out by a company that collected coffee grounds from big coffee-chains and cafeterias. There is plenty available: according to a report by the United States Department of Agriculture, more than 7m tonnes of coffee are consumed every year, which the researchers estimate could produce some 340m gallons of biodiesel.

(Illustration by Pelle Mellor)

Victoire EP released on eMusic

Victoire has just released a short EP-style album, A Door Into the Dark, made up of live recordings (spruced up beautifully by the studio-wizard, Lawson White) to hold us over until their full album comes out at the end of the year.

Its an eMusic exclusive, so I think its only available for download for subscribers, but you can also hear the music on Missy's website.

eMusic has a really nice review, too:

Missy Mazzoli, the young composer who writes the music for the all-female modern classical ensemble Victoire, seems to have a private line on mute anxiety, on quietly nagging uncertainty, and on the four short pieces that comprise the Door Into the Dark EP, she taps it with effortlessness bordering on the uncanny. Her urgent, enigmatic songs feel like 3AM dispatches garbled by a bad connection, with only the occasional loaded phrase puncturing the static. The band's combination of chittering electronics, found sound and repetitive string and woodwind lines eloquently conjures how it feels to helplessly grope for words that don't exist to describe disquiet we can't place, how it feels to be left alone with only the colors of our own thoughts for company. Victoire live in the up-close dots of a Seurat painting, the point where a seemingly clear picture dissolves into incomprehensibility. You can squint and focus, but the harder you train your gaze, the further everything breaks apart.

...

...it urges you to lean forward, to decode the message just out of earshot. But there is no secret, nothing that needs unlocking, just four gorgeous and inscrutable pieces of music worth puzzling over.

Plus, for the burgeoning groupie-base, they also post an interview with the band:

Do you ever think about where your music "fits"?

Missy: I think about it a lot. I always have the same thought pattern, and it's like a circle. It starts when I'm trying to figure out where we're going to play a gig, or trying to figure out who's going to release our album. Even the next song, or piece, or whatever you want to call it, that I'm going to write, where to start from. I always have this question: "It would be a lot easier if we had this specific genre." But then my next thought is: Wait, that would defeat the very purpose of writing music that exists in this crack, in this imagined world. It's kind of like our very mission is to not be defined in one or two words. It's fun being enigmatic. It's fun not really being able to be pinned down.

There are so many bands like that, though! Whenever I get angsty about categories, I think about bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor! or the Dirty Projectors. It sounds like they just don't give a shit, like they are totally free from having to stuff themselves in a genre.

Norway Public Broadcasting is the future of

Via Boing Boing, It seems that NRK, the Norwegian Public Broadcaster, is beginning to implement its own BitTorrent system to distribute its content to viewers.

According to NRK:

"Experience from our early tests show that if we're the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it."

very interesting...

Detroit: City of the Future (trendsetter alert!)

The Financial Times has an interesting piece about the present state of Detroit.

Boing Boing has an interesting take on the city, imagined as an archetypal "science fiction" city:

I got to thinking that Detroit may be the most science fictional city in the world -- if sf is about the way that technology changes society (and vice-versa), then Detroit, the first New World, world-class city built around a high-tech industry that collapsed, is about as science fictional as it gets.

When I think about it, the premise makes sense: it is places like this that become quickly interesting and unpredictable as the 'old order' of social structures breaks down and there is neither an entity big enough or effective enough (government, corporation, civic society, etc.) to impose a new order, nor a large enough population base to maintain its social influence over such a large city.

Maybe big new things will be coming out of places like detroit in the future; nothing like what came out of them in the past, of course, but these things may well be even bigger and certainly stranger.

(here's your chance, trendsetters: I heard that the median price of home sales in Detroit have dropped to $7500!)

Pirate (Gang) Radio

On Saturday night, the Orange County (Florida) Sheriff's department raided a pirate radio station called "Street Heat". Apparently it was an illegal, vulgar gang-promoting radio station. This is an intriguing story; i'm hoping that a little audio will eventually emerge from the station itself so we can get a little perspective on this.

It does raise some interesting issues about what media is for and what limits are placed on it for the public good.

According to the police: "There are no sentences in this stuff that they're putting out that didn't have vulgar language, didn't have some demeaning language towards women, towards people," said Sgt. Mike Gibson.

Gibson said the radio show covered "where to buy drugs, where to buy prostitutes and what gang to be a member of."

...

"They're promoting violence," Gibson said. "When you promote violence, the robberies go up, the homicides go up, people become victims of crimes."