Manhattan Street Photos

Here is a nice slideshow from my old friend, Stephen Taylor, of photos taken the other day while walking through lower Manhattan:

Street Photos - 072709 - Manhattan - Stephen Taylor from steve taylor on Vimeo.

'Lets Just Sprinkle Some Crack on Him and Get Outta Here'

I have sorta been following the Gates/Police thing in the news lately. I think Chappelle illustrates the situation nicely here (even though this tape looks pretty old, I guess things don't change too much):

Detroit: City of the Feral Houses

Wow, detroit just keeps the hits coming. here are some photos by James D. Griffioen documenting what calls 'feral houses' -- houses that have been abandoned by humans and which nature is slowly engulfing. For those who read 'The World Without Us', this is the real thing in action. [via Boing Boing]

Pork Chop Sandwiches, cont'd

Ah, but of what must we know in order to succeed in battle?

Pork Chop Sandwiches

Yeah, Let's Do This [or, Yet Another Reason to Move to Utah and Get a Government Job}

I've always sorta felt this way (and it helps if you work for yourself/freelance, of course): as long as you get the work done, why does it matter when it gets done? If you're supposed to work 40 hours a week, why does it need to take 5 days to accomplish it? I mean, how lazy is that, really? I could just as easily waste 10 hours a day for four days as I could 8 hours a day for 5 days. Then I could have three days to actually live my proper life. It may even get the economy going again (if you give people three days with nothing else to do, they won't be able to resist going shopping and buying needless crap).

So this comes out of Utah, via Scientific American. 4-day work weeks (but still 40 hours long). Apparently it even saves money and energy while also letting people live their lives:

Local governments in particular have had their eyes on Utah over the last year; the state redefined the workday for more than 17,000 of its employees last August. For those workplaces, there's no longer a need to turn on the lights, elevators or computers on Fridays—nor do janitors need to clean vacant buildings. Electric bills have dropped even further during the summer, thanks to less air-conditioning: Friday's midday hours have been replaced by cooler mornings and evenings on Monday through Thursday. As of May, the state had saved $1.8 million.

Perhaps as important, workers seem all too ready to replace "TGIF" with "TGIT". "People just love it," says Lori Wadsworth, a professor of public management at Brigham Young University in Provo. She helped survey those on the new Working 4 Utah schedule this May and found 82 percent would prefer to stick with it.

The environment seems to like it, too. "If employees are on the road 20 percent less, and office buildings are only powered four days a week," Langmaid says, "the energy savings and congestion savings would be enormous." Plus, the hour shift for the Monday through Thursday workers means fewer commuters during the traditional rush hours, speeding travel for all. It also means less time spent idling in traffic and therefore less spewing of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. The 9-to-5 crowd also gets the benefit of extended hours at the DMV and other state agencies that adopt the four-day schedule.

Some Words from Some Sponsors

Duke University has a project that collects vintage TV commercials and posts them online, called AdViews:

AdViews is a digital archive of thousands of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. These commercials were created or collected by the ad agency Benton & Bowles or its successor, D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B). Founded in 1929, Benton & Bowles was a New York advertising agency that merged with D'Arcy Masius McManus in 1985 to form DMB&B. Major clients included are Procter & Gamble, Kraft, Schick, Vicks, and Post, among others. Commercials will be added in phased batches over several months in 2009. The commercials are a part of the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles Archives found at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

This archive also does something I've never seen before. You watch all of the videos through iTunes, and you can download them all for free, too. Pretty slick.

Oh, and note this:

The television commercials in the AdViews collection have been made available for use in research, teaching, and private study. Content from this collection may not be used for any commercial purpose without prior permission.

A Brief History of the Past 80 Years of the American Economy

The Economist has the informative little video about the US Economy since World War II, focusing on savings vs. consumption, and government deficits, and national exports. No wonder we're in the midst of an economic crisis, massive government deficits, and a thoroughly wrecked credit system. Did nobody think that the 80s were a bad idea?

Since the Economist doesn't seem to do embedding, here's the link.

Detroit: City of Just

So it seems that Jorge Just was recently in Detroit. We turn to him for some insight on the city of the future [for the uninitiated, read the twitter posts backwards to put them in chronological order]:

And You Thought Tina Fey Was Good

She may look and sound like, Sarah Palin, but I think William Shatner has some special insight into the deep meaning hidden in that woman's mysterious words. A friend of mine recently reminded me that it is important in life for there to be things that we don't fully understand....