(08.11.09) Recommends:

Scenes from a Recession, c. 2009.


lot, gower & melrose.

(01.19.09) Recommends:

Ericailcane.

We learned about Ericailcane this weekend while we were walking down LaBrea. If you've been around LaBrea and Melrose lately perhaps you've seen this giant [some type of animal(1)] eating a car:

Further research revealed that this mural went up as part of Ericailcane's new show Man Is The Bastard at the nearby Carmichael Gallery. The gallery has a nice, er, gallery of photos from the show up on the website, if you can't see it in person.

But lovers of whimsical ink on paper work should give Ericailane a try.




(1) We use the term 'animal' with some trepidation since it appears to be wearing a very civilized pair of shoes.

(01.02.09) Recommends:

New Year's Resolutions (Written on, and From the Prosepective of, My Blackberry Curve).

1. Lose the smudges. I want to come standard with a protective cover that prevents unsightly smudges and tiny micro-fractures in the screen. I'm becoming the Tammy Faye Baker of mobile devices. Ugh.

2. Flash people more often. I want to come with a web-browser that supports mutliple tabs and Flash (and a media player that can be easily minimized).

3. Become a sharp shooter. In a world under the reign of Web 2.0, convenience is increasingly valued over quality. But If I marginally increase the quality of my camera, I'll be Panglossian.

4. Learn to speak in tongues. When users are riding on the metro and publish blog posts to, e.g., Mobile Blogger, html tags should be recognized. (In reality, this is probably more of a Gmail issue. But, alas, the unexamined life is not worth living.)

5. Get fatter. My keys should be a little bigger, so even novices can confidently type with the meaty part of their thumbs rather than tentatively peck with the nail portion of their thumbs. (The BB Bold -- that tramp -- has the perfect sized keys, but I have the perfect amount of "clickiness")

6. Get braces. The F and J key -- or some appropriate combination -- should come with little notches, like on a standard keyboard, so even novices will be able to type while looking at the screen rather than looking at the keyboard.

7. Get timed. Changes in time zones and day light saving should occur automatically. Does this really not already happen?? Don't think it does. There's both a BB and "network" source for time and date, but nobody wants to take they time to figure out the difference.

8. Be nicer to friends. Texting a number not already in the address book takes too long. You have to scroll all the way up to the Use One Time (or whatever) option. As a result people never use me to text and everybody thinks I hate them. Sad face. (Of course, if my friends were really friends, they'd have BBM and this resolution would be mooted. Hint, hint ppl. Srsly.)

9. Get Logged. My call log feature is laughable. I know I'm a mobile computing device first and a phone second, but really, c'mon.

That's my 949 suckas!

(12.28.08) Recommends:

Airport Confessions.

(Or, People Who Grabbed Our Attention This Year, Written While Flying To Denver).

The other day while on the way to the airport, we blogged about the events of 2K8 that grabbed our attention. Today we thought we'd pass the time on the first leg of our flight back blogging about the people (in the news) who came to dominate our attention this year. We're doing this on the fly, literally -- rim shot! -- so we'll miss some people. And naturally there will be some overlap from our list from earlier in the week. But here goes (and in no particular order).

1. The People Behind the Planet Money Podcast. Planet Money is a blog/podcast put out by NPR (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money). It is only a few months old, but consistantly put out what we thought was the best reporting of the financial meltdown in both its weekday podcast and in particular it's two, hour-long episodes produced in conjunction with This American Life. One of the things we find annoying about a lot of traditional journalism is the amount of assumed knowledge contained in a typical story. What we love about Planet Money is that takes on big economic issues and unpacks them in a manner that is digestable for a non-economist listener, but without dumbing down the content. The show doesn't assume you know what a CDO is. In fact, the reporters admit they're not really sure what certain things are (in fact, they often get the experts to admit that they aren't always sure what's going on -- simple enough definition of a bubble or a dubious scheme, we'd say). So they go hunt down the story and present it link by link. Clearly and systematically explaining each link and linkage. For our money, Adam Davidson is the star of the show.

2. Paul Krugman. We were first exposed to Krugman -- and hence to his enormous impact on the field -- as econ undergrads back in the late 90s-early 00s, before he started his stint as a NYTimes columnist. We mention this time frame because today some people view him as purely a political or partisan voice. While we've agreed with almost all of his critiques of the Bush Administration, particularly over the past three plus years (during which he increasingly took off the gloves, and was often alone in the wilderness as one of the lone, legitimate, mainstream voices doing so), we were never really convinced it took a first-rate, world-class -- indeed, 2008 Nobel Prize winner -- Economist to point out the failings of the Bush Administration. But as the financial crisis began unfolding in front of us this year, suddenly all the pieces that Krugman has been presenting over the years fell into place. During his time at the Times you arguably could have been forgiven for thinking he was just another member of the liberal elite ego machine, but in 2008 you simply couldn't say you were serious about understanding what was going on in the world financial markets without reading Krugman's column (and perhaps re-reading some of those 2004-06 wilderness era columns) and blog, and listening to him lecture.

3. Barack Obama. It's a funny paradox. The pace of Obama's meteoric rise has been perhaps unprecedented. But the length of the campaign was also perhaps unprecedented. Which made it easy to occassionally lose site of how inspiring we found Obama. After he gave The Speech in 2004 we -- along with most of our family and friends -- instictively knew he would win the 2008 election -- he hit a nerve that was so raw, so exposed, so waiting, yearning to be hit. 2008 was the year that instinct became reality. It'll be a year that history books will both, to paraphrase Lincoln, significantly note and long remember. And it's because of Obama.

4. David Plouffe. We both detested yet were inspired by Plouffe's incessant emails. Detested because the role of money in politics gives us the heebie-jeebies. But inspired because every time he asked he received so much goddam money. There is a fine line between money corrupting and people who normally don't care pitching in because they finally give a damn. Plouffe made us feel it was the latter that was happening. Plus, those "homemade strategy videos" he would sent out were pretty sweet, right?

5. Nate Silver. If you seriously followed this election, between September and November 04 you spent more hours at work checking FiveThirtyEight.com than working. The week after the election, you checked it like a man who loses his leg in war reports being able to feel his amputated leg. We're only now getting over it. We all know these three things to be true.

6. Shepard Fairey. 2008 was the year he went from being known as the guy who created an image that was widely influential in certain cultural circles, to creating the defining imagine of an historic election. There's no need to attempt to overstate Fairey's role in getting Obama elected, but there's no question that his iconic-imaging of Obama will go hand-in-hand with history's recounting of the election.

7. The Pirates. First we thought the stories were just kind of funny and odd and seemed out of place. Then we thought the Pirates were making a brave, populist stance against foreign overfishing. Then we feared that the world economy was certainly going to collapse and we were headed to a life based on the movie Water World. We still have a few more days in '08 to come up with a new story line. But the fact is we were glued to pirate stories this year.

Plane is landing. Perhaps more later.

(12.24.08) Recommends:

Taxicab Confessions.

Stories That Grabbed Our Attention This Year, Written While in the Cab to LAX.

01. The election. This probably tops most people's list. From primaries to caucuses to FiveThirtyEight to that awful Sarah Palin person to the election of BH Obama, it was literally a year-long ride.

02. The near collapse of the world economy. Who thought we'd read with such interest stories about the TED spread and the commercial paper market. Every day tried to top the previous day in over-the-topness of bad news.

03. Pirates. A mixture of childlike fasination, admiration of the perhaps dubious populist stance of the pirates, and a fear that due to point 2, pirate economies would become more prevalant, we couldn't read enought about this.

04. Nebraska Anti-Abandonment Law. So NE passed a law meant to encourage parents who couldn't carry the burden of a baby, to turn newborns in rather than abandon them. Problem is, no age restriction was written into the law and something like 50 children, many as old as 17, were immediately given up. Law was amended in an emergency session.

05. Suicide of David Foster Wallace. If anybody could have put stories 1-4 into context of modern culture, it would have been Dave Wallace. When he checked out early, we feared mass confusion had finally carried the day. We all carry on, but with heavy hearts.

06. Myspace verdict. It's always hard to talk about the import of case law until years later when it's impact can be fully analyzed. But this case makes it a federal crime to violate a private company's terms of use. The back story makes this result easy to handle for casual observers, but it's theoretically taking us into murky waters.

Well, that's all the time we have. We're being lectured on taxicab credit card use by the driver and can no longer concentrate. What is up with the cash entitlement complex of cab drivers? I know it's marginally inconvenient for you, but it's marginally inconvenient for me to pay for the price of the ride. So it evens out, okay?

(12.23.08) Recommends:

Scenes From Little Armenia.

So the other day we were out walking around, exploring Little Armenia, which is a little neighborhood nestled roughly between Hollywood and Thai Town and which, incidentally (and somewhat inexplicably), has a pretty decent $20 all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant which has all of these elaborate restrictions on the all-you-can-eat meal, including an ominous, though we're guessing never enforced, threat written on the menu that you are being timed, and if you eat for too long you will be asked to leave. The place specializes in spicy sushi rolls, complete with a "if you can eat a certain amount of such and such spicy roll, we'll put your picture up on a wall." Again, all somewhat inexplicable.

Anyway. As we were saying. We were exploring the neighborhood and came across the following sign:




And the sign seemed pretty perfect. Here we were, in this pretty hard to explain neighborhood, during a time when the country and, in fact, literally the entire world, has been gripped by an almost palatable sense of weariness and nervousness and relentless bad news. And then we saw this sign and realized that though the people walking along the street might have differet lots in life, might be at different points in life, might be aiming for different goals in life, there are certain things that are common to us all. It's a useful thing to keep in the back of our minds, as we go about our day to day lives.

(12.18.08) Recommends:

Introducing: The Red Line Diaries.

So, there's no question that we've become bored with this blog over the last several months. We've spent much more time engaging in short Twitter bursts, and playing around with other mobile blogging platforms. (In fact we're -- err, I'm -- typing this waiting on the metro platform on the way home from work, so please excuse the lack of links). To this end, we're developing a new blog -- working name The Red Line Diaries -- that we hope to debut, and link to in this space, very soon.

Ooop. Here comes our train. Talk soon.