Month: February 2023
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Manhattan Tower of Terror
A new hotel going up near Times Square is proposing putting one of those vertical-drop rides on the top of the building. In the request, Extell suggests that vertical-drop rides will pull in tourists as well as “a few jaded New Yorkers,” and pitches it as the next level for hoteliers who “must think flexibly […]
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Ukraine
Today is the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. The Stop Putin page is still up and the Yale School of Management estimates over 1,000 companies have withdrawn from Russia since the conflict started. If you’re looking for someplace to donate, check out the 1K Project. Looking through my archives, here’s a rundown of things […]
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Wet Leg
Nothing to report, just a musical interlude for your enjoyment. Chaise Longue blew up when it was first posted on YouTube. After a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist (they lost to Samara Joy who we saw recently at the Blue Note). “I was staying over at Hester’s house when we wrote it, and when I […]
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AI Mongering
I’ve been saving links to articles concerning the advancements & ethical quandaries related to ChatGPT, Bing AI Chat, Sydney, Bard and other Large Language Model AIs. All of this was in the hope that I’d be able to string together a cogent point of view about how I feel about the latest advancements. After doing […]
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The Internet’s Circle of Life
Paul Ford, great sage of internet culture, has a piece in Wired where he puts the inevitable dismantling of Twitter into perspective. Musk is merely the vehicle. The real reason Twitter lies in ruins is because it was an abomination before God. It was a Tower of Babel. The internet is always in motion, like […]
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Allen Ginsberg
I recognized the font of the “Howl” on the front of his baseball cap. We struck up a conversation about City Lights bookstore, Ferlinghetti, the Beats and old San Francisco. Eric was his name. Turns out he was an agent for some of Allen Ginsberg’s art and hung out at his apartment on the Lower […]
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American Food Mythology
Let us remember the giants of American Cuisine. Betty Crocker Betty Crocker isn’t actually a real person. She is the brainchild of an advertising campaign developed by the Washburn-Crosby Company, a flour milling company started in the late 1800s that eventually became General Mills. Who was Betty Crocker? Colonel Sanders Ironically, Colonel Harland Sanders cannot […]
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That was fast
AI-generated junk suffocating online platforms like algal blooms that choke the life out of ponds. Hustle bros are jumping on the AI bandwagon Well that was fast. While still pondering the impact of generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT, we already have the hucksters rushing in to put it to market and make a quick buck. On […]
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suck.com – birth of snark
I wanted to share something which I think is lost on today’s web, the art of the hyperlink. The decision to link to something using the web should be more than just informational. There are the basic points of style such as collapsing the sentence and using the verb as the link to more information […]