Saturday in Santa Fe

02010-05-29 | Uncategorized | 1 comment

A Buddhist monk watches fireworks during the opening ceremony of the Shanghai World Expo – Guardian Eyewitness. Great photo. That would have been my preferred vantage point, also.
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This piece on the Wired iPad issue might only be of interest to designers, but I find it captivating. It’s a new medium and it is interesting to imagine what digital news will look like in ten years. Personally, I found that ads and editorials were too hard to distinguish. Sometimes I tried to scroll down, only to find out that it was an ad and not an article. Lots of scrolling to skip ads. I felt that the iPad issue is basically a paper issue with a few links and a couple of sound and video files. And, unsurprisingly, it turns out that it was designed by a paper-mag designer (((who cares that he won awards for paper-mag design – this is a different animal altogether))), using inDesign, which is an Adobe app for designing paper-mags. Fail.

I have not enjoyed the design of Wired Magazine in quite a while, especially the use of fonts, (((stopped reading it a long while ago))) and this is really no different. It may be a decent start, but I won’t buy another issue unless it improves dramatically.
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Some of BPGlobalPR’s tweets, in billboard format. New logos for BP. This is my fav, natch. Roshi Halifax suggested new name: Biggest Polluter and suggested this.
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Photos from B.B.King’s. Found here.



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Official Japanese government site explaining how to use Furoshiki:
In Focus: How to use “Furoshiki” [MOE]
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The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People | Zen Habits
The No. 1 Creativity Habit

In a word: solitude.

Creativity flourishes in solitude. With quiet, you can hear your thoughts, you can reach deep within yourself, you can focus.
(Via the music of sound)

Of course if you read this article from the BBC you find out that

Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works.

Then you might be tempted to add the two things together and come to the conclusion that people who enjoy solitude are insane.

I shall quote a few lines from a book I am reading, Tropic of the Night by Michael Gruber (((I am reading the iBook version))):

A hallucination, that useful word. Of course. I hallucinate, we hallucinate, Berozhinski hallucinates (((not sure who that is, maybe it will be explained later in the book))): yes, but when all of us hallucinate, each of us hallucinating the same thing, then that is the hallucination we are pleased to call reality.

Love that.

We need neural diversity. What we don’t need it is pointing the finger at creatives, saying you guys have a higher percentage of thinking like a schizophrenic person. I thought NORMAL died in the Sixties. No need for it to make a come-back. No need for politicians or concerned parents to read that article and come to the idiotic conclusion that art and music should really never be taught in school… and you know they will draw that conclusion!

From the BBC article:

Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes.

Creativity is a process, and that process ranges from uncomfortable to bliss. In other words, like everything else. Also:

Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It’s like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way.

Shattered mirror? Watched too many Hitchcock movies, have we? What a bunch of horse manure!!

PS: interesting foreword in Tropic of the Night:

Although this is a work of fiction, much of it is based on stories of Africa, sorcery, and Santería told to me many years ago in Miami by J.H. (((here is a J.H.))) How much of this is true, whatever “true” means, only she can say. Thanks Joan.

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seed grenades
(Via the music of sound)

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BP really is a class act.

Parish official: BP shipped in workers for president’s visit – CNN.com
A Gulf Coast official accused BP of shipping workers into Grand Isle, Louisiana, for President Obama’s visit to the oil-stricken area Friday and sending them away once the president left the region.

Early Friday morning, “a number of buses brought in approximately 300 to 400 workers that had been recruited all week,” Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts told CNN’s “Situation Room.”

Roberts said the workers were offered $12 an hour to come out to the scene at Grand Isle and work.

But, when Obama departed, so did the workers, he said.

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Marginal Revolution: Food in Istanbul
My favorite sight has been the mother-daughter pair I saw on the Bosporous ferry. They were hugging each other on the bench and had virtually the same profile features, yet the mother carried full traditional dress and the daughter wore a mini-skirt and was otherwise dressed comparably. They loved each other dearly.

How you interpret these women is central to how you view Istanbul. One intuition is that they are quite alike, another is that they are quite different.

And the food? You can eat the traditional dishes, in simpler settings, or you can pay extra to eat them — slightly modified — in more gussied up surroundings. The key to eating well here is to go simple and to look for the best and purest versions of straightforward dishes. World class raw ingredients are at your disposal, if only you don’t let anyone ruin them.

1 Comment

  1. marijose

    Sadly, it looks like there will continue to be more BP-like catastrophes. From today’s Guardian – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell :

    “Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond.”

    Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: “Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care.”

    Hard to know what it will take to end our addiction to oil.

    Reply

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