Is that it for Homeland? Forever? Not sure where they can go from here.

oatmeal for one

A twelve table restaurant with a five year waiting list in upstate New York that I've never heard of: Damon Baehrel

Formerly known as the Basement Bistro and now simply called Damon Baehrel, the 12-table restaurant has a five-year waiting list. Patrons have come from 48 countries, and celebrities such as Jerry Seinfeld and Martha Stewart regularly visit. The Obamas reportedly requested a table in 2011, but Baehrel, who prefers to keep his guest list private, won’t confirm or deny this. He doesn’t have to worry about loudmouthed waiters, either: “You’ve probably realized I work completely alone here,” Baehrel says each night before service begins. “I’m the chef, the waiter, the grower, the forager, the gardener, the cheesemaker, the cured-meat maker, and, as I will explain, everything comes from this 12-acre property.”

And RIP Joan Fontaine

and there's a few hours left in the day
RIP Tom Laughlin (actor In Billy Jack)
Rip Peter O'toole
Brancusi ny

ooooh, these boots were made for walkin'. kind of.

i read very little of this technical history but have been listening to a lecture series about world war one and they were talking about the problem of mounted machine guns shooting through propellers so i sought out more information. that always seemed problematic when watching aerial combat in war movies but they pretty quickly overcame it in reality. hard to believe they could synchronize the guns and propellers at those speeds. who knew? science! (and killing machines!)

The only place I can find in the entire nation (using limited searching tools) the full boat a) IMAX b) 3D c) HFR release of the Hobbit-Smaug movie is the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. In any large city, you can find either IMAX 3D or HFR 3D, but not the trifecta. That is in just the one theater.

I fear the dilution of our precious national frame rate. Don't count on the Europeans to help. Those barbarians think 50 Hz is perfectly adequate. Video delivery in the US is increasing done with mobile and notebook devices -- at 30 Hz rather than good old American 60 Hz. Yes, I said it, 30 Hz video. And somehow that's okay. If that's okay, then why bother with 48 Hz in the theater. And likewise, if the theaters get by with 24, what's wrong with 30 Hz "TV". If Peter Jackson's experiment doesn't gain market traction, we may lose a generation to low frame rate visual imagery.

But the very devices that bring the scourge of 30 Hz video may be the solution. Deep inside the production studios will exist the master format: 60 Hz video. The video production professionals know what's up, and won't let their visual imagery stutter. One mobile device maker will dig deep and tap into that high frame rate video. "Why do sports look like shit on my phone?" "Dear sir, you suffer from low frame rate syndrome. Try one of my brand!"

(I think 24 Hz is a lovely temporal format. But it should be one of many. Personally, I like 120 Hz, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

rainbows and unicorns

GLADWELL: Hold on. Paul to Hilton to Kardashian to … Johnny Carson! I just read the new book about him by his lawyer and confidant Henry Bushkin. It's really about what it means to have been a celebrity in the 1960s and 1970s, and reads like something from another century. So Bushkin tells the following story: Carson used to hang out at a bar run called Jilly's, on 52nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, which was a big mob hangout. One night, Carson got very drunk and hit on an attractive woman at the bar who turns out, unfortunately, to be the girlfriend of a major Mafia guy.

Carson gets thrown down the stairs and escapes more serious injury only because "Jilly," who is everything the name "Jilly" would suggest, steps in. The mobster then puts a contract on Carson's life, who — terrified — holes up in his apartment and misses three consecutive shows. Desperate, NBC gets in touch with an agent at William Morris known to have an in with the mob, who brokers a deal with Joseph Colombo, the head of the Five Families, in which the contract is lifted in exchange for NBC agreeing to cover the Italian American unity rally on Columbus Day.

when headline writing goes horribly wrong.

Twitter's shock block unlock deemed cockup, gets a lockup
Blocking block BLOCKED after 'blogger blindfold blip

more for the incredible shrinking bag files. the pint of pesto salad i bought from fresh direct felt smaller than usual in my manly mitts last time i bought it. thats cuz a pint now is officially 13 oz! that extra handful of shells must be killing their bottom line. and then just now the bag of pita chips i bought seemed a wee bit petite. shrunk from a size 8 to a size 7.3. i must assume they are just looking out for my figure.

barcelona: the picasso of football brands. when i first saw a tease i was expecting some sort of technological innovation within the fabric but its just a branding exercise at this point.

so let me get this straight. you want to pay us a lot of money to market your brand by putting the logo on the inside of our uniforms where no one can see them except when they are doing the laundry? i think we can accomodate that.

But why are nastiness and snideness taken to be features of our age? One general point of agreement, in denunciations of snark, is that snark is reactive. It is a kind of response. Yet to what is it responding? Of what is it contemptuous?

Stand against snark, and you are standing with everything decent. And who doesn't want to be decent? The snarkers don't, it seems. Or at least they (let's be honest: we) don't want to be decent on those terms.

i havent watched it yet but i have the first season and i keep seeing positive reviews.

Black Mirror gets you like that: First you're giggling, then you're sobbing. It's the rare show that unsettles just as much as it entertains. It rejects easy descriptors, but a first step might be calling it a Twilight Zone for the Information Age...