LA Times Buzz on the Berkeley Bowl

Google News pointed me to the LA Times feature story on Berkeley Bowl, one of our local grocery stores with a justifably stellar reputation for its produce selection, quality, and price. (Back in 2001, I wrote about the store on Everything2 as a must-see destination in Berkeley)

Staff Writer John Glionna focuses as much on the antics of shoppers as much as the produce, and notes that the penalty at the Bowl for grazing (sampling foods before purchase) is being banned from the store, forever.

Today I learned (hat tip to the Daily Clog) that after it was published on Monday, Glionna heard from Berkeley Bowl owner Glenn Yasuda. According to Glionna's blog, Yasuda didn't like the tone Glionna took in the article, and banned him for life.

Glionna seems to take it in stride. Read the comments following his blog posting, though. I learned as much about Berkeley's reputation, culture, and recent history from these postings as anything I've ever read in all the time I've been living here.

In Case You Missed It: McCain Snubs Letterman

You may have seen this buzzing around the internet this morning. I stayed up to watch the show because of the buzz moving through Twitter last night, and wished I'd waited for the YouTube edits.

For those who aren't caught up: along with McCain's announcement that he was "suspending" his presidential campaign, he called David Letterman hours before his scheduled appearance and cancelled it, saying he had to rush back to Washington to deal with the economic crisis.

Not only was Letterman ruffled by the last-minute need to rejigger his show, but he was genuinely bothered by the implications of McCain's decision to suspend his campaign. He spent much of the show stuck on the issue.

Even *before* he learned (during his sitdown with Keith Olbermann) what McCain was actually doing at the time.

If you only have three minutes, here's a quick version from Air America:



But I'd recommend this nine minute edit, which gives you a better sense of how much talk of McCain's cancellation dominated the entire program. It also includes Letterman's disclaimer in which he spends a full minute lauding McCain for his heroic survival in North Vietnam.



A surreal and classic pop culture moment.

Fictional advice for a real candidate

Maureen Dowd hands over her Sunday column to Aaron ("The West Wing") Sorkin, who dramatizes a meeting between Obama and a certain former president.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

Link

Got Cowbell?

SNL. 2000. Will Farrell. Christopher Walken. "More Cowbell" sketch.

Web. 2008. Your mp3 collection. A web developer with a lot of time on his hands. Cowbell.

Add cowbell to any mp3 file.

Also, add Christopher Walken.

	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

A Pro-Life Catholic and Barack Obama

Conservative and antiabortion legal scholar (and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel for Reagan and Bush I) Douglas Kmiec made waves last spring when he publicly endorsed Barack Obama over John McCain.

The clarity of thought expressed in his endorsement is remarkable, but it angered at least one Catholic priest enough to verbally shame him during mass and to deny him communion.

He recounts this story this week in an excerpt from his new book Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama.

The irony of ironies was that my motivation for the endorsement was entirely Catholic. No, Obama doesn't share the Catholic faith, but he certainly campaigns like he does. As reflected in his book, the Senator is focused on the human person, on the common good, on the social justice of economic arrangement. All is so very Catholic.

Whether Obama and his base of support are able to capture the election in our current political and cultural environment remains to be seen. But I welcome any and all evidence of intellectual honesty and rigor in America.

Real clarity of thought (and LEARNING) on any issue of importance will always lead to accusations of hypocrisy and betrayal by those who would rather feel good about an issue than do good.

Link

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Insanity is: Skateboarding down Claremont Canyon

The shrinking of digital video cameras has allowed for the creation of new forms of cinema that would not have been possible otherwise. I make kids'-eye-view home movies, others toss their cameras in the air, still others hold cameras to their faces to create "POV" sex movies.

Skateboarding videos take up an entire wing of YouTube. Skaters have become increasingly skilled at performing tricks while holding small HD cameras, to capture footage inconceivable by Hollywood cinematographers and their enormous camera rigs.

This video manages to stand out from the crowd, simply by being UNBELIEVABLY FUCKING NUTS.

Two guys (Noah Sakamoto and Patrick Rizzo) in powder-blue suits and laughably insufficient head and hand protection, skateboard down Claremont Ave in the upper hills of Berkeley at speeds higher than I would probably drive (at one point they zoom past a car), all the while videotaping each other with an HD camera, outfitted with a fisheye lens.

If you can ignore the meaningless title ("Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD"), interminable opening credits, and opaque two-minute intro, you will be "treated" to two gravity-driven runs down the canyon that make street luge-ing seem positively serene in comparison.

Oh, and click through to Vimeo if you actually want to watch it in HD, full screen, so you too can clutch at your seat muttering bad idea bad idea bad idea bad idea BAD IDEA BAD IDEA BAD IDEA BAD BAD BAD IDEA.


Link

(Via Kottke.)

Les Misbarack

An improv company from LA pays homage to Obama. Or Les Mis. Or something:



Is it me, or does framing the election as the finale of Act I of Les Mis, seem to miss the point of both the campaign AND the musical?

It's been twenty years, so it's kinda hazy, but IIRC this song musical counterpoint threading together inner emotional monologues from disparate subplots and building to a thunderous was meant to musically browbeat the audience into an emotional frenzy-- not because anything was resolved in the story to this point, it wasn't, but because Schoenberg wanted the audience to stay for the second act.

(Also, I'm not sure but I think the tune keeps modulating and the chord progression never resolves until the very end of the four minutes)

Also, while it's framed here as a rallying point for the Obama campaign, in Act II of Les Mis, the mob on the barricades is abandoned by the people and they all realize they're going to be crushed like bugs and that their movement accomplished exactly nothing and then they all die. Maybe that's the point, but seeing as this is coming from an improv group I kinda think they didn't think that far ahead.

Especially because most of lyrics expressed here DON'T fit the visual narrative (a one location number? no way. And if McCain is Javert in what possible world does it make sense that Palin is Madame Thénardier?)

Okay, I've just spent way too much time on YouTube and Wikipedia fact-checking a musical I wasn't that interested in two decades ago just so I could confirm that
this new mashup squandered a key musical theatre geek callback: the marching in place of the actors.

Although I have to say it's growing on me. The fourth time around the video isn't so grating and I'm ready to dash out to the lobby to buy me one of them tricolour Cosette/Obama mashup t-shirts.

The Particle Zoo: Subatomic Particle plushies

When Boingboing posted the photo below of the plush toy version of the as-yet-unconfirmed Higgs Boson particle, I thought it was a rushed attempt to capitalize on this past week's news from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in which they flipped the switch on their massive 17-mile long particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.

Turns out though, the Particle Zoo (a home-based business) has been offering plush physics particles, both real and imagined, since last year... you can get your proton, your electron, your neutron, quarks, leptons... and for the truly nerdy, the entire line is also available in their antimatter counterparts.

And, if you browse through the gallery at the Particle Zoo, you can see photos of various famous physicists with their plush particles, answering the question "What do you get a physicist for Christmas when he already has a Nobel Prize?"

Hats off to Particle Zookeeper Julie Peasley, the sole proprieter (and sole seamstress) of this venture.

The Daily Show does journalism. Again.

The Daily Show spent a lot of its annual budget dispatching its sets, writers, and performers to Denver, CO and St. Paul, MN to cover the Democratic and Republican conventions.

But the sharpest segment of either week, as assembled by the writing and video research staff, could (and may) have been put together from the show's New York home base.

It leaves one wishing that "real" television news organizations were as quick or as skilled in retrieving footage from their voluminous archives.

Or as willing to call people on their bullshit.



Or go here

Pat Buchanan Gives It Up for Obama

I wasn't watching MSNBC last night, so I missed this moment where Pat Buchanan declared Obama's nomination acceptance speech "the greatest convention speech, and probably the most important."



It's pretty remarkable to see this typically-condescending jackass express such unaffected enthusiasm, as he strains to read a passage of the transcript without his glasses.

YouTube link

via @laughingsquid and @KarinaLongworth on the Twitter

Stunning Olympic Photos from The Big Picture

If you haven't yet been pointed to the Boston Globe's new photojournalism blog The Big Picture, then this wrapup of the Beijing Olympics is as good of a place as any to start.

One of the many casualties of the transition of newspapers from print to online has been the art of photojournalism; online news sites originally designed their template grids with a minimum of images to avoid alienating readers with slower internet connections. What photos do appear are too small to make much of a visual impression.

Enter The Big Picture, which assumes that a critical mass of Americans are now surfing the internet with fast connections and widescreen displays, and presents the work of some of the world's best photojournalists in gigantic, gorgeous, sometimes shocking color (since computer displays can present a wider range of sharpness and contrast than newsprint could ever muster).

Like a museum exhibit or a good coffee table book, The Big Picture reawakens viewers to photography's power to startle, move, and astonish, whether depicting the Iowa flooding, California's wildfires, or images of people from around the Northern Hemisphere merely trying to beat the summer heat,

It may sound like hyperbole, but I'd nominate this four-month-old site as one of the best uses to date of the world wide web.

Go there now.

Unresolved anthrax questions - Glenn Greenwald

Taking a break now from the general internet oddities I've posted of late.

I would feel remiss if I didn't point to this article by Glenn Greenwald posing questions about the apparent suicide of Bruce E. Ivins, the FBI's most recent lead suspect in the anthrax mailings of late 2001.

Greenwald generally offers smart, lengthy, ridiculously well-researched analysis for Salon.com. Here he is clearly struggling not to jump to wild assertions or theories, despite a series of facts that in their aggregate stink to high holy heaven.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick.

That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information [about the presence of bentonite, a chemical additive used by Iraq] that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.

Lots more, including reports of suspicious behavior by Ivins back in 2001 that went uninvestigated by the Department of Justice, and a sideswipe at McCain that asks why he was asserting a link to Iraq even before ABC's original bentonite report.

(Via Boing Boing.)

InDecision 2008: The News Better Run

The Daily Show loudly states its case as to why it has the best political news team (and the most Situation Rooms) on basic cable.

CNN mailbox, meet the Daily Show bat, as swung from a moving convertible.

Decoding Joe Cocker

This is one of those bits with a premise (Joe Cocker's unintelligible Woodstock performance of "With a Little Help from My Friends", with added comedic subtitles) that depends entirely on the execution.

Which in this case made me laugh. More than I might like to admit.



By Jared Pike. Via Your Monkey Called

"Mom, Dad, I'm Into Steampunk"

(via boingboing)

This gem available on Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Short Imagined Monologues

If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that's fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle.

Dubya: It's The End of the World As We Know It

via I'm Learning to Share:

Mashup of George W. Bush covering REM:

Ernie & Bert Ante Up

This does not appear to be the first example of someone recutting Sesame Street footage to match up the muppet lipsync to rap songs, but the execution on this one definitely makes it a winner.

Here Ernie & Bert take on M.O.P.'s hit "Ante Up".



YouTube link

via Monoscope

Slate: You've already spent your tax windfall on gas and bread.

Citing Merrill Lynch's chief economist, Slate's Daniel Gross writes:

The chunk of the stimulus package likely to get spent is roughly equivalent to the amount Americans are paying for higher food and gas prices because of inflation. Put another way, you've already spent your stimulus at ExxonMobil.

Here's the math. Merrill Lynch is basing its calculations on two assumptions:
1. that Americans will spend only 40% of their rebate (and pay down debt with the rest, or save it); and,
2. energy and food inflation combined is costing us $50 billion per quarter.

Total stimulus package in rebates: $120 billion.
40% of 120 is 48 billion, eaten up in one quarter.

At first I thought, big deal, there are still three other quarters in the year. People might--operative word, might --choose to spend more than 40% of their rebate. Say, 100%.

$120 billion minus $50 billion minus $50 billion minus $50 billion (3rd quarter) minus $50 billion (4th quarter)...

Oops.

We don't track the gasoline expenses in our house, but this year we're on track to pay $700 extra in groceries, not because the kids are eating more, or because of more organic produce, but simply the increased cost of everything at the store. $4.50 gasoline doesn't faze me. But $4.50 bread: I get sticker shock.

Wait. This isn't a fake documentary?

(via Whack-a-Flick)

I watched this movie trailer, and wondered at first if it was a low-budget indie movie. Then, once the trailer revealed its premise, I thought it was a put-on. Like Christopher Guest doing a "Best in Show" take on the war in Iraq. (Warning: graphic images in the trailer)



Turns out, this is a straight ahead documentary.

There really is a fake town in the Mojave Desert where the military pays Iraqi refugees to play the part of Iraqi police and insurgents so that the army can conduct war games, complete with fake explosions and movie make up and funerals.

J. Hoberman's review in the Village Voice

David Edelstein in New York magazine

Ethicurean: Eating Local isn't about Greenhouse Gases

Ethicurean, the group blog dedicated to the notion of food mindfulness, or, as they so artfully put it, "Chew the Right Thing", responds to Dubner's post in the New York Times Freaknomics blog.

Well, not directly. They respond to the same peer reviewed study that Dubner cites in his blog, namely "Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States," by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews.

The paper does note that the last miles to the table are not the major source of greenhouse gas emissions... agricultural inputs are. So you make more of a "green" impact by reducing consumption of red meat (since you're using a lot less agricultural inputs (fertilizer) to grow soy and corn which is fed to methane-producing cattle) than by buying local.

Ethicurean doesn't disagree. But their analysis of the paper doesn't lead them to the conclusion that local isn't better. There are other quality of life reasons for eating locally (which Dubner doesn't address... since he sticks to simple economics).

Ethicurean also stands up to Salon's recent attack on localvores here:
http://www.ethicurean.com/2008/06/28/salon-locavore/

A dissenting commenter on this latter post dismisses the food miles issue and notes: "I buy food at farmers markets. Mostly for the reason you mention: it's picked later and thus tastes better."