Archive for April, 2004

The last Oldsmobile rolls off the assembly line today in Lansing, Michigan. It will be the 35,229,218th Oldsmobile built since 1897.

Crackhead, why don’t you just do both of us a favor and buy yourself a crackpipe? It will both enhance your crack smoking experience and save me a lot of time and felony assault charges. The ways of crackie are mysterious indeed.

Locked in a Lancashire England basement for 90 years, a large collection of films documenting everyday life in the earliest days of the 20 Century are being preserved by the British Film Institute. A few clips from the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection are available online.

Rem Koolhaas’s new Seattle Central Public Library is getting rave reviews. The new library is arguably the most striking and imaginative piece of Seattle architecture since the Space Needle, says the Seattle Times. The $165.5 million building will have 320 public-use computers, room for 1.4 million books and art installations by Gary Hill and Ann Hamilton. The dazzling 11-story glass and metal building in Downtown Seattle also was built on the relative cheap at only $273 a square foot.

Directly from the frontlines, someone has posted images from Iraq. (Extremely graphic)

National Geographic has made their maps available online through MapMachine.

April 24, 1915 marks the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, when the Turkish government arrested over 200 Armenian community leaders in Constantinople. Within the next eight years an estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed. It was the first genocide of the 20th Century.

Why spend all that time reading all 467 pages of Bob Woodward’s new book, Plan of Attack? Instead, read Slate’s condensed summary of the juiciest highlights.

Checkout the Columbia Journalism Review’s guide to what major media companies own.

I don’t think he’s working now. All he ever talks about is monkeys and robots, from overheardinnewyork.com.

A terrific flash feature on sushi from the New York Times, the gray lady of flash journalism, it seems.

For its new Renzo Piano-designed 52-storey Times Square headquarters building, the New York Times has built what Metropolis Magazine calls the most ambitious lighting experiment in American commercial real estate. The new building’s facade will be made of sun-shielding ceramic rods.

Dallas nerd Paul Slocum makes music from dotmatrix printers. My favorite track is dotmatrix_rev.mp3 (800K).

Go behind the scenes of how and why Bush decided to invade Iraq in this first of five articles from The Washington Post, that adapts sections of Bob Woodward’s new book Plan of Attack.

Finally, a complete guide to Japanese smiley face emoticons is available on line. ( ^.^)( -.-)( _ _) <–that’s me bowing politely.

Toppan Printing Co. and Sony have come up with a new 25GB disc that is made of 51% paper.

The Beijing Evening News took a recent Onion article seriously. After the paper realized its mistake, it issued a retraction, saying Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money. Carol Kolb, editor of the Onion, laughs. That’s what we do at The Onion. We do print lies to make money.

Jennifer Garner on careers at CIA.

We all know there seems to be a Starbucks every other corner, but damn, look at all the Starbucks just in San Francisco.

The Library of Congress has mp3s of more than 100 live recordings made in the late 30s and early 40s from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort Valley, Georgia. Don’t miss the 1943 recording of the Golden Jubilee Quartet singing What a Time. Or the Middle Georgia Four singing I’m a Pilgrim. Or Buster Brown’s I’m Gonna Make You Happy.