Month: April 2004

From a great article from Epicurious about how to tip/bribe your way into the most exclusive restaurants:

I was clearly in another league of exclusivity. Lay eaters wouldn’t dream of trying to enter a restaurant where if you order verbena tea they bring the plant to your table and a white-gloved waiter snips the leaves with silver shears.

I fully admit to falling big-time for this type of novelty. It actually ties in to the whole Purple Cow thing that Seth Godin talks about.

Reading Rory @ Neopoleon.com and he recounts a story of watching U2 play a crappy show and follows it with this:

But I like that. I remember walking away from the show thinking that I had just watched some of my heroes really biff it, and, lord, it was reassuring. There’s nothing worse than believing that the people you look up to are perfect.

That’s why it was nice for me to learn that:

– Bobby Fischer is totally nuts

– Audrey Hepburn wasn’t the most loyal of significant others

– Even Gates’ billions couldn’t stop that pie

– Carl Sagan, brilliant as all-get-out, was uncannily close to a bowling pin in shape

– T.S. Eliot, although probably the greatest poet in the universe, didn’t have a sense of humor, and couldn’t write himself one

– Michael Jackson used to be able to dance, but his later life as a scrawny white woman hasn’t turned out as well as it could have

– Kurt Vonnegut can’t quit smoking, and he sometimes says really stupid things

– Chris Sells doesn’t have a photographic memory (you can be smart and still lose your car keys)

– Harrison Ford is not Indiana Jones or Han Solo, but really just a big weenie with a helicopter

– Sting is an uber-egotesticle jack-ass

– George Lucas, he man responsible for creating my childhood, also destroyed it

– Peter O’Toole – well, there’s actually nothing wrong with Peter. He is perfect… 

 

[via Scoble’s experimental feed + Dylan Greene]

Some interesting Apprentice info:

• The board room is on the same floor as their swank apartment.
• The elevators outside the board room are fake and just lead to another hallway.
• The young woman who rented the apartment Troy’s team renovated already obtained a lease before the show decided to even renovate that apartment. She received $2000 in free furniture her involvement, and knew that no matter what rent she negotiated for, she’d be paying her original rent.
• That apartment was empty because the previous occupant jumped out the window a month earlier.

More details: Elevator Rides to Nowhere, from New Yorkish and Reality’s Apprentice, which was written by the person living underneath the renovated apartment and is an interesting read.

Tracked from: Apprentice Watch and Craig Pfeifer’s Maps and Legends.

I don’t know what it is about child-like drawings with dirty phrases that I find so funny… but I do… very much.

[via Natalie Dee]

Your Name in Nudes

I have been concerned with this topic for a while now, but I couldn’t really put a coherent theory behind it all.

Larry O’Brien has a rant about a SCUBA dive computer failing on him and makes a great point about where we are in the history of computing.

Here’s my point: computers suck. They’re unreliable, expensive, difficult to use, incomprehensible when functioning, and utterly useless when they fail. I’ve never had a pressure gauge fail on me. I’ve never had a depth gauge fail on me. Such things happen with analog gauges, but I wager the rate of computer failures to analog failures is hundreds if not thousands to one. Every time someone talks about lack of innovation or “Where are computers going?” we should keep this in mind: computers are nothing, nothing, compared to what they should, and will, become.

We are marking notches into clay tablets and wondering if innovation in writing is dead. Virtually the entire history of computers lies before us: we exist in a footnote between Alan Turing and God-Knows-Who. Today’s hardware is crap. Today’s software is crap. Today’s tools to build software are crap. Let’s change that.

Bill Gates has a quote: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.”

*Bonus old/funny picture of Bill