Here is Pandora sleeping with her head under the couch. (Same couch as was assembled here.) You’ll notice from the top view that her shape is very rectangular, as opposed to the oval form she takes when in a chair.
NJ/NYC Aug 2008
Amy and I spent the weekend up in the NJ/NYC area, shopping for clothes and picnicking in Clinton on Saturday, and bussing up to New York after church on Sunday. We met up with Marc and Kate for dim sum in Chinatown, and originally had planned to check out the MoMA or Guggenheim, but having not much time in the day, instead walked around the Avenue of the Americas Association Festival on 6th Ave between 56th and 42nd Streets. Some pics from the trip:
TJ Maxx will give you a free bottle of water if their cashiers don’t bombard you with store discount credit card offers! Because the one thing you most want to weasel out of a retailer is free bottled water.
Subway turnstiles, A/C/E line. The gates are closed, but the turnstile card swipes are still on. The price of inattentiveness is $2. I paid dearly.
I spotted this Tagalog text on a market awning in Chinatown. “Karne-pagkain dagat isda” translates directly as “Meat-food sea fish” AND MAKES NO SENSE.
After we abandoned plans to visit MoMA or the Guggenheim, we saw this street festival on 6th Ave. It went on and on forever; we entered at 56th Street and walked down as far as 43rd Street and didn’t see the end of it. There were gyro/souvlaki stands at every corner, and the same vendors of jewelry, handbags, and sunglasses, on every block, mixed with other exotic sellers. Highlight of the afternoon for me was the discovery of a spice vendor with sichuan peppercorns. I bought 7 grams for a future preparation of ma po tofu.
What is the point of these? There is no point. These sunglasses defy all explanation and good sense.
More in this photoset, including a short New York movie cobbled together from quick, shaky videos shot from my SD1000. Nothing particularly awesome about it other than that it’s my first production made with iMovie ’08 on my MacBook.
Union Station: 1921, 2008
As promised earlier, an updated photo of Union Station based on this 1921 National Photo Company Collection photo on Shorpy:
Can you spot the differences? Look closely! For your reference, read about “The Pit.” As for me and Amy, we’re off to go through this same concourse right now, to catch a train up to New Jersey for the weekend.
Feed Changes
If you follow How Now Brownpau through a feed reader, change the feed URL to feeds.feedburner.com/brownpau. (The current feed URL will soon redirect.) I’m starting to aggregate to a single stream (with help from a Yahoo Pipe) so that my dear readers are saved the trouble of visiting a plethora of sites (or subscribing to a mess of feeds) in order to partake of my dazzling brilliance. Stuff I post to places like Tumblr, Flickr, Twittr, MetaFiltr, and WeLoveDCr nowr formr a streamr ofr contentr (ahem) in preparation for the day that the site itself can act as a similarly unified point of aggregation from many sources.
Till that day comes (but I don’t have time to work on it right now), I will just have to rely on FriendFeed for my content-consolidation needs; hence the new “View FriendFeed Shared Items” link on the home page, which reveals a simple JS badge. Those of you who are on FriendFeed may want to add me.
I’ve also switched the site feed from excerpts to full text. A few readers complained about the inconvenience of having to click through to the site to read the rest of the content. That’s often the exact intention — getting actual clickthrough to garner page views, ad clicks, or simply design accolades — but on a web where content is going more and more portable, the audience’s convenience wins out over pride and eyeballs, so full text feeds it shall be. I’m also aware this raises the risk of scrapers plagiarizing my entries, but that happened with excerpts anyway, and it’s a risk every webmaster faces and must guard against to be able to publish to the internet.
It all feels very hacked together, which makes me feel I need to do an upgrade, cleanup, and reboot soon. But for now, work.
Area Man Takes Escalator Video, Appears On Local News
Some of you may have seen me on TV last night, on FOX 5 News Edge at 11 (news story, video). Our local Fox affiliate sent reporter Jessica Weinstein to interview me at Foggy Bottom yesterday, site of the Metro Escalator Mess that I caught on video. I recall talking at length about Metro delays and mobile video, and Jessica was trying to get a bit of a “citizen journalist” angle into the mix, but the segment appears to have been edited down to just subway news, thankfully cutting out most of my inane rambling. (Sadly they also cut out some of the closeups the camera guy took of my cellphone, which I made sure was running rickroll.mp4 at the time.)
At left, the original video I took of the escalator mess, and at right, a screen capture of me on the news, some Photoshopped improvement courtesy neckro. (Click to view the video on myfoxdc.com, which sadly does not provide an embeddable player. Also interviewed was my coworker, Mike Weinstein, the guy in the blue shirt.)
Update: I let fame and glory get to my head and forgot to mention how coworker Russell’s considerable internet influence played a part in rocketing me to stardom.
Ghostland: 2008
Speaking of recreations of old public domain Library of Congress photos, Shorpy has been going through pictures of Washington, DC from the National Photo Company Collection, and each new image gives me an itch to walk over to the location in the photo and snap a “today” pic. I was able to scratch that itch yesterday with “Ghostland: 1920,” a cloudy B/W shot looking north up the rails from Union Station. When I saw that one, I immediately picked up my camera, walked with Amy to the Union Station parking garage, and took updated shots of the scene as it is in the present day: (as always, click the thumbs to see them larger on Flickr)
Of course, this photo was taken in summer rather than winter, and lacks the ethereal gray ambience of the original, and the vantage point from the parking garage roof is much higher than in the 1920 photo (the H Street Bridge now blocks the view from the original height). Still, you can see that the focal point — the old rail lookout building — hasn’t changed much at all.
You can see more of my attempts to match the “Ghostland” view in the “Looking North from Union Station” photoset.
City Desk has more on Shorpy’s posts from the National Photo Collection. I intend to get an updated shot of this Union Station interior photo next.
USA Today on Flickr Commons
Amy and I are briefly mentioned in this USA Today story by Rebecca Kaplan on the Flickr Commons, for our restaging of the LOC lipstick photo. The article doesn’t have the photos themselves but I left a comment with a link, and of course you can see them right here:
Ellen Lupton at Refresh DC
Ellen Lupton gave a talk on type and design for Refresh DC last Thursday at the CDIA, and it was great fun and education all around. Ellen has published several design books — I have Thinking With Type — and directs the MFA Graphic Design Program at MICA. I didn’t have classes under her, but she was a frequent sight on campus and gave several talks, and Amy had her for Type 1 class.
Ellen delivers her lectures in a free-flowing stream of consciousness, punctuated by witty images drawn, painted, or photographed by herself and projected on a large screen. A good chunk of the talk was devoted to her upcoming book, Design For Life, a collaboration with her twin sister on design concepts intersecting with day-to-day living. (Hence the bras.) After the Q&A I beat the crowd to say hi to her, and pleasantly enough, she remembered me from MICA.
So if you’re in graphic design, Ellen is the go-to author and instructor for contemporary, sensible, readable information and opinion on typography. I recommend her books, and of course her MFA program at MICA. She’s my design superhero.
Caturday!
Good heavens, two Caturday posts in a row due to total weblog non-activity! It has been a long, busy week of late nights, and I feel mostly like doing what Pandora is doing in this photo.
Caturday!
Here is a quick macro video of Pandora doing one of her meow-yawns, a meow that gets interrupted by a sleepy yawn: (Update: As Flickr video embeds no longer work, you will have to click the thumbnail below to see the video.)
When I play back this video on the computer she perks up at the sound of the meow and looks around for the other cat who sounds just like her.