Month: June 2009

Nerd Time: The Leopard Seal

UntitledA few years ago, I got really into reading accounts of extreme adventures and explorations. There’s something comforting about sitting in the warmth of your living room while other people haplessly freeze to death, fall of cliffs, catch on fire, have their still-beating hearts removed by Mayan priests, or  get half-digested in a the stomach of a whale and emerge bleached and peevish.

During this time, I read two accounts of the Shacktelton expedition. Basically, Shackleton and his mates head off from the south pole, but their boat gets frozen in ice in the Weddell Sea, effectively trapping them for 6 months of dark Antarctic winter.  Adorably, they actually stage puppet shows and stuff like that in order to maintain their sanity. Eventually, the ship is crushed by ice and the crew is forced to float around on giant ice bergs for months trying to sail their way out of the sea to land.

All sorts of terrible stuff happens, but one thing that was really a head-scratcher for me was the frequent account of attacks by Leopard Seals. Leopard Seals? Apparently, this is a species of carnivorous seal specific to the Antarctic. Shackleton and his crew are constantly trying to drift off to sleep on their flying ice floe when this leopard seal thing clambers out of the sea and starts attacking them. Apparently, it’s a worst-of-both-words proposition, in the sense that the Leopard Seal is dangerous (like a non-seal) but totally fatty and non-nutritious (like a seal). So, once they kill it, there’s still nothing in it for the beleaguered crew

All this makes for a good scenario to re-enact with guests as an after-dinner game. Just commandeer a few sofa cushions to use as ice floes.

(Above: real Leopard Seal cranium. Eek.)

Taqueria Dolores

I’ve added Mission Mission to the blog roll, and was pleased to see that they covered the jarring Taqueria Dolores in one of their posts.

It’s a ‘Mission-style’ taqueria in Berlin (in Alexanderplatz, no less- a really sterile, touristy square) with maps of the Mission on the walls and bottles of Anchor Steam to be had. Behold:

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Basically, you can have fun locating on the walls three or four places you’ve lived while eating a really, really non-greasy burrito. All they’re missing is the unbelievably loud juke box that bursts into mariachi at unexpected intervals.

Man, I miss Berlin. Even though I’ve never lived there. The ‘Czech-Mex’ here in Prague is comparatively unimaginative and second-rate.

Follow-up on Grizzly Bear

elf712357fcra1Krafty recently pointed out to me that the lead singer of Grizzly Bear, Ed Droste, is actually the son of our grade school music teacher,  Diana “Ms.” Droste. This revelation immediately legitimizes in my mind the occupation of ‘grade school music teacher’, which I have to admit I’d held a skeptical attitude towards before.

I have few clear memories of Ms. Droste (as I was, like, 6 when she stopped teaching us), but they’re mainly pleasant. It’s when I think about the rogues gallery that followed her that I wonder how Will Ferrell hasn’t yet starred in an Anchorman-type role where he plays a music teacher in charge of leading small children in jocular rounds of ‘ta-ti-ti, ti-ti-ti-TAH-ti-ti-TAH-TAH!’

Fortnightly check-in

This blog is two weeks old today, which suggests the following info-graphic:

DAYS ON EARTH

Blog: 14

Son: 10

For better or for worse, this blog seems to be lacking two types of content that are staples of the blogosphere:

1. Embedded youtube videos

2. Sex

Maybe the lack of such gives this blog a refreshing, distinctive personality. Or maybe it gives it a stick-in-the-mud, stuck-at-home-on-the-Sabbath feeling, as I suppose neither multimedia nor promiscuity has any role in a properly-observed Sabbath either. We’re beginning to stray into the territory of Pennsylvania!: my imagined comedic musical about a community of Amish manning a power plant outside of Philadelphia.

Lastly, since the blog is 14 days old, I can link to this Grizzly Bear performance of ‘Two Weeks’ on Letterman in good conscience without feeling like it’s a complete non sequitur.

grizzly_bear-two_weeks

Pneumatically Prague

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Apparently, Prague still has an extant network of underground pneumatic tubes criss-crossing the Vltava.

This post is basically just an excuse to post goofy pneumatic tube imagery, such as this Brickenridge Pneumatic Pen:

BRICKENRIDGE-S-PNEUMATIC-STENCIL-PEN

Still, I’d like to take a tour, perhaps as a birthday present. Unlikely, but less childish than the other birthday wish posted here.

List of company name etymologies

Fascinating list here. This is a really great resource if you were wondering where companies had realised their names and trademarks.

Some very interesting ones:

  1. A&M Records – named after founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss (Actually, I believed it had to do with sound)
  2. Coleco – began as the Connecticut Leather Company. (who knew that!)
  3. Starbucks – named after Starbuck, a character in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick (NOT Battlestar Galactic)

Topless Taco Clubs to hit the Mission

Casa_sanchez In 1970, a SF activist newspaper published a story anticipating the dystopian impact that the soon-to-be-build BART system would have on the Mission District. In classic trying-predicting-the-future fashion, some of the predictions are spot-on and others are a bit… not so spot-on:

Is Senor Taco the type of urban renewal we want? BART will bring tourists from downtown to 16th and Mission in three minutes. Our homes will become hotel rooms and restaurants and serape stores, and Topless Taco Clubs that do not serve Mexicans.

Lurid! Then again, the article continues…

The increased sales will not only come from the tourists but also from the higher income single people and childless couples that will find the Mission more desirable to live in because BART will take them to work quickly and because Blacks, Indians, Chinese, Samoans and La Raza will have been removed by an economic squeeze-out.

… so I guess they’re weren’t off-base on the key issues.

Selective focus

Last week, I had a talented fellow named Ryan Cole do a guest lecture for my Ideas Generation class at Prague College. He talked about the difference between vertical thinking (hierarchical, problem-solving, precludes creative thinking) versus horizontal thinking (associative, lateral, creative but unable to accomplish anything on its own). This is basically something that designers like to talk about a lot, just phrased in nice concise terms.

Two days earlier, I was reading a New Yorker article about the neuro-enhancer revolution- i.e. the fact that lots of people take drugs like Ritalin simply to make themselves function at a higher cognitive level, not because they need it for any corrective reason. One of the concerns about this ‘revolution’  in the medical community (in addition to more obvious worries about health and so on) is the question about what part of people exactly is being made smarter by neuro-enhancers. Is there only one kind of intelligence, or are there some that are made smarter at the expense of others? Studies have shown that concentration (which is enhanced by drugs like Ritalin) actually works to the detriment of creative thinking. One researcher expressed the idea that we might be raising a generation of super-skilled accountants through over-prescription of neuro-enhancers.

Armed with these ideas, it occurred to me that perhaps the primary skill that graphic designers seek to cultivate cant best be described as selective focus: learning to expand and contract the locus of attention, rather than aiming for any kind of ‘genius thinking’ per se. I think this term can also be used to explain the intent of the writing on this blog and its peculiar idiom.


Dept of Lost Urban Features: Inside (and Above) the Mission Armory

Anyone who has lived in SF’s Mission District knows the big, round brick armory building on 14th St. A few years ago, I had the chance to go inside thanks to a friend of mine who got access through volunteering for a movie shoot that was going on inside. We also found our way to the roof, but apparently weren’t supposed to do that and got yelled at. Here’s what I found out:

1. There are dozens (or maybe hundreds) of manger-sized subdivisions inside that presumably used to house horses. You could probably allocate studio space to half the serious artists in San Francisco here if you wanted to. But, apparently, it’s not seismically sound.

2. The Mission Creek still runs through the basement of the armory. Not in a roaring, uncontrolled torrent, but in a sort of highly-custodialized trickle. The Mission Creek is a water source that used to supply a now-extinct lake  by Dolores and 14th, to my undying fascination.

3. At the time I gained access, the entire building was being maintained by one guy who lived with this young daughter in van parked inside the building and- one can only presume- maintained a kind of creepy Shining-like relationship withe the place. (See first photo).

I’m told that the building was later sold to some sort of porn mogul, who now has parties there. Why it’s seismically fit for porn but not for artists is a mystery to me.

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