Okay, how creepy is this? Billboards with hidden cameras–too much. Aren’t we being scrutinized and data mined enough as consumers? Do they have to take our pictures, too?
Makes you wonder if F. Scott Fitzgerald was being visionary when he wrote in THE GREAT GATSBY about the billboard featuring the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg, “blue and gigantic” and looking “out of no face…[as they] brood on over the solemn dumping ground.”
Categories: Advertising · Privacy · Technology
A San Diego company called Sapphire Energy says it can process “algae into oil, producing a green-colored crude yielding ultra-clean versions of gasoline and diesel without the downsides of biofuel production.”
According to the article, the algae-based fuel would “help curb the nation’s reliance on imported crude and alleviate concerns about the world’s dwindling supply of oil,” “produce fewer pollutants in the refining process and fewer harmful emissions from vehicle tailpipes” and would do so at an “expected cost as competitive with extracting oil from deep-water deposits and oil sands.”
Well, this sounds only slightly revolutionary.
Meanwhile, in other oil-related news, fast food restaurants are finding they don’t have to worry about disposing of used grease anymore–thieves are taking it off their hands.
Grease, it seems, is being traded on the commodities market. Its value has risen recently to historic highs, due to even higher-priced gas and ethanol. As a result, grease is more popular than ever as a type of biodiesel fuel for cars and trucks.
“Fryer grease has become gold,” according to Nick Damianidis, one of the owners of Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Wash. “And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away.”
As the old saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Categories: Business/Economic · Energy · Environment · Technology · Uncategorized
No, nothing about her weight or her relationship with her husband. I don’t do celebrity gossip.
But this does seem like an example of consumerism and branding gone mad. (Thanks to Peggy Rowland of Light Green Stairs for this one.)
And this . . . well, this was just too funny to pass up. (Maybe EVOO is actually a secret code or something.)
Categories: Consumerism · Entertainment · Food/Beverage · Lifestyle · Marketing · People · Women
Sydney Pollack was not only a great director of movies such as “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”, “Tootsie” and “Three Days of the Condor” (to name just a few), he was also a very good actor, who appeared in “Tootsie”, “Husbands and Wives”, “The Player” and other movies, TV shows and even on Broadway.
Sorry to hear about his death from cancer at age 73.
Categories: Entertainment · Movies · People
Could it be that an older brain may actually function better than a younger one?
Yes, it could, according to this article from the NY Times, which states: “When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.
“Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.”
While some older brains can deteriorate, leading to conditions like Alzheimer’s, researchers believe that “for most aging adults . . . much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.”
Older adults’ tendency to take in information more slowly indicates they’re paying more attention to detail, the researchers say. And having a broader attention span “may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” according to Dr. Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
Categories: Aging · Health/Wellness · Science
I wanted to share this from a post on a list for freelance writers. Like I said, many of these could be apocryphal. But, what the heck–they’re still funny:
Every year, English teachers from across the USA can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays in order to have them published and sent out for the amusement of other teachers across the country. Recent winners:
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled around inside his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the kind of wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who goes blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like the sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
10. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
11. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
12. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling west at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. traveling east at a speed of 35 mph.
13. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
14. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
15. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
16. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
17. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
18. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
19. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
20. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
No. 9 sounds suspiciously like something Douglas Adams would write . . . the rest, you can decide for yourselves.
Meghan Daum gives her optimistic take on the recession in her LA Times column today. She notices services are better, people even perhaps a bit nicer. She notes that recession may instill in people a “tranquil resignation–the state of being grateful for what you have.”
Something we should think about, even in the best of times.
Categories: Business/Economic · Commentary · Current Events · Social Issues
After all those books he’s written about how the developers are turning Florida into New Jersey with palm trees. After all the concern he’s expressed over environmental protection in his books. It turns out that Carl Hiaasen plays golf.
I’m completely flummoxed by this. Doesn’t Hiaasen know that golf is played on courses that are kept pristine through the avid overuse of fertilizers and pesticides? And that stuff runs off into the very waterways and wetlands he wants protected. And what about those people he’s golfing with? Aren’t they the ones who are always getting skewered (figuratively and, sometimes, literally) in his books?
The article notes that “Quail Valley, the Florida golf club where Carl Hiaasen plays, looks like the kind of place where some of the creeps who populate his novels–the environmental despoilers, glad-handing lobbyists and politicians on the take–might belong.” Hiaasen seemed to think it wasn’t quite “lavish enough” for them. Besides, he’s taken up golf after “a much-needed layoff of 32 years” so he can write a book about it, so really it’s research. (Excuses, excuses . . .)
The article goes on to call Hiaasen an “environmentalist, who both in his books and in his weekly column for The Miami Herald has complained a lot about uncontrolled development in Florida” (golf courses don’t qualify as development?), who nonetheless takes “pleasure in the surroundings [on the course]. He poked for snakes in the rocks, hoping to spot a water moccasin, and pointed out the ibises strolling the fairway, the carp, catfish and tilapia lolling in the lakes.”
“The great irony is that golf courses are becoming the last bit of wildlife refuge we have,” according to Hiaasen. “I saw a bobcat on a golf course once, and I don’t know that there’s anyplace else you could do that now.”
Okay, it’s ironic. But how many of those critters are being poisoned by the stuff they’re using to maintain those golf courses? (Not to mention runoff, groundwater contamination, worker poisoning, etc.)
Tsk, tsk, Carl. Tsk, tsk.
Categories: Authors · Environment · Land Use/Zoning · People · Pesticides · Sports · Toxic Substances
This is clever (blacking out parts of the NY Times, to make it make more, um, unusual reading) and I’d like to thank Kathy Kehrli for posting it on Screw You!, her irreverent freelance writer’s blog. But I gotta tell ya, my sister and I were doing this 30 years ago to my Nancy Drew books!
So, as a result, when Nancy had that case in Scotland, she got to walk down the hall of an old castle where the walls “were hung with several deceased members of the Douglas clan.”
And it led to the classic line, “What could be worse than a big ugly Bess?”
Follow Up Post on Sydney Pollock
May 28, 2008 · 2 Comments
The NY Times ran this appreciation of Sydney Pollock’s work today. And someone posted their regrets about a lost opportunity to meet the man.
Categories: Commentary · Entertainment · Movies · People