The Amazing Hair Hat Man!
I am not someone who wears hats, but I do have hair. Will this be my compromise?!
(Via Japan Probe)
I am not someone who wears hats, but I do have hair. Will this be my compromise?!
(Via Japan Probe)
In a further sign of our culture’s coarsening—or militarization—we may soon have to start paying for that typically abused flight privilege of facing forward. As The Daily Mail reports:
Air travel is being overhauled with a new aircraft design which plans to seat passengers facing each other in rows. The controversial design is intended to save space and money and could see 50 percent more passengers packed on to each plane.
Howard Guy, director of the UK company Design Q, acknowledges that some people will not be happy with the plan, but says they will be able to pay less for any inconvenience. ‘Having passengers face each other is not an ideal situation,’ he said. ‘But this will see increased revenue for the operator and more economical tickets for the passenger—so by keeping both happy, this concept makes an attractive alternative. Sure the passenger can choose a flight facing forward in a traditional seating position, but he or she will have to pay more for the luxury.’
Nevermind that having passengers sitting beside each other isn’t usually an ideal situation, either, the air travel of today hardly evokes glamour or luxury. To better remind ourselves of where we came from, take a look at the Pan Am promo spot in your lower window:
New Aircraft Design Puts Passengers Face-To-Face In Rows For Budget Travel
As a kid I spent roughly two hours a day getting bussed back and forth to middle school and when I wasn’t dodging apples, I had plenty of time to immerse myself in the then still-slim oeuvre of Stephen King. Carrie, Salem’s Lot and The Shining all made somewhat more tolerable the stupidity of my fellow riders, and gave my own outsider-ish existence if not heroic contours, then something just as good: the potential for them.
I mean, I knew I wouldn’t be bumping into migrating vampires or telekinetic prom queens. But say I did, and needed to save not just my ass, but the asses of everyone I loved, and even, what the hell, the asses of those apple-chuckers. In terms of how to make that happen, King’s books offered up a pretty persuasive set of blueprints.
Maybe more than King’s novels themselves, though, I remember being absolutely mesmerized by their covers, and spending many long moments at the local library (a frequent King setting) simply gazing at them. The artwork of those early hardcovers did a fantastic job of whittling core themes down into imagery that was as simple as it was evocative (see above).
If you’d already read the book, with just a glance at its cover, you could relive it all over again. And say you hadn’t read the book, the covers made you want to, like, immediately.
Well, fans of that early artwork can now skip the library and gaze at the more than 2,000 King covers gathered over at StephenKingShop. They’re arranged by title, and I find it particularly interesting (and saddening) that, with the advancement of years—and books—the elegance of the cover art grows less and less striking. And that’s especially true for the paperbacks. Don’t get me started on those “Signet” ‘90s!
This is, uh, a little depressing! Earlier this morning I read that in 2008 over 50,000 new US college graduates held journalism degrees and 60% of them were still out of work. The ones who are working are probably being paid minimum wage or interning. The old joke about a theater degree qualifying you for a job as a waiter can now be used with just about any creative industry for the set-up now.
You read that Obama and Congress “want” to save the newspaper industry, but HOW? The magazine business model is defunct too. If newspapers are reeling from the problem of being rendered “yesterday’s news” the moment they get printed by the relentless churn of the 24 hour Internet news cycle, how difficult would it be to edit a monthly magazine these days with a 90 day lead time? It’s a fool’s errand.
Aside from a few magazines that deserve to be read in print (Vanity Fair, Vogue and The Economist come to mind) there’s not a whole lot of excuses left to print on dead trees and so the idea of paying $60,000 or $120,000 for a print ad in a glossy magazine will also go the way of that same dinosaur. And that of course sets off an entire print industry food chain spiral of death in every career path from media buying to driving a newspaper delivery truck. The main problem—and it’s an insurmountable one—is that most people choose to get their information in the freshest, easiest, most up to date manner possible and that is not via print media.
In 1995 I personally subscribed to SEVENTY magazines and got five daily newspapers delivered to my office(oh those lazy hazy daze of expense accounts!). By 2005 I was buying just a monthly issue of MOJO at the newsstand and I haven’t bought a copy of that now in over two, almost three years. So I’ve gone from being print’s best customer to not spending a cent in the arena. As in ZERO cents and NO dollars. I’m simply not interested. It’s not like I read any less, I read far more! It’s just that I tend to be reading it off a monitor, not the pages of a newspaper, magazine or—I’m almost ashamed to say—book.
When VIBE magazine got shuttered last year, a wag on Gawker made the comment that if you had any plans to make a career writing about music for a living you could effectively FORGET IT when people were more interested to read the public’s Amazon reviews than “professional” record reviews in a magazine. Ouch! But it’s true. The entire gestalt of print is passe, it’s just that simple. How do you get around something like that? You don’t. And lest you think I’m saying “Bring it on” or laughing at the death of print, I’m not, I certainly don’t see what’s coming next as an improvement or anything, but as a former journalist and publisher myself, I just can’t see any way out of it.
From Unity’s press release:
UNITY 2009 Layoff Tracker Report shows sharp quarterly spikes in job losses
MCLEAN, Va. ?
Almost the flip-side of this post, How the Soviet Menace Was Hyped, Wired’s Nicholas Thompson takes us inside the Soviet Doomsday Machine so we can see how our Neo-Conservative fueled paranoia about them started a feedback loop that could have killed us all:
The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.
The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels?
Not that it necessarily lives up to its title, but this gallery, on the Web Designer Depot website does have some pretty good examples. Worth noting that the great Sixties Esquire covers designed by George Lois were done looooonng before Photoshop was invented.
The Most Controversial Magazine Covers of All Time
Via Vlad Nedelcu’s Twitter feed
Why waste any precious snark on this one, eh?
RICHMOND, Va. ?
I have to admit the question of why humankind is so hairless compared to most other mammals has crossed my mind, but it never occurred to me that Science itself would not actually know:
For most of the past century it was assumed that the problem had been solved. Raymond Dart, the anthropologist who recognised the significance of the famous Taung baby’s skull in 1924, began promoting the idea that while the apes’ ancestors stayed in the trees, our ancestors moved onto the open plains. There the males became hunters, got overheated in the chase, and shed body hair to cool down.
The problem with that theory is that no other mammal has resorted to this method of cooling down. Hair insulates animals against the sun by day as well as against the cold by night. The hominid females are not thought to have become overheated hunters, so they would merely have suffered the downsides of hairlessness - being cold at night, more prone to abrasions, and having no fur to provide a handhold for infants to cling to. Yet they ended up even more hairless than the males.
Dart’s solution, while the front-runner for more than 50 years, failed to win everyone over. In 1970, Russell W. Newman from the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine argued in Human Biology that hominids could never have evolved on the plains with their “unique trio of conditions: hypotrichosis corpus, hyperhydrosis, and polydipsia”. In other words, too little hair, too much sweat, and a need to drink little but often. Newman’s paper ran counter to contemporary beliefs and was largely ignored.
William Montagna, the most indefatigable student of primate skin of his generation and then at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, regretfully reported in 1972 that after years of research his investigations had “failed to explain the unique feature of man’s skin - his almost complete nakedness. We are left with the major objective… unattained.”
And it keeps going. Many intelligent people and big name scientists have come up with plausible sounding theories and they all get shot down, sooner of later. The fact is, they really don’t know!
Speaking of Naked Apes, here is zoologist Desmond Morris interviewing Kate Bush on his BBC talk show in 1980:
