While employees of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer coped with the news of an impending sale or shutdown, on the roof above them the P-I globe, a Seattle icon since 1948, was undergoing repair. Recent snowstorms damaged the neon and caretaker Dave DeFrank was called out of retirement to fix it up. The globe is in as bad shape as the newspaper business below it, rusted and faded. From the photos you can see that it is much larger than you may suspect from far away.
Here’s a fascinating work of art in laser-cut paper, Olafur Eliasson created a negative space rendering of his house with 454 slices in paper, bound together in a book. (thanks Seth!)
Seattle P.I. movie critic William Arnold revisits the legacy of Audrey Hepburn on the occasion of the DVD release today of “Funny Face” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” from Paramount’s Centennial Collection series.
The Color blind gamer (via Waxy) posted here for my red-green colorblind husband. Sometimes regular board games are a problem too. I believe if the original selection of red for “stop” and green for “go” (theorized in wikipedia to have originated from nautical right-of-way starboard/port lights) had been vetted by just 10-20 males and changed, we’d be much better off today with the indicators on most electronic devices.
Kathy Lesinski is probably the only long-distance competitive sled dog racer in Connecticut. She trains her 20 Siberian huskies in the wee hours when the weather is too warm during the day, packs them up for trips to colder climates when necessary, and has worked her team up to 100-mile long races. Most mushers live farther north, with 40% of U.S. racers hailing from Alaska.
It’s been ten years since the PowerPuff Girls first graced the Cartoon Network with their unique brand of girl-power whoop ass and cuteness. To commemorate Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles’ tenth birthday, Cartoon Network will be running a 14-hour marathon of episodes plus a brand-new episode with the original cast on January 19th. The following day a 6-DVD boxed set of all 79 episodes will be in stores. It will include the original concept cartoon: The Whoop Ass Girls: A Sticky Situation (which you can find on YouTube).
The news stories about the U.S. State Department’s “reply to all” emails bogging down their servers say that a cable was sent to all employees asking them to not use “reply to all” on large distribution lists. Being too familiar with the actual problem (see how it affected Microsoft in 1997 on the Exchange team blog and the resulting t-shirt), I focused instead on the word “cable.” How does the State Department send a cable to all employees? Not Western Union of course (which sent its last telegram in 2006). I found mentions of a five-year overhaul of State’s internal messaging system “based on Western Union-like telegrams which you thought were only in museums” to the State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset (SMART). So at the start of the new millenium they were still on WWII era Telex-like devices. The new SMART system is web-based according to this 2003 article and transmits both formal and informal cables, classified and not, and also email. “After delays and a management shake-up,” SMART should be fully rolled out by the end of fiscal year 2009. My question remains: was this cable about email received via old-style cable or SMART? Perhaps it was both.
Workers in China have begun their annual trips home for the Lunar New Year, some leaving earlier than usual because of manufacturing slowdowns and also because last year’s ice storms left so many stranded. With 2 billion trips by road and 24 million by air, the A.P. calls it “one of the world’s biggest annual migrations of humans.”
Subaru actually posted an increase in sales for 2008, and will likely be the only large automaker to do so. I noticed the local dealers had several visitors after the recent snow and ice conditions.
The record for the longest sentence in published literature is reportedly now a 150,000 word novel of one sentence. The other books in the top four are also listed.