Blogging since 2002
A couple of cherry and plum trees in Brooklyn Botanic Garden blossomed prematurely. I took these pictures last Saturday, January 6th.
This reminded me of the article that I’ve seen in the Fantastic Story Magazine for Winter 1953, in fact the same magazine from which I liberated the masthead of my website.
Dr. Bartlett’s company is still in business and “this theory about the more carbon dioxide the warmer” is still around too.
I want to have a personal business card. All the cool kids have one. The thing is, as you know from reading my blog, I am a bit eccentric. Just a plain ol’ boring business card won’t do.
I ventured forth into the depth of Interweb to find out about fancy business cards. One of the more useful articles was found on Robert Scoble’s blog, of all places. He has some good pointers.
Unfortunately I can’t do a card that will say “go and type in Michael into google and click 47234524th page of results”. It’s because I hope that you all will link to my blog and my pagerank will improve some day.
Another famous type of a cool business card was popularized (or even probably invented) by JWZ: his cards often had a neat title – they varied from “Scientist” to “Hacker” to “Hacker Emeritus” to “Benevolent Dictator”. I am not cool enough to pull something like that off.
The next though that came into my mind – titanium! There are companies that make metal business cards, and you can special order titanium.
The problem with cards like that is that they are prohibitively expensive, and since I am not
“King of All Pimps”, I simply can’t afford them.
“Michael Krakovskiy – Pimp Programmer.” Hmm, that’s won’t work either. By the way, Jonny Walker Blue Lable sucks. Any decent single malt is much, much better.
CD Rom business cards, while cool looking, are not that useful. Their unusual shape and thickness make them hard to keep, and nobody ever puts them in a cd rom. Ever. Well, almost.
There’s another side effect of cards like this: they don’t work in and may break slot-loading cd rom drives, like those on some macs. I know this firsthand as one certain magazine ran a promotion with a small cd in one of the issues. I hear that it broke a few car cd players.
The funniest type of cards that I could find is the chocolate one.
These are wildly impractical, expensive and probably don’t taste good. And unlike cd rom and metal cards can’t even be used as deadly weapons.
I even did some digging on Wikipedia. This Victorian card made me smile. I love the caption under the engraving.
I also found amusing the entry screen for Boris Akunin’s works. It shows calling cards (similar but not the same thing as a business card) of two of his book characters separated by 100 years. You can clearly see the decline of the art of typography today :)
Let me know if you have any ideas, as I seem to be stuck.
There’s one thing that I hate about Chrysler Building. It does not have a public observation deck. I feel that any major skyscraper needs to have two things at the top: a restaurant and an observation deck.
To the owners the public areas at the top are usually a pain in the ass and rarely pay for themselves. Having a lot of people from the street come up to the very top of the building, adding to the overall traffic is not fun for building management from the security standpoint. I remember reading about the co-op board of a posh building at 30 Central Park South trying to evict Nirvana, a top floor Indian restaurant with amazing views of Central Park. They complained about the traffic and the cooking smells.
Because of this most buildings that used to have observation decks and restaurants closed them. Over a the Tishman Building Top of the Sixes turned into an exclusive cigar club. At the City Services Building the public observation deck, which was actually planned as the owner’s penthouse, was turned into a closed lounge for AIG brass. An at the Chrysler Building, the observation deck became Schrafft’s Restaurant, then it morphed into posh and private Cloud Club, and then closed altogether.
When I was younger, I was not particularly attracted to the views from high vantage points. But for some reason at the turn of the Millennium found me deeply fascinated with skyscrapers and views from them. To this day I can’t forgive myself not visiting the observation deck at WTC. I probably did not have enough money to eat at the perished Windows on the World, but not visiting Top of the World still fills me with remorse.
Because of this upsetting tendency of restriction and destruction public spaces high in the skies, I find this very joyous news: the rocket-like 30 Rockefeller Plaza will be opening an observation deck to the public. It’s going to be called “Top of the Rock.”
Rockefeller Center has an interesting distinction of being one of the very few Rockefeller family projects that carry their name (the other big one being Rockefeller University). Most people also think that it’s built and named after John D. Senior, the Mr. Burns prototype and semi-crazy hander outer of nickels, when in fact, it was the mellow John D. Junior who built it.
Since the Rockefeller name is not that popular, it’s common to see “Rockefeller Center” to be shortened to sexier “Rock Center”, as for example the menu of Yummy Sushi contains several sushi combos named Rock X, where X is a number of the combo.
As much as I tried, I could not find out a more definite date than “sometime this fall”, but one of the free booklets that you can get in the lobby of the GE (former RCA) building has a little blurb and the logo. I like the logo. It’s all Art Deco-ey.
Graybar building is one of the bigger, yet lesser known New York City skyscrapers. Located at 420 Lexington Avenue, it leans against and over Grand Central Terminal. In fact, I walked by it many times thinking that it was a part of Grand Central.
The understated Art Deco design helps to hide the huge bulk of the building. Some of the sparse embellishments are striking and very unusual.
The cables that hold the rain canopy in place are in the shape of ship’s mooring ropes, complete with rats and anti-rat devices. I did not notice this at first, but the rosettes from which the ropes emanate are decorated with rat heads. Freaky, huh?
Bas relieves to the side of the entrances are rather conventional allegorical representations of communication – a dude holding an old-timey (but maybe slightly out of date in In 1927) phone with lightning bolts around his head and stuff and transportation – similar looking dude holding a truck. The other two relieves are of Deco-Assyrian looking Prometheus with fire.
There’s an antenna at the top of the building. I could not find any information about it.
Now, look, look at this picture and tell me that we are alone in this universe. This little Spacing Guild Navigator belongs to
While looking for a good picture of a Guild Navigator, I found this cool picture of Jean-Luc Picard Gurney Hullek “playing” a Chapman Stick baliset.
This abstract sculpture was once proudly standing near Ingersoll Hall. Now it rusts in the grass. I wonder who made this monstrosity and what it was called.
Strangely enough, twisted pieces of metal welded together are closely associated with sculpture these days. When I think of sculpture, I think about granite, marble, wood, clay or bronze. I think about chisels and wax models. Rebar and welding apparatus I closely associate with construction work.
A friend of mine met her boss’ daughter carrying a huge pile of rusty metal somewhere. She asked her about what is she was going to do with it. She became very surprised and answered – “Don’t you know? I am a sculptor!”
Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger was a son of Judge Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger. Interesting facts about him included:
Some of his non-fiction:
Here is an interesting excerpt from “Psychological Warfare”, which was, and still is an authoritative book in the field:
Enlargement of what the “ancient scholar” was doing with his hands:
But what I really love Paul Linebarger for is his science fiction stories, which he wrote under pseudonym Cordwainer Smith.
Cordwainer Smith’s science fiction is amazingly ambitious: he wrote a “history of the future” spanning years 2000 through 16000 (click here for a timeline). His prose is lucid, coherent, poetic, logical and very entertaining. The story that got me hooked was “Scanners Live in Vain”, which was one of those stories that makes you go “Oh, I’ve got to read everything this guy ever wrote”. My other favorite is “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul”, which is probably the most romantic sci-fi story that I know. Something really interesting and unusual abut these stories are religious overtones and Christian symbolism (which are really, really hard to notice on the first reading).
I highly recommend “The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith” to get started.
Cordwainer Smith sites (I used some of them to gather information for this post):
The Remarkable Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (site by PMA Linebarger’s daughter)
Cordwainer Smith Unofficial Biography Page
Christianity In the Science Fiction of “Cordwainer Smith”
The Universe of Cordwainer Smith
Cordwainer Smith Illustrated Bibliography, by Mike Bennett
While I am a big fan of Occam’s Razor, which I find very useful in most cases, I find Hanlon’s Razor to be false on most occasions.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” – states this “law”. It’s very frequently used by many people to explain why something is one way, when very clearly it should be done completely differently.
When I worked at Nathan’s clam bar, annoyed patrons frequently suggested that the pint containers of condiments should be always on the counter and not behind it at all times. My co-worker with decades of experience told me that it was not a good idea when he noticed that I started leaving the condiments on the counter. I chose to disregard this piece of advice as it was coming from someone who was opening clams for a little bit over minimum wage for decades. I was happy with this arrangement because I did not have to waste time on moving the condiments between waves of customers, and the customers were happy as they always had a few jars within easy reach at all times.
The reason for hiding the condiments became painfully clear to me pretty soon. Two drunks started an argument right at the counter. My lineup of pint containers of cocktail sauce and horseradish became perfect amunition for their condiment fight.
Reasons for presence and abscence of features is frequently governed by
