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“If You Paid Attention, You’d be Worried Too” or Finit Finis Finish Omnious Omnium Shmomnious

The very special 47-50th Street/Rockefeller Center station has some very strange advertisements posted in the decrepit old clock boxes. You know, the ones overhead, the ones to which nobody pays attention too because the clocks are usually way off?

For some reason I thought that the ads that I’ve seen for a long time were cigarette ads. But recently I looked at them a little bit more carefully and realized that something was odd. The ads show a sunset over the forest and a flock of birds in the air. The caption says “Omnium Finis Imminet”. Huh. Hello conspiracy theories.

Well, my crappy knowledge of Latin tells me that “omnium” means “all”, “finis” means “end” and “imminet” since it sounds just like “imminent” means “is coming”.

Apparently graffiti with this nice apocalyptic message has been popping up in other places. On the other hand, this is not graffiti, is it? At the very best this is a well executed hack.

Come Monday (well, if the end of the world is not going to happen before then) I am totally giving a call to Gannett Transit (formerly New York Subways Advertising Co) at (212) 297-6400 to figure out what’s up with this.

Update.
I called Gannett Transit just to be kicked to voicemail, but it looks like the ad is legit. I’ve seen a whole bunch in West 4th Station and comments are rolling in about TV spots too. As commenters pinted out this is probably a “guessing game” ad for the new War of the Worlds movie or some stupid Sci-fi Channel movie or series. Well, at least nobody seems to be paying attention to the ads. None of the people I asked were able to recall what it was about.

Well, at least it seems that my humble blog ranks high in the very sparse search results for “omnium finis imminet”, “omnium finis imminent” and the other creative ways to spell this slogan, so hopefully I’ll gain some readers along the way.

Now, if this were an ad for Darren Aronofsky’s Flicker, that would be way cool. But I am not even sure that he is filming it at all.

Another update
Wow, it looks like New York Times fact checkers are in hot water as the reporters totally pulled this out of their butts (or read on this in my blog as it was the top result on Google for a while) :

“The advertisements portray a flock of birds against an angry red sky, with a single phrase: Omnium Finis Imminet, Latin for The End of All Things Is Near. The advertisements, for Steven Spielberg’s movie version of H. G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds,” cost about $50,000. The film is to open in July.”

They did post a correction later on. Here’s the full ad from a recent Scientific American that my wife brought me today.

Note the Photoshop lens flare and the horrible font. Looks like their art director is about as competent as their marketing director. The letter “T” is probably made to look like the Orange County Choppers dagger logo to capitalize on the popularity of that show.

He heh, the show seems to have a stupid “X-Files” marries “Millennium” premise. The end of the world is approaching, and investigators are a physicist instead of Scully and a nun instead of Mulder. That’s some sexy and original stuff. Just get a bad 80s rock ballad for a theme song and all the geeks mourning Star Trek will flock to see this.

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Get Some

I am currently reading Great Fortune : The Epic of Rockefeller Center by Daniel Okrent, which is epic indeed. This quote made me chuckle, as it seems to be the only absolutely correct way of thinking about buying real estate in New York:

“… Arthur Brisbane, whose own ventures with William Randolph Hearst in the West 50s had already made him a very rich man, codified for his readers in The American the lesson of the Upper Estate deal: “Select your real estate CAREFULLY,” Brisbane wrote, “but GET SOME.“”

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Digital Rebel, Limited Deadprogrammer Edition

Even though I am squarely in the EOS camp, I have to note that Nikon usually does not force the indignity of owning a silvery plastic camera on the buyers of lower end models of their slrs. Dear Canon, please fricking stop using that silvery plastic!

A few weeks ago I got so annoyed looking at my Digital Rebel that I took a permanent black marker and made my own “Limited Edition” :

This might not have been the best idea as the resale value of my $800 camera suddenly took a nosedive, but the “paintjob” turned out to be remarkably durable (it only came off around the shutter button and the top a little), but also gave my camera a mean, grungy look that I like a lot.

I think I will buy some Krylon Fusion paint and do a less half-assed jobs. There are people out there who used similar paint to modify old silvery rangefinders.

In other news, reading through boring link blogs and popular link aggregators slowly pays off:
This is hard to believe, but there are Nikon lens to Canon camera adapters. I think I’ll buy one – I do not own any Nikon lenses, but have a lot of friends that own some pretty expensive ones. By the way, this might start a small flame avalanche, but in my experience most of the people that I know who own Nikon SLRs brag about having many very expensive lenses, but for some reason do not take a lot of pictures. Canon owners tend to have few cheapo lenses, but have pictures coming out their wazoo. (by the way, dictionary.com’s explanation of etymology of wazoo is not very convincing).

UV Filters considered harmful. I was never a fan of putting a glorified piece of window glass in front of my lens, but could not figure out why. Now I know. (I think I snagged this link from Kottke).

Making a lens out of an old magnifying glass and free time. This is some fine ducttapemanship.

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Soviet Realism In The Subway

During its renovation Times Square seems to have been steadily acquiring the biggest and ugliest modern mosaics. The architects seem to have forseen the ugliness of the mosaics and strategically used lighting with a lot of glare to mercifully obscure the them from view. Still, even ugly Soviet Realism style “The Return of Spring” by Jack Beal is a little better than water stained cracked tile.

Looking more closely though, some weird details become apparent. First of all, what is the guy with the hammer going to hit? Looks like one of the three guys in front of him. Also it looks like they are prying open a manhole, but it takes only one guy usually and they use a tool like this. The guy with a jackhammer seems intent on injuring the guy next to him too.

But what is going on with this guy’s hand?

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Kora Music In The Land Of The Stainless Steel Worm

Jaili Kandjia Cissoko, African Criot (Bard), Kora Player, Soloist Composer in NYC Subway’s Times Square station.

This is an illustration to my earlier article about Cora music. As Mr. Cissoko unfortunately doen’st have any cds of his own, your best bet of experiencing Cora music is either to seek him out in the subway or listening to one of these cds:

Djelika is my favorite, I absolutely love the title song that is based on the melody from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

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Raiding the Foodmotron

I am endlessly fascinated with vending machines, and being my old semi-autistic self like to study their contents. These days, trying to fight my way out of being overweight, the only thing I ever consume out of them is peanuts or trail mix. Still, I am amazed at how hard it is to get anything remotely healthy out of them.

I’ve seen an article once that described how to get a balanced meal out of a vending machine. All I have to say to that is – “Ha!”. So in the spirit of exploration I decided to figure out what is the single most unhealthy item you can get from them.

The placement of items in most of machines that I’ve seen at different workplaces follows the same pattern. Chips at the top, various snacks in the middle and ultrascary stuff at the bottom. The very last minirow is usually reserved for dried out rolls of lifesavers and gum.

The ultrascary items are the ones that I am interested in here. I have to admit that in the dot com years a consumed a couple of items from there. In fact I had a manager who publicly admitted his addiction to “Black Forrest Brownies” located there. I looked at the wrapper of the brownies and was absolutely scared of the fact that somebody managed to stick that much high calory crud into such a small package.

I checked the machine at work and promptly started the collection of scary vending machine food wrappers. I present to you the current champion:

The little “Eddie” character looks a little creepy, doesn’t he?

Wow, 40 grams of fat and 61 grams of carbs. Food of the gods!

I dare you to find something less healthy in your vending machine. If you do and send me a scan of the package I will send you a nice set of 3d photos of New York that I took and 3d glasses to view them.

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Deadprogrammer.com is Moving

Once again instead of writing something good for you to read I am changing my blogging software. Movable Type was a little better than Livejournal, but looks like WordPress is the right tool for me.

It will take some time for me to fix the feeds, lins, etc, so bear with me for a while.

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Side Effects Of Programming

“Nelson: Ah, he’s the greatest showman since that kid who eats worms!
Kid Who Eats Worms: My 15 minutes of fame are over!”
The Simpsons, Episode 3G02

The post about Durian seems to have been the most popular one in the recent history of deadprogrammer.com . This once again proves that eating gross things is entertaining to the masses. To prevent the surging popularity of my blog I absolutely must write a little bit about something that I almost never write about. Programming.

My co-worker who could not understand why he could not increment a variable in XSLT found an amazing piece of technical writing in an O’Reilly book about XSLT. Here it is:

“Although these XSLT variables are called variables, they’re not variables in the traditional sense of procedural programming languages like C++ or Java. Remember that earlier we said one goal behind the design of the stylesheet language is to avoid side effects in execution? Well, one of the most common side effects used in most procedural languages is changing the value of a variable. If we write our stylesheet so that the results depend on the varying values of different variables, the stylesheet engine would be forced to evaluate the templates in a certain order.

XSLT variables are more like variables in the traditional mathematical sense. In mathematics, we can define a function called square(x) that returns the value of a number (represented by x) multiplied by itself. In other words, square(2.5) returns 6.25. In this context, we understand that x can be any number; we also understand that the square function can’t change the value of x.

It takes a while to get used to this concept, but you’ll get there. Trust me on this.”

(full text here)

The quote that I highlighted in bold absolutely gets me. Yeah, that’s one good side effect. I get the feeling that XSLT was committee designed with the specific purpose to make life miserable for programmers. Also that committee must have had some really good stuff to smoke.

Update
Uh, see, now this is what happens when you try to write programs without actually understanding computer science fundamentals. I did not realize that XSLT was functional, not procedural. Like most mediocre programmers out there I was not exposed to much functional programming (I did try to teach myself Lisp, but quickly gave up). Having to do a lot of SQL(which is near-procedural) over the years improved my understanding of functional programming, but not enough to realize what the XSLT book was talking about (reading it from beginning would have been helpful too). Now hardware XSLT accelerators, which made me laugh when I first heard about them, make sense too.

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Ach, Mate, Say “Australian for Beer”. Please?

I have a friend who married a Scot and moved away to Scotland. In fact marrying men from exotic locales seems to be a trend amongst my female Russian friends – another one married an Australian.

It’s almost ironic that my favorite bar in New York is a Scottish bar called St. Andrews (which is also a place in Scotland where my friend used to live). St. Andrews the bar is characterized by an amazing selection of whisky, good atmosphere, good food (there’s a restaurant in the back), moderate prices and friendly kilt-wearing waiters with Scottish accents.

Recently I braced myself and ordered haggis. It’s a widely known “scary” dish which is a sausage made out of various organ meats. It is served with obscene sounding “neeps and tatties” (mashed turnips and potatoes).

At St. Andrews it was served the following way : a layer of the abovementioned “neeps and tatties”, then a layer of contents of haggis sausage (which is somewhat similar in texture to ground hamburger), then another layer of “neeps and tatties”.

It certainly did not smell as some cartoons would make you believe. In fact it was very tasty. The puree/meat combination was very nice. The haggis itself tasted like very tasty hamburger. Low grade meats rule!

St. Andrews bar is located at 120 W 44th St, Between 6th & Broadway.

The most exotic Australian thing that I had was kangaroo jerky that my friend brought me from her trip to Australia. It tasted a lot like chicken jerky :)

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Looking at Design.ru and Remembering Dot Com Ads

I was browsing http://www.design.ru and a few associations formed in my mind.

Latest set of images with quotes from Tema remind me of Kenneth Cole ads with obligatory quote from Mr. Cole himself. By the way, I am glad to see that kennethcole.com is back to an almost original state similar to what it was when I worked on it, from a horrible flash monster that it became later. I’ve met Kenneth Cole at the time, maybe I’ll meet Lebedev some day too.

Illustrations by Yana Moskalyuk look to me as if Lavalife.com ads mated with Bluefly.com ads. It’s interesting to see that bluefly.com is still around. I only bought something from there once, when they were giving away $50 gift certificates.