Tag: Newscorp building

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Freedom Cuts

I have a friend who likes to remind me that my taste is highly atypical and should not be taken into consideration when coming up with new products. For instance, Fox cancels any show that I start to really like. Firefly, The $treet, Futurama – all mistreated and gone. The Simpsons weren’t cancelled, but somehow changed by Fox to become unappealing to me. Strange but true.

Right now Fox is promoting a new show, Prison Break. Recently they turned a little raised plaza in front of the Newscorp Building into a “Fox River State Penitentiary”, complete with signs, a barbed wire fence, and a whole bunch of dudes in prison jumpsuits handing out nailfiles and fake tattoos with the show’s logo.

There were also free henna tattoos as well as free buzzcuts. I was very much surprised at how popular the buzzcuts were with the office crowd.

Ad:
You know what’s missing from The Simpsons today? Bite. There’s no bite left in them. And I don’t know, something else too. It’s still there in the old seasons, but somewhere along the way either Homer jumped the shark both literally and figuratevely.

A relatively well known fact is that Groening started his career with a “Life Is Hell” comic which was about bulgy eyed rabbits instead of bulgy eyed humans. It had what the Simpsons is missing these days.

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State Of The Art

“Robert Natkin discovered his calling at age 17, in Chicago, when he opened a book and stumbled on the intense abstract art of Paul Klee. He was stunned by the beauty, the color harmonies, and the “music” in Klee’s work.” And decided to rip him off. Behold – the mural at the Newscorp Building (formerly Celanese Building):

Apparently people pay Mr. Natkin to do this sort of stuff. This only shows that corporate art today ain’t what it used to be. Here’s a mural from the former Eastern Airlines Building (currently bleakly called 10 Rockefeller Plaza ):

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Rock Center At Night

Group portrait of the newer, uglier Rockefeller Center buildings: Newscorp Building, McGraw Hill Building and Exxon Building.

Jewelry district with the view of the illuminated glass crown of the Bear Stearns Building. The crown houses machinery and water tanks.

Wheeee.

For some weird reason green traffic light turns blue on my photographs.

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The Great Blackout Of 2003

For the first few hours I was pretty busy trying to find my wife and photography wasn’t on my mind. After talking to a doorman at the building where she works I realized that she couldn’t find me she took a bus to Brooklyn, I tried to relax a bit and took some pictures since there wasn’t much else I could do. I did not do anything except cropping and adding a border to these photos.

“Fair, Balanced and Hot”:

At this point I missed an amazing shot of cooks from a Japanese restaurants carrying home whole plates of sashimi ingredients, but got this:

Live entertainment in front of the Newscorp building.

I haven’t seen so much drinking in the streets and smelled so much pot smoke in my entire life.

Give my regards to power grid engineers.

Atlas Shrugged.

Unsuccessfully trying to catch a bus to Brooklyn in total darkness. The battery in my camera died and I missed absolutely amazing shots of a religious Jew reading Torah with a flashlight and of a police Segway. Stupid as I was, I was taking pictures without recharging my camera for about a month.

Later I joined some of my coworkers back at the office. Executives shared contents of their fridge (I didn’t even know it existed) and stores of promotional items. We found blankets, t-shirts and, amazingly, TV Guide branded flashlight radios. Who knew those could be useful? The radios in the flashlights didn’t work, but we found TV Guide branded radios that did. We had a little slumber party. I shared my antacid tablets with TV Guide president. In the morning we got home via car service provided by the company. Woo hoo!

I think I should go on a little survival shopping spree. I definitely need a high quality police scanner and maybe long range walkie-talkies. A red Photon light was very useful, I should get a few more of those. Need to stock up on batteries. Oh, and I definitely need to buy some black bakelite phones. Those worthless piece of crap wireless phones don’t work in a blackout of course.

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Another Post from cubicle filled corridors of the Newscorp Building.

We tender this premium coffee for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the deadprogrammer’s collection to you 33.

Recently a commercial Bunn coffeemaker in our office kitchen was replaced with an automatic Keurig B2003 machine that uses K-cups. K-cups are a neat technology, but not suitable to good coffee preparation. Cffee from k-cups tastes like coffee prepared in athletic cups (because it gets very stale). On the other hand, conventional Bunn machine was actually very good, but we had the most foul prepackaged coffee. To this day I have one package of that coffee hanging on the wall of one cubicle. Check it out:

I new there was something weird in that coffee. “Milds”! What the hell are “milds”? Judging by taste it is probably tobacco. Or dried dog crap. But then, what else what did I expect from a company called “Mother-Parkers”? Hey, these motherparkers even have a website.

There is an OU symbol on the package. Milds must be kosher.

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Thank You, Corporate Masters!

This is so amazingly cool. Ooooh.

Well, it turns out that the whole third floor of the Newscorp Building has been turned into the News Club which is open to the employees of all Newscorp companies. It consists of a number of conference rooms and classrooms, a gym and an espresso bar! They have a pretty decent superautomatic machine. The coffee is Moka D’oro (check out the logo on the site), which is no Espresso Vivache by a long shot. From packaged brands Illy and Lavazza are much better than it too. But it’s still a passable brand. And the barrista is keeping the machine very clean. And they serve espresso in porcelain cups. And it costs one dollar!!!

The gym is $5 a week. Woooo! I am joining.

See, and I was just complaining about how there was no club I could go to. News Club rocks! Laptop ports, papers from all over the world on the tables, view of Radio City Music Hall. I don’t want to go home to my dumpy apartment.

You know, those four espressos that I’ve had there today boosted my morale much better than Team Newscorp yacht.