Russian Sledges

niknak79:

Shaved Alpacas

Shutterstock

Get out your calendars—Sony will be making its final MiniDisc stereo system in March, marking an end to the 20-year-old media format.

MiniDisc was launched in 1992, but never saw widespread success outside of Japan. Its rise in the West was stymied by the existing popularity of the CD and the growth of the MP3 format and its smaller, more battery-efficient portable players.

It was based around small, rewritable optical disks housed in a plastic shell with a storage capacity of 80 minutes. An attempted reboot in 2004 as Hi-MD failed miserably, and sales of portable MiniDisc players ended in 2011.

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Advertising is so ubiquitous that much of it is worth nothing. But for one night, crowded rooms huddle together, shushed before a TV, to watch and discuss ads. That's truly scarce. And nearly priceless.

Inflation adjusted Super Bowl ad prices via Brent Cox, The Awl

The typical conversation about Super Bowl ads and their sticker-price begins with a statistic and ends with tremendous skepticism. "$4 million for no more than half a minute of TV time, are you kidding me?" And then every year, companies make it clear that they are not kidding you, by buying every last spot many weeks before the big game, at a higher price, over and over again.*

It's been well documented that Super Bowl ads are quantitatively different from normal TV ads. And every other form of advertising you see in magazines, on billboards, or on your computer. In fact, here's a graph of digital ad prices, in dollars, versus the price of a single Super Bowl spot (data via Digiday):

And here's a graph of Super Bowl ad spots compared to the 30-second ad rates of the most-watched and most-notable shows on television:

The quantitative argument for Super Bowl ads being reasonably priced would proceed with some simple math. More than 100 million people watch the Super Bowl. Compare that to 20 million people, on average, watching Sunday Night Football in 2012; or 12 million watching The X-Factor; or 4 million watching 30 Rock. On a per-person, per-30-second basis, those numbers suggest that a Super Bowl viewer is worth twice as much as somebody watching The X-Factor or 30 Rock (which can be DVR'd, so the ads can be skipped) -- or 33 percent more valuable than somebody watching a Sunday Night Football game.

But the quantitative approach isn't sufficient to reveal the true value of Super Bowl advertising, because Super Bowl ads are qualitatively different from practically every other advertising event on your computer screen or television screen. To understand why, go back to the first sentence of this article: "The typical conversation about Super Bowl ads..." Stop right there. Appreciate how amazing it is that you didn't flinch when you read that phrase.

Despite marketers' best intentions, the fundamental relationship between consumers and ads is the act of ignoring. But people actually talk about Super Bowl ads, on purpose. They discuss them, analyze them, rank them. The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post ... sites that hardly mention Madison Avenue 364 days of the year suddenly transform, for one morning, into Ad Week and give drooling close-up coverage to Super Bowl ads.

When else do advertisements get their own advertisements?

Measuring the effectiveness of advertising is devilishly difficult, because it's practically impossible to pin-point the moment that millions of very different people made up their mind to buy something. It's easier to measure attention. And the attention bestowed on Super Bowl ads -- their art, their message, their brand-y-ness -- is qualitatively different from every other standard ad spot. By designating the Super Bowl as the Super Bowl of advertising, Madison Avenue has created something utterly unique: A national media event where people beg the room to quiet down so they can hear branded messages brought to them by multinational corporations.

At $4 million, that's not a rip-off. It's a steal.

____

*While the average price for an ad fell in the $3.8 million range, CBS CEO Les Moonves said many spots sold for more than $4 million ... and that he was willing to accept as much as $6 million for late-entries.

"Churchill also has a polar bear jail. These are for bears who keep coming into town and can't be hazed out of town. And what they'll do is they will trap these bears and put them in the polar bear jail, which is just a great big decommissioned military building. And they will give them no food, and they're given only snow to drink and then they wait until the bay freezes up. And when the bay freezes up, these bears can be released to go back out on the ice. "[The bears] don't want to be in town, they're just waiting for the ice to freeze. But if they're a hassle in town, put them in jail, give them a short sentence, and the problem is solved."

Whereas the My Bloody Valentine website isn't working and there's a new record on it, we the people hereby petition the Obama administration to make it work again.

Fuck your plywood.

johnsnails writes "Around 60 students at Harvard University have been suspended and others disciplined in a mass cheating scandal at the elite college, the campus newspaper reports. The Harvard Crimson quoted an email from Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael Smith that said more than half of the cases heard by administrators in the scandal, which erupted last year, had resulted in suspension orders. 'After professor Matthew B. Platt reported suspicious similarities on a handful of take-home exams in his spring course Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress,” the College launched an investigation that eventually expanded to involve almost half of the 279 students enrolled in the course.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

enochianwarbirds:

OH MY FUCKING GOD

i borrowed my friend’s laptop and here’s the desktop

which is a little creepy but ok

but did you know that you can set your desktop to change every now and then

BECAUSE I DIDN’T AND I MINIMIZED MY BROWSER

I NEARLY PISSED MYSELF

A native treat?

A debate rages over at Universal Hub's "Wicked Good Guide to Boston English" regarding what the uniquely Bostonian Peking ravioli is called in the wilds west of Worcester. Responses have been interesting. The standard definition seems to be "a dumpling filled with meat, found only at Boston-area Chinese restaurants," but others are getting a bit more creative with alternative names.

Chris Faraone: "Just dumplings. Plus MA is the only place I know in US with real duck sauce (not packets) and Italian bread with Chinese food." (We concur.)

Prairie Rose Clayton: "Dumplings or potstickers. Also I had never had scallion pancake until I moved here--not on NC Chinese menus."

Penny Cherubino: "Pot stickers! Joyce Chen seems to have changed the name here."

Chris Boulanger: "Call it a dumpling or potsticker, but peking ravioli isnt really the same as either of those. Its really an aberration."

JK: "RAVIOLI? what colonialist named them ravioli? keep your European dough out of Asia!"

Next up: What's really inside our crab rangoons.

Read more posts by Kara Baskin

Filed Under: peking ravioli, duck sauce, joyce chen

A small-town library in Colorado is lending more than just books. Patrons can now check out seeds and farm them. After the crops are harvested, the patrons return the seeds from the best fruits and vegetables so the library can lend them out to others.

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Este felino se chama Sam, o gato nasceu com os pelos da parte superior de seu focinho na cor preta, parecendo com um par de sobrancelhas. Segue uma pequena galeria com muita fofura desse gatinho. :3

O campo de comentários está liberado para todos os que vomitaram um bilhão de arco-íros com o Sam. :3

The Baltimore Ravens have already packed their pads and made their way down to New Orleans, where they will face the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday in Super Bowl 47. It seemed only fitting to send them off with a cocktail, so I turned to Doug Atwell, the bar manager at Rye, a revivalist cocktail bar in Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood.

Fells Point is down on the water, just east of the Inner Harbor. It’s still a beer-and-a-shot-of-whiskey kind of place, but Rye has found itself a home along the cobblestone streets near the Broadway Market. One imbiber at a time, it is reintroducing classics like Manhattans and Old Fashioneds as well as a new array of craft cocktails.

Atwell wanted to enlist a classic Baltimore recipe for the occasion. So, he created the Diamondback No. 5, which, perhaps not coincidentally, bears the same number as the jersey of Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco.

A variant of the Diamondback, a historic Baltimore cocktail named after the long-departed Diamondback Lounge at the Lord Baltimore Hotel, the original formula, as published in Ted Saucier’s Bottoms Up (1951), calls for Old Schenley rye whiskey blended with applejack and yellow chartreuse.

Atwell swapped out the Old Schenley in favor of Pikesville Rye, which has a deeper local connection. Long a favorite of those beer-and-a-belt drinkers in Fells Point’s dive bars, Pikesville was the last rye whiskey to be distilled in the state of Maryland. The final barrel from the old Majestic Distillery was rolled into the warehouse back in 1972, but the brand is still on the market today--distilled way off in Kentucky but consumed almost exclusively in Baltimore.

For a nod to the Super Bowl’s host city, Atwell borrowed elements from the Sazerac, New Orleans’ signature rye cocktail. Rather than using the Sazerac’s traditional absinthe and Peychaud bitters, Atwell looked to more local Baltimore influence. “I opted to rinse the glass with Art in the Age's Root liqueur, the flavor profile of which resembles a recreated recipe for Abbott's Bitters.” (Abbott’s was a popular brand of bitters manufactured in Baltimore from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s.) 

Perhaps taking a nip of this Baltimore-inspired cocktail during the big game will be just the good luck the Ravens fans need to bring the Lombardi Trophy home to Charm City.

Diamondback No. 5

1 oz. Pikesville rye whiskey
3/4 oz. Laird's bonded apple brandy
3/4 oz. yellow Chartreuse
Rinse of Root liqueur
sugarcube

Combine rye, brandy, and Chartreuse in a mixing glass. Add ice and stir. Rinse a chilled rocks glass with Root liqueur, discarding excess. Place sugarcube in glass with a splash of water and muddle. Strain liquor into rocks glass and garnish with a large swath of lemon peel.

 

 

Visit the Comstock Saloon on a rainy night: start with a walk up Montgomery Street to San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood (past the oxidized copper Coppola building). Turn the corner and follow the sign of an oversized hand pointing to "Saloon" and "Cocktails."

When you walk into The Comstock, you'll enter a dimly lit room clad in French blue wallpaper and a polished mahogany bar. With a band playing in the eaves (in a small loft above the dining area), menus bound in soft black leather, and antique fans turning slowly overhead, you might get the feeling of dining in an earlier era. That's because The Comstock is named after prospector Henry Comstock and the Comstock Lode (the discovery that brought mining fortunes to the Bay Area). Also, the saloon occupies the building of the San Francisco Brewing Company, the first bar established in the city in 1861.

Formerly of Absinthe Brasserie & Bar, bartenders Jeff Hollinger and Jonny Raglin (who has a look straight out of There Will Be Blood) have partnered with Chef, or "grub slinger," Carlo Espinas of Piccino Cafe to offer a mix of classic cocktails (from the Sazerac to the Blood & Sand) and turn-of-the-century saloon fare. From the bar to the dining area, The Absinthe Group has designed a space with antiques and historical elements that pay tribute to San Francisco's Barbary Coast. For more information, visit The Comstock Saloon.

Photography by Liza Gershman for The Comstock Saloon (unless otherwise noted).

Above: Silver-toned serving ware and wine glasses on an antique wooden buffet.

Above: Bartender Jonny Raglin sips a Negroni in the dining room (L).

Above: Photograph via ZZ Eats.

Above: The saloon's more formal dining room is located just around the back.

Above: Ceiling fan light fixtures (L) and the warm mahogany bar (R).

Above: The Comstock Saloon is located at 155 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. Photograph via Salon Benjamin.

N.B.: Looking for more places to drink and dine in the area? See our San Francisco City Guide for 26 more restaurants.

As Whale Week nears its spectacular conclusion, here's just a bunch of crazy big tabs from the theater district club Emerald Lounge, in the Revere Hotel. The following come from Emerald Lounge general manager Aggelos Panagopoulos.

[Photo: Official Site]

1. A successful local businessman came back from his wedding, which was in Africa. He bought two magnum bottles of Cristal for $1,000 each, plus many more drinks. The tab came out to be in the mid $3,000 range.

2. We have a regular, a young businessman, just out of college. One day he bought eight of the Dom Pérignon Luminous. The special thing about that bottle is that the label is connected to a battery, hidden under bottle, and so it glows a bright green. At $300 per bottle, let's just says it is a vey expensive, very tasty glow stick.

3. We have a package that is $1,600 that includes a magnum bottle of Belvedere Intense vodka plus a magnum bottle of Armand de Brignac or "Ace of Spades" champagne. One night a group of three guys and three girls showed up, asked for a table, looked at package and ordered. It was a great scene: the bottles are gorgeous.

4. Once we held an afterparty for a wedding rehearsal dinner. One of my old clients was in the wedding party, and they were celebrating at a "secret" location within Emerald. He ended up buying shots for the entire wedding party of twelve of Louis XIII cognac, which is $250 a shot. That plus the rest of the drink tab exceeded $5,000.

5. On New Year's Eve, we had a gentleman who booked at the last minute the private VIP room package - called Ruby - for $3,000. He also came in the night before and spent $2,000 for an industry New Year's Eve party with [DJ/producer/songwriter] Clinton Sparks. Also, he booked the presidential suite in the hotel. $10k would not be an exaggeration for his little outing.

6. A businessman from Asia was staying at hotel. He had come early and we had a very lounge feel early in the night, but he was looking for something more upbeat. It was 10PM and I told him that we do transition to a vibrant scene later, but I directed him to some other clubs in the area and called the GMs to make sure our hotel guest was taken care of. Within an hour, he had returned. By 11PM our DJ was in full swing, and it was a fun and very busy scene. He ended up sitting down at a table and ordered five bottles of 2004 Champagne Perrier-Jouët campagne, which are all hand-painted. At $250 a pop, he had a fun time with all the ladies he met. It's nice to be gracious and offer other options at other venues to guests and then to see them return.

Lastly, all these tables are extremely generous. With gratuity in the 30% to 50% range.

· All Coverage of Emerald Lounge on Eater [~EBOS~]
· All Whale Week Coverage on Eater [~EBOS~]

TIMBUKTU, Mali—French tanks were closing in on this storied caravan city on the night of Jan. 23, when the al Qaeda-backed militants who had governed Timbuktu since April left a departing blow. They broke into one of the world's most valuable libraries, ripping centuries-old manuscripts from shelves. Then they torched these priceless artifacts, in a scene of destruction that horrified scholars around the world. But in a relief for this beleaguered city, and in a triumph for bibliophiles, the vast bulk of the library was saved by wily librarians and a security guard—with an assist from modern technology. An estimated 28,000 of the library's artifacts were smuggled out of town by donkey cart, said Prof. Abdoulaye Cissé and security guard Abba Alhadi, who worked to relocate the documents. Gunmen managed to burn only a few hundred papers, but even those were backed up digitally, said the library's bookkeepers.

Would you go up in a giant toilet cleaning brush to look at this wasteland of shitty Modernist boxes, surface parking, and auto emissions? The conceits of contemporary architecture are so far off the rails of what the human race needs that the profession may be beyond redemption. Below, check out the Brave New World androidal interior of this monstrosity. Are you having fun yet?

Personally, she should be asking that question of the writer(s) and creator of The Following, not an English professor who knows about Poe. Especially when the English professor says that the most accurate TV/film adaptation of Poe in recent years has been The Simpsons (well at least it’s still in the “Fox” family). I wonder how much Gwynne Watkins knows about Edgar Allan Poe? Well she seems to be very well educated and well written. However her Twitter biography includes two words that says it all – professional overthinker. Ah ha, there lies the problem. It’s television people, we’re not teaching an online class, we’re trying to entertain people. So it’s up to you if you want to read Gwynne’s column or … not.

[Photo: Knights of the Mashing Fork]

The rumors are true: the big, new beer hall at the Harpoon Brewery in the Seaport District opens at 5PM tonight. Some pertinent details: the only food served at the hall will be freshly baked pretzels, there will be seating for 250 and room for 300, tables and bar tops are made from salvaged butternut wood, and there will be there will be 20 varieties of Harpoons on tap plus an automatic growler filler.

· All Coverage of The Harpoon Brewery Beer Hall [~EBOS~]

Earlier this week, we posted a story about a restaurant customer who not only chose to deny the waitress a tip, but also wrote “I Give God 10% Why do you Get 18?” on the receipt. Now we’ve learned that the server who posted the receipt online has been fired.

Black Flag, Saccharine Trust, Poison Idea @ The Met. 1982

If Henry didn’t get some carbs, he was going to LOSE IT!

'These files document abuses that happened decades ago. But that does not make them less serious.… The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil.'

Here is the letter Archbishop Jose H. Gomez sent to the church community Thursday afternoon:

teratocybernetics:

slow-motion-shadow:

nudiemuse:

gothiccharmschool:

Tilda Swinton as Gabriel in Constantine

PAGING THE INFAMOUS BLUEJAY.

This was one of two things that made this movie bearable.

See also: visual inspiration for one of the main characters in the book series I’m working on. 

…someday I’ll actually start referring to them by name, as this isn’t exactly a hidden blog anymore. Whateverrrr.

Oh hello there, enormous ladyboner, how’s it going?

Henry Purcell, England's greatest composer.

Last weekend Handel and Haydn gave props to a composer they've rarely performed in the past - Henry Purcell (perhaps, as is often claimed, the greatest English composer who ever lived) - and dipped a hesitant toe into performance styles that we rarely encounter anymore, the semi-opera and masque.  This meant that the evening was instantly of considerable interest to a critic like me, who often ponders music, theatre, and opera, as well as their various intersections - and I confess that I left the performance highly intrigued, but not consistently satisfied.
This was partly because the works themselves were at times musically brilliant, but to be honest, also somewhat variable (a good deal of the concert was devoted to a masque from The Indian Queen that had to be completed by Purcell's brother Daniel, due to the composer's untimely death).  The lack of full staging for another long sequence from the same work (a kind of semi-opera by Dryden) resulted in a performance that felt rather tantalizingly un-focused (for the effect of masque, I think, is actually connected to its physicalization in a deeper way than that of opera).  The concert was also impacted by the illness of one of its stars, local light Teresa Wakim, whose absence required various roles be sung by members of the H&H chorus (amusingly, as I noted earlier this week, this fact seemed to sail right over the head of Globe critic Jeremy Eichler).  
On top of all this, I sometimes wondered whether other soloists might be suffering from a touch of the sniffles.  Tenor Zachary Wilder sounded far thinner than he had the last time I heard him; indeed, the entire top of his range sounded stretched, and he didn't have the vibrancy I recalled from earlier performances.  Likewise Wakim's replacements simply weren't singing at full force; only Margot Rood seemed in full possession of her sparkling instrument.

Jonathan Best

The great exception to this general rule was bass-baritone Jonathan Best, who made a stunning Boston debut in two of Purcell's most famous scenes: "Scene of the drunken poet" from The Fairy Queen (a kind of incidental masque devised for A Midsummer Night's Dream) and the delightful "Frost Scene" from King Arthur (again, set to a text by Dryden).  Best (at right) proved something like a force of nature - his deep, resonant baritone is the kind of voice that the word "burnished" was coined to describe, and what's more, he's an actor of startlingly command (after seeing this, I'd gladly watch him essay Falstaff, or any number of roles from Shakespeare).  I'm actually not sure I've ever encountered a singer this talented who is also an actor of this stature; Best is nothing less than a phenomenon.
Indeed, in some of these roles he was literally a force of nature - in Purcell's "Frost Scene" from King Arthur, the baritone portrayed "The Cold Genius," a personification of nature in winter, who is stirred from beds of snow to life (and spring) by the power of love.  The vignette, and Purcell's music, are built around the amusing similarity between shivery coughs and the familiar staccato stroke of baroque strings - and the results are deeply bewitching in the manner of the oldest fairy tales. (The score also features perhaps the only fully-sung sneeze in the choral repertoire.) And Best was irresistible, as he was in the even tougher role of the drunken (but self-aware) poet from The Fairy Queen.
Elsewhere the chorus shone brightest.  Purcell was a mysteriously powerful choral writer, and there are some stunning choral passages in The Indian Queen, all of which got the full Harry Christophers treatment here.  Best was in continued fine form, of course (although he actually seemed to be sight-singing at times), and the well-known duet for "Two Aerial Spirits" was given a charming rendition by Margot Rood and Erika Vogel; there were also strong solos from Woodrow Bynum and Donald Wilkinson.  But alas, Christophers didn't draw his usual level of precision from the instrumental ensemble.  The deceptively simple, lightly-dancing rhythms of Purcell are tricky; their casual grace requires a seemingly offhand (but actually utterly precise) syncopation.  Here, however, things were a little too loose at times - although the winds were in better shape than the strings, and Bruce Hall sparkled reliably on the trumpet.  I'd have to say this proved one of the shaggier H&H concerts I've encountered; but its high points were memorable, and I was happy to be introduced to both Jonathan Best and some of the more obscure aspects of Purcell's achievement. The Hub Review, the guide to everything that matters in Boston and elsewhere.