Just Kristin

Shel Sil­ver­stein on Kanye West’s The Col­lege Dropout It turns out that Jay-Z’s pro­ducer Is as cocky as a rooster Drop­ping albums as an homage To his drop­ping out of col­lege Rhymes are tight, Beats are bril­liant His career should be resilient To the plagues of hip-hop fame Like feuds with 50, or the Game Or race-based pres­i­den­tial scolds Or shut­ting down 19-year-olds. I think he’ll play it safe; he sets his sights On sell­ing wax to whites. * * * Kurt Von­negut on Suf­jan Steven’s Ill…

I just played SOCOM 4 with the newly-named PlaySta­tion Move con­troller. And now I know how the PlaySta­tion 3’s motion-sensitive con­troller is not just a me-too Wii con­troller. More »

Look at Todbot’s Bristle­Bots go! He held a work­shop at Crash Space in Cul­ver City, CA last night and showed peo­ple how to make them. (I’m sorry I didn’t announce it in advance!) Bristle­Bots and LED throwie art at Crash Space

Ben Green­man invents the 3*TYPE 3*TYPE process, saves text-based media from igno­min­ious death death.

Sin­joyla Townsend and Ange­lisa Young were the first same-sex cou­ple to wed this morn­ing in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.A les­bian cou­ple together for more than a decade smiled through tears Tues­day as they became the first same-sex cou­ple to marry in the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, on the first day such unions are legal in the nation’s capital.Sinjoyla Townsend and Ange­lisa Young said they had waited years to marry. They were first in line last week to apply for a mar­riage license at Washington’s mar­riage bureau.”…

“I like it when girls can snow­board. But I don’t need some chick try­ing to shred bet­ter than me, take my job.”—Champion snow­boarder Shaun White, in Peo­ple mag­a­zine, on what he looks for in a woman.Straight guys who want women to share their talents/interests/abilities, but be not quite as good, not quite as knowl­edge­able, not quite as capa­ble, are the totes worst.

Thanks to a smart TED talk by biol­o­gist Janine Beynus that made the rounds a few years ago, books like Bio­mimicry: Inno­va­tion Inspired by Nature, and new online resources like AskNature.org, more and more design­ers are real­iz­ing a sim­ple truth when try­ing to find respon­si­ble, eco­log­i­cal solu­tions: If we’re try­ing to do it, chances are, nature already did it bet­ter. Bio­mimicry is quickly becom­ing a cor­ner­stone of sus­tain­able design (read our story on bio­mimicry from 2008), but for design­ers who…

Lau­rie Pink posted a photo:

Lau­rie Pink posted a photo:

(YouTube Link) The com­edy duo Bri­TaN­ick cre­ated this trailer for a hypo­thet­i­cal movie that would be guar­an­teed to win Best Pic­ture at the Acad­emy Awards. All of the dia­logue is replaced with com­mon movie tropes. via Urlesque | Offi­cial Website

Water use in Edmon­ton dur­ing the Olympic gold medal Hockey Game. share this:

The city of Detroit is propos­ing to give over a quar­ter of its land to be turned into “semi-rural” fields and farms, with the sur­viv­ing neigh­bor­hoods stand­ing in “pock­ets in expanses of green.” The pro­posal is polit­i­cally charged (serv­ing a death-sentence on a whole neigh­bor­hood is bound to be con­tro­ver­sial) but the idea of “down­siz­ing” Detroit seems to have wide accep­tance. And yes, this entire thing was pre­dicted by David Byrne in 1988 in the song “(Noth­ing But) Flow­ers” on the final Talking…

The sign on the left is famil­iar to Amer­i­cans, but other coun­tries think it is a hor­ri­ble design, pre­fer­ring the green run­ning man on the right or a vari­a­tion of it. Julia Turner of Slate has an in-depth arti­cle on the 25-year inter­na­tional fight over exit signs. It’s one of a ter­rific six-part series about sign his­tory and design. Fans of Ota’s run­ning man point to two key advan­tages: It’s a pic­togram, and it’s green. The sign’s word­less­ness means it can be under­stood even by peo­ple who…

The band OK Go, blogged many a time here for their won­der­ful music videos and savvy take on the state of the music biz, is launch­ing its own record label. From okgo.com: The band has left the EMI fam­ily of cor­po­ra­tions to form their own enter­prise, a home­made upstart called Paracadute.“

Peo­ple in seven Euro­pean coun­tries have expressed will­ing­ness to try “NoMix” toi­lets that keep crap and urine sep­a­rate, allow­ing for more effi­cient waste pro­cess­ing and less seep­age of urine-borne phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals into the water sup­ply. The study was con­ducted with 2700 peo­ple in Switzer­land, Ger­many, Aus­tria, Lux­em­bourg, The Nether­lands, Swe­den, and Den­mark, with 80 per­cent sup­port­ing the toi­lets. Even higher num­bers were will­ing to use urine as fer­til­izer. The arti­cle doesn’t dis­cuss infras…

Click for a larger image.Thanks to Cal­cu­lated Risk for this chart. Note the huge diver­gence between unem­ploy­ment rates by edu­ca­tional level. Those with less than a high school edu­ca­tion saw their unem­ploy­ment spike from 8% at the begin­ning of the recess­sion to 15% cur­rently. Now look at those with a col­lege degree or higher — they are still at “tech­ni­cal” full employ­ment — they have an unem­ploy­ment rate at about 5%. In a recent arti­cle I wrote on the employ­ment sit­u­a­tion I noted the follow…

This is a pair of squir­rels play­ing out­er­space in the park with a cou­ple of coconut hel­mets on their heads. YOU TWO ARE CRACKING MY SHIT UP!! Miss Roberts, 46, leaves out two coconuts a week and sus­pends them on pieces of string from her wash­ing line and watches her furry friends dig in. She said: “The first time I saw them feed­ing I nearly died laugh­ing, they looked like a pair of astro­nauts and even now I can not stop chuck­ling every time I see them. “I make a large hole in the coconu…

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– Scots­man, Aug. 11, 1849, quoted in The Edin­burgh New Philo­soph­i­cal Jour­nal, Octo­ber 1849

Part One     Part Two     Carol Bur­nett, Tim Con­way, Har­vey Kor­man, Vicki Lawrence, and Dinah Shore destroy Gone With The Wind.

If you’re inter­ested, I wrote a piece for The Daily Mir­ror about my recent trip to the LAPD’s “Behind the Scenes” exhibit here in Vegas (which got a lot of media atten­tion when the Kennedy fam­ily protested the inclu­sion of bloody cloth­ing from Robert Kennedy’s shoot­ing). My friend Larry was inter­ested in the pol­i­tics involved–whose per­sonal tragedy gets put on pub­lic dis­play? Were the dis­plays as sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic as he sus­pected they would be? He was par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in how th…

[YouTube — Link] Cover designer Lau­ren Panepinto took a screecast while design­ing the jacket for an upcom­ing book by Gail Car­riger. If you’ve ever won­dered what goes into design­ing a book jacket, this video will give you a pretty good idea of the time and skill it takes! – via orbit­books From the Upcom­ing ueue, sub­mit­ted by jimmdare.

A hen in Shrews­bury, UK has been nest­ing on a lit­ter of pup­pies born on the farm of Edward and Ros Tate. This is to the chicken’s advan­tage, as the Tates have since decided to not eat her: Mr Tate said: ‘Mabel was hatched here about a year ago. She would have gone onto someone’s din­ner plate but we saved her.[…] ‘We have a dog, Net­tle, which has just given birth to a lit­ter of pups. Within a few days of giv­ing birth, Net­tle was up and about, prowl­ing in the yard. ‘Mabel observed Net…

The pro­tec­tive suits worn by bomb dif­fusers in “The Hurt Locker” are real, right down to those fab­u­lously popped col­lars, and they really do save lives. The secret is all in the mate­ri­als, which pro­vide a bar­rier against both shock­waves and shrap­nel. The over­pres­sure wave is actu­ally the more dan­ger­ous of the two. A microsec­ond after a bomb goes off, the explo­sion com­presses the sur­round­ing air and blows it out­ward in a lightning-fast shock­wave that rip­ples through cloth­ing and lit­er­ally flat…

Salon’s Mark Ben­jamin went spelunk­ing in the recently released CIA tor­ture memos and comes back with a stomach-churning account of the water­board­ing prac­ticed at Gitmo. This fine-tuned tor­ture process repeat­edly took its vic­tims to the brink of death (one vic­tim was water­boarded 180+ times) until many of them sim­ply gave up on breath­ing and tried to allow them­selves to drown, only to be revived by uneth­i­cal med­ical per­son­nel who col­lab­o­rated with the war crim­i­nals con­duct­ing the tor­ture. The…

As Tim Burton’s take on the story con­sumes movie­go­ers across the world, it seems a good oppor­tu­nity to read a let­ter or two from the orig­i­nal cre­ator of Alice in Won­der­land: Charles Dodg­son. Both let­ters were writ­ten by Dodg­son — better-known by most under his pseu­do­nym, Lewis Car­roll — to a young friend called Isabel Sey­mour in May of 1869, just four years after the release of the first Alice novel, and con­cern a rail­way ticket he had for­got­ten to pass on to the child. The sec­ond let­ter in par…

The orig­i­nal Bayeux Tapes­try is a huge embroi­dered panel illus­trat­ing the Bat­tle of Hast­ings and other his­tor­i­cal scenes sur­round­ing the Nor­man con­quest of Eng­land in the year 1066. Because of its use of pic­tures to tell the story, it has been called “the first known British comic strip.” Today, we have an online gen­er­a­tor called the His­toric Tale Con­struc­tion Kit, with which any­one can cre­ate a vir­tual tapes­try that will say any­thing you want. Mod­ern pop cul­tural ref­er­ences and internet…