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A bold experiment has come to a bitter end.. the “burgers & cupcakes” restaurant/shop that I’ve walked by every day for the past several months (without, strangely enough, ever being tempted to enter), is now empty with a “For Lease” sign in the window.

So right, or so wrong? 

You can just picture the owners brainstorming in a bar some years ago, saying “Let’s take our two favorite foods, and sell them together! Nobody’s doing it!” Guess they never put that one to the sniff test.. literally. Only a vegetarian wouldn’t love the smell of burgers (and even some of them do), and fresh-baked cupcakes smell quite nice.. but the two smells together, not so much.

Everybody knows China is a manufacturing powerhouse, but you can’t really understand what that means until you’ve seen Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary film about the scale on which humans are changing the surface of our earth. The filmmaker focuses on parts of the world where the landscape has been so completely changed by human activity that it becomes almost like a new kind of nature.

Endless factories, making crap for Americans

It’s hard not to be marked by the sheer scale of the Chinese factories, or the Bangladeshi salvage fields where old supertankers are carved up into scrap steel. Or the recycling depots, coal fields or tire dumps where hills and valleys of scrap form new mountain ranges. It’s not just the scale either, it’s the fact that in these images, there’s not even a shred of original Nature visible anymore - total “victory” by humans.

Living the plugged-in lifestyle, it’s rare to spend a whole day without doing email, reading blogs or RSS feeds.. funny how it now feels like a luxury to make an entire day about buying and preparing food for a big group. A lot of people do that for a living, maybe they envy people who get to make a living sitting around talking on the phone and emailing all day.

Saltine toffee cookies, better than crack.

This Thanksgiving threatened to take the old-fashioned unplugged theme too far, when our dear hostess informed us that the gas to her building had been shut off for the weekend. A day without email is one thing, but preparing a meal without the benefit of fire is a skill we lost a few million years ago. The day was saved by out-of-town friends with a nearby apartment (and unused kitchen), though we did draw a few odd looks as we shuttled down the street holding steaming pots and baking trays.

It feels like slipping on an old pair of shoes. Nice ones, made out of fine leather, old-school. With all the hype around restaurant openings, celebrity chefs (who rarely cook anymore) and following the scene.. Walking into an old steakhouse is just plain relaxing.

“Miss Keens” - classic steakhouse beauty? 

Keens is apparently one of New York’s oldest.. You can believe it too, maybe because it doesn’t try too hard to be old, skipping the cranky geronto-waiters and the ultra-traditional menu - will that be strip or filet? Spinach or asparagus? The specialty here is the mutton chop.. Pretty adventurous, for a NY steakhouse.

Reading corporate annual reports is usually about as much fun as watching paint dry, so every once in a while some company tries to make theirs more entertaining.. fashion companies fill theirs with pretty pictures and print them on heavy paper, others use funky fonts.. but this one takes the cake (so far).

Croatian food company Podravka released their annual report with a booklet that you have to bake (yes, bake) for 25 minutes in order for its heat-activated ink to become visible. Check out the full set of instructions here, including warnings about not overcooking the book - if you burn the pages, you won’t be able to read it.

Add some garlic for extra flavor

I love it - my only complaint is that they didn’t do this for the whole report, the main part with the financials is a regular book, and only the booklet with the company’s products and recipes needs to be baked to be read. I suppose you can’t expect portfolio managers to run around their offices looking for an oven before analyzing the company’s balance sheet.

I came across this video of an interview with Chris Carella from Electric Sheep, a digital agency specializing in virtual worlds. The interview itself was pretty good, but what was unusual (for me at least) was that it was done inside Second Life, in a virtual lecture hall, with people attending via their avatars.

I was watching this a couple of weeks after it happened, courtesy of SLCN, which offers videos of Second Life events. The video looked odd at first - none of the avatars were actually moving, they just sat there as the participants talked via actual audio (no IM-style typing bubbles, that’s so 2006). The camera moved around, panning and switching between angles, so it was engaging enough to watch… but at first I wondered why this is any better than a conference call - why bother with the 3D representation?

But after a while it did start to feel different. The TV-style angles, the constant subliminal message that this was happening in some kind of “space” some”where”.. it gave the event a more tangible feel than the disembodied nothingness you feel when you’re on a con-call. It certainly was more memorable, though it’s hard to say whether it was the visual context or just the novelty of the experience.

Marc Jacobs works out in my gym, whaddaya know.. He’s right in front of me on the stairmaster as I type. Cool tattoos, but man is he tiny.

No photo, sorry.. Don’t want to be one of those amateur paparazzi trying to snag a grainy camphone shot for their flickr page.. Though if the iphone had a decent zoom lens I might be tempted..

PS. The iPhone plugin for wordpress rocks, so easy to blog from anywhere now..

Last night I went to a dinner party that later evolved (or devolved?) into a game of charades. It was way more fun than it had any right to be. While the wine no doubt lubricated our path to this point in the evening, alcohol rarely makes people do things they don’t want to do.. it’s more about letting us do things that we’re normally too inhibited to do..

“Plumber”.. sounds like..

I guess that means that as we’re typing emails and talking to people all day, we’re all secretly wishing we could just mime out our messages and make people try to guess what we mean.

I spent Saturday afternoon at a birthday party.. not the kind where a friend/acquaintance is marking another year, this was for their twin children’s first anniversary of existence in our wonderful world. Of course parents, like all other tribes, travel in packs, so this party was dominated by people with little kids (0-4 range, with a few older outliers) in tow. We barren folk were a clear minority.

What are they really thinking?

I always find baby-gatherings to be very fascinating, in an anthropological way, for about the first hour.. at which point I quickly become overstimulated. A room full of 20 toddlers makes the average night club, football game or combat zone look serene in comparison. This being a Brooklyn crowd, they were at least a pretty self aware bunch - several of them looked at us childless couples and said “good birth control?”.. yup.

Forbes is not normally my source for pop culture trends.. but in this week’s newsletter, Steve McQueen made their top 10 list of highest-earning dead celebrities, right behind Marilyn Monroe and several of the Beatles.

King of Cool - forever?

Could he really be making a comeback?? My first exposure to him was in Le Mans, where he makes it through a full 38 minutes of the film without saying a single word of dialogue. I guess he was supposed to be the strong silent type.. I have no doubt that if I talked less, I’d probably be cooler too. Guess it’s time to stack up the Netflix list with a few of his movies and see what all the fuss is about..