Snowpocalypse!

We sure did get a lot of snow. Looks to be somewhere in the 15"-18" range in our yard, but at that point the precise measurement doesn't really matter. It's a pretty big snowfall for most places, and it's a really big snowfall for DC. So it's perhaps not too surprising that that "Snowpocalypse" appears to have caught on as a name for this event.

I love snow, so I was thrilled. I also appreciate the way that big snowstorms like this one barge into everybody's daily life simultaneously. Normally, everybody's doing their own thing, moving along in their own bubble of narrowcasted culture and self-absorption. But a big 'ol blizzard comes along, and -- boom! -- the first thing on most people's minds is that there's a crapload of snow. Hopefully the next step for most people is realizing that they should forget whatever they were going to do and frolick outside or curl up with a book...but anyway, it's nice that everybody is in sync in a small way for one day...

I wandered around town for quite a while today, eventually heading to dinner and game night at James and Courtney's place. I put up a collection of blizzard pictures on Flickr.

Different kind of bubble

The Hirshhorn -- the Smithsonian's contemporary art museum -- is shaped like a doughnut on stilts. They are proposing a temporary bubble structure that would be inflated a couple times a year, billowing out of the doughnut hole and turning the courtyard into an indoor space for events.

If it turns out to be feasible, I think it would be pretty cool.

Different type of mashup

This nifty web gizmo will speak text you type through snippets of songs that use those words. Fun trying to identify some of the songs -- I recognized a few for the text I put in.

Swiss Army Knife

Keying off an NYT article I read this week on cities releasing databases for creative public use, I was reminded of two instances in the past week where technology pulled together information in a way that was very useful:

I just got the iConcertCal app for my phone. It's not that complicated, but it's clever and saves a lot of time. It looks at the songs on your phone, and makes a list of the artists. Then it looks at your current location. Then it checks to see if any of those artists have shows planned in your area, neatly organizing them by date or venue. You can click through a link to purchase tickets. This solves my problem of not checking club websites often enough, only to find out about shows after they're sold out. For instance, now I know to get tickets for the RJD2 show on January 9. The database the app pulls from is pretty impressive -- it must be assembled through some sort of web scraping -- and includes shows at venues that I wouldn't know to check. (iConcertCal is also available as a free iTunes plugin.)

I've mentioned NextBus before. On Saturday night, I didn't want to ride my bike, so I took the bus to go out. Before NextBus was available, I might have ended up shelling out for a cab back home because it's hard to count on the bus at 2:30 AM. But I simply checked the NextBus times for the nearby stop when I was thinking about heading home, and saw when the next one was expected. I hung around the bar for a while longer, then walked out to the stop, where the bus appeared right on cue. Banishing the dilemma of standing forlornly at the curb and wondering if you should bite the bullet and hail a cab is a major achievement, in my book.

Defriending threshhold

I just defriended someone on Facebook for the first time. My standards for accepting a friend request are pretty low (i.e. Do I know who you are and not actively dislike you?), so perhaps it's surprising it took this long.

This is an individual who went to high school with me, but I barely ever talked to him. In addition to constant Farmville updates, during the past week he posted 13 different status updates regarding Tiger Woods, all containing the term "manwhore." Example: "[former friend] wonders if anyone knows how many manwhores it takes to screw in a lightbulb not counting Tiger Woods of course".

Good gravy. Anyway, I'm done with that.

Thanksgiving weekend recap

(Photo credit: Davin)

Been busy this month, and slacking off on the blogging. A quick roundup of items from the long weekend:

• Thanksgiving was great. Definitely my favorite holiday. Key stats -- attendance: 18, turkey weight: 20 lbs., pies: 6 (3 apple, 2 pumpkin, 1 cherry)
  
• I had my 10-year high school reunion over the weekend, too. About 100 people were there out of the 400 or so in my graduating class. It was kind of surreal, but also pretty fun. I've done a bad job of staying in touch with folks, and I think there are a few who I might now actually keep up with after having a chance to chat again. (Also, it turns out the class president lives a few blocks from me in DC. Surprised I haven't run into her.)
• I saw A Serious Man with Matt A. while I was in CT. I really liked it. A few moments were too goofy for my taste, but it's among the Coen brothers' best films, I think.
• Also went to the beach for a walk with the fam:

Lottery Slogan Fail

I noticed a bus shelter advertisement for the DC Lottery with the slogan "There's strength in numbers."

Finessing reality is part of marketing, but this is a little too much for me to swallow.

Double Bogie

When the financial crisis hit last year, the metaphors and similes were really flying in news coverage -- the economy was a patient in cardiac arrest, etc., etc. -- and I thought about starting a blog covering the good, bad, and interesting use of figurative language in the media. I didn't do it, in part because I wasn't sure I would want to write entries often enough to make it worthwhile, but I've been paying more attention to the metaphors in the news since then. In a New York Times article today about people taking steps to increase the energy efficiency of older urban buildings, I read one of the least effective similes I've seen in a while, from a guy describing the importance of energy efficiency in his ($5.95 million) brownstone:

Waste reduction should be part of the purpose of good design,” Mr. Mcdonald said. “It’s like in golf: you don’t want to waste any energy at all. It’s a long sport, and anything you waste ends up coming back and working against you.”

Maybe the problem is that I don't play golf, but the fact that games of golf are long and so you don't want to waste any energy seems mostly inapplicable to golf (don't you ride in a cart? how does wasted energy "come back and work against you?") and not at all related to the energy efficiency of this dude's brownstone.

Songs of the Moment (An Occasional Feature)

> Modest Mouse - Styrofoam Boots/It's All Nice on Ice, Alright
> Built to Spill - Kicked It in the Sun
> Panda Bear - Bros
> Smashing Pumpkins - Here Is No Why
> The Walkmen - Little House of Savages
> Broken Social Scene - 7/4 Shoreline

A Brit in Baltimore

I've still only seen the first season of The Wire -- I watched it back when I was living in Baltimore, where it's set. (As I mentioned at the time, the viewing of one episode was punctuated, appropriately enough, by the real-life sounds of gunshots and a police helicopter outside.) It's an excellent show, and the remaining seasons are in my queue now that I've run through the available episodes of Mad Men.

Apparently the show has gained notice in the UK, and there have even been instances of politicians using it as a point of reference (along the lines of "Violent crime has increased, but it's not like The Wire"). According to a new blog that went up today at the Baltimore Sun, The Independent, a British paper, approached them about sending a reporter for a stint in Baltimore, to see whether the actual city resembles the one portrayed on the show. The Sun is in turn sending one of its own crime reporters to London to compare how crime and the justice system work there. Looks like it's only a two-week project, which I would say is not really enough time to get a nuanced understanding of the how the systems portrayed in The Wire work, but it should be interesting nonetheless.

And here's a game: with apologies to the Sun for snatching their images, here are the headshots of the two reporters involved in the exchange...can you guess which one is from Baltimore and which one is from London? Click through to the blog to see of you were right. Your chances of guessing correctly are high.