Hologram Tupac performed at Coachella last night. And he’s in great shape! Lyrics and general creepiness NSFW:
Tupac makes long-awaited comeback
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Category Archives: Culture Jammin’
Bear Grylls begrudgingly respected
My stance on Man vs. Wild notwithstanding, this is pretty awesome.
LOAD “*” ,8,1
I’m 31, which means I’m likely older than about half the people reading this blog, old enough to remember life before the Internet, and just barely old enough to remember life before Nintendos became ubiquitous in households around the country.
A couple families on our block had Ataris. We had a Commodore 64. For me that meant countless hours in the basement spent pouring over stats and simulating games on Micro League Baseball. My baseball nerdery runs deep. For my older brother Chris, it meant a whole world of other things that failed to impress me at the time but now seem pretty damn amazing in retrospect.
At school, Chris was a two-sport athlete and a very good one, but at home he was kind of a a prototype 80s nerd, right down to the mesh-backed hat and the glasses with the double bar between the frames — both of which have come back into fashion ironically now. With his friends he played some the same games I did, but while alone he passed more time programming for the Commodore 64, staring at the glowing blue monitor, mastering its rudimentary operating system, making his own games.
I remember he wrote a program that turned the computer keyboard into a piano, learned to play the beginning of “Hey Jude” on it, then moved on. I think he made a couple of lemonade-stand type games too. It never seemed special at the time because I was 7 and never had any other older brother, so I just assumed programming computers was something older brothers did. He taught me a few basic operations, but it never really took.
Chris loved the Commodore 64 enough that he made 64 his football number and part of his email address and AIM name and probably his ATM pin — the number was some odd part of his identity. And he parlayed his interest in computers and science into a degree from M.I.T. and eventually a robotics fellowship at Texas A&M that he never got to enter.
OK, that took a turn for the sad that I never intended. I brought it up because Jack Tramiel, a Holocaust survivor and the inventor of the Commodore 64, died on Sunday at age 84.
And while I guess guys like Chris suspected this would happen back in the late 80s, so many of us now work and bank and learn and meet friends and lovers everyday through computers. We take it for granted, but that all started with nerds plugging away at lines of code in basements somewhere.
So give it up for the geeks, I guess.
People fail to appreciate Bill Murray, proving my old theory that people are stupid ingrates
There was the once famous and formerly funny comedian, Bill Murray, serving up his usual tiresome brand of shtick, running around the bases like a hyperactive kid and throwing out the ceremonial first pitch like an old woman. He would later bellow out a loutish version of Take Me Out To The Ballgame during the always excruciating 7th inning stretch before joining TV broadcasters Len Kasper and Bob Brenly for some uninspired banter that lasted into the 8th inning.
– Some guy who is not Bill Murray, via Chicagoist.
My uncle used to get awesome seats at Shea right next to the visiting team’s comp section, about 10 rows up between home plate and the visitor’s dugout in the Field Level — the orange seats. One time I sat right next to Bill Murray for a Mets-Cubs game. I actually know the date: April 15, 1998. I’ll tell you why in a second.
At that game, some drunken moron a few rows in front of me spent the entire time loudly harassing every Cub that came on-deck. It might have been funny if he were, but mostly it was just grating and awful. For whatever reason, he took particular interest in two Cubs: Mickey Morandini (to whom he sung the “Mickey Mouse Club” theme multiple times) and Sammy Sosa (or, in his words, “Sammy So-So”).
I realized Murray was next to us a couple innings in, but he was enjoying the game and I didn’t want to bother him. Still, seeing as he was a hero of mine, around the third inning I worked up the courage to ask him for an autograph for my friend Cara.
“Mr. Murray,” I said. “I’m really sorry to bother you, but my friend Cara has seen What About Bob? at least 100 times. Is there anyway I can have your autograph for her?”
“Is she… OK?” he asked. He signed: “To Cara: Be careful! Bill Murray.”
At one point, while the drunk guy was standing on his seats trying to get the entire section to chant “Sammy So-So,” he noticed Murray. He called everyone’s attention to the former Ghostbuster, then, when Bill Murray did the ol’ pretend-to-scratch-my-face-but-give-the-guy-the-finger thing, the guy yelled out, “Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Murray is giving me the finger!”
That guy sucked. Bill Murray rules.
Oh, and Sammy Sosa hit a home run that game, his third of 66 that season.
Wait so they won’t even need Bruce Willis?
The killer asteroid–the one that we might never even see coming–could end life on this planet and there would be nothing humans could do about it. It creates a kind of helplessness that’s difficult to even think about, and it’s Robert Weaver’s job to think about it all the time.
Weaver, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), doesn’t hunt for killer asteroids, but he does study the ways humans might use their vast nuclear arsenals–designed to wipe each other off the face of the planet–to save the whole of humanity from a catastrophic asteroid impact. Weaver has been running simulations on LANL’s Cielo supercomputer to determine humanity’s capacity to mitigate an impending asteroid threat using a one-megaton nuclear energy source–one roughly 50 times more powerful than the blasts inflicted upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II….
Weaver’s simulations have shown something that should boost humanity’s confidence in this endeavor: for an asteroid of the oblong shape and size of Itokawa–roughly 1,640 feet across–there’s no need to drill down into the center of the asteroid to mitigate the threat. “I varied the location of the explosion from the center of the asteroid to the surface of the asteroid both along the long side and the short side,” Weaver says. “The center was by far the most effective because it just blew the whole thing apart. But effective enough was an explosion at the surface of the asteroid, both on the short side and the long side, with the short side being most effective. Once I discovered that, my study focused on surface explosions because it’s just a much simpler mission.”
Well yeah, I guess that is simpler, but then you just send boring-ass astronauts and military dudes up there to save humanity and not a ragtag gang of super-drillers, at least one of whom is romantically involved with the daughter of the other one and oh no I just remembered that song.
Canada ditches the penny
In an effort to cut costs, the Canadian government released its 2012 budget Thursday without any money designated to fund the Canadian penny. The penny’s costs have finally grown so high that the government has realized it just doesn’t make sense to keep the 1-cent coin going. Does any of this sound familiar?…
The U.S. penny costs an incredible 2.4 cents to make (and the nickel, by the way, costs 11.2 cents). That’s why a couple months back the Obama White House included a proposal in their latest budget to make pennies and nickels cheaper to produce in order to pare down the federal deficit.
There are numerous private citizens and legislators who have proposed getting rid of the U.S. penny altogether. (There are some who even think we should retire the U.S. dollar.) A couple bills have been introduced but of course neither has passed.
Did you read that? We mint coins that cost twice as much as they’re worth. And we’re never going to do anything about it, you know why? Because we hate making minor mathematical adjustments. Why do you think happened with the metric system? Eliminating nickels and pennies would mean every cash-register exchange would require some tiny modicum of math: rounding and some very simple subtraction, at least until all businesses have new registers. No way is anyone signing up for that.
The future is stunning
Here is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life:
Did you catch the big reveal? It comes at about 2:13 in the video. Thanks to the self-driving car, this man can now eat a crunchy taco while driving!
I cried a little.
Hat tip to @dianagram.
See music, donate money, drink stuff
As I mentioned Tuesday, I’ll be at Move On, MS this evening, a benefit concert for the MS Association of America at American Trash on 1st Ave. between 76th and 77th on the Upper East Side. There are a bunch of bands playing, drink specials, and raffles. It’s $10 to get in. Look for the ridiculously handsome guy and come say what’s up.
See you at the Convention Convention!
AIBTM is the leading global exhibition for the U.S. meetings and events industry. Each June we bring together the world’s entire meetings and events industry in Baltimore for three days of focused business.
Oh wow, is it already time to start planning my trip to AIBTM? It’s the leading global exhibition for the U.S. meetings and events industry, but everyone I know just calls it the “Convention Convention. ”
And this year’s Convention Convention is going to be straight-up ridiculous. We’re talking hundreds of hosted buyers and thousands of exhibitors from the meetings industry, meeting to network, exchange information, share strategies, partner and associate.
.jpg "Here's what AIBTM looks like.")
Since AIBTM falls under the venerable IBTM umbrella, you know from its Wikipedia page that was definitely not written by an IBTM employee that the destination will be stunning. So no one should be surprised that the Convention Convention will be in Baltimore, easily one of the United States’ most stunning cities.
Plus, this year’s AIBTM is tricked out with new strategic partnerships with PCMA, SITE and ACTE. And they’ve ramped up their existing partnerships with ICCA and CSPI (formerly ACME)!
To top it off, this year’s Convention Convention heard the demands of last year’s Convention conventioneers and added an exciting new Business Travel sector. And you know who’s going to be there? We’re talking CEOs, senior directors, management, corporate travel managers, procurement managers, finance HR managers, personal assistants and travel agents. And there will be suppliers of various business-travel technologies, including self-booking tools!
And since Baltimore is a memorable destination with several cultural attractions and excitement around every corner, maybe after the networking event ends Monday evening you can head out for some electrifying nightlife and catch the area’s hottest new alt-rock band, The Self Booking Tools.
The Convention Convention is the biggest event in events this year, with something for everyone from corporate planners to junior planners. Just don’t plan anything for Tuesday from 1-2 p.m., because you’re not going to want to miss the vibrant panel on “Delivering Meetings that Meet Your Organization’s Strategic Plan.”
No one can throw a convention like the people whose jobs it is to throw conventions. Why waste your time at some other, more narrowly focused trade convention, like one more pertinent to your occupation? Convention Convention transcends those convention conventions, allowing you to trade the trade thrust for a concentration on convening.
New York Times recognizes
A Tim Tebow joke I made on Twitter got quoted in the Metropolitan section of Sunday’s New York Times. Check it out. They even copy-edited me, adding a comma where I omitted one.
The Gray Lady, reduced to fishing for pageviews from area sandwich blogs?
Thanks to @CoreyNYC for pointing it out.
Tedquarters 