Henry Rollins said, and I quote from memory because I cannot find a reference on the internet:
Always overpromise and underdeliver. Always run behind schedule, never rest.
How is that for a news year's resolution? I would just add this: overpromise and overdeliver to the people you love.
Whatever you wish for in 2011, I hope it will come true for you.
Happy New Year!
Op de valreep: mijn eindejaarslijstje voor daMusic.
From the No Shit, Sherlock department: Dealing with PMS
Women can be touchy about being labeled as a raving lunatic for a few days a month.
30 December 1920 - 14 November 2010
My grandmother would have turned 90 today. This photo must be from the 40s.
Jason Fried: This Atlantic article nails what it's like to be an introvert in an extrovert's world: http://bit.ly/c2waSI
This song by Röyksopp has been in my head today. Have you seen the video already? It is brilliant.
I am not much of a Röyksopp fan but consider myself lucky nevertheless. The song that was in my head yesterday was awful.
We saw the Another Year yesterday and it is great. A typical Mike Leigh movie without spectacular drama but with refined portraits of beautiful characters. Read this review by Roger Ebert or deze op Humo and/or watch the trailer.
Dave Lens: België heeft geen sneeuw-overlast. http://is.gd/jCZ6b
Chinezen stellen eten van hondenvlees zelf in vraag
"Honden en katten zijn trouwe mensenvrienden", aldus Chang. "Een verbod om ze te eten betekent dat China een nieuw niveau van beschaving bereikt."
Check the dictionary of cancer giving or cancer curing objects.
All links go to The Daily Mail. Some examples:
And that is just some of the entries for the letter B. The letter S contains next to the entry for smoking also an entry for sandals. What do you think? Causes cancer or cures it?
(via Metafilter)
The new video of Radical Slave just got released. It is completely shot in HDR and looks as if it is inspired by the latest Lars Von Trier. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a hit on Studio Brussels.
Someone found an enormous amount of beautiful photos made by an unknown woman called Vivian Maier that lived from 1926-2009. He takes on the job of archiving and promoting them.
See the story on Chicago Tonight
(via metafilter)
(via daMusic)
Nick De Mey: Concert ticket prices reached an all time high, now in decline. End of an era? http://j.mp/idEqaX
We all know Björk's It's Oh So Quiet
That however is a cover of the version of Betty Hutton, an American actress and contemporary of Judy Garland.
This in turn is a cover of a song by Hans Lang) sung by Harry Winter
Now that John Cage has not ended on the first position in the British Charts but some X-Factor song did this is my contribution to your Silent Night.
Merry christmas!
(hat tip @filletk)
In this photogallery from Time a picture is taken of various people around the world with their intake of food during a single day.
What is remarkable is how obvious it is that people that move more can eat more without getting fat. I should be getting back to doing sports.
(via @michaelpollan)
The Roots have as far as I am concerned not made one original track yet but they do make great songs danceable. Consider this a good Joanna Newsom remix that goes in the "if I ever have to DJ this will be played" playlist:
(was featured in Soundcheck's year in hip-hop)
From our Stop Pretending You Have Good Taste Department.
On Soundcheck they give an overview of what happened in Hip-Hop this year and of course it's a lot about Kanye West.
If you haven't checked his new album, you should. The Pitchfork maximum score is exaggerated for sure. Also the fact that the album shows up in almost all year-end lists is probably due to the fact that the release time was ideal for that purpose. Nevertheless it is a great record with a wide variety of interesting samples. There's even an Aphex Twin sample of this song.
Into The Abyss talks about the popularity of the colors teal and orange in contemporary Hollywood movies.
If you take two complementary colors and put them next to each other, they will "pop", and sometimes even vibrate. So, since people (flesh-tones) exist in almost every frame of every movie ever made, what could be better than applying complementary color theory to make people seem to "pop" from the background
and after reading this I could not help but noticing the teal and orange scenes in this trailer that was on De Standaard for reasons a lot less artistic: the ass of Natalie Portman.
(thx Nick)
3VOOR12: 3VOOR12TV Best of 2010: Vampire Weekend http://bit.ly/gKqaEJ
Facebook: A map of the world drawn entirely from Facebook friend connections: http://ow.ly/3pj4j
In Brussels a new shop has opened where you can 3D-Print your own lamp for the price of 199€. For those of you not knowing what that means, imagine this:
Download Google Sketchup and create the lamp of your dreams in this free program.
Upload the file you created to the website of i.materialize
Your file will be loaded into their computer system and they will print your lamp on their 3D-printer. This means that with a special process your design is automatically produced using laser sintering
A couple of days later you go and buy it in their shop.
In 10 years time there will be desktop 3D-printers for home users and I can email you my lamp and you can print it for your own use. Or chairs, or guitars, or who knows more complicated things like printers. Print your own printer. Now that is the future.
daMusic: [update] Arcade Fire op tournee met Portishead http://bit.ly/dGg287
Guardian music: Our indie professor reveals her 10 best gigs of 2010. It's all in the name of research, of course ... http://bit.ly/gHZIfh
Just as a matter of securing my snowball business I though I'd grow my own snowflakes. Then I noticed that next to a cola bottle and a sponge I will need dry ice.
Dry ice is very cold (about -60 ℃), so you'll want to wear gloves when handling it. Other than being cold, it's perfectly safe, as is consists of nothing more than solid carbon dioxide. It doesn't melt, but rather sublimes (changes from a solid to a gas when warmed), producing carbon dioxide gas in the process.
Now that is too much effort for me. (via boingboing)
Florian Seroussi: QOTD: "I’ve tried yoga, but I find stress less boring." +1
Tim Siedell: The moon turned red this morning. Exactly as foretold by Yahoo! News.
Chris Van Echelpoel: 13 Lonely Planet gidsen Europa voor de iPhone tijdelijk gratis http://bit.ly/etyoYk (via @MacFreakNL)
Pieter Baert: Een man geeft 300.000€ terug nadat gevonden in gekochte woning. En nu zegt niemand dat het een Turk was...
This text of Ricky Gervais on why he's an atheist is doing the internet rounds.
“Do unto others…” is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But that’s exactly what it is - a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good.
I like his humorous version better though:
It goes on in part2
PIL is coming to the AB in June. These days I'm trying to refrain myself from buying tickets that cost more than 25€ but this is a hard one.
KindaMuzik and daMusic both gave positive reviews of their previous gigs in the region.
This should be good. Of course, I could be wrong, I could be right.
Last weekend we watched C'est arrivé pres de chez vous which in English translates to Man Bites Dog. I never understood that but Wikipedia explains
The phrase man bites dog describes a phenomenon in journalism in which an unusual, infrequent event is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence (such as Dog bites man)
Man Bijt Hond is a Belgian television program that reports about "the other news" as well, so I could have guessed.
The movie is still as strong as it was over fifteen years ago. On imdb I found this interesting trivial fact:
Ben's family didn't know anything about the plot of the film. Ben's mother and grandparents thought they were filming raw footage of Ben, and had no idea that the footage was going to be used in a film in which Ben is a serial killer. Ben's mother was shocked to see her son behind bars, when she comes to visit him in prison.
Not as shocked as she was to see the movie itself I guess.
Ancienne Belgique : Public Image Ltd (PIL) (04/06/2011): http://bit.ly/fuQDUE
daMusic: [update] Captain Beefheart is niet meer http://bit.ly/fbjzwv
AnneJocteurMonrozier: 2010 en images (Big Picture) http://tinyurl.com/26yxc7v - http://tinyurl.com/26fggdn - http://tinyurl.com/35wpdyc
Apache: De Standaard neemt het op voor Singles
‘Single (zijn) maakt niet gelukkig’ vernemen we vandaag in De Standaard. Die primeur heeft de krant uit een onderzoek van … Singles, een commercieel bureau dat activiteiten organiseert voor singles en in die hoedanigheid, geheel toevallig, de perfecte remedie tegen zoveel ongeluk in huis heeft.
In short, the Belgian news paper De Standaard conducts surveys that imply that singles are not happy with their lives. A university made an enquiry and the results seem to point that way. The study was performed by on online dating agency. De Standaard has an online dating site by itself. There is a huge conflict of interests here that remains under the radar if it were not for Apache.
The difference between news and commercials is fading. Online as well as in printed newspapers. Almost every day the middle part of De Standaard is completely filled with advertorials that are almost indistinguishable from the real news. It is us, the readers that are being sold to advertisers. The news is there merely as a disguise and the investment in it is being minimized. It consists mostly of unverified copies of press releases, blatant product placement or short messages about celebrities or sex.
Also universities are going where the money is and do not hesitate to lend their services to private firms to do market research. The result is usually a silly statistic that will make a simple headline like "singles are not happy". The example given on Apache is excruciating, as students are being used as cheap workforce. We should not accept this from important actors of society like universities.
For an example, fill out this survey and try to guess at which result they want to arrive. My guess: it is to influence someone to invest more money in nicer concert halls.
From Yes, Minister. How to conduct surveys:
Het Nieuwsblad: Internationaal Zeemanshuis wordt dan toch gesloopt
Het Zeemanshuis, dat volgens de stad geen architecturale noch monumentale waarde heeft, moet wijken voor woningen en kantoorgebouwen.
De Rechtzetting: Internetenquête bij Limburgers brengt eindelijk opheldering: Jef Vermassen pleegde parachutemoord zelf. http://bit.ly/g81Lpm
Mijn review van de cd van Radical Slave staat online bij daMusic.
Uit die cd: Before We Got Rich
Pocket Revolution: Tempo of a restless soul online http://goo.gl/fb/AtVPj
Recently some website lost its entire database of passwords. Those passwords can now be used on other websites as many people choose the same password for all of the websites they visit.
You and I should try to prevent reusing the same password. Here is an easy method for creating good passwords that you can use:
Technical clothing comes with its own language, the language of performance. The marketing strategy revolves around presenting clothes as engineering. Sometimes, though, I suspect that we are being blinded with pseudo-science.
Then he goes on to marvel at the technical feats of outdoor gear like:
The fleece, the mainstay of every outdoor enthusiast, is made of recycled plastic bottles
and
Gore-Tex is an ingenious material. Because its pores are 20,000 times smaller than a water drop, it keeps water out while allowing water vapour from an overheating body to escape.
So there is your answer I guess. It's the same mentality that makes people choose SUV's in situations where a simple Mini would do.
All I can do is rant on Twitter
The guy that invented call centers should be shot, hung, drowned and sliced to pieces. Twice.
Peeters and Pichal have a popular radio show and can produce a whole campaign against call centers. Of course, I love it.
Radio 1: Bart Eeckhout (De Morgen) wint 1ste Groot Dictee der Federale Taal van Radio1 http://bit.ly/fW0db2 #joos
Wayne Coyne: Reprint of vintage Flaming Lips T-Shirt from legendary 1991 gig in Noble Oklahoma.. included in NYE V.I.P. package http://yfrog.com/gz5ozsj
Everybody knows giving money to charity only leads to bad radio, ugly christmas cards and gooey hit singles. For those people that despite all that still want to donate money down the drain Oxfam produced an album full of Joanna Newsom covers which, based on a quick youtube scan, must really be awful.
Except this one:
Price is ten dollars minimum. (via TMT)
Guardian music: Are the Vaccines and Kings of Leon ripping off the blog band aesthetic? @LauraSnapes thinks so ... http://bit.ly/i2RciK
Fraser Speirs: Of course, in football, the definition of "gay" is "reads a book without pictures from time to time".
De Standaard Online - Trajectcontrole in Brusselse tunnels
De Leopold II- en de Rogiertunnel zijn sinds enkele weken uitgerust met een trajectcontrolesysteem.
Als er één plaats is waar ik te snel rijd is het daar wel.
Conan O'Brien: The latest Rock Band videogame might be too realistic. It’s just four smelly guys sleeping on a bus as they cross Ohio at night.
The misconception that what these teenagers did is 'hacking' needs to be corrected. Journalists need to research what they're talking about, especially if they are doing a cover story for one of the biggest newspapers in the country.
Journalists need to research full stop.
You Can't Spell TIME Without 'I' and 'Me'!
It's now expected that writers of journalism insert themselves in stories.
Which is why I argued at daMusic that I wanted to write this review for the Lambchop concert in the first person. I won.
I wonder when we will see the beginning of Belgo-Nostalgia. Let's say we split up in 2020, based on Ostalgie and Yugo-Nostalgia articles in the press I would say it takes about 15 years. That should be around 2035. I'll be 63 then.
Durant l'existence de la Yougoslavie, nous n'avons eu peur que d'une chose : le nationalisme. La Belgique a du mal avec deux peuples, nous en avions une vingtaine.
houbi: Blogde met hulp van The Guardian eens over het achterste van zijn tong: http://t.co/7NfgCLB
I bet they don't tell you that you have to wade through the corpses in the touristic folder for climbing the Mount Everest.
Kristof: Maart, oktober, november en december. 4 Dode daklozen. In België. http://j.mp/gZd7eK
The countdown to Leopard, aka Mac OS X.5, has begun! It is very big on the front page of Apple's website. I have been playing with it since I got my beta preview at the developer conference. There are some new features in it that I am looking forward to using day in day out.
Most of them will be clear when you install Leopard and are already well known. Time Machine, Spaces, the new Finder, Cover Flow and the new Dock to name a few have all been thoroughly discussed in the Mac blogging community.
One of my favorite features that may go unnoticed if you don't pay attention: you can now share anyfolder, complete with access control lists and all. Finally!
What I've seen from the new XCode at the WWDC looks very promising. The snapshots, the message bubbles, Objective-C 2.0 and refactoring all look very promising. Let's hope that some bugs got fixed along the way of this significant upgrade. Interface Builder has gone through a major rewrite and the list of annoying things that are gotten rid of is impressive. The new resizer animation is what you would have wanted since day one, for example. Selecting multiple controls and change the common properties of them all at the same time, to name another one. But there were other examples, I'm sure.
According to The Daily Mail Julian Assange might have been the victim of a Honey Trap.
That's what I was thinking all along because a while ago I read this article about the history of honey traps and that Wikileaks-story reminded me of it.
My favorite part of the article was about the East German spies that got caught in the most silly way possible:
The scheme lost its usefulness when the West German counterintelligence authorities devised a simple way of identifying the Stasi officers as soon as they arrived in West Germany: They sported distinctly different haircuts -- the practical "short back and sides" variety instead of the fashionable, elaborate West German style. Alerted by train guards, counterintelligence officers would follow the Romeo spies and arrest them at their first wrong move.
(via Slate)
De Rechtzetting: Gelekt op WikiLeak:s 'Obama loopt soms rond in minirok.' http://bit.ly/eQZVIn
Long time no hear and I never saw the video before. A barely dressed girl running through the woods, you can't go wrong with that of course.
TrolleyCat: "On this episode of 60 Minutes, we'll talk to a woman who had a baby but did not change her Facebook profile picture to a photo of it..."
The concert of Das Racist yesterday was not much of a hit. They seemed to have fun but the sound was awful and they stopped after 45 minutes, which was way to early. Maybe it is because they came straight out of Amsterdam?
This song was played by the DJ's before the concert and made me smile:
Voor de mensen die geen YouTube hebben, vanavond om 23.50u zingt een engeltje je te slapen op de Canvas TV.
(merci Nick)
Belle & Sebastian in Ancienne Belgique
Op 10 april. Voorverkoop start morgenochtend om 11.00u. Echt fan van hun laatste ben ik (nog) niet, maar het zijn wél Belle & Sebastian, natuurlijk.
Do you have information overload? What else is new? All throughout history people have been struggling with information overload:
But around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: Printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books was distracting readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention. Printers “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness,” wrote Erasmus in the early 16th century, in the kind of tirade that might seem familiar to anyone exhausted by what they find online today.
David Lynch:All pop is magical. #lynchqa
Pitchfork:Low release free Live EP http://bit.ly/hZefBE
Operation Payback:WE ARE GLAD TO TELL YOU THAT http://www.mastercard.com/ is DOWN AND IT'S CONFIRMED! #ddos #wikileaks Operation:Payback(is a bitch!) #PAYBACK
San F. Yezerski: Pascal Smet en Joke Schauvliege gaan iets uitvinden om jongeren weer graag te laten lezen. Ge zoudt ze toch vijf frank geven.
Tonight in Democrazy/Charlatan: Das Racist. You can read this interview or watch this clip and then come along, it's not sold out yet.
Freaky.be over de nieuwe Chris Ware: K-U-N-S-T
We buy bio. We go to the local bio shop and get the best our money can buy. We love the taste of the food and we soothe the sense of guilt we have that way. I guess you could say we are nouveau riche.
That is what is being argued in What Food Says About Class in America. The difference between rich and poor is not more about how much we eat, it's about how we eat. As a consequence:
Corpulence used to signify the prosperity of a few but has now become a marker of poverty. Obesity has risen as the income gap has widened: more than a third of U.S. adults and 17 percent of children are obese, and the problem is acute among the poor.
Let's remind ourselves of the Pollan Doctrine: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. The article (and probably his book too) is a must read for anyone interested in food and its influence on society.
In a program on the Dutch VPRO there was an episode of Tegenlicht called California Dreaming, about the situation in the Golden State (Dutch Version). Recommended watching.
Miranda July Is Creating a New Movie as we speak
Renowned architect Norman Foster to design Apple's new campus in Cupertino. http://cl.ly/3Waj
Playboy Magazine releases every issue on a hard drive
All those magazines that are jumping on the iPad-bandwagon, why don't you do this instead? I would love to have the archives of De Morgen and Humo on a hard drive.
From the same series as that sketch about The German Skull Soldiers, a British Comedy Series by Mitchell and Webb that seems funny enough to be interesting.
So this is the new version of my web log. It is its third incarnation already, so it's version 3.0. First of all: things might be a little bit shaky for now, but all should settle down in the next couple of days.
The most obvious change is probably the new layout. You will see that it is based on a WordPress theme that I adapted to my specific needs. Doesn't it look nicer?
The second one is that comments are now powered by disqus. This should make commenting easier for everybody. Just type your comment and click the "Post As..."-button and you will be given a variety of options to identify yourself. Login as "guest" if you just want to give an email address and a name. Know that if there is ever a need to edit or delete a comment you made you can do so at the disqus website.
For me it should now be easier to blog. I am not using TextMate anymore but MarsEdit, possibly the best blogging software for Mac out there. The engine itself is a fork of blosxom, a perl script that converts a bunch of text files to static HTML and RSS. I will go into details about the technical side of things in another post.
I created a Facebook page for my blog. If you do not want to deal with RSS-feeds but you have a Facebook account you can like it and the posts should show up on Facebook. They will not look so nice as in for instance Google Reader though but they will be there.
Maybe it seemed like it was. From my point of view though it was as if my blogging experience got more and more dispersed over other media like Twitter and Facebook. While they have given me an easy way to communicate with the people I (virtually) know, I started hating the fact that they owned all of my data.
That to me is an almost unbearable idea and I much prefer the fact that all of my musings are stored away in neat little text files on my hard disk and, for your enjoyment, somewhere on the cloud. Here, where you can read them and comment on them. So this is the direction I am moving in, without (at this moment) giving up the social networks I'm on.
There are a lot of things that I would still like to do but require some programming work from my side. For the moment I will concentrate on other things, but sooner or later I will do them and you will see those changes here. Stay tuned.
