The Great Migration

As some of you know, I've had this blog for a while. A long while. And a few months ago, I started migrating over to Tumblr.

Tumblr is far from perfect, but I dig it. And I have faith that it will get better.

I've been posting here and re-posting the same stuff to my Tumblr for some time now, but the import tool I was using to do it has been deactivated, thus rendering the double-dipping a royal pain in the ass. So, friends, the time has come for me to commit and make the move to Tumblr. I hope you join me, since that's where I'm going to be posting everything from here on in.

Perhaps I'll come back to Blogger one day, who knows. But for the time being, I don't have the time to do both.

The full URL is http://marseniuk.tumblr.com but marseniuk.com redirects to it.

Cheers,
M

Goodnight, Internet

I swear to god, I do this every night. Except I don't have porn on my computer, and I usually put my laptop in sleep mode instead of shutting it down. Brutal, I know. But stressing my MacBook out is a small price to pay to avoid quitting the 14 programs I have open (including the six I'm actually using), and closing the 72 various tabs I have open. (Yeah, yeah, I know Firefox will automatically "save session" and remember my tabs for me ... but then I'll have to wait, like, 20 seconds for it to re-load all of them when I reboot! And who has time for that?!)

goodnight internet

Hardly Working Start-Up Guys

The medium is the message, sure — but sometimes the message is a mixed one. I am forever amused by people who drop buzzwords — "SEO!" "UGC!" "Viral!" "... But I know Larry Page!" — and they (a) think they're fooling everyone, and/or (b) actually do fool some people, who in turn agree to hire them. (In the world of Web, "consultant" can be a very dirty word.)

Enter this video, which pokes fun at morons who don't know anything about what they're talking about, but think that if they drop the right balance of acronyms and social media verbiage, people won't notice they're full of it.

It's sad and ironic because, all too often, it's true: "The best web strategy is one you don't understand."

Somewhere, Marshall McLuhan is turning in his grave.

Fancy Footwear

It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring — and this girl needs a pair of rain boots.

I've spent the last three years in Las Vegas, where the average yearly rainfall is 4.1-inches. (seriously! I'm not making that stat up!) I think it has rained more in the week and a half that I've been in NYC than it did during my entire time in Vegas.

"I think I'm going to have to break down and buy rain boots!" I texted a friend who also lives in New York and has been weathering this, um, weather.

"You def do," she replied, then suggested I pick up a pair of Hunters ASAP.

"Hunter boots are the best," she assured me. "You can consider yourself a real NYer as soon as you get them."

Now, if it was a commercial that told me buying Hunter brand rain boots were the true sign of a modern Manhattan woman, I would've boycotted the boots immediately. But since it was my friend, I believed her. I made a mental note to buy the first pair I saw.

I haven't purchased rain boots since I was in sixth grade — and even then, I'm pretty sure it was my mom who did the purchasing. Long story short, I had no idea how much a pair of Hunter boots was going to cost. I figured a regular pair of no-name boots was probably $25, so I did the math (multiplied what a normal pair should cost by three) and figured they'd be $75.

$75. For rain boots. AKA rubber boots... boots made of rubber, not leather. Ridiculous! I thought. What have we come to, spending that much on rubber boots? There are people who don't make that much in a month!

...But the rain kept coming, and my altruistic ideals went down the storm drain. And I needed to get some boots before I destroyed every pair of regular shoes I own, so I logged onto Zappos.com and found a pair of Hunters that I liked. They were beautiful: sleek, black, knee-high boots with a slight heel and a cute little strap around the ankle. They even had a name: Andora. I liked the sound of that.

What I didn't like was the price: $175.

$175?!? My eyes widened, half in disbelief, half in horror. Hunters, as it turns out, are the Manolo Bhlaniks of rain boots.

Who pays $175 for rubber boots?

Well, I do, apparently.

My frugal great grandmother (and, hell, most people I know!) would be so disappointed in me. I should know better! I shouldn't buy into it! Dumb, dumb, materialistic girl! Rubber boots aren't a status symbol! They're boots! Made of rubber, remember?!

[dramatic sigh]

OK, back to work. After all, momma needs [to pay for] a new pair of shoes...

P2P... C?

A new financial institution — financial system, really — is hoping to give traditional banks a run for their money. Bitcoin is a new, decentralized online currency that just might change the way we do business.

Basically, it's virtual Monopoly money, and runs around an online marketplace where people trade goods and services for credits — Bitcoins — that can be used, in turn, to buy other products and services. (see video below)

That's all fine and well, but things get particularly interesting when you trade your funny-money Bitcoins for real world dollars (or Euros). Apparently, there are organizations that will do just that. No, I haven't looked into it myself, and no, I don't think anyone is going to be offering competitive (read: worthwhile) exchange rates, but it's a neat concept — and might be worth keeping your eye on.

For more info, visit WeUseCoins.com.*

* WeUseCoins has nothing to do with Insert Coin(s) Videolounge and Gamebar, but the latter is awesome, so I use any excuse I can get to talk about it. Like this disclaimer, for example... ;)

Early Artists, Embellished

Kids' drawings never live up to what they're supposed to be. While those little hangs grasp Crayola markers and crayons, their attempts to recreate their modern family, favorite pet, or dream car usually look like little more than stick figures and a scribble-filled mess.

Or are they?

Maybe young minds are incredibly visual, and their hands are simply unable to keep up.

Artist Dave DeVries explores this possibility through a collection of images that are fantastic and fantastical. He took pre-schoolers' pictures, and used them as a foundation for full-fledged paintings. Personally, I think the extrapolated and embellished former stick figures are quite striking.

Like many of the off-the-wall-and-very-cool art-related things I blog about, this collection can be found on Flavorwire.


Here's what Flavorpill's Tom Hawking had to say:

"If you actually stop and look at them, children's drawings are really fascinating. You can spend hours thinking about the way kids' brains transfer the world they see onto paper, emphasizing certain characteristics of their subjects in a way that's more conceptual than literal, or the fact that children everywhere — no mater what their socioeconomic or cultural context — seem to draw in broadly the same way. Jersey artist Dave DeVries takes the idea of analyzing children's work one step further, by rendering their creations as fully-fledged, realistic (if somewhat cartoon-esque) paintings. His project The Monster Engine has been exploring this idea for a decade, and the results are both beautiful and fascinating."

I included two of my favorites in this post, but there are more to see, enjoy, and ponder. Check out the others by reading the original post on Flavorwire, and/or DeVries' website.

The Mississippi's Wrath... in Manitoba

When the Mississippi floods, Louisiana isn't the only place that takes a hit. The southern part of my home province of Manitoba, Canada, floods almost every spring. The Red River runs right through the province (right through my mother's back yard in Winnipeg, in fact -- yes, she has to sandbag every year), and feeds off the Mississippi, so when one overflows, so does the other. (The flood gates in North Dakota and the kind folks down in Grand Forks complicate matters, too, but we won't get into that right now...)

When I say flood, I mean flood. The near biblical proportions that we witnessed in '97 were worst by far (they called it "the Flood of the Century," and brought both the army and high school students in by the bus load to build dikes and sandbag), but the water rises up and washes out miles of farmland every spring.

Here are some pictures of this year's relatively small flood. They were taken near Morris, St. Jean Batiste, and between St. Agathe and St. Adolphe, MB.

Indeed, Louisiana is not alone.

Amazing

There is an animated gif, too, but I'm not going to post that here (Go here to see it for yourself).

You can thank my esteemed colleagues at Flavorpill for that one, as well as this royal comparison, which is interesting but not nearly as entertaining (or crude):

Note: I know, I know, you're sick of hearing about the Royal Wedding. But this is only the second time I've mentioned it (the first when I blogged about special RW barf bags), and I promise this will probably be the last time. Probably.

Welcome to the Neighborhood

Oh, the joys of moving.

I recently relocated the New York City, and, let me tell you, moving sucks. I’ve done it so much, you’d think I could pack and unpack in my sleep. Alas, that is not the case. I despise packing, and resent having to unpack just a day or two later. And don’t even get me started on the joy that can only be experienced while searching for people to live with. It’s like survival of the fittest, where the fastest to respond to a Craigslist ad wins, and all they can do is hope that the people their newfound roommates aren’t nuts.

I have to charming and completely random roomies, one of which took it upon himself to serenade me (and the other roomie) this morning the crack of 8:30 or so a.m. Yes, that’s right. He was playing guitar and singing. And, suffice to say, I’m pretty confident he was treating us to some original material that will never see the light of day, radio airplay, or even a sad open mic session at a neighborhood cafe. He’s lucky I have a sense of humor, and was already up.

Oh, the joys of moving, indeed.

One of the things I find most interesting about moving into a new place is discovering who your new neighbors are. I always hope they’re Mr. Quiet and Mrs. Minds-Her-Own-Business, not Mr. Noisy-Sex-All-Night, Dr. Drug-Dealer/Junkie, or Miss Musician-Who-Practices-Her-African-Drum-Routine-Before-Work-Every-Day.

I have no idea who my new neighbors are. I have yet to meet (or, thankfully, hear) a single one of them. However, I have seen their Wi-fi connections… and what Wi-fi connections they are!

When I opened my computer for the first time, I was greeted by a few dozen signals, and a few of them stood out:

• Why, hello, 5th Street Whorehouse! Sure glad I live on 6th!
• Bananapancakes?! Are you Jack Johnson fans? If so, you know it’s 2011, right?
• What’s that? You have Bieber Fever? Are you proud of your condition? You know, there’s a cure for that: It’s called “stop hanging out with seventh graders.” C’mon, guy. You might as well name your network “pizza face.”
• Ummmm... Assflag? Can someone please tell me what an assflag is? Because I’m confused, and I don’t feel like looking it up on UrbanDictionary.com.
• Look out! It’s Lil Monsta/Lil Monsta Guest! I’m fine with both, as long as they’re lil monstas, and not big monstas. Lil monstas I can deal with; big monstas are scary. (Same goes for obsessive Lady Gaga fans.)

… Now guess which one is my new roomies’ Wi-fi network. (They insist it was a former roomie who named it, but I’m not convinced.)

I [heart] the New Yorker

It’s no secret that I love the New Yorker. Heck, I’m lucky to call a handful of their cartoonists friends. Still, two things happened this week that solidified the publication’s strangle-hold of my heart:

#1: The finally — and, some might say, rather reluctantly — gave print subscribers full access to the web content AND the iPad app (which, up until this point, was only available if purchased on a week-to-week basis, for a whopping $5/week) at no extra charge. FINALLY. Welcome to the future of media, duh. Give people what they want how they want it! Don’t alienate (and lose) your audience! Don’t expect people to pay for the same thing twice! … the folks at the NY’er (and Condé Nast) are a smart bunch. I can’t understand why it took them this long to figure all of it out.

#2: This hilarious letter was sent to all NY’er subscribers, effectively reinstating my faith in the publication, and its leadership:

Dear Laughter Lovers, When Roger Ebert won Caption Contest #281, I mentioned that he had entered one hundred and seven contests, but that others had entered even more often. So here’s a shout-out to the ten most devoted entrants:

John Shields: 279; Dominic Ciafardini: 278; Preston Macdougal: 275; Sy Gaffin: 272; Rick Kaufman: 270; George Gopper: 269; Alice Gochman: 266; Jim Bertram: 264; Julian Wheeler: 263; William Keller: 262

Unfortunately, none of them have won. But I applaud their persistence. As I’ve pointed out, persistence in the face of failure is often the key to eventual success, except in skydiving. Persistence certainly paid off for Mr. Don Symons, who entered two hundred and thirty-one contests before winning. But Don and Roger might resent John Pignata, who won our most recent contest, #282, on his first try. To see what else could be gleaned from the data, I paid a visit the Bureau of Caption-Contest Statistics, in their climate-controlled aerie atop the Condé Nast Building. We looked at the winners of Caption Contests #250 through #282. Of the thirty-two winners, twenty-two are men and ten are women. Does this confirm that men are funnier than women? Not really. Many more men enter the contest than women, and many more men enter regularly. Of our top ten überenterers, only one is a woman. And when you look at the last thirty-two contests and factor in productivity, women come out on top. The twenty-two winning men entered an average of 70.22 contests, but the ten women averaged 6.4 entries—and four of them won on their first attempt. The only man to do so was the aforementioned John Pignata. Cheers, Bob Mankoff

… I had no idea so many people entered the caption contest so many times. Remember, there are just 52 weeks in a year, and 47 New Yorkers a year (there are a few double issues), so John Shields has entered every caption contest for nearly five years… without a single win. And still, he doesn’t show any signs of giving up. Talk about persistence! (Meanwhile, he is probably talking about conspiracy theories.) Same goes for Mr. Ciafardini, Mr. Macdougal, Mr. Gaffin, and the rest of the incredibly not-funny, yet persistent entrants.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming...

Forgive the interruption, folks. I've been on vacation for the past three weeks. During that time, I've toured through Portugal and Southern Spain, and had a taste of Morocco... and I've made a concentrated effort to not work or blog. But! I'm back, totally re-energized and am about to take over the world. Well, that's what it feels like, at least.

Apologies for my unannounced absence. And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming...

When Harry Bit Sally

It's When Harry Met Sally, the sequel. Leave it to FunnyOrDie to bring us this classic, with a modern twist for modern audiences. (Read: vampires, zombies... and Helen Mirren.) Cheers to Leah at Flavorpill.com for sharing this.

Over-Tweeting the ACMs (Oops)

I covered the Academy of Country Music Awards on Sunday, and the ACM Girls' Night Out: Superstar Women of Country extravaganza on Monday. I worked both for Us Weekly, meaning I didn't write a story, per se—I didn't even cover the red carpet or the press room; I was assigned to focus on interactions between the celebs during commercial breaks and at other opportune times when the cameras weren't looking.

Since I love, love, love country music, I enjoyed myself immensely, but since Monday night's show was being filmed for TV (it airs on CBS on April 22), there was a lot of downtime between takes. It didn't take long before I got bored. And what do I do when I'm bored? I tweet. Or, should I say, over-tweet.

Do I have any morning-after regret? Kind of. Thankfully, most of my followers on the east coast were already sleeping, so I don't think they cared or even noticed. On the west coast, however, I'm pretty sure I lost a few followers, and pissed even more of y'all off. And for that, I apologize. Still, I've decided to share some snapshots from last night's ACM-centric Twitter stream, since there's no way in hell that these observations will find their way to the glossy pages of Us. 

 

PS: I only had one drink that night. And no, smartypants, it wasn't a double.
 
PPS: I think I deserve a teeny tiny bit of credit for not making any quips about Taylor Swift's notable absence. Jokes about it being after her bedtime, etc. would've been too easy.

PPPS: If you don't already follow me on Twitter, you should. I don't just post stuff about country awards shows, really.

The Pacific = The New Lake Springfield?

Radioactive water continues to gush into the Pacific from Japan's damaged nuclear reactors, and no one really knows what's going to happen. The "experts" say there's little chance of "significant" health risks to seafood-eaters such as myself, but I don't buy it. (Or any Pacific seafood anymore.)

I wonder if the Pacific Ocean is being turned into a newer, larger version of Lake Springfield. (As in the river that runs past the nuclear plant in The Simpsons, helloooo!) Will we, like Bart, soon be seeing three-eyed fish? And if so, will we be seeing them at the dinner table? I can see it now: "Tonight's special, miso-glazed Blinky on a bed of sautéed, glow-in-the-dark kombu, nori and wakame..."

"Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., said readings for radioactive iodine and cesium show a thousand-fold drop from the shore to monitors about 19 miles offshore," reports HuffPo. Nice of them to test 19 miles offshore. Show me safe readings sourced one mile away, and I'll feel a lot better.

The article continues: "He said radioactive doses in seafood may turn out to be detectable but probably won't be a significant health hazard. They'd probably be less of a concern than what people could get from land-based sources like drinking water or eating produce, he said..."

I like how he trumpets the quality of drinking water and pesticide-laden produce as the new gold standard. The real irony, however, is that HuffPo published a story about contaminated water today, too—and has a link to that story at the top of the everything-is-OK-the-ocean-is-safe story. The water safety story explains how officials have known about "worrisome levels of a suspected carcinogen" (chromium-6, the Erin Brokovich cancer-causer) in tap water in 31 major U.S. cities since 2004, yet no one raised any red flags. Awesome!

Don't you feel safe? I sure do!

Back to Japan, though, as HuffPo offers more reassurance:

"Igor Linkov, an adjunct professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, also said he did not expect any major impact on ocean wildlife or people who eat seafood. He agreed that animals near the plant may be affected. It's not clear in what way, because the levels of radiation isn't well known, he said. In any case, fish would probably escape such an effect because unlike immobile species such as oysters, they move around and so would not get a continuous exposure..."

Still, radioactive water and nuclear waste finding its way into the ocean are nothing new. European countries have been using the ocean floor as a dumping ground for it's nuclear trash for years—the coast off Somalia is a particular favorite, apparently—and the Italian mafia doesn't bother going that far to dispose of entire ships full of nuclear junk, according to EcoDelMar.org.

Gross.

I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm willing to bet that all of this radioactive water and the impact on sea creatures is going to make for some interesting sea monster movies... possibly based on true stories.

AWOL Me = Busy Bee (Sorry!)

I've been noticeably quiet this week. Sorry, folks. I've been nuclear busy—meaning I've been in constant motion, not in borderline-meltdown mode.

CinemaCon is in town, which means a lot of celebs are in Vegas—and these celebs need to be interviewed. There's also the Academy of Country Music Awards this weekend, and the Michael Jordan Celebrity Invitational golf tournament. Translation: Lots and lots 'o late nights for Us Weekly and OK!, and I'm not complaining.

I'm about half way through it, and realize that the past week or so may be the most star-studded seven or so days of my life.

It started on Friday March 25, with Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas. Then Saturday was Kendra Wilkinson-Baskett (famous for dating Hugh Hefner and being Holly Madison's co-star and frequent nemesis on the E! reality show The Girls Next Door) and three Twilight actors (Tinsel Korey, Kiowa Gordon and Bronson Pelletier).

That was a soft appetizer of sorts; a warm-up round for what was yet to come.

Things heated up on Tuesday, with the opening of the Mob Experience at the Tropicana. It was pretty fun(ny) to walk around—wander aimlessly, actually—with the likes of Pam Anderson. ("What did she look like?" a friend asked yesterday. My reply: "Oh, she looked the same as always—like a whore.") Yesterday was the first official press day for CinemaCon, and I had a 1-on-1 with Cameron Diaz for Us Weekly. Then, later that night I got to chat with Curb Your Enthusiasm visionary Larry David (he said he liked my glasses. My life is officially complete), and watch a colorful rainbow of all-star athletes parade down the same red carpet: Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky (and Chris Chelios and Brett Hull), Jerome Bettis and more. 

Mike Piazza's wife wasn't wearing a bra, which prompted me to snap a pic and post the following to Twitter:

  Today is the main event: A round of musical chairs-style 1-on-1 interviews with Russell Brand (eeek! He terrifies me; he's far too smart for his own good), Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Jason Momoa, Julianne Hough, Helen Mirren, Vin Diesel, and more. (As I'm sure you can tell, I'm, like, so excited for that last one.) Then, on Sunday, The ACMAs take hold, and country's megastars make my life miserable. (Thanks in advance, Taylor Swift.)

I actually love the ACMAs. Black Shelton is always good for a laugh, and I'm looking forward to meeting his beer drinkin', deer shootin', song singin' leadin' lady, Miranda Lambert. Reba, Carrie Underwood, Sara Underwood, Dierks Bentley, [my least favorite country singer of all time/frequent piece-of-shit human being] Toby Keith, Keith Urban, Alabama, the Zac Brown Band and James Taylor will be there, too. (And chances legends such as current Vegas headliner [and my #1 country man] Garth Brooks and last year's ACMA inductee George Strait will be there, too, among others.)

But it's not just country singers (or full-time country singers) who will be there: Reese Witherspoon, Twilight's Robert Patterson are among the presenters.

OK, all this name-dropping has made me tired. Back to work!

Keeping It In Vegas

Apparently everything that happens in Vegas can stay in Vegas, after all.

The Vegas Box is a new service that allows customers to keep their sins in Sin City. I first read about this in USA Today, but apparently it's been covered by Vegas Chatter, too.

Each 20"x17"x12" box holds about 70 lbs of remorse and embarrassment that you can't even think of taking back home with you. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for STDs (To quote The Hangover: "Remember what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Except for herpes. That shit'll come back with you.") or unwanted-yet-still-conceived children. Bebe mini-dresses that are four sizes too small and way too short to wear back home, and all those Ed Hardy knock-offs that you bought on Fremont Street, however, are more than welcome. As are unfinished bottles of booze (you paid $700 for that $35 bottle of vodka! You can't throw it out!).

The service is just $99 a year, which includes two pick-ups and drop-offs of your magic-filled box. (If you come to town more often, you can still access your box—they pick it up, and drop it off for you—for $20 a pop). The kind folks at The Vegas Box will also deliver your box 'o goodies elsewhere, in case you find yourself in Albuquerque and in desperate need of your beloved gambling supplies and/or stripper-oogling accessories.

Frequent Vegas visitors might actually find this service useful—and even economical.

"Keeping your items in Vegas means no more checked luggage! Just one round trip for two can add up to one full year of The Vegas Box. 1 checked bag (avg.) = $25 x 2 people = $50 x 2 (round trip) = $100," the company explains on its website.

Jenna's Lost Her Marbles

I realize I'm slow on the uptake on this one, but better late than never.

This chick from Rhode Island is hilarious. Basically, she's every guy's dream girl: Funny as shit, crazy as hell, and with a wicked body. Well boys, meet Jenna Marbles. She's a go-go dancer by night (seriously) and witty blogger/vlogger by day. Honestly, I don't know why FunnyOrDie, SNL or Comedy Central haven't enlisted her help for their online projects. Clearly, it's just a matter of time.

Her R.I. accent is kind of gritty and annoying, but that's OK; she gets a pass, because what she's saying is, for the most part, brilliant. 

Her break-out gem was a video blog entitled "How to Trick People Into Thinking You're Good Looking." She posted it in July of last year, but it somehow (and tragically) failed to register on my radar... until now. Again: Better late than never.

OK, so that one is old, but it's good right? And I just stumbled upon it this past weekend. Since making this discovery, I've watched a lot of her stuff. Not all of it is good, but there are more diamonds in the rough.

Take this—a parody on The Biggest Loser called "The Biggest Blogger" wherein she plays a blog-pushing version of TBL's mildly psychotic trainer, Jillian Michaels. It's better than half the sketches on SNL.

I also dug her procrastinator tutorial, "Things To Do Instead of Cleaning Your Room," and guys will love all the ass-flaunting in her video response to her employer's canceling of their trip to Mexico, entitled "What I Would've Done in Cancun."

If you want to see more, check out herYouTube channel (JennaMarbles), or visit her blog, Stoollala.com.

Welcome to the World, Words

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) unleashed a new collection of words into the world today. Among them:

• Buzzkill, Cheeseball and Overthink:  all are one word! As I've maintained for years!! Take that, former copyeditors!
• Muffin Top: "A protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers (cf. spare tyre n., love handle n.), which may sometimes be attributed to an excessive appreciation for muffin tops in the literal sense.")
• Rub-a-dub Yesssss!
• Wassup Weren't those Budweiser commercials airing, like, 10 years ago?
  
• Smack-talking
• Suicide door
• LOL
• OMG: OMFG, however, did not make the cut.
  
• <3: As in ♥

OED also released a list of rejected words that, for the time being, will remain unofficial slang. There's a good list of them on AOL News, but most of them are head-scratchers. (Did someone really think nudenda—"An unhidden agenda," apparently—would make the cut?) Still, my favorite reject has to be "nonversation," which is described as being "a worthless conversation, wherein nothing is explained or otherwise elaborated upon."

I [Heart] Coquette

Coquette rules, and this is why:

Will I get married?
Sweetheart, I’m an advice columnist, not a Magic Eight Ball.

My wife says my shoes need to be put away. Do I have to do this?
What are you, 12? Go ahead and substitute the word “mommy” for the word “wife” in this ridiculous question. Notice how the tone didn’t change? Grow up, dude.

My favorite, however, has to be this one:

The tone of your advice is harsh and your column runs long. 
If your sensibilities are that delicate and your attention span that stunted, perhaps you should go read Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter.

For more, visit Coquette's latest entry in The Daily, or see the archive.

Hunting For Hipsters

The hipsters descended upon Austin, TX during SXSW, but now that the annual tech/film/music fest is over, the skinny jean-wearing set of self-obsessed self-loathers is left to find their way back home.

Anticipating the reverse migration, New York's  Jeff Greenspan and Hunter Fine are doing something about the infestation. They're setting hipster traps, and trying to control the Jersey Shore population.

Cardboard bear traps have been set up in hipster-dense areas, each baited with the quintessential hipster staples: Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, American Spirit cigarettes and neon faux Ray-Ban sunglasses.

Meanwhile, Greenspan and Fine have armed the tunnels and bridges connecting Manhattan to the rest of the world with bear traps designed to catch a whole different species: Jersey Shore type swine. Those traps are armed with spray tanner, hair gel, Drakkar Noir, a fake gold necklace, a LIRR schedules and PATH tickets.

New York Metro writer Nate Jones suggests other cliché traps to control the population density in other overpopulated areas:

Park Slope: One bushel of kale, one organic fair-trade childrens jumper.
Upper East Side: One pearl necklace, one gin & tonic, one pamphlet of yacht leasing information.
Fort Greene: One issue of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list, one unclaimed "Bored to Death" spec script.
Upper West Side: Two discount opera tickets, one copy of The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life.
Soho and Nolita: One pair of white trousers (unisex), one pair of enormous sunglasses (unisex), one striped sailor shirt (unisex)

The Big 0-5

Today is the 5th birthday of Twitter, a.k.a. the information superhighway's favorite phenomenon and microblogging site.

Twitter may top out at a speed of 140 characters per update, but the site is still flying high, with nearly 1 billion new tweets every week. If only they could make a BlackBerry app that'd work properly, so I could read them all... #FirstWorldProblem

App issues aside, Twitter is growing by leaps in bounds. Within the past year, the average number of tweets per day has exploded, going from 50 million to 140 million. Again, that's 140 million tweets every 24 hours, folks. (For more Twitter stats, check out #numbers, which was posted to the official Twitter Blog last week)

Site co-founder Biz Stone (@Biz) spewed some interesting stats in a celebratory bday blog entry earlier today:

"Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets," he said. "While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day."

To celebrate Twitter's 5th anniversary, I suggest you grab yourself a big slice of cake and check out the most recent edition of my Tweets of the Week column in Vegas Seven. :P But before that, I'll leave you with some food for thought, courtesy of our good friends at Wired:

7 in every 10 tweets sink without any kind of reaction from the world. Of the remainder, just 6% get re-tweeted, and 92% of those re-tweets occur within the 1st hour. In other words, fewer than 1 in 200 messages get re-tweeted after an hour. 

Moral of the story: You've got 140 characters. Make 'em count—today, especially.

American Idiots

Newsweek asked, and America answered... incorrectly. In fact, 39% of the 1,000 U.S. citizens polled failed the standard U.S. citizenship test.

According to Newsweek's poll:

• 29% of Americans don't know who their vice president is. (It's Joe Biden, in case you fall into that percentile.)
• 73% of Americans—that's roughly 3 out of 4 people, folks—aren't sure why the U.S. was involved in the Cold War. (Need a quick refresher? Here's a link to the Cold War Wikipedia entry.)
• 6% of Americans couldn’t circle Independence Day on a calendar. (That's the Fourth of July, helloooo!)
• Just 58% of Americans can identify the Taliban. Holland beat the U.S. by 10 points, scoring 68%. Meanwhile, Brittan beat that 75%, and Finland finished slightly ahead of them, with 76%.
• Most Americans think foreign aid represents 27% of the country's budget, and suggest cutting it to 13% of the budget. However, foreign aid represents less than 1% of the nation's budgetary spending. 

More than a quarter of the country doesn't know who's second to the throne in the Oval Office? Really?! And 3/4 of the nation doesn't know what the big deal about the Cold War was?That's almost as depressing as hearing 6% of Americans don't know what day to celebrate, um, America on—and it's a national holiday. With fireworks and BBQ. Even the dumbest drunken Nascar fans know when the Fourth of July is.

Where did they find these people?

"Hey there! Have you been living in a cave since 1963? Yes? Great! Come take this survey..."

"Howdy, ma'am. That's a nice bonnet you're wearing. Do you by chance live on a commune with no access to books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the internet, or any other contact with the outside world—other than this chance meeting with me, that is? You do? Great! Come take this survey..."

"Excuse me. Judging from your grizzly, bewildered appearance, it looks to me like you've been living in a remote cabin in the woods since childbirth. What's that? You were raised by wolves? That's incredible—and perfect! Come take this survey..."

... sadly, the people who responded to Newsweek's poll are card-carrying, flag-waving citizens of modern day America. They have access to news, politics and civic information; what they don't have is an excuse for their ignorance. (Think you can do better? Take the test for yourself.)

Details of the poll—and the implications of the results—are explored in Andrew Romano's story, "How Dumb Are We?" in this week's Newsweek. It's a short, snappy and fairly depressing read.

The piece finishes with a quote from Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker: “The problem is ignorance, not stupidity,” he says. To this, Romano aptly replies, "Whether that’s a treatable affliction or a terminal illness remains to be seen. But now’s the time to start searching for a cure."

The Aunt I Never Knew I Had ... and Now Love

The Aunt Eeee I never knew I had

I don't subscribe to or read much of Elle, but an old column of "Ask E. Jean" was recently featured on the Daily Beast (my new guilty pleasure! Follow DB on Twitter!), so I read it and, surprisingly enough, I liked it.

I don't usually care for the fluffy, superficial and useless chatter in womens magazines, but this one was good. It was real, it was well-written, and it was useful—even though it was months old.

In the column, 17-year Elle veteran columnist Ms. Eeee outlines the 25 things every woman should know. (Read it! It won't take long, I promise.)

The crucial Cliff's Notes:

• Regarding men: "Tell him what you want him to do, reward him when he does it, and ignore him when he doesn’t do it."
• Do onto others as you'd do onto them. Ask yourself, "What would happen if everyone in the world believed this idea and behaved as I’m behaving now?" I.E.: "If you’re considering lying to your boss to save your job, imagine a universal law that says everyone must lie to his or her boss."
• Always choose action over words. She was referring to actions under the covers and pillow talk, but it applies beyond the bedroom, too.
• Don’t expect a man to give you multiple orgasms. "Indeed, you’ll live a more fulfilling life if you don’t expect a man to give you multiple anything."

Although it's chock-full of useful gems and cheeky wisdom shared, I didn't agree with everything dear Aunt Eeee had to say in her column—toward the end of the list, especially. For example, I firmly believe that grades do matter (#15), even though they aren't everything (if you want to work for Google, they will look at your college GPA—so it better be good). Also, I don't give money to panhandlers (#18) but, in my defense, I do offer to buy the occasional sandwich for someone who's truly hungry for lunch and not just another fix; I would never introduce a boyfriend as my fiancé, no matter how badly I wanted him to propose (#18); chasing men is not the highest purpose in life (#23), and I'm friends with nearly all my exes (#25) because they are great people and, while sure, things between us fizzled, that doesn't mean they can't be fun, interesting, smart friends.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a bed to prop up (#6)...

Air Canada: Take Off, Eh

Air Canada should stick to what it does best: flying airplanes.

Canada’s national airline is meddling in Canada’s national game, and it’s ridiculous. AC is a major sponsor of the NHL, but after witnessing Boston Bruins defenceman Zdeno Chara’s massive hit on on Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty, the airline says the game is getting too violent, and is threatening to pull their ad dollars.

“From a corporate social responsibility standpoint, it is becoming increasingly difficult to associate our brand with sports events which could lead to serious and irresponsible accidents,” Air Canada warned in the letter. (as reported by CBC.ca)

This is like Cover Girl calling up the editors of Cosmopolitan saying the stories are too sexy, so get more conservative or we’re pulling our ads. Hockey is a rough sport, and Cosmo is a saucy magazine. Get over it!

Now, let me be clear: I’m not saying Chara’s check was fair game; I’m saying advertisers have no place in league policy discussions.

Everyone knows Air Canada’s customers love hockey. If they didn’t, the airline wouldn’t be advertising with the NHL in the first place. And those same customers are still going to games and tuning in to Hockey Night in Canada—they love the game, violent as it may be. So if Air Canada wants to market their services to them, they should go right ahead—but stay out of the politics and inner workings of the game.

Final thought: Instead of wasting time trying to fix imaginary problems for the NHL, perhaps AC should address their own problems, starting with their notoriously bad customer service.

Victoria's Secret Revealed

Not a paradigm shift, per se, but a torso shift

Victoria, we know your secret—and it's brutal, heavy-handed airbrushing and digital re-imaging.

We're in the midst of a recession (or recovery), yet the hacks working in the Victoria's Secret graphic design department are still willfully employed—despite repeated, embarrassing flubs.

I'd think competition for graphic design positions at Victoria's Secret would be stiff—VS being the holy grail for [male] designers. (Imagine, being paid to stare at bikini and bra-clad supermodels all day.) Still, Vicky has some mighty shoddy designers on staff.

Models frequently are shown in brochures with their arms totally airbrushed off their bodies; their torsos (and legs and other limbs) shifted in atomically impossible ways, and more. There are several sites and news stories dedicated to pointing out these flubs, including this one (Brittan's Daily Mail) and this one (HuffPo). Yet somehow, the incompetent VS designers still have jobs.

May I carry that for you? On second thought,
let me delete your handbag altogether.

HackerFactor has a great page dedicated to breaking down the various manipulations in this photo (left), in which the model is holding what appears to be the remnants of a handbag strap in her right hand, but the rest of the bag is missing. Oops! Body By Victoria, indeed. And By "Victoria," we mean Photoshop.

Altered Reality

What happens when parallel realities collide? Apparently, roads look like fettuccine noodles, as bridges and overpasses droop down in a scene that looks like what you'd get if there was a Hot Wheels version of The Sims.

 This comes to us courtesy of Brooklyn-based artist-programmer Clement Valla, who studied "the intersection between art and computer programming" at the Rhode Island School of Design.

"My work focuses on socio-technical systems that raise a number of interesting questions about authorship and human/computer relationships. I explore digital technologies that are not simply new tools to create and distribute copies of things but that also enable new social relationships through which people produce multiples," he says on his website.


The warped images are the product of Valla's vast collection of Google Maps images, which he scraped from the search giant's mapping tool, as it attempts to transition from standard views to Google Earth's 3-D perspectives. Google Earth is good—even amazing at times—but, as Vallas collection shows us, it's not perfect.

The surreal images made HuffPo headlines earlier this week, and two of my favorites are here. Still, I highly recommend you click through the entire collection here.

Revisiting WWII

I love this: Russian photog Sergey Larenkov took images of modern day Europe, then photoshopped parts of WWII pics taken at the same locations on top of the newer ones. The results, as you can see, are both beautiful and powerful.

There is so much history in Europe, it just boggles my mind. Simply trying to try to grasp all the events that have happened at any one location a over the decades (or centuries) gives me a headache. Yet these photos transcend time, and in high, dramatic fashion.

A few of my favorites are below, but I highly suggest checking out the full collection here.

Death to Comic Sans

It's true: I'm a font snob. Go ahead, say it to my face. It's OK. (And I've been called far worse.) Sure, my snobbery isn't limited to typefaces alone: My snobbery extends to food (especially carrots, tomatoes, apples, bread, butter and pasta) and wine, and many other areas of life that I refuse to accept mediocrity. But fonts! They hold a special place in my heart.
 
As a proud, bonafide font snob, I judge people by the type of font they use, family members included. (Apologies in advance to any soon-to-be-relatives.) It's not that I'm all that passionate in the great serif or sans-serif debate; it's that I strongly believe the time has come for Comic Sans to die. I mean, really: For the love of god and all things holy, please, lord, make it stop.

Nobody likes a clown.
(A clown using Comic Sans, especially.)

In my ever-so-humble opinion, that font belongs in one place and one place only: elementary schools. If your audience reads at or above a sixth grade level, they should not be subjected to Comic Sans. Yet somehow, I see it everywhere. In professional e-mail signatures, community notices, business signage... it's nothing short of insane. I consider being forced to read it an insult to my intelligence. Suffice to say, I'd pull my teeth out before going to a dentist who writes his name in CS. (Would you let a third grader give you a filling? I think not.)

I'm not alone: Comic Sans Criminal is a very cute, clever and well-designed website dedicated to putting an end to the CS epidemic.

"The only appropriate uses for comic sans," it states, include "when your audience is under 11 years old (Writing to their parents in Comic Sans does not count), when you're designing a comic, [and] when your audience is dyslexic."

I admit, I probably got a little too much joy out of this cheeky little site, but it is what it is: Awesome.

So go forth and enjoy, dear readers—just please, promise me you'll never use Comic Sans ever again.

Japan: Before & After

This series by HuffPo's Mike Sparks is one of the coolest (and most useful) applications of multimedia I've seen so far regarding the ongoing disaster Japan.

Part of the reason I like it so much is because it's so simple. Sparks took images from Google Maps that were taken before the earthquake/tsunami, then layered images of the same terrain taken after the disaster over top.

As you mouse over the images, the before shot switches to the after shot. It's as cool as it is devastating.

Click here to see the entire collection on my beloved HuffPo.

I'll Drink To That

 

Cheers to Pepsi Co., which announced today that it has developed the world's first plant-derived pop bottle. Although it doesn't look any different than the current plastic bottles the company uses, the new ones are made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and "other materials" (that we assume are plan-based but too obscure and perhaps gross-out worthy to mention.) Pepsi says it will use biproducts of its food business—including orange peels, oat hulls and potato scraps—to make the bottles, too.

The stuff inside the bottles, on the other hand, will continue to be a witch's brew composed primarily of "nasty chemicals" (to quote my mother, who says there's too much sugar [worse! corn syrup] in regular soda, and too much aspartame that'll give me cancer in diet versions.)

Despite my mother's concerns, I still drink a lot of diet Pepsi (deal with it!), and the new bottles are good news.

"PepsiCo plans to test the product in 2012 in a few hundred thousand bottles. Once the company is sure it can successfully produce the bottle at that scale, it will begin converting all its products over," reports the Huffington Post.

Meanwhile, Coca-Cola Co., which makes bottles using 30% plant-derived materials, recently stated, rather erroneously, that it'd likely be several years before they could make a commercially viable, totally plant-based bottle. So much for that theory!

Pepsi already earned earth brownie points for creating the first compostable chip bag, for SunChips. Why they don't put all their chips in similar bags is beyond me ... but hey, it's a baby step in the right direction. And they did cut a lot of the plastic out of their Aqua-Fina bottles in 2009 (saves them money, saves the earth... everybody wins!). And according to the Huffington Post, Pepsi is in the midst of transitioning Naked Juice branded drinks into bottles made from 100% recycled plastic.

Boise? Really?

I hate losing, but I hate losing to Boise even more. But that's just what Las Vegas did, according to a  ranking of the most socially networked cities in the U.S.

The [bogus?] poll, released by Men's Health, claims to have considered Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Twitter, MySpace, Reddit and Digg usage, along with reported blog and chat room activity when compiling the list. (To do so, they depended heavily on data from NetProspex, Chitika and SimplyMap.)

While you night assume San Francisco would top the poll, the closest major city to Silicon Valley didn't even place within the top five. In fact, SF finished in sixth place—which is respectable, sure, but can someone please explain to be how Atlanta, Denver and Minneapolis out-teched SF?

As I told the friend who sent me a link to the story (via twitter, no less): " I smell another flawed algorithm."

"I thought you would have single-handidly brought Vegas to the top 5," he quipped. Alas, my rampant tweeting was not enough: Boise, Salt Lake, Wilmington and 21 other cities outranked Vegas; we finished in 25th place.

Washington D.C. was awarded first place, which wasn't all that surprising to me. I used to live there, and I recall fondly the abundance of smart, tech-savvy and totally-into-themselves people in that city. (My initial response to learning D.C.: "D.C. won b/c the city is full of narcissists who LOVE checking into 4sq & bragging about what congressman they just talked to."

Atlanta and Denver somehow followed the nation's capital, placing second and third, respectively. Rounding out the list of 100 cities were social network dunces Billings, Detroit, Bakersfild, Lubbock and, in last place, El Paso. Funny: Three of the four most unsavvy cities in terms of social networking were in Texas. Click here to see the full list—not that I think it's all that accurate.

Big Week

tweet tweet, tweak tweak

This week, my ever-so-popular Tweets of the Week column in Vegas Seven is different. It's usually a mish-mash of funny, timely and political rants, raves and random observations (kind of like this blog!), but this week, it's all about everyone's favorite celeb gone wrong, Charlie Sheen.

It's in the new issue that hit newsstands today, but if you haven't seen it, check out Tweets of the Week: The Charlie Sheen Edition online. Because, let's face it: We really haven't heard enough about winning, tiger blood, goddesses or warlocks from the former Two and a Half Men star.

Sheen recently set the world record for amassing the most Twitter followers in the least amount of time. He has more than 2.5 million followers (and counting...) yet follows just 31. Unsurprisingly, my Twitter account isn't one of them, but Vegas' very own Floyd Mayweather is, as is Jessie Waits (who runs Tryst and XS nightclubs, and was recently named one of Vegas' top 40 under 40 by InBusiness). Come to think of it, Waits just signed up for Twitter, too. Right around the same time Charlie did, come to think of it. Hmmm...

Choices at the Pump

You can either laugh or cry.

Damning the Manning

Usually this blog is a happy place for sharing happy links and videos and other random, cool stuff. Well, this post is different.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 6 months, you probably know what Wikileaks is. Yes, it's controversial, but I think, by in large, that it's fantastic. Sure, you can argue that it puts national security at risk, but if you do, your argument is weak at best. I have yet to see a single thing come out of Wikileaks that put an American life at risk—other than Bradley Manning's.

Manning is the 23-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst who leaked a bunch of classified information to Wikileaks, which in turn made the information (cables) public. He's since been arrested and is currently being held in solitary confinement in Virginia. He's spent more than 200 days in a 6 x 12' cell, and is let out (into a larger room, goodie) just one hour per day.

Imagine having essentially no human contact for 6+ months. Just try to wrap your head around that. And, remember, he has yet to be convicted. If convicted, he could face the death penalty... even though he didn't kill anyone, and his actions didn't result in a single death or injury. The U.S. Army sustained a few bruises to its ego, but that's it.

As the poster that I every-so-gingerly copied and pasted at the bottom of this post states:

"Manning faces decades in prison [or death] for allegedly leaking a video of a US helicopter attack that killed 11 civilians and wounded 2 children in Baghdad, Iraq. The army covered up the evidence and declared the war crime justified, now they claim that exposing the massacre is criminal.

This is a massive human rights issue. As this column, published in The Guardian, points out:

"The US condemns human rights abuses abroad yet appears to be allowing the psychological torture of Bradley Manning."

The piece is a quick, informative read—so read it! And, as a citizen of the world, it is your civic duty to keep up with this story. Still, I can already tell you the lesser moral, here: Don't enlist in the U.S. Army. (Look what happened to Pat Tillman. Get The Tillman Story on Netflix ... it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year, is narrated by Josh Brolan, and will scare the shit out of you.) Mark my words: Years from now, Manning will heralded as a hero. A martyr, perhaps, but a hero nonetheless.