I'm sure you'll all be safely ensconsed at home this Friday, protesting the materialist, commercialized nature of the holidays, self-righteously snickering at all the fools who woke up at the crack of dawn to drive their gas-guzzling SUVs to the local big box retailer to take advantage of a measly 10% discount on the brightly colored made-with-petroleum painted-with-lead crap made by slave labor in China.

But if around noontime you get tired of re-reading your well-thumbed copies of Tom Frank or Lizabeth Cohen or Kalle Lasn, you may want to pick up the copy of the Restoration Hardware gift catalog that most likely landed in your mailbox this week. It's the best catalog of the year (it's obviously less expensive than what Neiman's pitching, and it's less pretentious then the one from Design Within Reach), and it's chock full of great toys, games and stocking stuffers like a wooden box Clue, or a Jokes on You Prank Kit or a pair of Marshmallow Roasters. (And even though this is all online, the paper catalog (relax, you can recycle it!) is worth getting your hands on. It's really a thing of beauty.)

Don't worry -- after you drool over the nice Scrabble set and possibly order a few prank kits for your nieces or nephews, you can pick up your Frank or Cohen or Lasn again and step back into your usual Black Friday spirit before your friends come over for a few games of Guitar Hero or Wii Tennis.  No one will have to know.

Anil writes the blog post I wanted to write[1] about Kindle.[2]

[1] But didn't get to it today; how the hell did he?
[2] NB: this post is filed under "Books" and not "Business" or "Software."

From this weekend's "Adventures with Tivo," Charlie Rose had Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and the Coen brothers on to discuss No Country for Old Men. Worth the time, even though it's, you know, Charlie Rose.

Holy cow, futurefeedforward lives! My inbox told me that "Socal Skyfires Torch Subprime Skytellites."

The airborne fires, some of which have burned for more than nine days, are fueled by thermobaric clouds of atomized landfill and other condensing nano-particulates disbursed into the upper atmosphere by disposal units commonly used in the county's tethered, low-earth-orbit neighborhoods. The roiling clouds of burning waste-vapor have been described by local witnesses as both "apocalyptic" and "breathtaking." "I mean, I've seen the entire rainbow in those fires," notes William Lennox, 43, a Plato Verde dentist and father of two. "The heat is incredible, and the smell, but the colors are really what gets you. The sky is literally burning, but the colors are just amazing."

They're also working on a novel.

A.O. Scott on Brian DePalma's new movie, "Redacted."

An unrivaled master of showy cinematic technique, he has made a film whose governing conceit is that it is not a film at all but rather a palimpsest of found video culled from consumer-grade camcorders, surveillance cameras, cellphones and Web sites. (There are also snippets from a French documentary, a mischievous parody complete with portentous music and solemn narration.) “Redacted” takes us on a tour not only of the battlefield, but also of the modern media environment, where no moment goes unrecorded and where everyone is, at least potentially, a filmmaker.

I'm not planning on seeing "Redacted" in the theater for a variety of reasons ("I don't get out much and I'd rather spend babysitter money on 'No Country for Old Men'" being the leading contender), but I wish there were  way to experience this tour of "the modern media environment" in that actual environment.

Chronicle sports columnist Gwen Knapp on the Bonds indictment:

If Bonds is guilty, the best outcome would be a plea agreement, requiring him to say aloud what really happened. The BALCO prosecution started with the mission of cleaning up sports, and a long jail term can't match the effect of a confession from a superstar.

Small Macintosh OS X Leopard hint, first in a series of one, because I usually don't do this kind of thing. If you have a local mail folder named "notes" you need to rename it before Mail will let you save a new note you create.  Otherwise you will get an error message that reads "The note could not be saved." May legions of Leopard users find this blog post through the wonders of Google and save themselves just a little bit of time.

If I had a dollar for every time I've said this over the past dozen odd years I'd have enough to money buy a sandwich, a bag of chips and maybe a chocolate chip cookie, but hooray! An Entirely Other Day is back.

You know it will be a good day when The Cold Inclusive posts more in the ongoing adventures of Jennifer Love Hewitt.  Today our protagonist is being interviewed alongside Cory Doctorow:

CD: I guess it depends on the kind of profit and how they’re profiting by it. I don’t get upset if a carpenter sells a bookcase to someone and makes money because that person needs somewhere to put my book. Even though that carpenter is benefiting from my labor.

JLH: You did not just say that. Cory honey, if you want to change people’s mind about something, you have to use examples from this planet to illustrate your point.

Via Modern Art Notes comes the Indianapolis Museum of Art Dashboard, which gives a view into some of the metrics the museum tracks about its operations. Attendance as a percentage of population, percentage of attendance from museum members, number of pieces on loan to other institutions, percentage of Indianapolis third graders that have visited the museum this year, etc.

Derek Gottfrid of the New York Times describes how he used Amazon's EC2 and S3 to generate PDF versions of 11 million articles.

"I then began some rough calculations and determined that if I used only four machines, it could take some time to generate all 11 million article PDFs. But thanks to the swell people at Amazon, I got access to a few more machines and churned through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances, and generated another 1.5TB of data to store in S3."

Michael is enjoying his brand new pair of Keen sneakers, which he bought from Zappos.  Michael is enjoying a triple grande latte, which he bought from the Starbucks at the corner of 4th and Brannan. Michael is comfortably clad in a pair of Levi 501 blue jeans, which he bought at the Levi's store in Union Square in San Francisco.  Michael is typing on a 13" white Apple MacBook, which was purchased for him through CDW's remarkable online store.

Karl Long gushes about the experience of flying Virgin America. I don't really care about linux-powered seat back terminals that let you chat with the person three seats over (though the drink ordering feature sounds pretty nice), but this bit was refreshing...

Even more extraordinary, the person sitting in the seat in front of me and my buddy was a one of Virgin America’s pilots. We had a very good chat with him, talking about the planes and the business, and asked some questions about the reward program. I asked about signing up for the rewards program after the fact and how to get credit for this trip and he said we could just use our boarding cards, then he gave us his business card with his email “in case we had any problems”, wow.

From Todd Thompson, Citi's ousted head of wealth management, on the fish tank in his office that was dubbed the Todd Mahal (the office, not the fish tank):  “If that gives me a little bit of a leg up with three or four Chinese billionaires, I think I’ve paid for the goldfish bowl.”

There's this fantastic chapter in White Noise where Jack and Murray take a drive to visit The Most Photographed Barn in America.

There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot.  We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits.  A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot.

(Some genius, I wish it had been me, at a reading in San Francisco a few years back, made the argument to DeLillo that he is the master of the serial comma. This is true.)

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

The Most Photographed Barn in America found its way into my head tonight on the Bay Bridge while listening to Episode #110 of This American Life, titled "Mapping."  The setup for the episode was that maps are lenses about how we look at the world, and each act would be about one of our senses -- sight, sound, smell, etc. Act One (sight) featured this fascinating gentleman named Dennis Wood who makes maps of his neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. Maps of the streets, maps of the sewers and power lines...

...a map of how light falls on the ground through the leaves of trees; a map of where all the Halloween pumpkins are each year; and a map of all the graffiti in the neighborhood and of who was mentioned most often in the neighborhood newspaper.

These aren't normal maps like you think about maps -- GPS coordinates defined in an XML file and overlaid on to a spinning 3D satellite-photographed zoomable view of our big blue ball. These are maps of just those things -- the pumpkins, the patterns of power lines, the light of street lamps -- without the context of roads. Or borders, or even a grid. (TAL has posted scans of some of them.) As Wood put it (paraphrasing here), he's writing a novel about his neighborhood through his maps.

Stewart Butterfield showed off some amazing new Flickr mapping functionality at Web2 a couple of weeks ago. With what they're building you could theoretically pick any place in the world -- a city, a neighborhood, a street corner, a building, and literally view that place through the lenses of the people who had photographed that place...filtered by interestingness, by date, by person, etc. Flickr users are building a map of the world where the lens is literal.

About the barn, Murray says...

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender.  We see only what the others see.  The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."

Another silence ensued.

"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

And here's what hit me tonight passing the cranes at the Port of Oakland: with all of its data, Flickr knows what, exactly, is -- quite literally -- the most photographed barn in America. Where everyone is taking pictures of taking pictures.

I really need to get out more, don't I.

Can't a glass wall just be a glass wall?  Penelope Green trots out Sherry Turkle in her Times piece on peekabo architecture.

“There is real confusion about intimacy and solitude,” said Professor Turkle, who for more than two decades has been studying computers and the people who love them. “Are we alone in these buildings, facing the anonymity of the city, or are we connected to the city? What do we show and what do we hide?

“That mirrors what happens when we’re on the computer, on our networks in Facebook. We are no longer able to distinguish when we are together and nurtured and when we are alone and isolated. I can be in intimate contact with 300 people on e-mail, but when I look up from my computer I feel bereft. I haven’t heard a voice, touched a hand, for hours or days. I think people are no longer certain where the self resides.”

Must watch: Ze Frank, strike day.  (Related, this overheard.)

File under I Wish I'd Thought of That: Vampire Cupcakes.

Here's one thing that's abundantly clear about the current administration: no one has the stones political capital to tell the Vice President to put down the goddamn gun until January of 2009.

NYTimes: "Boras made his announcement by e-mailing The Associated Press during the World Series game."  Just as soon as everyone figured out that Lowell would win MVP.  You stay classy, A-Rod.

How can I use spreadsheets to answer some of my many questions about the world? 

• =GoogleLookup("life"; "meaning")
• =GoogleLookup("God"; "existence")
• =GoogleLookup("Beatles"; "iTunes launch date")
• =GoogleLookup("one hand clapping"; "sound level")
• etc.

I had the pleasure last night of seeing Glenn Kotche and the Kronos Quartet perform Kotche's new piece, Anomaly. Kotche's description of the piece in the liner notes is worth quoting at length.

After seeing a Kronos Quartet performance in early 2006, I got the idea to compose a string quartet. I wanted to do it from my perspective as a percussionist, treating the four members of the quartet like the varying relationships and roles of my limbs when I play the drum set. I also thought it would be interesting to arrange it with the addition of an optional drum set part. ...

My closest uncle, Eddie Kotche, died around the time of that Kronos performance.  I went home and improvised a short melody on the vibraphone. This would become the dominant, recurring theme in what would eventually be titled Anomaly. ...

My uncle was an anomaly. He had an incredible zest for life and an uproarious sense of humor despite being severely challenged throughout his life by cerebral palsy. ... After losing him, I began to think about my reliance on physical motion and coordination for my self-expression and livelihood, and about the dichotomy between our physical circumstances. ...

Although the origins of Anomaly are deeply personal...I wrote the piece to be broad in its emotional range and appeal. ... I wanted the individual instruments to experience both freedom and restriction. I wanted Kronos to be dependent on each other for the execution of certain melodies and musical passages. The main motif that appears in each movement is, for me, symbolic of the love and experience that those dear to us leave behind. ...

As the first piece I've composed outside of the realm of percussion, it is for me also an anomaly.

If you're in SF, there is another performance tonight at Herbst Theater. If you're into this sort of thing, check out Kotche's album Mobile, on the Nonesuch label. And for those looking for context, I've posted about Kotche before, in his role as the drummer for the band Wilco.

Oh. Hey. You just caught us blogging.

It shouldn't surprise any of you that this made me laugh out loud. (Via pasc.)

I just saw a television commercial for the upcoming DVD release of Ratatouille that was unabashedly aspected 16:9. It stuck out because most movie commercials (esp for DVD releases) are formatted to fit your 4:3 screen... Of course the different look distracted me from the actual release date, though I'm assuming it'll be out in time for Thanksgiving.

Second order question: will the DVD drive incremental sales of Thomas Keller cookbooks?

Nov 2007 . Oct 2007 . Sep 2007 . Aug 2007 . Jul 2007 . Jun 2007 .

(un)filtered is a product of michael sippey. there are older things at sippey.typepad.com/filtered, with archives back to 2003, and even older things at stating the obvious.