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.

« October 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.