It’s like a metaphor come to life, on 6th Avenue. You come out of your Jenny Craig consultation. Do you turn left…
…or do you turn right?
I like to think that the Jenny Craig was already there when some brilliant McDonald’s franchisee strolled past a storefront for rent and thought, “Jackpot.”
Posted in Shoot the Messenger, Write and Wrong
Tagged gnc, jenny craig, mcdonald's, yogurt
After an extended break, the Unhappy Mediator is back with some Google Gaming goodness for you. And I do mean goodness. I thought perhaps I’d try to do some good with today’s post. And my public service starts with this:
Here’s a good idea for you: Don’t get a tattoo you found searching the internet. Find out why after the jump.
Dear readers,
No Happy Medium is about to go on a two-month hiatus while the Unhappy Mediator ventures into territories unknown, places unwired. There is no Last Mile in the Syrian desert.
The site will be back in swing in July. In the meantime I hope you’ll stop by every now and again. Maybe read those early posts you never saw. Revisit (and forward and tweet!) old favorites. Think fondly of your wayward digital curmudgeon.
Until next time,
The Unhappy Mediator
The Reluctant Technologist
nohappymedium.com
Posted in Uncategorized
I’d like to draw your attention today to Breakup Letter, Dramatic Reading, which features, as you may have guessed, a dramatic reading of a breakup letter (below), originally posted on Craigslist. It may be familiar to many of you. If you haven’t been to the site you must go. If you have, it’s time to go back.
Brought to us by the gents behind You’re the Man Now, Dog (ytmnd.com), this gem in the crown of Internet forwards is more than a hilarious three-minute diversion. It’s an allegory of a world without grammar lessons. A cold, dark place where there’s never time to pause for breath and everyone sounds like a foreigner on uppers.
The link takes you straight to the audio of the reading, so if you’re at work, pop in them headphones:
http://youmakemetouchyourhandsforstupidreasons.ytmnd.com/
Please, if you ever have a moment when you’re wondering why it matters where that comma goes, just think of this letter… and of the children.
Thanks to the reader who found the site by searching
“I can do bad all by myself haircut.”
In a departure from our usual Google Game, today we take a look at set of Google Image search results.
Upon learning that the Unhappy Mediator is soon departing to live out an Indiana Jones fantasy in Syria, a friend ran a quick Google Image query for “archaeological dig.” This is a snapshot of what she found:
And here’s a zoom in on the first image result returned:
Yes, a diorama. Complete with Astroturf. How is that the first image? How?
Out of curiosity I ran a little search of my own, on rival search engine Bing Images. I found that the top result was something comparably hilarious and improbable. Continue reading
If you want to print:
If you want to multitask:
So have you ordered one?
I’ve ordered one for a friend. Then I ordered two for myself. One with the Wi-Fi and one with the 3G. And I’ll go to the store on Friday night and wait in line, just for fun.What’s your favorite phone?
The iPhone, because of the apps. By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone.Really?
Yeah. I just have two iPhones, so if the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other. And if I’m talking on one, I can use the other one to look something up. You would not believe how much use I get out of that.
[From the Form Group and Newsweek]
Census forms are due today. Did you fill yours out? I did, and for that I can honestly credit the gov’s $133 million marketing campaign. The spending seems exorbitant, but it must have been effective because the ads convinced me send it back, and I’m one of the laziest, least particpatory citizens you’re likely to meet. Unless you take the L train.
According to a report on NPR, the lowest Census return rate comes from our very own Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where residents are, like, above it. Take a listen, because the transcript really doesn’t do the interview between NPR’s Robert Smith and The ‘Burg’s Nate Stark justice (my goodness, all those “like”s!):
Mr. STARK: We still get mail from the past 30 people that have lived there. So it’s like who knows if people are getting these.
SMITH: Well, actually the census knows. These few blocks around Wythe Avenue and 6th Street have about a 36 percent return rate.
Nate Stark has an explanation.
Mr. STARK: I guess it’s laziness and like, what’s the point? When it comes down to it, nobody wants to fill out like another form that’s just like getting sent to your house that really relatively has nothing to do with your life.
SMITH: He thinks the young people just haven’t been given a good enough reason to fill out the census.
Mr. STARK: I mean people would do if they got like five bucks.
SMITH: Five bucks?
Mr. STARK: Yeah. Or if there was like more than just like a piece of paper that’s like you have to do this or you could get in trouble, which no one will get in trouble; that’s why they don’t do it.
From the mouths of, like, total babes, eh? Add idle disobedience to day-glo Ray Bans on the list of this month’s top Bedford trends. See, I freaking told you guys I wasn’t a hipster.
The new Photoshop scares me. Adobe Photoshop CS5, out this week, includes an eerily easy and accurate “content aware fill” feature. That basically means that if you want to touch up or remove something from a picture, the program looks around the image and intelligently fills in the empty space with fabricated content to match. Not just little holes, neither. It can fill huge swaths of the image with stuff it just makes up on the spot. Like that. It’s freaky:
On the one hand, the Photoshop moron in me loves how easy this is. But of course the photographer and all-around hater in me sees this as a terrifying precedent. Will we be able to believe anything we see anymore? And what about integrity in the craft? When I first learned darkroom techniques (in a high school darkroom next to and completely dissociated from the computer & Photoshop class) I was taught to respect printing full-frame, which means not zooming in on “the good part” and cutting off the “bad parts,” but taking photos that start out good across all 35 mm. Nowadays it’s like it doesn’t even matter what’s in the photo in the first place — just Photoshop it. It makes me sad. And angry, since I hang onto this antiquated view of taking and making pictures and my work turns out looking shittier than everyone else’s.
What is “the craft” anymore, though, really? Thinking of Photoshop as a different art than Photography makes me more comfortable with the evolution of digital photo manipulation. Helps me embrace the awesome accomplishments of CS5. But the distinction between Photography and Photoshopping is so blurry that separating them feels futile and idealistic. I’m sure there’s a tool in CS5 for that.
In case historical Google searches and most-watched YouTube videos weren’t enough to condemn our time as an epoch marked by frivolity and self-indulgent rot, the Library of Congress announced today that it will archive all Twitter posts since March 2006. And, yes, they announced it via tweet:
I really do shudder when I think about passing on a digital time capsule of the Internet Age. Whereas we have physically dug up stone tablets and arrowheads of civilizations before us, strong and persistent clues to the past, future humans will be downloading and deciphering every niggling, impulsive linguistic belch we’ve spewed in the new millennium. May as well Sharpie a penis on the face of humanity and call it a day.
[ars technica, via Gizmodo]
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