brevity

while on the bus reading the new yorker, i came upon the financial page, which i dutifully read, mostly agree with, but usually fear will take me a really, really long time to get through. anyway, this week’s column is about oil and the price of oil and how oil might have been the straw that broke the global economy by reaching $150 a barrel 11 months ago and how rising oil prices might override whatever signs of recovery there are (or as the column so metaphorically puts it: “higher prices at the pump could end up choking off the economy’s putative green shoots before they’ve even had a chance to grow”).

i was about halfway through when i noticed the picture. and maybe it’s just because i’m a pervert, but c’mon, that’s a guy humping a gigantic gas penis, right? not only that, but he has a really angry look on his face (ostensibly because he has to hump his way up the shaft to get the tip to spray everywhere). i can’t quite figure out if the obviously phallic (it is obviously phallic, right? i’m not really a pervert, am i?) gas pump was intentional or that nobody in the new yorker remarked to anybody else in the new yorker, ‘hey, doesn’t this comically tall gas pump look really, really phallic?”

i made this.

» awesomest thing i've seen in awhile

» Vehicular Manslaughter in 10 Easy Steps

my friend josh (one of the dreadfully few people who read this stupid blog) is great. i know he toyed with stand-up comedy for a minute (he actually owes me an email responding to a stand-up show i saw. i’m still waiting josh, these colors don’t run. or forget. and we also need to talk about that whole summer vacation thing), such that he has a myspace comedy page. i’ve been to that page a few times, but apparently i’m blind and never saw this really funny post! i hope this isn’t based on a true story.

if you know me, you know i’m writing my master’s thesis on light rail in seattle. and if you know me really well, you know that i’m writing specifically about one segment of the seattle light rail system that is at-grade (i.e. runs at street level). this is a PSA about being safe and aware around the at-grade portions of light rail because, you know, you might die. props to the advertising company that put this absurd product together.

holy cow, GOOD magazine put all their awesome infographics on one easy-to-navigate flickr page. a very informative time-waster.

relatedly, i will be updating my own flickr page later today, with far less educational images. (EDIT: updated).

i really want to go to tokyo. anyone willing to finance that, let me know. this is an iteration of their rail network. like woah. (via)

so i like cities. no surprise there. i also like tilt-shift videos. are you familiar with tilt-shift? you can start here, if you are unfamiliar. you can make your own here, if you’d like. there are a surprising number of really neat videos like the one above (e.g. here, here, and here), but why do so many of them feature really crappy music?

EDIT: i forgot to include this link about making your own tilt-shift pictures.

an addendum to that post about subway maps, courtesy of the always-great strangemaps. a couple things:

of course this comes from an architecture school. architects have an unfortunate habit of making things that could be beautiful some kind of ugly. and check out the legend! why not arrange the legend to the size of the rings instead of alphabetically?! it becomes impossible to decipher, especially when there are 27 (27!) ring roads.
as usual in america, size matters. it’s a point of pride for houston to have the giganticest ring road ever, though it shouldn’t be a point of pride for rice to memorialize this. enormous ring roads mean a severe auto-orientation, low, low densities, and a retarded urban form. if you can decipher the map, you’ll see that phoenix, st. louis, and kansas city are well represented in the outer rings. and yes, beijing and london also sport huge ring roads, but these are legitimate mega-cities. and for comparison’s sake, beijing (11.9 million) > kansas city (2 million). you should read the strangemaps post for the reasons why this map is also deceptive in its claim that houston’s is the biggest ring road of them all.