It brings to mind a similar arrangement made by another visionary, the sorely underestimated Desi Arnaz. In 1951, for “I Love Lucy,” the show he did with his wife, Lucille Ball, he suggested that CBS use three cameras and film the show in 35 millimeter instead of just the rudimentary technology they used to broadcast the show nationally.

The network balked at the $3,000 expense, reasoning that preserving it on film was pointless: why would anyone ever want to watch a show more than once? Mr. Arnaz said he would pay for the film as long as he got the rights. We all know how that turned out.

Huh. Never knew that. Very cool.

via nick douglas

Via War and Piece comes a Huffington Post article about some apparent hanky-panky surrounding the awarding of a contract to build 28 new Presidential helicopters to an Italian aerospace firm:

“Obama Confronts a Choice on Copters” read this week’s New York Times . The President soon “will have to decide whether to proceed with some of the priciest aircraft in the world — a new fleet of 28 Marine One helicopters that will each cost more than the last Air Force One….The choice confronting Mr. Obama encapsulates the tension between two imperatives of his nascent presidency, the need to meet the continuing threats of an age of terrorism and the demand for austerity in a period of economic hardship.”

This is a gross misrepresentation of the choice Obama faces. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn) and others have alleged that the contract for 28 Marine One helicopters was awarded to the Italian firm Finmeccanica as a thank you for Italy’s participation in the Iraq War. The evidence, however, indicates that the contract was more specifically a payoff to the Italian government for supplying the forged documents showing Saddam had obtained weapons grade uranium from Niger. President Bush famously used this fraudulent “yellowcake” intelligence to justify launching the war.

Um, wow. First of all… 28? Second… One helicopter costs more than Clinton’s Air Force One? Really nice, and I mean really nice civilian helicopters cost between $10 and $15 million. The famous UH-60 Blackhawk “only” costs around $6 million, and the decked-out Apache gunship costs around $18 million. I’m either suprised that Air Force One cost less than that, or that we’re spending $400 million for a single chopper. Not sure which is worse. Third… We apparently spent less than a million on the new Presidential limousines, and that bought us 3 of ‘em.

I really hope I’m not the last person to write about this.

This 6MB PDF that is purported to be the pitch used by design group Arnell to sell executives at Pepsi on a new logo design is perhaps the most brilliant example of puffed up design faffery I’ve ever seen. I think the final design of the logo family, each slightly modified on each Pepsi product, is weaker than its predecessor, but the bolstering quasi-science used to justify the recalibration of a few bezier curves is art of Timecubeesquemagnificence. [via]

Some choice excerpts:

“1929 Pepsi Geometries: Perimeter Oscillations”, giving me a new favorite term to trot out the next time I’m criticizing the shape of a design.

My favorite bit of their favorite bits:

There is supposedly some equation underpinning the ratio of each of the logo curves, which, well, duh. It’s as if the designer took off his chunky glasses, peered around around the conference table, and stared into each Pepsi executive’s soul. “Gentlemen, we will make these lines…with math.”

I have to say, this may look like it was thrown together out of bullshit and, who knows?  It may have been.  I can attest that the designers I’ve worked with, particularly the logo designers, have been known to overthink things to a shocking degree.  Making something that just looks cool is pretty easy for designers, but making shit up to justify it isn’t all that easy, since most designers are not creative writers.  Thus, it’s usually easier to design something with a philosophy behind it that you can stand on.  It makes presentations go a lot more smoothly since you’re not just pulling answers out of your ass, plus it’s often the only way to sleep at night given the tremendous fees one gets for designing corporate identities.  Finally, as much as it may look like these things are mostly improvised, the guys that make them take their jobs pretty seriously.  Often annoyingly so.  Go watch Helvetica if you want to see what I mean.

That said, there’s a quote out there by rockstar designer David Carson that I can’t find at the moment, but it goes something like “Sometimes you just want to make the logo you want to make, so you go in there and say ‘I researched the history of your company and noticed your commitment to environmental sustainability and that’s why I made your logo green.’”

Amusingly, when I went to go find the link for the movie Helvetica, whose ugly mug was up there?  David Carson!  Weird, since he’s the person I least associate with that font.

In the foreseeable future, it seems, there will be two kinds of nonprofit newspapers—those which are deliberately so and those which are reluctantly so. Ever since I left the Washington Post, in 2005—after twenty years there that included a stint in management—and particularly since I joined the nonprofit world at the New America Foundation and started learning about the management and fund-raising issues at tax-exempt organizations, I have been mulling over this idea: that only by turning the Post into a nonprofit trust and raising a university-size endowment to support the newsroom could the paper retain the vitality it requires to serve as a successful watchdog over our constitutional system.

via War and Piece

So I’m seeing if the wordpress iPhone app works like it should.

And so this post isn’t a total waste, I’m going to attach some photos from my trip to Darkroom last weekend. Hopefully.

Your patience is appreciated.

ON ‘FOODIES’ —

“For me, the word is a warning that says, ‘Hey, I’m not any fun to have a meal with.’ I’m all for people enjoying the hell out of food, but not if it means they have to give themselves a title to lord over ‘non-foodies.’..I like the olden days when people who enjoyed food the most were simply called overweight.” [Fat City via EMD]

It’s a Greek tragedy, and everyone’s trying to think Antigone or Medea or Oedipus out of the box. Which is understandable. When you go see those plays performed, if they’re done well, you know the ending with absolute certainty — and yet you can’t help but think somewhere in act two that the fates are not the fates. And, listen, American entertainment does nothing but sell redemption and easy victories 24-7.

I’m not saying that “The Wire’s” unique in that respect — there’s a lot of other high-end television that is dark and continues to be dark — but I agree with Chase in one respect. I read an interview with him where he said what American television gets wrong relentlessly is that life is really tragic. Not a lot of people want to tune their living room box to that channel. It’s an escapist form. There are people who are willing to look at it for something else. It’s not a mass audience, but possibly some portion of that mass audience finds its way to something else, and then they expect to be treated as they’ve always been treated. There’s nothing the writers can do about that, other than twist themselves into hacks trying to please people with what they want. What are you gonna do? We weren’t doing it to be mean, we were doing it cause this is the story we cared about.

Yep.

[also, in case you haven't noticed, I finally figured out how to get ecto/blogger to stop inserting random line breaks into my carefully crafted entries. You know how? I spent ten seconds on the ecto forums. Sometimes you just have to ask, people!]