Der Spiegel:

“We noticed that American products and the American way of eating are trendy at the moment,” Judith Witting, sales manager for Sprehe, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “Americans are more relaxed. Not like us stiff Germans, like (Chancellor Angela) Merkel.”

The idea, she claimed, was to get in on the Obama-mania which is continuing to grip Germany. The word “fingers” in the name refers to the fact that it is a finger food. “It’s like hotdogs,” Witting said. “No one would ever think they are actually from dogs.”

For Americans in Germany, though, there is a risk that the product might be seen as racially insensitive. Fried chicken has long been associated with African-Americans in the US — naming strips of fried chicken after the first black president could cause some furrowing of brows.

Witting told SPIEGEL ONLINE the connection never even occurred to her. “It was supposed to be an homage to the American lifestyle and the new US president,” she said.

Steve Marsh might be the second-best writer in the entire Greater Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. And he’s written what might be the best introduction to a magazine website party photo gallery this week. It’s insider-y and superficial and pompous and awful and I love it. The event being photographed is the third annual Fashion Fight Night, which I’ll let Steve describe:

It’s fashion photographer vs. fashion photographer, with each ring holding a photographer, a model, and a team of stylists. Each snapper would shoot for three five-minute rounds, and then their results

Don’t get dizzy now: Jason Kottke picks up on a word I kind of made up in response to one of his posts and runs with it:

Retronovation n. The conscious process of mining the past to produce methods, ideas, or products which seem novel to the modern mind. Some recent examples include Pepsi Throwback’s use of real sugar, Pepsi Natural’s glass bottle, and General Mills’ introduction of old packaging for some of their cereals. In general, the local & natural food and farming thing that’s big right now is all about retronovation…time tested methods that have been reintroduced to make food that is closer to what people used to eat. (I’m sure there are non-food examples as well, but I can’t think of any.)

No sooner does Jason oh-so-gently throw down the gauntlet than Waxy, who almost certainly meant nothing of the kind, answers the question by linking to an amazing post about a transcript of a story conference between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan about Raiders of the Lost Ark:

(Key: G = George; S = Steven; L = Larry)

G

Robert Sullivan in the New York Times, has some suggestions to remedy the venial sins of cyclists:

NO. 1: How about we stop at major intersections? Especially where there are school crossing guards, or disabled people crossing, or a lot of people during the morning or evening rush. (I have the law with me on this one.) At minor intersections, on far-from-traffic intersections, let

When I wrote my last post, I googled “North by Northwest” to check the train route Cary Grant takes in that film. I came across a term I hadn’t (to my knowldge) seen before: kinetic typography.

Kinetic typography refers to the art and technique of expression with animated text. Similar to the study of traditional typography of designing static typographic forms, kinetic typography focuses on understanding the effect time has on the expression of text. Kinetic typography has demonstrated the ability to add significant emotive content and appeal to expressive text, allowing some of the qualities normally found in film and the spoken word to be added to static text.

A classic example of kinetic typography is the Saul Bass-designed title sequence for North By Northwest:

This concept reminds me of Walther Ruttmann’s great documentary film Berlin, which did kinetic typography the old-fashioned way: take a big, horking street sign and zip past it on a train:

It also reminds me (of course) of Bob Brown’s “Readies” and Eugene Jolas’s Revolution of the Word.

But kinetic typography in these senses are in some sense old hat — how are we taking kinetic type and making it new?

Here is a YouTube playlist of new, digitally produced exemplars of kinetic typography, assembled by Jo

New York to San Francisco in one week on an Amtrak sleeper car. My wife forwarded me this email with one sentence: “This is my dream trip.”

There are two reasons why people lose economic confidence. In the first case, there’s enough instability that you just don’t know what’s going to happen. In the second case, you have a pretty good idea about tomorrow, but you know that things are going to be genuinely bad.

If you know things are going to be genuinely bad, then given sufficient resources, you can prepare for them: save money, make a budget, gather information and make plans. In particularly, if you know (for example) that your income is going to drop or your rent is going to go up by a preset amount, you can budget accordingly. But if you really have no idea about tomorrow — whether you could get your pay cut, or get outright fired, whether gasoline prices could halve or double — then you just lurch from day to day, not knowing quite what to do, afraid to spend, afraid to save, generally, afraid.

This is where colleges and universities are now:

Colleges

In English, the names of (some) vowel sounds are given by a smaller subset of those sounds — so “A” involves one of the pronunciations of “a,” ditto “E,” “I,” and “O,” with the exception of “U,” which by all rights ought to be “oo” instead of “yoo.” Let’s just chalk this up to the Y-as-an-assistant-vowel phenomenon, whereby the “U” in words like “cute” or “fume” is pronounced “yoo.” And “I” is a dipthong, but that’s neither here nor there.

Consonants are generally either given by a pronounciation of a consonant plus a vowel (“B” = “bee”) or a vowel plus the consonant (“S” = “ess”). “W” is weird, as is “H,” “Y” is and always shall be a mess. “Q” is, surprisingly, not bad; even if it slights the typical sound of the consonant — arguably, so does “C.”

Consonants are even harder than vowels to articulate completely in isolation, so it seems obvious that you need SOME vowel with the consonant. But why do some letters get the vowel in front and others the vowel in behind? And while most letters get the short e in front or the long E behind, this isn’t universal – “J” and “K” could just as easily by “Jee” and “Kee” (assuming that “G” was “ghi” or “gay” or “goo” or something else).

You could say that as a general rule, names of letters avoid being homonyms with meaningful words, but “B,” “C,” “J,” “P,” and “T” violate this rule — in the case of “B,” pretty drastically.

I’m willing to entertain the possibility that there is some partial motivation for the sounds we use — maybe “M, “N,” or “S” appear more often at the end of words than other letters, so they get known by an end-consonant sound.

Think with me — imagine an alphabet where all the names of consonants were reversed, so that:

“B” = “ebb”

“C” = “ack” / K = “eck”

“D” = “edd,”

“M” = “mee”

“N” = “nee”

and so on. What would be wrong with that pronunciation of the alphabet?

Ron Charles looks for college radicals — er, kids reading radical books:

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans — those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents’ dismay? [Abbie] Hoffman’s manual of disruption and discontent — “Steal This Book” — sold more than a quarter of a million copies when it appeared in 1971 and then jumped onto the paperback bestseller list. Even in the conservative 1950s, when Hemingway’s plane went down in Uganda, students wore black armbands till news came that the bad-boy novelist had survived. Could any author of fiction that has not inspired a set of Happy Meal toys elicit such collegiate mourning today? Could a radical book that speaks to young people ever rise up again if — to rip-off LSD aficionado Timothy Leary — they’ve turned on the computer, tuned in the iPod and dropped out of serious literature?

Gotta love that “13-year old girls” crack — because 13-year old boys, you know, they’re all reading Middlemarch. Is Steal This Book “serious literature” now? This whole schtick is some kind of weird fever dream, muddling nostalgias, a botched amalgam of Thomas Frank and Harold Bloom. It can’t quite make up its mind which version of cultural decay it wants to endorse.

Speaking from ground zero, kids are as hard up for reasonably radical social messages as ever — remember No Logo? Remember Fight Club? My students do. It wasn’t so long ago.

Ultimately, though, radical literature is only as strong as the social movements that nourish it. Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Hunter S. Thompson, and co. had lots of readers because Something Big was happening, people were organizing and doing things, living new ways and trying new politics, and other people wanted to know what it was all about. If people are tuning into the internet rather than books, or rather than the newspaper, or rather than television or anything else, it’s not least because it’s on the internet that they’re finding out all about what’s new. Which means that all of those other media begin to serve a slightly different function. I think escapist YA lit is stealing more of its audience from television and the movies than campus radicals, but that’s just my guess — which is apparently as good as Charles’s.

There are so many reasons to enjoy Maximum PC’s“Computer Data Storage Through the Ages — From Punch Cards to Blu-Ray,” but I like the way it relates the technologies to the broader culture. For instance:

Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and magnetic tape all rose to prominence in the 1950s, and it was the latter that helped shape the recording industry. Magnetic tape also changed the computing landscape by making long-term storage of vasts amount of data possible. A single reel of the oxide coated half-inch tape could store as much information as 10,000 punch cards, and most commonly came in lengths measuring anywhere from 2400 to 4800 feet. The long length presented plenty of opportunities for tears and breaks, so in 1952, IBM devised bulky floor standing drives that made use of vacuum columns to buffer the nickel-plated bronze tape. This helped prevent the media from ripping as it sped and up and slowed down.

Likewise, audio quality of cassette tapes improved, “ushering in the era of boom boxes and parachute pants (thanks M.C. Hammer.” And “the floppy disk might one day go down as the only creature as resistant to extinction as the cockroach.” 

But my favorite digital storage media, hands-down, is paper tape:

Similar to punch cards, paper tape contained patterns of holes to represent recorded data. But unlike its rigid counterpart, rolls of paper tape could feed much more data in one continuous stream, and it was incredibly cheap to boot. The same couldn’t be said for the hardware involved. In 1966, HP introduced the 2753A Tape Punch, which boasted a blistering fast tape pinch speed of 120 characters per second and sold for $4,150. Yikes!

One thing I’ve always wondered about these early paper-based computer programs is whether they were copyrighted — and whether that, in part, led to the adoption of paper. One of Thomas Edison’s clever exploitations of copyright loopholes was to take celluloid moving pictures (which weren’t initially eligible for copyright) and copy them onto a long, continuous paper print — this meant that an entire feature film could be copyrighted as a single “photograph.”

I also wonder if/why early computer programmers didn’t use celluloid instead of paper. You can move it a lot faster than paper tape, and it’s generally stronger — except, perhaps, if you punch it with lots of little holes.

(Via Slashdot.)