Brian Carlo

It Springs Eternal

Whenever I get down about the business of journalism I come across things that re-inspire me.

Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger

Read more at The New York Times.

via Neatorama

Best Disney Movie Of The ’70s

… by far is the animated Robin Hood. I had it on VHS growing up and probably wore out the tape.

Ever wondered what it’d sound like translated into 13 languages? Wonder no longer.

via Neatorama

Best Meal I Had Last Weekend

the website.

the menu.

above: pastel azteca

Life Imitates Art. Sort Of.

It’s no secret that I think “The Wire” is the best television ever made. I’ve been rewatching it (again) as another one of my roommates has gotten hooked on the series. Which is why I was delighted to read about “Vancouver’s Radical New Approach To Drugs: Let Junkies Be Junkies.” Sounds awfully similar to Hamsterdam from “The Wire,” fictional areas of inner city West Baltimore filled with vacant houses where dealers were corralled away from the neighborhoods they were destroying and allowed to freely distribute drugs. All as long as they kept in the “free zones.”

In reality, what Vancouver is trying in response to drug addicts is far more groundbreaking and involved. Sure, they’ve decriminalized marijuana. But they’ve also set up sites where addicts can get free, clean paraphernalia, shoot up with the help of medical staff, and in some cases even get free drugs themselves. Any fan of “The Wire” has to respect an alternative approach to the war on drugs here in the U.S. Still, reading about the Vancouver police’s role in all this, I couldn’t help but think of Bunny Colvin getting chewed out at Comstat after telling his bosses he had effectively legalized drugs.

Let’s hope Vancouver’s plan doesn’t descend into chaos like Hamsterdam.

via the Ideas blog.

BONUS COVERAGE: Check out another link from the Ideas blog to the New Scientist, which explains why our tendency to go to war, and why males tend to form bonds together to hate other groups of males, might be an evolutionary response. This explains why all my college buddies and I hate Duke and Carolina so much.

Movie Trailers Won’t Ever Be The Same

Don LaFontaine, the man behind the chilling voice in various movie trailers and commercials, died Monday, his agent said. He was 68.

Whoa, 2020 Is Only 12 Years Away

And look how cool Shanghai (maybe) will look by then! I’ve always been a sucker for maps of all kinds and, by extension, cool scale models like the one seen above. Neatorama pulls together some Flickr snapshots of this cooler than cool scale projection of what the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum believes China’s largest city will look like in 2020.

Any time I see one of these cool scale models I stop and stare for entirely too much time. Wake Forest has one (I think it’s in Benson University Center now?), and so does the library at the University of Hartford, where I taught this spring. And who could forget that cool model of Revolutionary Boston that lit up and made noises that they had up in the sadly now-defunct observation deck at the John Hancock Tower?

Some People Hate The Word “Moist.” I Hate …

… the word “mouthfeel.” It just gets under my skin. For the way it sounds. For the combination of two fairly intimate words in a way that just seems unnatural and creepy. But most important, for what it stands for.

I’ve often grouped people who harp on the texture of food into two camps: picky or pompous. There’s nothing worse than someone who refuses to eat something that tastes delicious because they “don’t like the texture.” It’s the classic cop-out for the unadventurous. But it’s also a classic crutch for food writers (and other gourmets, or wine connoisseurs) who can’t do their jobs well. It’s a real shame, because discussing the texture of food can be really fun. I wish I didn’t have such a hangup about it.

So it was kind of surprising that a Gourmet blog post, “The Mouthfeel Wheel,” could generate something of value. This texture wheel for wine tasters is actually kind of neat. Maybe I’ll get over my distaste for texture discussions yet. (But I still refuse to say “mouthfeel.” Urgh.)

P.S. Other tasty bites recently from Gourmet:

• The perfect burger might have more to do with size than you might realize. I had a similar thought this weekend when I was grilling burgers and couldn’t tear off the right size leaf of lettuce.
• New study shows link between fructose and the “surprising speed” of fat buildup. Yet another reason to hate corn products.
• Mexican breakfast in Denver. Yet another reason to plan my first trip there.

‘The Economics Of Free’ Win Again

It’s been difficult to get a straight analysis of Radiohead’s groundbreaking, pay-what-you-want-online record release strategy for its latest effort, In Rainbows. Lots of winking and nodding and declining to comment.

But Wired gives a nice breakdown of a new British study of how torrent downloads affected the sanctioned downloads at the band’s official site. The verdict? First, there’s a jillion tech-savvy Radiohead fans out there. Second and more important, especially for the music business on the whole:

“The hard lesson to the music business here is that it must license venues for music acquisition that fans prefer to file sharing networks or otherwise make the toleration of file sharing part of their business plans. If even Radiohead’s freely available album was torrented 2.3 million times in the first three and a half weeks, how can more traditional offerings successfully clamp-down on file sharing? They can’t, pure and simple.”

Ouch.

Even when an album is basically free, it boils down to what venue a downloader is more comfortable with. That often means illegal torrent sites. This reminds me of Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame’s upcoming book, “FREE.” Here’s a great intro to some of its principles, also from Wired.