August 2007

The incredible likeness between Tsar Nicholas II and Raster is quite apparent as seen in the images here. Raster’s DNA samples will be sent directly to archaeologists where they will be compared with the DNA of living relative, Ivan Artsishevsky, head of the Romanov Family Association in Russia.

Last week,  archaeologists believe they have found remains of the two missing members of the Romanov family, the young Tsarevich, Alexei, and his older sister the Grand Duchess Maria.  This is nearly, a decade since the discovery of  the remains of Nicholas II and his family, and almost nine decades following the entire family’s execution by the Bolsheviks.

Seizing the moment, Raster requested we confirm his DNA samples ASAP. In honor of this occasion I have posted recent images of our celebrated boy, Raster.  Perhaps Raster can also be canonized into sainthood.

A naked man walks down Melrose wearing a live leopard around his neck. Really, you ought to check it out.

Thanks, Miles, for the heads up.   Sometimes, I really miss LA.

but one of the necessities of life"
-Mechanics’ Institute, SF

Shot on a lovely walk this afternoon with m’ love.

Panic set in for some southern Californians who rushed to Countrywide Banks today to withdraw their savings in cash.  All the mania due to the potential for the banks parent company’s  (Countrywide Financial Corp.) to file for bankruptcy protection in the coming days or weeks.

A couple of the higher-profile folks in line to collect their cash included a former LA King’s hockey player and the president of a Countrywide competitor in Irvine, Impac Mortgage Holdings.

I had the opportunity to drop by a beautiful new gas station on Saturday night. It stands at the corner of Olympic and Robertson in LA. This sight is new to this native, but for local Angelenos this version of the station has been around for a couple months already.

Visually it looks like something Frank Gehry might have designed. But what’s more incredible is that it is a living testament to how a brand can extend itself so far outside of it’s own milieu and actually force a sense of recognition and applause for the guts to make such a leap of faith.

Only one other type of firm comes to mind in this experimental arena. That would be big Philip Morris’ attempt to launch various anti-smoking programs aimed at kids.

At any rate, this new BP station is as green as purchasing gas in a car-obsessed city can get. The site was the former value driven "Gas" station (no name).  BP razed the station, recycled all the materials and constructed its new replacement comprised of recycled, renewable and sustainable materials. 

This monument to sustainable architecture is also a case study in design practice (read: extremely thorough), experience, and branding.

To convey a sense of how thoughtfully designed this gas station is, here’s a list of some of the architectural components:

• Farmed Wood: The facade of the back building and the trellis are made from farm-raised, renewable cedar

• CO2 – Reducing Landscaping: The green wall behind the station is wrapped with trumpet vines that require minimal maintenance in a local climate

• Motion Sensor Lights: Motion sensitive lighting in the back building reduces energy waste when not in use

• Recycled Aluminum Shavings: The material used in the basin of the bathroom sinks is made from recycled aluminum shavings

• Recycled Glass Tile: The bathroom tile is made from 100% recycled glass

• Farmed Wood: The wood interior in the restrooms is made from farm-raised, rapidly renewable bamboo

• LED Lighting:  LED lighting is used throughout this site, focusing light just where it’s needed and using less energy to get the same brightness

• Cradle to Cradle Stainless Steel: The highly durable uncoated stainless steel canopy, a key design feature of this site, is completely recyclable with no degradation of steel quality

• Solar Panels: 90 solar panels on the BP canopy produce the amount of  annual energy needed to power 2-3 average American homes

• Rainwater-Collecting Canopy: Rainwater from the canopy is collected, filtered and reused for onsite irrigation of landscaping

The list goes on. Check out more at thegreencurve.com. 

Right on. The NY Times is removing the pay barrier to the Times Select columnists.

The Times is the latest, and perhaps most influential, in breaking down the online subscription model for consumers.

In the recent past, the following pay walls have also crumbled:

• CNN’s Pipeline
• LA Times Calendar section*
• Boston Herald
• Fortune Magazine

*arguably the oddest content to put behind any kind of subscription model. Must have been for events so exclusive, nobody even knew about them!

More people who could learn from his lesson:

• The Nation
• New Republic
• Janes Defence Weekly
• The Economist

and of course, Mr. Murdoch’s own WSJ.

Sometimes people go through phases of losing things or simply misplacing items. It happens from time to time.  You know, sunglasses, keys, mobile devices, cars (in rare cases), books, bills, etc.

Totally understandable, people have a lot on their minds. No surprise at all then to find the US military has lost track of 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces. 

Still, it’s such a drag to lose things.

News, in all its forms, is a loaded word at home.  Our combined reading habits span the behaviors of a wide spectrum of news consumers (across platforms and continents).

In a nutshell we are proud news junkies, in-depth readers of wars, technology, international coverage, business, art, film, blogs, bottom-up aggregators, self-selecting aggregators,  and foreign television newscasts. We skim the surface, turn the pages, scroll through screens, listen to the BBC world news, watch Tanya Beckett in the mornings, and all the while we slice up the information received in semi-conscious waves into new pieces.

We live the news, we write it, we enable its navigation, its channels, feeds.  We contextualize it and then re-contextualize several times over as the mood strikes.

Newspapers:
Right now we are missing our daily home delivery of the NY Times.  Nearly once a year for the past several, we have chosen to cancel our daily subscription to the Times in favor of saving a few bucks and many trees.  Every time we do this, not a week goes by and we miss the paper in the worst possible way. I believe this is our 4th time canceling delivery. We even sampled the Financial Times as a halfway measure this time. It’s not working.

Screens:
We read on screen, all day and often through the night. We need the physical. When all else is bits, we still want something outside of our screens we can handle, fold, crumble, tuck away, bring to the beach, read on the train, forget, drop, leave behind and be done.

Screens will never go away.  They will only proliferate. Understanding the context of use for each form is where we’re at.  Some folks are getting it (NYTimes, BBC, The Guardian come to mind).  Others seem miserably lost (Chicago Tribune, LA Times, SF Chronicle).  Nothing new here.  We’ve been tracking the decline of print publications for many years at home.

It’s just now that we see this trend realizing itself finally. The web, blogging and digitization is only one of many factors which helped to create the perfect storm for the news industry.