on diagrams

this is a nice website.

maybe not for everyone, but pretty danged nice.

like tufte, but cheaper.

de lauers closing

first cody's now de lauers

well, this comes as no surprise to me. I've been buying l'equipe at de lauers for years, or trying to.

it used to be that l'equipe would even be sold out during the tour de france, then they just stopped carrying it.

"come back in a few days"

thanks for the advice, I would take bart to downtown oakland just to get copies during the tour, and to be told to come back multiple times to give a story money is just retarded. the newspaper never showed up.

the last time I went in before the tour and asked if they could arrange to get some copies and they said no.

lets see: you sell foreign newspapers. someone comes in asking for one that you used to carry and tells you they will buy them every day for the next month and you say no. well no wonder you went out of business, you were actively turning it away.

I'm not suggesting that I single handedly could save the institution, but it seems to indicate that the problem may be something other than the internet.

despite this, I'm still sad to see it go. there's not a lot of real culture left in downtown oakland, and there's even less now.

harry j. aleo

mr. despiser of liberal loonies hisself died this weekend from a heart full of hate for the city ruined by godless communists and homosexuals.

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

who will keep up all his neighbor hating in noe valley?

I knew he was a horse and real estate owner, but I didn't know he was a baseball player. that's some new info.


and for the record, I always liked his freakishness, despite the apparent unhealth associated with such hatred. takes all kinds they say.

george carlin RIP

the man was funny. and important. and funny. damned funny.

so here, on the internet, I give you the 7 words you cannot say on television:

shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits

a man who loves his job

Mr. Mack, of the NY MTA, a real gem. This is who NY is relying on to improve their transportation infrastructure? It's likely only because those concrete contracts still need to get doled out that there are paved roads in NYC at all, to say nothing of public transit.

from the nytimes article:

“We’re invaluable,” Mr. Mack said, speaking to reporters during a break between meetings of two board committees that he heads, one on the Long Island Rail Road and Long Island Bus and the other on the authority’s bridges and tunnels.

“If you saw something and called it in, it goes right there,” he added, as he put his foot on top of a wastebasket. “When the normal public calls it in, you know what happens with the bureaucracy, they don’t get the response that a board member would get.”

But Mr. Mack, a Long Island resident who says he typically rides the railroad 5 to 10 times a year, said that if he had to pay, he might change his habits.

“Why should I ride and inconvenience myself when I can ride in a car?” he said.

i would like to thank

Diana Henriques for writing a great article on speculators in the nytimes.

Like Alexei Barrionuevo of the same paper, Henriques manages to explain fairly complicated financial instruments/practices/markets accurately and concisely in a way I appreciate and respect.

the n to the y to the c

I want every single person to know I had a damned good time hangin' with slim dawg, smolin, and justin last weekend.

how much of a good time?

well, trust me, it was a lot of a good time.

and no, criff dogs was not the highlight. duh. it ain't no hot doug's so there.

for the record, i like dan

Ugh. Just read an article that Dan Gonzalez is in a shitty spot right now.

I don't normally write about this sort of stuff, but I like Dan.

I've always respected Dan and liked him despite not always agreeing with what his boss's office was doing. Frankly Commissioner Martin's staff has always been a great group of people which I think says a lot. I probably know Dan the least well of the lot but that's just how he is.

As much as luck has anything to do with it I wish him the best that this pans out for him.

characterization of character assassination

wow. why do we even think of boston as part of america anymore? it's pretty obvious that whatever america becomes as it degenerates into a fascist state, it's gonna start in boston.

alton kelly

half of mouse studios died. same goes for 1/4 of the family dog.

good posters.

to be fair, it wasn't until after we stopped photocopying stuff that we figured out how good their stuff was.