Crazy morning in the Northwest Como/Roseville area. On the heels of last night’s torrential downpour, the intersection of Fernwood and Larpenteur Avenues (near the new-ish Roseville Rainbow Foods) flooded, leaving at least one car mostly submerged (pictures below were snapped after the tow track had pulled the Toyota out).
Check out the hurried, cell-phone pictures (click on each for a full-sized version):
From the top of the hill at Larpenteur and Hamline:
Bolthouse Farms, one of two major players in the American carrot industry (is there a carrot lobby and can I call them Big Carrot?), recently retained Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad agency responsible for, among so many other things, the Burger King’s Tumblr. Bolthouse had seen sales of baby carrots flatten as the economy dipped.
Fun fact: people don’t buy baby carrots during recessions; they buy big carrots because they’re cheaper, don’t eat them because they require more labor and don’t replace them as quickly because they disappear in the vegetable crisper.
We loved Sherlock, despite the played-out tilt-shift lens effect in the title sequence, above.
We just finished watching the first season of BBC’s Sherlock, which stars Martin Freeman as Dr. Watson and something called “Benedict Cumberbatch” as Sherlock Holmes.
The consensus around the house is twofold:
This is really good TV.
This incarnation of Conan Doyle’s classic stories features Holmes as a an ultra-modern man, familiar with mobile phones, GPS technology and the like. The writers, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, did well to integrate Holmes into the 21st century while the London cityscape helps connect viewers to the past without feeling wholly Victorian.
The episodes (or “films” as the cast and crew seem fond of calling them) are each an hour and a half long. There are only three episodes in the inaugural season but a second season is in the works.
This is how handheld devices should be displayed
The Sherlock team has unlocked the means by which directors—for screens of sizes large and small—will display the content of devices in the hands of their onscreen characters.
It’s always been an awkward thing, shooting small screens. From screen flicker to unrealistically still hands, the end product has never quite felt right. Sherlock throws the old conventions out the window and replaces them with a deviously simple and totally elegant solution.
Rather than awkwardly cut away from the scene to allow the audience a glimpse of the handheld device, the words the character sees on his device float directly onto the scene while the character continues to view his device. It’s a hard thing to explain but i heart subtitles does a nice job:
Rather than have an obligatory camera shot of someone holding a mobile phone followed by a close up shot of said message on the phone, the text is creatively added in post production to the shot and placed in a prominent position on screen. Far from being distracting I really felt it added to the story telling.
The Johnny Haynes statue is a true reflection of how Fulham should be represented, but his presence will be undoubtedly undermined by that of Michael Jackson, a man who means nothing to football and means nothing to Fulham. Yes, he was a lyrical genius, but he was just that.
That’s the question explored by Brian Phillips (to whom I cannot give enough link juice) from The Run of Play in his latest piece on Slate.com. It’s kind of a tired old question but Brian (as he always does) deals with it in a way that feels very fresh.
It’s been argued, seriously, that all soccer needs to become a major sport in America is a better suite of stats. Give us the hard numbers, and we will give you Peoria.
Well, they’re trying. Last fall, New England Sports Ventures, the sabermetrically inclined owners of the Boston Red Sox, bought the storied English football club Liverpool. They installed as their “director of football strategy” an executive named Damien Comolli, a Frenchman known for using unconventional scouting metrics to discover undervalued talent. Suddenly, the English press flooded with articles about Moneyball and baseball wonks and the “whirring internal cogs” of the computers that, at Liverpool and maybe throughout the game, were about to replace soccer’s age-old human focus with an American-style reign of algorithms.
On the other hand:
…the notion of soccer as a kind of quaint, starry-eyed endeavor that can’t be explained by the numbers is a little outdated. There’s just one problem with the sport’s newfound sophistication, which is that soccer happens to be a quaint, starry-eyed endeavor that can’t be explained by the numbers.
If you’re a Moneyball fan and/or even the slightest bit interested in world football or the convergence of technology and sport, this is a super read.
It is so cliché to talk about Detroit only in context of its dilapidated infrastructure and ruins nouveau but these pictures, taken by photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre are stunning portrayals of the death of that city.
Recent Comments