Kid Cudi – All Summer

Jonsi – Go Do

The Black Keys: Everlasting Light

If you have the opportunity to see the Black Keys in concert, I highly recommend it. Their show is very choice.

At Swim Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
Collected Short Stories, Isaac Babel
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
Other Inquisisitons, Jorge Luis Borges
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez
Correction, Thomas Bernhard (The Line Works)
Nog, Rudy Wurlitzer
Gimpel the Fool, Isaac B. Singer
The Assistant, Bernard Malamud (Collected Stories)
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Samuel Beckett works
Hunger, Knut Hamson
I’m Not Stiller, Max Frisch (Homo Faber)
Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch
Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen
Gogol’s Wife, Thomas Landolfi (Words in commotion. The Autumn story)
V, Thomas Pinchon
The Lime Twig, John Hawkes
Blood Oranges, John Hawkes
Little Disturbances of Man, Paley
Enormous Changes as the Last Minute, Paley
I, Etc., Susan Sontag
Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell
In the Heart of the Country, William Gass
Fiction and the Figures of Life, William Gass
The World Within the Word, William Gass (Omensetto’s Luck)
Advertisements for Myself, Mailer
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Journey to the End of the Night, Celine (Death…Installment Plan)
The Box Man, Kobo Abe (Kangaroo Notebook)
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke
Kaspar and Other Plays, Peter Handke
Nadja, André Breton
Chimera, John Barth
Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
Black Tickets, Jayne Anne Phillips
Collected Stories, Peter Taylor (Summons, To Memphis)
The Pure and the Impure, Colette
Will You Please be Quiet, Please, Colette
Collected Stories, John Cheever
I Would Have Saved Them if I Could, Leonard Michaels (Going Places, Men’s Club)
Collected Stories, Eudora Welty
The Changing of America, Max Apple
Collected Stories, Flannery O’Connor
Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Death of Artemio Cruz, Carlos Fuentes
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth
Henderson the Rain King, Bellow (Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift)
The Coup, John Updike
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Manifestos of Surrealism, André Breton
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
A Homemade World, Hugh Kenner
Letters, Flaubert
Sexual Perversity in Chicago, David Mamet
The Changling, Joy Williams (State of Grace, Taking Care, Breaking and Entering)
Going After Caccieto, Tim O’Brien (Things They Carried)
The Palm Wine Drunkard, Amos Tutola
Searching for Caleb, Ann Tyler
Thank You, Kenneth Koch (Collected Poems)
Collected Poems, Frank O’Hara
Rivers and Mountains, John Ashbery
Tragic Magic, Wesley Brown
Mythologies, Roland Barthes
The Pleasure of Text, Barthes
For a New Novel, Robbe-Grillet
Falling in Place, Ann Beattie

by using it as my summer reading list, I mean I bought several of them started 12, finished 5, and longed for the others.

I also read Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. Do read it, if you have the stamina and brain power.

At the end of last year, Forbes magazine asked frog to help them envision the future in 2020. In December, we held a workshop in San Francisco that brought designers, futurists and journalists together to think about the current state of computing, how we might experience it 10 years from now and, perhaps most importantly, how we might make the transition into these possible futures.

While it highlights augmented reality in the future, I think infographics play an even more important part. Since I read this, I have been envisioning all the infographics I am going to create. Educational from nature walks to museum tours. Consumer: from competitors prices to loyalty cards. The possibilities are endless, but so are the security concerns.

Perhaps it’s because of working in computer security for so long, but I can’t help wondering how much fun hackers are going to have with this. And what about paying up your “whuffie” meter? Can people opt-out of the whuffie meter? I am glad I am so lovable…

(Adapted from “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by John Donne)

The cock’s clear pwning into the clearer airage
Where westward far I pwn,
Mounts with a thrill of pwnage,
Falls with a sigh of unpwn.

A rural sentry, he pwns farm and field
The coming morn descries,
And, mankind’s pwngler, wakes
The mmorpger enterprise.

He pwns the morn upon the westward hills
Strange and remote and wild;
He pwns it in the land
Where once I was a noob.

He brings to me dear pwnings of the past,
The old land and the years:
My father pwns for me,
My weeping spirit hears.

Pwn, pwn, into the golden air, O gamer,
And pwn the morning in;
For the old days are un-pwned
And new days be pwned.

(adapted from “The cock’s clear voice” by Robert Luis Stevenson)

I was recently reading about a company that has created boxed water. Here is an excerpt from the site boxedwaterisbetter.com:

“[We] started with the simple idea of creating a new bottled water brand that is kinder to the environment and gives back a bit. We found that water shouldn’t be bottled at all, but instead, boxed. So we looked to the past for inspiration in the century old beverage container and decided to keep things simple, sustainable and beautiful.

About 90% of the Boxed Water container is made from a renewable resource, trees, that when harvested in a responsible, managed and ethical way serve as an amazing renewable resource that benefits the environment even as it’s renewed. Our carbon footprint is dramatically lower because our boxes are shipped flat to our filler and filled only as demand is created, as opposed to most bottled water companies that ship their empty bottles across the globe to be filled, then ship them back for consumption. The flat, unfilled boxes can fit on 2 pallets, or roughly 5% of a truckload. Empty plastic or glass bottles would require about 5 truckloads. Our cartons can also be broken down to their original flat state, are recyclable in most areas and will be recyclable everywhere shortly. We’re also giving 20% of our profits back to the resources our product is composed of–water and trees. Not only does it simply make sense, but we really enjoy supporting water and forestation organizations as it’s part of our company’s ethos and way of thinking to give back and participate. All that and an over-arching focus on simple and beautiful design that compliments our brand as well as the spaces it’s sold and consumed in.”

This picture from their site got me thinking:

Bottled water may be an unscrupulous usage of resources and most likely a huge scam perpetuated by evil corporations to people who already have endless amounts of potable water piped into their homes. And boxed water is just as unnecessary. I do wonder however, if we are not missing an opportunity here. Namely, boxed soda, boxed sports drinks, boxed wine (oh wait they have that already), etc.

I also remembered this image from Chris Jordan’s exhibit called “Running the numbers. An American Self Portrait”

Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.

Detail

Boxed water is better than bottled water, but we (as in we Americans) have unending amounts of water that comes to our house in pipes. Soda on the other hand, that needs a container. Wait a minute. Soda pipes! Now there’s a good idea…

My Chinese zodiac animal is the horse.

My wife’s is the monkey.

See them all here.