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April 30, 2007
Notes written on newspaper during 4hr flight from Delhi to Bangalore
1. This plane needs pillow lined video screens for people who want to rest their head on the back of forward seat
2. I want to set up a fortune telling screen that looks like one of those large announcement/ clacker boards at a railroad station
3. I've been thinking about geese that get sucked into jet engines. I'll bet that there is a goose legend about a plane engine that opens a doorway to a secret fantastical world with goose-elves and stuff like that or maybe about a goose that gets magical powers after getting sucked through the jet engine
4. I wonder if surgeons have a secret sword and the stone mythos, possibly centered around a difficult extraction procedure. Dentists, I am sure have a molar and a jaw myth. Even today there is a dentist somewhere waving about a pair of silver pliers, saving the west from imminent tooth decay
5. The Janitor at Mecca, sweeping up around the al-Haram, at the end of the day after everyone has left. What is that job like?
6. Is it now possible to exchange large amounts of money by swapping phone sim cards?
7. I'm glad that trees can't use their leaves as sharpened throwing stars because then nature hikes would suck
8. It would be better if doctors has someone drag their fingernails against a chalkboard when they administer a shot since you would be so horrified by the sound that you would not notice the shot.
9. There are other sounds that I can't stand: fingertips pulled across balloons, the sound of thread being pulled through particular fabrics and, occasionally, the sound of dental floss moving through my teeth.
10. In Singapore, floss refers to finely shredded meat-- normally pork-- I shudder to think of dental floss in Singapore. It might be made of finely shredded teeth.
11. I'll bet that astronomers totally fake each other out by re-orienting the high powered microscope toward the moon and then getting an unsuspecting astronomer to get moon blindness by looking through the eyepiece.
12. I've never been jealous of birds for their ability to fly but I am envious of their ability to sleep while standing up
13. I had a dream last night, about unicorns walking into a mall. As each one passed the sliding glass doors at the front of the mall, it took off it's horn and placed it in an umbrella stand
14. Why did GI Joe never have a special operator called Rikki Tikki Tavi?
15. Everyone should get a special message printed on a T-Shirt in a big font. Then they should wear that t-shirt every day because you never know when you will end up in the background of a live news cast
16. Whoever came up with the oversized Styrofoam finger, that person was a genius.
17. Someday I will own my own airplane and I will play the video of "grave of the Fireflies" during inflight because, if you think you seats are uncomfortable...
18. If I had a small country without a defense budget, I might be tempted to develop Styrofoam tanks to increase the perceived size of my army. How terrifying would it be to drive a Styrofoam tank? I'll bet that you would not be afraid of anything after that.
19. I've noticed that there are always a few people who stand up for long periods of time on flights. Airplanes should have a standing section for these people.
20. Mini golf on an airplane would be badass. Real golf, not so realistic.
21. Also, we need hand rails for people who are willing to lift themselves over sleeping passengers in order to get in and out of their seat
22. I liked Pirates of the Caribbean but it is clear to me that this Disney chose an easy ride for a movie plot. They should try extracting a plot from a more opaque ride, like the teacup ride.
Posted by jb at 01:02 PM | Comments (1)
Hot Days
High of 116 or 117 degrees predicted for today. 114/115 yesterday. It has been like this in Gurgaon for the last four days. I spend maybe an hour walking around in the afternoons an then I head back inside. I like the feeling of the sun, because it reminds me of a day that I spent walking around in Faro, on the southern tip of Portugal (I was carrying a thirty lb backpack at the time and did not have a hotel to go back to so the case was different). You can feel the heat in your joints and in the sensitive skin under your eyelids. When the wind picks up the air seems to get hotter. Everyone who works outside during the day seeks shelter in the afternoon so the streets are abandoned and strangely quiet, day laborers and barbers sleep in the shade of the trees along the sidewalks.
Posted by jb at 12:18 AM | Comments (2)
April 21, 2007
Now I've arrived in Kerala
Flew into Kerala yesterday and walked right past the man waving the "Mr. Johnny Poppia" sign, which was understandable because the connection between the Galaxy hotel phone and the Solty taxi service in Kerala was iffy at best.
Hari and I took the cab out the Ginger hotel- probably the first true budget business hotel in India. On the one hand, the hotel provides all basic amenities and the rate is less than Rs. 1000 (USD ~24.00) per night. On the other hand, the room looks exactly like one of those minimum security prison dorm rooms for transitional inmates, with heavy steel doors, miniature bed and desk, and mustard yellow walls. There is not really any shelving so it looks like I will be living out of the suitcase for a while.
Still, this room, at ten feet by ten feet with windows and an attached bathroom, is considerably better than the 5x10 windowless, unfurnished servant rooms that I saw in Gurgaon/ Delhi when looking for a house.
There is a roadway that runs below my window and the scooters, cars and lorrys start up at seven. I like this sound, so I keep my window open.
After dropping my stuff off in my room, Hari and I headed into town. I stopped by his house and said hello to his wife, who brought out squeezed ginger and lemon and who mentioned that she'd lived with Hari in Cincinnati a few years ago.
The cab driver took me to the beach, where I was accosted by engineering / management students from the local university. They let me go only after I handed over my business email address. Resumes may follow.
Posted by jb at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2007
The Great Desi Wedding Ruckus
Aishwrya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan... the wedding is going on, probably right now. This is a big event in India, with lots of news coverage. Everything else is being squeezed for the headlines. The attendees are a who's who of Indian glitterati. Some of the gitterati have even been excluded. It's that exclusive. There are five security personnel for every attendee.
In case you don't know who this is, I've tracked down a picture of Aishwrya Rai:
Courtesy of an Australian Airbrushing firm called Powerstudios.
You know that you've arrived when complete strangers in foreign countries spend hours airbrushing your image on to the hood of a car. To the best of my knowledge, there is no "Princess Diana" car hood.
Posted by jb at 05:21 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2007
South of the Border Comes to India
Part of the shocking growth in Gurgaon, India is driven by a 28KM strip of sparkling expressway that starts at Km 14.3 in Delhi near Rao Tularam Marg and ends at Km 42.0 in Gurgaon, bisecting the city in the process. This is the first real expressway in India and it runs through India's only planned city, a bit like the Baltimore-DC highway running through an desi version of Columbia, MD. Real estate investors and local developers have built hotels and malls along this highway and drivers speed past cranes and construction equipment every day.
This is not to say that every developer seeks to build the most modern amenities in the best of taste. In at least one part of Gurgaon-- Sector 32-- some enterprising developers have decided to rebuild a miniature version of "South of the Border" the famously crappy hotel, restaurant and theme park jammed off of I-95 just south of the Border of North Carolina.
The Gurgaon version does not sit south of any particular border. Instead it is called th 32nd Milestone, since it is stationed both in Sector 32 and at mile 32 on the expressway.
Like its American counterpart, the 32nd Milestone has a hotel:
And a bungee jump near some batting cages:
And a restaurant-...with the best restaurant name ever.
Best of all, it has a killer pop art go kart track. If it were bigger, I would convince someone to re-film Talledega Nights here:
No...really. The go kart track- visible from the highway- is great:
Posted by jb at 07:16 AM | Comments (1)
April 15, 2007
I have a mental block about airline flight times
So I missed my flight to Delhi again. This time I had the day right but the time wrong. I've just bought another ticket and am hanging out at the airport. That is the third time I've missed a flight or lost a ticket in three months. I think that I have a mental block about this. I mean, I'm moving to India right? You'd think I'd remember the right time for my flight. Sheesh.
Posted by jb at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007
Eric Bostrom Reflex+ And Hobo Nickels
Eric Bostrom (Flickr: Diversionmary) is a network administrator and marketing coordinator who feeds a serious pen and ink habit in his spare time. His flickr site screens 42 of his drawings and includes references to the REACH+ sticker show in Tokyo and the Munny Show in Petaluma, CA.
Some sketches:
Some of this reminds me of an edgier, darker Jim Woodring.
Reach+ also maintains a flickr page
From the profile: "Reach, Graf artist from Taiwan,is inviting 1000 artists / designers to participate to customize blank "FU" sticker." 200 submissions are posted at present. It reminds me a little bit of the 700 Hoboes project.
Eric's submission:
Also, an interesting page on Hobo nickles.
"But rather than come back around to his purist way of thinking, by the 1990s the hobby had changed. No longer were the best carvers imitating the works of Bo and Bert. They didn't need to. They were talented professional engravers who were using the Buffalo nickel — and other coins, but chiefly the Buffalo — as a blank canvas for their own original creations."
The hobo nickel, by George Washington "Bo" Hughes, who carved nickels from 1913 "until late 1981 or early 1982 when he disappeared from a hobo jungle in Florida, never to be seen again"
Posted by jb at 02:52 AM | Comments (1)
April 09, 2007
Jungle Fowl
I took the $2 ferry from Signapore to Pulau Ubin last Saturday. A small but terribly pleasant place in a Martha's Vineyard meets Caye Caulker sort of way. The island is entirely devoted to leisure cycling. I'd never been there before.
At one point I strayed off of one of the main roads and ended up on a bluff on the southern side of the Island where I saw a male red jungle fowl (gallus gallus spadiceus), the ancestor of the modern day chicken. It sprang from the bushes and scrambled down the dirt track in front of me before stumbling left into the underbrush. The only word that came to mind was...clumsy.
Red Jungle Fowl:
pic va flickr courtesy of sagarmhatre who pursued this particular jungle fowl through the Jim Corbett national park in India only to watch it jump over a juvenile king cobra (pic also in his flickr set)
Posted by jb at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2007
Spider-man assessment
So Nestle and Sony, two of the largest brands in Asia, have agreed to promote the Spider-man 3 movie by creating Spider-man themed Nestle cereals. I noticed this when I walked by a pallet-sized stack of Spiderman-themed Nestle cereal boxes near the fresh vegetables at the Cold Storage grocery in Bugis center.
Promotionals of this sort are standard and are expected to work to the benefit of both firms. Kellogg, for example, has worked with Disney to create an entire promotional product line that really works. In this case, a longstanding promotional arrangement has allowed the company to develop a line of well executed Winnie the Pooh, Finding Nemo and Lilo & Stich cereal boxes under a new Kellogg Disney brand. As far as cereals go, these are excellent products. The cereal itself has been re-engineered, the box has been re-engineered. Everything about the box is tied back to the movie. This works the best with Winnie the Pooh, since honey flavored cereals are well known. It works less well with finding Nemo (cereal and fish are not in any way a classic combination) and Lilo & Stitch (because the kids who want L&S cereal are apt to imitate Stitch by flinging the cereal everywhere, making this a one box experimental purchase). This level of re-engineering makes sense, because these are television shows expected to last from 2-10 years and even margins are suppressed in the first year as Kellogg amortizes its development costs, it should expect another 2-10 years of great margins on any of the present boxes of cereal.
An aside: there is a great note on the Kellogg Disney cereal on the MIT Convergent Culture Consortium weblog which is running an interesting four part series on breakfast cereals
Cereal based promotional materials for television shows make sense but movies are more tricky. A movie has a short shelf life unless it is transformed into a television show or running DVD/ product series that can be tied to a fully developed cereal. In the case of Spider-man 3 cereal, it looks like Nestle and Sony got together in the absence of Marvel or any other party involved in the Spider-man empire (hence the small print tag line on each box: "Only in cinemas" or "Only in Theaters.") This means that the Nestle/Sony promotional cereals are focused entirely on Spider-man 3, the movie. We expect to find-- and do find-- that this sets the stage for a cereal fiasco.
Let me say at this point, that I have a great deal of sympathy for the marketing and product development people at Nestle. They put their best into this. They even managed to come up with a limited edition Spider-man 3 cereal. Spider-man is not an easy subject. Spider-man 3, a movie centered around an otherworldly parasite (a symbiote) which possesses Spider-man, is even worse. Breakfast cereals and alien parasites that drive you insane do not a good marriage make.
This was probably the first hurdle. Save for two toys (a small Venom squirty gun figure and a Venom themed web-flinger), and some small pictures on the back of the newspaper-themed boxes, Nestle does not mention Venom at all.
The Spider-man cereals are instead focused on projectile spider webs. The limited edition cereal is made of crunchy chocolate webs, which look, from the box, like miniature pizzelles. From that point onward, though, the concept falls apart. First, there seems to have been a conceptual argument about the spider webbing shooting from Spider-man's wrist. One team may have wanted it to look like a spider web. A second team may have wanted Spider-man to shoot milk from his wrist. As it is, he is shooting some futzy white goo that looks somewhat like milk and somewhat like spider webbing. He is shooting it into a bowl filled with milk, though, so I suspect that the milk web people outmaneuvered the fixed web people (why? Possibly from the angle of the drawing, a real web would have obscured too much of Spidey's hand. There are probably 2-3 concept drawings dealing with this point alone on a computer somewhere.)
Spider man only shoots a web on the front of the limited edition boxes. The issue may have been fraught with too much tension for general use. On the back of the smaller legacy brand boxes, he is using the Spider-man version of the web flinger toy. Now, I realize that this is a cereal toy, but the web shooter is one of the holy grails of kid design (every kid will ask how a truly effective web shooter could actually be built) and the web flinger- an offshoot of the paper and stick toy called a Chinese paper yo yo- does not really work. I want it to work, because this is a creative approach to expressing the idea of flinging a web while meeting what I can only imagine were horrendous cost and product safety constraints. The problem here is that every kid in the universe wants an actually working web shooter and the flingers are packaged in such a way that it is difficult to assess their potential before the cereal is purchased. I suspect that there are some severely disappointed kids who are even now looking first at the web flinger and back at the box and are experiencing just a little bit of the first in a series of soul crushing disappointments that will haunt them throughout their lives.
As a side note, Spider-man himself is using these web flingers on the back of two of the cereal boxes but it looks like his Spider sense has failed him and he has been forced to use a directional mic to fight crime.
Cost and product safety (and intellectual property) are basic factors that limit design freedom when making cereal box toys. Nestle runs into worse problems when the Spider-man imagery clashes with the legacy cereal brand images and icons on the Cookie Crisp, Milo, and Honey Stars boxes. We will ignore the problem that spiders and webs have little to do with miniature cookies, stars and fibrous balls of drinking chocolate. Apparently, the Spider-man promotional materials ran into the first rule of cereal brand icons, which states that you need to keep the colors, fonts, cereal shapes and animation icons consistent from box to box. Clearly, the Spider-man 3 team came down with a mission from higher up in the company, took over the back of each box and fought it out with the brand managers who were running the front. Here, we reached a 60/40 stalemate. 60% of the front of each box is allocated to the legacy brand while 40% is allocated to the Spider-man promotion. In no case will the legacy brand image change to accommodate a Spider-man theme.
This created some odd juxtapositions. On the Honey Stars box, Spider man has apparently used his web to open a portal to a region of space filled with Astronaut bears
Whereas in the cookie crisp box, the viewer is given an in-kitchen perspective, maybe from a spider hole, of a panther who is eating a bowl of milk soaked cookies. Evidently the viewer has been bitten by an arachnid and dragged into a hole and the poison is slowly working its way through the nervous system with hallucinogenic effects. You want to call out to your parents but your mom has been transformed into a panther. Mom?...Mom?
The Milo people did not compromise at all. They just left the lower half of the box green. Why couldn't spider man shoot a green web?
Notice the potential for toy confusion here. Is there a hammer in the box? No, it is a web flinger like the rest, but this time, it is linked to the character Sand-man so the flinger flings...sand. No need to represent this through a paper tube. Anyone can fling sand. Give each kid a shovel and send them to the beach. Put a small pouch of sand in each box of cereal and tell kids to fling it around.
So the observation here is that movie promotionals can be tough on cereals. It is not a bad idea to turn down a promotional opportunity that is too complex and Spider-man may be pushing that envelope. I'm sure that it sounded great, but the cereal managers should have been prepared to sacrifice some additional legacy image space and possibly some margins (for better toys) in order to get this to work. That, of course, is never an easy proposition.
Posted by jb at 02:09 AM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2007
Hope Quotes
"Which book was it set in Venice...oh wait, it was a romance novel...I thought it was a real book, never mind...."
(To gas station attendant, Jersey Turnpike Rest Stop) "How do I get back on the highway?"
(Discussing a map of India) "Wait... your East or my East?"
(Looking at a wood burning fireplace, set into a chimney, with the metal guard doors closed) "Hey...is this thing on?"
Posted by jb at 07:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2007
Toxoplasma Gondii
Toxoplasma gondi - a parasite found in cat feces associated with behavioral changes in humans- has been getting a great deal of coverage recently. BoingBoing has posted a few articles on Toxoplasmosis. Corante addressed the parasite through an excellent article back in January of 2006. wikipedia, medline, eMedicine, and the CDC each have sheets on the disease. The sheets indicate that up to 40% of the adult population in the US might show evidence of a toxo infection in blood. Typically adults get it in the womb (it travels from mother to child).
The CDC et al focus on accepted clinical manifestations of toxo but the articles focus on some new (somewhat slim) research leads that suggest adult women become more outgoing when infected while adult men tend to become more jealous and, possibly, schizophrenic, noting (1) rats suffering from Toxoplasmosis tend to lose their fear of cats and (2) Toxo-infected rats regain their fear of cats when treated with standard anti-schizophrenia drugs
So this is great, because it explains cat ownership to some degree. I suspect, however, that Toxo is only one of a wide variety of parasites competing for neurological control. All of them up there, leading us to walk in bare feet on grass, spend excessive amounts of time near open water, dress small dogs in silly outfits, have anything to do with horses, putter about in our gardens, and watch the Ricki Lake show. In the end, it just adds one more layer of complexity to our own mental ecosystems. I, for one, love the thought that the devil on my shoulder comes with its own Latin name and its own gram negative stain.
Posted by jb at 08:33 AM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2007
Tuscan Whole Milk
The Tuscan Whole Milk reviews in Amazon.com. 933 (today) and counting. I find this sort of obsessiveness (or the thought that someone else has this sort of obsessiveness) very reassuring. It reminds me that there is nothing wrong with focus and that the real trick is to choose a target rather than frittering around from topic to topic, stoking unevenly a pallid fire of weak intentions in the coal box of an otherwise heavenly dynamo that drives us from birth to death.
TWM is not the best example of this sort of obsessiveness. I kept an ongoing editorial argument between two ornithologists over my desk for year when I worked in Cambridge, MA. as I recall, the article that sparked the argument covered the habits of the piping plover. Both ornithologists posed as Plover experts. The argument, which has now been lost to me (I would need to plow through the Wall Street Journal's letter archive and I'm too lazy right now), was entirely vicious. Lots of underhanded sarcasm and obsessive, obsessive attention for detail.
also...
Continue reading "Tuscan Whole Milk"
Posted by jb at 05:29 AM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2007
Banana Burrito
I'm getting better but I've been sick for the last week. I brought something back from India to Singapore. It is...tough to be sick when you live in an office (I live in an upstairs room that overlooks the office). Now all that I want is comfort food, refried beans mixed with pasta, oatmeal mixed with peanut butter, banana burritos, that sort of thing. All comfort food is weird.
I didn't even do comfort food correctly, meaning that I only began eating one of these things—refried beans and pasta— when I was growing up and living at home. I began mixing oatmeal with peanut butter during my first semester at college and I started eating banana burritos when I arrived in Boston. Maybe each stage in my life has a particular comfort food. No comfort food out here yet. Once the comfort food comes, I will have spent one third of my trip out here. No calendars for me. My life is marked from dish to dish.
Spoke with Hari recently. We were talking to the designers in Bangalore and then he kept me on the phone for a bit afterward. Some of our clients have not paid us yet, which may prevent me from moving into Gurgaon in mid-April. The office, with all of the rental furniture, looks pricey. I vote for a beachfront shack in Tivandrum (sp?) with beautiful sunsets and mephaquin for breakfast every morning. I will be out in India one way or another this spring but yet again I have no idea where I am living. Someday, I think, I will rent a normal apartment of my own rather than the dorms, back porches, cars, offices and busted up group houses that I have lived in. A house, right now, is too much to ask for (and I am not sure that I really want a house—maybe at the start of the next bubble). Nothing, as a rule, is set until it happens.
In the world of reading, Jan Chipchase at the Nokia Research center in Tokyo has a great piece on Informal Repair Cultures. This interests me because I'm in India to provide products that will enable these cultures. I assemble low end ventures. Simplified refrigerators, safety devices for scooters, that sort of thing. In the end, finished products are less interesting than tools that can be used to make other products. I suspect that, twenty years from now, many manufacturing businesses will have shifted away from mass production of finished products to producing core items such as chipsets and t-shirt blanks, which will be modified either by the end user or by specialty finishing companies. Absolutely everyone will be a designer. And it will be…interesting.
Posted by jb at 07:18 PM | Comments (1)
April 01, 2007
Blue Steel Ant Farm
There are 1,121 photos matching "ant" and "farm" in flickr right now, including one set of 44 ant farm photos. The ones at the front (I have not searched through all of them) seem to focus on the Antworks farm—an ant farm that uses a translucent blue nutrient gel in the place of dirt and sand. You can light the tank from different directions and the tank is wider than the traditional ant farm so the nest can branch out in three rather than two dimensions.
I have no idea what the ants must think about this farm. Here they are, scrabbling around in the dirt only to be picked up and placed in a posh 70's Lava Lamp nightmare. Some of the ants are happy. I'll bet that there is at least one Wendell Berry ant that is terribly disappointed by the whole thing.
Anyway, I was looking at these ant farm pictures and wondering. When do ants decide to make new tunnels? There seems to be no clear pattern to the ant nests featured in flickr. Some ants seem to be early branchers. Others seem to branch late. Is it a function of lighting or of a temperature gradient or of the antgenes? If I placed two sets of genetically identical ants in two separate containers at the same temperature gradient and with the same levels of ambient light, would I end up with identical patterns? I doubt it, since ant farm configurations have an initial conditions feel, but I can see the value of being an early brancher vs a late brancher and being a surface digger vs a deep digger so It might be that ants taken from the same colony will make similar if not identical digging decisions.
These are all important questions. It will be difficult to justify the effort of knitting a scale "ant farm" series if I could just knit together a series of tubes (the internet!) and call it an ant farm. The ant farm sweaters will need to wait until I figure this out.
Posted by jb at 05:38 AM | Comments (0)