[Utsuru]

And with it, Nader seals his fate as a once-noble man whose nonsense has reduced his reputation to mud. Kinda like someone else we know.

[YouTube, via Sullivan]

County by county on the New York Times map, Kansas was almost entirely red, with three exceptions in the eastern part of the state.

I grew up in Johnson County (above). Knowing the people I grew up with and among, there’s no surprise it went McCain. I wish my good friends who still live there could have helped flip it blue, but that’ll happen when moose fly.

The three counties that went for Obama and why:

Douglas: Home to the University of Kansas. Liberal college students.

Wyandotte: Kansas City, Kansas, lies in this county. Black people.

Crawford: Pittsburg, Kansas, is here. I have no idea why this county swung blue. My only guess is that there’s a teachers college here and that folks in education tend to vote Dem.

C: JoCo went red
C: The times has got a great map where you can see county by county
C: only two kansas counties went blue
AK: Douglas
AK: and WyCo
C: Wyandotte
AK: i’m guessing
C: yep
C: how did you know?
AK: Douglas = Lawrence; WyCo = Black people
C: even JoCo went 54 to 47.4, though
C so almost half of JoCo went for Obama
C: 84.7 to 13.2 for Obama in SF. unsurprisingly!
C: 55.6 to 43.5 for McCain in Lancaster PA
C: But actually I think those numbers show the lack of support for McCain
C: because they should have won those counties
C: with the lopsided-ness of SF
AK: Crawford County in KS also went for Obama

Alien Lanes is, of course, one of Guided by Voices’ best albums:

I never thought to research the title of this GBV album before, but a quick Google search seems to reveal that there’s no L.A. bowling alley by that name.

The site PopMatters, however, has a possible explanation for the title. From an interview with Eric Johnson of the Fruit Bats:

I’ve heard that Bob Pollock of Guided By Voices gets a lot of his song titles by misreading signs while he’s driving around. Like Bee Thousand, came from driving by this movie theater where they were playing this Charles Grodin dog movie Beethoven, and [he] misread Beethoven as Bee Thousand. And I think Alien Lanes came from a bowling alley called Allen Lanes.

And there you have it. From Allen Lanes to Alien Lanes to a sly reference in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

[via Sullivan]

Jake Dobkin finds an unusual piece of street art.

I SO WANT THIS.

At Katsuhama.

More about Katsuhama on Serious Eats.

To quote Charlie Todd, who sums it up pretty well: “Holy shit. This new MTV Music site is UNREAL. If you have, like, a few days to kill, go check it out. They basically put every video by every band ever on the site…. I’m in heaven! I used to hit record on my VCR before going to bed each Sunday night to tape 120 Minutes in hopes I would catch some of this stuff.”

That’s exactly what I used to do back in ‘88, ‘89. And Malkmus and the gang started making videos during my non-cable-havin’ college years, so I’ve never really seen any of these Pavement videos—except for maybe “Cut Your Hair.” Once, at a friend’s house.

[MTV Music]

[YouTube; via Sullivan]

McCain & Co. are trying to say that “spreading the wealth around” is socialist. Fact: As has been pointed out by people much smarter and more eloquent that I, “spreading the wealth” is WHAT TAXES DO.

Also, what struck me the most about this video is how well Obama broke down the info so that anyone could understand it—and how sincere he sounds. When I listen to Obama here, he doesn’t sound like he’s giving a soundbite or reciting some lame, empty campaign line.

[YouTube]

Senior moment.

[YouTube]

[YouTube]

[YouTube]

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[YouTube]

Poster Boy has gone missing from the 23rd Street C/E Station so I have to look online for his work these days. Looks like he’s been collaborating with Aakash Nihalani on some amazing pieces that seem to jump from walls onto benches, platform floors, and all over the interior of subway cars. Nihalani’s signature seems to be the colorful boxes, while Poster Boy brings the surreallist collage element to the collaboration.

I’ve got a loaner camera from Nikon after having done a podcast with the folks there on food photography. It’s been a good camera so far, though I think I still need to get used to its features before I can get some really amazing photos out of it. I’m using the standard kit lens with it (18-55mm/f3.5), but Nick may let me borrow his Sigma zoom macro for it for a spell. Then we’ll really take this thing out on the road and open her up.

[YouTube, via Dan]

Slapped together the seed of a website for a friend yesterday. He wants a portfolio site for his artwork. I was suprised how little time it took—only two hours of futzing. I found a workable photoblog template for Wordpress, hacked it a bit to change it from black and gray to white and gray, and uploaded some of his work to it to see how it would look. Not bad, I might say. I actually like this design more than Kublog here.

The boxes on the main page are created by using the Wordpress built-in custom fields option and are pulling in the thumbnail version of the artwork. Additionally, I hacked the template to pull in only images from category “featured art,” so that my friend can control which work appears there—an option he mentioned wanting on this site.

What he did want was a way to minimize scrolling if not eliminate it at all, but that ain’t gonna happen. The only way I can fit a grid of images on the main page—and keep individual artwork pages from scrolling—would be to make thumbnails and main images small enough to fit entirely onscreen for a laptop user (the smallest anticipated screen).

I think this, with a few more tweaks, is a fairly stylish solution, if I do say so myself.