Adam Kuban: Kublog

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Snow-covered exterior of the Grand Opera House at Elm Place and Fulton Street, Brooklyn, during the Blizzard of 1888. [Photograph: Wallace G. Levinson/Life]

OK, people. I am at the office today. BFD. I’m am now officially sick of people acting like it’s crazy that the office is open today.

It’s not that crazy outside. Sure, it’s unpleasant at intersections, where plows have piled snow and there are puddles of near-freezing slush to navigate. BUT IT’S NOT THAT BAD OUTSIDE.

There is no reason not to go about business as usual. We have become a city of wusses. May I remind you that the subway was built partially in reaction to the Great Blizzard of 1888, which dumped 40 to 50 inches of snow in parts of New York. From Wikipedia:

The first underground line of the subway opened on October 27, 1904, almost 35 years after the opening of the first elevated line in New York City, which became the IRT Ninth Avenue Line. The heavy 1888 snowstorm helped illustrate the benefits of an underground transportation system.

Get out there and get to work, weaklings.

Here’s the poem Shane Koyczan recited in the opening ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games: “We Are More.”

I liked the pacing more in the opening ceremony more than here. I’m sure his Olympic performance will be up on the tubes soon enough. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on him. Read the rest of this entry »

• Raclette in NYC? [Serious Eats Talk]
  "Sue Perette in Brooklyn (270 smith st) have Raclette like in France, with the grill on the table, and they serve individual as well. Great little place where all the menu is worth trying."
• Lorusso Pizza & Focaccia – Long Island City – Astoria, NY
  Saw this while driving in Astoria near the park. Looks like it could be a find.
• JEOPARDY! Adult Online Test
  Whenever I visit my parents and watch Jeopardy! with them, my dad says I should try out for the show. Looks like there's a testing session coming up on Tuesday, January 26 at 8 p.m. ET. Look out, Ken Jennings!

• Grand Burrito recommendation
  "For really good, non-chain-style Mexican, y'all really need to check out Grand Burrito (SW corner of 23rd/5th), open 24/7." —drmoze, on Serious Eats New York
• The Top 100 Sci-Fi Short Stories [Sci-Fi Lists]
  Good reading list to have on hand. I've only read 12 of them.
• Big Red Kitchen: Jalapeño Popper Dip
  Another good one for Super Bowl recipes.

On the Web, a Wave of Support for Conan O’Brien [Media Decoder/NYT]

This has been bugging me since iTunes 9 was released. Before iTunes 9, when you wanted to mark a podcast or video as having been played or not, the verbiage Apple used was “Mark as played” or “Mark as unplayed.”

When iTunes 9 launched, it became “Mark as watched” and “Mark as unwatched.” This is crazy.

Obviously, you can’t watch an audio program like a podcast. You can, however play it.

What’s more is that you can play a video, movie, TV show, or video podcast, too. So play works for both video and audio.

Just seeing that stupid “watched”/”unwatched” thing whenever I have to do some podcast cleaning drives me a little batty. I wish Apple would change it. These guys noticed it, too.

On Gothamist the other day, I was a bit sad to see how this post on Slice was credited to Serious Eats instead.

Sure, they’re from the same “family” of blogs, and, sure, “The Food Lab” posts generally live on the Serious Eats homepage, so maybe this isn’t the best example to whine about, but it seems like more and more these days, Slice is referred to as “Serious Eats.”

In the end, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. It’s good that people are viewing what Slice does as part of the Serious Eats mission. But when something you’ve worked on for six years (and that predates Serious Eats by three years and was in fact among the first wave of food blogs) is sort of overlooked, it kinda blows.

Oh well, it’s from some dude whose name I don’t even recognize on Gothamist. Probably some new young turk there.

• 13 Tutorials to Help You Grow Your Blog Readership Next Year [Problogger]
  1. The Myth of Great Content Marketing Itself
  2. Nine Things to Do to Make Sure Your Next Blog Post is Read by More Than Your Mom
  3. Five Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours
  4. SEO Tips for Bloggers
  5. How Not to Promote Your Blog: Top 10 Broken Blog Promotion Strategies
• The End of the 00s: The Hunt for lonelygirl15 [The Awl]
  "…At that pre-dawn meeting, followed by a round of interviews with dozens of reporters from around the world, it became very clear that what lay ahead of us all was one of the most confused, misguided—one might even say retarded—chapters of human history. The internet age had brought forth episodes of buffoonery the likes of which our forefathers could only have dreamed…."
• Times-ers: "We’re Scared" [the nytpicker]
  "It's a far cry from the NYT culture that once gave new hires the confidence that they had been given a job for life. In decades past, a reporter past his prime might be sent to cover New Jersey, or assigned to real estate—and there they would linger until they were either old or bored enough to retire. Those days are over."

Curious as to what the 1970s UK rock powerhouse Slade actually looked like, I turned to YouTube. Was there a live performance of the iconic holiday song “Merry Xmas Everybody” there? There are at least four. And what’s beautiful is that each version is from a distinctly different era.

There’s the glam era Slade, the disco Slade, the ’80s Slade (in which lead guitarist/singer Noddy Holder looks like Tom Baker wearing Patrick McGoohan’s blazer from The Prisoner), and, last, the GnR-meets–Bon Jovi–meets–Robert Palmer Slade of 1991.

And, although they changed styles with each era, they lip-sync to the original recorded version of the song in each performance. Not a live version in the bunch. Anyway, check out the four videos after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »