“CBS’ coverage of Super Bowl XLIV was watched by an estimated 106.5 million viewers, making it the most-watched program in [US] television history.”
TV, unlike the papers, still got it. Never lost it.
Super Bowl XLIV most watched program ever in US TV history
February 9, 2010
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Pre-Oscar piracy on the decline
February 9, 2010Andy Baio, entrepreneur and blogger behind Waxy.org, puts out an annual data set reflecting the state of piracy of Oscar nominated films. This year’s shows that it takes roughly 21 days–the highest since at least 2003–for films to leak onto the Internet from date of theatrical release. While only 3 weeks, still huge if you consider (1) back in 2003/04/05 it only took one or two days; and (2) opening weekend typically captures 1/4 or more of box office revenues.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Weinstein to Morris
February 9, 2010Harvey Weinstein berating Errol Morris on his lackluster promotion of The Thin Blue Line. Hilarious. “If you continue to be boring, I will hire an actor in New York and pretend that he is Errol Morris.”
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Chicken feet arbitrage
February 7, 2010Globalization will occasionally yield the darnedest of exchanges; this from the WSJ on Friday:
“Indeed, the U.S. sells almost all the chicken feet it produces to China, where they can fetch around 65 cents-70 cents per pound, compared to the 2 cents a pound they would sell for domestically, where they are rendered into such products as animal feed. In the first seven months of 2009, the U.S. exported 436,544 tons of chicken worth $376 million to China, about half of which was chicken feet.”
Which, of course, upsets Chinese farmers, prompting MOFCOM to levy taxes on US poultry producers proportional to business and benefit they bring to China, taxes ranging from 40 to 80%.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
McSweeney’s Wholphin
February 6, 2010Love my Wholphin, savior of the slow office afternoon.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Timothy McSweeney passes away
February 6, 2010Dave Eggers reveals the full story behind Timothy McSweeney, the man whom the line of McSweeney’s journals and mags was named after, befitting of not just the personality behind the man but the strange manner in which the two came to form a connection.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Dallas Open, 2009, Round 6, Joel Sherman vs. Joey Mallick
February 5, 2010Play-by-play analysis of Scrabble playoff between Sherman and Mallick by three-time NSC champion Joe Edley. Game play beyond my grasp.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
The lost era of US book prices
February 5, 2010Stumbled upon some data from The Library and Book Trade Almanac tracking historical book prices in the US. Best I could go out to was 2005. Still, makes you appreciate the lost era of book publishing where hardback fiction averaged over $25 in the ’90s/early 2000s; the decades of setback that digital brought on (with Kindle’s $9/$10 bestseller pricing); and respite that iPad’s $13/$14 brings, however incremental.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
As with Tupac Shakur . . .
February 5, 2010. . . consuming the work of posthumous Salinger enjoys additional pleasure brought forth by scarcity.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Things will be good again.
January 20, 2010My life’s been a bit drab since The Wire ended a few years ago. Tried to find solace in substitutes. Generation Kill turned out a bit weary. Eastbound & Down never made it to China. Nor did Bored To Death. Even tried BSG, for godsake. But things have been looking up for me–David Simon’s new HBO series Treme, set to land in April, seems to have the seeds of a cure. New Orleans, post-Katrina. Kermit Ruffins. Bunk. Playing the trombone. (Yes.) Life is good again.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Tufte on Venturi/Brown/Izenour on Duck
January 19, 2010Same book. Book’s got it all. Quantitative suspense, incensing, and here, avian humor–Edward Tufte applies to graphic design the philosophy behind architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and the late Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas. Writes Tufte:
“When a graphic is taken over by decorative forms or computer debris, when the data measures and structures become Design Elements, when the overall measures and structures become Design Elements, when the overall design purveys Graphical Style rather than quantitative information, then that graphic may be called a duck in honor of the duck-form store, ‘Big Duck.’ For this building the whole structure is itself decoration, just as in the duck data graphic.”
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Edward Tufte on the state of information design in the US
January 18, 2010From his book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information:
“And so, just as there is a double standard of integrity at a good many news publications–one for words, another for graphics–so there is a double standard of sophistication. The statistical graphics are stupid; the prose is often serious and sometimes even demanding of expertise . . .”
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Baidu having a field day
January 18, 2010Baidu seems to have stepped up hiring, uh, just a tad.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
Ugh, dreams crushed.
January 17, 2010Tetris has always been a bit of a vice for me. First time I saw it, I said, that’s a game for me, I’m gonna get real good at that. Skipped class to play. Went by a Tetris game-name. One day, figured out I could play Tetris independent of computers. Simulated sets in my head. Right elbow. Left elbow. Kink. Tee. Like an athlete, pre-game. Got real good at it. Thought I was real good at it; thought I was 100th percentile. Until I saw this video today.
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Posted by Eugene Lin
These United States of America
January 17, 2010
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Posted by Eugene Lin
