Category: culture

Even giant inflatable ducks need a break

My mancrush favorite artist working the medium of inflatable ducks, Florentijn Hofman, has brought his giant inflatable duck to Hong Kong harbor, a place that is also special to me. Apparently many welcomed their new rubber duckie overlord.

Pretty much the usual crowd (apart from the duck) at Harbour City!

The 54 foot high duck brought its usual brand of whimsy and good will to the people of Hong Kong, but apparently caused some alarm when a scheduled maintenance deflation caused some concern to duck viewers. Quoth the BBC,

The giant bird, … was found lying on its side on Tuesday night and was completely flat by Wednesday, reports say.

The Wall Street Journal gets extra points for making a hedcut of the duck and quotes a source close to the collapsed canard:

Harbour City said the duck was being deflated for a routine inspection and repairs after exposure to heavy waves in the harbor.

The photos of the deflation are too much to bear posting here so I’ll let you click through above if you must. If this is anything other than scheduled maintenance, to the duck deflators I say: you’ll take away my inflatable duck when you dredge it from the cold dead harbor floor. The duck lives on inside of everybody who’s ever seen it, even just in pictures.

Bye bye Beatrice, and happy Koninginnedag

In the Netherlands, today is Koninginnedag, the official celebration of the Queen’s birthday, if not the actual birthday of the woman who is currently queen. Or rather, was queen. Today, Queen Beatrice abdicated the throne at the age of 75, after a 33-year reign.

In a year that’s seen the almost unprecedented resignation of a pope and violent ends to the reigns if not the lives of some long-running despots, I have to wonder why more leaders – in business as well as politics – don’t make graceful, controlled exits and enjoy some retirement. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Mrs. Windsor.

Move in, people, help is on the way

This just in from Gothamist: reconfiguring the layout of subway car seats might give the cars greater effective capacity with the same number of seats. The thinking is that there are certain behaviors that lead to inefficient packing of subway cars, mainly people’s desire for personal space and preference for holding on at hand level rather than holding on above head level. And I thought all those people standing in front of the door and not moving in to the car were just selfish asshats.

I’m not sure about the idea that riders who know they aren’t getting off soon are any more likely to pack in to the ends of the cars – I often see people standing right in front of the door for many stops even on half-empty trains. But I do like the designs where (at least some of) the doors are staggered rather than opposite. On lines where the doors open on each side of the train at about the same number of stops, this should help move people in and away from the doors at least a little more often.

Until the science is complete and new cars are in place, just remember that blocking the door slows down the train at every stop and that’s a lousy tradeoff for getting out a tiny bit faster when it’s finally yours. Similar logic applies to those waiting behind the yellow line to board the train.

Glitch will be the next Instagram

I’m calling the peak of the Instagram reto “film” filters thing.  Soon enough that visual language will be dead as cupcakes. Recently I poked fun at Apartment Therapy for calling bathroom home offices a trend, and they had three data points to support that claim. I’ve got exactly none, but I’m going for it anyway.

What’s going to replace Instagram as the way to make a boring photo cool? I say what’s next is glitching. Glitch is a movement – or at least an aesthetic:

Glitch art [via Wikipedia] is the aestheticization of digital or analog errors, such as artifacts and other “bugs”, by either corrupting digital code/data or by physically manipulating electronic devices.

Ordinary digital photos, like the ones we take of our lunches every day, are pretty boring, and generally – at least technically – pretty good. Instagram and its ilk put some noise and quirk into regular shots, adding a tiny bit of what film used to deliver – randomness. Glitch can do that too, and it it’ll do it in a native digital language instead of a folksy but ultimately bogus analog one. It’s the imagery of the DIYer, the Maker and the hardware hacker. Glitch shows you how many things have to work just right to make a digital picture show up, by breaking them just a bit.

I think soon enough there will be glitch camera apps, maybe even glitch filters for Instagram. Somebody will make a digital camera that will be to digital cameras as Holgas and Dianas were to film cameras. As a way of easing the transition, here’s a cat photo that’s been glitched and also instagrammed. You saw it here first, trendspotters.

Lucy controls the horizontal

The ides of April ain’t what you think

Death and taxes are the only sure things, they say. The Ides of March – the 15th – is well-known as the day some folks got all stabby with Julius Caesar in 44 BC,  an event (at least in Shakespeare’s telling) predicted by a seer who was ignored by Caesar. April 15 is well-known as the due date for filing US Federal taxes. But as catchy as it would be to call tax day “the Ides of April” it is not. The Ides of April falls on the 13th. I won’t bore you with the details of the Roman calendar; the simplest and yet still largely correct explaination is that the Ides of April is on the 13th because April has only 30 days, and the Ides of March is the 15th because March hath 31 days.

This year, April 15 is also Patriots’ Day (commemorating first battles of the revolutionary way at Lexington and Concord) and Marathon Monday (the running of the Boston Marathon, commemorating in a roundabout way the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, thereby predating Ceasar’s assassination by a few hundred years) in Massachusetts, a state holiday for many. It’s observed on the third Monday of March so it doesn’t often align with the Ides or tax day, but this year it means that Massachusetts folk have an extra day to file their state taxes, though they still owe the feds today. You can confuse Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts with Patriot’s Day in Maine, (at the time of the events in question, they were the same state but I guess Maine got only one patriot in the breakup) but don’t mix it up with Patriot Day on September 11.