Why have major-league baseball managers taken to wearing these dumpy-looking windshirts?

I have mentioned this more than once, but sometimes it just bears repeating:

I will never, ever understand Japanese television.

Super awesome photo archive of the Apollo 11 project and landing right here. A fitting commemoration for the 40th anniversary of the whole thing. Certainly a better effort that the one from the ‘tards at CNN, who mark the day by putting a story about the “it was all a hoax” morons on the top of their home page.

The pictures are glorious. Enjoy.

UPDATE: In a fitting tribute to both the Apollo mission and the legendary Walter Cronkite, Kottke will stream the original coverage in Walter’s own words at exactly 40 years (to the second!) later. And yes, I am aware that you could just go watch all the clips whenever you wanted, but this is much cooler, so shush.

Just leave the page open and your volume up and you won’t miss a thing. The show starts at 16:10 EDT, and in the immortal words of Billy Red Lyons … “Don’t you dare miss it!”

No matter what else happens, there is one great thing about working at a newspaper. If you go to the can and forget to take reading material, the previous users have got you covered.

So I am told by Reliable Sources that there is a new Muppet Christmas special tonight. Part of me wants to be all happy about that, but a larger part of me is less-than-enthused. Because the show will have the same Muppets, but – after the passing of Jim Henson – the Muppets aren’t the same. You might have to dwell on that for a while, but trust me, you will eventually get to the same point.

So yeah. Instead of doing a new Muppet special, why not get busy and free up the old Christmas Together special with John Denver and the Muppets of yore. I am of the understanding that the thing is tied up in the reams of litigation that still surround the Denver estate, but come on people – this is Christmas. Find a solution and get it done. Between that and the perfectly delightful Muppet Christmas Carol” you will have all the holiday Muppetry you need, without bastardizing the legacy in the pursuit of a few more bucks.

In the meantime, watch this. The sound quality sucks, and the video looks like it is ripped from a copy of a copy of a copy of a bad VHS, but it’s still … magic.

It’s no secret that fundamentalist and/or totalitarian regeimes are not fans of citizen journalism in any way shape or form. This usually takes the form of blanket bans on sites like YouTube, blogger.com, wordpress.org – any site that gives people the tools to say their piece is verboten in toto by the powers that be. China, Iraq, What-Used-To-Be-Burma, even Turkey has joined in on this particular fray.

But blanket bans are easy – you just block an entire domain, a scattershot of oppression if you will. Banning sites that are blogs on personal or one-shot domains, however, takes a lot of work. Which is why I am thrilled to report that attempting to surf to “geekboy.ca” from anywhere in the United Arab Emerates gives you this delightful result:

Yeah, baby! I feel like I have arrived!

In a word: Perfect.

The world is good. Eat your heart out, Maggie.

Another new crop of “Get A Mac” ads have hit the airwaves this week, and as per usual they run the gamut from “so-so” to “amusing” to “pretty fucking awesome“. What is even more awesome is that there is an “extended mix” of Vista Blues that you won’t see on TV but is definitely worth a look and a listen – click here to take a peek.

I think the crew at Apple has really missed a trick, however, by not making the audio of the full-length version available as a free download at the iTunes Store. Come on, guys, get with the program here … this shit is gold.

Please pause for a moment and reflect on the glory of the Red and White:

I was listening to the call in shows on the Detroit sports radio stations this morning, and it was interesting to hear how the fans consider this to be no victory at all. They know that there are only two possible outcomes to the hockey season for any NHL team: You either win the Stanley Cup, or you are a complete and utter failure. Contrast that to the sad and hapless fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who wax poetic over 1992 – the year that the Leafs almost won a game that would have let them keep playing in the series that might have let them get a chance to maybe play for the Cup. They get tearful and nostalgic over coming close to getting a chance to almost win.

This, however, is about real hockey teams, and not some pathetic collection of talentless goons, floaters, and half-wits. This is about a final that should be every bit as fabulous as the Canada-Russia thing in last week’s World Championship … but hopefully one with a more gratifying ending.

Game on.

Sigh.

I am quite sure that a grillion or so people will be linking to this today, but on the off chance that this is the only web page you ever hit then I’ll add my HREF to the pile. It purports to be an internal Microsoft rah-rah video for the Glory That Is Vista. It’s so bad that it is almost embarassing to watch, and part of me – despite all of the less-than-wonderful things I have said about Microsoft in the past – wants it to be fake. I mean, really. It’s that bad.

If it is a real deal, then I really want to know if the people that made this or the people that it is targeted at have any idea that other divisions of Microsoft are busy making deals with PC makers to allow them to use XP, 2000, anything but Vista because even Microsoft seems to understand just how badly the product actually sucks.

Who knows, maybe there is strength in ignorance. Or something.

It is worth pointing out that the new coinage to be minted in the United Kingdom is absolutely stunning. Designing for something with such restrictive limitation in size and shape is a bitch, and one of the reason that most coins are just, well, coins. There is only so much you can do … usually.

This new guy breaks all the molds, though, and the end product is – as they say in the pubs down in Kensignton – fucking brilliant. Wow.

(via Hoefler & Frere-Jones)

Cover Flow is, quite frankly, a lot of fun. It was fun in iTunes when it first showed up, it is fun in the Leopard finder … and it would probably be tons of fun when using Flikr or Google Images or some other such portal full or picture goodness.

Regrettably, there is no Cover Flow style of browsing built in to these sites.

Not so regrettably, the gang over at Cooliris have whipped up a faboo little plug-in called Piclens for both Safari and Firefox to give you something that is acceptably close. In fact, with the new “wall of images” function, you might think that this is even better than Cover Flow. Either way, it is definitely worth a try. Head on over to the Piclens site and grab yourself a copy, and then go surf one of the sites that the thing supports. I think you will be suitably impressed.

When I was working in the U.S. of A. there would be moment when friends, acquaintances, and even random folks who were born in the Great 48 would ask me what being a Canadian was all about. They would ask the question in different ways and with different words, but the gist of the thing was always the same – they were looking for to find out why were weren’t just “Americans with back bacon”.

I always found it hard to come up with a good answer for that one – most of what being a Canadian is all about is more in the “doing” than the “saying”, and the parts that could be explained in saying would probably come off sounding kind of condescending, so I used to mostly beg off when this sort of thing happened. Getting a laugh with a “how’s it goin’, eh?” would usually be enough to pave it over and move on.

That strategy used to bug me, though … I wanted to have a real answer, to give them something concrete, and it irked me when I couldn’t do it, and that question has stuck in the back of my mind for a long time. Which brings us to right now, where I actually do have an answer – something that I saw on the annual Hockey Day In Canada broadcast that really summed up in words and pictures what being Canadian is really all about.

I have always been a fan of Joe Juneau – his willingness to forge his own path, his balls for going to a U.S. college to study engineering despite speaking no english at all, his ability to get a degree at that same college in three years with a 4.0 GPA, and his sublime touch with the puck around the net were all things that made me root for the guy even when his team happened to be playing my beloved Red Wings. M. Juneau was, to use a somewhat unoriginal phrase, the man.

Which is all fine and dandy, but it is what he is doing after his life in hockey that really sums up what being a Canuck is all about. So if any of those people who ever asked me this question happen to read this, here is your answer. It’s a few years late and a country removed, but it works.

How’s it goin’, eh?

NOTE: This video is posted on the CBC Sports website in a higher-quality format, but there is no way to link directly to the video – their flash player is self-contained and the playlist is always changing. So I have done A Very Bad Thing here and ripped the flash to an MP4 file and posted it on YouTube. Definitely against the rules, but such is life. I really wanted to be able to point people to this item and if that means a rule gets bent, so be it.

In the past I have taken space in These Very Pages to pimp Adobe’s Kuler portal/website/tool/community/whatever – the place where webheads, designers, art freaks, and anyone else with an eye for layout can create and share colour schemes. Now, through the magic of Cocoa Kuler you can have this goldmine of goodness right inside your Mac. Download the plug-in and any application that uses the OSX colour picker – everything from the Finder to InDesign to Photoshop to Keynote – can now access some seriously awesome content. You will be putting together wicked-ass pages and presentations faster than you can say “Wow, PowerPoint presentations look even more ghetto now.”

Oh, and it’s free. You’re welcome.

UPDATE: A day after I posted this they changed the name to Mondrianum. I get the point, this wasn’t just a plug-in for Cocoa-based apps, but come on. Mondrianum? That’s pretty awful.

Just in time for Macworld, a couple of new “Get A Mac” commercials have hit the airwaves. Referee is kind of weak – although the “realization” by PC that he lives on a featureless white plain is pretty good – but Time Machine is wonderful. I have been hoping that they would start to move away from the recent “attack Vista” ads and get back to “Mac is awesome, period” ads. I mean, it’s not even sporting at the point …

I am more than a bit smitten with this font. Stylistically, I adore pretty much everything from this era, and this font has some serious potential for display work. Also, it is wickedly well-though-out, with different kerning and pairing options built-in. Check it out.

As an aside, this guy looks to have some serious talent. Usually you look at a font designer’s portfolio and you see one “good” font, a couple of “maybe okay” ones and a bunch of “crap”. But – while I could do without the Marker/Felt junk – the catalog here has a lot of “good” and least three fonts that count as “fucking great” (Mostra, Kinescope, and Refrigerator).

Also, Goldenbook reminds me of Tootle (my second favourite book from when I was a tiny kid) so that’s kind of fun too.

There have been some hits (”PR Lady”, “Podium”) and some misses (”The Boxer”) in the recent crop of Apple ads, but there is no doubt at all that this year’s Christmas ad is 100% awesome. Enjoy.

There are a lot of people out there who want to do occasional and very simple photo editing – a crop or two, a red-eye correction, maybe an image rotation or flip. While the OSX crowd can use iPhoto for these sorts of quick-n-dirty things, the great unwashed Windoze masses are usually stuck with one of three choices:

1 – massive amounts of overkill with Photoshop
2 - a bastard collection of freeware and shareware apps
3 - the horrific editing tools that come bundled with the various digital cameras

None of these really fit the bill. Photoshop works, oh yes indeed, but it also costs annoying amounts of money and is a behemoth to work with. The nine-dozen freeware apps of doom are cheap, but never tend to do exactly what you want. And the third choice? Forget it. Unless you like pain. And truly shitty results.

Luckily, it’s Flickr to the rescue – and believe me, I never thought I would be saying that. They have partnered up with Picnik (ie: given them shitloads of money) and now the entire Picnik editing tools suite is available on Flickr. And the results are, quite frankly, impressive as hell. You should really give it a try. Kudos all around.

Befuddlr is a super-simple digital jigsaw game – it takes an image from Flickr, scrambles it, and then times you to see how long you need to put the thing back together. You can choose from a variety of canned pics from pre-selected Flickr groups, or use the handy bookmarklet to make any Flickr image into an instant puzzle. If you need a pleasant little diversion on a Friday afternoon, this might just be it.

This is a somewhat off-putting video clip of an Indonesian man who has a skin condition that looks like tree roots – or maybe giant begonia roots, if you want a more accurate mental picture – growing in huge and quite frankly hideous masses from his skin. Don’t watch this if you are freaked out by this sort of thing.

For those that asked, here are a few snaps from this year’s Halloween decorations. I didn’t get as many as I wanted because it was crazy windy and I was kind of busy keeping everything in place.

This year I lighted the path up to the house with glowing skulls – I think it worked out well:

And I am really happy with the lighting effects I had at the end of the drive – this was the first thing the kids saw as they started to approach the house:

I had a lot of pumpkins again this year:

There were some interesting details to be found in the pumpkin patch as you got close to the house:

And I put in some outdoor UV emitters right by the house, which meant that the pumpkin patch got even more interesting when you got right up to the candy:

I also shot some raw video, I may post it later. For now, this should at least sate your curiosity. Enjoy.

Public displays of the Blue Screen Of Death are nothing new – in These Very Pages we’ve had them on gas pumps, mall directories, and (rather distressingly) on the arrivals and departures boards at the Calgary airport. And while those were all heartwarming examples of the folly of trying to use Windoze for anything that might be even remotely mission-critical, they pale in comparison to this display of the BSOD at The Bay’s flagship store in Toronto:

Could anything be more awesome? No, of course not. Stupid question.

There are three new “Get A Mac” ads hitting the airwaves this week, all of them trying to get some mileage out of the ongoing Longhorn Vista woes. “Boxer” is pretty weak, and “PR Lady” is okay … but “Podium” is total gold. Love it to pieces!

There has been some discussion in These Very Pages about Christmas lights and the deployment thereof. Some people have asked if there is a similar “all-out assault” for other holidays, specifically Halloween. The answer would be “sorta” – while there is not a fortnight of lights and music, there is a dressing of the house on trick-or-treat night that gets some good reviews from the neighbourhood kids. It’s amazing that a few flickering lights, some pumpkins, and a couple of fog machines can still give kids the willies … here are some pics from last year’s setup.

Down at the end of the driveway there are tattered ribbons on the poles and lampstands and skeletons lurking about:

Up by the house is the pumpkin patch and strategic fog:

And finally, deep in the bowels of the garage, the Candy Shrine Of EVIL:

This year there will be some graves in the front yard and some more (and better quality) fog, which hopefully will creep the wee ones even more … stay tuned.

I came across this article today and the photo just shakes me to the core. The story that goes with it fills me with both sadness and anger – heavy on the anger – but the picture has grabbed my mind and will just not let go. It definitely one of the most powerful images I have ever seen.

It was pointed out to me that – being in the midst of an election and all – there was a need for editorial balance in the media. Equal time for opposing points of view, and all like that. I agree wholeheartedly, and in that spirit we present an equally uplifting photo from one of the other events taking place last night:

You’re welcome.

There is a timeless sort of joy in the changing of the seasons …

Best. Ecards. Ever.

One of the best Homestar Runner updates to come down the pike in just about forever. It’s brilliant, provided you are hip to both Limozeen and Sloshy and are old enough to remember the Second Coming Of Alternative Music.