Category: Post

     I’m what you would call a casual sports fan. One of my roommates, however, is always watching ESPN. I wandered into the living room on Sunday while “Sportscenter” was on and saw the BEST THING EVER.

     First, some background. My pet peeve with watching football for the last, oh, 26 years has been the presentation of information. The top of the screen would usually have some sort of strip across it with a number denoting the quarter (1-4) and another number denoting the current down (1-4). Usually, these numbers are not labelled. People like my roommate, who watch football all the damn time just KNOW which is the quarter and which is the down. People like me spend a few plays watching to see which number changes to asses the present state of the game.

     The information graphics would change from season to season and channel to channel, and sometimes they were better than others. Usually you could determine which was the quarter number because it was closer to the gameclock. Still, i’ve always said that there had to be a better way to do this – someone should be able to glance at the screen and get all the information immediately without having to fall back on deductive reasoning.

     Anyway: back to Sportscenter. Apparently, this season, FOX (At least I was told it was FOX) has started superimposing an arrow on the field conveying who has posession, what down it is, and how many yards to go for a first down. This SORT of solves the problem, unless you tune in during a time out or something. I only saw clips on sportscenter, so I don’t know how they handle the information between plays, but this is a step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.

     I think I freaked my roommate out a little bit, because I was so excited when I saw this that all I could do to display this excitement was point at the screen and yell “YEAH!” The fact that a play had not yet begun when I chose to point and yell made the whole situation even more ridiculous.

     I tried hunting around a bit for an image of the ‘Arrow’ in question. I watched a few of the NFL video clips on foxsports.com and wondered why they were all talking heads and no sports before it dawned on me that the NFL probably hasn’t liscensed game footage for the internet yet. Not satisfied with simply making watching football way nerdy, I pressed on – searching google for usability studies on sports information graphics. So far I haven’t turned up too much, but I did find this usability study on Electronic Program Guides, which my local cable company (Comcast) should definitely peruse, as certain submenus of our ‘On Demand’ system kick you back to the main menu every time you try and back up. I’m sure ESPN or the networks must have someone who does this internally. What a great job that would be.

     You may have read about the recent discovery of a bit of animation on an ancient Iranian goblet, said to be the first recorded example of man-made animation. The article that’s been making the rounds (I first saw it on Cartoon Brew, it was also on Boing Boing the other day) can be found here.
Here are the important bits for those too lazy to click through to the article:

     “An animated piece on an earthen goblet that belongs to 5000 years ago was found in Burnt City in Sistan-Baluchistan province, southeastern Iran.”

     “The earthenware found in Burnt City, one of the most developed civilizations dating back to 5000 years ago, show the images of goat and fish more than any other subject. It seems these animals were used more than any other by the people of this city.”

     “On this goblet, with a diameter of 8 cm and height of 10 cm, the images show movement in an intricate way that is an unprecedented discovery. Some earthenware found in Burnt City show repetitive images, but none of them implicate any movements.”

     “While excavating the grave in which the cream-colored goblet has been found, we came across a skeleton that probably belongs to the creator of this piece”, Mansour Sajjadi, the Iranian archaeologist responsible for excavations in Burnt City told CHN.

     At the end of the article, there’s a link to a short .avi that the archaeologists put together to show off the animation. You can view that file here. Unfortunately, they chose to keep each frame on-screen for three seconds, and then crossfade into the next frame. Anyone familiar with the principles of animation will see that this presentation completely defeats the purpose of the sequential images.

     I was pretty excited to see the first example of animation, so I was understandably disappointed with the video file offered with the article. I wanted to see the animation as it was intended, so I took the .avi and edited it down into the animated gif below. E-Archaeology.

     There aren’t any photos of the actual goblet itself in the article, so I assumed that the illustrations stretched around the sides of the goblet and were intended to be viewed by spinning the goblet, which implies looping. This is what I do with my free time.

     So, I finally got around to seeing Spider-Man 2. It was pretty fun, even if it did seem to hit the same notes as Spider-man 1, in roughly the same order. One thing about it has been bugging the CRAP out of me though.

     Ok, so Dr. Octopus wants a batch of Desirable Compound X, which only Harry Osbourne can afford. Osbourne wants Spider-Man dead because he killed his father, so he tells Dr. Octopus to kill Spider-Man. He is to accomplish this by finding Peter Parker, who has a reputation for being able to find Spider-man. Upon locating Parker, the first thing Dr. Octopus does is THROW A CAR AT HIS HEAD. He doesn’t know that he’s Spider-Man yet. If I was banking on an obscure piece of information that only one random guy had, I probably wouldn’t push my luck by seeing if he could whip his precious-information-containing noggin out of the way of a flying vehicle. Am I missing something? Perhaps this has been discussed elsewhere.

     I added two videos to my Zumpano page: “I Dig You” and “Behind the Beehive.” They appear to have been encoded using some archaic codec, so quicktime chokes on the sound. Until I find the time to re-encode them, you should be able to play them with VLC (Mac) or MPlayer (PC).

     If anyone stumbles upon a digital copy of Zumpano’s video for “The Party Rages On,” let me know.

     Apparently there exists a black and white video for Radiohead’s “We Suck Young Blood,” shot by director P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). Here are the details, from Thom Yorke:

     “Paul Thomas Anderson came into the studio and he brought this camera with him, it was exactly the same camera model that they shot the Nosferatu in, basically this camera is a box and you wind it, and you have to have a tempo to wind it to and if you wind it fast or slow you get this extraordinary movement, and we wanted to shoot this really over the top vaudeville b-movie thing with it, because that to me is partly where it was coming from, and also it was really sick and sexual in a really peverse way, very L.A. as far as I’m concerened. I think that was the reason why we went to L.A., because ‘we suck young blood’ was our take on Hollywood really. in fact, we went out to a party that night everyone was dressed as mad hatters, it just fit completely. we went to this place, it was just… [whispers] you people are so silly. and it was like that’s how they dressed every day to create an impression. it was brilliant. we felt like old people, maybe we’d missed something.”

     This quote comes from a relatively rare promo interview CD [cover], discussed in a thread in the P.T. Anderson forum at xixax.com, which I found via this posting on metafilter. Posters in the same thread appear to have determined that the clip does not appear on the latest Radiohead DVD, “The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of all Time“.

 Also of note is the bad blood that apparently exists between the band and director extraordinaire Michel Gondry:

     “I generally find a good way of communicating to prevent clash, but I had one terrible experience with Radiohead,” he says of his 2001 video for “Knives Out.” Gondry, going through a breakup at the time, transferred his despair to a character played by lead singer Thom Yorke, grieving anxiously in a crowded hospital room.

     “I showed him a storyboard and every single detail: he was completely excited and happy for it – and then, it turned out, they all criticize me for being selfish and putting my own views on it and my own introspection,” says a still peeved Gondry. (Yorke and Radiohead declined to comment for this story.) “And they didn’t let me use my video for my DVD!” he adds, his voice rising.

     “And I’m really mad at them for having done that to me, that they abuse their power! It did not go smooth, but if it went smooth, it would be mediocre.”

     Oh man, a snowstorm closed work today, so I got to lay in bed and watch cartoons (The Venture Brothers and Tom Goes to the Mayor Xmas specials) until I was sufficiently awake. I found one more MP3 to post for christmas, so here it is:

North Coast Noel – ‘Enter Snowman’
From: North Coast Noel (2001)

     It’s a fusion of Metallica’s biggest hit and Frosty the Snowman. The rigorous recreation of the intro is a bit tedious, but if you skip ahead to 1:12 where the vocals kick in, it’s pretty good. It took my roommates and I awhile to figure out what was being said in the chorus – it’s “Thumpity thump thump.” The Hetfieldian exclamations during the “truck hitting the bed” part are pretty good, too.

     Oh man, who wants to hear an angry story about the Post Office? Oh, everyone does? Then I’ll tell it!

     This holiday season the loose musical collective in which I participate tried an experiment. We offered to mail out a free holiday CD to the first hundred people to request one (Don’t bother requesting one now, we’re completely out – BUT you can download it for free). We’ve been mailing these 100 CD’s out in batches over the last week. Today I took the last pile of 20 to the post office.

     The Setup: You can mail a modestly packaged CD in a cardboard sleeve almost anywhere in the US for sixty cents. This is convenient, because we could pick up a sheet of sixty-cent stamps and just drop them off at the window – we wouldn’t have to wait for the little label spitter-outer to shoot out 20 stickers each time we stopped by. The first several batches of CD’s: No problem. Today’s batch: big problem.

     It seems that in packaging this batch, I had taped over the sixty cent stamps with 100% transparent cello tape. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is another one of those things that everyone in the country but me knows, but apparently if you put tape on a stamp, it becomes VOID. At least that’s what my postal teller told me.

     When she told me this I thought she was kidding, so I sort of chuckled – until she gave me this weird dazed look and asked if wanted to buy new stamps for the envelopes. Then we got into a bizarre discussion about how I’d already paid for the service of their delivery, which clearly hadn’t happened yet, and here she was – asking me to pay again, for the same service.

     I asked her what would have happened if I had dropped them in the mailbox instead of taking them to the window, and she explained that not only were they void, but attempting to use them would be MAIL FRAUD because they couldn’t be cancelled.

     It was almost five o’ clock and there was a christmas-sized line of weary postal patrons behind me, so I asked for a number to call to speak to someone about it and paid her, just to get out of there.

     So: I paid $24.00 for $12.00 worth of stamps, and my dastardly scheme to include sixty cents of free, FRAUDULANT postage with each holiday greeting I sent: FOILED.

     …and to think I never went ahead with my “Mail a Taco Bell Chicken Quesadilla to someone” experiment (The packaging is very envelop-ish) because I felt bad for the poor postal workers who would come into contact with it.