Monthly Archives: August 2010

Fizz

this batch of root beer is the best-carbonated root beer I have made yet.

1-10-50

A US Dollar Redesign

If it were up to me, this US Currency redesign by Dowling Duncan would be our money tomorrow.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these bills, to me anyway, is the vertically-oriented format:

Why the vertical format?

When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.

The artwork on each bill relates in some way to the number of the bill.

$1 – The first African American president
$5 – The five biggest native American tribes
$10 – The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 – 20th Century America
$50 – The 50 States of America
$100 – The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Simply put, this is a great look.

Tarùsc

The lost language of Italian parasols and the men who made them.

According to local folklore, il Tarùsc was a very shy, small bad-tempered gnome who lived on the slopes of Mottarone and Motta Rossa. He was surly, difficult, and misanthropic. Nevertheless from him the ombrellai learned the art of making the shapeliest, lightest, most lissome and elegant umbrellas in all the world. And in the process Tarùsc taught the ombrellai how to speak his own strange tongue.

[The Paris Review]

Sunday Brunch

I Miss OLGA

There was a time (as I recall, the late 90s or perhaps even the early 2000s) when you could search for guitar tabs on the internet, and actually find useful ones, and sometimes you would even find more than one. As I think back on it, a lot of these tabs were on fan-created websites. If not, there was always OLGA (the Online Guitar Archive), one of the best resources the internet ever had to offer, now litigated out of existence.

Now, you search for, say, “Sunny Day Real Estate tabs” as I just was, or “Neutral Milk Hotel tabs”, or whatever band you’re searching for, and all you get are these ridiculous tab sites like 911tabs.com, ultimate-guitar.com or some other equally useless site, all of which have the exact same file. Infuriating.

The only really good band-specific site I know of that still exists is the R.E.M. Guitar Archive.

NBA uniform updates!

The Utah Jazz have unveiled their new retro-inspired uniforms, and they’re utterly fantastic:

The Jazzzzz

I am so psyched that they’re going back to this sort of look. The note logo is one of the more iconic sports logos and this “update” makes their late 90s-2000s jerseys look like junk (which they mostly were until the last couple of years).

Grade: A+

Contrast this with the Timberwolves unveiling their jersey updates, in which they stupidly removed all traces of green from their color scheme, and as a result basically just look like the Orlando Magic:

Timberwolves BOOOOOOOOOOO

Awful. The only saving grace is that they made the collar look better, but that can’t possibly make up for ditching the green. There is a very slight improvement in the uni number typography as well, but it’s very slight.

Grade: D-

The best sound for an 11-year-old kid in the 80s was the sound of a five dollar bill being converted into quarters.

- Dan Benjamin