Blockbuster Video’s torn-ticket logo once fronted thousands of stores worldwide. That was then, this is now… by late 2013, Blockbuster was officially busted.

This Is The End

(images via: 2 Oceans Vibe)

Blockbuster Video did not go gentle into that good night; it went loudly, painfully and messily. The final curtain (for all intents and purposes) finally came down at 11pm on November 9th of 2013 when a Blockbuster store in Hawaii became the last store to rent out a movie. According to Blockbuster themselves, the film was “This Is The End” starring James Franco and Seth Rogen.

Scots On The Rocks

(image via: Daily Record)

A vicious storm that struck Scotland in late 2011 only damaged the Blockbuster Video location above; it took a tsunami of red ink to sink the chain for good. It’s a pity the hapless owner above didn’t see the signs of impending doom while he was occupied in repairing the sign of his franchise store.

(images via: Past The Pixels and Zoopla)

The Blockbuster Video location in Dunoon, on the scenic Cowal Peninsula in western Scotland, had little area competition but local success was meaningless in the face of global mismanagement on an epic scale. In the case of the Dunoon store, deterioration had begun even as the chain was in its final death throes… and rapidly accelerated once the store shut its doors for good. View more interior shots and learn more about this now-for-sale ex-Blockbuster at the Zoopla site.

That Socks!

(images via: Penarth News)

The last days of Blockbuster somewhat resembled the last hours on the Titanic – lots of rearranging the deck chairs for no discernible purpose and neglible useful results. Take the above doomed Blockbuster store in Penarth, Cornwall, UK. for example. With customers spending their hard-earned pence on internet-based entertainment, the desperate store began stocking socks instead. Evidently in Cornwall one cannot purchase socks online.

VA Means Vacant

(images via: RetailByRyan95)

Flickr user RetailByRyan95 was in the right place at the right times when a Blockbuster store in Virgina’s Poquoson Commons shopping center closed in early May of 2009. Presciently documenting the store as it was before closing, Ryan returned almost exactly one month later, camera in hand, to observe what remained.

(images via: RetailByRyan95)

Critiques of today’s supposedly disposable society ring true when the differences between an open and a closed Blockbuster are so evident after only a short time. Removal of stock, signage and branding also reveals the essentially sterile nature of modern retail-commercial McArchitecture, which is shown to have little if any appeal once tenants have flown the coop.

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Name: PuppyPics
Platform: Chrome Browser, Web
Author: Ezra Velazquez
Technology: JavaScript, HTML, CSS
Source Code: Available on GitHub
Version: 0.9

About PuppyPics: Chrome extension that replaces page images with pictures of puppies!
Intent: Brighten up people’s day with pictures of puppies.
Personal Intent: Wanted to build a Chrome extension and something fun.
Backstory: Wanted to stretch my JavaScript muscles and follow a new set of guidelines for development.

Gallery:

Stretching and reversing conventions for balancing foreground and background, one urban photographer in Tokyo is taking the Japanese concept of Bokeh to dazzling extremes.

Bokeh (which translates as ‘blur’) plays with a lens’s circle of confusion in which points of light become glowing discs, but instead of making the background fuzzy, Takashi Kitajima unexpectedly lets the foreground become the backdrop.

The result seems to highlight the chaos and movement of what is closest to the viewer’s perspective in a surreal but suggestive way that indirectly resonates with our actual experience of cities.

In turn, more distant monuments, buildings and bridges on the horizon or off to one side emerge as stable anchors, contrasted with a sea of light.

The net effect is something between a photograph and a watercolor or pastel painting, a fusion of concrete realism and playful abstraction.

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Gonna get to that New Year’s resolution next week. Promise.

Theater of Pain: The Knicks as Performance Art
Robert Silverman
The Classical

If there is one thing that’s been good about this Knicks season, it’s that it’s produced writing of the likes I’ve never read before in my time as an internet-bound fan. This piece takes the proverbial cake, so to speak; a loose comparison of this Knicks campaign to performance art, and the way the audience becomes complicit with whatever the performance artist is trying to do. The piece trots along at a beguiling but eerily sinister pace; taking the reader on a slow march through Silverman’s questionable performance art with small snippets of the Knicks season sprinkled on top. Silverman concludes that while the performance is offensive, sloppy, and questionably executed, it is the very spectacle that keeps bringing himself, and other fans, back to enjoy the show. “The Knicks are not the NBA’s worst team, but they are the laughingstock of the NBA—more ridiculous than they are bad,” writes Silverman, adding that they are “too sour and paranoid and unhappy in their ridiculous to be worth a laugh.” Yet, “those of us who consider ourselves fans keep coming back, knowing that we’ll be mocked for doing so in various ways.” A really great piece from Silverman in the wake of a bizarrely artistic Knicks season, in a sadistic sort of way.

Amir, Freed
Miles Wray
Hickory High

Definitely enjoyed this piece from Diss contributor Miles Wray at Hickory High, which focuses on power forward du jour Amir Johnson. Of course, the Toronto Raptors have been the hottest team in the NBA since trading away Rudy Gay, and Amir Johnson has become one of the faces of the post-trade resurgance. Wray takes us on a brief spin around the block of life that has been Amir Johnson’s; a strangely seasoned veteran who has seen quite a bit in his decade in the NBA, and who still has quite a bit of career left. Hearkening back to an analytical era that is fond and familiar to many of us late-twentysomethings, Wray chooses to look at Amir Johnson as a player “freed”, and indeed, this is a beautiful thing. “Freed Amir looks and acts really different than we imagined In-Captivity Amir would act when a coach finally up and unchained him,” writes Wray, who includes a useful corpus of retro Amir Johnson highlights and tidbits. I learned much about Amir in this piece by Mr. Wray, who has quite the talent at this basketball-writing thing.

Does Race Matter in NBA Coaching?
Andres Alvarez
Boxscore Geeks

This ambitious piece seeks to answer an important question: does race matter when it comes to getting a job as an NBA head coach? To get at an answer, the piece’s authors (in addition to Alvarez, Joe Price and Chandler Phelps of BYU, as well as Ben Noah) take a look at hard data tracking the number of games coached between 1991-2013. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the numbers tell a troubling tale. Overall, far more white men have coached NBA games than black men over the last two decades. Moreover, among the black coaches, playing in the NBA is a minimum requirement. White coaches are far less likely to have played in the NBA than their black colleagues. According to Alvarez, this seems to hint at structural shortcomings (such as institutionalized racism) that lead to more opportunities for white candidates than black ones. This is a very important piece due to its focus on racial inequalities in the NBA workplace, and its production of a set of data that deserves further analysis in years to come.

Wolves’ Ricky Rubio Facing a Momentous 2014
Britt Robson
MinnPost.com

As much as we’d like to, we can’t hide it anymore: Ricky Rubio can’t shoot, and it’s starting to become a problem for a lot of different reasons. Luckily we have Britt Robson, a longtime Wolves vet for a variety of Minnesota-based outlets, to explain all the reasons why Rubio’s non-existent offensive game is becoming an issue, and what might be done about it. Robson is one of my favorite NBA writers because of his ability to lay out the complexities of the NBA in layman’s terms. Without using any of the jargon that has become part and parcel with NBA writing, Robson easily discusses max and super-max contracts, plus-minus, branding, efficiency and the importance help defense without it seeming overbearing or unnecessary. In the end, he produces one of the fullest efforts on Ricky Rubio I’ve ever read, and offers a set of assertions that seem backed by both evidence and eloquent writing. This is well worth the read, and very nice work from a writer I have enjoyed for a very long time.

NBA Shootaround: New Years’ Resolutions
Grantland Staff
Grantland

It was something of a quiet week in the basketblogosphere, so we’ll wrap it up with this mixed-bag New Years resolution piece from Grantland. You like all the writers, and I like all the writers, and they’re all telling jokes that are at least as good as the ones they use on Twitter. And it’s a textbook Grantland “Take a Work Email Thread and Turn It Into Content” piece, so you know there are some decent gifs and YouTube shorts embedded in there in order to make the piece longer and more piece-like. I enjoyed the “chuckers” portion. netw3rk always has good jokes. I approve, especially if you’re in the bathroom. So give it a look-see and I’m sure you’ll find something you like.

As someone whose job includes both teaching and research, I’ve always found it valuable to attend both research-oriented conferences and teaching-oriented conferences. Reading the literature on physics education just isn’t the same as having conversations and making personal connections with others who are enthusiastic and dedicated teachers or PER scholars. I’ve just returned from a day at the AAPT winter meeting (it was 100 ºF colder in Minneapolis than it had been in Orlando!) , where I had the chance to hear a report and discussion of the progress of the AAPT undergraduate curriculum task force.  I’m part of the subcommittee developing lab guidelines to support this work, and with an upcoming review of our department, the topic was timely. A couple of items that lingered with me from the discussion:

• When talking about the undergraduate curriculum, physicists often talk in terms of courses. Instead, we need to be articulating the skills and concepts that we want a physics student to learn. Focusing on skills and concepts, instead of course accounting, provides departments more flexibility and room for creativity in the curriculum. However, it also requires more careful coordination between the members of a department because everyone has to agree that particular skills will get covered in particular courses.  The corollary to this point is that spiraling in the curriculum is generally a strength, but only when the spiraling  is well done, not providing too much redundancy or leaving too many gaps.

• Computation needs to be more fully integrated into the core curriculum. The importance of computation in physics is growing, but few departments have computational methods infused throughout the curriculum. Personally, I’d love to see more connection between all three elements — theory, experiment, and computation — in courses. At Carleton, this can be difficult because the faculty members who are most comfortable teaching computation are often not particularly comfortable teaching labs beyond the first year and vice versa. We need to find better ways to collaborate and support each other as colleagues if we want to fully integrate theory, experiment, and computation.  (I know our neighbor to the north, the University of St Thomas, has made a concerted effort at this integration.)

• Physicists need to think about what skills and content we can stop teaching, or at least move out of the core, to make more room for new skills and contemporary topics.

• Engineering, biology, and computer science are much better about including original research or design projects in the first course in the major. Students can (and do) do amazing projects in physics classes, but often that only occurs when students get to the intermediate and advanced classes.

I’d be interested to hear what others are doing to address these topics.

Waiting until the crowds thin out. Watching basketball until then.

Monday: Orlando Magic at LA Clippers (7:30 PM PST on League Pass)

There’s only three games on the docket tonight, and they all suck something fierce. This late-night fete between the bumbling Magic and the wounded Clippers is the best one of the bunch. I’m planning on having this on as background noise as I cover my entire life in 409 and hope for the best. My apartment reeks of me. I need to scrub.

Tuesday: Golden State Warriors at Milwaukee Bucks (5:00 PM PST on League Pass)

The Homer Game this weeks pits my beloved (and surging) Golden State Warriors against the Milwaukee Bucks, who are also surging, but mostly in rage against each other. There’s not a lot to be happy about in Milwaukee, what with the bad team, the last-place standing in the awful conference, the bottom-feeder numbers in almost every statistical category, and the bitter fucking cold. It doesn’t help that Andrew Bogut, the guy they drafted first overall, and who they traded away after two acute injuries compromised his career, is playing some of the best basketball for a first-place team. Nor does it help that the guy they traded him away for, Monta Ellis, is playing some of the best basketball of his career for a different (but nearly as successful) team after delivering a season and a half of inefficient chuckery for the Bucks. Sorta makes you want to play six straight hours of Big Buck Hunter while getting tanked on Milwaukee’s Best in a dive bar somewhere. I can hear the Toby Keith now. I don’t miss the midwest.

Wednesday: Phoenix Suns at Minnesota Timberwolves (6:30 PM PST on ESPN)

Wednesday’s are always my longest day at work, so I’ll be in the mood for points and points only, motherfucker. After a dragging day on the job, nothing makes me more peeved than a boring-ass defensive slug-fest. I know defense wins playoff games. I know this. But it’s January. Just give me baskets, man. I don’t think these two teams are going to disappoint, but it’s sorta hard to tell with the Wolves these days. Their offense has gone a bit cold as of late; much of it having to do with outside shots that are no longer falling with any sort of consistency. With that in mind, I’ll be looking to see if the so-called “Bruise Brothers” are able to feast upon the Suns’ rather porous interior defense and stuff the stat sheet, or whether the Suns’ vaunted dual point guard lineup is able to exploit the Wolves ho-hum defense. Again: all I want is points. I’m a cheap date, especially on Wednesdays.

Thursday: Miami Heat at New York Knicks (5:00 PM PST on TNT)

Appearing before us like a mutated test-tube baby with two heads is this week’s TNT double header: Heat-Knicks, followed up by Thunder-Nuggets. The horror! The horror! What cruel God allowed for the creation of this atrocity??? Our goal will be to find something in this scientific monstrosity to love. I’m choosing to focus on the Grade-A self-flagellation that Knicks fans will inflict upon themselves (and others) on Twitter as LeBron James goes off on them at MSG, and as trade machine delusions focused around Melo and Chandler grow as numerous as stars in the night sky. That will likely be enough.

Friday: Dallas Mavericks at New Orleans Hornets (5:00 PM PST on League Pass)

This honestly is the game I’m looking forward to the most this week. There’s the Dirk vs. Davis factor, but that’s just the low hanging fruit. Mavs are starting to show a bit of shakiness; .500 in their last 10 games, and having dropped a few games in sorta bullets-in-the-foot fashion. The Pelicans could be gaining ground if they wanted to — the Wolves aren’t living the carpe diem life, either — but they can’t quite seem to put it together either. So who knows where these teams will be by this point in the week; perhaps fighting for the 8th seed, or even dealing with premature “season slipping away” narratives. I’m already thinking of excuses to get out of social commitments so I can watch this game.

Saturday: Brooklyn Nets at Toronto Raptors (4:00 PM PST on League Pass)

I will freely admit that I am all-aboard the Raptors bandwagon. I am of the opinion that the NBA is a better place when the Raptors are good, and it has almost nothing to do with the team itself. Everything about the Raptors total package is pretty cool right now. Raptor’s play-by-play dude Matt Devlin calls the game like a boxing match, describing jumpers and blocks like jabs and uppercuts. He’s played as big of a role as anyone in making the Raptors surge as exciting as anything this season. The Air Canada Centre has been bumping, as of late, and I’ve grown to appreciate the Raptors fan base, which is surprisingly pluckish and prickly, both in their reactions on the television and on social media. It’s all been a lot of fun. In a season that has undeniably been dimmed by untimely injuries to star players, and what seems to be a prevalence of uncompetitive games, the Raptors have been a compelling storyline. Hopefully they keep it up.

Sunday: Cleveland Cavaliers at Sacramento Kings (3:00 PM PST on League Pass)

Sunday’s will be mostly spoken for until the Niners are eliminated from the playoffs, but I’ll make some time to check in on this shit team slug fest. Not sure what it is about saving the bad teams for the weekend, but that always seems to be when I find the time to watch them. More than most other teams, the Cavs and the Kings seem to put the polar nature of human existence on brutal display. Both of these teams have seen their seasons greatly altered by just about every NBA-type distraction, from trades, to emotional outbursts, to coaching transitions, to untimely injury. In the mess, we have two borderline stars (of whom one likely will not be playing), a Rookie of the Year candidate, tons of available pieces who could help a contender, and a myriad of other crazy storylines. And every single one of them will likely be put on hold while I watch the Niners game. But I’ll have this on in the background I think.

A global poll of attitudes toward wealth has found what many domestic critics allege already: Chinese today are just too materialistic.

The survey was conducted by the French market research company Ipsos in September and polled more than 16,000 adults in 20 countries.

Chinese respondents topped the list in measuring success by their possessions, coming in more than double the global average, according to the results published last week. Seventy-one percent of Chinese respondents agreed with the statement “I measure my success by the things I own"…

Chinese bling

Chinese were also the most likely to agree with the statement “I feel under a lot of pressure to be successful and make money.” Sixty-eight percent of Chinese surveyed agreed with this statement…

Although large parts of the country remain poor, China now has a flourishing middle class and there are few major cities that do not boast a luxury shopping district or two. According to the research firm Euromonitor International, in 2012 China overtook France to become the world’s third-largest market for luxury goods…

The poll results should, however, be carefully weighed. Ipsos said that results from China “are not reflective of the general population” because the country’s Internet penetration rate is less than 60 percent. However… the participants in the survey are deemed to be “primary engaged citizens” with education, income and connectivity levels comparable to those in more developed countries, the company said…

• four slightly swaying roses against a blue sky somewhere in Pasadena
• part of a fiber optic art work at the Huntington Library
• steps of a moving escalator reflected in its shiny metal side panel 
• the shadow of a tree on the USC campus as it blows in the wind as seen through a venetian blind
• water droplets landing in a Monterey Park fountain to which someone had thoughtfully added soap 
• a tree reflected in the lake at the Chinese Garden, also at the Huntington.

So, when I got up this morning, I found this on weather.gov:

It’s cold, everyone!

This was written for my work blog (what are the odds, right?) Read @ MPL.

A common complaint about cookbooks is there aren’t enough pictures. Boy howdy do I have a cookbook for those complainers! Picture Cook: See. Make. Eat. by Katie Shelly is a graphic cookbook where the recipes are drawn not written. Each recipe features drawings of the ingredients and the process of preparing the dish, with the instructions contained in the drawings. The recipes aren’t strict blueprints for perfect food, but more like a framework to experiment with. Instead of a recipe for tacos, she has “Some Thoughts on Tacos” featuring a huge variety of ingredients that you can combine in any way you want to create your perfect taco. People who are strict recipe followers probably won’t like this; it’s very loosey-goosey. Shelly does finish each recipe with a ribbon across the bottom of each page featuring the measurements and quantities of ingredients, so you aren’t totally out on a limb. If you want a taste of the cookbook (pun intended!), she has posted several preview recipes on her website.

In addition to the yummy food, I am totally smitten with Katie Shelly’s drawings. The lines are beautiful and clean, the colors bold, and the recipes very tempting. Cookbook innovation is pretty infrequent. People stopped trying to change it up once they figured out a standard format. And don’t get me wrong, that format is wonderfully efficient; but not all recipes have to be that way! This cookbook is beautiful, interesting, and delicious. Some cookbooks have a tone of haute cuisine, but Picture Cook is just an artist sharing her favorite recipes.

My absolute favorite part of this recipe is the hands. Mix! Around!

Notes:
Cover photo via Goodreads.
Recipe photo from katieshelly.com.

2014 Reading Challenge

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The city of the future addresses problems like overpopulation, pollution and sprawl by building high-density vertical neighborhoods that are interconnected at all levels so residents can move freely from one place to another on foot. These 14 city concepts, some of which are already under construction, emphasize walkability, sometimes going so far as to ban cars altogether.

Car-Free City in China

China is creating a totally car-free city from scratch, building a new urban center around a high-rise core housing 80,000 people. Great City, planned for a rural area outside Chengdu, will be entirely walkable and surrounded by green space. Getting from the center to the outer ring of parks on foot takes just ten minutes. Other nearby urban centers will be accessible via mass transit. The city will use 48% less energy and 58% less water than a more conventional city of the same size, and will produce 89% less landfill waste.

Masdar, World’s First Zero-Carbon City

The world’s most sustainable metropolis – with no cars or skyscrapers allowed – is currently under construction in the desert outside Abu Dhabi. Masdar, the world’s first zero-carbon, zero waste city, will feature a public rapid transit system in place of personal automobiles, and will be fueled by solar, wind and geothermal power. Giant ‘sunflower umbrellas’ designed for the city center will provide movable shade during the day, store heat, and then close and release heat at night.

Shan-Shui City

MAD Architects envisions Shan-Shui City as the city of the future. Inspired by the worship of mountains and water in China, the concept is made up of large-scale mixed-use buildings with lots of public spaces where people can gather, communicate and enjoy nature. High-density living and making all necessary resources readily available within easy walking or public transit distance is a far more sustainable way of building a city than the current trend of “boxes spreading all over,” say the architects. The concept makes access to nature just as vital as access to schools, health care and work.

Dubai Sustainable City

Baharash Architecture proposes a sustainable Dubai incorporating “the best practices in environmental building technologies,” with a strong focus on community connections and social interaction in green spaces. The design consists of 550 residential villas, organic farms, educational facilities and 600,000 square feet of solar panels. The city will produce 50 percent of its own energy through solar power and offset its carbon footprint via mass transit.

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Walkability Hyperdensity 14 Concepts For Future Cities

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Polish duo Sainer and Bezt, collectively known as Etam Cru, paint massive-scale murals of people and animals on blank building faces around the world. Their unexpected visuals liven up dreary urban surfaces, often stretching dozens of feet into the air. Some of the tallest, in fact, cover ten-story facades.

Recent collaborative works include a blue-haired girl bathing in a jar of strawberry jam entitled ‘Moonshine’, painted as part of the Richmond Mural Project in Virginia, and ‘Madamme Chicken’ in their native Lodz, Poland.

Each painter also works solo, as well. Sainer’s work is reminiscent of graphic novels, while Bezt works in brighter colors and a somewhat more realistic style. Check out more at their blog and on Facebook.

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