“I Used To Be Younger” is a fun new photo blog featuring photos that show what people look like now compared to when they were younger.
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Today I completed first transaction using Square (see previous post), buying a latte at Sightglass Coffee in San Francisco. I had the receipt emailed to me. Here’s what it looks like. It’s a great system, I can’t wait to be able to use it more places. Restaurants would be at the top of my list. It’s time to give up that tired old ritual.
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photo by unknown
Surviving members of the San Francisco Suicide Club are hosting a memorial event for co-founder David T. Warren (AKA: R.J. Mololopozy, Irving Glikk, Flammo LeGrande, etc.,) from 2-7pm on Saturday January 2nd, 2010 at Playland-Not-At-The-Beach in El Cerrito, CA.
David Warren died in a East Bay hospital on January 2, 2009. This is the same day of the month, exactly 32 years after Dave, along with Adrienne Burk, Gary Warne and Nancy Prussia founded The San Francisco Suicide Club. The notion struck them after a terrifying adventure where they clung desperately to a heavy barricade chain atop the seawall under the Golden Gate Bridge at Fort Point as thirty foot waves crashed down on top of them. Later, over tea and pastries the four friends decided to start a club where they would encourage members to “live each day as though it were their last” by creating events and experiences that would challenge their deep personal fears, expand their knowledge and understanding of their world and those in it AND be hella fun.
Dave was a carnival magician and barker as a young man and retained a lifetime interest in the seedy world of carneys, amusement parks and sardonic magicians. In 1975, two years after the magical and (by the end) seedy amusement park Playland at the Beach was demolished Dave founded Playland Research Corporation. PRC was dedicated to collecting and archiving photos, film, personal interviews of and about the classic attraction out at Ocean Beach that served as a magnet for young and old alike.
His surviving collection was donated to Playland-Not-At-The-Beach a wonderful museum in El Cerritto curated by Richard Tuck.
In 1978, along with Chris De Monterrey, David restored and operated the Giant Camera Obscura below the Cliff House at Ocean Beach. This spectral attraction, one of fewer that half a dozen surviving in the world, was originally envisioned by Leonardo DaVinci and became a popular type of attraction at scenic tourist spots during the Victorian era.
photo by unknown
The Suicide Club morphed into The Cacophony Society in the mid 1980’s. Out of Cacophony, Burning Man was born. Dave Warren was lighted the wooden man by blowing a 15 foot flame.
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Along with being a beautifully designed, full-featured iPhone flashlight app, Safety Light by The Iconfactory also includes a SOS signal option for emergency rescue.
via Daring Fireball
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Phillip Niemeyer, art director at Double Triple in Brooklyn, created a “Picturing the Past 10 Years” chart for the New York Times Opinion section that features graphics represending major events in the last decade. Here’s a larger version.
via Stowe Boyd
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Ricky Gervais makes a special guest appearance on Sesame Street where he sings Elmo a Celebrity Lullaby.
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The film “Half-Life” is a trip. It’s funny, it’s weird, it’s upsetting and it’s sweet. It was home-grown in the Bay Area by Jennifer Phang who shot it in the Diablo Valley, with visual effects out of the SF Academy of Art CG program and sound by Novato-based Audiosfx. I caught it at South By Southwest and got pretty excited about it.
As of December 29th, it’s on DVD and VOD (through Warner Digital). The movie’s site and blog are each worth checking out.
Here’s a couple teaser trailers:
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As a result of their research doing the “How Much is Inside a Cocktail” series, Cockeyed has created an extensive Cocktail Cost Calculator that helps you determine how much it costs to make various cocktails.
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The Pantsless Knights have created “I’m on a Mac”, a spoof of “I’m on a Boat”, the Lonely Island song that has been nominated for a Grammy.
Here’s the original music video for “I’m on a Boat”.
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Gord Fynes shot a photo of an awesome chalk drawing featuring a giant squid snapping off the top of the iconic CN Tower in Toronto.
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“Never a Year Like ‘09″, the 2009 year in review animated video by JibJab. Check out the JibJab blog for a “Behind the Scenes” look at how the video was made.
Wow, 2009 was really a useless year, here’s to 2010 and the next decade!
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Chicken John is selling his legendary warehouse located at 3359 Cesar Chavez Street at the foot of Bernal Heights in San Francisco. It is on the market with an asking price of $899,000.
This unique property is next to the Valencia Corridor/Mission District with very easy access to transit and freeways. The main portion is a spacious open warehouse/work area with 20 ft. ceilings and eight skylights. There is a large bright room above the front entry plus more offices/storage rooms.
There is a roof deck with hot tub. This property potentially might work for an architect, artist, cabinetmaker, plumber or contractor. Huge open kitchen has a Wolf range and two refrigerators. All appliances are included. Zero lot-line structure.
Chicken’s warehouse has been home to many unique events over the years, including the long running Ask Dr. Hal Show. Early on the warehouse even served as a location for Laughing Squid Web Hosting tech support when Paul de Jong lived there.
Here’s what Chicken has to say about the sale of his warehouse:
I’m caught in the mortgage crisis by association. I took a 5 year arm mortgage with a balloon payment thinking I could re-finance. There are no loans today for Showman with non-conforming warehouses. So it goes on the block. Hell, I’ll even finance it…..
Here’s one more reason to buy the warehouse, it comes with a wonderful “Chicken John Rinaldi For Dog Catcher” mural painted by Mongoloid.
photos by Scott Beale
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ZOOM was a PBS kids show produced in Boston and syndicated nationally. There were two runs of it, most recently from 1999 to 2005. But it’s the original 1972 to 1978 version that burned holes in my evolving brain.
By season 5 (1976) the 70’s funky grooves were in full effect:
The cast changed each season, but it was always multicultural and there was usually at least one kid who looked like s/he’d never had haircut.
The sometimes wacky, frenetic style of the show gave a pretty clear indication that the adults involved were fans of the show Laugh-In, which was in its heyday at the time. For example, this “Fannee Doolee” clip:
ZOOM even had their own language, Ubbi Dubbi, which is Pig Latin-esque but harder to figure out if you don’t know the trick. There’s lots of Ubbi Dubbi out there, but here are a few examples:
Why didn’t anyone straighten this kid’s shirt before he went on:
Here Ubbi Dubbi combines with pantomime & 70’s video editing for a singular effect:
By 2000, in the second run of the show, they had to do Ubbi Dubbi rap:
Another segment I vividly remember is “Roll Out the Barrel”, which was some kind of viewer mail thing; it confused the hell out of me why there was a barrel involved. I managed to find one clip of it online–there are none on YouTube.
In fact there’s surprisingly little online about the odd, rugby-shirted kid-ruled past reality of ZOOM. It surprised me anyway. The current PBS site has a tiny tiny Boomer ZOOMers nostalgia section. Ugh.
TVparty.com has a decent one page fan’s history of the show. Another site has a collection of sound samples of Zoom (and other 70’s kids shows and commercials). And of course there’s Wikipedia which lets you in on the secret to Fannee Doolee.
To send us out, here are the closing credits from Season 3:
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“Star Wars / A-Team” by kalleanka71
via The Official Star Wars Blog
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Annabel Scheme is a short novella written by Robin Sloan that he published through through the support of a Kickstarter project.
It’s a story about a Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century. Holmes is a woman, Watson is an AI, all the good cases are on the internet, and some thing very strange has happened to San Francisco…
You can download a digital version for free under a Creative Commons license.
Here’s the animated book cover for Annabel Scheme.
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anonEvents, Sunset Promotions & an-ten-nae present the 10th annual Sea of Dreams NYE on Thursday, December 31st at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco.
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Growing Up Heroes is a wonderful new photo blog that takes a reflective look back at the heroes that we wanted to be growing up and how they influenced our childhood.
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