Esquire Magazine has an interesting article about Teller (of Penn & Teller) suing for copyright infringement of one of his magic performances. But the article is really about the raison d’être of performing magic and illusion.
When Teller filed his lawsuit, it made news: ROGUE MAGICIAN IS EXPOSING OUR SECRETS!!! read the TMZ headline. Teller did not like the coverage. The publicity might have sold more tickets to the show, but it misunderstood his purpose. Most of the stories suggested that he was suing Bakardy to protect the secret of his trick, the method. “The method doesn’t matter,” Teller says. He has performed Shadows over the years with three different methods, seeking perfection. The first involved a web of fishing line that took a painfully long time to set up; the second version required rigid, uncomfortable choreography; the third, today’s version, he has never revealed. Bakardy, who said that he had seen Penn & Teller’s show, almost certainly didn’t use Teller’s present method. He knew only the idea and the effect it had on the audience. He felt the crackle that runs through the otherwise silent theater when Teller wields his knife; he saw that some people start to cry, little soft sobs in the dark; he heard that some people make strange noises and other people try to make noises and fail. What Bakardy stole from Teller wasn’t a secret. Bakardy stole something that everybody who has ever seen Shadows already knows.
“It’s a particularly great trick,” Steinmeyer says. “It’s beautiful and elegant. It needs no stupid patter. It needs no stupid presentation. Every one of its little surprises makes perfect sense. It has some feeling that it’s bigger; it hints at things that are bigger and more interesting than the trick itself. It’s three minutes long, and it’s just perfect.”
stuloh Michael Lewis: Obama’s Way (Vanity Fair) http://t.co/fKmtobZ8
stuloh Menlo Park not as safe as I thought! I leave for a week & someone robs a bank & sets fire to a car in my neighborhood! http://t.co/nzv9siIA
(0)Stephen Gageler SC, Australia’s Solicitor-General, has been appointed to the High Court to replace Gummow J. As a junior solicitor I remember sitting in his chambers as my supervising partner at the time and the GC of our client instructed him on a matter, not too long before he was appointed as Sol-Gen. Super sharp guy (obviously). He will be able to spend up to 16 years on the court.
Was at Great America yesterday, and I lost my glasses. Not in the way that you’d think you’d normally them at a theme park. I did the responsible thing and took them off before getting on a ride (which quite frankly was unnecessary), and then when I went to collect them on the other side, they were gone. Vanished. Just like that. I filled out a lost & found card but I doubt I’ll see them again.
Alas, this is not the first time that this has happened. The first time was 14 years ago, at another theme park. In January 1998, in fact – I know because I wrote a blog post about it (actually like the fifth blog post I ever wrote).
Anyway, I felt like this for the rest of the day (NSFW):
My friends had to drive my car home for me. Might be time to start thinking about Lasik again.
Victorian novels. I’m not literate enough to read them. I remember intentionally moving from 2 Unit Related English in Year 11 down a few classes to 2 Unit General English in Year 12 because Austen and the Bronte sisters were required reading. I found those early 19th century tomes impenetrable. Rohan Maitzen has written a guide on how to read them:
Take the book with you everywhere, that’s what. Bank line-ups, buses, bathrooms, those precious 8 minutes while the pasta boils — you know what to do! A few pages here, a few pages there, and next thing you know, you’re 500 pages in, with only another 200 to go.
This guide may have been helpful in high school, but more likely I suspect not. A friend bought me a copy of Middlemarch about ten years ago, and it still remains untouched.
Try looking away. You can’t, can you?
This thing has over 32 million views.
This is huge:
Just when the mobile payment wars were heating up, Square dropped an A-bomb on the competition. Last night the payment processing startup, previously focused on small and very small vendors, announced a deal with Starbucks. Square will now process all credit and debit payments for 7000 US Starbucks stores. And Starbucks will invest $25 million into Square’s latest monster round of funding. Celebratory frappuccinos all around.
Here’s a pretty devastating story about Gizmodo reporter who got really badly hacked.
Apple ID access credentials are really scary as a single point of failure. A simple username and password can be all it takes to wipe out all your Apple devices.
(0)Hmmm… I seem to have just missed out on a UA deal which mispriced flights to HKG in F at 4 MileagePlus points (yes that’s literally 4, not 4k, or 70k, which is the normal going rate). Apparently it’s been already honored at least once (comment #169).
I can’t seem to find a service that will reliably notify me when an RSS feed updates, so looks like I’m going to need to code one this evening.
Update (6.53pm): And I’m done. I added on a new bit to my existing script which periodically scrapes this cheap fares forum for any postings for routings containing SFO, LAX, SIN or SYD and emails me. It now monitors a bunch of feeds for new posts from One Mile at a Time and a couple other FF blogs. First non-test poll should be at 7.00pm.
Update (7.10pm): Used dos2unix to fix up a weird newline issue caused by Windows that was preventing the cron job from running. Working now:
(0) stuloh The new MacBook Pro Retina is Awesome. With a capital A.
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| » Currently | San Francisco, CA (5/12/25 3:34pm) |
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11:24pm 