“Gulls are scavengers anyway. Most birds are. Get yourselves guns and wipe them off the face of the earth.”

Geek Out

Scavenge. The previously mentioned Metro Metro Land Metropolitan Odyssey Hunt happens this weekend, and the sign-up period has long been over. But perhaps you were intimidated by the all-day, all-out nature of the hunt. If so, the savvy counter-programmers at Watson Scavenger Hunts have the answer: the Met Madness Relaxed Scavenger Hunt. Run at a slower pace than Watson’s standard lineup of weekend hunts, this “relaxed” version is the bunny slope to the Metropolitan Odyssey’s black diamond. Since it takes place on Mother’s Day, you can bring your mom and get a 50-percent ticket discount, and for those of you in the sixth borough, there’s a relaxed hunt at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well. Both hunts start at 2:00 on Sunday; get there early.

Squint. I’d guess most of my readers have at some point been intrigued by spots like Area 51, whether it’s because of the extraterrestrial folklore or the simple 007-esque attraction of a top-secret government installation. Trevor Paglen has turned that intrigue into a career, having compiled a haunting portfolio of CIA sites, “black sites,” and “nonexistent” military bases. Paglen also published a collection of the bizarre, very creepy mission patches used for “black” military operations, entitled I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me. (He talked about the book on The Colbert Report last month.) Paglen will deliver a lecture at the New Museum (235 Bowery) tonight at 7:30, with a focus on the peculiar aesthetics of state-secret photography.

Geek In

Revisit the classics. My uncle once told me that he had his beloved copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy locked in a box so that he wouldn’t be tempted to reread them, and his memories of the books would fade over time. That way, he said, he could read the books late in life and experience the journey “fresh.” After finishing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, I vowed to do the same thing. I also decided to read Asimov’s other works slowly, waiting a few years before I returned to his catalog.

During my last trip to Japan, I brought along Nemesis (1989) and The Gods Themselves (1972). Asimov’s introduction to Nemesis notes that the story alternates between two timeframes, past and present, and for better or worse, the “past” storyline proves to be much more compelling than the other. TGT, despite being the older book, has aged more gracefully. It was Asimov’s favorite, and probably my favorite read since Foundation and Earth. Nemesis and TGT are both worthwhile, but if you only have time to peruse one this weekend, pick up The Gods Themselves. Both books should be available at your local bookshop or lending library.

I’ve mentioned before that I find New York City traffic fascinating. Not as an everyday phenomenon—I don’t relish sitting on a bus for 15 minutes to go two blocks—but as an engineering problem.

Part of that engineering is the signs, so when I am stuck on a bus or walking around, I like to examine them. Who decides on the font? The layout? Who is the wordsmith behind the classic “Don’t Even THINK of Parking Here” and the more recent “Times Square Shuffle”?

More importantly, who is messing with the Walk/Don’t Walk signs?

This has been annoying me for months, and I hesitated to even post it because it might seem too nitpicky, but I feel it needs a public airing, so here it is. Most Walk/Don’t Walk signs in New York match the photos above. A chubby hand for “stop,” and the outline of a walking person for “go.”

In the past year, however, I have noticed an intruder staking its claim at certain intersections. The skinny hand…

…and the opaque man:

The first time I saw the skinny hand, I immediately disliked it. Its fingers are manicured and dainty (especially the thumb), and the inclusion of the wrist is overkill.

Chubby looks like it will slap you—hard—if you don’t park your ass on that sidewalk. Skinny politely asks that you maybe step out of the way, or not, whatever. Skinny doesn’t want any trouble.

Opaque man vs. outline man is a closer call, but I prefer the curves of outline man to the chunkiness of Mr. Opaque. Opaque man holds his back arm at an odd angle, not so much “walk” as it is “walk like an Egyptian.”

Is this the beginning of an anti-chubby revolution? Is skinny/opaque the new wave? It wouldn’t be the first modern makeover of the pedestrian crossing signals. Kevin Walsh of the exhaustive, entertaining Forgotten NY notes with a touch of disdain that the signals used to say “DONT WALK/WALK” (note the lack of apostrophe) until the Department of Transportation began replacing them with pictograms in 1999.

Fearful that the city was making another change, I got in touch with the NYCDOT. Here’s the email I sent earlier today to the commissioner’s office.

Hi there,

I’m writing with a question re: pedestrian walk/don’t walk signs. In my neighborhood, I have noticed two types of signs with slightly different designs for the go/stop signals. One type of design has, for lack of a better description, a “chubby”-looking hand for “stop” and the outline of a walking man for “go.” The other type has a thinner hand and a walking man whose shape is filled in. Just out of curiosity, can you explain the difference in design?

I have included links to images so you can see what I’m talking about:

“Chubby” hand:
http://geekoutnewyork.com/images/chubbyhand.jpg

“Skinny” hand:
http://geekoutnewyork.com/images/skinnyhand.jpg

Thanks in advance, and keep up the great work,
John Teti

The sign-off may seem a little kiss-assy, but I find you get better results if you come off as an admirer. Don’t get me wrong, DOT officials, if you are reading this, I am a tremendous fan! Tremendous!

I’ll let you know if I get a reply. I won’t rest until Chubby Hand is safe. By the way, this may be the most pointlessly obsessive post I’ve written yet, which makes me pretty proud.

Near the midpoint of In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary of the Apollo missions that was recently released on DVD, the filmmakers present a tense moment during the Apollo 11 lunar module’s first descent to the surface. “Program alarm!” Neil Armstrong says. “1202. 1202. … Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.”

The Apollo program is remembered as the gold standard of modern technological achievement, the most dramatic example of innovation applied toward a noble end. In this moment, though, as a guidance computer less powerful than a Commodore 64 alerts the astronauts that radar data is coming faster than it can process, and ground officers tell the astronauts to “go” nonetheless, the technology seems like a bit player in a story about human force of will.

We’re nearing the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, and since 1969 the humanity of the moon landings has faded somewhat from the general imagination, a situation that In the Shadow of the Moon tries to remedy. It does so by way of interviews with ten Apollo astronauts, archival footage, and little else—there’s no narration aside from that of the astronauts, and there are only a few explanatory titles.

It surprised me that this film hadn’t already been made years ago. There have been countless fictionalizations of the lunar missions, many of them quite powerful, but in retrospect, isn’t In the Shadow an obvious concept? Only a handful of people have ever been to the moon, so why not get them together and have them share their impressions of the place?

Thankfully, director David Sington was thoughtful enough to do that, and the result is a treasury of intimate, personal stories about men rather than mankind. Like this recollection from Edgar Mitchell, who got to walk on the moon but whose most vivid memory came on the return flight:

The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window, every two minutes: the earth, the moon, the sun, and a whole 360-degree panorama of the heavens. And that was the powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules in my body and the molecules of the spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners were prototyped — manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness. It wasn’t “them and us,” it was, “that’s me.” It’s all, it’s all — it’s one thing!

Each of the participating Apollo astronauts gets ample screen time, but In the Shadow places a particular focus on Apollo 11, and I was often struck by the insights of that mission’s Command Module Pilot, Michael Collins:

It’s not a question of, you’re scared all the time, but it is — you’re mildly worried all the time, or at least I was. You know, you’re not sure all these things are going to work properly! And there’s a hell of a lot of them coming in a very fragile daisy chain, and you don’t want any of the links in that chain to break because downstream from that broken link they’re all useless. So, yes, you’re worried, you’re concerned.

Throughout the archival footage in the film, I repeatedly wondered how engineers managed to make the flimsy, archaic-looking machinery perform on a trip with so little room for error. It was nice to hear that the astronauts might have felt the same way.

After a detailed recounting of Apollo 11, In the Shadow meanders. Perhaps because the Tom Hanks film has become such an icon, there’s only a brief discussion of Apollo 13, and even that short interlude is unnecessarily hushed and cryptic—my wife, watching the movie with me, had to ask, “They’re talking about Apollo 13, right?” I’m not sure if the filmmakers were reticent to include that mission or if the astronauts hesitated to discuss it, but the omission is odd.

The interviewees tread carefully when speaking of Neil Armstrong’s post-Apollo reclusiveness. It’s hard not to feel Armstrong’s absence, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that his lack of participation hurts the film.

My biggest complaint about In the Shadow is that its 100-minute running time isn’t long enough. The Apollo 11 story is well-told, but I got a sense that there were fascinating stories to be told about all of the Apollo missions, and I would relish the opportunity to hear them from the men who were there. To its credit, though, In the Shadow isn’t intended as a chronicle of our trips to the moon. It’s an oral history of the experience of traveling to the moon from a flesh-and-blood perspective. For a tech-obsessed gearhead like myself, this is a refreshing—maybe even necessary—take on our exploration of space.

“Yeah. I can fly.”¹

Geek Out

Get earthy. Al Gore hits the stage tonight for the Radio City Music Hall Speaker Series, and while the ex-VP has made himself the brand name of climate change, many forget that he has solid nerd credentials to back up his newly prominent science wonkiness. Behind the old “Al Gore said he invented the Internet” canard was a guy who truly did back the formation of the Internet before many of us were born. That said, don’t expect Gore to talk up his favorite Twitter mash-ups on stage—he’s got a globe to save, after all. Available tickets start at $90 for a talk that starts at 8:00, just after the 5:00 showing of Iron Man lets out. Convenient!

Gore’s price of admission is pretty steep, but if you’re looking to get in touch with nature on a budget, the park’s always free. Did you know that Central Park’s North Woods were modeled on the Adirondack Mountains? I didn’t. Well, technically, I did, but only because I read the description of the “Manhattan Adirondacks Tour” that kicks off at 9:30 Saturday morning from the park’s Discovery Center. The tour will teach you about Central Park history, and the serene walk in a calming drizzle (bring an umbrella) should clear your mind for a matinee showing of Iron Man. Serendipitous!

Finally, my pet eco-issue is marine life, so the latest entry in Columbia’s LDEO Spring Lectures, “A Slippery Slope? The Watery World Beneath The Changing Ice Sheets,” sounds like an enlightening way to spend Sunday afternoon. The lecture starts at 3:00 and wraps up about an hour later, so I might even have time to hit the theaters afterward. But is there anything playing…?

Geek In

Conquer feudal Japan. A special treat this week, as a game recommendation comes to us all the way from GONY West—i.e., my friend Hank Leukart, who lives in Los Angeles. Hank is a former project manager for a major software company who now works in the TV industry and occasionally publishes a missive on his travel blog, Without Baggage. He also wrote this staggeringly dweeby book in the 1990s. Come to think of it, he’s more qualified to write this blog than I am.

Anyway, Hank, an avid board-game enthusiast, recommends Shogun and writes:

“Shogun combines a light war game with the strategy of a Eurogame; it’s complex without being impossible to understand. In the game, you try to take over feudal Japan by attacking other players’ regions and building churches and palaces. You need to be careful, though—if you don’t take care of the people living on your land while you’re trying to take over the world, they will revolt.

“My favorite part is the mechanism used to determine the outcome of battles, called the Battle Tower. It’s this crazy contraption where you throw cubes representing armies into a funnel and a random bunch comes out the other side.

“(Note that this game used to be called Wallenstein when it first came out and it had a Germany/World War II theme. I’ve never seen that version, but the Shogun version is what’s available now.)”

Thanks, Hank!

UPDATE: Baby Ruthless author Johnny writes in:

Just a quick heads up before you get flamed … Wallenstein, the original version of Shogun, was based on The Hundred Year’s War, not World War II.

Picky. He was only off by five centuries, give or take.

Johnny also included his own impressions of the game, and they were too interesting not to pass along:

There are about 25 things you determine before each turn. Then you’re powerless to change any of it during the game. In fact, each turn is resolved in minutes. By far, making all the decisions beforehand takes up the bulk of gameplay. Analysis Paralysis isn’t a by-product of the game; it is the game.

In a way, the game is almost like a programming challenge: You and your opponents create complex executables, then run them simultaneously and see who was the best programmer.

Thanks, Johnny!

FINAL UPDATE, GOD WILLING: I had no idea it was possible to be so sick of a game that I've never played. Hank did the research and found that Wallenstein was based on the Thirty Years War, not the Hundred Years War. Hank wins.

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1. According to some new flick by that guy from Swingers. ↑

Indie toy store Kidrobot celebrates its grand reopening tonight at 118 Prince St.—not far from the old Kidrobot location, but in a roomier space. The festivities kick off at 6:00, and if you can’t make it, you can watch the store’s Flash video broadcast starting at either 5:30 or 5:45, depending on which section of the website you believe. Or, if you don’t care about the “limited-edition one-night-only giveaway!!!” claptrap, you can just visit the new store another time.

You might gather that I have mixed feelings about Kidrobot. In its varied role as designer/marketer/gallery/retailer, Kidrobot has played a large part in the rise of the art toy, a medium that gives voice to independent character artists who otherwise might not have found a ready niche. For this it should be hugely commended. But while I don’t begrudge an effort to scrape together some profit, I think Kidrobot’s marketing interests have contributed to a stagnation of the form.

The three toys depicted above, for instance, were all done by different artists, yet each hews closely to an aesthetic that has prevailed among indie vinyl toys for most of the decade: big curves, angry-but-cute, with a hearty but hollow dose of attitude. The Kidrobot marketing model encourages artists to stick to a familiar form that can be easily reissued in countless “limited editions,” each time with a different coat of paint and each time treated as something new. A similar technique is sometimes used to create new characters from a basic template in video games (especially RPGs), where it’s called “palette shifting” and is considered poor form.¹

At the center of the palette shifting is Dunny, a character created by Kidrobot to serve as a blank canvas for big-name toy designers. (The blank-canvas toy isn't unique to Kidrobot. There's also the Superdeux Stereotype and Bearbrick, among others, and they all have roots in urban art projects like Cow Parade.) A sibling of the brilliant, enduring do-it-yourself toy Munny, Dunny has been redesigned hundreds of times by the various artists who have enjoyed Kidrobot’s patronage. As a marketing tool, Dunny seems invincible, but as a piece of art, it hasn’t had anything to say for years. The fact that it remains such a focal point for Kidrobot disappoints me.

Hey, limited editions are fun, and I have no problem with them in principle. It’s when they become a raison d’etre that I think the medium suffers. When the vinyl-toy scene was exploding earlier this decade, artists contorted and combined traditional kiddie/cute forms in ways that spat in the face of a pre-packaged Toys ’R’ Us childhood, expanding the notion of what constituted a toy (and who constituted a toy buyer). Now, toy artists seem more content to turn out variations on a theme. The designs are new, but the ideas are old.

Kidrobot is still a fun time (and I like Toy Tokyo even better), so I don’t mean to be so solemn. I realize it’s pop art. I only wish it would pop like it used to.

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1. To be specific, the use of palette shifting to create “new” characters is considered poor form. Palette shifting is just a graphical technique, not necessarily bad and often artfully employed. ↑