May 2008 Archives

“I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset…”¹

Geek Out

Look at a sunset. Today is the second day of Manhattanhenge, the period during which the sun sets in alignment with the Manhattan street grid, resulting in a stirring vista and billions of Flickr pictures. May 29 (yesterday) is considered by some to be the best viewing day, along with its “sister” date July 12, because the sun dips below the horizon at the moment of best alignment—a phenomenon termed “half sun on grid” by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, who coined the phrase “Manhattanhenge.”

Tonight’s sunset will be of the “full sun on grid” variety, but the most striking effect is not so much the sunset as the red sunlight shining across the city’s tall corridors. July 11 and 12 will see the sun in the same position again, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll get the same clear forecast as we’ve been lucky enough to have today and yesterday. (I’ll have a full writeup of the Manhattanhenge spectacle on Monday.)

Blind yourself with science. Rather than blinding yourself with the sun, that is. As noted yesterday, this weekend sees the World Science Festival come to New York. Check out yesterday’s post for some highlights, or visit the official site to see the full schedule.

Geek In

Root out the Reds. Friend of GONY Hank Leukart was in town over Memorial Day Weekend, and we got in a couple matches of one of my favorite board games, Twilight Struggle. While we were reliving the Cold War through a deck of cards and flimsy cardboard markers, Hank said that he recently played a simpler card game that ran along the same lines, Cold War: CIA vs. KGB. Espionage is probably the most overhyped aspect of the Cold War in terms of real-life impact, but there’s little spying in Twilight Struggle², and I miss it. I’ll definitely be picking this game up soon.

---

1. According to a little prince. ↑

2. Although there is some, including that annoying Defectors card. ↑

I’ve been trying to figure out whether this Washington Post column, “Real Archaeologists Don’t Wear Fedoras,” is tongue-in-cheek or not. In it, archaeologist Neil Asher Silberman expends more than 1,000 words to tell us plebes that the Indiana Jones you see on the big screen isn’t actually real.

I know that the Indiana Jones series is just a campy tribute to the Saturday afternoon serials of the 1930s and the B-movies of the 1950s, but believe me, it totally misrepresents who archaeologists are and what goals we pursue. It’s filled with exaggerated and inaccurate nonsense. Even the centerpiece of the new movie — the “crystal skull” — is a phony.

The crystal skull…a phony? What a turn-off. When I buy my ticket to an Indiana Jones movie, I’m paying for verisimilitude, dammit!

The World Science Festival is underway here in New York, with a cavalcade of scientific fun unfolding over the next four days. Tickets are still available for most of the schedule, including these noteworthy events:

• Toil and Trouble… Stories of Experiments Gone Wrong, tonight (Thursday), 7:30-9:00 at The Moth at Symphony Space: Pointing and laughing (and learning!) at the blooper reel of scientific achievement.
• The Brain and Bourne: Neuroscience in the Bourne Trilogy, Friday, 5:00-8:00 p.m. at MoMA: A panel discussion with a neuroscientist and Bourne producer Doug Liman, this one might be a little light on the hard science, but come on, it’s Bourne.
• The Sixth Extinction, Friday, 8:00-9:00 p.m. at Columbia’s Miller Theatre: Name-brand conservationist Richard Leakey, of the formidable Leakey dynasty, joins a bio-acoustician to show off footage of some of the planet’s endangered species. Interesting because: 1. It’s a lot easier to fight for endangered animals when you’ve met some of them, and 2. How many chances do you get to meet a bio-acoustician?
• Science of Sports, Saturday, 3:00-4:30 p.m. at Coles Sports Center: My mother-in-law doesn’t know why I like to watch basketball because, according to her, it’s just “tall guys walking up to a hoop with the ball and putting it in.” There’s a little more to it than that, as you’ll presumably learn at this show-and-tell. Festival materials say there will be a “lively mix of action, audience participation and video,” so be forewarned, you may be asked to exercise.

Memorial Day Weekend was marked in the geek world by a stir over “Biggest Drawing in the World,” an advertising design project by Erik Nordenankar, a student at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. The “drawing” was supposedly made by sending a GPS tracking device on a convoluted path around the world via DHL and then tracing its path on a map. Nordenankar created a website with sparse information about the project and a breezy YouTube video that “documents” his process:

To bring you up to speed, after an explosion of attention on technology blogs, it became clear that Nordenankar did not execute the plan—it was conceptual spec work done as a thesis of sorts. He’s added a statement explaining as much to the Biggest Drawing site. And thus the Internet became angry.

Some may find it distasteful that Nordenankar created a public site for his project without making the context clear. This was indeed a mistake. For me, though, it’s mitigated somewhat in that there’s no evidence Nordenankar sought out such wide publicity. The presentation is appropriate for its academic setting; did Nordenankar intentionally propagate it beyond that realm? Perhaps—maybe he got a little overzealous. We don’t know, and none of the journalists crying “hoax!” have made any effort to find out. Since a hoax, by definition, connotes an intention to deceive, you’d think they’d want to look into this.

I’m even less impressed by the righteous indignation from bloggers who are now flogging a student for publicity that they created. Among the standard-bearers of the vitriol is Engadget’s Joshua Fruhlinger, who first noted the drawing early Sunday morning.¹ Fruhlinger added an update soon after, when a reader directed him to Nordenankar’s Beckmans student profile. Fruhlinger’s update read:

Ah, well that explains why DHL went out of its way to do a bunch of backtracking loops over the ocean — it was an ad (supposedly in the name of art). From the “artist’s” site: “The best advertising is developed with society. using [sic] a GPs [sic] and the express shipping company DhL [sic], i [sic] drew a self-portrait on our planet. i [sic] used the technological aids of our time to make the world’s biggest drawing, along with advertising adapted to the contemporary era. a [sic] campaign the recipient wants to see and which is interesting enough for people to want to share it with their friends.” Way to sell out, Erik.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the level of dickishness in this screed. I had an especially hard time wrapping my head around the notion that when an advertising-design student designs an advertisement, this constitutes “selling out.” The sarcastic use of “[sic]” is also pretty galling for a publication that plays as fast and loose with the English language as Engadget. Note that as of this update, Fruhlinger still found the story credible enough to believe that DHL had performed “backtracking loops over the ocean.”

“We had a pretty good idea that not only was this whole ‘Biggest Drawing in the World’ business fake, but also impossible,” Fruhlinger wrote today, retroactively discovering that the tale didn’t pass muster with his keen investigative instincts. He also used the post to further condemn Nordenankar, and he tarred DHL with the same brush.²

I found Fruhlinger’s series of posts the ugliest (and most transparently ass-covering) writing on the topic, but he’s hardly the only one to work himself into a froth. Gizmodo’s Kit Eaton chimed in with “GPS-Tracked Biggest Drawing in the World is Complete Fake,” and hack247 offered up “World’s biggest GPS Drawing is a scam!”

My question is, why are we so eager to vilify Nordenankar? Are we that desperate for villains? I mean, the kid’s not exactly The Riddler. He put together an awesome graduation project—I would have given him an “A”—and then bungled his coming-out party. A sane response to the saga would be, “It turns out this was just a conceptual demo; hopefully, Erik has learned from this whole dust-up and will be more careful in his future advertising career.”

It speaks to the immaturity and pent-up testosterone of the gadget blogging world that the response was, instead, to trash the reputation of a hapless college student. (Remember when bloggers were “the little guy”?) Not for a moment did Fruhlinger et al. consider casting partial blame toward the sloppy and credulous “reporting” that amplified the initial error. Nope, it was all Erik’s fault.

Screw that. Hey, Erik: This blogger, at least, thinks your drawing is pretty neat.

Minor update, 5/29: I tried to call Nordenankar at the number provided on his contact page in order to get his take on how things unfolded, but he's directing calls to an voicemail message that refers people back to his statement on the Biggest Drawing in the World site. I suppose that's going to be the extent of his comment on the matter for now.

---

1. Fruhlinger got the story from Hack a Day, which got it from Waxy, which got it from Ze Frank, so the concept really did travel around the world, in a manner of speaking. ↑

2. I don’t get the DHL hatred, either. DHL gave a student access to their warehouse, drivers, and other facilities for a college project, and it’s not even remotely their fault that things got out of hand. How can you not simply admire their willingness to help a guy out? Cheers to DHL. ↑

“If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets.”¹

A quick DSTW this time since it’s a holiday weekend. I imagine most of you already have plans.

Geek Out

Go vinyl. You wouldn’t know it from their neglected website—can’t wait for the October ’07 grand re-opening!—but Zakka NYC (155 Plymouth St., Brooklyn) hosts a show tonight featuring some of the best cover art from the Eschatone Records label. Zakka is a cool space out in DUMBO that you may recall from my review back in December, or not. The email that accompanied the press release promised, “We are going to have a relax time with ambient acoustic guitar Live performance. Please stop by ZAKKA NYC and have a great time.” What better way to start your weekend than a great relax time?

Satisfy your Jones Jones. I hear there’s some sort of indie flick out this weekend about an elderly archaeologist who wears a dusty old hat and carries a bullwhip. Supposed to be a sleeper hit, I gather?

Geek In

Don’t. Highs for the long weekend: 72°, 76°, 80°.

---

1. According to Gurney Halleck. ↑

Internet Week New York is June 3-10. It seems like a nice idea, as I’m in favor of anything that promotes the city’s online culture, but something about the name “Internet Week” rings a little quaint. It sounds like something that would be put together in 1998 by an eager chamber of commerce executive who has only a passing familiarity with this whole Internet thing. Hooray! It’s Internet Week! Let’s all go to New York and do Internet together!

The newsletter sign-up page has the same feel. First, it asks you, “Are you interested in Internet Week NY as a professional, an internet-lover, or both?” I guess both, but I was a little embarrassed to self-identify as an internet-lover. “Yeah, I’m a big fan of the Internet. Not anything particular, just the Internet and Internetty-type stuff, et cetera. I guess you could say I’m a bit of an Internet buff.”

Then there’s the “Your company is a:” dropdown menu, which offers five ways to complete the sentence, each more vague than the last.

“Solutions Provider” reminds me of the commercials you’d see during golf tournaments¹ around 2000 or so. They’d talk about providing solutions for 30 seconds without telling you what the company actually did. Please tell me that term is not still in wide use.

---

1. Yeah, I like to watch golf, what of it? ↑

Fox has ordered 13 episodes of an Americanized version of the Japanese game show Brain Wall, more popularly known as “Human Tetris” on YouTube. Here’s a clip if, by some stretch of fortune, you haven’t seen the show in the last 15 minutes:

Fox reality executive Mike Darnell—the brains behind “salacious” yet incredibly boring Moment of Truth, leaden shlockfest Don’t Forget the Lyrics, and cultural low point-setting Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?—will be applying his creative juices toward the Brain Wall remake. According to a Hollywood Reporter story on the series pickup, Darnell’s juices are already flowing:

Overseas versions were often played by contestants for fun, but American audiences respond stronger to unscripted shows when there’s tangible stakes. Darnell also is toying with the idea of increasing the height of the platform, so players will fall a greater distance into the water (and he might switch what substance the players fall into for each level). [Emphasis added.]

Expect the words “poop-like consistency” to be uttered at some point during the show. You can also look forward to an excess of pre-show spoilers and relentless slo-mo “Will they fit through the million-dollar hole? Find out…after this!” moments, both Darnell trademarks. And I’m sure there are plenty more surprises in store as the world’s stupidest show joins forces with the TV industry’s least creative man.

In case I haven’t been clear, I’m not looking forward to the premiere of this program.

Nintendo held a launch event for the Wii Fit yesterday at Central Park, and the park’s Columbus Circle entrance was festooned with little Nintendo tents. Under the tents were Wii Fit demo kiosks and Official Wii Fit Trainers wearing gleaming white tracksuits and gleaming white grins that occasionally sparkled and made a little “ding!” sound, for this was the land of Wii Fit, where exercise is magically incredibly fun!

As you might have gleaned from gee-whiz TV news reports and whatnot, Wii Fit is Nintendo’s latest gaming revolution, in which they will cure the nation’s obesity problem by pairing a movement-sensing balance board with some lame mini-games. Simply step on Nintendo’s lump of white plastic, and you will feel the excess pounds melt away. The biggest challenge is getting the Trainer to get off the board so you can have a damn turn already:

The event had a different vibe, at least kinetically, than I’d expected. Prepared to see a crowd gyrating and laughing on the balance boards, I was surprised to arrive at a relatively static, solemn affair. The balance board is very sensitive, requiring you to adjust your position on a borderline-subconscious level—at least in the modes that were on display in the tents. People figured this out pretty quickly, and the result was a long line of people standing ramrod straight in front of a TV, imperceptibly wiggling their toes. Kind of eerie.

Exceptions: the yoga mode, which saw people contorting their body into new positions with an anguished, “I AM bending at the waist, you stupid game” look on their faces, and the hula-hoop game, which was well-received and appeared realistic, if a little ornery. “The trick is to swing your hips in a large neat, circle,” it would say, as a little girl desperately wiggled around and around.

While people tried out the games, the training staff would pepper them with a well-rehearsed spiel. The bullet points:

• Wii Fit is sold separately from the Wii, so you must also have a Wii to play it. My designated Trainer re-emphasized this fact to the point where I interrupted her and politely explained that yes, I get it, Wii sold separately, I already have a Wii, thank you. Undeterred, she emphasized it again, not willing to waver from the script. So I’m guessing people are having some trouble grasping this one. (In fairness, the way Nintendo had the kiosks set up, I can see how a novice would be confused and think it’s a plug-and-play package deal.)
• Wii Fit has a number of different training modes, which you can use to track your progress. Again, this feature was repeated and rephrased in a number of different ways. At first it sounded like a feature pitch, but then I realized that by focusing on “progress,” Nintendo was begging you to keep playing and not just slide the balance board under the couch after a week or so, which you will anyway.
• Wii Fit is on sale two days early in New York, but on Wednesday, everybody will be able to get it, so if you want it, you’d better go get it right now. My Trainer said this with a knowing smile, and the clear implication was that the game would be sold out everywhere for the foreseeable future, just like the Wii itself. I half-admired, half-resented the nerve of Nintendo turning their notorious Wii shortages into a marketing tool. “We suck at inventory control, therefore, buy this game. Q.E.D.”

When I finished with my allotted tryout time—I did the table-tilt game (everybody had to do this one) and the slalom game—the Wii Trainer gave me a wristband and directed me toward a swag tent near the exit. My swag bag would include, she noted with forced excitement, a map from Columbus Circle to the Nintendo World store in Rockefeller Plaza in case, y’know, I had to have Wii Fit right this moment.

Nobody acknowledged the irony of holding this event at Central Park, where hundreds of New Yorkers were probably, at that very moment, exercising without the benefit of a twitchy $90 balance board. Of course, the trouble with a real-life park is that weather can happen. With Wii Fit, you can look like a complete doof rain or shine:

That footage of a man jogging in place¹ while watching a cartoon version of himself run through a fake park—which I have played and rewound a couple thousand times since yesterday and still have not tired of—comes from the promotional DVD that Nintendo distributed at the event.

The great outdoors is not the only target of the Wii Fit smear campaign. Smelly old gyms get what’s coming to them, as well. “NO FITNESS CLUB DUES,” offers the on-screen text as a narrator ticks off the benefits of the game. Also: “NO SWEATY GYM EQUIPMENT” and “NO FIGHTING TRAFFIC.”

The swag bag included a free T-shirt, which was cool, but it was a “Youth Large,” which was not. An odd choice, given that 90% of the crowd yesterday was grownups. I made the best of it.

Am I Wii Fit yet?

---

1. Note he is not even on the balance board, which I thought was the whole point. ↑

Geek Out

Meet the man behind the old jewish comedians. Drew Friedman, the accomplished illustrator best known for his bestselling 2006 compilation Old Jewish Comedians (and the creator of that Bush/Dr. Strangelove portrait above), will appear at Rocketship (208 Smith St., Brooklyn) tonight at 8:00 p.m. The event is one part art opening—Friedman will have a “special exhibition of original art and objects” on display at Rocketship through June 4—and one part signing, in conjunction with the release of More Old Jewish Comedians.

Lord it over your dumber peers. I’ve been going to a regular pub trivia night with some friends recently, the first time I’ve done something like that since college, and it reminded me what a rush it is to be smarter than everybody else in the room. We haven’t come in first place yet, but that’s just because everybody else keeps winning on stupid questions that shouldn’t count. Obviously.

MurphGuide has a nice directory of pub quizzes in the city. Tuesday appears to be the most popular day, but there are a few on the weekend, including one presented by the National Trivia Association, whatever that is.

Geek In

The outsourcing of GONY continues this week with a Traders of Genoa recommendation from Johnny Dale. Johnny is a GONY reader (naturally), board game lover, and the author of young-adult novel The Darling Budds. He also sometimes drives a cab in New Orleans to relax. Pretty interesting dude. Anyway, here’s why Johnny thinks you should play Traders this weekend:

—

Traders Of Genoa, part of the Alea “Big Box” line which also gave us Princes Of Florence and Puerto Rico, is a negotiation game of the purest sort: nearly everything on the board can be bought, sold, traded, or bartered.  

In the game, you play a Renaissance power broker. You scurry around Genoa delivering messages, buying and selling goods, securing privileges, and bribing other players. The right combination of purchases and bribes can pay off big…but make sure that you’re not paying out more than you’re going to bring in. On the other hand, accepting bribes can be a good source of income, but are you actually helping your opponents defeat you?

If your gaming group likes the trading aspect of Settlers Of Catan, they’ll love Traders of Genoa. In Settlers, there are, what, five things you can trade? In Traders, that list is at least twice as long, and the trades are more opaque. In Settlers, you pretty much know why your opponent wants Brick and Wood; in Traders, you can never be sure what the motive is behind any transaction.

Like a lot of Eurogames, the game looks daunting at first but feels simple once it’s set in motion. After a couple of turns, the rhythm of the gameplay becomes natural. With the right group of players, Traders resembles a night of poker or even a party game…a party game that requires charisma, business savvy, and treachery. If your gaming group is full of charming amoral backstabbers—mine is!—you just found your new Cranium.

—

Thanks, Johnny!

According to the Brookings Institution, it’s a five-step scheme that begins with “Get Off-the-Shelf Gear” and ends with “Weigh the Consequences.” Here’s hoping that the real thing will be less boring and disappointing than the film, although I’m guessing the overall plot is just as preposterous.

(Seriously, aside from critical Robert Downey Jr. lust, how did that movie manage a Metacritic 78? I walked out of last weekend’s Iron Man matinee more ravenous than ever for The Dark Knight.)

I always enjoy exploring the idiosyncratic lexicons that fan bases develop on the Internet. Fandom thrived before newsgroups and PHP message boards were common, but the rate and quantity of communication on the web make fertile ground for neologisms.

Case in point: the First-Run The Price is Right recaps on Price is Right fan forum Golden-Road.net. Regular readers know that I’m a game-show fan, and TPIR is the undisputed king of the mountain. It’s also one of the most accessible shows on television. Lights flash, music plays, “A NEW CAR!” etc. So you’d expect that the recaps would be user-friendly, as well.

But they’re not. These dense, borderline impenetrable documents are ornate box scores—with some commentary (e.g., “STUPID BID”)—encapsulating the day’s TPIR action. Here’s the entry (taken from the much longer full recap) for a recent segment of primetime TPIR in which the game “Pocket Change” was played:

3   (Samsung) 52” LCD HDTV (A&L)
Rita 4600 +Dewey 3800 +Jeremy *3900 CHRISTOPHER 2800 ($4298)

Jeremy plays POCKET ¢HANGE for a LINCOLN! MKZ (Std., GPS, Wheels, Stereo, Prot)(G)

1st		.25				3
2nd				12579		2		X
		.50				7		X
		.75				5		*		(11)		.05		.30
3rd				12–79		9		X
		1.00				7		X
		1.25				2		*		(18)		.10		.40
4th				1––79		7		*		(16)		.00		.40
5th				1–––9		9		*		( 6 )		.10		.50   LOSS

It’s like you were there, right?

In fact, from this mess of numbers and symbols, a trained eye can discern that the players in Contestants’ Row bid on an HDTV, as shown off by models Amber Lancaster and Lanisha Cole, and Christopher was the first bidder. With a $3,900 bid, Jeremy (one of the first four contestants called up, as indicated by the “+” sign next to his name) got up on stage, where model Gabrielle Tuite fondled a $35,279 Lincoln MKZ sporting the standard equipment package plus GPS navigation, chrome wheels, high-end sound system, and paint & fabric protection. Jeremy lost the “Pocket Change” game due to some early missteps and some unlucky choices on the board.

Even if you’re not a game-show person, I encourage you to peruse the recaps and be awed. To decode the recaps—which, by the way, are written for every new TPIR episode by one man on the Golden Road forums, Joe Capitano—it helps to be a lifelong fan of the show with an eye for minutiae. I fit that bill, but I still found the lingo impenetrable, so thank heavens for the Golden-Road.net Survival Guide. This page provides a welcome glossary to the myriad catchphrases used by the show’s online fans. The definitions give you a deep, hilarious insight into the culture. Excerpts:

Exacta - A pricing game win where the contestant does not make a single mistake.

Wipeout - When a contestant loses a game based on blowing any and every opportunity they had to win anything, or losing completely on a first pick.

[…]

Stupid Bid - Said during one-bids when a contestant bids stupidly. (i.e. Bids $1 LESS than the previous bidder, bids $1 as either the 2nd or 3rd bidder, or makes a severely low bid.) Might have “2nd” or “3rd” in the middle depending on how many overbids there are.

Suicide Bid - Similar to “Stupid Bid,” but used during the final One-Bid.

Smeghead Gambit - When a contestant somehow manages to win a one-bid with what would otherwise be a “Stupid” or “Suicide” bid. Smeghead is the television show Red Dwarf’s term for an idiot.

[…]

The Dob - Nickname given to Roger Dobkowitz, longtime producer of The Price Is Right.

Can’t Stop the Dob - A situation where a contestant loses a difficult pricing game; refers to the fact that Roger sets up each pricing game. Alternately, “Stopping the Dob” refers to a contestant winning such a game.

Can’t Stop the Dom - A play-on-words referring to Roger’s recent obsession with replacing various games’ prize and grocery labels with new ones written in the Dom Casual font.

I promise you those are not made up or facetious, not even the last one.

This type of extreme nitpicking probably strikes some people as weird, but to me it’s a sign of all that is pure and good on the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy obsession. Almost everybody has one; some people are just more willing to admit it. I laugh at the Golden Road recaps and the surrounding culture not because I look down on them—quite the opposite. You have to admire the relentless effort of someone like Joe Capitano, recap king.

No, I laugh because the geekiness is so unapologetic. I mean, honestly, “Can’t Stop the Dom”? Priceless. The banner at the top of the site says (for now, at least) “There’s no such thing as too much information,” and the Golden Road TPIR recaps exemplify what I mean.

Metro Metro Land’s “Metropolitan Odyssey 2008” commenced on Saturday as planned, and this year the premier urban gaming event took its act to Central Park. So honestly, it wasn’t so much urban gaming as it was “running around in the park” gaming. Which is a little more normal. But still fun.

The Odyssey can be summed up as an all-day scavenger hunt, but that elicits visions of kids dashing around the neighborhood, stuffing trinkets into a bag: an old golf ball, a nickel dated before 1975, a severed finger, etc. In fact, there’s not much actual “scavenging” in the Odyssey.¹ The aim of the hunt is to answer as many questions as you can on a list of about 100—it’s impossible to get them all. The questions direct you toward locations all around the field of play (in this case, of course, sprawling Central Park) and they’re assembled in mostly random order, so organizing the efforts of your four-person team is a major challenge.

The hunt begins around 8:30 in the morning when teams assemble to get information from the Metro Metro brain trust: Bo, Brady, Will, and Tim. You’re not allowed to open your clue packet until 9:00, so teams use the time to greet old friends and intimidate the competition. Teams get extra points for coming in costume, so there are the requisite hipsters in wacky leggings, seemingly a staple of such events. (Seriously, whether it’s a scavenger hunt, marathon, go-kart race, neighborhood parade, whatever, there are always hipsters in wacky leggings.) The weather-oriented group pictured at the beginning of the piece billed themselves as “Scavenge of the Nerds” despite that being my team’s name for three years running. We set our phasers on Destroy.

The 9:00 “go” signal is an envelope-ripping, page-flipping frenzy as teams try to eke out a few minutes’ advantage by digesting the 11-page clue packet as quickly as possible. The deadline at 4:00 always approaches so much faster than you’d like, so every second counts. But these clues don’t go down so easy: Bo, Brady, Will, and Tim use plenty of verbal obfuscation to make the hints harder to scan, e.g.:

Great Grandpa Joe (age 82), Not-So-Great Aunt Mildred (age 62), Bobby and Cheryl (ages 60 and 55, respectively), and their two grandkids Billy and Chrissy (ages 6 and 2) are spending the day at the Central Park Zoo. How much does Bobby have to shell out to get everyone in?

Metro Metro has been at this for a while, and they know how to write a good hunt question. For a nerd, nothing beats that miniature epiphany when you match up the wit and wordplay of a clue with its real-world equivalent. When you finally realize that the “small winged mammal that is accused of a crime it didn’t commit” is a framed bat at Belvedere Castle. It’s like having that inscrutable crossword clue “click” in your mind, yet the tangible nature of the hunt environs adds an extra delight. The seven hours of sprinting and scribbling always drive everyone to exhaustion, but the Eureka moments sustain me.²

The structure of the hunt’s clue sheet is an interesting study in game engineering. The apparent winning strategy, at first glance, to split the team up and have each hunter gather clues in a different section of the park. But this is supposed to be a team event—sticking together is more fun, after all—so the Metro Metro guys discourage loners with clues like this:

Get a picture of all four teammates between 12:15 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. at the spot indicated on the map [Fort Clinton]. You must be on the pedestal, pretending to be a monument to laziness. Our clock [placed by Metro Metro staff] must be visible.

There are 15 such photo clues, along with three “compulsory” photo clues that cause you to lose huge sums of points if you fail to get them. (The clock clue is always one the compulsories, leading everybody to reassemble for a refreshing mid-day check-in.)

It’s a clever concept, but it’s beginning to show its age. Metro Metro has grown infatuated with the photos, as they make a good promotional tool, and they’re fun to look at later in the evening at the “award ceremony.” They’re not as much fun to do, though. There’s virtually zero element of surprise and certainly none of those delicious epiphanies. “Get a photo of your four teammates asleep in a hansom cab,” reads one clue, and so you do, because it’s worth a huge 300 points, but you do it out of a sense of duty rather than whimsy. This year, the photo clues were worth more than 60 percent of all the other clues combined, a phenomenon that turns the “hunt” into more of a checklist.

That said, there are plenty of clues in the packet to keep a hardcore hunter occupied for seven hours, so if you’re not an ultra-competitive ass like me, you can ignore most of the photo tasks and complete the hunt however you’d like. You just won’t have any chance of winning. As a game, the Odyssey has some problems that I hope are addressed in 2009, but as a cheap way to spend a Saturday in May, it’s hard to top.

---

1. There are a few “bring backs,” but most of them are refrigerator magnets placed in inconspicuous spots by the Metro Metro guys themselves, and the others are items that are equally available to everybody, like a squashed penny from the Central Park Zoo gift shop. ↑

2. The Central Park hunt suffered a bit in this respect, actually, simply because there were fewer interesting details that made for a good clue. Previous hunts have taken place in the city, where there is an endless supply of old signs, forgotten nooks, and urban ephemera to serve as fodder for good clues. The Metro Metro writers seemed to struggle to find such goodies in the park, making the clues more straightforward and repetitive than usual. ↑

“Gulls are scavengers anyway. Most birds are. Get yourselves guns and wipe them off the face of the earth.”¹

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.

---

1. According to the master of suspense. ↑

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.

---

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.

---

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. ↑