[d]online

Sep Kamvar, the technical lead of personalization at Google and a Consulting Professor of Computational Mathematics at Stanford University, and his artist friend, Jonathan Harris, designed a pretty cool Java Applet that searches blogs for the phrase “I Feel” and adds the remaining context to a catalogued database. With Harris’s design, the result of We Feel Fine is a trippy visualization of how the world’s bloggers are feeling at any given time. Sub-sort by genre, gender, location, and narrow results to see specific sub-sets of the blogging demographic.

I’ve decided that for the next few posts (or at least until I get bored of it) all my blog postings will incorporate the phrase “I feel” just so I can skew their statistics. The more likely result, however, is that I’m doing exactly what they want and simply contributing to their way-cool site.
Click here to see We Feel Fine.

Kudos, guys. I feel impressed.

Julian Velard has a new CD out called “The Movies Without You” and, while we weren’t mentioned on the liner notes for designing his site, I still encourage you to give it a listen. The tracks “Joni” and “Jimmy Dean and Steve McQueen” are my favorites, but the others a pretty hot too. My personal favorite of the disk is that, in the lyrics of Joni, JV tries to lure a girl back to his apartment by pleading “I got cable! I got caabbbbllleeeee!!!”

By the way, in reading the fine print in this disk’s ©Copyright, I’ve learned “Unauthorized Duplication is Completely Encouraged.” So grab the contents of this directory and share it amongst your friends.

(I feel somewhat non-plussed about duping music with the artist’s permisson.)

Google never ceases to amaze me. Sean told me last night over a few drinks at Soho House that Google now has a BlogSearch…which his diabolical mind is trying to fit into some upcoming projects. When I woke up this morning, I had to run to the computer to see if it was true, or just Captain Morgan talking. Well, he’s right…and they’re already sniffing donline. Thanks Google, your talents a making my job of an organic SEO’er have saved me yet again. Bless you guys…

When I was a kid, I had a dream that when you die, you’re taken to a room in heaven where a red line traces your existance on the world, darting in and out of streets, houses, colleges, towns, states, countries, etc. This way, even if your work didn’t leave an indelible line on society, your steps surely would. In the dream, I saw the lines intersect with my family and then split off again. The lines tangoed with lovers (and glowed more vividly when they crossed), meandered with friends, sped down highways on roadtrips and caromed off near misses with soul mates, only to intertwine again. The pulsing line, so full of activity, only ended when you were laid to rest for good. It’s a stupid dream, but, hey, I was a kid.

Click here to see the whole tutorial.

I found an old gesso’d board along the side of the street in Chelsea that some photographer threw away, along with a bunch of prints and photo-paper that they no longer needed. The board was great, because it was painted white, but wear-and-tear had created a unique “aged” feeling on it.

I hadn’t actually painted for a while, so I thought it might be time to get my brush wet again. The concept was to draw a scene from a Shakespeare play and, of course, I drew something from MacDeath. Below is the watercolor illustration of Lady Mac and husband after “the deed is done.” Click for an ultra-hi-rez version.

Your thoughts, as always, are appreciated.

Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Everything is Illuminated is up for The Koret International Jewish Book Award and so far, he’s winning.  Do your civic duty, man. Step up to the plate. Make your neighbors proud. One for the gipper, and all that…

Click here to vote for your favorite Jewish Book.

Tráigame sus pobres, su cansado, sus masas amontonadas anhelando respirar libremente…

Well, that’s the way that Altavista’s Babel Fish translates Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus“ to Spanish. I’d have to ask my Spanish friends if that’s anything close to the actual translation, but it serves its purpose for now.

I got in a discussion with my 80-year-old cousin this weekend about a national language. Vinnie is a self-proclaimed Republican, though he’s a registered Democrat where he lives so that he can vote in the primaries. He and his wife noted (strangely) that the two politicians they most abhor are Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush. Both, by their accounts, are idiots. While I only half agree with that statement, I was swept in the undertow of a political conversation, brought about by a veritable ocean of Scotch and Plum Rum Cordial (both home-made and delicious).

And while Vinnie continued to state that he refused to ruin an otherwise perfect weekend with a political debate, he also continued to pursue the conversation; the heart of which was the adoption of a national language.

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