1970’s Bollywood Filmi star (Taken with instagram)
Break the Machine (Taken with instagram)
I think they are making the Tabasco bottles smaller… (Taken with instagram)
I helped start the co-ed a capella group ‘Superfood’ when I was at Georgetown. Two weeks ago they had the first ever Superfood reunion on campus where they invited all of the alums (affectionately known as leftover ‘foods) to attend and sing a song on stage with them during their Spring Sing concert. The one song that every Superfoodian knows is ‘Zombie’ by the Cranberries. While the song has undergone a lot of improvements in arrangement over the past few years (thanks Vince!) we were all able to remember the core / fake it pretty well. Thank you Superfood. It was great to be back on stage in Gaston Hall.
Benefits of cooking at my parent’s house? Fresh herbs. What Mint! (Taken with instagram)
"I see this in politics all the time. Candidates enter politics wanting to be authentic and change things. But once the candidates enter the campaign, they stop focusing on how to be change-agents. They and their staff spend all their time focusing on beating the other guy. They hone the skills of one-upsmanship. They get engulfed in a tit-for-tat competition to win the news cycle. Instead of being new and authentic, they become artificial mirror opposites of their opponents. Instead of providing the value voters want — change — they become canned tacticians, hoping to eke out a slight win over the other side.
Competition has trumped value-creation. In this and other ways, the competitive arena undermines innovation.
"
—
The Creative Monopoly - NYTimes.com
Interesting ideas by Mr. Brooks. Give it a read if you have a moment. There are lots of good nuggets in the article, however the discussion about politics struck me today.
"we have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day"
—
The Flight From Conversation is a fascinating article by Sherry Turkle in the NYTimes this weekend. Check it out. This killer quote struck a chord.
I think that we often times embrace the digital world as an alternative to the physical world because we can control our interactions - we treat digital as a sort of antiseptic to help sand down the edges of our reality.
This is a dangerous game that makes you feel like you are connected, learning, talking and REALLY living. Futurists might claim that in fact, it IS living. But I don’t think it is really living. It is a simulation of living by itself. And as days go by, we all become more guilty of it.
But it doesn’t need to be.
I look at digital interactions and social platforms as extensions of my real (analog) life. These tools and communities provide further levels of discourse and interaction - but these further levels are extensions of thoughts and interactions that I have in conversations over a meal or with friends in face to face interactions. And in my opinion that’s how they should be considered. As extensions, not as replacements. Digital interactions and social platforms enable emergent outcomes - those serendipitous moments which provide overwhelming value (a blog post in itself). They are additions, not alternatives and if we consider them to be alternatives, then our future looks a lot more grim and dystopian. And that’s a bit soul crushing.
(H/T @katenieder)
How Big is Amazon's Cloud?
Amazon is a fascinating company and it’s web services are a good representation of the concept of ‘eating your own dog food’.
Think about what Amazon has built and/or has access to: a boatload of digital content, tremendous hardware and software infrastructure, taste and preference data for millions of consumers, the credit cards of those consumers, consumer facing hardware, a publishing platform, payment, efficient distribution, the list goes on and on. I’m loooooong Amazon. Amazing company. Can’t wait to see what Bezos continues to do.
"Levon Helm will be sorely missed, and never forgotten. He cuts an imposing figure in the history of rock and roll and leaves behind a body of work that that we’re blessed to have, a lifetime of perfect tempos, perfect taste, perfect feel. It’s music we describe with vague metaphors because we can’t describe it with anything else, and because when we run out of those there’s just nothing left to say."
—Levon Helm Was Perfect - Jack Hamilton - Entertainment - The Atlantic (via toddzeigler)
(via toddzeigler)
I realize that people might be a bit sick of Gotye and Kimbra (and that I’m pretty late to the party) but check out Walk off the Earth covering ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ if you haven’t seen them before.
H’amazing.
