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From this month’s cover story in Rolling Stone about Mad Men, a great set of 20 photos of behind the scenes, on set photos from MM. Easily the strangest one is the photo of Cosgrove with an Apple laptop since computers were not even on the radar back then.
Earlier in the decade, Mark Prior was the big pitching phenom. He was a star at USC, was drafted at the top of the draft by the Chicago Cubs, and was in the major leagues in 2003, within a year or so of being drafted. His name could have been changed to “Can’t Miss”. Problem was, his arm did not agree with all the pundits. By 2006 he was out of baseball after numerous arm surgeries, unfortunate injuries, and a fateful collision with a guy named Bartman.
It is easy, because it has been so long since he has pitched in a major league game, to forget how exceptional Prior was. He was hailed as a once-in-a-generation pitcher at Southern California, with an unheard-of 17-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio and seemingly flawless mechanics. The small-market Minnesota Twins, perhaps scared off by Prior’s price, chose a hometown product, Joe Mauer, with the top pick in the 2001 draft and lavished him with a $5.15 million signing bonus, a record. About six weeks later, the Cubs, who chose Prior second, gave him $10.5 million.
Today, Prior is attempting to make his comeback to the majors by playing in a semi-pro league out in his hometown of San Diego.
I bring all of this up because on Friday, today’s phenom of the year Stephen Strasburg is scheduled to have “Tommy John” surgery on his once golden right arm that has taken MLB by storm this year. And I do mean “taken by storm”. The well deserved hype surrounding Strasburg was off the charts in today’s 24/7 online media world. Like Mark Prior, Strasburg has (or now, had?) all the natural gifts and tools to be special. But with this injury, the hyped up sports world has to again ask “what if” with this newest athlete of the moment. Will he fall on the phenom scrap heap along with David Clyde, Joe Charboneau, and Brien Taylor? Or will he come back and continue (in 2012) on the amazing trajectory he has been on this year?
Destiny is an evil bitch sometimes.
Well, this did not take long. Facebook Places has been out for a week or to, and already an enterprising individual has hacked together Nearby Friends, a mash up that enables you to see where those in your FB graph have recently checked in. The interesting and scary thing is that it can also track where you have checked in over the recent past, thus putting together a trail of your check ins for all in your network to see. Once again, Facebook has set the bar that much higher for complete disregard for everyone’s privacy. Here is a good article on ReadWriteWeb to help you manage your privacy settings related to Facebook Places.
Via RWW
Caught this article on Techcrunch about how the band Arcade Fire teamed up with Google, Google Chrome and Google Streetview to show off what HTML5 can do as part of a Google Chrome Experiment. After typing in your childhood home address, a “modular” video of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used to Wait” starts playing that includes a guy running through streets with a hoodie on. And after a few minutes, the video brings in Google Streetview and Google Earth aerial views of your childhood neighborhood and then uses those visuals as the backdrop for the video. Its really cool and an intensely personal way to connect you to the video/song and the band.
Here is my video using my childhood home in Boston as the address. NOTE: Be sure to only have this browser open. Its a very processor intensive app and video.
I can’t believe someone actually pays for studies like this. A recent study in England has found…wait for it….almost 90% of users of DVR/TV time shifting devices skip the ads in the shows they have recorded. It really took a market research study by Deloitte to figure this out? Stunning!! A revelation of market research!! In the same story, the respondents did say that if the “ad pods” were shorter, they would consider paying more attention to the advertising. As noted earlier this week, some advertisers are grappling with this situation by trying to fake out viewers by having their ads look so much like the show that they are watching that they will stop Fast Forwarding through the ads.
Google is taking its popular site YouTube to NYC’s Guggenheim Museum. The search company will set up shop in the Guggenheim’s main atrium with all sorts of TV and video displays promoting the finalists from a recent promotion they ran.
The goal of this initiative is to try to re-position YouTube as a site/service that can cater to a more upscale, arts driven clientele and move it beyond the perception that its content is, er, lowbrow.The exhibition, set for October, will showcase videos from as many as 20 finalists of YouTube Play, a contest for graphic artists and users of Googles GOOG video site. A celebrity jury that includes Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky will wade through about 200 videos whittled down from thousands submitted in July.
The gaming of the ads on Mad Men is getting out of hand. Yeah, yeah…they did the job because I’m blogging about it. But there were three different ads that were “gaming” the DVR crowd by presenting their ads in the motif of the actual show so that viewers will stop fast forwarding the DVR at what they think is the end of the ad pod. Klondike had two guys in 1960 era suits pitching a new campaign for the brand. Clorox and Hotels.com then led their pedestrian ads with the animated building and red/black lettering so clearly associated with the show itself. The clear irony here is that these advertisers are holding on with their fingernails to the very interruptive, 1960′s era marketing model that is the central focus of the Mad Men show itself.
Posted via email from my Posterous site
It would be really cool to recreate the street bending scene from Paris using Lego.
Via Amusing Planet
In early June I went down to Baltimore and Washington DC and took in two games at Camden Yards and Nationals Park respectively. Two weeks ago I was in Boston at Fenway watching the Sox come back in the 9th inning to beat the Tigers and in the process created an additional panoramic of Fenway to add to my growing collection. So here are all three for your viewing pleasure. I guess the goal now is to take panoramics from every MLB stadium. Three down, twenty seven to go.
Nationals Park – Home of the Washington Nationals
Camden Yards – Home of the Baltimore Orioles
Fenway Park – Home of the Boston Red Sox
August 12th, 2010 • View Comments • baseball • nationals • orioles • panoramics • red sox • stadiums
The fine folks at Atari are attempting to revive their fortunes by bringing some of their classic games back to life online. If silly games like Farmville can be raging successes online, why can’t Centipede, Frogger, Astroids, and the like also rock it online?
