Coyote Tracks

Thoughts, links and found objects § Coyote Cartography (home page)

Oct 16, 2008 10:59am
With Android, you’re not learning an unfamiliar but logical methodology; you’re adapting to its quirks. There’s a difference. FedEx will happily deliver your package anywhere across the country, overnight: you just have to fill out a form according to the procedures they’ve set. By contrast, Android’s UI is often like the FedEx driver who refused to leave a package on your doorstep until you removed the garden gnome with “those mocking, judgmental eyes. - Andy Ihnatko on the Google Phone
Sep 10, 2008 10:05am
Sep 9, 2008 3:54pm
[President William Howard] Taft was, perhaps, too often the butt of unfair jokes. Despite his legendary bulk, he was an energetic man; when governor of the Philippines he cabled Secretary of War Elihu Root, “Just rode a mule a hundred miles over the mountains. Feeling fine.” Which of course prompted Elihu Root to ask earnestly by cable, “Glad to hear you are well; but how is the mule? - The Edge of the American West
Aug 19, 2008 2:09pm
Aug 15, 2008 1:46pm
Aug 14, 2008 3:06pm
No less an authority than Kiefer Sutherland recalls that Bambi was the first film he ever saw and that “it taught [him] about—I guess on a broad scale—sexuality.” Getting into a bit more detail than may be necessary, Sutherland admits: “I was in love with Thumper’s girlfriend from the time I was seven until I was ten. She’s got all that eye shadow on and she’s looking real good.” Any movie that can make a furry out of a man like Jack Bauer is strong stuff. - Ari Kelman, The Edge of the American West
Aug 6, 2008 1:29pm
My sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry. - Merlin Mann
Jul 24, 2008 8:46am
Humans suffer from bright’n’shiny complex, where we’re titillated by the new. Think of it like this: have you actually done anything with that last domain you bought? No. You had the idea for it on Tuesday morning and you got all fired up, so you bought the domain the moment you got in to work. At lunch you furiously doodled your design in your notebook, fully intending to get home and get started on the HTML/CSS, and then you got home… and watched Lost. Take the bright’n’shiny complex and apply it to your entire group, where everyone is prioritizing their day by their particular inspiration, and you’ll realize it’s shocking that we ever collectively get anything done. - Rands In Repose
Jul 14, 2008 4:26pm
Jul 9, 2008 5:13pm
Jul 8, 2008 4:10pm
The White House is scrambling to contain a diplomatic fiasco after an official briefing book distributed to reporters at this week’s G8 summit contained a not very flattering description of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. We may have taken a few shots at Berlusconi around here, but obviously this is no way for the White House to treat the U.S.’s staunchest European ally. And if they must, at least do it right and make fun of his tan. - Joshua Keating, FP Passport
Jul 7, 2008 1:45pm
An Edison bulb, in a velvet-fronted panel set behind a hand-blown ruby glass dome mounted in a brass fitting with giant steel lugs, is lit. A hand-painted warning is now visible: The steampunk is nearing excruciating weariness and tedium; son, kindly seek an alternative aesthetic. - Andy Ihnatko (on Twitter)
Jul 3, 2008 3:07pm
Jul 2, 2008 3:23pm
You could blame consumerism as one thing that’s happening in this film, but there’s a million other things we do that distract us from connecting to the person next to us and from furthering relationships, which is truly the point of living. I loved the idea of WALL·E finding something real. He was fascinated with the idea of living. And what’s the point of living? Something real. He was a manmade object with something real inside him. And he found something real while surrounded by manmade objects. That just was poetic for me. - Andrew Stanton in Christianity Today
Jun 26, 2008 3:13pm
Let’s ignore, for the moment, the absurdity of Florida’s paying a premium price to a company that has done hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in damage to the state’s most precious natural resource, draining swaths of the Everglades and polluting the rest with fertilizer runoff. Instead, let’s get in touch with our inner libertarians and fulminate about this deal’s biggest outrage: it rewards a company that has been gouging American taxpayers and consumers for the better part of a century. - The Atlantic, “A Not-So-Sweet Environmental Victory
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