Play me for my ping pong table! – $50/150 (Greenpoint/Williamsburg)
I have a perfectly functional, regulation size Sportcraft ping pong table that I need to sell before I move into a smaller place. It folds up so you can store it in a corner.
In order to have a little fun in the process of letting it go, I decided to make a wager: best out of 3 games to 21. If you win, you can buy it for the low price $50, but if I win you buy it for $150 (which is still not a terrible deal). We’ll shake on it up front. I’m a man of my word, and I expect you to be a person of your word as well. I can help you dismantle it for transportation after the game.
I’m not making the bet because I’m sure that I’ll win. In fact, I realize that an ad like this might attract very good players. I just wanted to make the process of letting my table go more exciting than sad.
Theoretical cosmologist Sean Carroll explains to Steven Colbert the idea of the Multiverse, the theory that multiple universes make up all that exists.
I was shopping in a supermarket recently and noticed a mountain of Quisp cereal, an erstwhile dead brand that was originally introduced in 1965. It reminded me of Rob Walker’s excellent 2008Sunday Times Magazine article about River West Brands, a Chicago outfit that purchases and reivitalizes ghost products, including the sugar-coated flying saucer cereal, hoping to capitalize on nostalgia and brand familiarity. An excerpt from Walker’s article:
“River West’s offices, on the 36th floor of the Chicago Board of Trade Building, are sprinkled with the bric-a-brac of obscure products: a Quisp cereal box, Ipana toothpaste packages, Duz detergent bottles. On a wall of Paul Earle’s office is a framed, five-foot-by-three-foot sheet of uncut ‘Wacky Packages’ stickers — those 1970s trading-card-size brand-parody images that rendered the word Crust in the style of the Crest logo, for example. Earle has a Midwestern everyman quality about him: he’s compact, with a big and friendly let’s-get-along voice and a penchant for deadpan jokes. Only his designer-eyeglass frames deviate from his overall demeanor.
Earle loves brands. They are not mere commercial trademarks to him, but pieces of Americana. He seems not just nostalgic but almost hurt about the fate of the ‘castoff brands’ of the world. ‘If commerce is part of the American fabric, then brands are part of the American fabric,’ he said to me on one occasion. ‘When a brand goes away, a piece of Americana goes away.’
Earle’s professional entanglement with branding began at Saatchi & Saatchi, where he was a cog in a gigantic ad agency working for gigantic clients, like General Mills and Johnson & Johnson. That was in the mid-1990s, and he saw what happened as conglomerates merged: brands that didn’t have the potential for global scale got squeezed to the bottom shelf, or out of existence. He was attracted to the idea of working with ‘noncore’ brands, but when he figured out that big-agency economics made it impractical, he left Saatchi and went to the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and then took a brand-management job at Kraft.
At Kraft he observed the same mergers-and-consolidation process from a different angle, and he seems to have found it equally frustrating. ‘These are American icons with loyal consumers,’ he says. ‘It’s not their fault a $40 billion company doesn’t like them anymore. Consumers like them.’ He sees reviving brands as ‘a civic mission’ of sorts. ‘If it weren’t my job,’ he said, ‘it would be my hobby.’ He says this in a way that sounds not just plausible but hard to doubt.
Even so, he has set out to make this particular civic mission turn a profit. While he recognizes that a given brand might not be able to survive in the portfolio of a multinational, different sorts of business models might work to sustain it. As surely as the ownership of brands has consolidated through one megamerger after another, the consumer market seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with an individualism-fueled demand for almost unlimited variety.”
There was a ridiculous and popular 1968 book by Erich Von Daniken, called Chariots of the Gods?, that was turned into a 1970 film by Harald Reinl. It proposed that extraterrestrial astronauts visited Earth and influenced history. This video, a TV reedit of the film, is narrated by Rod Serling.
Prevents spotting on Mets’ uniforms. (Image by Shattonbury.)
Many people were surprised when embattled New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon mocked and ridiculed the star players on his self-described “shitty team” in a recent New Yorker article, but the formerly wealthy idiot is just getting started. In order to send an even sterner message to his loser club, Fred Wilpon has decided to install a tampon machine in the Mets clubhouse, letting his players know that he doesn’t believe that they truly are men and that, perhaps, they are able to menstruate. This is poor behavior for two reasons. First of all, it is sexist as many women are great athletes and being compared to a woman is not an insult. Secondly, cash-strapped Fred Wilpon is charging $3,000 per tampon in order to raise money for his Madoff legal defense fund.
Fred Wilpon, a rich, dumb man who is no longer so rich but is as dumb as ever, is filled with rage for his ballplayers. Of course, he should be angry with himself for horribly mismanaging his baseball team and investing heavily in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. But that’s not Fred Wilpon’s way.
To show his disdain, Fred Wilpon has taken to using outfielder Carlos Beltran’s locker as a urinal. The well-dressed dummy sits in the owner’s box at games, pointing at his players and laughing derisively. When Mets players are about to catch the ball, Fred Wilpon blows a vuvuzela and calls their mothers “whores,” hoping to distract them so that they will make an error. When he sees players’ wives in the stands, Fred Wilpon gestures putting his index finger down his throat, suggesting that they are homely and make him want to vomit.
Fred Wilpon decided to make an example of beloved team mascot, Mr. Met. Calling the bulbous-headed figure a “disgusting bag of shit,” Fred Wilpon took away Mr. Met’s uniform and underwear, forcing him to parade around in the parking lot with his genitals exposed. Mr. Met has been ordered to squeegee for change and turn tricks in cars. He has developed Hep-C and a serious drinking problem.
In a recent Sports Illustrated article, Fred Wilpon said the Mets may lose $70 million this year, that they are bleeding money. And there is no tampon big enough to stop that.
Mr. Met: Will use his mouth on you. (Image by Richiek.)
"It can be done in a day if you focus on it." (Image by Bjørn som tegner.)
I need someone to do my college paper – $9999999 (bronx)
I have a paper that needs to get done, it is 17 paragraphs and all the sources are included. The paper has very specific instructions eg.what is included in each parapgrah etc… There is less than 30 pages total of reading. It can be done in a day if you focus on it.
I can give $20 cash, $45 chilli’s gift card (3x $15 chili gift cards) or you can feel free to offer what you would want to do this assignment.
"He was literally and figuratively behind the wheel of our bus, driving it the way Charlie Parker worked the saxophone." (Image by Joe Mabel.)
In a 1994 Paris Review Q&A, Ken Kesey explains how Beat muse Neal Cassady wound up driving Furthur, the Merry Pranksters’ bus:
“Cassady was around us often. There was one incident in particular when he truly impressed me not only as a madman, genius, and poet but also as an avatar—someone in contact with other powers. He took me to a racetrack near San Francisco. He was driving and talking very fast, checking his watch frantically, hoping we would get to the track on time. If we got to the track just before the last three races, we’d get in free. We made it just in time and we bet on the last two races. Cassady had a theory about betting he’d learned in jail from someone named Knee-Walking Jackson. His theory was that the third favorite at post time is often the horse most likely to upset the winner and make big money. Cassady’s strategy was to step up to the tellers at the ticket booths just at post time. He’d glance up to see who was third favorite and put money on that horse. He didn’t look at the horses, the jockeys, or the racing sheets. He said to me, This is going to be the one, I can feel it. He asked me for ten bucks and I gave it to him. He put three dollars down with my ten. Given the odds we would have made some good money. We went right down to the line to watch, and it was a close race, neck and neck. I’m no horse fan, but I was getting into it because it looked like the third favorite could win. There was a photo finish and Cassady suddenly tore up his tickets and left. I followed him back to the car and could hear the announcement: We have a photo finish and the winner is . . . It turned out to be the favorite. Neal was so confident of his vision that if he lost, he never waited around or looked back.
Cassady was a hustler, a wheeler-dealer, a conniver. He was a scuffler. He never had new clothes but was always clean, and so were his clothes. He always had a toothbrush and was always trying to sell us little things and trying to find a place where he could wash up. Cassady was an elder to me and the other Pranksters, and we knew it. He was literally and figuratively behind the wheel of our bus, driving it the way Charlie Parker worked the saxophone. When he was driving he was improvising an endless monologue about what he was seeing and thinking, what we were seeing and thinking, and what we had seen, thought, and remembered. Proust was his literary hero and he would quote long passages from Proust and Melville from memory, lacing his revelations with passages from the Bible. He was a great teacher and we all knew it and were affected by him.”
••••••••••
Cassady in conversation with Allen Ginsberg, 1965:
"They have been pestered almost to death by a gang of young ruffians." (Image by Lewis Hine.)
In a December 24, 1890 article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a New York candy store owner has lots of problems with neighborhood toughs, and for some strange reason, the shakedowns, beatdowns, arson and explosions were treated as laughing matters by the police. An excerpt:
“Charles Bauer’s candy store at 35 Second Avenue, New York, was entered by burglars at 1 o’clock this morning. After ransacking the store they fired the place and tried to blow it up with the use of powder and gas. A package of powder was placed by the fire and the plug in the gas pipe was removed, causing the gas to escape.
An explosion occurred but fortunately did little damage. Two policemen who had discovered the burglary and fire narrowly escaped being blinded. The store is on the ground floor of a four story tenement. Bauer, a young German, who with his wife, had saved a little money, and four months ago they bought the place from the former owner. They sell newspapers, tobacco, stationery and candy. Ever since they have had the store they have been pestered almost to death by a gang of young ruffians who hang around the corner on Second Avenue and Second Street. They have made life miserable for Bauer and his wife. He has been robbed a number of times and some of the loafers on one or two occasions have beaten him when he protested against their outrages. He says that they have been in the habit of running into his place when the police drove them from the corners. He got himself a club and when they came into the store again he attempted to put them out. They defied him and beat him.
Bauer says he appealed to the police, but he got no protection. His tormentors would come boldly into the store, steal cigars and cigarettes and get out again. A week after they took that kind of possession of the place it was broken into and robbed. Last night Bauer closed up about 11 o’clock and he and his wife went home. They live across the way.
At 1:20 o’clock the police found the door of the candy store open. There was a fire burning in the back part of the place. Around the store at the end of the counter had been piled a lot of papers, in the center of which was a pile of rags and a package of powder.
The rags were burning. One policeman was badly burned while putting the fire out. Police Captain McCollagh said he was investigating the matter. He didn’t believe there was a gang in his precinct. There are only little boys, 9 or 10 years old, he said. He apparently regarded the burglary and attempt to blow up the building as a joke. However, he said he would look into it.”
"American troops wrote 'Kilroy was here' on the walls of Europe in World War II in order to prove that somebody had been there." (Image by Luis Rubio.)
Matthew Hahn interviewed Hunter S. Thompson for The Atlantic in 1997, discussing the impact of the Internet on journalism and culture, among other matters. Thompson was particularly prescient about the ego-feeding nature of the Net. An excerpt:
“Matthew Hahn: The Internet has been touted as a new mode of journalism — some even go so far as to say it might democratize journalism. Do you see a future for the Internet as a journalistic medium?
Hunter S. Thompson: Well, I don’t know. There is a line somewhere between democratizing journalism and every man a journalist. You can’t really believe what you read in the papers anyway, but there is at least some spectrum of reliability. Maybe it’s becoming like the TV talk shows or the tabloids where anything’s acceptable as long as it’s interesting.
I believe that the major operating ethic in American society right now, the most universal want and need is to be on TV. I’ve been on TV. I could be on TV all the time if I wanted to. But most people will never get on TV. It has to be a real breakthrough for them. And trouble is, people will do almost anything to get on it. You know, confess to crimes they haven’t committed. You don’t exist unless you’re on TV. Yeah, it’s a validation process. Faulkner said that American troops wrote ‘Kilroy was here’ on the walls of Europe in World War II in order to prove that somebody had been there — ‘I was here’ — and that the whole history of man is just an effort by people, writers, to just write your name on the great wall.
You can get on [the Internet] and all of a sudden you can write a story about me, or you can put it on top of my name. You can have your picture on there too. I don’t know the percentage of the Internet that’s valid, do you? Jesus, it’s scary. I don’t surf the Internet. I did for a while. I thought I’d have a little fun and learn something. I have an e-mail address. No one knows it. But I wouldn’t check it anyway, because it’s just too fucking much. You know, it’s the volume. The Internet is probably the first wave of people who have figured out a different way to catch up with TV — if you can’t be on TV, well at least you can reach 45 million people [on the Internet].”
We’re so annoying even machines don’t want to talk to us. According to a BBC article, scientists are encouraging robots to develop their own words. An excerpt:
“The Lingodroid research project lets robots generate random sounds for the places they visit in both simulations and a real office.
The ‘words’ are shared and the robots play games to establish which sound represents which location.
The lexicon has proved so sophisticated that it can be used to help robots find places other robots direct them to.
The machines are being allowed to generate their own words because human language is so loaded with information that robots found it hard to understand, said project leader Dr Ruth Schulz from the University of Queensland.
‘Robot-robot languages take the human out of the loop,’ she said. ‘This is important because the robots demonstrate that they understand the meaning of the words they invent independent of humans.'”
This classic 1976 photograph shows the tempestuous musical genius Charles Mingus playing in Manhattan as part of the celebration for the two hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Mingus would live just three more years, passing away from ALS in 1979. From a 1971 Ebony article about the musician’s memoir:
“In his offbeat autobiography, Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus, the noted composer, bassist and general enigma of that name contends that he is really three people. One man stands at dead center, cooly surveying his domain and expressing what he sees to the other two, one of whom is prone to strike out like a frightened animal while the other is gentle and painfully vulnerable. While it is not quite clear as to which self wrote this “Sex Machine” of a book (possibly it was the middle man since he speaks of himself in the third person), it is interesting to note that one might find elements of all these selves in this man’s music. Mingus composes and plays like a beleaguered genius challenging some nameless deity to account for the inequities imposed on the man by fate and other men–and to do so in no uncertain terms. He is a music of storm and constant questioning, beauty, brilliance and embracing tenderness, all of it molded on a framework of logical musical order. It is difficult to think of any ‘jazz’ artists, aside from Mingus’ idol, Duke Ellington, who is capable of creating such impressionistic tapestries of shimmering sound. In other words, Charles Mingus is one of the truly great ones, beneath the layer of legends surrounding his sexual exploits and eccentricities. His genius must be acknowledged.”
••••••••••
Silent super-8 footage of Battery Park celebration on July 4, 1976:
It was a slow day And the sun was beating On the soldiers by the side of the road There was a bright light A shattering of shop windows The bomb in the baby carriage Was wired to the radio These are the days of miracle and wonder This is the long distance call The way the camera follows us in slo-mo The way we look to us all The way we look to a distant constellation That’s dying in a corner of the sky These are the days of miracle and wonder And don’t cry baby, don’t cry Don’t cry
"The bomb in the baby carriage is wired to the radio." (Image by Malene Thyssen.)
It was a dry wind And it swept across the desert And it curled into the circle of birth And the dead sand Falling on the children The mothers and the fathers And the automatic earth These are the days of miracle and wonder This is the long distance call The way the camera follows us in slo-mo The way we look to us all The way we look to a distant constellation That’s dying in a corner of the sky These are the days of miracle and wonder And don’t cry baby, don’t cry Don’t cry
It’s a turn-around jump shot It’s everybody jump start It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts Medicine is magical and magical is art The boy in the bubble And the baby with the baboon heart
And I believe These are the days of lasers in the jungle Lasers in the jungle somewhere Staccato signals of constant information A loose affiliation of millionaires And billionaires and baby These are the days of miracle and wonder This is the long distance call The way the camera follows us in slo-mo The way we look to us all The way we look to a distant constellation That’s dying in a corner of the sky These are the days of miracle and wonder And don’t cry baby, don’t cry Don’t cry
SIDESHOW ARMLESS/LEGLESS MAN WRITES LETTER WITH HIS MOUTH 1868 – $400 (NEW JERSEY)
This is a two-page letter written by Walter H. Stuart of Brownfield, Maine dated 1868, Stuart had no arms or legs and worked the Sideshows and Carnivals in the years after the Civil War. He was also known as “Texas Jack the One-Armed Whittler” His performance would include him writing a letter or signing autographs with his mouth. A real unique piece of Americana. I have included a scanned photo of Stuart with a comparison autograph on the reverse. I do not possess the photo, just the letter. CDV photo’s of Stuart are frequently available on EBAY, which is where I copied this photo. This letter details his summer shedule for the year 1868. Nice content and easily readable. This is a “Must Have” for the collector or historian of Sideshow memorabilia. This letter comes with it’s original envelope, also addressed by Stuart. This letter is suitable for framing along with the many other scanned photos of Stuart which I will provide with the sale of this document.
For some reason in 1973, more Americans than usual imagined they were seeing UFOs. Maybe after trips to the moon, we thought we were due a visit of our own? Maybe the Vietnam-and-Watergate era was so surreal that everything felt alien anyway? Governor John Gilligan of Ohio, who thought he saw a saucer, is, of course, the father of Kathleen Sebilius, the current Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Much like team owner Fred Wilpon, Mr. Met is a balloon-headed symbol of mediocrity. (Image by richiek.)
Madoff-mired Mets owner Fred Wilpon, the handsomely attired and hapless dummkopf who, with help from his jugheaded scion, Jeff, has run the New York baseball team into the ground for half his adult life, is the focus of anew profile in the New Yorkerby the reliably excellent Jeffrey Toobin. An excerpt:
“In the game against the Astros, Jose Reyes, leading off for the Mets, singled sharply up the middle, then stole second. ‘He’s a racehorse,’ Wilpon said. When Reyes started with the Mets, in 2003, just before his twentieth birthday, he was pegged as a future star. Injuries have limited him to a more pedestrian career, though he’s off to a good start this season. ‘He thinks he’s going to get Carl Crawford money,’ Wilpon said, referring to the Red Sox’ signing of the former Tampa Bay player to a seven-year, $142-million contract. ‘He’s had everything wrong with him,’ Wilpon said of Reyes. ‘He won’t get it.’
After the catcher, Josh Thole, struck out, David Wright came to the plate. Wright, the team’s marquee attraction, has started the season dreadfully at the plate. ‘He’s pressing,’ Wilpon said. ‘A really good kid. A very good player. Not a superstar.’
Wright walked.
When Carlos Beltran came up, I mentioned his prodigious post-season with the Astros in 2004, when he hit eight home runs, just before he went to the Mets as a free agent. Wilpon laughed, not happily. ‘We had some schmuck in New York who paid him based on that one series,’ he said, referring to himself. In the course of playing out his seven-year, $119-million contract with the Mets, Beltran, too, has been hobbled by injuries. ‘He’s sixty-five to seventy per cent of what he was.’ Beltran singled, loading the bases with one out.
Ike Davis, the sophomore first baseman and the one pleasant surprise for the Mets so far this season, was up next. ‘Good hitter,’ Wilpon said. ‘Shitty team—good hitter.’ Davis struck out. Angel Pagan flied out to right, ending the Mets’ threat. ‘Lousy clubs—that’s what happens.’ Wilpon sighed. The Astros put three runs on the board in the top of the second.
I have no love for science fiction as art or entertainment, but I really like the cultural visionary aspect of it. The Independent feeds that interest with an article by Simmy Richman about a sci-fi writer named Geoffrey Hoyle, who was asked in 1972 to write a book (2011: Living in the Future) for children that would predict what life would be like this year. His prognostications were amazingly correct. In the piece, Hoyle discusses what he got right and the aspects of contemporary life he simply doesn’t understand. An excerpt:
“‘Over the years politicians have added new thing to new thing and nobody has the intellect to wipe the slate clean and say, ‘What do we need?’ What have changed over the decades are the levels of bureaucracy, the control over our lives and the rise of the career politician with pop-star status. We live in a time where there’s a huge amount of disinformation and facts can be twisted to alarm or control. The original draft of the US constitution is 20 pages long; Brussels turns out thousands and thousands of pages – which says to me that no one knows how to make law [any more].’
So while Hoyle predicted both the large (the ubiquity of the computer, the invention of the smartphone and the microwave) and the small (Skype, home supermarket delivery, touchscreens and webcams) ways our lives have changed, he has no idea why the social model of Europe is still ‘tailored to the way people were living in 1947.'”
The opening of Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail,” his famous 2004 Wired article about a shift in consumerism, propelled by the Internet, which the author later expanded into a best seller of the same name:
“In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.
Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.
What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller’s software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.
Particularly notable is that when Krakauer’s book hit shelves, Simpson’s was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson’s book – and if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.
This is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what’s available atBlockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).”
"Ever since I was a little boy I always wanted to be rich."
Help Dominic make his American Dream come true (Upper East Side)
Hello everyone! My name is Dominic Light and I am 17 years old and I am from New York City. Ever since I was a little boy I always wanted to be rich. I started working when I was 11 years old to try and save money to open a business. I have had many jobs which include dish washer,bus boy,waiter,cook,landscaper,paper boy,and many other small jobs. I wasn’t able to save all of my money because my parents are not doing well financially. I have managed to save $20,000 but I know that ain’t nearly enough to open a nice establishment. I plan on opening many restaurants and stores and hopefully become a millionaire. With all of your contributes it will bring me one step closer to making my American Dream come true. Thank you and may God Bless you.
