Ballet Shoes Sound Like a Design Problem to Me
Your classic pair [of traditional ballet pointe shoes] can last anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of days…The American Ballet Theatre in New York City sets aside $350,000 for pointe shoes per season, about $7,500 per ballerina…Most of the shoes purchased for Ballet Tucson come from Freed of London, an established British pointe shoe maker since 1929.
— excerpted from the article En Pointe Takes Toll on Shoes
Your classic pair [of traditional ballet pointe shoes] can last anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of days…The American Ballet Theatre in New York City sets aside $350,000 for pointe shoes per season, about $7,500 per ballerina…Most of the shoes purchased for Ballet Tucson come from Freed of London, an established British pointe shoe maker since 1929.
— excerpted from the article En Pointe Takes Toll on Shoes
I don’t mean to sound ridiculously naive here, but if good ballet shoes cost $50-100, and professional ballerinas completely destroy a pair in less than a week, and most of these shoes are being made by (ostensibly) a handful of companies who have been making the shoes since the early 20th century (ostensibly) in the same fashion, doesn’t it stand to reason that someone needs to design a better ballet shoe?
This week's sign that Hollywood is a sad, sad place: Disney brings us Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
Five Musicians Whose Respective Bands Would Be Better Off if They Didn’t Include a Fiddle Player
1. Dave Matthews
2. Carter Beauford
3. Steffan Lessard
4. LeRoi Moore
5. Butch Taylor
A note from The Management: Apologies for the downtime today; not very Very Daily Weblog of me. Some server maintenance snipered most of my sites for most of the day, but everything should be back to normal.
Having a Mustache en Espanol
With Moustache May in full swing, and my Team Western stache in full effect, I have to admit staches have been on my mind.
This video = brilliant.
Behold Wordpress, Destroyer of CPUs - Jeff Atwood discusses the irresponsible lack of built-in caching in Wordpress’s out-of-the-box installation. I’m starting to use the WP-Cache plugin and seeing a fairly dramatic speed increase (and I don’t even get that much traffic in the grand scheme of things.)
Dear Scarlett Johansson,
Don’t quit your day job.
I think you’ll get by without a music career,
Joshua
Twitter gets more interesting by the day. For example, Cobra Commander (and General Hawk.)
Trent Reznor can’t be stopped. The new Nine Inch Nails album The Slip is available for download. For free. Quote, “thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one’s on me.” It’s like he’s a kid who just discovered he can fly; now he flies everywhere. And paradigms for music distribution continue to change.
[A website ought to be] a platform that’s supple and flexible, lends itself to tuning, and supports multiple levels of engagement. — Louis Rosenfeld
This week's sign that Hollywood is a sad, sad place: It was completely believable to most of the internet that this fake site for Speed 3 was a studio-backed reality.
Bad, wasteful, hard-to-recycle-able food packaging annoys me, so this clever take on take-out food packaging is glorious. The chopsticks-as-handle move is classy and well-crafted (though not exactly sanitary (as if the paper sleeve really helps that much, Joshua)).
I doubt any future photographic excursions or learnings will ever stop my love for abstract images of lights and pretty colors. Gorgeous cut paper, watercolor, and etc. illustration from Stina Persson. (Some potentially NSFW imagery in there.)
Kids, let’s face it. Facebook is Webkinz for adults. — Fake Steve Jobs, The Problem with Facebook
Five Dudes I’d Love to Share a Tasty Beverage or Off-Kilter Buddy Movie With
1. Tom Waits
2. Tom Peters
3. J.D. Salinger
4. Rob Lowe (in character as Sam Seaborn from The West Wing)
5. Ron Perlman
Wired interviews Justin Ouellette about the fantastic Muxtape. Good news all around.
Iiro Rantala New Trio on YouTube
I found this video of the Iiro Rantala New Trio via some videos of the beatboxer Felix Zenger.
The guitar player, Marzi Nyman, is obviously completely insane (that first solo from 0:18-0:24 sounds like a digital squirrel dying in a blender.) And a trio consisting of multi-genre piano, avant garde electric guitar, and beatbox is decidedly odd. And the first 1:30 of the oddly-titled song seems extremely appropriately-titled. And then somehow, someway…
It mostly works for me (minus the guitar tone), especially from 4:00 onward. I’ve been whistling the melodies for most of the day. File under: not really my thing, but I’m sort of glad it exists.