Sweet Jesus!!

The proverbial girl in every port as applied to electric cars. I'm sure my Tesla wouldn't begrudge me a Lightning as long as I didn't try to bring her to the states... A deposit is only 15,000 Pounds (in today's dollars that oughta be about $80k). I have to say, though, as beautiful as the Tesla is, this blows it out of the water.

kwame

I'll spare you from the ranting my long-suffering wife has been audience to for the past few weeks. I can't add anything to the anti-Detroit-mayor conversation that hasn't been said except for my own outrage at the hypocrisy, lying, entitlement, race-baiting, bible-thumping, and general contempt for the people of the area and the law.

That said, how stone stupid do you have to be to text message accomplices about affairs and illegal activity? That alone demonstrates that we're not just dealing with brazen criminals, but flagrantly moronic ones. Their antics are so sophmoric and clumsy, only deep political entrenchment could have covered it up this long. I was talking to a coworker from Chicago about our respective city's corruptions yesterday and at the same time we blurted out, 'At least Chicago works!' I doubt Daley or his father ever considered giving a grey-area-order via email, chat, text, or paper of any kind. Professionals realize these kinds of things are better said via word of mouth; chumps in crooks' clothing text their illegal intentions.

Mudgie's

Holy crap - saw this in drafts - thought I'd posted about Mudgie's ages ago.

I finally got a chance to go to Mudgie's about foru or five weeks after it opened in Corktown, where Eph McNally's used to be; I'd wanted to get there since intending to go to Eph's and finding it gone and renovation on Mudgie's wrapping up. The paint-spattered owner and long-time Eph's waiter, Greg Mudge, explained that he was giving it a go with sandwiches and soups.

All I can say is, go. I've been twice now and been happily surprised both times. Eph's, though cool and a Detroit tradition, has been I feel resting on its laurels a bit - I've been to the new location on Woodward twice and have felt only fine about it each time. It's good, just not terribly interesting. Mudgie's though, is fighting for your attention and you see it in the sandwich creations and the service which is friendly and top notch. Well worth the stroll, if you work downtown, or even a drive, if you need to come in.

movies and cars

Good article in Wired about progress on the Netflix Prize, a million-dollar challenge to improve the accuracy of their suggestion algorithm by ten percent. Mathematically, it lost me after k-nearest-neighbor, but the rest is very interesting and supports the currently popular conversations around smart mobs and black swans: if all you have are one type of person working on a problem, you'll only ever get one type of solution, which will likely not be as good as it could be. In this case the non-mathematician taking the crowd by storm is a bit of a polymath named Gavin Potter who has the only-obvious-after-you-hear-it quote of the article (and probably of the industry):

"The 20th century was about sorting out supply," Potter says. "The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand."

Just a short way into the article, I was reminded of both today's X Prize and 1924's Orteig Prize and started to wonder why the American auto industry hasn't done something similar. If you found that you were heavily invested in the infrastructure and history of just one industry yet you were being beaten in both the fundamentals and the new concepts by your competitors and couldn't picture what the next step was, what would you do? Would you heavily invest in marketing and lobbying to flatten the playing field for your same-old product which you know has a limited life anyway (due in this case to increasing gas prices), or would you pony up some cash for the best next big idea? Crowdsource that contest to the internet and not only do you get a few good ideas for which you offer smaller payouts, but you could easily glean priceless marketing info (Mr. Lutz, you can paste a job offer in a comment to this post).

he's got the whole world in his hands

A friend whose opinion I normally value forwarded me an email he seemed to agree with the other night that contained this quote:

"Obama has the good judgment and intelligence to surround himself with top key advisors. Hillary will surround herself with campaign pay-off appointees. At 3:00 in the morning, I want brains, not debts."

At 3 in the morning that person is going to be wanting of brains no matter who's in the White House. But, for that anonymous would be commentator I offer Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle.

hapless

On NPR tonight the announcer was talking about an upcoming piece on The War of the Worlds seventy years later. He asked if it, meaning the baseless fear that gripped some listeners who didn't realize the radio transmission wasn't real, could happen again.

I thought, ''Could?' It has.' We're at war based on cleverly manipulated fictions intended to scare the bejeebus out of us just as effectively as Orson Welles carefully scripted his radio story to send chills up all those spines in 1938. The only difference is the length of time taken for 100% of those fooled to understand it was all a hoax.

Most of those folks in 1938 probably would've bet money that by 2008 we'd have superior powers of intellect helping us to overcome the Martian threat; given compound interest, that money would've been better invested in, um, anything.

Terrorist Martians are coming to take away your foot massages!

IRON MAN!

My favorite childhood comic + a favorite actor in a part I never would've thought to put him in = me in a sweaty tizzy looking forward to May 2nd.

WHOW!! Like these guys, I "could not be more excited about this movie right now without becoming a danger to" myself. Seriously, I've watched the trailer four five six times already.