The price of ice cream might be going up as the global price of vanilla spikes.

In turn, that's seen 40 per cent of the world's current stock of vanilla—around 1,000 tonnes—shipped out of Madagascar recently, and as a result the markets have gone crazy. After six years hovering at around $25 per kilo, the price has jumped to $40 in single day.

A bunch of Redditors talk about how they became rich. (via Stellar)

What I've learned/realized:
Acquire an education, secure a stream of income, put it to work intelligently, and live with self-control.
Don't get divorced.
Never trust your business partners; never treat them like you don't trust them.

A demographic historian has determined the death toll in the Civil War is 20% higher, 130K people, than the currently agreed upon estimate. (via @davidg)

He counted the number of native-born white men of military age in 1860 and determined how many of that group were still alive in 1870. He compared that survival rate with the survival rates of the men of the same ages from 1850-1860, and from 1870-1880 - the 10-year census periods before and after the Civil War...He controlled for other demographic assumptions, including mortality rates of foreign-born soldiers, added the relatively small number of black soldiers killed, and compared the numbers with the rates of female survival over the same periods.

Here's an interview with H.R. of Bad Brains.


The New York Times has a writer live like a billionaire for a day because that IS IMPORTANT NEWS.

After breakfast, I rush back to the car for a high-speed trip to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, where I’m meeting a real-life billionaire for a trip on his private jet. The billionaire, a hedge fund manager, was scheduled to go down to Georgia and offered to let me interview him during the two-hour jaunt on the condition that I not reveal his identity.

I don't know what this is, but it's 100% the best skateboarding video I watched today. Certain clips made me laugh in real life. The first one. The one where the guy is just standing there and then flips over. The one where the guy gets stuck on the roof. In the streetlight.



Via Stellar.

Person 1: I just don't understand it, it's so useless, who would be against getting rid of the penny?
Person 2: We'll never get rid of the penny because we'd have to round change to the nickle, and people don't want to get more Nickelsback.
Person 1 [quielty]: I didn't think the last album was that bad.

Context.

Lance Armstrong recently competed in a half Ironman (1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike and 13.1-mile run), and was moments from finishing 6th when Jordan James sprinted by him to nab the spot. Armstrong's daughter was waiting at the finish line to give him a medal, but... Well, just watch it.




Here's the Ramones visiting the Regis and Kathy Lee show in 1988. Kathy Lee asked some pretty good questions, actually. (via Stellar Interesting)

Every week, Chris Piascik (@chrispiascik) illustrates his favorite quotation from the episode, and I write up a recap.

"When is everything gonna get back to normal?" This line from Roger towards the end of the episode works as well as anything for the jumping off point of this recap. The answer, dear Roger, is never. Things are changing, and they're changing rapidly. (Jeeze, listen to me, how trite?) The 60s were a time of turbulence. It must have been quite unsettling to still be a part of everyday life, but knowing you're barely hanging on, about to get passed. Roger says he's exhausted by it, mentions hanging on by his finger tips as his hand gets stomped. I imagine this happens for every generation, is always happening, actually, and it's powerful to see Roger so broken by it.

-If Henry hadn't mentioned Scrooge, it would be really brilliant for me to call this the Scrooged/A Christmas Carol episode of Mad Men. Actually, screw it. This was the Scrooged/A Christmas Carol episode of Mad Men, though it was mostly looking into the future. There was SO much looking into the future. Let's see if I can list them all: Betty's dream seeing the family at the table after she died, the fortune teller at lunch, the teenage girl Don met at the Rolling Stones heavily foreshadowed future Sally, and Don talking about the kids growing up without their mother. Even the 2 new characters, minorities both, pushing the firm into the future. I don't remember an episode in the series with this much mention of the future, but it's possible I have a bias because this was the theme I settled on. As for visions of the past... Maybe Roger talking about hiring Pete, and Don and Betty talking on the phone. For visions of the present, we have Don at the Rolling Stones and Michael Ginsberg going home. What were the lessons of A Christmas Carol? Well, obviously, be thankful for what you've got. Betty just seems angry about being fat without having the excuse of being sick. "The cause is usually psychological." Like Roger, Betty mentions she is exhausted, too.

-We're now in the first week of July, 1966. Pete Fox, the Red Sox outfielder mentioned by Michael Ginsberg's dad, died on Wednesday, July 6, 1966. The Rolling Stones concert at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium was July 2nd, 1966, and did in fact, feature the Trade Winds opening up, among others. Here's the set list. Also, in the scene featuring the Francis Manse, Sally and Bobby were running around with sparklers. How about that house, huh? And two phone lines in 1966. Henry Francis is a very important man.

-Wow, Betty looked huge compared to last year. I'm not totally sure why, but her being that big reminded me of when Britney Spears got big. What broad shoulders she had getting out of the bathtub. Clearly, Betty is still dissatisfied about her lot in life. I don't know what's going to shake her out of it, and I wonder if she'll play heavy all season long. The show generally jumps a couple weeks to a month every week, so if she does diet, it'll be at least a couple weeks. Henry's mother is not helping. "I know how it happens." "Obviously at my age I don't have to please men anymore." It must be so weird trying to connect with Betty, and yet she still has a connection with Don. "Say what you always say." "Everything's going to be OK." She needed to hear this from Don. And the connection isn't one sided, either. Don's response to Betty's potential illness was indicative of feelings on his side. Real feelings, not feelings he thinks people want him to have, which don't show up too often. And Betty eating Bugles.

-Megan had a pretty strong week. Not really the focus of anything, but interesting nonetheless. Out to dinner with Raymond from Heinz ("Are you kidding me, he's the only man I want to please more than you."), she was in an interesting position: being treated like a peer, but closer in age to the not present teenage daughter. Ray's wife, "This is boring, isn't it Megan" ignored that Megan could be working, wasn't really living in the present (and definitely not the future). Other funny lines from the dinner, "Everyone's pretty much who you expect them to be." and "I told you he was smooth." Because Don is so smooth, he appears to be what people expect, but isn't at all. Another good scene with Megan was Don's reluctance to tell her about Betty. He didn't know how she would react, yes, but he also may have been surprised to be feeling the way he did. Megan had a good point that he was fine to go to the concert, but not to go to the beach with her friends. Unless that was in there to show a tension between Don and Megan and what Megan wants, I'm not really sure what was happening. I liked she was watching TV and listening to the radio to let the advertising wash over her and having her so sunburned the next day was a good detail.

-Bonjour, Marie! Don's making an effort at least. Was it me, or was Don not a central part to this episode? He was in the periphery a lot, but the story didn't focus on him.

-Mohawk is coming back. I guess it's worth noting that SCDP is not really struggling anymore. Don't you love when your favorite shows leave 17 month cliffhangers unaddressed?

-Incidentally, it was the 2nd episode of last season where 2 somewhat recurring characters were introduced (Faye and Phoebe). This season's 2nd episode features Don's new secretary, Dawn, and a brash new copy writer, Michael Ginsberg. Dawn and Michael significantly increase the number of minorities working for SCDP, and it'll be interesting to see how much of a glimpse we get of Dawn's life. Is she going to get any scenes outside of the office? We know a little more about Michael. He's flashy and adds a different style of character to the cast. "You can see advertising ain't my day job." But also, "Then you're like everyone else." Whenever I hear statements like this one, or the one above from the Heniz dinner, my ears perk up because these statements describe the overarching theme of the show. No one is really who they seem, and everyone is always trying to be something or someone else. Even in the Rolling Stones scene, the groupie does the move with Don's tie and Don asks her if she saw that in a movie. She was playing a part. The scene of Michael at home with his father reinforces this. In the world he's a character, at home he is a son.

-"I like working about talented people, it inspires me." Roger and Stan both brought up the idea that Peggy was going to have a hard time hiring someone because she'd be afraid the new person would replace her. And then it turns out what Roger thought Peggy was afraid of is actually playing out with Pete Campbell. "Pete Campbell, that's the last guy I hired." In fact, Peggy cared more about impressing Don, hiring someone he liked, than anything. It seems like she did that, and Ginsberg's flattery of Don didn't hurt. "You wouldn't want me running all over town telling your secrets."

-"You're so square, you've got corners." Megan said this to Don before the Heinz dinner, but she may as well have said it before the Rolling Stones concert. Don and Harry were square as hell. I'm not really sure why the young groupie approached them, but I thought she was 16 or 17. Don tried to turn it into a focus group, but it didn't work. She didn't answer many of his questions. Was that his only way of relating to her? "None of you want any of us to have any fun because you never did." "No, we're worried about you." After this, I couldn't get it out of my head that this was Sally in 5 years. It's a common trope of Mad Men analysis to mention Sally will be just the right age to experience "The 60s", so this felt super foreshadowy to me.

-Harry ate 20 White Castle cheeseburgers. "Eat first." Indeed

-"Romney's a clown." It's rare that a show taking place 45 years before the present can get in such a jab at a politician running for office. That's just well-thought out story telling right there is what that is.

-Pete Campbell is such a prick to Roger, he made Roger drink brown liquor for the first time in a long time. Pete Campbell is such a prick.

-Don chasing Roger down was interesting. They seemed to have squashed whatever needed squashing, and it was interesting Don confided in Roger. Don is confiding more and more these days. Sup with that?

Update:
I guess I should read the show titles before watching/writing a recap. This one being called, 'Tea Leaves' makes it less exciting for me to pick up all the symbols of the future. Oh well.

I like the idea of using a GoPro to shoot slip and slide action shots. Well done.

I was thrilled to spend last week editing Kottke.org. It's a fun time introducing a larger audience the stuff I like on the Internet. When posting on Kottke, I obviously post a lot more often than I post here, and from time to time I'll have a problem with pacing. I'll see something awesome, but not have the time to write it up right then, and then 5 other awesome things show up for which I have to make time. But then I've gone and posted too much that day, and so the original awesome thing will have to wait until tomorrow. I'll just leave the tab open and get back to it.

To me tabbed browsing is equal parts blessing and curse. I'll open a link in a new tab with the intention of doing something with it, and I'll leave it there forever if I have to. When I started this post I had 75 tabs open. I have a problem. (There's a Firefox extension that makes it so anytime you restart Firefox, the tabs don't load until you click on them again. This extension is an enabler, and makes the whole tab attic idea possible. Tab attic: noun describing the brain space occupied by unopened tabs you know are in a row up above somewhere, but you're not ready to use. The more tabs you have open, the heavier the tab attic is.

In any case, I wanted to share a bunch of links that definitely could have gone on Kottke last week (maybe some of them still might?), but didn't because they got locked up in the tab attic. This post took a ton of time and I realized because it's actually 10 Kottke.org posts in one.
-Damien Hirst and the great art market heist.

Hirst is not only the world's richest artist, but a transformative figure who can be assured of his place in history. Sadly – for him and for us – this is not because of the quality of his work but because he has almost single-handedly remade the global art market in his image: that is to say, the image of the artist as celebrity clown, the licensed working-class fool who not only shits on us from on top of his pile of cash, but persuades us to buy that shit and beg for more. This cockney chancer routine, perfected in the 60s by the likes of David Bailey and Keith Moon, has deep roots in British pop culture. We have a lot of affection for guys like these, who seem to be getting away with it, sticking it to the man.

Also, here's Felix Salmon on How Damien Hirst recaptured his market.

-I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter.

The answer: they don’t. The days when a celebrated chef might wait until the end of a distinguished career and spend years polishing the prose of the single volume that would represent his life’s work are gone. Recipes are product, and today’s successful cookbook authors are demons at providing it — usually, with the assistance of an army of writer-cooks.

Gwyneth Paltrow denied having a ghostwriter in a Tweet with a grammatical mistake.

-Jorge Louis Borges on The Task of Art.

For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. Your are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed.

-Extreme Maple Syrup. This one I was going to post because it mentions my friends Jamie and Matt in the first paragraph, and I was going to tie it to Making the Grade: Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best which has been in the tab attic since November.

Martin Picard! You make the macho chefs of America look like sissies—except maybe your fellows in the group that calls itself the International Hoof and Snout Mafia: Chris Cosentino; Fergus Henderson; Anthony Bourdain; Matt Jennings, of Farmstead, in Providence; Jamie Bissonnette, of Coppa, in Boston, and a former vegetarian. Inventor of foie gras poutine, popularizer of head cheese, butcher: Picard, at his Montreal restaurant Au Pied de Cochon, has for almost a decade been outdoing just about everyone in decadent down-home cooking.

-I don't know if this one would have made it in, but it was opened as a maybe, and I am in tab attic prune mode. Sasha Frere-Jones: Good Things About Twitter.

That’s the vegetables. What else is on Twitter? A poetic spambot named Horse_ebooks that spits out isolated phrases like “monopoly on your radio” or fragments like “33 Dependence on chance may seem a burden and a limitation on fraternity.” Occasionally this found poetry comes with a link to a terrible e-book such as Pizza Recipes, which would seem to be the original purpose of Horse_ebooks. Adrian Chen of Gawker recently reported on the feed’s origin (Russia) and purpose (inept commerce) and poetic engine (maybe automated, maybe human). Why do more than fifty-five thousand people follow Horse_ebooks? Because he/it tweets “Pocket Change Written Plan Ball Games Family Haircuts” and, after you’ve read the name Santorum for the 456^th time, these are the words that keep hope alive.

The Secret Ingredient. "Liquor companies love to claim they use closely guarded, centuries-old recipes. usually it’s just marketing."

As Breaux points out, even if he were to determine the exact formula for Chartreuse or Campari, it’s not as though customers would come clamoring for his imitations. The makers of the originals are “going to outspend me in marketing,” he says. Breaux notes that the best-selling spirit globally is vodka, behind which there are no significant production secrets at all. It’s essentially pure ethanol; the main added ingredient is marketing.

-I really like talking about pig breeds and breeding habits, so I was excited to share this article from a couple months ago. Hogs Wild by Ian Frazier should remind you of Ossibaw pigs, a post I put on Kottke the summer before last.

In frontier times, farmers let their hogs run loose, then collected them with the help of dogs on butchering day. Many hogs chose to skip this event, naturally. After America became rich, circa 1890, sportsmen with money imported Eurasian wild boars to stock hunting preserves. When these animals escaped and crossbred with feral swine, they created a tougher and even better-adapted (some say) feral hog. The fact that wild swine have been living in America for centuries does not dissuade wildlife biologists from referring to them as a "non-native" species. Feral hogs of the species Sus scrofa live on every continent but Antarctica, and also on many islands and archipelagoes. Except in the original range of the Eurasian wild boar, feral hogs are non-native everywhere.

-One of the best parts of editing Kottke.org are the people who send in links. I still haven't quite hardened myself to not feeling guilty about not using these links. This is a job for sociopaths, I think. In any case, former ShareBro Jonah Keri, sports statistics advocate, Grandland.com writer, and all around bon vivant sent me this link and I thought it was a no-brainer for posting, but didn't have the time to get through the article, or even start it. I'm fascinated by this topic for a movie, and the fact that it rose organically out of the Internet. How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big-Budget Flick. I've posted about this project twice before, and Jason may have, as well, but this is a great definitive profile of James Erwin.

The encyclopedias proved that he had talent and erudition, but they didn’t bring him any attention—the buyers were mainly libraries—and barely earned him minimum wage. But writing the encyclopedias did teach him a crucial set of skills. He now knew how to mine history for tragedy and comedy. He could instantly recall huge swaths of fact. (Erwin competed on Jeopardy! in 2009, walking away a two-time champion and $23,598 richer.) Perhaps most important, he could compose large blocks of text with astonishing speed.

-Kevin Nguyen of the Bygone Bureau (why are you here? go there!) sent over a bunch of awesome things that...fuck. These really should have been posted. Well, two of the links, the rest were boring. Kevin's taste is only slightly attuned to mine. Now I'm just being a jerk to goad Kevin into an angry Tweet.
Dance the flip-flop by Robin Sloan:

Sculpt eight different vases. PHYSICAL

Take photos of those vases. DIGITAL

Find those photos and combine them somehow into a single vase. DIGITAL

Print that new vase in plaster with a 3D printer. PHYSICAL

Take photos of that new vase. DIGITAL

Make an animated GIF! DIGITAL

And I don't know how to describe sssspace.tumblr.com except as Kottkeporn. This one would have been perfect.

Also, if you think 75 tabs is a lot, Jason uses 3 different browsers at the same time.

Here's 8 year old Max Vu from California, tearing it up.. Cult BMX has a new line of juvenile completes, Max is riding the 12". Now kids everywhere can ride like what.


Via Chris

Andrew Dickey tears up the streets of Melbourne in this street trials video. He'll remind you of Danny MacAskill, but the videography isn't as tight, and, well, he's just not Danny MacAskill. There are a couple points, riding off a parking garage, and hopping from tiny barrier to tiny barrier, where it feels good, though.



Via The Daily What

Time lapse AND tilt shift? Oh, boy!