Hummer brand to be wound down after sale fails

GM finally shuts it down:

Hummers were originally built by AM General. GM bought the brand from AM in 1999. They became a status symbol of the road when Schwarzenegger became the first owner of one in 1992 after persuading manufacturers to make a civilian version. Six years later, the actor-turned-governor ditched his $950,000 (£615,000) fleet of Hummers because they hardly conformed to his new image as eco-warrior.

Hummers emit three times more carbon dioxide than a normal car and eke out just 14 miles to the gallon in city driving.

Other Hummer owners have included David Beckham and Paris Hilton, but Schwarzenegger in particular could hardly be seen to own one after the state of California decided to sue Toyota, Nissan, Ford, Honda, Chrysler and GM over emissions.

02.25.2010Tagged with:    

Nintendo system and five games sell for $13,105

An auction for an original NES bundled with 5 games recently brought in $13, 105 on ebay. It was Family & Fitness Stadium Events, in the original packaging, that drove the price up. Soon after the initial launch the game would be re-branded as World Class Track Meet, but the original incarnation saw only limited release and production in the holiday season of 1987. It is considered one of the rarest licensed NES games you can buy.

02.21.2010Tagged with:    

Roger Ebert’s Last Words, con’t.

Ebert responds to Chris Jones’ article in Esquire.

Well, we’re all dying in increments. I don’t mind people knowing what I look like, but I don’t want them thinking I’m dying. To be fair, Chris Jones never said I was. If he took a certain elegiac tone, you know what? I might have, too. And if he structured his elements into a story arc, that’s just good writing. He wasn’t precisely an eyewitness the second evening after Chaz had gone off to bed and I was streaming Radio Caroline and writing late into the night. But that’s what I did. It may be, the more interviews you’ve done, the more you appreciate a good one. I knew exactly what he started with, and I could see where he ended, and he can be proud of the piece.

I mentioned that it was sort of a relief to have that full-page photo of my face. Yes, I winced. What I hated most was that my hair was so neatly combed. Running it that big was good journalism. It made you want to read the article.

I studiously avoid looking at myself in a mirror. It would not be productive. If we think we have physical imperfections, obsessing about them is only destructive. Low self-esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.

02.21.2010Tagged with:    

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man

Esquire has a great piece on Roger Ebert, the lion in winter.

Ebert is dying in increments, and he is aware of it.

“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear,” he writes in a journal entry titled ‘Go Gently into That Good Night.’ “I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.”

There has been no death-row conversion. He has not found God. He has been beaten in some ways. But his other senses have picked up since he lost his sense of taste. He has tuned better into life. Some things aren’t as important as they once were; some things are more important than ever. He has built for himself a new kind of universe. Roger Ebert is no mystic, but he knows things we don’t know.

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

02.18.2010Tagged with:    

I met a character from Dickens

Roger Ebert laments the tearing down of 22 Jermyn Street in London, the hotel he frequented for some 25 years. It’s chock-full of wonderful, vivid descriptions of everything from the neighboring shops to his first visit to the hotel.

I had just settled in my easy chair when a key turned in the lock and a nattily-dressed man in his 60s let himself in. He held a bottle of Teachers’ scotch under his arm. He walked to the sideboard, took a glass, poured a shot, and while filling it with soda from the siphon, asked me, “Fancy a spot?”

“I’m afraid I don’t drink,” I said.

“Oh, my.”

This man sat on my sofa, lit a cigarette, and said, “I’m Henry.”

“Am I…in your room?”

“Oh, no, no, old boy! I’m only the owner. I dropped in to say hello.”

It all sounds beautiful, and irreplaceable, which makes it sadder still that it’s being destroyed and replaced with “some obscene architectural extrusion,” as Ebert calls it.

02.15.2010Tagged with:    

Meat stylus for the iPhone

Too cold to use your iPhone? Try using a sausage:

Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.

02.11.2010Tagged with:    

OK Go explain why you can’t embed their new video

The band OK Go has a new video for their song “This Too Shall Pass”, but you’re not allowed to post it on your website. Now, this is a band that owes much of it’s exposure to the viral web. How many people first heard about OK Go because of their treadmill video?

Why, you might ask, would this new video be any different?

The catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn’t pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn’t get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won’t let us be on your blog. And, voilá: four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards.

Pretty much describes what’s wrong with the music industry these days.

So instead, let me invite you to enjoy this great little video of OK Go practicing “This Too Shall Pass” with a choir for a performance on the Tonight Show.

02.10.2010Tagged with:    

10 Most Incredible Abandoned Mental Asylums

Perhaps it’s the hollow yet the forbidding facades. Probably it’s the neglected and decaying interiors, riddled with gusty corridors and the relics of their former purpose. More likely still there’s something in the fear and stigma attached to mental disorder itself. Abandoned buildings of all descriptions seem haunted by the ghosts of their past – but when the ghosts are the souls of those declared clinically insane and sectioned, the place is likely to hold more bad memories than most; bad memories but also great character, rare solace, and irresistible magnetism for urban explorers.

A beautiful collection of photos of abandoned and decaying British asylums. How creepy is that dental chair? Great stuff.

02.10.2010Tagged with:    

The Letterman-Oprah-Leno Super Bowl Ad

Most of the Super Bowl ads sucked this year. This one was by far the best of the bunch. Here’s how it happened.

02.08.2010Tagged with:    

Male Boob Jobs on the Rise

For the second year in a row, breast reduction for men represents the fastest growing segment of the cosmetic surgery business in the UK.

02.06.2010Tagged with:    

An Interview with Bill Watterson

The Creator of Calvin and Hobbes gives a brief email interview 15 years after he called it quits.

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

(via df)

02.02.2010Tagged with:    

Chernobyl > Lost Souls

In the dead zone we didn’t encounter eight-legged frogs, giant grown trees or mutant children. But the breathtaking silence was more we could have ever imagined for. It’s hard not to make a fantasy out of this place.

Take a video tour of the remnants of life in Chernobyl.

02.01.2010Tagged with: