The documentary Dear Zachary tells the story of the 2001 murder of Dr. Andrew Bagby in a parking lot in western Pennsylvania. The prime suspect, his ex-girlfriend Dr. Shirley Turner, promptly fled the United States for St. John’s, Canada, where she announced that she was pregnant with Andrew’s child. She named the little boy Zachary.
Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne, Andrew’s oldest friend, began making a film for little Zachary as a way for him to get to know the father he’d never meet. But when Shirley Turner was released on bail in Canada and was given custody of Zachary while awaiting extradition to the U.S., the film’s focus shifted to Zachary’s grandparents, David & Kathleen Bagby, and their desperate efforts to win custody of the boy from the woman they knew had murdered their son. What happened next, no one ever could have foreseen… they commissioned a killer movie poster. Pun intended. Click here to enlarge the poster.
So it’s been just over 6 months since I first started rocking the MacBook Air and I think it’s about time to give a long-term update. Unfortunately, the news isn’t all that good. First, I’ve gotta say that obviously the Air’s design is top notch. Apple’s done an incredible job of designing a striking, stylish, compact computing machine. It’s ergonomic, it’s easy on the shoulder when in my messenger bag, and it’s beyond portable. The MacBook Air is the easily the leader in the ultra-compact category.
However, there are really two areas that I’m not so stoked on. The first is the straight-up hardware and performance. Unfortunately, I’ve already had to replace the Airport Card, antenna, and even the hard drive! Luckily the machine’s under an AppleCare plan and the doods at MacDocs had the foresight to do a quick Time Machine backup once the hard drive kicked back some unrecoverable errors.
Now I can understand a faulty piece of hardware, but I have to say, I’ve never had to restart, force quit, or watch the spinning-beach-ball-of-death more than with this machine. And this occurs frequently, even during basic browser surfing, or blogging. Yeah, it kinda gets old.
The other major struggle I’ve found is that this machine is from the future. Now it’s true that we’ve officially entered the future since we’ve now elected an African-American President, but the MacBook is apparently from an even more distant future. In the MacBook’s future, the internet is screaming fast, media can be compressed to miniscule sizes, and discs of any kind are non-existent. Though I look forward to this future, the fact of the matter is that it just isn’t here quite yet.
I’ve found myself continually flustered by my inability to rip a disc in a hassle-free manner. It’s currently very difficult to manage and transfer media files wirelessly. And unfortunately, most of the infrastructure outside of my office and home just isn’t Air-friendly and find myself defaulting to my iPhone more often than not.
The best part about the MacBook Air, is that it conjures up some serious wow-factor with clients, which is sweet. But more importantly, the Air is apparently the precursor to the new MacBooks. Prior to the Air, I at one point rocked the 12-inch PowerBook G4, and loved it. So if you’ve seen Jony Ive’s new 13-inch MacBook, I’m sure you can guess what my next computer will be!
I don't care who you're for. Just go vote. But look at this rad fixie by Tristan Eaton.
Sometimes a Cooper can pass for A. Cooper. Also, by popular request, I'll be focusing on some non-MINI related topics for the next little bit... sorry SouthernJ.
During the 2001 autoshow season, Volkswagen mesmerized crowds with their stunning Microbus Concept. It was a beautiful and progressive reinterpretation of their classic VW Bus based on the original Beetle chassis. Everyone with kids who laid eyes on that thing said to themselves: Yeah, I’d rock that!
I’ve been waiting ever since then to write this, the review of the first VW minivan since the Eurovan. But alas, this is not even close to the review I was hoping to give. For the past couple of weeks VW has been advertising their new Routan; what’s being referred to their “German Engineered” minivan.
Unfortunately, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only does this thing look like a Chrysler Town & Country, that’s precisely what it is. Yep, you heard me right. Apparently this “thing” is made in the exact same factory as the T&C. To be honest, referring to the Routan as a “thing” is giving it far too much credit—a Thing actually was a cool VW.
I once again, feel the need to reference Steve Jobs. In October of 2005, Jobs described to TIME Magazine a phenomenon he called the Parable of the Concept Car: "You know how you see a show car, and it's really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands!”
Rather than giving us the family vehicle we all lusted after, the boneheads at VW gave us a watered down Eurovan in the form of the crappy Dodge Caravan that I already have. Do they not get that they could have easily been the driving force behind bringing us the first genuinely cool family mover? In the words, well word, of the great Liz Lemon… blerg.
PS: Perhaps MINI will seize this wide-open window of opportunity. I could definitely go for a MINIvan.
After 6 years of ownership, almost to the day, we sold our cherry red 1975 BMW 2002. It went to a cool, young couple who reminded us of ourselves (before we were outnumbered by our own spawn). He's a graphic designer and they already have a sweet old VW Beetle.
It's sad to see the empty spot next to our garage, but I will be creating a little shrine in memoriam to our 2002. HabbenINK offered to retouch a photo of it—which will be matted and framed directly above a full color copy of the cashiers check for, you guessed it, $2,002.00 exactly.
On Tuesday Jenny Lewis, the single force on the planet in pure opposition to my lifelong fear of redheads, released her folksy follow-up to her first sassy solo album. Acid Tongue follows Rabbit Fur Coat with the backup talents of all of Jenny’s closest crew including the likes of Zooey Deschanel, M. Ward, and Elvis Costello.
I’ve been lucky enough to catch live performances of the two standout tracks on the album, title track Acid Tongue and See Fernando, between the most previous tours of Rilo Kiley and Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins.
So, yes, my fear of redheads is decreasing more and more. However, my hatred of unicyclists increases daily, as witnessed by the photo below. Man I friggin’ hate ‘em!
One of my most vivid memories of growing up was the drive home from the movie theater after seeing Return of the Jedi with my dad, Normality. My head was spinning with visions of bounty hunters, speeder bikes, and B-wing fighters. Without a doubt, Return of the Jedi was the coolest movie a kid could possibly imagine. Here’s a pic of the ROTJ storybook I had as a kid. I always thought Luke’s hair looked pretty rad in this picture.
This weekend I watched ROTJ with the Kyality Kids for the first time. I know, I know it’s a bit early to be showing these kids those kinda scary scenes with the Rancor and the Emperor. But I sat there and cuddled up with them during those particular scenes—and I have to admit—the Kyailty Kids are serious Star Wars enthusiasts. They were glued; they didn’t want to miss a thing.
I realized it had been a while since I’d actually watched good old ROTJ. It was interesting to see how it held up over time. I have to admit—it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. Granted the acting was either over the top or uncannily stale. But things like the star-fighter dogfight scene still looked fantastic. The old-school motion-control model effects are definitely better than CG in my opinion.
It was really the little things that got to me. For instance, how does Luke know that Artoo would be serving drinks on Jabba’s sail barge and that he’d be able to launch his lightsaber at the perfect moment? Why aren’t Luke and Leia even squinting on the speeder bikes? Seriously, aren’t they going like 150 mph? And when the team gets captured by the Ewoks, why the crap does Leia show up all of the sudden with a tailored hemp dress on? Aren’t they heading into battle the next day? Shouldn’t you probably stick to the fatigues there Princess? (Or at least put on the brass Jabba bra again, sheesh.) And who the crap made that hippie outfit for her anyway? Did Wicket W. Warrick just bust out a loom and whip up a quick pattern or something?
Anyways. If you get a chance, go ahead and hit the Return key again for kicks. It’s good fun, and way better than the recently released Clone Wars feature. And maybe, just maybe you too can spot Luke’s glove switching hands while he’s riding his speeder bike!
Yesterday, MINI released official concept photos of its long-rumored crossover SUV. Dubbed the MINI Crossover Concept, the vehicle will be making its physical debut at the Paris Motor Show. It sports a variety of unique door arrangements, which in my opinion is an awesome way to keep folks guessing as to what the production model will finally look like.
Aesthetically, I love the proportions. It looks very MINI, though it will be their largest vehicle to date. And as far as the door arrangement goes, I hope the production model, tentatively called the Crossman, will have rear doors that slide backward on both sides. (Like on the driver side of the Crossover Concept.) And I hope it has double barn doors in the back, like the current Clubman. But that’s just me. Here's a link to some killer concept sketches.
My MINI sources tell me that the production version is already undergoing serious offroad tests in South America and that it will be manufactured at the same plant as the BMW X3. Wouldn’t it be so totally aws if you could choose your door arrangement as one of your options!?!
On Friday night, Mrs. Kyality, who recently had our third, had to get out of the house. So she went to the movies with a friend and I was left to fend for myself with the little trio of Kyality Kids. Once the rugrats were all snoozing, I felt the need to watch a serious car flick. After perusing the personal collection and realizing I wanted to see something I haven’t seen before—I hopped on iTunes Movies.
After a quick search, I settled on renting the definitive dood movie classic, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. I had a limited amount of time to knock this one out. So it was awesome that you can actually start watching your movie before you done downloading.
I kicked back on the couch, dual wielding my Apple Remote and my Wireless Mighty Mouse, and watched “The Drift”—as I like to call it—in fullscreen mode on our 24-inch iMac. Seriously I have to say, the image quality was fantastic. It was easily near-DVD-quality, but maybe that’s not saying much for all you Blu-ray-ers out there.
All in all the convenience and quality of renting a flick on iTunes made the evening’s experience pretty awesome. Too bad I spent it watching “The Drift”. I dunno, it was more or less exactly what I expected. The characters were pedestrian, the storyline was predictable, but the driving was driftacular.
It’s an interesting question posed to me by D-mode yesterday. Well, discover the answer for yourself by heading on over to Apple’s iTunes Store. There you can download all 45 minutes of pristine audio and/or video podcasts of Senator Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech from last week’s 2008 DNC for free. It’s definitely worth listening to and making your own call!
Also on 9/4 a new image upload site will launch called Design/ers for Obama. Here’s the description on site’s splash page:
"Many artists including Shepard Fairy have already proven that poster art is not a dead medium in the United States and have also shown how much of an impact a single poster can have. It is in this spirit Design/ers for Obama was created. With the goal of supporting Barack Obama's campaign for presidency, Design/ers for Obama will bring web-powered grass roots campaigning to visual communicators. Think Threadless, but for political poster art. That is, members create posters and upload them to be judged by the community, of which anyone and everyone is a part. But instead of selling merchandise, the best posters will be mass-produced and distributed in cities across the country to be seen by millions. Design/ers for Obama will begin accepting poster submissions on September 4th and will hold four, two week contests in the two months before the election."
So you’re probably thinking, enough MINI posts already. Yeah, sorry about that, but I can’t not write about this one. Turns out that within the past couple of weeks MINIInternational (one word) launched a community-based website for MINI fans with creative sensibilities. It's the site I've been waiting for!
The concept behind MINIspace.com is based on a phrase coined by the designer of the original Mini, Sir Alec Issigonis. Upon drafting the first sketches of the original Mini, he touted it as a "Creative use of space." When I stumbled upon this site, you better believe I was stoked. I set up a profile and notified my MINI driving friends.
However, I’ve dug through this site and unfortunately its not as cool as I hoped it would be. I like features such as the blog, the size of the profile pics, and the random design contests they host. But the personalization of the profile pages is weak, the custom backgrounds are limited and there’s absolutely no thought put toward featuring both a car and a driver.
I can understand that perhaps they didn’t want to alienate users who are non-MINI owners. But for those of us who do have MINI’s, it would be so awesome if there were further profile capabilities that would allow drivers to post pics, mods, and nicknames of their MINI’s. Actually, that’s not a bad idea…
Last week, my family from NY was in town, so on Saturday, Normailty, Snizzle and I detailed the cars and headed over to a local middle school for a morning photo shoot. I borrowed the ultra-wide Canon lens from Struck and got down and dirty with some vehicular glamour shots of my dark silver 2006 MINI Coopers S and my cherry red 1975 BMW 2002.
Thanks to my killer b-day present from Mrs. Kyality, my sliver 2008 Specialized Sirrus also joined the vehicle roster. She got me a brand new set of Saris Bones 2, the ultimate MINI Cooper bike rack, recently discovered by Southern J. The thing seriously looks like it was made for a MINI. As you can see, it was a beautiful morning and we had a blast composing each shot.
It was also a bittersweet event. I’ve decided after 5 years of back and forth to sell my Bimmer. So the secondary purpose behind the shoot was to capture some "for sale" images. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun car, I love the way I feel behind the wheel. It’s classic, I feel like I know something that no ones else on the road knows.
However if you don’t have 1) a ton of extra cashflow 2) a mechanical mind or 3) a fix-it dood who owes you a favor or ten—owning a vintage auto just isn't worth it. Plus, and this is the good news, the MINI totally fulfills the “I know something you don’t know” vibe. So enjoy the pics. You can see more at my brand new Flickr Stream and if you’re in the market for a cherry red 2002, you know who to contact!
They're a fun pair of rods.
At this ultra-wide angle, this little Cooper looks almost Clubman-like!
It’s been a long time dream to do advertising and design for MINI. And as of yesterday the realization of that dream launched. Meet the MINI Carfun Footprint Calculator. What is a Carfun Footprint you might ask? Well, it’s a unit of measurement that pits your car’s fun factor against its environmental impact.
This is an actual quantitative number calculated by a combination of legitimate sources. And once the facts were in, guess which car came out on top? Yep, the MINI Cooper Hardtop has the ultimate combo of fun vs. green on the road today!
BSSP developed a killer concept and Struck was responsible for the final design, 3D, motion graphics and development of the Flash app itself. Every time I play with the thing, I’m absolutely blown away by the killer 3D, texturing and motion that the team cranked out. We actually did use quite a few photos from the Clubman shoot from a few weeks ago both as reference and as actual textures as well.
The entire site experience will also literally be delivered through some serious rich media banner buys, which is an awesome feat in and of itself. So if you see a Carfun banner in your daily perusal of the world wide web, make sure to play with it for a bit then click through to miniusa.com and configure a Cooper of your own. But just remember, I call Hot Chocolate!
Check out this sa-weet poster for Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin yesterday. It’s a very Bauhaus-inspired design, which oddly enough lends itself well to whole patriotic/hope/change vibe he's got going on. It’s an awesome piece for sure. So here’s the question, is it bad to want to vote for a guy just cuz of good design?
So Struck shut down on Friday and took everyone to see The Dark Knight on opening day. Yeah, pretty awesome… it may or may not have been my idea. Anyways, it’s taken me a couple of days to compose my thoughts about the flick—and I don’t even know if I’ve fully processed it all as of yet. But I want to at least get my impressions out there.
The Dark Knight is a serious flick. Why so serious, you ask? Uh, cuz it’s awesome. If you thought that Batman Begins was a fairly “realistic” comic book movie—you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I mean, Batman Begins still had its share of surrealism, what with the several hallucination scenes. But this is something quite different.
The Dark Knight takes the comic book genre and flips it on its head. In fact, there are several parts where you completely forget you’re watching a “superhero movie” and it feels much more like you’re watching a very realistic, very awesome action and/or suspense flick. A majority of this vibe is accomplished by the combination of an ultra tight script, fantastic and raw cinematography, and of most of all by the buzzworthy performance of Heath Ledger—that you buy into—hook, line and sinker.
This is easily the must-see-movie-event of the summer, easily. The action sequences were absolutely legit. You get some great Batmobile/Batpod scenes. But oddly enough the automotive scene-stealer is in some ways Bruce Wayne’s gorgeous graphite grey, not-so-subtle Lamborghini Murcielago. (And I don't even like Lambos!) Bottom line: go see this flick. Anyone who knows me, knows I'm a massive Batman fan—and this flick has instantly catapulted itself to become my fave Batman movie yet. And word on the street is, if it’s at all possible; see it on an IMAX screen.
Yesterday, BMW officially announced that they will create 500 electric versions of the MINI, which will all be exported to California. 490 of them will be leased to selected customers with the remaining 10 set to be saved for display purposes.
The electric MINIs will be built at the MINI Factory in Oxford ,UK, then shipped to Germany without engines, gearboxes or fuel tanks. They’ll have a unique color scheme as well. Apparently, they’ll feature a silver body and a yellow roof, which eludes (I mean alludes) slightly to the project Struck's currently doing for MINI. (Check out my sweet, wannabe Photoshop skills pictured above.)
Once in Germany, BMW will equip the models with an electric powertrain, before heading across the pond all the way to California. This whole endeavor is meant to keep BMW in check with the Golden State's strict emission guidelines that will requires that automakers offer a certain percentage of zero emission vehicles. The success of the project could then lead to the mass production of the vehicle, sources state BMW are likely to make an official announcement later this year.
Bottom line is that MINI has the opportunity within its grasp to change the entire equation. And if anyone can do it, it’s MINI. But they've got to do more than lease a measly 490 cars! There’s currently an online petition requesting that BMW make the electric MINI for the masses sooner than later. Let’s face it, if the electric MINI’s performance is anything like the Tesla, we’ll be in good shape!
Thanks for the heads up Southern J.
Between 1975 and 1999, BMW has commissioned fifteen world-class artists to use BMW vehilces as canvases for original artwork. Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein were just some of the artists invited to participate in the BMW Art Cars Collection. In 2006, even interactive design legend Joshua Davis was asked to use custom algorithms to create original art based on the Z4 Coupe. This year, artist and vinyl toy designer Tristan Eaton—of Kidrobot fame—was commissioned to create a MINI art car for Garage419. So basically, this is more or less the result when MINI meets MUNNY.
Using a new type of highly reflective vinyl decals, Tristan turned this typical Mk I MINI Cooper S, with some sweet John Cooper Works accouterments, into a sooped-up, surrealistic Super-Cooper. I’ve researched a ton of custom MINI’s and I can easily say this is one of the best treatments I’ve come across. Besides the amazing artwork, I’m especially stoked on the 18” JCW Matte Black Wheels and the JCW Carbon-fiber Rear Wing. Nicely done, gentlemen, nicely done.
The documentary Dear Zachary tells the story of the 2001 murder of Dr. Andrew Bagby in a parking lot in western Pennsylvania. The prime suspect, his ex-girlfriend Dr. Shirley Turner, promptly fled the United States for St. John’s, Canada, where she announced that she was pregnant with Andrew’s child. She named the little boy Zachary.
