kevin barnett

A well-designed, technically-superior alarm clock for those heavy sleeping, non-morning people…like me:

The Neverlate Executive Alarm Clock by American Innovative

I was just listening to U2 - Numb

This year, I spent Thanksgiving away from family and with friends who might as well be family. We had a great dinner (for which I supplied the requisite side: cornbread dressing), which was accompanied by good food, drinks, company, Trivial Pursuit (90’s edition) and the Cowboys beating the Jets 34-3.

New York is an interesting scene on Thanksgiving in that it actually gets quiet for a day. It’s not quite Will Smith in the I Am Legend previews that have been lynching the TV lately but still a little eerie and suspicious when you’re walking around the city. Of course if you’re out for a more typical 4am curfew, you can greet the Black Friday shoppers arriving in the city and lining up ready to feed at the trough.

Walking down Broadway through the 20s the next day, I noticed some sketchy-looking guys putting out boxes of random retail product on the sidewalk to move. A crowd would collect around each one until it was sold out and the ravenous shoppers would move on to the next one. It could have been socks or iPhones, but I think just the prospect of getting a deal — never mind how the product came to be in an unmarked shipping box on the street — was enough to attract customers.

My own consumerist thirst - which is rarely quenched - has never been enough to get me out on Black Friday not to mention enough to scope out the Red Hot deals I witnessed on Broadway Ave. For that, I am thankful. And a short list of other stuff like my 5 senses and my health, my family and friends, my career and employment.

Oh and I am also thankful for Dennis Franchione’s resignation, delivered in the press conference immediately following Texas A&M’s win over Texas for the second year in a row.

Texas fans will be quick to point out how that win is nothing compared to a National Championship that they won in 2005 against USC with Vince Young, blah blah blah… But in a year in which Missouri is the #1 team in the nation going into the Big 12 Championship game as an underdog to #8 Oklahoma — not to mention A&M’s mediocre season — you take what you can get.

I was just listening to Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas

Fig. 1: Ishihara color test plate for red-green color blindness

It can be embarrassing to be in the business of design and have to ask someone what color is that? or spend all day working on a color palette. Jon Hicks of UK-based Hicksdesign shares my handicap and suggests a software application to help our colorblind designer brethren.

To illustrate what exactly I can and cannot see, look at Fig. 1. I see several individual colored dots but I do not see the number 74 within the mass of dots. Someone had to tell me it’s there.

I was just listening to Gorillaz - People

Les Claypool on his feature film directorial debut:

“It was like trying to climb Mount Everest wearing a Speedo…”

I was just listening to MC Solaar - Séquelles

…and the state of nanny state politics.

Huffington Post has a rundown of all of the sketches/antics the Saturday Night Live cast performed Saturday at Upright Citizens Brigade theater. The audience - mostly crew members and friends, who the cast were performing and raising money for - was treated to material considered too risqué for NBC to air. For example, during Weekend Update:

Seth [reported] on a gay priest who had stepped down, claiming he had fought biology by “praying for God to end his homosexual urges…unfortunately, God responded by instead introducing him to hotter and hotter guys.”

I would have loved to have seen Sudeikis’ The Best, Best Man and Are You My Adopted Chinese Baby? but reading that Update bit led to me spitting up my first warm coffee of the season. See you next year, iced coffee.

I was just listening to Metric - Dead Disco