Month: October 2010

SPOILER ALERT: Season 05, Episode 01: Setting: 1968. Political climate: Nixon, Humphrey, Wallace election. Henry’s in Nixon’s boat and brings Sterling, Draper, Price on to manage the ad campaign. Megan and Don have an infant son. Will this relationship fizzle after its 15 minutes of fame, only to see Don off to selling tomato soup cans for Nixon’s mug? Season 5 theme: loss of innocence. Vietnam, as the first televised war, brings a loss of innocence to a nation. Sally loses her virginity. Ultimately, Watergate and the demise of the presidency twists the knife in the collective wound. Side stories: Peggy and Ken find their way to each other? Joan’s a widowed mom, Roger doesn’t step up to the plate, though he’d love to taste the food. Advertising struggles with the new evolving individuality and counter-cultural ethos of the anti-establishment generation. A commercializing conundrum: how to market mass production to a culture that rejects conformity? More Madison Avenue ad campaign candy strewn throughout season 5 shows us shifts in the ad and media industries. Season opener song: America by Simon and Garfunkel.
Also featured: Lonely Little Girl by Frank Zappa; Mah nà mah nà by Piero Umiliani
Finale song: Elton John’s Tiny Dancer. It hurts already

my friend’s thoughts on MadMen Season 5. ‘Mad Men’ Watch: A Whole New Kind of Cliché – Readers’ Comments – NYTimes.com

“Small Change” dismisses leaderless, self-organizing systems as viable agents of change. A flock of birds flying around an object in flight has no leader yet this beautiful, seemingly choreographed movement is the very embodiment of change. Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows many to move together as one–suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal. Lowering the barrier to activism doesn’t weaken humanity, it brings us together and it makes us stronger.

Exclusive: Biz Stone on Twitter and Activism – The Atlantic

In recent and not-so-recent years, every city administration has aggressively rolled out car lanes all across the city, snatching away space from pedestrians and cyclists and handing them over to drivers. A new report by Captain Obvious, however, found that the lanes in Manhattan aren’t living up to hopes – with motorists illegally speeding and parked in them, pedestrians and cyclists snarled in them, and traffic causing excessive air and noise pollution in them.

Should we pull the plug on Manhattan car lanes?

Should we pull the plug on Manhattan bike lanes? – Polls | Crain’s New York Business

CapitolCamp 2010 Recap, with videos! #Gov20

“CapitolCamp is a new way for Albany to talk about the use of technology within government. This peer-to-peer conference blends the best of Web 2.0 with Government to address our specific needs while not requiring any one to spend a dime. At CapitolCamp there are no vendors, no consumers, only users who learn from each other on what can go right and what can go wrong,” – Noel Hidalgo, organizer of CapitolCamp with the New York Senate’s Office of the Chief Information Officer.