I liked the design of this subway poster for the upcoming season of Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “Hamlet” paired with the hippie-musical “Hair” so much that I snapped a cameraphone photo of it. Apologies for the middling-to-poor quality; I tried to find a cleaner version online, but no such luck.

What I like best about it, outside of the mock-industrial print design, is the deft visual method of combining two very different stage plays. The image of the skull is instantly associative with “Hamlet” thanks to the famous “alas poor Yorick” scene, while the wavy green lines added along the top of the cranium subtly suggest “hair”. Viola, a mohawked Yorick to define a summer of outdoor theater!

Works for me, anyway.

That wacky Robert Olen Butler is at it again. To follow up “Severance”, an offbeat short story collection about celebrity decapitations, he follows the same critical-thought motif with “Intercourse”, a collection that deals with a decidedly different experience:

The keynote of Intercourse is not connection but distraction. Very few of Butler’s characters are what you would call “in the moment.” Many scheme for political gain: Cleopatra, for instance, services “stone-fingered” Marcus Antonius while remembering hot nights with Caesar and plotting the consolidation of her power—“the first thing I will ask of him is that he kill my sister.” Others see sex as redemptive, a chance to heal past abuses. A Mississippi slave sleeps with a fellow slave in order to cancel out her rape at the hands of the Master; the sixteenth-century Italian aristocrat Lucrezia Borgia sees the consummation of her marriage as a way to negate being raped by her father, the pope. Butler’s best vignettes create, in just a handful of lines, surprisingly rich dramatic texture. Mary Magdalene has sex with a Roman centurion under a fig tree on the day she first sees Jesus; she thinks of the mysterious holy stranger as the centurion ponders his first murder, which he committed earlier that day. Leda is insulted that Zeus, as a swan, stopped to eat barley on his way to meet her.

And it’s not just long-ago historical figures who get the stream-of-coital-consciousness treatment. Among the fictionalized contemporary couplings are Princess Diana and Prince Charles, Bill Clinton and Hillary Diane Rodham, and (what sounds like my favorite) Santa Claus and a workshop elf named Ingebirgitta. Ho ho, ho.

The early review of this book indicates that Butler fell into the same trap as he did with “Severance”, in that the thoughts emanating from the famous characters’ heads are cliche-ridden, due to the impulse to provide a full narrative context in what’s supposed to be an isolated moment. Doesn’t mean I won’t pick it up, although I’ll likely wait for the paperback to come out.

Perhaps not surprisingly, but disappointing nonetheless, Butler passed on a chance to include the much-publicized hookup of his ex-wife and Ted Turner. I think it would have provided a nice piece of revenge, even if it would have hit a bit too close to home.

I foolishly thought I’d be the only one to notice that Google snuck in a new-look favicon for themselves, apparently today. It’s a lower-case “g” with a shadowed background — fairly ornate for a tiny image, and very distinct from their old capital-G square.

My eye caught it this morning, while doing scads of image research. So I saw it applied on the Google Image Search and Google Maps sub-sites. However, it doesn’t appear to be on the default Google site; iGoogle and Google News also are left out. So maybe Mountain View is slowly rolling this 16×16 rebrand, on a trial basis.

I’m a big fan of using favicons, in all their subtle glory, as a fundamental part of good website design. Just because you can’t see it most of the time in Internet Explorer doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it on your site; going without one comes off to me as amateurish.

This is definitely worth checking out: David Byrne of (whether he likes it or not) Talking Heads fame is getting kooky with a lower Manhattan landmark. He’s taken the Battery Maritime Building on Whitehall Street and turned it into a massive musical instrument, via an art installation called “Playing the Building”.

At least for the next two and a half months, though, the building will simply serve as a gargantuan cast-iron orchestra. Besides being fitted with several motors, which produce the bass sounds by vibrating a set of girders that once supported a stained-glass skylight in the 40-foot-high ceiling, the organ is attached to a pump that blows air through a tangle of hoses. These hoses snake into the huge room’s old water and heating pipes and conduits, making primitive flute sounds. And then there are more than a dozen spring-loaded solenoids, attached like woodpeckers to the columns and even to a linebacker-size radiator that emits a surprisingly sonorous tone when struck in just the right place with a metal rod.

Rocking the house, Beaux-Arts style. I’m trying to imagine the Heads applying this to CBGB back in the day…

Best of all, it’s a free show, and open to a hands-on public. Basically just have to take the 1 train all the way to the end at South Ferry, then walk a couple of blocks. Nothing easier.

I’m thinking Byrne or whoever at Creative Time should keep a running recording of what the masses’ gliding fingers produce. At least a couple of outputs would be lyrical and worthy of inclusion on Byrne’s next project, musical or otherwise.

Donald Trump was giving away frisbees this afternoon on 42nd Street.

What, you want details?

Well, it wasn’t Trump himself. Rather, a bunch of his people were handing out the emerald green plastic discs. They were promotional trinkets for Trump Park Residences, the Donald’s new real estate development in Westchester County near Peekskill. It’s being marketed as “The UnHamptons”, i.e. an upscale spread that’s not overcrowded. Considering that it’s in essentially the opposite direction from the City as the Hamptons are — upstate versus Long Island — I guess the hype makes sense.

While I did help myself to the freebie fris — you never know when a frolf game’s gonna break out, and besides I have an affinity for green toys — I couldn’t help but think that it was a rather chintzy giveaway, considering Trump’s penchant for the luxe. Maybe his recent Atlantic City casino divestiture took a little of the extravagance out of him.

Looks like next season’s NHL Winter Classic has been confirmed: Both TSN in Canada and the Chicago Sun-Times are reporting that Chicago will host the January 2009 outdoor National Hockey League matchup, with the Blackhawks hosting the Red Wings.

The specific venue isn’t clear yet, with Chi-town’s major-league baseball and football stadiums capable of being iced over. The media outlets say Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs, will be the site. However, I’ll point to last month’s announcement of a cross-marketing agreement between the Blackhawks and White Sox as a potential clue that U.S. Cellular Field will get to be the host facility. (That’s a cue to the pundits to discard the football-hockey comparisons used last time around in Buffalo, and to cook up some fitting pine tar quips.)

Doesn’t make much difference to me which Chicago ballpark gets the game, as I’m bummed that logistical problems killed a Rangers-Bruins Winter Classic in what would have been the last sporting even in old Yankee Stadium. But the early verdict on Wrigley, for one, suggests some potential issues:

Think of all the small ez-out parking lots that will be filled with mounds of plowed snow. The lack of parking is not so much an issue when it is 80 degrees out and you can walk blocks, even a mile or two. More importantly, the plumbing and facilities are suspect. That place is falling apart. Regardless, I’ll be there.

I don’t know enough about Chicago to judge whether the area surrounding U.S. Cellular (the former New Comiskey Park) is better-equipped for unfamiliar wintertime parking. Soldier Field, naturally, is well-situated for snow days during Bears season. I’m sure (or, at least, I hope) they’ll work all that out by January.

Big news out of the field of neurorobotics today, as scientists got two monkeys to manipulate a robot arm via their brainwaves.

On several occasions, a monkey kept its [robotic] claw open on the way back, with the food stuck to one finger. At other times, a monkey moved the arm to lick the fingers clean or to push a bit of food into its mouth while ignoring a newly presented morsel.

The animals were apparently freelancing, discovering new uses for the arm, showing “displays of embodiment that would never be seen in a virtual environment,” the researchers wrote.

Freelancing monkeys? With an extra limb at their disposal? I think we all know where that will lead.

No goals, no wins and few shots on goal in this Stanley Cup Finals series: The Penguins are effectively in do-or-die mode for Game 3 tonight. Rather than rely upon just the home-arena mojo to turn things around versus the Red Wings, Pittsburgh is putting Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin on the same line — the hockey equivalent of choosing the nuclear option.

Will it work? Presumably they’ll have Pascal Dupuis on the left wing with The Kid and Gino, to form a modified left-wing lock. It’ll certainly keep Detroit’s blueliners busier than usual, while the second unit has to worry about Marian Hossa on the next shift. The Pens should generate more offense, meaning we get to see if Chris Osgood can really steal a win on his own. Either way, definitely a pivotal move in a pivotal game, and just in time for the start of NBC’s coverage of the Finals.

Something I’d been keeping an eye on: Chase Paymentech Solutions, the joint venture between JPMorgan Chase and First Data Corp. that dominates the multibillion-dollar card-based and electronic payments industry, will be formally divvied up by the end of 2008.

I recently wrapped up an extended assignment (two years) with CPS — ironically coming onboard to help with merger integration right after the company was formed in 2005. The impending break-up has been hanging over the company ever since buyout firm KKR’s acquisition of First Data last year, which triggered negotiations toward an early termination of the JV. Given that I still have friends and colleagues at Chase Paymentech, and that there have been a few false starts on this announcement becoming official before this, I’m guessing this provides short-term closure for them — before longer-term consequences (i.e., the cutbacks that come with such moves) develop.

As for how this cash-cow that generates billions — that’s with a “b” — of dollars will be split:

The companies also have reached agreement about the future of Chase Paymentech’s most valuable asset: its processing platform in Salem, N.H., for card-not-present merchants: Chase gets it, but First Data will get a copy of its software. Originally developed for catalog merchants, the so-called Salem platform serves about 70% of the top 500 Internet retailers, making Chase Paymentech by far the leading e-commerce merchant acquirer.

JPMorgan Chase also will get most of Chase Paymentech’s 2,700 employees, its Dallas headquarters, and Canadian and European operations. President and chief executive Mike Duffy and his senior managers also are likely to go with the bank, though that’s not official yet. “It is anticipated that he and the management team will be moving to Chase,” [CPS EVP of Marketing Mia] Shernoff says…

Although the companies would not confirm it, First Data seems likely to get Chase Paymentech’s biggest customer: Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer. It also is getting Chase Paymentech’s independent sales organization business, a highly valued commodity in today’s merchant-acquiring market because of ISOs’ ability to find higher-margin small merchants.

Still doesn’t seem like much of a parting gift for First Data. A “copy” of the Salem platform? Big deal. They could have developed their own competing software system that would have matched or improved upon CPS’ established platform, given that they’d create a scalable model from scratch. Besides, the actual innards of a processing network doesn’t matter to prospective merchants as much as the existing portfolio of clients — peer pressure on a grand retail scale. That’s where keeping Wal-Mart’s business will help, but that alone would be meager spoils. Plus, Chase has an existing head-start in this new competition, since Chase Paymentech has been using (and thus extending) Chase’s branding for a couple of years now.

Anyway, I guess anyone looking to accept credit cards and such will have an extra option starting in 2009. And with Pariter, the new JV from Bank of America and Well Fargo that will focus on automated clearinghouse (ACH) transactions also launching next year, the payments industry should be rollicking for the near future.

Um, yeah. I think the pairing of Dan Marino and Larry the Cable Guy represents the nadir of the already bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping NutriSystem testimonial TV commercial.

The most confusing thing? I can’t figure out which guy’s supposed to be lending cache to the other. Maybe it’s the “Git-R-Done” hack who’s supplying the star power, since “Dan M” leads an anonymous existence in NutriSystem’s eyes.

(Via Y! Sports’ Shutdown Corner)

I hadn’t kept up with Penguin Putnam’s “A Million Penguins” online collaborative novel-writing project, despite making a note of it last year.

So I didn’t notice when the experiment came to an end earlier this month, and, well, the result sucked.

But there is a silver lining to the whole thing, from a business perspective:

After all, you release some trendy high-concept book, and for every person who reads it there are a hundred who just enjoy the concept and ten people who buy it just to put on the bookshelf. Hell, I had more to say about Freakonomics before I read it than after — I got the point by the time I’d read a review and half of the dust jacket. So if the book doesn’t have to live up to its publicity, why not come up with a clever idea and outsource the actual writing?

No surprise, as the entire concept was a marketing exercise to begin with. True, some academic collateral emerged as a byproduct, but ultimately it’s all about creating enough buzz to tickle the cash register.

Born out of either eco-consciousness or gasoline-fueled economic distress (or both), the newsworthy buzzword on this normally automobile-dominated Memorial Day weekend is “staycation”, i.e. the stay-at-home vacation.

Works for me. Not only am I happy to enjoy a day off hereabouts, but I’m always a sucker for a newly-born portmanteau.

At this past Friday’s Jelly session (wonderfully hosted by Kara by the way), some minor debate cropped up about Twitter. Specifically, there was some doubt cast on whether or not “twitter” was a real word, or else some nonsensical URL string of letters.

I quickly quelled the debate by calling up the Dictionary.com definition of “twitter”, specifically this one:

2. to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.

Yes, the microblogging dynamic pretty much fits this summation. Although the site’s liberal use of the bird motif tells me that the Twitter bosses are hearkening to the association with “birds a’twittering” figurative description as well.

From this, we pondered that the word “twit” might be derived from the above. Whether it is or not, the increasingly frequent Twitter.com outages (which also came up among Twittering Jelly-ers on Friday) will probably prompt more than one invocation of that British-ish insult term toward the Head Twits in charge. Unless “Shitter” doesn’t take hold first.

I’ve been a bit skeptical about the Federal tax rebate/economic stimulus scheme, figuring that $600 per adult head really wouldn’t go that far in juicing the body politic’s financial well-being.

And the spending spree results submitted to HowISpentMyStimulus.com seem to bear that out, especially when browsing some choice examples. Unless you consider a new pet kitten, kitchen supplies, and matching his-and-her Gameboys to be macroeconomic saviors.

Still, it’s nice to see some folks getting jolly with their government checks. I can live vicariously through them, since (ahem) I’m not getting one this year. Maybe next time around.

A year ago, T-Mobile reported that a surprisingly big chunk of the Web traffic on Sidekick phones was going toward social networking sites like MySpace. This suggested that mobile browsing had less to do with conventional Web research and entertainment and more to do with communications, i.e. more like a traditional phone chore.

Now, Opera’s just-released Mobile Browsing Report backs up that suspected trend, noting that 40 percent of Opera Mini browser users worldwide frequently hit social network sites (with the share jumping to 63 percent among U.S. users). Since Opera Mini has an installed user base of some 12 million (thanks to agreements with global wireless phone manufacturers and carriers), Opera has a pretty reliable base upon which to draw these conclusions.

So again, phone Web access is more about staying tethered to your MySpace crew instead of, say, checking movie start times or the nearest Italian restaurant. That behavior should be key in how phone companies push their forthcoming mobile Web offerings.

I’m so glad to see one of my old favorite Flash gamelets, Penguin Baseball, get a Stanley Cup-inspired revival. The Detroit Free Press invites Red Wings fans to whack-a-pen as a show of team support.

It’s as addictive as it ever was. My best swing for the fences was 322.9 feet. Beat that!

I’d imagine Pittsburgh’s media would retaliate, perhaps with another game selection from YetiSports. I can’t find any sign of it, though.

Nothing like living in a patch of disappearing history. Manhattan’s very own Lower East Side has been designated one of the 11 “America’s Most Endangered Historic Places” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

I don’t know about the other 10 hotspots (a shoutout there to the Great Falls Portage, presumably closeby to local blogger Dave), but for the LES, it’s already old news:

Christopher Mele, author of “Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City,” said in a phone interview: “It’s a formal recognition of a trend that’s been in place since the ’80s. The local culture has been under prey from the forces of real estate development.”

Mr. Mele’s book argued that the Lower East Side had in fact “been a target of change since the cutoff of immigration in the 1920s.” The pressures on the neighborhood continued through the 1960s, when the loosening of immigration laws prompted a new wave of immigration to the neighborhood and the city, and the term “East Village” was popularized “as a counterpoint to the West Village — a bohemian enclave in the ’40s and ’50s that became a bit too pricey for artists, who then moved east.” And the process really gained steam in the 1980s, Mr. Mele argued, when the name “Alphabet City” became popular.

As for why this corner of the LES is called Alphabet City, notice the names of the streets here: Avenue A, Avenue B, Avenue C, and last but not least, Avenue D. Get it? Hey, a living museum piece should be clearly tagged, shouldn’t it?

Yes, John Dvorak regularly produces a muddled mess of a column for MarketWatch, and this week’s edition is no exception. He jumps haphazardly from some fabricated speculation about AltaVista re-emerging as a search player (maybe he’s not aware that Yahoo! swallowed it up ages ago, and is now steadily erasing the AltaVista brand?) to how much Vista sucks, and back to search via how Google might someday buy Microsoft.

But read down far enough, and you’ll uncover a good nugget:

What is really needed are new and better search engines. To be honest about it, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all stink.

We all know this is true. Sure, you can find the major and obvious sites with any of them. But seriously try and find, for example, the best knitting site.

Go ahead: Type in the keywords “best knitting site” into Google and tell me which site, out of the 300,000-plus results Google returns, is really the best knitting site. It cannot be done, despite the fact that there must be a best one. A group of knitters might know, or maybe not.

It’s getting more difficult to find anything with a narrow target using any of these search engines. Recently, I was searching for a Barack Obama citation for an article and could not find it on Google; there were too many results to be useful.

While the Google mechanism works great for selling millions of little ads, it’s old-fashioned and already dead, as are the rest of these search engines, which basically are all based on decade-old Web-crawling technologies combined with massive caching.

To do its job, Google has to maintain up-to-date and redundant copies of the entire Internet on its servers. It’s a ridiculous idea.

Even this quickie analysis contains a major flaw: Google doesn’t store “the entire Internet on its servers”. Last stat I saw was that Google’s entire cache could hold only about a third of the Web at any one time — still a very impressive mass of information, but nowhere near everything. (Not to mention that it doesn’t do much to plumb the depths of the Deep Web.)

But other than that, he’s right. Search technology isn’t particularly robust, and that’s because it runs on a primitive concept: Text recognition. Search engines can’t do squat unless a page/site is loaded up with keywords, and accurate keywords at that. That still does the job most of the time, because the Web is still overwhelmingly a written form of media. Even sites that specialize in non-written content are forced to include tags and other text-identifiers in order to be searchable.

The problem comes with SEO techniques, legitimate and not-so-much, that attempt to game the system. The focus on words as flags for what a webpage is “about” makes that system relatively easy to manipulate, and all the algorithms that Google et al devise ultimately can’t get past this fundamental shortcoming.

So what’s the solution? It’d be a neat trick to devise an automated system that can recognize more substantive content than just text. Efforts at digital photo recognition and such are good moves, but to me they seem to lead to the same dead-end focus: One element of what’s on the Web, instead of a way to recognize qualitative Web content. And really, maybe the very structure of the Web prevents the development of better Web search. For now, we’re stuck with what we’re stuck with.

A few days back, while chatting with a fellow laptop-lugger at *$, I encouraged her to check out my online thang by telling her I had a blog.

She looked a little confused. “A writer’s blog?” I thought I heard her ask.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I guess you could call it that.”

“There are books that can help with that problem,” she offered.

Um. Granted, I can get a little too engaged with this site, but I’m not sure I’d label it as a “problem”.

But then, I realized what was going on, and I clarified: “No no — it’s not ‘writer’s block’. It’s a blog.”

I guess I should work on that enunciation. English was her second language though, so I’ll assign her partial blame for the momentary misunderstanding. Besides, it’s not unheard of for blogging to lead to blockage.

Sorry to deliver so blunt a post-title. But really, how else to sum up one Edward Smith and his sexual preference for four-wheeled companionship?

People who feel sexually attracted to cars or other machines have been dubbed “mechaniphiliacs” and are the subject of a new documentary film made for British television.

This is apparently a rare enough condition that there’s scant reference to it on the Web, even in a source which would presumably have this perversion covered.

Smith says his fetish took root when he was a teenager.

“When I was 13 and the famous Corvette Stingray came about, that car was pure sex and just an incredible machine. I wanted it.”

He continued, “There have been certain cars that attracted me and I would wait until nighttime, creep up to them and just hug and kiss them.”

Smith also believes his love isn’t completely one-sided. Despite their apparent lack of feelings, he thinks there’s something in it for the objects of his affection.

“There are moments way out in the middle of nowhere when I see a little car parked and I swear it needs loving.”

Smith lives somewhere in Washington State, so needless to say, be sure to inspect your vehicle’s tailpipe closely the next time you’re in his neighborhood. Especially if you have a cute little car.

And should you eve get offered a ride by Mr. Smith: Take a second to imagine exactly how and where he would express — and, more to the point, expel — his physical love. Not sure I’d want to make contact with the seat cushions nor the dashboard in that heap.

Even I cannot avoid the cultural black hole that is “American Idol”. Solely through media-consumption osmosis, I know — just like you do, admit it — that 25-year-old David Cook is this season’s big winner.

What I did not know was that Cook probably owes his victory to the show’s strong middle-aged (and up) women viewers, who consider him to be safer sexual-fantasy material than boyish-looking runner-up David Archuleta.

Apparently these women weren’t just smitten with a younger man, they were motivated, too: In a landslide victory, Cook, from Blue Springs, Mo., beat Archuleta by a margin of 12 million votes out of the record 97.5 million cast by viewers.

“American Idol” had slipped in the overall ratings this season, but Wednesday’s finale was seen by 31.7 million people — about a million more than the year before, according to Nielsen data — suggesting the show swiftly gathered momentum after it boiled down to man vs. boy.

And the biggest viewer erosion in season seven was right in Archuleta’s voting bloc. Ratings fell 18 percent among women aged 18-34; and 12 percent among teenagers 12-17. Also apparently in Cook’s favor: Viewership has risen among people aged 50 and over, and the median age of an “Idol” viewer, once in the mid-30s, is now up to 42.

You can bet FOX wasn’t envisioning a mommybopper demographic when it originally greenlighted this show. Far from embracing it, they’ll be retooling the talent-herding process during the summer in an effort to lure back the youngsters.

Here’s some first-hand MILF idolation for Cook. Look for the backlash at that and similar URLs this time next year, when all the love from Season 7 is spurned.