Back in the late 1990s, my friend Beatrice had a tradition of hosting dumpling parties. She'd make a few fillings ahead of time and then a bunch of us would spend the afternoon sitting around stuffing, folding, sealing, pinching, steaming, chatting and eventually eating. If you've never tried making your own dumplings you might consider the whole process a bit fussy, but the next time you have a bit of extra time on your hands, and/or a few nimble-fingered helpers, consider giving it a try.

Plump Pea Dumplings Recipe - 101 Cookbooks

The revolution coincided with a period of many radically different art forms in western culture, dada, futurism, constructivism, surrealism and so on. Especially in its early years, propaganda posters produced in Soviet Russia were influenced by such movements.

Though the more experimental looks eventually gave way to designs more akin to what could be seen in other western countries, Soviet propaganda still retained a look of its own, beyond the presence of cyrillic lettering.

Propaganda Design & Aesthetics: Soviet Retro Posters | Crestock.com Blog

Q: The other campaigns are less typographically successful. Is maintaining a strong design program really so difficult?

A: I think the real story here is less about typography than it is about discipline. Political campaigns are the Brigadoon of branding. There’s a compressed amount of time to tell a candidate’s story before the race is over and the campaign vanishes. During that window, the campaign must make sure that everything it produces — everything it touches — delivers the candidate’s message in a meaningful way. No opportunity to amplify that story should be missed. The Obama people have used design to take that discipline to a whole new level.

Barack Obama is running the first real transmedia campaign of the 21st century.

To the Letter Born - Campaign Stops - 2008 Elections - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Slog tipper Daniel wrote us yesterday to tell us that Seattle’s Municipal Code prohibits parking vehicles that are more than 80 inches wide on city streets overnight. (Here’s the relevant text, if you’re interested). Since Hummers are bigger than that (81 and a half inches, according to the specs on Hummer’s web site), Daniel figured it must be illegal to park them overnight here, too.

I checked in with the Seattle Department of Transportation, and it turns out Daniel’s right. Although SDOT spokesman Rick Sheridan says “the intent of this code is more for commercial vehicles like an 18-wheeler rather than an automobile,” it would apply to the largest SUVs as well.

H1: 81.5"
H2: 80.2"

Whoops, H2. Still too big.

Hummers: Illegal on City Streets | Slog | The Stranger | Seattle's Only Newspaper

Barack Obama comes off as the most intelligent, reasonable candidate left. But I think a lot of this comes via a lack of track record. His stint at the Harvard review, he didn't pen one article, nor while on the faculty at U Chicago. He didn't propose any big legislation as a state senator in Illinois, or in the US senate. At least McCain has McCain-Feingold, and Hillary has health care, and their failures in these areas are learning experiences that will make them better.

Falkenblog: Barack Obama as the Ultimate Corporate Climber

The NTSB did not mention any mechanical problems with the airplane or the engines and did not list engine failure as a possibility. The NTSB said only that the probable cause was “the pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane while maneuvering resulting in an inadvertent stall/spin.”

Teledyne Continental (TCM) was the manufacturer of the Baron’s engines way back in the 1970s or whenever this plane was produced (the NTSB doesn’t say). An engineer might say “it is impressive that those engines spun flawlessly for thirty years, not quitting until this pilot flew them right into the ground.” A jury saw this accident differently, ordering TCM to pay $4 million to the survivors of the pilot. The total market for these kinds of engines in new airplanes is about 2500 per year, of which Teledyne makes roughly half. So this judgment represents a cost of about $4,000 per engine sold every year to airplane manufacturers.

Wow. NTSB reports are not admissible in court. It sounds like, considering that $4m is enough to put the manufacturer out, there was no solution for the maker... go broke doing everything you can in defense, or go broke with the judgement. The plaintiff was in a pretty safe situation -- no one who lives was on the plane and no one would (to the survivors' face) say it was wrong to sue.

As the blog notes, with this kind of legal environment, US aerospace seems way too risky to be worth it.

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Airplane engine manufacturer loses $4 million judgment

Enron worked out very badly for investors and average employees, but it was a great place to be a senior manager, some of whom are now among the wealthiest Americans (e.g., Lou Pi walked away with $250 million and become the second largest landowner in Colorado).

Have public company Boards learned any lesson from Enron? A March 31, 2008 article [sadly not online] about Stan O’Neal, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, suggests not.

The Board at Merrill Lynch Enronized their company by promising to pay Stan O’Neal roughly $50 million per year if he made some numbers look good.

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » 2008 » April » 21

Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.

Bessemer Venture Partners

Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes. Sit back, this might take a while.

The original was pretty great.

Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org

Which makes me wonder... could it be Sun loves Ruby because it needs lots of their servers to scale?

Jim Roepcke's weblog: have browser, will travel