Category Archives: Reviews

Future Driving: Smart EQ Fortwo Cabrio Electric Drive Is “Fun-Filled, Quirky Open Air Experience”

From a DesignBoom.com online article:

smart fortwo cabrio electric 2020 interiorthe result of its energetic design, both on the exterior and interior, ensures the smart ‘fortwo cabrio electric drive’ is fun-filled and quirky yet stylishly typical of the brand. at a size of 2.69 meters in length, 1.66m in width and 1.55m in height, the model delivers agile functionality for city mobility, even turning circles in less than 7 meters. however this time, smart has provided all this whilst offering electric economy with accelerating power and a fresh, open-air driving experience.

smart fortwo cabrio electric drive test: from weaving between bustling city streets to winding down swiss country roads, designboom test drove the smart ‘fortwo cabrio electric drive‘ around geneva, switzerland, and the surrounding area. in just 12 seconds ‘the roof opens.. and you can cruise almost silently through the city’, says dr annette winkler, head of smart. the folding soft top becomes a complete convertible with removable roof bars, combining an open-air element to smart’s already notoriously fun driving experience. the openness of the car’s design enables the driver to feel ‘the fantastic acceleration get right under your skin.

To read more click on following link:

 https://www.designboom.com/technology/smart-fortwo-cabrio-electric-drive-test-07-05-2017/

WHO SHAPED THE 1960’S?: CULTURAL CHANGE SWEPT UP THE BOOMERS, IT JUST DIDN’T BEGIN WITH THEM

From a New Yorker article by Louis Menand:

Woodstock GenerationAlthough the boomers may not have contributed much to the social and cultural changes of the nineteen-sixties, many certainly consumed them, embraced them, and identified with them. Still, the peak year of the boom was 1957, when 4.3 million people were born, and those folks did not go to Woodstock. They were twelve years old. Neither did the rest of the 33.5 million people born between 1957 and 1964. They didn’t start even going to high school until 1971. When the youngest boomer graduated from high school, Ronald Reagan was President and the Vietnam War had been over for seven years.

The boomers get tied to the sixties because they are assumed to have created a culture of liberal permissiveness, and because they were utopians—political idealists, social activists, counterculturalists. In fact, it is almost impossible to name a single person born after 1945 who played any kind of role in the civil-rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left, the antiwar movement, or the Black Panthers during the nineteen-sixties. Those movements were all started by older, usually much older, people.

To read more click on the following link: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-misconception-about-baby-boomers-and-the-sixties

Movie Nostalgia: It’s Been 60 Years Since “Best Ever” Big-Screen Comedy “Some Like It Hot” Opened (1959)

From a BBC.com cuture article:

Some Like It Hot movie sceneFaced with the question of why Some Like It Hot has topped BBC Culture’s poll of the best ever big-screen comedies, it’s tempting to say something similar. Wilder’s glittering masterpiece doesn’t just use the handsomest kid in town (and a terrific actor, to boot), but its most radiant sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, and one of its most dexterous comedians, Jack Lemmon. It also has a bevy of bathing beauties, a crowd of sinister mafiosi, a glamorous seaside setting in the roaring ‘20s, and a sizzling selection of songs.

It is structured so meticulously that it glides from moment to moment with the elegance of an Olympic figure skater, and the consummate screwball dialogue, by Wilder and IAL Diamond, is so polished that every line includes either a joke, a double meaning, or an allusion to a line elsewhere in the film. To quote one character, it’s a riot of “spills, thrills, laughs and games”. To quote another, it deserves to be “the biggest thing since the Graf Zeppelin”. So why was it chosen as the best comedy ever made? Simple. What else were we going to choose?

To read more click on the following link: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170817-why-some-like-it-hot-is-the-greatest-comedy-ever-made

Future Of Travel: AirPortr.com Checks Bags At Your Home, You Pick Them Up At The Airport

From a Skift.com online article:

Airportr shippingHere’s how Airport’s service works: A passenger checks in online. The company collects the bags from their doorstep after confirming the person’s identity. The driver puts the bag in a coded, tamperproof, and trackable security bag, the company said. The driver delivers the luggage to the airport, where they check in the bag.

AirPortr has handled 113,251 bag shipments. Two years ago, the startup landed British Airways as a customer. It also works with Virgin Atlantic, American Airlines, and other carriers. This year, EasyJet began offering the AirPortr service at London’s Luton airport.

“Business is seeing really good year-over-year growth,” said founder and CEO Randel Darby. “This year we expect airline revenues to double. We plan to scale the product to become a network proposition with our airline partners.”

AirPortr has 15 workers at its London headquarters. It has about 30 others handling operations, customer support, and logistics.

 

To read more click on the following link: https://skift.com/2019/08/16/airportr-raises-8-6-million-for-luggage-delivery-travel-startup-funding-this-week/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=75749779&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8DsKrqf5KFyRUzu0E7UjVF6Y3ZXR7IRTOphrsZ06Vv4jDIQc5Zqfbzh3Eqv2NwxAj0kCAcaXwsjvyzTchwYmBDwdRYcA&_hsmi=75749779

Urban Agriculture: Agripolis Will Open World’s Largest Rooftop Farm In Paris In 2020

From a Curbed.com online article:

Agripolis Urban FarmNext year, French company Agripolis is opening a 150,000-square-foot urban farm in Paris, where, according to The Guardian, it will grow more than 2,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables every day during high season. The farm is located in the 15th arrondissement, where it will occupy the rooftop of a sprawling entertainment complex that’s currently undergoing renovations.

The farm will be home to more than 30 different species of plants that will grow vertically with aeroponic farming, a method that uses nutrient-filled mist to nourish the produce. Local residents will be able to secure plots of land, effectively turning the garden into a community space. “Our vision is a city in which flat roofs and abandoned surfaces are covered with these new growing systems,” Pascal Hardy, head of Agripolis told The Guardian.

 

http://agripolis.eu/project/la-plus-grande-ferme-urbaine-en-toiture-au-monde/

To read more click on the following link: https://www.curbed.com/2019/8/15/20806540/paris-rooftop-urban-farm-opening

Landmark Restaurants: Frank Fat’s Has Served Sacramento Politicians Great Food For 80 Years

From a KCRA.com article and Frank Fat’s website:

Frank Fat's 1939 - 2019Walk into Frank Fat’s and you’ll find people today of all political stripes, with a love for authentic Chinese food — cuisine that attracted politicians like former Gov. Jerry Brown. As a bachelor governor in the 1970s, he loved to hang out in the kitchen at closing time, where he might find a free meal, according to California State Librarian Greg Lucas.

It’s not often that a restaurant celebrates its 80th anniversary. It’s even more uncommon when that restaurant happens to be a political landmark. But in August of 2019, the city’s oldest eatery, Frank Fat’s, will celebrate eight decades of business.  A short walk from the Capitol, Fat’s established itself from the beginning in 1939 as a place where politicians could meet with colleagues and discuss business, as well as enjoy a bite to eat and have a nice conversation. Frank Fat was known for a simple mantra: You give people good food, a nice place to eat it in and make them happy. Pretty simple, really.

Frank Fat's Logo
https://frankfats.com/

To read more click on following link: https://www.kcra.com/article/sacramento-frank-fats-80th-anniversary/28705042

Books On Boomers: “Stop Mugging Grandma” By Jennie Bristow Seeks To Edify The Boomer Bashers

From a Wall Street Journal book review by Daniel Akst:

Stop Mugging Grandma by Jennie BristowAt the center of the attack on those of us born between 1946 and 1964, days when the U.S. birth rate was extraordinarily high, is our supposed radical individualism. Its roots are said to be found in the excesses of the 1960s, a decade for which “boomers have become fall guys.”

Ms. Bristow, to her everlasting credit, isn’t buying it. “What about the two catastrophic world wars that had dominated the first half of the century; the cynical hedonism of the ‘Roaring Twenties’; the parasitism of colonialism and racial segregation?”

Ms. Bristow, a sociology professor in England, shrewdly situates this new resentment in the context of today’s vogue for collective responsibility and the transmission of guilt across many generations. “Generationalism,” as she calls it, “has come to find its most comfortable home within identity politics, that shrill sentiment of victimisation and grievance that has become an increasingly powerful cultural force.”

To read more click on the following link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-mugging-grandma-review-defying-the-boomer-bashers-11565651816

Iconic Movies: Film Noir Thriller “Double Indemnity” (1944) Directed By Billy Wilder Turns 75

Feom a Wall Street Journal Arts & Entertainment article:

Double_Indemnity_publSeventy-five years ago, “Double Indemnity” opened in theaters across America. It was an instant hit, and remains to this day a staple offering of revival houses and on cable TV and streaming video. Yet little journalistic notice has been taken of the birthday of Billy Wilder’s first great screen drama, a homicidal thriller that nonetheless had—and has—something truly unsettling to say about the dark crosscurrents of middle-class American life.

Directed by Wilder and co-written by him and Raymond Chandler, the celebrated mystery novelist, “Double Indemnity” is the story of a restless insurance salesman who helps a sexy, frustrated housewife murder her husband for profit. Though neither Wilder nor Chandler realized it at the time, it would later be acknowledged by critics and scholars as the first fully developed example of film noir, in which a flawed but basically innocent protagonist is presented with a moral choice, makes the wrong call, and is plunged into a violent after-hours world of passion and crime.

To read more click on following link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-film-noir-icon-turns-75-11565637941

Behind The Scenes Books: “Stealing The Show” By John Barelli Showcases The NY Metropolitan Museum Of Art Security

From a Wall Street Journal book review:

Stealing The Show John BarelliWhen Diana, Princess of Wales, attended the Met’s Costume Institute Gala in 1996, a black-tie-clad Mr. Barelli was at her side. “I wasn’t nervous, but the pressure!” he said. “You don’t want anything to go wrong.” The princess had one request: that he keep an eye on the black lace shoulder straps of her midnight blue Dior dress and adjust them if they slipped. “I almost told her: ‘Yeah, right, I have to touch your dress.’ That’s all I have to do. I think my wife would be a little upset,” he recalled. There was no wardrobe malfunction and the evening went off without a hitch, although Mr. Barelli remembers security concerns putting a damper on the fun-loving princess. “We couldn’t let her dance,” he said.

Mr. Barelli, now 70 years old, devoted much of his tenure to less-glamorous work, such as disposing of artifacts from would-be donors. In 2007, a curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas received two shrunken human heads in the mail. The cardboard box had no return address, just a note donating the contents, which the sender said had come from friends in Ecuador. “They did have an odor,” said Mr. Barelli, who ultimately consigned the package to the city morgue.

To read more click on the following link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/royalty-a-naked-visitor-and-shrunken-heads-at-the-met-11565521202

Boomers Retirement: Senior Planet Aims To Be “Tech-Savviest Retirement Community On Earth”

From an MIT Technology Review online article:

Senior Planet Founder Tom Kamber photo by Adrienne Grunwald 2019That’s why Kamber created Senior Planet, a tech-themed community center that preps seniors to hack their way through a world conspiring to keep them sidelined. The glass door reads “Aging with Attitude.” With its sleek grays and wood tables, it rivals the WeWork next door in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

Kamber is pretty exciting, but the place itself is a beehive. By the time he and I sat down to talk, I’d already bought some fingerless gloves from one of its graduates, Madelyn Rich, a fiber artist and entrepreneur who’d paid for her recent Caribbean cruise with her holiday glove sales, mostly online. In a computer lab, a class was learning to use Google Calendar and Google Hangouts. Rachel Roth, a white-haired sophisticate in aviator glasses, wheeled in a cart of her sea-salt-dusted chocolate almonds called Opera Nuts—she hawks them online and through West Elm, Pottery Barn, and Williams Sonoma—and doled out some samples to the staffers in her signature Chinese-takeout-box packaging.

To read more click on following link: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614076/next-generation-entrepreneurs-senior-planet/?utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=75583596&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_BF-0OylrzYeKbDveAED9EcrZW1pM54hDXRdCY_nW4wCiGV6r4i8uuf-wNyHYDnIVksgwR0vqA5fYUAHMo2yN-Rq0RWA&_hsmi=75583596