Category: Odds & Endz

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner's NYT profile of Gwyneth Paltrow and GOOP.

— The history of the vinyl record format

— An upcoming documentary about Gilda Radner. 

 – My 45th birthday next week

I heard the other week why Dalmatians have been historically associated with fire departments. Which is that special category of trivia that answers a question I didn't know I had asked but am glad to have answered anyway. It's trivia serving the same purpose as good advertising.

Anyway, it turns out that in the early days of firefighting, hoses and water pumps were carried to the scene by horse drawn carriages which looked like so.

Also back then, firefighting wasn't a municipal service you paid for with your taxes. Neighborhoods, unions, ethnic groups and street gangs had their own firefighting units. Whoever got to a fire first and put it out got paid. Often fires went on burning as competing firefighitng units battled with fists and weapons over who got to put out the blaze. This, not surprisingly, is why firefighting ended up becoming a municipal service.

So fire engines were powered by horses and horses had to run fast to get said engines to the fire first. But what if the horses didn't feel like running that day? What if they were tired, cranky, sleepy or it was that time of the horse month?

Enter Dalmatians. Dalmatians were bred from way back as herding dogs whose job was to get cattle all running in the same direction. So firefighting untis began employing Dalmatians to run with the horses in order to keep their pace rapid and steady.

And the association stuck.

Origins of the name "Dalmatian", incidentally, are not so interesting. The bred originated from the Dalmatia region of Croatia (via Podictionary, an awesome podcast about word origins)

My Twitter Grade is 80: I can hold this over the heads of exactly no one that cares (via ChronicBabe).

The Totem Fridge is an appliance I could get used to as it seems designed to both minimize footprint and internal floor/shelf space. For someone like me who cleans their fridge a) when it starts to smell or b) when the foodstuffs stick to everything, preventing their removal, the less room to spill, the better.

I would not render it in green and yellow myself (although I’d be all in favor of green/yellow/red traffic signal motif) but I’m sure designer Stefan Buchberger has his reasons and I respect them. He is after all a design student at the University fo Applied Arts in Vienna and has done a more than respectable job giving new life to one of the home’s less sexy fixtures. I believe at his age I was giving new life to eating potato chips through a Pixy Stix while dressed as a vagrant.

Mr. Kottke has noted that the unit has…

the perhaps unfortunate side effect of reinforcing which household
members hold lower positions on the metaphorical totem pole and
therefore always need to bend down to access their unit while
higher-status members can easily get at their fruit and veg without
genuflection.

Agreed although I also wonder how the contents themsleves would regard this slight. I can imagine the fancy sodas I now keep in the bottom bin getting a big head from the promotion to Second Shelf. I’ll be sure to take that head down to size, Mr. Boylan, when next we meet.

What are big data sets and why is there an entire community devoted to them (via Waxy.org)?

A banner that reads…

"I am. Therefore I run"

I love that.