As a runner up, I would say that this one about creeping theocratic rhetoric and behavior, particulalry among American conservatives, is very effective in pointing out just how pervasive those things have become in our political and cultural discourse, and why it’s important to protect and restore secular ideals.

If you’re interested, the restaurant’s own website is here, and I’m pleased to see that it’s very reasonably priced, especially considering the location. There’s too many modest-to-poor joints in New York City that feel justified in charging prices and treating customers like they were in the Rainbow Room and not a coffee shop or burger joint. What’s evident, though, is that the sense of place borders on the eternal, which is a quality that has pervaded New York for a long time but is beginning to die out.

Wu and Usui have also produced other short films for clients ranging from the New York Times to MoMA to Pepsi, which you can view on the website for their production company Lost & Found Films.

Because this is a) a documentary and b) sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada, I don’t expect that you’ll see this at your local multiplex any time soon, but perhaps the fortuitous timing will get this booked into some smaller indie movie houses that might have otherwise not bothered. NFBC is also good about putting content online, so it might wind up on their website at some point too.

And it’s FOR REAL.

It’s not your imagination, cable TV reality shows are getting more redneck by the day. This Venn diagram comes from this article at New York Magazine’s pop culture blog Vulture, where you can see the full-sized version of the diagram. I guess dwarves and people with lots of kids are out of vogue, since I don’t see any of those on the list.

Yesterday, I had an experience I hadn’t entirely anticipated having at this stage of my life: I got fingerprinted by the Cambridge Police Department.

The biotech company where I work part-time is planning to start selling products that require them to have a particularly lethal neurotoxin on premises, as well as some other chemicals that can be used in the creation of narcotics. Those substances will be kept in a secure area, but anyone who has to have access to said area has had to go through a security clearance process that includes having fingerprints on file with the FBI’s bioterrorism unit. As one of the IT guys, I will have to have access to the Chamber Of Death, so off I went to the Cambridge PD at lunchtime. There, in a small room, a young woman firmly took each of my fingers, rolled them on an inkpad, and pressed them onto a pair of cards to be sent to the Feds.

I remarked to her that I was surprised that the process had not gone digital. Digital fingerprinting is actually pretty common these days. She informed me that they do, in fact, have a digital system in the booking area where arrestees are processed because it’s faster and easier, which is key when dealing with uncooperative people, but the traditional ink print is still preferred. The room where she fingerprinted me was only just around the corner from the front entrance of what is a fairly large building, so it must be a common enough procedure to do non-arrest-related prints.

As I alluded to above, I also had to have a basic criminal background check, the result of which is that I now have some clearance number from the FBI that I can use if I go to another job that requires such things. I assume the same holds true of the prints — once they’re on file I doubt they ever have to be done again. Now that I’m marked man, though, whatever madcap crime spree I may or may not have been planning will be all that easier to foil. Curses!

Salon, of all places, had a wonderful article last week featuring a slew of gorgeous posters designed for the various passenger rail lines that serviced Chicago and the region surrounding the city, as well as the Chicago Transit Authority. The posters are mostly from the 1920s, and they feature many Chicago landmarks, some of which are gone but not all. There are also nature scenes and other travel poster style images of such “exotic” destinations as the Ogden Dunes in Indiana and Benton Harbor, Michigan. Toward the bottom of the article, there are even some photographs of the actual posters “in the wild” at “L” stops in Evanston and Wilmette. Though the posters pre-date the iconic art of the WPA, it’s clear where some of the aesthetics for WPA-period travel posters comes from when you look at these.

Thanks to my old Northwestern University grad school classmate Nina Berry for pointing me to this link.