(August 2010)
Tech
Apps for Travelers and Food-Truck Lovers
Music WithMe: No signal? No problem. Wirelessly download your iTunes playlists to your Blackberry, Symbian, or Android phone. ($14.99; music.withme.com) Road Stoves GPS: This app lists the nearest gourmet food trucks via your iPhone's GPS, putting those nomadic burritos and ice-cream cones just a finger swipe away. ($0.99; iTunes) Google Goggles: Foreign-language menus, unlabeled landmarks, and obscure artworks are no longer an issue on the road. Translate the text and identify images via your Android's camera. (Free; Android Market)
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Movies + TV
Vital Fall TV Viewing
Terriers [FX] PLOT An ex-cop (Donal Logue) starts a private-investigation service with his equally immature buddy. PEDIGREE Executive producer Shawn Ryan previously served as creator-producer-writer for FX's The Shield. PROGNOSIS A smarter spin on the Starsky & Hutch buddy-cop genre. PREMIERE DATE Wednesday September 8, 10 p.m.Boardwalk Empire [HBO] PLOT A gangster politician (Steve Buscemi) rules Atlantic City at the advent of Prohibition. PEDIGREE Terrence Winter (The Sopranos) and Martin Scorsese are executive producers. PROGNOSIS The bootlegging of The Untouchables with the body count of The Wire. PREMIERE DATE Sunday September 19, 9 p.m. Undercovers [NBC] PLOT Spy work becomes
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Design
The Missing Links: The Best Way to Start Fires and a New Converse Collaboration
An electric wand makes grilling more fun. It's one of the world's biggest food fights; just don't use what's left over for sauce. Go horseback riding to see Icelandic volcanoes; make sure the airlines are working. Converse teams up with Missoni to bring new patterns to classic sneakers. A man sets out to make a documentary with very little equipment. State boundaries now limit the cutting of cheese. A valuable memo: AOL will award grants to innovative thinkers. A sartorial solution displayed by Cary Grant. A three-martini lunch for $30? It come with food? Yes, please!
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Tech
You Could Be Wearing Marty McFly's Self-Lacing Shoes by 2015
Good news, nerds! Remember Marty McFly's self-lacing sneakers from Back to the Future II? Well today the sneaker blog Nice Kicks is reporting that Nike finally got around to filing a patent on a self-lacing (light-up!) shoe late last year, which means by 2015—the year Back to the Future Part II is set—you could be wearing your own McFly Dunks. At that point, we can all move on to getting hoverboard racing approved as an Olympic event for 2016. Admit it: This looks pretty cool: Via Gadget Lab.
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Food + Drinks
Top-Shelf Travel: Three Airport Bars Worth a Long Layover
COCKTAILS One Flew South Atlanta The busiest airport in the world can take a lot out of you. A barkeep who knows his way around an egg-white cocktail and mixes a rye Manhattan with allspice dram can put most of it back. BEER Ike's Food & Cocktails Minneapolis MSP is already one of the better airports for layovers. This spin-off of a beloved downtown eatery seals that reputation with its first-rate beer list, including offerings from local craft brewery Surly. WINE 5ive Steak New York-JFK Tucked into JetBlue's mod Terminal 5, this spot--along with a 1999 Chateau Petrus and
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Style
How to Dress for Work: A Put This On Video
Yesterday, the always excellent style blog Put This On released the third video in its series on dressing like a grownup (a subject we know a thing or two about), this one focused on what to wear to work. The clip features Emmy-nominated director Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks, The Office, and the forthcoming Bridesmaids) discussing the professional and personal advantages of suits, Roxanna of Put This On's sister blog Nerd Boyfriend deconstructing a classic Tom Wolfe look (if you're still worried about pulling off white pants, here's a primer), and answers to questions about dressing for job interviews. The
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Tech
Where to Refurbish Your Vintage Fridge
A master at refurbishing early-to-mid-20th-century refrigerators, Vintage Appliances of Tucson, Arizona, dissects each specimen, adds new insulation and energy-efficient compressors, then paints and re-chromes the exterior to its original gleaming finish. With its array of brands--Frigidaire to Philco to Foodarama--the shop is the go-to resource for set designers (Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and notables from T. Boone Pickens to Neko Case. $5,000--$10,000; antiquevintageappliances.com
Travel
Gnomes, Spies, and Thieves: A Secret History of Umbrellas
If you live in New York, rain gear has probably been on your mind this week. Far less dreary than the weather is this Paris Review post on the ombrellai of Piedmont, a mostly closed community of umbrella craftsmen who worked in northern Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries. To protect their trade secrets, the ombrellai used an Italian-French-German-Spanish hybrid language called Tarùsc, believed to be named for a misanthropic gnome with a knack for making "the shapeliest, lightest, most lissome and elegant umbrellas in all the world" (seriously). Tarùsc (the language, not the gnome) died out in
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Politics
Efraim Diveroli, Our Favorite Pot-Smoking Millennial Arms Dealer, Can't Stay Out of Trouble
Remember Efraim Diveroli? He was the pot-smoking high-school dropout who secured a $300 million weapons contract with the Pentagon at the tender age of 21, got mixed up with a shady Albanian arms dealer, attempted to supply the U.S. Army with shoddily packaged ammunition from China, and, in the wake of a drunk-driving arrest and a New York Times investigation, was indicted for conspiracy and fraud. Which is pretty much where we left him. But it seems he just can't stay away from the international arms trade. The Times is reporting that he was arrested Friday and charged with
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Books
Cheat Sheet: How to Become an Expert in Anything
A website that gathers experts on everything from Buddhism to soccer to medical marijuana to the Great Depression and asks each to winnow a topic down to, yes, five essential titles. You'll never have to resort to the Dummies series again.
The Daily Details Continues
