"I will now sail away to Blackout Island"

Cheers to this fantastic compilation of Bar Signs (helpful hand signals to indicate needs, actions, and tactics whilst in a public house) from the greatest magazine in America, Modern Drunkard. Tonight's activities involve a daring two-man infiltration of perhaps a dozen of the city's bars and taverns for "research" for a "book" I am "working on."

E-squire

pt posted a short clip of Esquire magazine's new and much-bepimped e-ink e-cover (via Gizmodo). It's . . . not that impressive, but it could be in a year or so. This feels like something a not-very-with-it 45-year-old marketing guy thought up: "Let's put an intertube-like screen on our cover! It'll be synergistically paradigm subverting." Okey dokey, bub. Call me when it's IN COLOR and full screen and HD.

Dharavi

(Much larger version here)

Today's L.A. times has a photo/audio megaslideshow sort of thing by Michael Robinson Chavez (and a companion article by Henry Wu) about Dharavi, one of Mumbai's worst slums (unlike the nice ones with the great water slides and golf course communities, I guess. Gah.) which happens to be on some of Mumbai's most desirable land.

About half a million people live and work in Dharavi -- recyclers, tailors, leather tanners, laundrymen, potters, cloth dyers and shopkeepers, all jammed into a single square mile of narrow alleys and rickety buildings made from corrugated metal sheets.

Yes, that's half a million people living in one square mile.

The new plan?

"You're talking of a location that's fantastic. This is the only location in Mumbai where I can bulldoze 500 acres of land and redesign," said architect Mukesh Mehta, whose $3-billion redevelopment plan was adopted by the Maharashtra state government in 2004 but has been subject to repeated debate and delay.

His goal is to "create a brand-new beautiful suburb," complete with green space, schools, hospitals and reliable public services such as sanitation, things Dharavi currently lacks.

Yes, that's half a million people living in one square mile with no sanitation.

All Your Data Are Belong To 538

If you are a massive election stats dork--and I know you are out there--or you are even just curious about how really bright and numerically-obsessed folks view the upcoming Presidential battle, I recommend you run over to 538. It's named after the number of votes in the Electoral College, and run by Nate Silver, who is managing partner of Baseball Prospectus, which means he does to numbers what the late Steve Howe did to lines of cocaine. Apparently, Silver could not be contained by the meager world of digits that baseball provides; he decided to apply his skillz to a far more boring contest, politics. Your mind will be exploded by data and pie charts and numbers and thinking and truth (NOTE: It is more interesting that the chart you see here, but I wanted to show how balls-out the data is). 538 was in some fancy publication that probably had the words "New York" in its title a while back, and my bright engineer pal Bill brought 538 up the other night; now get over there and start learning about the reality of everything. Bring clean pants, it will be like that time you went to Burning Man by accident with those girls who tasted like copper and you didn't have any spare clean pants.

Eight is Enough

This was the fastest any Oakland Athletic player had to move after the sixth inning last night, as they walked their way (and then added a grand slam) to an 11-2 bitch-slapping of the once-again-hapless Orioles last night.

Here are some fun stats from the contest:

-Five bases-loaded walks issues by Orioles pitchers (Brian Bass, Brian Burres, Kameron Mickolio, and Randor Bierd) including four in the eighth inning.

-The aforementioned Kam Mickolio gets his own stat line: 6' 9"; bred in Wolf Point, Montana; entered the game with a 9.00 ERA; left with a 27.00 ERA; intro song is "Folsom Prison Blues," because--looking at his ERA--he is apparently familiar with the sensations experienced during prison rape.

-The A's scored eight runs in the eighth inning on one hit (a grand slam by Rajai Davis, only his third of the season, that had to be discussed by the lethargic ump crew because they were confused by the ball actually being struck by the bat).

FlurkrFind #99

Get Ready For Mind-Exploding

See this? It's, like . . . WHOA!!!1!!

From Poynter.org, the tale of a relic of a magazine that no longer exists, published back in October 2004, giving us a bizarre glimpse into a future no one could imagine. Read about the hilarious hi-jinx behind the scenes here!

GOPanoramic

Thee New York Times has a smashing panoramic of the Money Shot from thee GOP Convention.

P.S. The music here was so bad.

Photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times

FlurkrFind #98