I just uploaded some photos from a New York trip from 2006. We spent Thanksgiving there.  Rather than staying with friends or a hotel, we rented someone’s apartment off craigslist.  It was awesome.  For about 80 bucks a night we had our own little apartment on the Upper West Side, just off Broadway.  The apartment was cozy, convenient, and saved us quite a bit of money.  We did the same thing again on a trip to Austin.  So far there have been no horror stories.  Could this be a new, better way to travel and really appreciate a neighborhood?

This is a funny and very clever commercial I picked up on break.com.

Good Advice - Watch more free videos

http://www.break.com/index/sex-advice-from-mom.html

The most interesting thing I’ve read in a while…

That is, if you read…

Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She writes extensively on the effects of technology and media on culture. Her observations are insightful and well written. The most recent essay, “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism”, discusses the impact of the use of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook on the younger generations:

As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, “I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook.” That she finds these online relationships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk—the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.

I invite you to read her other essays:

• “The Image Culture” : A discussion about how communication and culture is increasingly affected by visual images alone and the decline of the the written word.
• “Ego Casting” :Rosen takes us on a James Burke style “Connections” tour from the birth of the remote control to TiVO and the hyper have-it-your-way individual’s society we live in today.

”I am just a dirty old man trapped inside a dirty old man’s body” - you gotta love it!I wonder if there is a frat-boy interest in creating a secret society  of those who can appreciate the mentality of dirty old men.  Burgess Meredith of Grumpy Old Men fame set a great example for all dirty old men to live by. His running list of jokes and one-liners are comedy gold.  I highly recommend Netflix-ing Grumpy Old Men and the sequel, Grumpier Old Men.  Skip the movie and jump right to the out takes where Birgess Meredith goes off talking dirty and making innuendo.  He is the inspiration for the shirt, and possibly a larger society of dirty old men.Buy the shirt here !

Maybe you have seen the ads in your city. They appear on bus stops and on the sides of buildings. They blend into an overcrowded, ad-infested landscape filled with images of so-called beauty and objects of desire. The Sunglass Hut has its contribution to the noise in its newest campaign.

The quips go on and on. These ads are offensive and stupid. They like to suggest that there is something wrong or shameful about being an accountant or collecting stamps. On the contrary, these are admirable jobs and hobbies. Accountants are a necessary to business, so why alienate those who have chosen this profession? Hobbies are constructive past times and certainly better than getting hammered every weekend.

Unfortunately this is a symptom of a society who is becoming increasingly self-conscious and detached. These ads instruct the consumer to deny his individualism (the mother of four, the accountant, the stamp collector) and hide his intentions.

In response I decided to create my own Sunglass Hut ads. The concept was simple - “Let us make ads for things which people truly wish to hide.” Toilet humor and sex jokes are always a laugh, so that is where we began.

I invited a few friends to model for me. We shot them over the July 4th holiday, and here are the results. I hope you appreciate them as much as we do.