Yesterday Gawker expressed bafflement regarding Russ Smith’s assertion in The New York Press that Gawker Media has been sold to The New York Times Company for $32 million. “As this is utterly ridiculous and unequivocally not true,” Gawker wrote, “we imagine Smith intended the piece as some sort of quasi-parody.”

But Smith, as unhinged as he most certainly is, may be onto something. A well-placed source inside the Times sent me a screenshot of an in-house mockup of Gawker redesigned to conform to the look, feel, and editorial tone of the Times Company’s flagship website. It’s not a pretty thing: Something is definitely lost when the snarkiness of Gawker is filtered through the bland, establishment-friendly tone of the Times. Let’s hope this deal doesn’t actually go through—it would mean the end of Gawker as we know it. Click on the logotype below to see the rest of this top-secret design.

John Tierney’s New York Times columns are filled with willfully obtuse justifications for selfish behavior, not to mention lots of cherry-picked data. But until last week his columns were fun to read online, because the photo that accompanied them was so hilarious. Here’s the photo, which must have been taken a few years ago during Tierney’s tenure as dean of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College:

The hand-stapled-to-chin pose: so sexy. It turns out that this guy also loves to pose that way, which should tell you something about Tierney.

Alas, the above picture has apparently been abandoned in favor of this perfectly normal one, which accompanied the online version of Tierney’s Times column yesterday:

Perhaps Tierney finally realized that he’s not much of a thinker after all.

I began playing guitar in 1984, and I’ve gone through long periods where I’ve played hours and hours every week. I’ve hardly played at all in the last six months or a year; I’ve been busy with other things. But for several years beginning in mid-1998, I spent much of my free time writing and recording music in my apartment. Thanks to the inexpensive digital-recording technologies (audio sequencers, software synthesizers, drum-loop editors) that were just then becoming available, I started working with electronic textures and elaborate song structures. Most of my music from this period involves electric and acoustic guitars combined with looped beats, atmospheric synths, and historical voice samples from people like Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and J. Edgar Hoover. (I don’t sing, so the samples were partly a way to add human voices to my recordings.) I was listening a lot to this guy and these guys at the time, and their influence on some of those tunes is pretty evident.

I finished about an album’s worth of tracks during that phase. Here are a couple of them (they’ve now been added to the other tracks on my music page):

“Zero Sum,” from 1999, is one of the more elaborate tracks from that period. I used this and this to create the swooping octave shifts in the first solo, about halfway through the track; I used this (again) and this for the growly, synthlike solo in the progtastic final section.

“Trained Assassin,” from 2001, is sort of a futuristic spy theme. My then-girlfriend lent her voice for the whispered sample at the beginning. Once again, the solo is this combined with this.

In late 2001, I got my hands on one of these awesome gadgets and a couple of these awesome gadgets. Before long, I moved away from doing intricate, highly composed studio recordings and began doing extemporaneous live looping routed through analog filters and other effects. A few tracks from that period can be found on my music page.

One of a series of ads created by Saatchi & Saatchi New York for an apparently fictitious printing company called Hudson Repro:

Graphic-design geeks will probably find this hilarious; most other people will simply be confused. If you fall into the latter category, read this for some insight. Go to Frederik Samuel’s blog for two more from the same series. A fourth ad from the series is here.

[via The Spunker.]

Too busy or uncreative to come up with a truly memorable Christmas experience for your child? Eager to lay the groundwork for your tot’s inevitable realization that adults lie all the time, despite your constant nagging that it’s always best to tell the truth? Then head to santamail.org, where you can spend $9.95 to buy your snot-nosed bundle of joy a personalized letter from Santa Claus, lovingly typeset with unconvincing computer-generated handwriting.

The best thing on the site is the $19.95 “Santa Was Here!” kit, a veritable Christmas stocking full of ways to take advantage of the fact that your gullible child’s critical faculties are not yet fully formed. According to the company, the kit contains “complete instructions on how to stage your room to convince your child that Santa really did come”:

Added this weekend: a Best Of archive that brings together about 30 of my favorite Panopticist posts from the past ten months. You really can’t afford to miss this thrilling new category archive.

This exciting compilation contains many recent smash hits—“Judy Miller Finally Goes Off the Deep End” and “The iPod Harper’s Special Edition,” among others—as well as some early classics you might have missed:

• “Seven-Year-Olds Can’t Write Upside Down,” in which I trace my artistic development all the way back to my favorite childhood dinner plate;
• “The Only Interesting Thing About Paris Hilton,” in which I share a not-widely-known nugget of trivia about the overexposed, undereducated heiress;
• “Bill Laimbeer Was a Sleestak,” in which I reveal that Bill Laimbeer was, in fact, a Sleestak;
• “Microsoft Caught in Sinister Copyediting Conspiracy!,” in which I expose Bill Gates’s ongoing efforts to crush longstanding English formatting rules; and
• “Entry Points,” my first-ever post, in which I explain the origins of this site’s name, among other things.

Regarding the album whose cover is parodied above, don’t pretend like you didn’t dance around drunk to it at least once in high school or college. Or maybe during a candy-induced sugar high in elementary school. I know your secrets, people.

A Vancouver music store is selling a custom guitar with a pot-leaf-shaped body. Check out the abalone weed-leaf inlay on the first fret and the joint inlay on the 12th fret:

Judging from the picture, that thing must weigh a ton. Its eventual owner—assuming someone actually buys it—will have to smoke a lot of weed just to deal with the debilitating back pain it will cause.

[Thanks to my Vancouver friend Dominic Ali for the tip!]

Stumbled onto this cool thing last night: The Portland, Oregon-based artist Michael Paulus has created a series of pieces that imagine the skeletal structures underneath the skin of various cartoon characters, including Hello Kitty, Charlie Brown, Marvin the Martian, and Pikachu. “I decided to take a select few of these popular characters,” Paulus writes, “and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.” The characters themselves are printed on an opaque overlay; the full skeletal structure is revealed when the overlay is lifted. Here’s Betty Boop:

A couple of months ago an editor at Vanity Fair approached me to see if I wanted to try to come up with something for VF. It worked out pretty nicely: I have a page of four new magazine covers in the December 2005 issue. The issue is on newsstands now; it’s the one with Kate Moss on the front. I can’t post the four covers here, at least not yet, but I will tease you with the logotype for one of them:

For the rest of this cover, plus three other brand-new ones, see page 288 of the December Vanity Fair. I’m excited to be in the same publication as this guy and these guys, among other fine contributors.

[UPDATE: In August 2007, I finally posted all four covers.]

During the process, I submitted a few design concepts that we decided not to pursue, including an earlier version of the cover below, wherein genetic material from this magazine has been spliced into the DNA of this magazine. I reimagined most of this one over the weekend, so it’s more or less oven-fresh. (As you’ll discover if you check out Vanity Fair, a different but related concept did make it into the magazine.)

This cover I posted a few weeks ago is also an outtake from the Vanity Fair assignment. Yes, I know: Too many boob jokes recently. But sex sells magazines!

I probably won’t be doing too many more of these covers—I want to start doing more stuff like this. I have one other cover in mind that I’m planning to create and post in February, for reasons that shall become clear…

At the end of the night on Wednesday, after drinking here with this person and this person and this person, among others, I worked my way to the 14th Street 1/2/3 stop to wait for the train to take me uptown. After peering south down the express track and seeing no evidence of an approaching train, I reached into my man purse for my iPod … and it promptly slipped from my fingers and down onto the tracks:

I wasn’t about to jump down to retrieve it without being absolutely sure I’d be able to get back up again very quickly. I’ve seen the occasional news stories about New Yorkers who’ve jumped down to the tracks to fetch a dropped cellphone only to be crushed by several thousand tons of high-speed metal. I don’t want the end of my life to serve as a cautionary tale about modern man’s dangerously misguided worship of technology. I just like listening to music on my iPod.

So I stood there for a few minutes pondering what to do. I decided I’d wait until right after the next express train left the station and then recruit a couple of strong men to spot me as I jumped down. I waited five minutes, then ten, before realizing that all express trains were apparently being routed to the local track. And then I spotted my opportunity: A very tall man, maybe six-foot-six, walked by with a burly friend. I approached them and sheepishly asked if they’d help me up from the tracks after I’d retrieved my iPod. But without any prompting from me, the tall guy simply jumped down to the tracks, grabbed the iPod, and hoisted himself back up. I thanked him, and as he and his friend started to walk away, I pulled out my wallet so I could give him a twenty or something. But he refused. Thanks, iPod Man, whoever you are.

This picture exists in several places on the web. I don’t know where or when it was taken.

I had no idea how bad things had gotten for Judith Miller until I saw the Ethicist column in this past Sunday’s Times Magazine. When is the Times finally going to rein in this crazy woman?

(Here’s a link to this week’s Ethicist column.)