Continuing this thread from the other day, I’ll add my agreement that the new Apple Maps program is highly problematic. Twice over the weekend I sat in total highway standstill traffic for long periods of time while Maps showed me no traffic whatsoever.

One more contrast from the post-Jobs era. APPL now says they’re working hard to fix Maps. In the Jobs days, they would have worked hard to fix Maps while insisting that Maps worked great and was the best map application ever made.

This truly awesome Esquire  piece on Teller and the theft of magic tricks (sorry, “illusions”) has Santino written all over it:

“Invention is all fuzzy, sloppy stuff,” Steinmeyer says. “I have patents, and I have had patents that have expired. Everything has a limited lifetime. But when a person can’t make a living by coming up with new material, that’s when you have to wonder about the system. I would say that over the last few years, the last ten years, it’s a net zero. I’m putting as much money into it as I’m getting out.”

Steinmeyer is surrounded by so many pirates, he’s almost given up fighting them off. Because some venerable tricks, like the Zig-Zag Girl, have become so commonplace — much to the likely despair of its late inventor, Robert Harbin — many magicians have convinced themselves that every trick is fair game so long as they’re able to crack its code. Pursuing the Origami thieves alone would be more than “a full-time job,” Steinmeyer says. While his patents have provided some theoretical protection, he has never actually sued one of his robbers, because he knows how consuming and costly that grim task could be. Court cases might also require the magician to reveal too much about his trick in public, making the very act of protecting magic one of the easiest ways to destroy it.

That’s the Santino stuff. But this passage struck me as particularly profound:

Among his many works, Steinmeyer wrote Hiding the Elephant, his best-selling history of magic. In it, he writes that the best tricks are a “collection of tiny lies, in words and deeds, that are stacked and arranged ingeniously.” Like jokes, tricks should have little plots with a twist at the end that’s both implausible and yet logical. You shouldn’t see the punchline coming, but when you do see it, it makes sense. The secret to a great trick isn’t really its method; the method behind most tricks is ugly and disappointing, something blunt and mechanical. (When Penn & Teller have famously exposed a trick, they’ve almost always invented a ridiculously poetic method and built the trick around it; by making their art seem more intricate than it is, they force the audience to assume that the rest of their tricks are equally complex. Penn & Teller’s exposures are really part of an elaborate con.)

Courtesy of Galley Friend M.F.: Mitt Romney. Lucille Bluth.

It had to happen. And it is awesome.

But we need make this even better. I want a converse tumblr, with photos of Romney and Lucille Bluth quotes. Something to get you started:

“I will go when I am good and ready, Michael.”

“I do not know what that is, and I will not dignify it with a response.”

“You want your belt to buckle, not your chair.”

“No, I’m withholding it. Look at me, ‘getting off’.”

Offered without comment.

Let me get this straight:

Tim Pawlenty fails at running for president. So he signs on as co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign and starts running for vice president. He fails at getting the veep pick and the campaign he’s co-chairing performs, at best, not-so-hot.

And so, for his fourth gig in 18 months, Pawlenty gets hired as CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable. What does T-Paw know about financial services? Beats me. He worked for a law firm once and was a vp at a software company called Wizmo Inc. Maybe he did really well with his 401(k).

But hey, don’t worry. Free markets are awesome and executive talent is precious and never over-valued.

After living with iOS 6 for a hot 24 hours, I’m struck by what this update tells us about APPL in its post-Steve Jobs phase.

The new OS is largely incremental in its changes, but it carries one gigantic feature that’s being weirdly overlooked in write-ups: Passbook.

If you haven’t tinkered in iOS 6, Passbook is a new permanent icon which APPL plants on your home screen when you boot up for the first time. And it’s function is amazing. The idea is that it mates all of your customer information from your dealings with various companies and brings it to the fore exactly when you need it.

So your customer loyalty card from Giant/Wegmans/Safeway you have on your keychain? When you get to the register, Passbook pulls it up automatically and lets you scan it from your iPhone. Bye-bye plastic. Ditto cards for Starbucks, Panera, REI, and what-have you. But wait! There’s more! If you travel, Passbook takes your flight information, your hotel information, your rental car information, puts it all in one place, and pulls it up as you need it. You get to the airport and it pulls up the barcode to scan at the check-in kiosk. Etc.

I love it. Passbook is the kind of routine-changing app that makes your life better and it shows APPL can still be really smart and creative post-Jobs.

But there’s a catch. APPL launched iOS 6, plunked Passbook on your home screen, and the app is basically just a cardboard placeholder. It doesn’t work yet. Hardly any Passbook-enabled apps exist. From the user-end, it’s like getting a totally non-functional beta design.

That’s insane. It would be like launching the iPhone 4S and enabling Siri–but not having her able to do anything. And then telling users, Don’t worry–this Siri thing is going to be awesome in a few months!

I suspect that this would never have happened under Jobs. You either make Passbook functional right out of the gate, or you roll it out when it’s ready as an update later on. You don’t include your most radical improvement in the OS before it’s usable.

Galley Friend X offers up an alt explanation for Romney’s Moocher Theory of American Politics. I’ll paraphrase:

Why does everyone suddenly believe that this is what Mitt Romney really believes? The whole rap against him is that he’s always telling audiences what he thinks they want to hear. Why should this dinner have been any different? Maybe the whole 47% thing is just the schtick that he thinks his big donors want to hear because it comports with their worldview?

Shorter version: To believe that Mitt Romney really thinks that way about 47 percent of America you have to believe that Mitt Romney really believes anything in the first place.

Well, it’s a theory!

But awesome on so many levels.

Courtesy of Galley Friend G.R. we have Slate’s Lexicon Valley podcast on the word “asshole” and the distinctions between profanity and obscenity.

Bonus: The podcast opens with a remembrance of original Galley Slave David Skinner utterly pwning the hosts when he was on preparing the way for his fantastic book, The Story of Ain’t. (Which you should pre-order right away.)