Elevator, One a Day

Recently, the good folks over at Tux & Tom Productions have become fascinated with elevators. For their next project, they're taking the "elevator pitch" to a strange new place, where sound is the landscape three hapless passengers attempt to navigate. ELE↓↑TOR premieres this June at The sound scape Festival at The Brick in Brooklyn: www.bricktheater.com (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-41028826-1', 'tumblr.com'); ga('send', 'pageview');

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Renewable energy is reportedly a key national priority at the moment, but the petroleum industry is--needless to say--still working hard to pull stuff out of the ground and meet demand. A sector with the scale and transnational profile of Big Oil is inevitably ringed by assorted secondary and tertiary sub-industries, but it's only at the quaternary outer edge that we find the apparently booming trade in oilfield bling.

The keychain pictured here is a cast-pewter, gold-finished replica of a 250-ton drill rig elevator. It's the perfect gift for an oil industry middle manager--freshly returned to the suburbs of Houston from a week spent observing the roughnecks at his or her company's Wyoming oilfields--to bring home and bestow upon an adoring spouse or child.

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In case you were wondering...

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Holy schmokes! We're pretty far behind in our elevator updates, aren't we?

Apologies, breathless followers, but we premiered ELE↓↑TOR this week, and thus have gotten a bit backed up. Just a reminder that there are three performances left, for which you can obtain tickets here.

Now, without further ado, your backdated elevators!

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June 4, 2013

A list of hotels with wheelchair-accessible elevators in and around Hershey, Pennsylvania.

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June 5, 2013

New elevators at the Colorado Supreme Court building.

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June 6, 2013

The sequel to Roald Dahl's beloved novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

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June 7, 2013

The direct-to-DVD thriller Elevator.

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June 8, 2013

An elevator-friendly, China-based freight forwarder with access to Central Asian markets.

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June 9, 2013

Off-Broadway experimental theater mainstays Elevator Repair Service.

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Behold, the official ELE↓↑TOR audio preview!

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Most of you are probably familiar with the obstacles preventing the construction of an Earth-based space elevator anytime soon. Space entrepreneur Michael Laine was among those striving to make it happen via his company LiftPort in the early 2000s, though those efforts ultimately failed.

Nonetheless, LiftPort was back at it last summer, attacking the problem from a different direction. They ran a high-profile and wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to fund their first steps toward building a lunar elevator, which turns out to be a lot easier. In fact, the projected final costs would only be $800 million. All things considered, this strikes us as a good bargain, especially when compared to, say, the breathtaking price of expanding rail capacity under the Hudson River.

We're reminded here of one of our favorite passages from the script for ELE↓↑TOR:

ELIJAH OTIS [gasping and coughing horribly]: They spanned the continent with rail--but still they encountered the water. We might populate the seas in vast submersibles--and despair nonetheless when we reach the ocean floor. But the cosmos: the cosmos is infinite--and it is on that firmament we must inscribe our impossible destiny. Ever upward, ever outward--we approach the boundary of some as yet unimagined asymptote. All this was foretold to me twenty years ago--in Oswego, New York, by an ancient Mohegan witch-woman.

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It's a commonplace that the 13th floor is often omitted from building numbering schemes because of its unlucky connotations. In our experience, this is not consistently true, but--as in all such matters--we must defer to the unfathomably awesome On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, whose standard sequence of American elevator buttons does not include 13.

As it turns out, though, only omitting 13 is inexcusably cavalier. We quote here from the Wikipedia article on the subject, with reference to the image above:

Panel from an elevator in a residential apartment building in Shanghai. Floors 4, 13 and 14 are missing, because of the similarity between the pronunciation of the word 'four' and 'death' in Chinese; note also the "negative first floor".

The -1 bit, naturally is left unexplained.

We're reminded here of the even more unfathomably awesome '90s PC game Floor 13, in which you ran a secret department within the British government tasked with violating civil liberties to squelch bad publicity; the options at your disposal included wiretapping, kidnapping, torture, and outright murder. Even better, you were simultaneously a member of the Illuminati-like organization The Secret Masters of Thoth, whose objectives were often at odds with the government's. The whole thing was incredibly complex and dark. We cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Today's elevator is the LG-Otis/Sigma at the Nordstrom in Bellevue, Washington. As many of you are doubtless aware, Sigma is a Seoul-based subsidiary of Otis Elevator Korea. They use the Otis or LG-Otis name in Asian markets, but employ the Sigma brand for sales and marketing overseas. (Their international reach is impressive, extending from Guatemala to Equatorial Guinea to Kazakhstan.)

True story*: It was in this very elevator that Bill Gates first developed the idea to make Windows Vista a maddening, at times nearly unusable operating system.

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One of these days, we will actually get around to playing Minecraft, which from afar seems utterly baffling to us, but which we gather is kind of a mash-up of Dig Dug, SimCity, and Doom. But as longtime readers know, incuriosity and laziness have never been obstacles to our slapping something up on this blog.

E.g., the following three types of Minecraft elevators:

The Piston Elevator:

A sticky piston pushes the player into a wall. Since suffocation is disabled on TeamExtreme, the player is pushed upward until there is at least a two block high gap.

The Water Elevator:

Like the piston elevator it’s quite simple; the player swims upward to ascend and floats down to descend. The elevator’s design prevents suffocation.

The Minecart Elevator:

This elevator is good for tall buildings with individual floor stops. It's faster than the water elevator and the player can decide what floor to get off of.

One thing we now know about Minecraft: suffocation is apparently an ever-present danger.

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We're sure many of you were on your boats this past holiday weekend... perhaps passing by some scenic canal (Gowanus anyone?)... thinking, wouldn't it be great if I could elevate my boat to the other side?

...In which case we strongly recommend schoonering over to the land of Mac*eth and taking a ride on the Falkirk Wheel. (We hear that at the top, you can even catch a glimpse of Brigadoon!)

While you're there, we hope you'll do us proud by adapting the lyrics of this 2009 Lonely Island song to include the word "elevator."

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The Tux & Tom team was not quite old enough to be allowed to watch the Steven Bochco-produced legal procedural L.A. Law, which aired from 1986 to 1994, though one half of us remembers reading the MAD parody in the October 1987 issue multiple times. We have, truth be told, a tendency to confuse it with thirtysomething.

In any case, one of the show's most memorable plot turns apparently involved an elevator. Even by the significantly looser narrative conventions of 2013, it's a pretty bizarre moment:

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From tariff hearings held by the House Ways and Means Committee in 1908 and 1909:

Have a happy and healthy Memorial Day weekend, everyone.

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Human jaws are crazy complex: they've got to move in and out, side to side, up and down. Disorders of the TM joint--bane of nervous nighttime teeth-grinders, improperly embouchured clarinetists, and the otherwise orthodontically aberrant--sit within the hazy borderlands between dentistry and other medical disciplines. They're poorly understood and have inspired all sorts of questionable procedures (with corresponding horror stories).

But whether swishing and clattering merrily like Gene Kelly or mired in agonizing dysfunction like Gary Busey, none of the jaw's remarkable array of movements would be possible without JAW ELEVATORS!

(Jaw elevators are four of the eight muscles that power the jaw when you chew.)

LET'S HEAR IT FOR...

The Masseter!

The Temporalis!

The Medial Pterygoid!

    The Superior Belly of the Lateral Pterygoid!

Elevate on, you crazy masticators.

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Did you know?:

Due to high specifications and building standards, hospital projects in California can be very challenging to any trade.

Today's elevator ... is actually, count 'em, nineteen elevators! To be specific, we're featuring the major job that octopus-like German multinational ThyssenKrupp (lovingly profiled here) landed with Palomar Medical Center Hospital in Escondido, California. And lo, well into the night, did the sales team in ThyssenKrupp's San Diego office celebrate their good fortune with tapas and pitchers of sangria.

Nineteen. Man. That number includes three AC 50-04, 500-fpm gearless overhead ThyssenKrupp Elevator 450 machines, one TAC 50-04, 350-fpm geared adjacent ThyssenKrupp Elevator GD2 machines, two ... well, just read the article.

Below, a Kubrickian hallway shot of the Palomar. Spooky.

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This isn't a story of peeing in an elevator as much as it is a story of superior customer service.

As if the two were mutually exclusive!

...

Anyway, moral of the story: If you get stuck in an elevator at Disneyland ("a terrible experience," we are told), you too can, for a day, do your part to rend the social fabric by pretending to be so impatient and entitled that you can't be bothered to wait in line with the rest of us.

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Oh lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ... elevator ... 

The Mercedes-Benz Museum is an automotive museum housed in Stuttgart, Germany. Stuttgart is home to the Mercedes-Benz brand and the international headquarters of Daimler AG. The current building, which stands directly outside the main gate of the Daimler factory in Stuttgart, was designed by UN Studio. It is based on a unique cloverleaf concept using three overlapping circles with the center removed to form a triangular atrium. The building was completed and opened on 19 May 2006. Previously, the museum was housed in a dedicated building within the factory complex and visitors had in recent decades been transported from the main gate by a secured shuttle.

Yeah, we were thinking the same thing: it's like Willy Wonka and James Bond collaborated one drunken night in Stuttgart. 

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This being our first Sunday post, we found ourselves wondering, "What actually constitutes a church elevator?"

Simple question, right?

Right:

A church elevator is nothing more than an elevator installed in a church.

And yet, as Indianapolis-based Metro Elevator goes on to point out,

In most situations, a church is interested in accommodating only those who are disabled and cannot use the stairs,

which strikes us as an oddly uncharitable way to put it.

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Questions! Answers?

Curious about why we started this thing? Or just curious? 

Here are some Questions with Answers, from ELE↓↑TOR director, Patrice Miller. 

http://www.nytheatre.com/Preview/patrice-miller-eletor