March 1, 2013
Replacement Key
Hey Jude in Minor Scale. Smells Like Teen Spirit in Major Scale. The Final Countdown in Major. Beat It in Major. Losing My Religion in Major.
The "50 Shades" of 1969. Except this one was intentionally bad.
Naked Came The Stranger was a collaborative work of terrible erotica released as a satire of the all too American love for stories of bored suburban women getting their freak on. Perhaps surprising no one, it became a huge hit anyways. Released as the work of a single female author, the ruse of it being written by a large pool mostly male journalists coming out some time later spurred further sales and cemented its place in the annals of literary hoaxes.
Two concert films from Tom Waits
Burma Shave and Big Time, all there in their entirety, for your Waitsian viewing and listening pleasure.
Classic Albums, covering 3 decades of popular music
Classic Albums is a rock and pop documentary series, broadcast and on DVD, starting with The Making of Sgt. Pepper. There were 38 more albums covered, plus five more in the Netherlands... [more inside]
The Green Mafia
“Uncle Vincenzo,” implored the businessman, Angelo Salvatore, using a term of affection for the alleged head of Sicily’s Gimbellina crime family, 79-year-old Vincenzo Funari. According to a transcript of their wiretapped conversation, Salvatore continued: “For the love of our sons, renewable energy is important. . . . It’s a business we can live on.” [more inside]
A Curious and rather difficult experiment
On the November 11, 1954 edition of the US educational program Omnibus, Leonard Bernstein presented what amounted to a 30-minute master class on one of the most familiar of all classical works, the first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, to include reinserting some unused sketches. The results are, to put it mildly, interesting.
Woodworking with a twist
Frank Howarth's woodworking videos are a joy to watch. Even if you know nothing about woodworking, the stop-motion animation he incorporates into them is a treat.
A Sign of Hope for Dogs and Mankind
Dachshund UN. Shock, delight, cacophony! A meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights is staged with the help of specially recruited dachshunds in this wild performance installation. Joyful and chaotic, spectacular and fascinating, Dachshund UN questions our capacity to imagine and achieve a universal system of justice. [more inside]
Pensive Mechanical Bodhisattvas
Pretty Little Demons
The youngest band to perform at SXSW this year is made up by two friends who love music. Lydia Night and Marlhy Murphy will play songs from their recently released CD Flowers [more inside]
HTML5 Exploit
FillDisk -- HTML5 permits websites to store considerable data on your local disk. It was originally expected that the browsers would impose a ceiling on this, but IE, Opera, Safari, and Chrome do not. A properly coded HTML5 site can completely fill your hard drive. [more inside]
How Pegging Can Save the World
If You Want a More Thoughtful Boyfriend, Try Pegging Him. Want to make straight men better in bed — and better feminist allies? The path may be simple: fuck them up the ass. According to one brand new book, the path to making men more compassionate, appreciative and playful may be straight through their butts.
Pizzuzzles in the hizzouse!
Puzzle World is a repository of puzzle awesomeness. In includes types of puzzles (including a great selection of burr puzzles), puzzle designers, a staggering index of puzzles, and a plethora of puzzling resources. For the most committed puzzle pursuer, Puzzle World also hosts a digital reprint of Stewart Coffin's seminal work The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections (previously). Bonus: sliding block puzzles!
Baseball players and their dogs
Both Ripken and Champagne have that same look of determination, of steely grit and fiery passion, in their eyes. For Ripken, it was to play in 2,632 straight games, for Champagne, it was for the bag of Beggin’ Bits the photographer had hidden in his camera bag: the 1993 Milk Bone Super Stars Trading Cards.
"Can we really expect that such a government is interested"
A Contagion Of Violence
In exploring the occurrence of violence, researchers have recognized the tendency for violent acts to cluster, to spread from place to place, and to mutate from one type to another – similar to the infectious disease model, in which an agent or vector initiates a specific biological pathway leading to symptoms of disease and infectivity.Is It Time To Treat Violence Like A Contagious Disease? [more inside]
"Pushing a Wall", "Mock Baptismal" and "Stirring Excrements with a Stick"
In 1560, the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder created Children's Games, a painting featuring about 80 contemporary games. Included among the games are "Pushing a Wall", "Mock Baptismal" and "Stirring Excrements with a Stick".
Abbot to Zimmerman
How can she slap?
Area man asks his wife to wake him up with a slap. The arrangement lasts for at least 15 days. [slyt]
Auti-Sim
Auti-Sim is a Unity Web Player game that simulates the experience of childhood autism (warning: loud sound). [more inside]
Castrating The Whelk
Motor City Sadness
Asteroid Discovery - 1980-2012
Using data provided by the Lowell Observatory and Minor Planet Center, this fascinating video provides a view of our knowledge of nearby asteroids and how closely their paths intersect with Earth's. The voiceover explains the count of objects, and what the colorations mean. [slyt]
Mars: Cosmic Bullseye?
Will Mars be rocked by a massive comet in 2014? Maybe a little. Maybe a lot. A comet will definitely pass close to the Red Planet on October 19, 2014. [more inside]
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
Pablo Neruda (bio, pics, recordings) was a Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner. His work comprises 48 books* (excluding posthumous publications), the most famous of which remain Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (scribd, alt) (Spanish, alt) and Canto General (Spanish).
Documentary. [more inside]
The Grateful New Riders of The Crosby Airplane
The Perro Tapes, are a series of studio jams featuring David Crosby, Jerry Garcia, (and the usual subjects) that led to Crosby's acclaimed solo debut, If Only I Could Remember My Name. [previously]
Lando, Lando, Lando get your adverbs here
Happy this makes me (hurray!). Excited I am! (woo-hoo!)
Women Hosted Podcasts
Mexico City gets the hero we all deserve
You know how it feels when you're trying to cross the street and a driver comes through the intersection as if you’re not even there? Like he’s muscling through with that big box of metal as if to say, “Hey, get out of my way, you little flesh-and-blood weakling!”
Wouldn’t you just love to have a superhero sweep down, stand up to the jerk behind the wheel, and block the car so you could cross safely?
Enter Peatónito, the masked Mexican defender of pedestrians!
As below, so above.
"Forget the old heliocentric model – our solar system is a vortex!" Part 1, Part 2. [via] [more inside]
Wokka wokka wokka
Determine never to be idle
We got lost in the process of brick making and firing. The sounds and the rhythm of the work, the patterns, the processes. An amazing day! [more inside]
Beware of Dog.
Remember BigDog, the robot 'mule' that Boston Dynamic is developing? Well, now it throws cinderblocks. [more inside]
30 PRINT "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.."
"That got me thinking: Could the Romans have built a digital computer using only the technology and manufacturing processes available to them?"
In a sea of whisky, we‘re castaways and who can find us
Eurovision, the annual offering of musical culture from the continent to a sometimes bewildered world, approaches. Greece have decided that they can now afford to send an entry to the finals in Sweden this May, using private sponsorship. Their entry, winning the national selection contest, is the Rebetiko-infused "Alcohol is free", an anti-austerity song performed by Koza Mostra and Agathonas Iakovidis. [more inside]
It's Not in Your Brain, It's in Your Genes
The psychiatric illnesses seem very different — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. A study funded by the NIMH and published in The Lancet, as reported by the New York Times indicates that five seemingly-different psychiatric diseases share several genetic glitches. [more inside]
"Designed in Japan, brewed in Belgium, drunk in Hong Kong"
"Yamada had already become interested in beer after going drinking with fellow students around Cambridge, and taken trips to Belgium and Munich to widen his beery knowledge. Listening to Bilimoria talk about his desire to brew a beer that would match up with Indian food, Yamada had a revelation. What about a beer specifically brewed to match up with Japanese food?"
Russia Attacks Sweden
"Mamma Mia! They will tear us apart! 7-3! Just like in hockey last year." Sverker Göransson, commander-in-chief of the Swedish armed forces, recently said that Sweden’s scaled backed military leaves the country vulnerable. Sweden, he claimed, could only defend itself for one week if it came under attack. The Russians have taken notice and issued a satirical response. [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »