April 17, 2009
It was a Dark and Silly Night
It was a Dark and Silly night -- a cartoon written by Neil Gaman and drawn by Gahan Wilson. [more inside]
The Online Music Chart
New music service We Are Hunted aims to create charts of emerging music tracks. They aggregate the buzz from social networks, forums, music blogs, torrents, P2P networks and Twitter. In the artists section you can comment about what you're hearing.
Culture & Barbarism
Moar Crafty
Curious Creatures and Beautiful Beasts
The art of Justin Gibbens. Gibbens imitates the conventions of 18th and 19th century zoological illustration and traditional Chinese fine-line painting to make images of curious creatures and beautiful beasts. [Via]
Ay ay ay, ay ay ay...
yOni - sacred feminine place
All things yoni - "yOni is a women's circle in cyberspace. a place to honour, empower, share, support and celebrate all that is woman." Might be considered NSFW (vulva-themed handicrafts)
A LECTURE DELIVERED BY THE SHORT-STORY WRITER GARY LUTZ TO THE STUDENTS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S WRITING PROGRAM IN NEW YORK
The sentence is a lonely place. "The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly."
The Torture Colony
The Torture Colony. In a remote part of Chile, an evil German evangelist built a utopia whose members helped the Pinochet regime perform its foulest deeds... [i]nvestigations by Amnesty International and the governments of Chile, Germany, and France, as well as the testimony of former colonos who, over the years, managed to escape the colony, have revealed evidence of terrible crimes: child molestation, forced labor, weapons trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, torture, and murder. It may sound like the farfetched plot of Saw VII (or something out of Kafka) but it's horrifyingly true. [Previously]
Fantastic Voyage into Angiogenesis
"Angiogenesis is critical for tumors to grow beyond a few millimeters, and for cancer to metastasize to other parts of the body. Cancer cells use the blood vessels as conduits to other areas of the body, where a single cell can set up camp and begin forming a new tumor. Stop angiogenesis, and you stop cancer." (via) [more inside]
"If one of your kids were kept in such circumstances, you'd be up there with rifles."
For Their Own Good. "They were screwed-up kids, sent to the reform school in Marianna for smoking, fighting, stealing cars or worse. The Florida School for Boys -- that'd straighten them out." A well-written and heartbreaking feature from the St Pete Times. Includes an extensive list of supporting news links (going back to 1932) and a gallery of portraits by Edmund D. Fountain.
Neither hook, line, nor sinker
Noodling, catfisting, grabbling, graveling, hogging, dogging, gurgling, tickling, stumping: all these words mean the same thing--catching big, honkin' catfish with your bare hands!
The Year of Led Zeppelin
School for Sadists
Father Luis Barrios, Episcopalian priest, full professor and academic chair at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was sent to federal prison five weeks ago, after being convicted of trespassing. He was arrested in November for pushing a wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran about one mile past the gates of the Fort Benning military base in Georgia. Fort Benning is the home of The School of the Americas also known as "School for Dictators", "School of Assassins", and "Nursery of Death Squads". SOAW campaigns to close this School which has the distinction of providing murderers for Latin American Regimes.
Wild Wonders of Europe nature photography
Wild Wonders of Europe "wants to show that Europe really is not about just highways and cities. But today, many seem to know more about nature in Africa or in America, than in Europe, because that is what’s on TV. The European natural wonders are still very little known to the World. We want to change that." 58 nature photographers are working on the project, and there are 29 galleries representing 16 countries thus far, with more to come. [via]
stationaryerrific
Biffy Beans is kind of a hippy dippy chick. But she makes the stationary nerds drool. Oh sure, there's reviews of Journals, Fountain Pens, Inks. But she also draws the occasional Mandala.
50 Photographers You May Want to Know
Fifty photographers you should know from Hongkiat, range from the abstract underwater marine life of Nicholas Samaras, to the heavily finished concert scenes of David Lindsey Wade, to the horrific Birds of Lyndon Wayne, to the staged Hollywood scenes of Alex Prager, to the 100 meter picture "We're All Gonna Die", plus a lot of interesting fashion and commercial art. Be warned, lots of portfolios use flash, with UIs ranging from interesting to the annoying.
On This Ground
The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is a directory of historic sites that interpret themes related to ethical, political, and social issues worldwide.
"It wasn't as bad as the movie makes it seem"
"We used to find teeth in the yard. We used to find wigs, glasses, guns. Everything we found in the yard…nobody came back for them, though." May Timpano describes her life in the house under the rollercoaster where she and her boyfriend, rollercoaster operator Fred Moran, lived for 36 years in the former Kensington Hotel which had the Thunderbolt rollercoaster built around it in 1925. The house -- the model for Alvy Singer's childhood home in Annie Hall -- burned in 1991 and the roller coaster was razed in 2000.
LTTE Is No Excuse For Killing Vanni Civilians
"A young mother is injured and her three month old baby killed by shell fragments as she breastfeeds the child in the government declared no fire zone. Parents hide their children in roughly dug bunkers to escape LTTE press gangs who comb the no-fire zone for conscripts. A woman loses her husband to sniper fire and the toddler he was carrying too drowns when they attempt to wade across a lagoon to escape the no-fire zone. A father is shot in the head by LTTE members as he attempted to flee with his family." - The University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) discuss the situation in Vanni, Sri Lanka, in their 47th information bulletin.
Baby Mammoths on ice!
Make Believe you're in a jungle movie. Watch the frozen baby elephants mammoths go by. The beat world is groovy. [more inside]
Bridge Too Far
Friday Flash Frustration: Their cute little faces ask for the impossible. Get them to the other side. (via)
Zombies and Aliens and Darcy, Oh my!
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." Jane Austen, who last year, along with her sisters, engaged in the deadly earnest fight against "unmentionables" in Seth Grahame-Smith's work, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has sadly fallen prey once more, this time to aliens. Coming next year to a theater near you, from Elton John's Rocket Pictures.
A world in which knowledge is always a double edged sword
The Wire - David Simon's original pitch and series bible. "At the end of thirteen episodes, the viewer - who has been lured all this way by a well-constructed police show - is not the simple gratification of hearing handcuffs click. Instead the conclusion is something Euripides or O'Neill might recognize: an America at every level at war with itself." [Previously.] (via)
Life’s pretty good, and why wouldn’t it be? I’m a pirate, after all.
"It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release." Peter Sunde of the Pirate Bay manages a little black humour after hearing word of the trial judgement. 1 year in prison and a 30m Kronor fine (£2.4m). Streaming press conference to be held today at friday at 13.00 swedish time (GMT+1 / CET). Get your pirate phrases at the ready.
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Offensive Tea Party Signs
Snow Monkeys bathe in hot springs
Japanese snow monkeys in Yamanouchi have developed a neat trick - they bathe in the region's hot springs. Here's another gallery. There's even a webcam! [more inside]
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