July 5, 2013
Bow. String. Gourd. Bliss.
You think you need more than one string to make some totally captivating, subtly expressive and utterly soulful music? Well, you wrong!
STERANKO
Tinkertown, on the far side of the mountain from Albuquerque
It may take months for this odyssey of a place to completely sink in: quirky and utterly fascinating, Tinkertown Museum contains a world of miniature carved-wood characters. The museum's late founder, Ross Ward, spent more than 40 years carving and collecting the hundreds of figures that populate this cheerfully bizarre museum, including an animated miniature Western village, a Boot Hill cemetery, and a 1940s circus exhibit. Ragtime piano music, a 40-foot sailboat (that traveled around the world for a decade), and a life-size general store are other highlights. The walls surrounding this 22-room museum have been fashioned out of more than 50,000 glass bottles pressed into cement. This homage to folk art, found art, and eccentric kitsch tends to strike a chord with people of all ages. [more inside]
RIP: Randy Udall
Randy Udall was the son the late Mo Udall brother of Colorado Senator Mark Udall and cousin of New Mexico Senator Tom Udall. He died of natural causes while hiking to Titcomb Basin in Wyoming. [more inside]
50th birthday of the favorite radio station of clocks
Today is the 50th birthday of WWVB, a low frequency broadcast time service and frequency standard station of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology that can be received in much of the Northern hemisphere. Along with high frequency sister stations WWV and WWVH, WWVB continues to evaluate and deploy new technologies to provide easily received and decoded time and frequency signals, which unlike GPS signals, will penetrate buildings and propagate past many terrain feature shadows, like hills and canyons.
Audio recordings of 1964 interviews with Civil Rights activists
Robert Penn Warren's book Who Speaks for the Negro? was a collection of interviews with various men and women involved in the Civil Rights Movement published in 1965. Vanderbilt University has made all the interviews available as audio and transcripts, taken from the original reel-to-reel recordings. Among the interviewees were Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Septima Poinsette Clark, Ralph Ellison, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. On the page for each interview there are links to related documents, such as letters, photos and contemporary news articles.
It's Minimal. But the *Parts* are Maximal.
Lou Reed Reviews 'Yeezus' for The Talkhouse: "This guy is seriously smart. He keeps unbalancing you. He'll pile on all this sound and then suddenly pull it away, all the way to complete silence, and then there's a scream or a beautiful melody, right there in your face. That's what I call a sucker punch."
Hello Again Goodbye Horses
Hayden Thorpe and Jon Hopkins cover Q Lazzarus' Goodbye Horses. The cover will be paired with the original song, which is being reissued. More on the mystery diva, Q Lazzarus.
There never was a golden ratio
There are many subjects that will get people mad on the internet, but in cinephile circles, the reddest flag is aspect ratio. Ever since the bad old practice of pan and scan was abandoned, DVD and Blu-Ray releases have tried to echo the widescreen aspect ratio that a film was released in, but that's often very hard to get right. Most recently, the Blu-Ray reissue of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon resulted in prolonged arguing and triumphant research. How did things get so confused? Filmmaker John Hess is here to explain, with an extensive and excellent history of aspect ratios.
I prefer a wet San Francisco to a dry Manhattan.
"Adrift is a love letter to the fog of the San Francisco Bay Area. I chased it for over two years to capture the magical interaction between the soft mist, the ridges of the California coast and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge."
Being a mermaid "is a lot more fun than bagging groceries."
Tourists have been visiting the roadside attraction since 1947. Don Knotts filmed a movie there, and Supergrass made a video. A few men have tried to join, but mostly it's a women's (underwater) world at Weeki Wachee. Now the New York Times visits The Last Mermaid Show.
Can I see the iPad? "Patience", he said.
Anagramatron is a tumblr blog that hosts algorithmically detected pairs of twitter anagrams.
[via mefi projects]
"I don't push anything on my kids," he said, again and again.
Balloon Boy's Tween Heavy Metal Career Lifts Off Remember the Balloon Boy hoax of 2009 when the Heene family falsely claimed that young Falcon Heene had stowed away in his father's large balloon as part of a stunt to bring the family some sort of reality TV show fame? Not one to go quietly into that good night, the Heene family is back to trying to be famous. They've become the self-proclaimed world's youngest metal band: the Heene Boyz! Patriarch Richard Heene has roped his family into another of his get-famous-quick schemes with songs like "Duct Tape Man" and "Cactus People" off their four-track debut album, American Chili, based on his own failed B-movie script. [more inside]
At least someone in Jackson is thinking of the children
"Counter-clockwise seating is unnatural" according to Jackson City Council member LaRita Cooper-Stokes. It's confusing innocent school children who are taught to read from left to right. Fortunately the reporter provides a helpful diagram to clear things up for us (drawing not to scale).
The Star-Spangled Fork-Flip, the Freedom Fork-Over, the Homeland Handoff
The American way of using a fork and knife is inefficient and inelegant. (SLSlate) Do you cut-and-switch? Well, you've got to stop. The more time you waste pointlessly handing utensils back and forth to yourself, the less time you’ll have to cherish life and liberty, pursue happiness, and contribute to America’s future greatness. And also—though that snob at dinner surely didn't know this—the supposedly all-American cut-and-switch is in fact an old European pretension, of just the sort we decided to free ourselves from 237 years ago.
It's My Day
Do modern Western weddings encourage narcissism?. From the large budgets to the phenomenon of self marriage, many people skirt the line between narcissism and individuality.
Things get a little crazy in the scriptorium after compline
Skeleton doodles, crappy D's, cat hats, embroidered book repair, dentistry, and a duck going queck, from the tumblr of Erik Kwakkel, a medieval book historian at Leiden University.
Examined Life - Judith Butler & Sunaura Taylor
Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor went for a walk and engaged in a terrific conversation about disability as not merely some physical status but largely a social status, and that is also true for so called "able-bodied" persons. (14:23) [more inside]
The Men Under the Influence
Jon Uriarte on Feature Shoot: Portraits of men wearing their girlfriends' clothes. (Photographer's own gallery)
Huh, so that's what it's like to feel like a superhero.
'My kids were in your library before me. I was really interested.'
Burma's Lucky Bibliophile
When the Ministry of Information’s director general visited Ye Htet Oo’s library in 2010, it could have been disastrous. Ye Htet Oo, then a recent college graduate, was running his new library in downtown Rangoon on the sly, without approval from the former military regime, and was told he could face three months in jail for every book he lent without permission from the censorship board. Unable to get a library license from the government, which saw libraries as a way to spread subversive ideas, he fronted his operation as a bookshop but kept a collection of unapproved library books hidden in a back room. Then one day, unknown to the young bibliophile, the ministry’s director general—who has since become the deputy minister of information and President Thein Sein’s spokesman—entered the “bookshop” and walked straight into the secret room.[more inside]
Omniscient spung
"Imagine a female pov character is going along about her protagonist adventure, seeing things from her perspective of the world as written in third person. She hears, sees, considers, and makes decisions and reacts based on her view of the world and what she is aware of and encounters. Abruptly, a description is dropped into the text of her secondary sexual characteristics usually in the form of soft-focus Playboy-Magazine-style sexualized kitten-bunny-I-would-fuck-her-in-a-heartbeat lustrous-eyes-and-nipples phrases. Her breasts have just become omniscient breasts." -- Kate Elliott on the male (and female) gaze in literature.
Project Souvenir
On Tuesday, details began to emerge about a failed attempt to detonate a pressure cooker bomb outside the BC Legislature in Victoria on Canada Day, a day on which few politicians would be present and the lawn packed with families. Independent publication The Tyee examines what role the RCMP played in the bomb plot while reviewing the history of so-called 'honeypot' investigations used by the FBI in the US.
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