July 7, 2014
Holy moly Soviet cars
Soviet concept vehicles. "GAZ-A-Aero, designed by Alexei Nikitin Osipovich, 1934" is the first in the line-up, but I like the "Cyclops-like ZIS-112 with a single headlamp and an experimental 6005 cc engine, that could run the car with 126 mph (204 kmh) in 1951," and the Moskvitch G2, which once reached the speed of 139 mph and looks like it will bite whatever's in front of it. [more inside]
Hollywood Magic: impossibly young mothers, ageism against women
Hollywood is tough on older women -- it's like they're filed away in a folder simply marked "old" — and it’s a problem their male counterparts rarely have to contend with. To prove it, we’ve rounded up some recent examples of age-inappropriate casting, then imagined what would happen if some of these believability-busting pairings got a gender flip. [more inside]
I get all steamed up
I love your poise
Of perfect thighs
When they hold me
in paradise ...
If I had you today, I’d kiss and
fondle you into my arms and
hold you there until you said
‘Warren, oh, Warren’
Warren G. Harding, perhaps the worst chief executive in U.S. history, was a poet to longtime mistress and possible German spy Carrie Fulton Phillips.
Of perfect thighs
When they hold me
in paradise ...
If I had you today, I’d kiss and
fondle you into my arms and
hold you there until you said
‘Warren, oh, Warren’
Warren G. Harding, perhaps the worst chief executive in U.S. history, was a poet to longtime mistress and possible German spy Carrie Fulton Phillips.
By hook or by crook, we will.
A man wearing a dark blazer with white braiding steps out from behind what looks to be a giant white balloon. A penny-farthing sits in the foreground. Cheerily, he addresses the camera: "Hi, I'm Scott Apel, video critic for the San Jose Mercury News, and I'm here to welcome you again to The Prisoner, one of the most intriguing and most talked about television series ever made..." (YT) [more inside]
I'm your best friend. I am your Lucky Strike.
The secret history behind the science of stress. Hans Selye, the "Father of Stress," first coined the idea of "stress" and wrote 1700 articles and 39 books, was nominated for the Nobel Prize 10 times, and received the Order of Canada, one of the country's highest honors. He also, Mark Petticrew discovered, received major funding from the tobacco industry for his research. Tobacco executives hoped he might offer reasonable scientific alternatives for the link between heart disease and smoking. He obliged, writing, "While some scientists have associated cigarette smoking with heart disease, it is reasonably [here, the word “reasonably” has been deleted, and the word “certainly” inserted] clear that a number of other factors including life-style, blood pressure, biochemistry, genetics and in particular, stress, may also be involved." [more inside]
A True and Affecting History
From the early modern period to the nineteenth century, one of the most popular forms of inexpensive literary entertainment was the chapbook. (The phenomenon was not limited to English-speaking countries.) Encompassing everything from nursery rhymes to shocking tales, chapbooks (also known as "small books." among other things) were targeted at both adults and children. Frequently, as in the case of Gothic chapbooks, these ephemeral books provided readers with (much shortened) access to popular novels. (Other chapbooks were more wholesome and/or educational in intent.) McGill Library and Ball State University have some of the most extensive chapbook collections now online.
"a thousand libraries were lost"
Bob Abrahamian was a Chicago DJ, record collector, and chronicler of Chicago's soul history whose death in June at age 35 shocked soul music lovers around the world. The Chicago Sun-Times' Mark Guarino says: "He left behind tens of thousands of 45-rpm records, but to those who knew him, it was the generous spirit in evangelizing the music that made the greatest impact." His work lives on on the site for his radio show, Sitting in the Park, which features exclusive music from and extensive interviews with 60s and 70s Chicago soul musicians. [more inside]
Smell-o-Vision
Last month, an oNote was sent across the Atlantic via the oPhone, and the recipients were treated to the scent of champagne and macarons. [more inside]
This land was never given up, this land was never bought and sold
It's NAIDOC week in Australia. NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee, which dates from the 1920s. NAIDOC Week is held in the first full week of July. It is a time to celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and an opportunity to recognise the contributions that Indigenous Australians make to our country and our society. ... Music and more inside. [more inside]
Eldfell Volcano
The Vestmannaeyjar Archipelago, off the south coast of Iceland, was first settled in 874 AD. Heimaey, the only populated island, was home to both a center of the Icelandic fishing industry, and a volcano which had never erupted during nearly a millennium of continuous human settlement.
Then, in 1973, all hell broke loose. [more inside]
Everything Pasolini did, he did as a poet.
But what was it, precisely, that Pasolini did? In 1970, five years before he was murdered on a beach near Rome, and about a decade after his first movie, Accattone, had made him notorious as a filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini sat down to write a preface to a new book of his selected poems.He called this little essay “To the New Reader,” and in it he wanted to explain to this new reader—who perhaps only knew him as a filmmaker, or novelist, or polemical essayist—why he was always, in fact, a poet. His first poem, he observed, was written when he was seven. His first collection had come out when he was twenty. The volume of selected poems was taken from three books: Gramsci’s Ashes, which appeared in 1957, when he was thirty-five; The Religion of My Time, from 1961; and Poem in the Shape of a Rose, which was published in 1964, the same year that his movie The Gospel According to St. Matthew came out. And so he had really made his films, he argued, “as a poet.” Not that a film and a poem were exactly equivalent, but still: “I think one can’t deny that a certain way of feeling something occurs in the same identical way when one is faced with some of my lines and some of my shots.” [more inside]
Look sharp? Keep your edge!
The Commandments for Making Your Suit Last Advice from Rachel Tutera (The Handsome Butch) of clothier Bindle & Keep (previously).
Utility, welfare, and efficiency
- Welfare economics: an introduction
- The perils of Potential Pareto
- Inequality, production, and technology
- Welfare theorems, distribution priority, and market clearing
- Normative is performative, not positive
A Supposedly Fun Thing You'll Maybe Click Around Once
Inked in White
En Fläsh
Super Pixel Quest
Adventures in Time and Space
Little did Maria E. Alonzo know back in the eighties when she started tracking down her grandfather's missing brother -- lost to the family since 1913 -- that he would turn out to have been one of science fiction's most influential early editors.
Soothing Sounds of Jazz... with rain
Jazz and Rain Feeling stressed? Listen to some cool jazz and the relaxing sound of rain.
loaded questions
The loaded meaning behind 'What do you do?': [Deb] Fallows says the questions are meant to tease out socioeconomic status, political viewpoints, and cultural background. “You know that somebody’s kind of digging for information to put you into their world – how do you fit into my world?” [more inside]
Women in archaeology, geology, and palaeontology
"TrowelBlazers is a celebration of women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists who have been doing awesome work for far longer, and in far greater numbers, than most people realize." [via]
Crush? Kill? Destroy? What would you like your robot to do?
21st Century Robot: Intel Corp. debuts "Jimmy" an open-source 3d printed home robot to launch later this year.
Alfredo Di Stefano RIP
BBC: Real Madrid legend Alfredo Di Stefano, regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, has died.
The 88-year-old suffered a heart attack on Saturday and had been in an induced coma in Madrid's Gregorio Maranon hospital.
Real Madrid confirmed the news, saying Di Stefano, their honorary president, died at 17:15 CET (16:15 BST).
The forward won five straight European Cups, scoring in each final between 1956 and 1960. Tim Vickery Article on Di Stefano.
What The Poor Deserve
"When our donors met the actual people they were helping they often didn’t like them. During our Secret Santa drive, volunteers sometimes refused to drop gifts at houses with TVs inside. They got angry when clients had cell phones or in some other way didn’t match their expectations. Other times, the donations we got were too disgusting to pass along—soup cans that bulged with botulism and diapers so dry rotted they crumbled in our hands. One Thanksgiving, a board member called from the parking lot, requesting help carrying a frozen turkey from her trunk to our office. “Can you find a deserving family?” she asked. I lugged the bird up three flights of stairs. Somewhere near the top, I noticed the expiration date. It was seventeen years old." Anya Groner talks about working for Hudson Outreach in up-state New York and the sobering, chilling effect it had on her idealism.
How to craft pop perfection
You Look Sexy When You Do That (SLYT) by Brett Domino
Food from Algeria to Zimbabwe
Food in Every Country provides information on the foodways of several dozen countries (not all of them, despite the site's name), with brief explanations of their culture and history -- and recipes! [more inside]
Magma Monday
Not many bands can claim to have inspired whole genres of music from a single track. But in addition to wholly inventing Zeuhl from scratch, Magma laid the basis for what evolved into the Brutal Prog scene populated by bass-heavy acts like The Flying Luttenbachers, Lightning Bolt, and Ruins by recording "De Futura" in 1976 for their Üdü Ẁüdü release. [more inside]
The Millions' Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2014 Book Preview
Birds with arms.
"Best Site On The Web!" - Mother Teresa, Mark Twain, and George Carlin
“The instructor is just there to deliver the content”
Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), a small non-profit school, has gained a reputation for its adoption of for-profit marketing and operating techniques, relying on prolific advertising and a faculty of low-paid adjuncts to teach its online courses. More recently the school earned the unenviable title of "The Amazon of Higher Education". [more inside]
"If you give a girl a different toy, she will tell a different story."
Frustrated with the modern toy market's focus on female characters with uncomfortable costumes, uninspiring back stories, and unrealistic body proportions -- "most are created for the adult male collector, decidedly more Hooters than heroine" -- Wellesley alumnae Julie Kerwin and Dawn Nadeau joined forces with the legendary creative team at EleventyPlex to crowdfund a new line of fierce, Joan of Arc-inspired action figures, designed to encourage girls to embrace their inner strengths and imagine themselves as self-made superheroes: I Am Elemental. [more inside]
A ‘Band-Aid’ for 800 children
Nora Sandigo is guardian to hundreds of U.S. citizens born to illegal immigrants who are subject to deportation. [more inside]
THUS SPOKE CARLY RAE: a song of friedrich nietzsche
That’s technology for you, always making an ass out of someone.
Sarah Wendall, of the romance book blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, discovers a disturbing quirk of optical character recognition used to digitize older texts: the word "arms" is converted to "anus". [more inside]
We go forward
Classic Rock Peaked (By Song Plays) in 1973
The "Light-Blue" Puppy
The Light-Blue Puppy is a visually extraordinary India Ink-animated Soviet musical children's cartoon made in 1976, only recently translated into English. It tells the tale of a small, sad puppy who has been rejected by his peers for his unusual color, but nevertheless manages to find his way in the world (with some help from a few other colorful characters, of course). On its surface it appears to be a cute, cleverly-animated story with a simple message of tolerance. [more inside]
She's Still Dying on Facebook
#peakedinhighschool
In March, Lawrenceville School Student Body President Maya Peterson, the first Black woman to be elected to that position, posted a photo to her Instagram account where she depicted what she described to be a “Lawrenceville boi”: white, Republican, and cockily holding a hockey stick. She used the hashtags “#romney2016,” “#confederate,” and “#peakedinhighschool." In response to the backlash from the photo, Maya, who is headed to Wesleyan in the fall, chose to step down. [more inside]
Mary's Gone Wild
At her "Visionary Folk Art Garden & Doll Village" in Holden Beach, North Carolina, Mary Paulsen has built a "bottle house", multiple houses for more than 6,000 dolls, and a standalone gallery to showcase the relentlessly colorful paintings she makes on discarded window glass. No surface goes unembellished. [more inside]
Murder, She Wrote
What an incredible smell you've discovered.
Are you in Leipzig with €10 burning a hole in your pocket? You probably shouldn't spend it on this hilariously crappy Star Wars exhibition. [more inside]
Your voice still echoes in my heart
Not quite 11 years old at the time, Jackie Evancho performs the song "Lovers" on her Dream With Me concert tour. Revel not only in Evancho's rapturous vocals, but also in the sublime accompaniments on zither, 2-string fiddle, bamboo flute and taiko drums.
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