July 23, 2007
Don't go in the basement!
Sally Cruikshank intends to put all of her animations on YouTube, including her opening credits for Ruthless People, the Seseame Street Feets too Big short, and don't miss the Oingo Boingo assist on Face Like A Frog.
She's very active in the comments section of some of her videos, too, answering questions and participating in the discussion of her work.
Sumo Volleyball
Sumo Volleyball - online competition at its finest. Yep, Friday flash fun on Tuesday. For those of you who used to have ICQ, this game will be very familiar. Four different variates of play are offered. 1 on 1 is by far the favorite and the most fun, IMHO. One tiny downside, activeX based, and thus, pretty much IE only. There are also other games via the home page, of which Kung-fu chess is also very popular.
Hey Mom And Dad, Leave Those Kids Alone!
Leave Those Kids Alone. The idea that parents should be engaging in play with their children is a modern concept (and not necessarily a good one, according to anthropologist David Lancy). Via.
The Man of the Hole
Smell Like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing
Are you tired of NOT smelling like characters in Neil Gaiman books?? Well thank Morpheus, just like Alex Burgess in The Wake, your long nightmare is at an end thanks to this collection of Gaiman-inspired perfumes & colognes.
Gift to the noble ladies of Christendom
The poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym A project at Swansea University puts the works of one of mediaeval (14th century) Europe's literary giants on line in full, including a full concordance, digitalised manuscripts, English translations and recorded readings. Dafydd was a great poet of love, lust and nature and a master of strict form. His work was also hilariously funny.
Walk Score
Email Overload
E-motional breakdown: The state of e-mail misery. Is email finally at the breaking point? My inbox is so oversaturated I need professional advice to avoid bankrupcy. Or maybe I'll just wait it out -- the kids might know best.
NYC has Ugly People, Too
Meet Toronto's newest temple
A few weeks ago, the first traditional Vedic temple (or mandir) opened in Europe. Yesterday the first of its kind was inaugrated in Canada. Something of an architectural marvel, each piece of the temple was made in India, the stones all being interlocking and load-bearing, thereby eliminating the need for nails or steel supports. In fact, it's put together entirely using ancient techniques.
Get to the Show
Baseball (flash) from sandlots to majors. Arguably harder than actual baseball.
The Theiving Magpie: Jimmy Page's Dubious Recording Legacy
The Diary of Dr. Saad Eskander
The British Library is posting the Diary of Dr. Saad Eskander, the courageous director of the Iraq National Library and Archive. His entries "detail the daily hurdles of keeping Iraq’s central library open, preserving the surviving archives and, oh yes, staying alive."
The finest perveyors of cut & paste entertainment
Cassetteboy "record famous people and make it sound like they're talking about sex or drugs. It's a winning formula" but they also bring anarchic political awareness to an already piratical realm.
Harry Potter (not for sensitive Potterphiles), Big Brother, Bill Gates, Jeremy Clarkson, Jamie Oliver and The Streets face the wrath of some adolescent humourists with far too much time on their hands while David Attenborough surveys British wildlife and Frank Sinatra sings about 9/11. And for dessert Martin Luther King Jr plays Deal or No Deal.
Most links YT, NSFW, YMMV.
Hipster CEOs go 1880s robber baron retro by building large libraries
On executives and their libraries, "C.E.O.’s are starting to collect books on climate change and global warming, not Al Gore’s tomes but books from the 15th century about the weather, Egyptian droughts, even replicas of Sumerian tablets recording extraordinary changes in climate."
Highway 61 Relived
Highway 61 Revisited: Like a Rolling Stone (1966);
Tombstone Blues (2000);
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (1971); (Rolling Thunder version);
From a Buick 6 (NOT DYLAN);
Ballad of a Thin Man (1966);
Queen Jane Approximately (1998);
Highway 61 Revisited (1969);
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (1995);
Desolation Row (1998).
Orphan Grain
In January 2006, small amounts of genetically engineered rice turned up in a shipment that was tested ... by a French customer of Riceland Foods, a big rice mill based in Stuttgart, Ark. Testing revealed that the genetically modified rice contained a strain of Liberty Link that had not been approved for human consumption. What's more, trace amounts of the Liberty Link had mysteriously made their way into the commercial rice supply in all five of the Southern states where long-grain rice is grown. Aventis Crop Science had contracted with a handful of farmers to grow the rice, which was known as Liberty Link because its genes had been altered to resist a weed killer called Liberty, also made by Aventis. Then, the French pharmaceutical giant that owned Aventis Crop Science decided to sell the U.S. biotech unit and abandon the very emotional business of reengineering the foods we eat. "We didn't want to take any chances," says a former Aventis executive. "We burned and buried enough rice to feed 20 million people." Last November, the USDA retroactively approved the Liberty Link rice for human consumption.
Continental integration on the march
A coworker hipped me to this, and I found it quite astonishing that I'd heard nothing about it.
It's a great irony that, while the United States has probably never been less popular among Canadians than in the era of George W Bush, plans to integrate Canada more deeply into the US have been proceeding at a brisk clip. The threat of Canada being absorbed into the US has traditionally provoked strong reactions here, as the pitched electoral battles over the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1980s and '90s attest. But the issue seems to have largely disappeared in recent years, leaving the impression that the push for deeper integration has stopped or that Canadians no longer care about it. Neither is true.It seems that a goodly number of politically active groups are aware, however, and are organizing protests. How effective will those protests be when they won't be able to get within several kilometers of the site? Has anyone got any thoughts about this? How will they fit 52 stars on the Star-Spangled Banner? Should I don my tinfoil hat? Is the protest even relevant, given that most of the news reports I can find are calling it a fait accompli?
Made in China
Made in China. A look inside the world’s manufacturing center. Flash video slideshow of the port of Shenzhen (7:00 minutes with sound)
There once was a girl named Lenore
Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks, as brought to us by our very own Lore Sjöberg. English majors, begin your griping now.
Babies & Burkhas
A never-before-seen look inside a hospital in the Middle East. Yemen is a country where women have an average of 7.9 children compared to 2.7 in the rest of the world. This disparity might have something to do with a culture that censures contraception and allows marriages to be consummated when the bride is as young as nine years old. VICE gains exclusive access to a Yemeni hospital maternity unit...
Washed Away
Weatherfilter: Widespread flooding in the UK leaves hundreds of thousands of homes without water and power. Extraordinary scenes of the floods command many of the front pages of Monday's newspapers. The Environment Agency has warned water levels are expected to exceed those of the devastating floods of 1947.
Why do they hate us?
"Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values.
Because at their core, those values are sound. That is why, even in places where you'll find virulent anti-Americanism, you'll also find enormous affection for things American."
An article by Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
shoots grandfather, hits self instead
Time Travel, or, the art of causing events after they've already happened. [requires java, more inside]
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