August 27, 2012

Square Word Calligraphy: English that Looks Like Chinese

English that looks like Chinese. "At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be nothing more unusual than Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English words in the format of a square so they resemble Chinese characters. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read Square Word Calligraphy but cannot. Western viewers, however are surprised to find they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed." (Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing.) [more inside]
posted by jef at 9:56 PM PST - 67 comments

Sher Valenzuela, First State Manufacturing, received millions in government business loans

Small business owner and candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Delaware Sher Valenzuela is slated to speak at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday as part of a platform meant to suggest business owners build businesses on their own with no assistance from government. The problem is that Valenzuela received millions of dollars in taxpayer funds as business loans from the US government, along with other government assistance. One Reddit user noticed the url for the full name of Valenzuela's First State Manufacturing business was unregistered, and remedied that with full details. [more inside]
posted by cashman at 8:20 PM PST - 90 comments

Noble Silence

"I chose the meditation style known as Vipassana for several reasons. It's wholly nondenominational. No gods are prayed to, no mantras chanted, all religious iconography is prohibited. If you typically wear, say, a crucifix, you must remove it for the duration of the course. Also, there is no need for prior meditation experience – in fact, I was told, a neophyte is the ideal student because you won't have any bad habits to avoid – which suited me perfectly, as I'd never meditated before." [The Quiet Hell of Extreme Meditation]
posted by vidur at 8:16 PM PST - 60 comments

Why a calorie is not a calorie

The known knowns, known unknowns, and perhaps even the unknown unknowns of why a calorie is not a calorie.
posted by NortonDC at 8:08 PM PST - 96 comments

REMINGTONELECTRICRAZORREMINGTONELECTRICRAZOR

How did an unused 1967 commerical jingle produced by Frank Zappa lead to the Simpsons Theme?
posted by The Whelk at 5:09 PM PST - 41 comments

Peter Brook's "King Lear"

[Peter] Brook's stripped-back adaptation [of King Lear]... draws from Jan Kott's insight that Lear, like Beckett's Endgame, reveals a world devoid of consolation, morality or universal justice. ... Brook's is a devastating realisation of the play: a pitiless examination of the cruelty and emptiness that lies at the heart of the lust for power. - Alison Croggon [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen at 4:11 PM PST - 12 comments

Magic realism: not fantasy. Sorry.

Magic realism: not fantasy. Sorry.
posted by shivohum at 3:37 PM PST - 136 comments

Get ready for adventure, in the exciting stories of Colonel Bleep!

The first color cartoon came out in 1957, from the Miami, Florida studio Soundac, beating out LA-based Hanna-Barbera's The Ruff & Reddy Show by a few months. Soundac's Colonel Bleep was styled after space-age design ideas of the era, featured in three to six-minute long segments with limited animation, designed for syndication into local kids shows with live hosts. Of the 104 episodes, less than half survive, as most of that and other Soundac material was stolen from a studio van in the ’70s, when the studio was closing. Luckily, episodes have been found in the collections and archives of various TV studios, so Col. Bleep and his side-kicks Squeek and Scratch are available online (YT), some clips on Archive.org, and more on YouTube (playlist with 43 clips).
posted by filthy light thief at 3:21 PM PST - 20 comments

High Weirdness By Mail

"I guess it started for me when, as a young sci-fi movie fan, I did a fanzine at age 12 to 15... that’s when I learned how relatively cheap and easy it was to self-publish, at least for a small circle of weirdos. Later, after comics went up to 50¢, I started collecting stuff equally weird but much cheaper than comic books: kook literature." - Rev. Ivan Stang

You may know of the Church of the SubGenius, that parody religion that worships the almighty "Bob" and was a fixture of MTV and Night Flights back in the day. But do you know of its SECRET ORIGINS? Co-founder Ivan Stang corresponded with hundreds of "mad prophets, crackpots, kooks & true visionaries," from sincere cults to winking charlatans to utter nutjobs to hate groups to independent artists and musicians, with some respected names thrown in, and synthesized them into a half-joking, half-serious celebration of the kook spirit. These days of course the forward-thinking crackpot looking for sheep goes directly to the internet. But while it lasted Stang and co-authors Mike Gunderloy, Waver Forest and Mark Johnston collaborated to document this vanished scene in the legendary book HIGH WEIRDNESS BY MAIL. (All links within may quickly lead someplace NSFW by the nature of the beast.) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 3:05 PM PST - 134 comments

Made By Hand II

Masters of handcrafts, showing how they work in beautiful short-form videos. Flamenco guitar luthier. Carpenter. Potter. Letterpress printer. Furniture maker.
Much more at Those Who Make and whycraft.com. Post intended as something of a sequel to this, previously.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 2:41 PM PST - 5 comments

Too good to be true?

NewScientist is reporting new way of processing wood pulp making new wonder construction material. [snip] To ramp up production, the US opened its first NCC factory in Madison, Wisconsin, on 26 July, marking the rise of what the US National Science Foundation predicts will become a $600 billion industry by 2020. So why all the fuss? Well, not only is NCC transparent but it is made from a tightly packed array of needle-like crystals which have a strength-to-weight ratio that is eight times better than stainless steel. Even better, it's incredibly cheap.
posted by aleph at 2:01 PM PST - 98 comments

RIP Nina Bawden, 1925 to 2012

Nina Bawden, writer of novels for adults and children, born in 1925, died on 22nd August 2012. “As a child, Nina said, she had felt wicked because the children in the books she read were all so good, and she was one of the first writers for children to create characters who could be jealous, selfish and bad-tempered” (Guardian obituary). [more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 12:59 PM PST - 10 comments

"I don’t believe in decorative titles — neato for the sake of being neato."

"David Fincher: A Film Title Retrospective"Art of the Title follows up on their interview with Fincher for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 12:26 PM PST - 21 comments

Sock 'n' Roll

Famous Album Covers Recreated With My Socks
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:22 PM PST - 24 comments

"For each inch a player grows above 5'6", announcers are 2 percent less likely to praise him with intangibles."

The product of a successful Kickstarter project, a study has been released focusing on subconscious racism in baseball announcing. [more inside]
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:42 AM PST - 72 comments

Not the Happy Squirrel!

Tarot decks used for occult purposes usually have 78 cards: the Major Arcana of twenty-two plus the Minor Arcana, four suits of fourteen cards each. In the last few years, though, some otherwise traditional decks have been printed with 79 cards. The new inclusion is to the Major Arcana: number XXIII, the Happy Squirrel. [more inside]
posted by daisyk at 10:08 AM PST - 80 comments

Dred Reckoning

I’m about to tell you a story about videogames, kitchens, and internet forums that has a happy ending. Stop laughing, I’m serious. - A woman gamer declares Gaslamp Games's Dungeons of Dredmor forums awesome.
posted by Artw at 10:02 AM PST - 77 comments

"I went from God loves everybody to God saves everybody to God is in everybody."

From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader. Jerry DeWitt is a former Pentecostal pastor in the evangelical parish of DeRidder, Louisiana who slowly lost his religious faith. Last Fall, he went public with his atheism, committing what he calls "identity suicide," and instantly becoming "the most disliked person in town." Since then, Mr. DeWitt's lost his job, his wife, his community and may be losing his house, but is still persevering and working to help others who find themselves in similar circumstances. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:47 AM PST - 167 comments

Pazhitnov Home for Wayward Cubs

When baby bears are orphaned in Russia, it's up to the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Dr. Valentin Pazhitnov to raise them to maturity while realizing they must not become too comfortable with humans. Observe as the cubs discover their natural instincts and dine al fresco and, well, eat some more. Have fun, little guys!
posted by griphus at 9:27 AM PST - 10 comments

Shunsuke, the Cutest Dog of All the Dogs

Shunsuke is a Japanese Pomeranian guaranteed to brighten your day. He's amassed a considerable fanbase; his owner's Twitter feed is followed by more than a hundred thousand people, and he's got a calendar and photo book. Here he is riding a snow shovel. Here he is dressed as a bee.
posted by Monster_Zero at 8:56 AM PST - 22 comments

Robots and skateboards

Lupe Fiasco's new single Bitch Bad offers a powerful commentary on the roles of men, women and children in popular hip-hop culture. [more inside]
posted by gnutron at 7:16 AM PST - 84 comments

Clean hair is the new catnip.

The Cat Gets Comfortable: starts slow, gets increasingly ridiculous. [slyt]
posted by quin at 5:22 AM PST - 62 comments

Summer ice in the Arctic to disappear

Several measures of Arctic ice cover have hit record lows. Melting usually continues into September, so this year’s minimum should be below the 2007 record. The rate of melting far exceeds that predicted by most models. Predictions of when the Arctic might be entirely ice-free at the summer minimum are being brought sharply forwards.
posted by wilful at 4:41 AM PST - 90 comments

smart bird

"Tool use in animals is rare, and bespeaks a level of intelligence that most of us are unaccustomed to associating with non-humans. That's what makes this video of a Green Heron using bread to lure fish to their doom so remarkable. One would be hard pressed to argue that this bird is not thinking critically about the technique it is employing to catch its prey. Not only is it demonstrating logic and reason in its capacity to understand that a piece of bread can be used as bait, it's also passing up the chance to eat the bread in favor of a better meal, actively weighing cost and benefit, pitting immediate gratification against delayed satisfaction. It's a stunning display of animal intelligence."
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:56 AM PST - 69 comments

Could our evolutionary novel environment be disrupting the human superorganism?

Is autism an autoimmune disorder? "The prevalence of inflammatory diseases in general has increased significantly in the past 60 years. As a group, they include asthma, now estimated to affect 1 in 10 children — at least double the prevalence of 1980 — and autoimmune disorders, which afflict 1 in 20. Both are linked to autism, especially in the mother. One large Danish study, which included nearly 700,000 births over a decade, found that a mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease of the joints, elevated a child’s risk of autism by 80 percent. Her celiac disease, an inflammatory disease prompted by proteins in wheat and other grains, increased it 350 percent. Genetic studies tell a similar tale. Gene variants associated with autoimmune disease — genes of the immune system — also increase the risk of autism, especially when they occur in the mother." [more inside]
posted by bookman117 at 1:46 AM PST - 45 comments

LETS

Start Your Own Currency - "In the Catalonia region of Spain, a restaurant and a community garden are part of an experiment in alternative cash--they are accepting a home-grown currency called the Eco as well as the Euro." [viz. gated article (Google link), cf. The Wörgl Experiment]
posted by kliuless at 1:23 AM PST - 29 comments

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