September 19, 2011
"I will always love you and be proud of you."
Immediately following the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, a previously-closeted gay soldier stationed in Germany calls his father to come out of the closet. (SLYT)
WHETHER 'TIS NOBLER in the mind to......{KACHUNK!}......suffer the slings AND ARROWS OF OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE
It's a bit old, but there's nothing on the Blue about the Eight Track Museum in Dallas, TX which opened this Valentine's Day. Such an oversight must be redressed. The museum's curator, Bucks Bennett, didn't start collecting 8-track tapes until 1988, long after the format has ceased being viable. As of this year, Bennett has about 3000 tapes in his collection, one of which you really, truly need to see (though whether or not you actually want to hear this tape is a decision best left to you, Gentle Reader). [more inside]
Jean Paul Gaultier
Waving Torches At Things
“Light painting (also known as light drawing or light graffiti) is a photographic technique in which exposures are made usually at night or in a darkened room by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera. In many cases the light source itself does not have to appear in the image. The term light painting also encompasses images lit from outside the frame with hand-held light sources. The first known photographer to use this technique was Man Ray in his series "Space Writing" created in 1935. The photographer Ellen Carey discovered Man Ray's signature signed by penlight nearly 74 years after the pictures had been taken” (wiki) [more inside]
"The first image I made was purely for beauty..." photographing the analemma
"As noted elsewhere, more men have walked on the moon than have successfully photographed the analemma." (details) [more inside]
Too Many Pencils
"Don Draper would have been working side-by-side with a brother."
The Other Mad Men. It's been accepted more or less as a truism that black people didn't work on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. But facts are stubborn things. There were black people in advertising even then, some (a few) in high places. Contrary to the popular assumption, blacks in that era met with success and challenges on Madison Avenue, like everywhere else.
Depictions drawn from regrettable accounts of the less fortunate for purposes of instruction; so that one may avoid similar missteps.
Joy.
This little girl just had surgery to correct her cleft palate. Watch as she sees her "new" smile for the first time, and prepare to experience sheer, pure joy with her. SLYT. [more inside]
New Jersey Time Machine
"We'll do to you what we did to the Jews."
Just over five months after the ban came into force, the Guardian reports on the impact of France's so-called burqa ban on niqab-wearing women.
Aaliyah's One in a Million - $6.99 on cassette
Chext
Chext is a site that enables the user to enter transactions and track their bank balance via SMS. People sharing a bank account can also get updates when money is spent from the account by the other person. [more inside]
Permanent Record
Paul Lukas found hundreds of Manhattan Trade School for Girls "report cards" from the early 1900's and has posted several of them online. [more inside]
Slow Build x 10^6
By processing a million songs in twenty minutes, and using the Stairway detector Paul discovered many songs that Slow Build "more" (up to 29) than Stairway to Heaven (which gets only a 9). [via] [more inside]
The luxury vehicle of choice... for the Apocalypse
The Knight XV from Conquest Vehicles: For when you absolutely, positively need a luxury ride that can withstand the Apocalypse. With a limited production run of only 100 vehicles, this luxury armored SUV - inspired by the Gurkha military vehicle - costs a paltry $310,000 USD; its nearest competitor, the Dartz Pombron, has no base price listed (estimated cost: $1.5 million USD). [more inside]
In The Devil House
A summer day, a dirt road, heat thick as steam from a boiling pot. Along the shoulder are verdant trees, shadows, the hum and croak and whistle and buzz of the woods. This is Clarksville, Texas, 1910. And here is Frank Jones, who will one day, decades from now, years after his death, be among the most recognized African-American self-taught artists.[more inside]
Bushman Lives
Read the latest Daniel Pinkwater novel before it's published. As he has done with his last three novels , children's author, NPR commentator and pet lover Daniel Pinkwater is serialising his latest novel, Bushman Lives. [more inside]
I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me
The secretive NRO celebrated 50 years of spying from space with a one-day surprise public exhibition of a just-declassified KH-9 Hexagon "Big Bird" imaging satellite. Between 1963 and 1986, a constellation of KH-7 Gambit, KH-8 Gambit 3, and KH-9 Hexagon satellites, all revealed after a half-century of secrecy, returned high-resolution film exposures of Cold War targets from orbit by parachute.
A museum's descent into financial trouble.
The American Folk Art Museum in New York City is said to be considering dissolution and dispersal of its outstanding collection of folk and outsider art.
Pages and Pages of Hollywood History
Will Your Favorite Star Survive Color? This article from a 1935 issue of the Hollywood fan magazine Photoplay breathlessly anticipates a new standard of screen beauty due to the spread of Technicolor motion pictures. You can read or download the whole magazine, for free, legally, at the Media History Digital Library. [more inside]
Mmm...sixty-four slices of American cheese.
By now we all know how to pimp our grilled cheese sandwiches, but maybe that's just not your style. Maybe you're like me, and enjoy the simple pleasure of a melts-just-right Kraft Single, but don't like the long list of unpronounceable ingredients. Well, today is your lucky day: America's Test Kitchen comes up with a recipe for DIY American Cheese.
YesGayYA
YA authors asked to 'straighten' gay characters. Two YA authors posted about their unhappy experience with trying to find an agent for their book that includes gay characters. Soon, a representative of the previously unnamed agency (though also not the actual agent in question) posts a rebuttal. Debate flies back and forth in the comments, on Twitter, and on various blogs, with writers coming forward with their own experiences. (1 2 3, among many others.) Cleolinda has a detailed and informative summary of the whole situation. (Previously.)
Mount Tambora awakens
After nearly 200 years of rest, Mount Tambora is rumbling again and spewing ash. The last eruption of Mount Tambora was in 1815 and at the time was the largest eruption in the world since 180 AD. The massive amount of volcanic ash kicked into the stratosphere (around 160 cubic kilometers of ejecta were released) cooled Earth's temperature by over a degree Fahrenheit and caused "The year without a summer". In comparison, the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens released around 1 cubic kilometer of ejecta.
Et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam
St. Peter's was a seminary built near Cardross, on the outskirts of Glasgow. It is remarkable for its modernist design, the architects having drawn significant inspiration from Le Corbusier's brutalist monastery at La Tourette, and has been A-listed by Historic Scotland. During its construction, the Second Vatican Council recommended that priests should be trained and educated in the communities they were to serve; the quasi-monastic setting of St. Peter's thus meant it was obsolescent before its completion. Although it was briefly adapted to serve as a rehabilitation centre for drug abusers, it was abandoned in the 80s and, by 2008, found itself on the World Monument Foundation's list of most endangered sites (PDF, see p.58). There has been recent talk of the Scottish Government funding a £10m restoration project, but it is not entirely clear if the restoration is intended to turn the building into an arts centre, a museum or an 'intentional modernist ruin'. [more inside]
Big pink raisin discovered in tub, boy's whereabouts unknown
Are wet-induced wrinkled fingers primate rain treads? (Nature's summary) In the words of a famous bathtub philosopher, pretty neat, huh? Warning: may trigger rhytiphobia.
It's not procrastination if you're learning things
Did you know that two guys once flew a Cessna for 64 days, without landing? They apparently refuelled from a moving pickup truck with a hose. Did you also know of the monks from Mt. Hiei, Japan who run 900 marathons in 6 years? To qualify, they do 30 km. a day for 100 consecutive days. I did not know these things when I woke up on Friday, but Now I Know. [more inside]
Things Apple Is Worth More Than
Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem One Night Only
Retro Muppet Concert Posters (Five total, one for each character). Beautifully simple and possibly available as posters for sale soon.
Big ones, small ones, and all of them are AWESOME.
Musical Guide to the Malls of Dubai. By Rohit.
Scrupulosity
Locke, Johnson, Kierkegaard, Freud, and dozens of other historical figures on the subject of obsessive-compulsive disorder. [more inside]
"I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation."
"I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation." Netflix has lost 26% of its value after raising prices and splitting their DVD and streaming services (previously); they'll lose lose 600,000 subscribers by September 30 instead of gaining the 400,000 they predicted. Now Netflix is spinning off their DVD-by-mail service into a separate web site, Qwikster. [more inside]
Victorians, groping their way toward a new view of the sexual body.
The African Hulu
Reel African is a new video-streaming site showing licensed African productions, films, series and documentaries, including The XYZ Show, the African Spitting Image. Also some MTV.
Free to watch, with adverts inserted in the content. Promo trailer. Variety write-up. Via.
Nigella and Jamie Talk Dirty.
Data Visualization
InForm: Turning Data into Meaning. An exhibit at the Adobe Museum of Digital Media.
Noah Lewis, blowin' that harp
This post is really only intended for those that can appreciate and afford high quality bird pistols
Baltimore Lead Study
An experiment done in the 1990s exposed children to various levels of lead. The lawsuit filed in 2001 by the parents of over 100 participants accuses the Kennedy Krieger Institute that the scientists knowingly used the kids as test subjects in toxic dust control study. [more inside]
"duct tape you can sell for $3 and buy for $150"
"The weapons also have levels, and if you are not at the level needed to wield a weapon, you are unable to use it. This does not make a hell of a lot of sense when the weapon in question is a knife or a pipe or an axe, especially when you have been wielding all of the above quite adroitly for hours. What on earth does a Level 4 Pipe even mean, anyway? Worse yet, the weapons are all subclassed, so you are not just finding a Level 4 Pipe; you are finding a Flimsy Level 4 Pipe or a Homemade Level 4 Pipe, the differences of which are utterly unclear." --Tom Bissell on why a new zombie game sucks due to its reckless "Gamification," and why this means your future will also suck
« Previous day | Next day »