September 25, 2013
So here we are now standing at the grave / Trying so hard to best behave
One day in February several years ago, William D. Drake – a distant cousin of famous folk musician Nick Drake – released two very different albums at once. There was Yew's Paw, a collection of strange and lovely piano music, such as the bouncy, joyful Pipistrelle, the sometimes-misty, sometimes-urgent At the End of the Harbour Wall. (Not to mention the aptly-named Short & Sweet Like A Donkey's Gallop, which is 17 satisfying seconds long.) Then there was Briny Hooves, a set of rock/folk/pop songs which are all confounding and fantastic. Wolves is an angry elegy that's nonetheless incredibly catchy; equally catchy is Serendipity Doodah. Ugly Fortress is a softer, Beatlesy sort of tune, The Fountains Smoke is a lovely folk duet, and Requiem for a Snail is exactly what it claims to be. Perhaps its two most affecting moments are Sweet Peace, a gently dark number that grows and grows, and Seahorse, which is very reminiscent of Robert Wyatt's (also wonderful) Rock Bottom. Both albums are worth a listen, and both can be streamed freely from Bandcamp—Yew's Paw, Briny Hooves, and Drake's more recent album The Rising of the Lights.
Security fail in Los Angeles High Schools
"It took just a week for nearly 300 students who got iPads from their Los Angeles high school to figure out how to alter the security settings so they could surf the Web and access social media sites."
Because I Could Not Stop For Death Panels
eating out of the trash can
Slavoj Žižek on John Carpenter's They Live, from the upcoming film The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Slavoj Žižek delivers a Q&A on the film at TIFF.
School Desegregation
Are our schools becoming more segregated? In 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka" desegregated schools in the United States... but, it appears that the country is losing ground in this effort.
According to an article in Aljazeera America: "African-American and Latino students are less likely to attend racially and ethnically diverse schools today than at any other time in the last four decades. This, almost 60 years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling that desegregated schools, represents a major setback for one of the core goals of the civil rights movement."
Another brick in the wall
Fireman Saves Kiten
Fireman Saves Kitten, captured with a GoPro. (SLYT)
There are people out there who love Nickelback.
Genius: The Nickelback Story. "In addition to masterminding Nickelback's ascent, Chad Kroeger, 37, has found ways for his band to make money onstage and off, through licensing, merchandising, and product-placement agreements. He's also helped groom many other acts, including some that the haters might even like."
Game behind gamed: your narrative programming for the day
How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio[1] actually makes a case against austerity[2] and for redistribution, but also for money printing (and, arguably, for bailouts), while stressing the need to keep making productivity-improving public and private investments. However, it could be equally entitled: How The Industrial Age Political-Economy Doesn't Work Anymore, viz. Surviving Progress (2011)... [more inside]
A magic lie
Hocus Pocus (SLYT) - the story of a woman who grew up without happiness and a girl who didn't know it. Written by Shikemoku, sung by Gumi and Hatsune Miku. Warnings for: singing robots, high-pitched Japanese voices, English subtitles, and references to child abuse and abduction. [more inside]
Twilight; no Sparkle.
I know full well to my great & abiding dismay the compulsive fascination that the eldritch & uncanny may exert upon the imagination of an introspective & sensitive scholar. From Charlie Stross (cstross): Equoid, a Laundry novella available free to access from Tor.
Give it a good bash!
Percussive Maintenance (SLYT)
PTSD and Gene Kelly's lost wartime star turn
PTSD and Gene Kelly's lost wartime star turn: For the last six decades or so, a copy [of "Combat Fatigue Irritability"] has been filed away, along with thousands of other films, at the National Library of Medicine. The only people it has been lost to are the public and Gene Kelly’s devoted and still numerous fans. But now the National Library of Medicine is featuring Combat Fatigue Irritability in Medical Movies on the Web, and the film will be given a well-deserved, though very belated, New York premiere, on October 5, 2013, at the New York Academy of Medicine. [more inside]
Comics of the Damned
Celebrate Banned Books Week by perusing The comics that corrupted our kids - but mind your eyes! Meanwhile the American Library Association’s list of this year’s most challenged books is led by another comic, Captain Underpants.
Very Young MCs: Brooklyn Babies Try Out DJing
"The midi-trigger’s connected to the laptop, the laptop’s connected to the PA" Mommy and baby yoga, music and sign language classes are apparently so over. Some parents are instead giving baby disc jockey classes a spin.
A Different Age
In 1914, Captain Robert Campbell was taken captive by the German Army. In 1916, he got word that his mother back in England was dying. He was given a laissez-passer to visit her on condition that he return to captivity as soon as practicable.
An officer and a gentleman, he did exactly that. [more inside]
“You’ve been up for 15 minutes and you haven’t made me a sandwich?”
“Honey, you’re 300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring!”The blogger behind 300Sandwiches.com talks about the genisis of her blog and the quest for her that engagement ring, one sandwich at a time.
Farewell to Tilting
The most Irish island in the world. Booker Prize winning author Anne Enright travels to the edge of Newfoundland. (single page version, may trigger printer).
Nailed it.
More than the slot machines
Gawker has some revelatory excerpts from a new New Yorker article [behind paywall] digging into the extraordinarily high-profit world of the EDM DJ in Vegas nightclubs. [more inside]
Let it Go, This T(uba) Shall Pass
The 2008 USC-Notre Dame football game at the LA Coliseum was not a great one for the Fighting Irish. They lost to USC 38-3, en route to a disappointing 6-6 record for the season. Notre Dame had only 4 first downs and 91 total yards on offense (!!!).
But the game turned out to be a fateful one for the Band of the Fighting Irish, Notre Dame's 167 year-old marching band. Playing a triumphant show at USC for the first time ever, the band did a medley that included the OK Go song "Here it Goes Again," which became famous when the very fun low-budget video of the rock band's members performing on treadmills went viral. The Notre Dame band's performance that day included the marching band making two gigantic treadmills on the field, and band members reenacting some of the video's moves. Little did they know that this would lead to their star turn in a music video. [more inside]
The Fallen
On the 21st September 2013 it is International Peace Day. We are making an event called ‘The Fallen’ on the D-Day landing beach of Arromanches in northern France that illustrates what happens with the absence of peace. It was on the 6th June 1944 that a total of 9,000 civilians, German forces and Allies lost their lives.
Our challenge is to represent those lives lost between the times of the tide with a stark visual representation using stencilled sand drawings of people on the beach. Each silhouette represents a life and when it is washed away its loss. There is no distinction between nationalities, they will only be known as ‘The Fallen’.
Why #overdoing #hashtags is not cool
"What Does The Fox Say?"
Norwegian animators Twintrash have created the animated short "What Does The Fox Say," based on "The Fox" music video by Ylvis. [previously | via] [more inside]
Digital panhandling is the next internet boom
“It’s a lot less embarrassing,” he says. “You don’t have to put yourself out there.” And unlike panhandling in Pensacola, using an app like Bitcoin Tapper won’t put him on the wrong side of the law. This past May, Pensacola — where Angle has lived since April — passed an ordinance that bans not only panhandling but camping on city property. -- Homeless, unemployed and surviving on bitcoins (and food stamps).
It's a van, it's a bus, it's a camper
Effective 12/31, it will no longer be manufactured. I was more surprised to learn that the VW Bus was still being manufactured in 2013.
The Smile in Portraiture
Prison, stardom and a terrible past
From prison to pro football (~soccer) but hampered by a dark past: how Ilombe Mboyo's rise destroyed the scheme that saved him. Can football help rehabilitate a criminal?
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