November 30, 2013

Farewell to a giant of African popular music

The much-renowned and very influential singer, songwriter and bandleader Tabu Ley Rochereau, the legendary pioneer of soukous, has died. His music was characterized by his sweet, mellow voice, smoothly beautiful and quintessentially African vocal harmonies, and chiming, smooth-as-silk interwoven guitar melodies. Not to mention a steady, infectious beat that kept people moving on dance floors all across Africa for the past five decades. Here is but a small sampling, spanning from his very fruitful, prolific musical career: Mokolo Nakokufa, Muzina, Kaful Mayay, Bania Irene, Mongali... and since the man is said to have written as many as 3000 songs, there's plenty more out there to discover. RIP Tabu Ley Rochereau.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:34 PM PST - 20 comments

"...more confrontational than most scientists are used to."

A silent but epic battle is waging in the pages of toxicology journals over the use of science in public health policy. [more inside]
posted by hereticfig at 10:21 PM PST - 43 comments

The next Shakira, strong female Latin musicians to take the mantle

"Shakira aside, the female presence is a little light. Why are there no more big female acts in Latin music right now? I look at my charts, and there's very few female names.... you have a lot of these pretty, sexy young women, who women now are identifying less and less with. I really wish that were different." That's a quote from Leila Cobo, executive director of Latin Content & Programming for Billboard, that opened an NPR piece that countered with a few names to watch, featuring input from Latin Alternative co-host Ernesto Lechner. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:01 PM PST - 10 comments

RIP Paul Walker

The "Fast & Furious" actor died earlier today at the age of 40.
posted by DRoll at 8:51 PM PST - 121 comments

a museum deep underground in a salt mine

Salina Turda: salt mines turned subterranean history museum. "What was once an enormous salt mine in Turda, Romania, has now been carefully renovated by the regional Cluj county council into the world’s first salt mining history museum. The Salina Turda salt mines were excavated in the 17th century, proving a crucial source for salt that brought the Romans much wealth. Today, the Durgau lakes at the mine’s surface – responsible for much of the salt deposits in the area – are popular tourist attractions that guarantee a steady flow of visitors all year around. A trip down the vertical shafts that once transported thousands of tons of salt will slowly reveal the immense scale of the excavated earth, made blatantly clear upon reaching the very bottom of the mine which is covered in a sand-like layer of salt."
posted by moonmilk at 6:32 PM PST - 26 comments

Old Skull are young and half-informed.

"It is truly punk beyond any of the music played by celebrated punk bands at the time of the term’s genesis." Old Skull were a trio of prepubescent boys from Wisconsin whose raw (some would say talentless) thrash punk albums in the late 1980s gained them nationwide attention and a record deal. The band consisted of J.-P. and Jamie Toulon and Jesse Collins-Davies, with a lot of help from the Toulon patriarch Vern. Their songs dealt with issues big ("Homeless," "AIDS") and small ("Pizza Man," "D'Yall Know Where the Herb Is?"). They opened for Sonic Youth and Gwar, they made it onto MTV and into People Magazine. Then their 15 minutes passed. Here's a haunting 2010 WFMU interview with Jamie Toulon when he was a homeless addict in NYC. Then the Toulon brothers died within a year of each other.
posted by goatdog at 6:26 PM PST - 29 comments

21 Cooking Tips That Will Kill Us All; Nintendo Steps Into Porn Biz...

... and other quality headlines by Headline Smasher.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:13 PM PST - 55 comments

Budgies Go Round And Round

Someone in the UK really likes training budgies to ride little rides.
posted by The Whelk at 2:06 PM PST - 24 comments

What if NYC apartment brokers ran a bodega?

Broker Bodega. (SLTumblr, excessive pun warning.)
posted by Anonymous at 2:00 PM PST - 28 comments

My kind executive action.

Clinton with an Uzi?...check.
Reagan on a velociraptor?...check.
TR taking out Big Foot?...check.
Hey, what about Abe Lincoln, riding a grizzly bear and packing an M-16?
No?!?! What kind of place is this? Oh, wait, here it is.
And many more, but for my money, nothing beats Abe on the bear. (Sort of single link Deviant Art)
posted by hwestiii at 1:51 PM PST - 27 comments

Bodies: we've all got them, and they're all different

"We never get to see those photos juxtaposed against a picture of that same person looking unflattering." Gracie Hagen takes a stab at dismantling the myth of the "normal" body. [NSFW] [more inside]
posted by tybeet at 1:30 PM PST - 50 comments

freemartin (n.):

A sexually imperfect, usually sterile female calf born as a twin with a male calf due to the influence of male hormones during the development in utero. The Freemartin Calf is a 40 minute experimental fiction shot on black and white Super 8. The whole film is free to watch on Vimeo. It's written, directed and edited by Jayne Amara Ross, with a soundtrack by Frédéric D. Oberland released on the excellent Manchester label Gizeh records. [more inside]
posted by Joeruckus at 12:56 PM PST - 3 comments

Canine phallic music

It's easy to dismiss DJ Dog Dick as a juvenile joke. Anyone with that name for a project can't be doing anything worthy of my time, right? But dig deeper, and what emerges is a man eloquently, urgently capturing the details of his life on the fringes of America. After years operating in the outsider noise scene, combining modular drones and off-kilter raps into a singular live show, 2013 saw a move toward something different. The Identity EP earlier this year was his statement of intent, a miniature coming of age narrative (stream full EP here.) His debut full-length on Hoss Records, The Life Stains was released last week. It's an ambitious, often deeply personal pop album. A modern song cycle about the way we live now. It also happens to be slathered in weirdo diarrhea death production. Watch the video for "Dried Old Leaves" and listen to "The Grease I Got", one of the best songs I've heard this year. And read a great little interview with Noisey that sheds light on where Eisenberg came from and where he's going with this unusual project.
posted by naju at 10:48 AM PST - 10 comments

Neo-prog tour of British history

The British band Big Big Train, winners of the Breakthrough Award at the 2013 Progressive Music Awards, have a vocalist who sings not unlike Peter Gabriel, and plays flute not unlike Ian Anderson; a hint of ELP in some songs; and a new member who was previously the guitarist for XTC. Non-prog fans may find the band's source matter intriguing: Their recent (double) album, English Electric I and II, features songs about the first scuba diver, Alexander Lambert, and his heroic work during the flooding of the Severn Tunnel in 1880; notorious fine art forger Tom Keating; an 1842 Royal Commission report on the working conditions of children employed in Welsh coal mines; a world-record-setting, 126 m.p.h. run by a steam locomotive in 1938; and a woman named Blanca Huertas, who is the Curator Lepidoptera at London's Natural History Museum.
posted by helpthebear at 8:38 AM PST - 17 comments

Her Little Ponies

"Childhood ponies getting final brush out before going into storage indefinitely. I feel like a mortician. " - Freindship Is Magic creator Lauren Faust tweets her G1 My Little Pony collection. [more inside]
posted by Artw at 8:01 AM PST - 41 comments

Island of silt and sand

So it's well known that apart from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, queen Elizabeth also rules the so-called crown dependencies, not part of the United Kingdom. The best known of those are the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands countries, Guernsey and Jersey. But who would recognise that other Channel Islands dependency, who could say even when presented with its distinctive outline that this is Jinsy? [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 7:43 AM PST - 7 comments

Indirect fusion's nothing less than HiiiPoWeR

Installed solar capacity is growing by leaps and bounds, led by Walmart and Apple, and helped by bonds backed by solar power payments,[*] which have sent industry stocks soaring, even as molten salt and new battery technologies come on line to generate storage for use when the sun doesn't shine. Of course we could always go to geostationary orbit -- or the moon -- as well we may (if politics allow it) as thirst from the developing world grows beyond the earth's carrying capacity. [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 7:42 AM PST - 41 comments

‘Insanely more ambitious’ than Google knowledge graph

Not satisfied with Rule 110 - the first Turing Complete cellular automata (as proven by Matthew Cook), Wolfram Mathematics has announced a system that is “Making the world computable..." A combination of natural language recognition, data description and computational language, the goal is to allow a person to define what they want, not how to get it and manipulate it. Wolfram describes the process as follows: "A human defines what the goal should be, and a computer does its best to figure out what that means, and does its best to do it..." Of course, the rest is left as an exercise for the reader...
posted by BillW at 7:31 AM PST - 37 comments

ASCII fluid simulator

ASCII fluid simulator (source code)
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:18 AM PST - 24 comments

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