December 1, 2010
Fuck You If You Don't Like Eid & Channukah
Fuck You If You Don't Like Christmas (NSFW Comedy Rap Song) by CRUDBUMP (aka Drew of Toothpaste for Dinner) [more inside]
"Chattanooga is a young and thriving city and, with all the chances in her favor, her people are not to be discouraged by anything."
In Chattanooga, early in the first week of March 1867, rains came, and did not stop for four days. It was not until March 14 that the floodwaters began to subside, and the city was left covered in mud and debris and nearly destroyed. More than a century later, archaeologist and UTC Professor Dr. Jeff Brown became fascinated by strange architectural features he was finding on some of Chattanooga’s downtown buildings. [more inside]
Everything you wanted from an 1860
The Long Recall is a daily news aggregator chronicling the buildup to the U.S. Civil War. The daily posts are "digests of the news and commentary that an intelligent American might have had accessible 150 years ago."
It's really loud (the Shop-Vac not the song)
Considering Jonathan Coulton's lyric-writing, any text-based video of one of his songs is going to be good. But when graphic artist Jarrett Heather committed acts of "kinetic typography" to the ode to suburbia "Shop Vac", he made a SLYT that deserves multiple viewings.
"Adopt a [Wax] Cylinder" for you and yours!
A great gift for the archivist and/or audiophile in your life! Just in time for the holidays, donate NOW only $60 to preserve for posterity the controversial, the scandalous, the quixotic, the Springsteen-ian, the timeless classics, plus many, many more wax cylinder recordings from UCSB's Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. [more inside]
A Brief History of Mathematics
A Brief History of Mathematics is a BBC series of ten fifteen-minute podcasts by Professor Marcus du Sautoy about the history of mathematics from Newton and Leibniz to Nicolas Bourbaki, the pseudonym of a group of French 20th Century mathematicians. Among those covered by Professor du Sautoy are Euler, Fourier and Poincaré. The podcasts also include short interviews with people such as Brian Eno and Roger Penrose.
I for one welcome our to be announced overlords...
“NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST (11am PST) on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.” Watch it HERE live. [more inside]
Dentō!
Welcome Home, Soldier
"Regardless of political stance, no one can deny the joy felt upon seeing your loved ones return home safely -- WelcomeHomeBlog.com is a site celebrating that amazing feeling. Visit daily for heartwarming stories, videos and pictures of members of our courageous armed forces returning home to their families and friends..."
Lur, the original (classier) vuvuzela?
The Lur is an overblown ancient northern European wind instrument made of bark or carved solid wood, with an incredibly "noble" sound (usually). [more inside]
Beyond the blog?
With it's new redesign Gawker, and it's affiliates, will be moving away from being blogs. They want to be like Television.
Bill Murray is playing at my house
"Every year my wife and I throw a party and when I send out the photos I add famous people."
The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism
Leci n'est pas une pipe
Ever wanted to start smoking a tobacco pipe? Begin by selecting from the many types of pipes available. Next, choose a tobacco type and flavor. Pipe smoking has a long and storied history- many a famous man, woman, or fictional character would not be parted from his or her pipe (link slightly NSFW). Pipes in art. Books about pipes. And of course, there is widely varying opinion on just how healthy pipe smoking isn't.
Creation Museum adds ark park
The Creation Museum is seeking tax breaks to expand by building an ark-themed amusement park.
“We’re going to get this Ark Encounter,” Link said. “With every ark there is a rainbow and at the end of this rainbow is a pot of gold.”
Seriously, he looks hungry.
Dr Stephen Duckett, recently of Australia, has been heading Alberta's Health board. After an injudicious cookie related media distraction, he is released from his position. He has apologized from the CEO's blog, but his position was still terminated. Here is some of the joy that has developed.
Die! Die! My Darling!
Few bands have undergone as many reinventions as the Misfits (no, not those Misfits). Formed in New Jersey in 1977 by Glenn Danzig (vocals and keyboard), Jerry Only (bass) and Manny Martinez (drums), the original lineup played at CBGB and released one unclassifiable guitar-less rock single. In late '77 guitarist Franché Coma was brought on and Martinez was kicked out of the band in favor of a drummer named Mr. Jim. With this lineup, their sound began to take on a more defined sound, merging with the developing second wave of North American punk rock. [more inside]
I Hope This Gets To You
"I Hope This Gets To You" is a "digital love letter" by Walter C. May of The Daylights. He hopes it gets to her "organically—through tweets, links passed between friends, and blog posts."
‘A Serbian Film’: Not torture porn
A Serbian Film: Not “torture porn” but an allegory of civil war. Reputed to be a frightening, unwatchable movie reminiscent of torture porn, A Serbian Film (IMDB listing) is actually, according to Jim Henshaw, “exquisitely shot and beautifully designed.… There is no explicit sex and many of the worst horrors are clearly fake. This is not a film that panders to fans of horror or porn, but it definitely is about exploitation.… [T]en minutes in you realize what you are really watching is a re-creation of the Serbian experience of the Balkan wars…. The horrific scenes described above and others that I found far more unsettling are clearly the atrocities of the Balkan conflict moulded into horrific set pieces within the metaphor of a porn film gone horribly wrong.”
You're ALL getting mixtapes
Midwest label Suburban Sprawl puts out a CD of X-Mas music every winter. They've collected the last eight years of them here. Highlights include The High Strung, The Hard Lessons, and the common lament, "Santa Just Crashed Into My House and He's Drunk as Fuck."
Who is J.C. Owsley? and why did he pay a 69% tax rate back in 1941?
Think your taxes are high now? A list of the top ten salaries in the US in 1941, and the taxes they paid (spoiler: 65-73% tax rate! but, still doesn't include total compensation, though, which makes it a little sketchy). Interestingly, the NYTimes couldn't figure out two of the names, C.S. Woolman (who is probably C.E. Woolman, one of the founders of delta airlines) and another mysterious name, J.C. Owsley, that seems to be unidentifiable...
Think of the damn kids, man!
No Return Address
Wax lips, or the discovery of red dye #40 among the bees
Brooklyn bees eat maraschino cherries, make nasty red honey. (Here's a non-nytimes link to the same article)
Just another counterfactual Monday
Hite's Law: "All alternate histories produce zeppelins." Kenneth Hite has been featuring alternate Mondays on his livejournal.What if Tewodros II hadn't unified Ethiopia? What if Bonnie Prince Charlie had been worth the powder it would take to blow him out of a cannon barrel? How could Carthage have won the Punic Wars? What if King Kalakaua of Hawai'i had succeeded in forging a Union and Federation of Asiatic Nations and Sovereigns with Japan? How could 20th century North America have ended up ruled by rival warlords? How could things have gone not quite so badly for the Huguenots? What if the Suez Crisis and the invasion of Hungary hadn't been contemporaneous? [more inside]
We are like the Mob. If Mr. Rogers ran the mob.
back in October, when reddit was helping raise money for DonorsChoose, Stephen Colbert (major reddit fan, BTW) provided us with an extra incentive: if we raised $500,000 before the rally, he would let reddit ask him anything. Well, you guys held up your end of the deal ($575,000 and counting, with the vast majority of donations coming from redditors). You asked some great questions. And now, we have answers to the top 11, as voted by you. [more inside]
God Speed the Sexism
In a new paper, Harvard economics Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn and UCLA economist Paola Giuliano correlate "societies with a tradition of plough agriculture" with "female labor force participation, female participation in politics, female ownership of firms, the sex ratio and self-expressed attitudes about the role of women in society." In short, if your ancestors used a plough, you're likely to think women belong in the kitchen.
Don't Baby Don't
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Wednesday afternoon that the Obama administration will not allow offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as part of the next five-year drilling plan, reversing two key policy changes President Obama announced in late March. Drilling will continue in other parts of the Gulf of Mexico under new safeguards. Previously.
&
Stompin' Tom Connors
I see you driving 'round town with the girl I love, and I'm like...Barbra Streisand
ARTSAT Streaming Radio
ARTSAT Internet Radio uses SuperCollider and telemetry data from the PRiSM picosatellite to make music. The satellite weighs only 1kg and measures 10cm on each edge of its cubic body. (Google translation • direct radio link for your audio player)
"An outrageous use of tax payer money"
Bowing to pressure from right-wing critics, the National Portrait Gallery has decided to remove David Wojnarowicz's film "A Fire in My Belly" from its groundbreaking exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture". [more inside]
Is infertility the unintended consequence of The Pill?
"The fact is that the Pill, while giving women control of their bodies for the first time in history, allowed them to forget about the biological realities of being female until it was, in some cases, too late." New York magazine explores the connection between the Pill and the infertility industry. The XX Factor blog takes issue with the article, calling it "sexist" and "condescending."
Paul Tatara on Pop Culture (and so forth)
Wall Of Paul. Paul Tatara used to be one of CNN.com's film critics, until his negative review of Black Hawk Down (one of many, many pans) led to death threats and a freelance contract he declined to renew. Since 2007 he's been blogging about "music, sports, politics, religion, firecrackers, action figures, babies, fast food, heroes, hypocrites, air conditioning, parades, cream puffs, and a slew of other topics that have come to shape my consciousness." [more inside]
A view into North Korea
This flickr user collection offers a look into North Korea, complete with translations of propaganda murals and cultural background on the images, plus two collections of old postcards.
He has the pipes
In defense of Simply Red. A look at Mick Hucknall, and the 25 years since the band's debut Picture Book.
"You're right. Man, this is beautiful"
Built as part of the fifth /dev/fort developer retreat, Spacelog.org allows you to explore early space missions via the original NASA transcripts. Currently live are Mercury 6 which made John Glenn the first American in orbit, and the 'successful failure' Apollo 13 (The transcribed key moment and the original). Alongside the transcripts are supporting materials from the NASA archives including photography and descriptions of the mission phases. The developers are looking for help to digitise the Gemini 7, Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions.
Holey sweater? Fixed!
Holey sweater? Fixed! Use a piece of foam, some wool and a felt needle. No knitting skills required.
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