December 18, 2007
Irish traditional flute music on video
Everything you want to know about Irish traditional music played on flute, including a guide to the instrument, a guide to styles and a rather comprehensive collection of the best Irish traditional flute videos on the web. And if you like these, perhaps you'd like to learn how to play too. [more inside]
A weakness for Iowa
…you are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always well taken care of if you come from Iowa. [more inside]
Movie prop collecting as a business
It's a bigger business. than you knew. International even. So big that there’s a secondary market of replicas of originals. Some are big, but some are tiny yet very ambitious about collecting. Many choose to build their own, and often they painstakingly document the process.
And yes, there is a main watering hole where they ALL gather.
Footnote to History
Footnote (mentioned previously but briefly on MeFi) is trying to be the latest big destination for history buffs and family historians on the web, where... "you can view the most exciting original source documents," over 22 million of 'em, some of which are "available for the first time on the internet"!
Sure, you have to pay to get to a bunch of the genealogy stuff, but they've also got digital scans of lots of cool American history documents for FREE! A current, more-or-less chronological list of the free docs follows... [more inside]
When you care enough to send the very bewildering.
If you're looking for a good prank this holiday season, why not have someone living in Europe send cryptic, bizarre postcards to your friends. Bidding has commenced.
There and Back Again
Middle Earth Filter: Peter Jackson and New Line to produce The Hobbit and a sequel. After a lengthy legal dispute between the director and the production company behind the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, the two parties have come to a resolution - and Middle Earth will be back in cinemas in 2010 and 2011.
Reuters Photos of the Year, Aught Seven
Oswald has been shot
An archive of raw footage and news reports concerning the assassination of JFK and the guy most people think that did it, Oswald.
Sustainability
Our Decrepit Food Factories. Michael Pollan on what sustainability is really about. [Via Gristmill.]
The Ultimate Paranormalist
Henry Steel Olcott is best known as one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, along with Helena Blavatsky. He died 100 years ago. [more inside]
The Best Music of 2007 According to
The best music of 2007 according to Stereogum, Pitchfork, All Music, NME, PopMatters, The A.V. Club, Rolling Stone, TIME, MTV, the Guardian, eMusic, Amazon, Spin Magazine, Q, Largehearted Boy, and more. Among the most frequently listed are Radiohead, Spoon, Arcade Fire, Of Montreal, Feist, and The National.
ITAPPMONROBOT
"So, at our meeting earlier, you suggested building a robot. Is that something we can really do?" [more inside]
Tacky Christmas Yards. REALLY Tacky.
Tales from the Booze Bus
"It is binge drinking. We don't see people who've had just two drinks. People have had 20 shots of vodka." In central London, "Alternative Response Vehicle - or Booze Bus, as it's more commonly known - draw on their reserves of composure, ingenuity and stoicism to treat more than 20 dazed drunks," over the course of a 12-hour shift. [more inside]
Self-publishing in an Internet Age, or, Web Comics Without the Pictures.
Pages Unbound is a portal for serialized web novels, similar to web comic portals such as Buzz Comix and Top Web Comics, if not nearly as fancy. It is a new project by Tales of MU author Alexandra Erin. Note: Tales of MU and some of the novels found on Pages Unbound may be NSFW, as they contain explicit material of various sorts. MU, specifically, is concerned with LGBT issues and racism in a fantasy setting.
top ten stories
Here are the ten stories you probably missed this year From Foreign Policy. I certainly missed a lot of them. Sorry about the single link.
20 years of line noise and here's to 20 more
#!/usr/bin/perl
@d = localtime(time);
if ($d[4] == 11 && $d[3] == 18 ) {
print "Happy ".($d[5]-87)."th Birthday, Perl!\n";
}
if( $ARGV[0] eq "love" || $ARGV[0] eq "hate" ) {
print "$you can't deny its contribution to our culture\n";
}
New iPod speaker complete with tortured fish
iCruel: "Even if it does live it's not [a] life worth living ... it's really just a torture box."
Feliz Nahbehblah
Victims of the Rising Tide
As the immigration debate rages, Anti-Latino hate crimes rose by almost 35% between 2003 and 2006. Here are a few dozen of them. To some, this trend may seem perfectly FAIR.
I'll Remember Mingus
Even if he was a world-class weirdo (or, if you take his words literally, three world-class weirdoes) who spent time in Bellevue, enlisted his psychotherapist to write his liner notes, and allegedly taught his cat to use the toilet (h/t to MeFi's urbanwhaleshark), I'll best remember Charles Mingus for giving me his 1960 take on "I'll Remember April", featuring the most exciting four minutes of music in my entire collection (starting at the 9:25 mark of the video). [more inside]
For your consideration
Fox Searchlight has made the screenplays to The Darjeeling Limited, Juno, The Namesake, Once, The Savages, and Waitress available online. Paramount Vantage has done the same for A Mighty Heart, Into the Wild, and Margot at the Wedding. (Note: All links are to pdf files.) (Via.)
Hammer Has Risen From The Grave!... er Rave!
Hammer films are back! ... The classic British horror film company has returned from the dead with the first new film in 20 years to be first broadcast in instalments via MySpace. This has allowed some news programs to camp it up just a little... See the trailer here. Behind the scenes. [more inside]
Salvation Lies Within
The holes in the men’s cells were covered by revealing photographs of women in bikinis, which officials displayed at Monday’s news conference.
Grudgingly, Mr. Romankow acknowledged the similarity to the film “The Shawshank Redemption.”
Literacy & Thought
Is it time to unwrap Oxfam Unwrapped?
Do The Collage
When he's not recording more songs than Bob Dylan, former Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard is busy creating collages, many of which can now be seen online in an exhibit from Studio Dante in New York City. [more inside]
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