March 8, 2010
The Goon Show
The Goon Show was a highly popular and immensely influential radio show on the BBC in the 1950s featuring Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan. They would sometimes do live readings of episodes, here's a video recording of The Whistling Spy Enigma (parts 1, 2, 3) and a much later recording of Tales of Men's Shirts (parts 1, 2, 3). The first features Ray Ellington, musical director of the Goon Show, and the second John Cleese, who, like his fellow Pythons, was a huge fan of The Goon Show growing up. In the 50s BBC turned The Goon Show into a TV show with puppets, called Telegoons. A number of shows exist online: The Lurgi Strikes Britain (1, 2), The Nadger Plague (1, 2), Captain Seagoon RN (1, 2), Tales of Montmartre (1, 2), The First Albert Memorial to the Moon (1, 2), The Hastings Flyer (1, 2), The Affair of the Lone Banana (1, 2), The Africa Ship Canal (1, 2), The Booted Gorilla (1, 2), The Ascent of Mount Everest (1, 2), The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill on Sea (1, 2), Fort Knight (1, 2), The Terrible Revenge of Fred Fu Manchu (1, 2), The Lost Colony (1, 2) and, finally, back where we first began, the Telegoons version of The Whistling Spy Enigma (1, 2).
Millennium Villages
Shower of Aid Brings Flood of Progress - "An experiment that is bombarding a Kenyan town of 65,000 with health care, education, and job training seems to be achieving its goal of rapidly lifting people out of poverty, but can the results be magnified?" [more inside]
The Best Scene Wasn't Broadcast
A sublime prank on an SNL audience: Zach Galifianakis shaves his beard (SLHP).
Adventure Time!
Remember Adventure Time with Finn and Jake?! Cartoon Network starts airing it Monday, April 5th. Go watch the promo and then play the totally awesome game!
Google suggestions in lovely tree form
What Do You Suggest? is a supercool way of visually exploring the suggestions Google offers as you type, suggestions that have long served to baffle and amuse. If you can't find your own intriguing suggestion tree, use the random word or question option...
The archives are a window into his mind
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas today announced that it has acquired the papers of David Foster Wallace. The collection includes "manuscript materials for Wallace's books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace's college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters; teaching materials and books." The Center's blog has more details.
Jet pack
"If it's the 21st Century, where's my jetpack?" Here you go. Flight time of 30 minutes, runs on premium gasoline. Cheap, at just $86,000!
Mind the High Beams
Honk. [SLYT]
"Maybe that's the purpose of television. You just turn it on and watch it whether you want to or not." - David Letterman
After getting his start as a DJ on Ball State's WAGO-FM, David Letterman spent most of the 1970s appearing in a lot of cheesy television, exhaustively chronicled here. Whether kayaking on the Battle of the Network Stars, appearing on an ill-fated variety show with Mary Tyler Moore, working as a panelist on The Love Experts, or hosting a game-show pilot for The Riddlers (part 1, 2, and 3), Letterman more than paid his dues. [more inside]
Avatar = Oz
The Death of the Artist
With techniques like "art by telephone" and a studio called "the Factory" where even the security guard helped with the painting, Andy Warhol redefined the relationship between artist and artwork, and blurred the line between work and copy. [more inside]
Ain't no party like a midwest party
A map and discussion of those areas of the US in which grocery stores outnumber bars. In which the regional number of bars per capita is arrived at, and outliers found. A boring person would conclude that these numbers are inversely correlated with population density. A more obviously correct conclusion, of course, is that the Midwest knows how to get down.
The Sandpit
It looks like Grandpa's shotgun, but it's not.
Double guns were invented so you can shoot twice. Double guns have been around for a long time now. They followed the British around the world, to Africa and India. You can buy one if you can afford it.
The Enemy Within.
Rage on the Right. The Year in Hate and Extremism. Hate groups are growing.
Protecting the US president has presented the secret service with the greatest challenge in its history.
A brief review of Terror From the Right 1995 - 2009
Signs Seem Clear: Obama Appoints Tufte to Help Sell Recovery Act.
Edward Tufte, infographics mandarin, has been recruited by the Obama administration to help explain the $787 billion stimulus plan. Mr. Tufte is said to abhor Powerpoint.
Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World from Wade Davis, Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist.
Hollywood produces weird gays
In The Advocate's interview with Will and Grace actor Sean Hayes the actor discusses what it was like to keep his sexuality an open secret, and what it was like to be pegged as "Just Jack" while also looking for leading man roles. [more inside]
IT'S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS.
IT'S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS. An interactive map of NYC made to look like an 8 bit Nintendo game.
Talking squid in outer space
Underwear!
Manpacks. The underwear-replacement start-up.
if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere
Lessons of a $618,616 Death
Topology on the Runway
There's always been hyperbole in fashion; but fashion became truly hyperbolic this week when mathematican William Thurston, winner of a 1982 Fields Medal for his revolutionary re-envisioning of low-dimensional topology and geometry, teamed up with designer Dai Fujiwara (of the house of Issey Miyake) to produce a Paris runway show based on the fundamental geometries of 3-dimensional spaces. Thurston and Fujiwara briefly interviewed. Thurston's famous essay "Proof and Progress in Mathematics" concerns, among other things, Thurston's belief that the production of mathematical understanding can be carried out by means other than the writing down of formal proofs (though fashion shows are not specifically mentioned.) Previously in wearable non-Euclidean geometry: Daina Taimina's hyperbolic skirt.
Sea monkeys love trance music!
Sea monkeys love trance music! Dancing sea monkeys close-up. Sea monkeys doing flips. Sometimes they prefer more of a nightclub atmosphere.
MTV Hits and Nick Too for $.01
What the cable company pays for the channels you don't watch. A chart of the subscriber fees for basic and digital cable. ESPN laps the field at over $4.00 per subscriber, MTV Hits ("MTV Classic") and Nick Too (west coast Nick) come in at $.01.
YouTube Closes Down For The Night
Scout, Mum, Dad, etc
Portraits – Somewhat creepy but arresting, nevertheless.
Number gossip
All this number gossip. 41 is deficient, while 43, its twin, is lucky. But 43 is also evil. 44 is happy. 144 is hungry. 126 is a vampire. 7912 is weird.
Light up the sky like a... well, like a flame.
Flame is a really nice web-based experimental painting programme from Slovak animator and designer Peter Blaskovic.
Guinea pigs, monkeys, and humans.
How we lost the cure for scurvy. "Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747...but here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times."
« Previous day | Next day »