May 11
Soundgarden's Reunion Tour 2012
I don't know why YouTube is serving me all these concerts right now, but I'm not complaining. Here's Soundgarden - Hyde Park - Hard Rock Calling 7-13-2012 - Pro Shot (HQ) Full Show [1h54m], arguably the band at the height of their career after taking a break and reforming. This concert is shortly before the release of their final album King Animal. [more inside]
The Walking House collection comes home
30 years ago, a set of paintings for a showing in Sweden painted by Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi went missing. They have been found and returned to her.
From an online biography:
"In her work, Mmakgabo Sebidi traverses mental and physical landscapes with an eye trained on the dangerous, the discomfiting, the traumatic and the ecstatic in human experience. She is deeply grounded in her rural upbringing and traditions but also finely attuned to the rhythms of the city in which she has spent much of her adult life. Sebidi brings together these two worlds in works of great visionary and prophetic power. Her themes are wide-ranging: her cultural roots, the wisdom of the ancestors, the ravages of the modern world on the human psyche, the loss of tradition, the potential of human creativity to build relationships and restore the past."
Helen Sebidi to exhibit rediscovered work after 30 years. (SLYT)
You done messed up, A-A-Ron!
Thomas Jefferson University apologizes after commencement presenter flubs names. Unfortunately for the hapless presenter, the name cards used the International Phonetic Alphabet, a technical rendering used mainly by linguists. kænt rid ðɪs? Don't let it happen to you! Learn how to pronounce IPA spelling today, test your skills, or just entertain yourself with the world's most unintentionally hilarious soundboards.
“We were told by his assistant he doesn’t do paintings like that"
WaPo gift link: Inside the surreal world of $20,000 pet portraits THIS GETS EXTREMELY WEIRD, features Alan Tudyk getting ESPECIALLY weird with his choice of pet portraits. (Disclaimer: gory descriptions within.) [more inside]
Ouch
TATS
Fake Deep Fake
The Guardian (2021): "Mother charged with deepfake plot against daughter's cheerleading rivals". The Guardian (2024):
"She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all"
Peregrine Falcon babies on Alcatraz
This is a live feed (complete with screechy babies) of the successful return of Peregrins to Alcatraz. The mom is Larry (Lawrencium) from a nest on the UC Berkeley Campanile tower in 2018.
Celebrate Madonna, Again!
Since this post has been taken down because the video has been taken down, I have since found three versions of Madonna - Live From Copacabana, Río de Janeiro, Brasil (The Celebration Tour 2024) [2h15m], of which this is the most recent. This is essentially a game of whack-a-mole, but it keeps getting reposted. Just search for "Madonna Celebration Rio" to find the newest version. Enjoy!
Chana Tower has frogs, snails, mushrooms and adventure
Wet Work
In a state with prolonged bouts of drought and unquenching thirst, stolen water is an indelible part of California lore. But this was not Los Angeles’ brazen gambit to take water from the Owens Valley. Or San Francisco’s ploy to flood part of Yosemite National Park for a reservoir. The water grab described in a federal indictment allegedly happened cat burglar-style, siphoned through a secret pipe, often after hours, to avoid detection. from Feds say he masterminded an epic California water heist. Some farmers say he’s their Robin Hood [LA Times; ungated]
the winner takes it all
Good morning Europe! The Grand Final of the 68th Eurovision Song Contest 2024 will take place today in Malmö, Sweden (detailed previously on the Blue).
At least, it's supposed to. [more inside]
May 10
This Is What Being in Your Twenties Was Like in 18th-Century London
This Is What Being in Your Twenties Was Like in 18th-Century London. A newly restored collection of letters describes a 27-year-old’s office job, social life and financial concerns beginning in 1719.
Jeff Daniels Loves His Guitar, And Talks About Other Things
So, Jeff Daniels recently visited the Kelly Clarkson Show [13m]. It was an entirely lovely and kind visit full of humanity. But the real surprise is his confession of the love of playing guitar, having written a zillion original songs, and his performance of a song about how the guitar is his best friend and he moves Clarkson to tears with his performance. It's entirely unexpected, and I'm sorry to have spoiled it for you, but how else could I have gotten you to watch this interview? [more inside]
Postmodern TVbox
AI has fostered a lot of mash-ups in various styles. Some guy named demonflyingfox has been turning popular animated and live-action series into colorized versions from the fifties. I'm not really doing it justice so check out Friends, The Simpsons, and SpongBob SquarePants among many others. [more inside]
We’re the men, and here’s the map.
Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones, an English comedian with an interest in geography and a former geography teacher who's also very funny, are the Map Men ("...Map Men, Map Map Map Men Men" 🎵 ), whose highly entertaining YouTube channel is chock full of educational cartographic goodness. Try any of their (27) videos at random, or all of them—even the ads are worth watching. Their recent episodes on undersea internet cables and country codes wouldn't be a bad place to start for the extremely online. [more inside]
Climax Blue
Context: Cheese Award Controversy. Cheese Professor: “In the US food-selling world, there is a term called Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS). For our store, and most natural foods stores, buyers won’t buy foods with ingredients that are not GRAS I looked at the Climax Blue ingredient list and there was something I didn’t recognize: kokum butter. I looked it up and, while approved for cosmetics and for one specific confection, it was not on the GRAS list. So we rejected it.” Elsewhere: Reddit, Plant based News, AgFunderNews.
Snark Tank
At the Habsburg convention in Plano
Floral Notes
Haidee Chu writes about Manhattan's Flower District for The City - its history, its shop cats, and its remaining vendors' opinions on which is the better holiday for florists, Mothers Day or Valentines Day.
With photos by Ben Fractenberg. [more inside]
"Teacher Spice."
Green sky at night
On Thursday, May 9, 2024, the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center issued a Severe (G4) Geomagnetic Storm Watch -- its first since January 2005.
Coinciding with a new moon, aurorae should be visible (weather permitting) much further than typical. The Northern/Western-specific current predictions from NOAO show the view line extending below 40 degrees Northern latitude. [more inside]
Do the jitterbug at a muskrat land
The Waning Reign of the Wetland Architect We Barely Know (Hint: Not a Beaver) Little-appreciated, semiaquatic, and cute-as-hell, muskrats can survive almost anywhere. So where are they? (Brandon Keim for Hakai Magazine) [more inside]
Say there is a young writer
In the dreamworld of the arts, every inanimate thing is animate, every object contains the entire world, millions of years of history and future and feeling. As she writes her story, which is ultimately her life, it can look like anything she wants. The more she thinks about it, the greater the possibilities. The more she’s cast out, the more she must innovate. The more she will be unique, the more her voice will be untamed. Whatever she is, whoever. She has lived for literature from the beginning and so literature will be her; her indomitable will shall make it so. Our young writer, still unpublished, is the essence of the word itself. Any of her books that may, that will come, be published, read—a footnote. from Every Ship Is a Passenger Too: On Publishing Today by Chris Molnar [LARB]
Rare handfish population returned to wild
Rare handfish population returned to wild after riding out marine heatwave in tank.
They've been gently coaxed out of the plastic bag and into the big, bad underwater world where they are exposed to the elements. Now, researchers have big hopes this small group of red handfish will not only survive, but thrive — the species is depending on it.
May 9
25
Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry
Maggie Harrison Dupré, writing for Futurism, goes on a deep, deep dive into AdVon, a fine purveyor of content slurry.
Fear, Cynicism, Nihilism, and Apathy
Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. [...] If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. [...] Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda.The New Propaganda War: Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world. [SLAtlantic]
Zoom in on God's Hand
Where's the Beef? The Greatest Diss Tracks in Hip Hop
The Ringer- Greatest Diss Tracks of All Time, Ranked As the Kendrick Lamar/ Drake feud continues (apparently won by Kendrick at this point), the Ringer looks over their listing of great diss tracks in hip-hop. At the Root, Noah McGee provides a different list. Alex Petridis also weighs in on the subject at the Grauniad.
David Bowie Serious Moonlight Tour Full Show
David Bowie Live | 1983 | Sydney | Serious Moonlight Tour | Pro shot | Complete Concert [1h50m] "On the 20th November 1983, David Bowie performed his final Australian concert of the Serious Moonlight tour. This Betamax recording was taken from a sight screen feed made at that time. The first couple of numbers, plus the end have some artefacts but, as it hasn't been viewed in nearly 40 years, the quality overall has held up well. The audio was in mono and has been remastered to bring it out more." [more inside]
The Last Thing My Mother Wanted
Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us. [more inside]
Katju
They said the quiet part out loud
We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read
This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration. The first time you get our message, you only will only find one thread. Short fiction by Caroline M Yoachim.
Retraction Isn’t Enough
“the conclusions of this paper were disseminated to over 5 million people and less than 0.02% of them actually read the full text or the retraction notice. The result is roughly 5 million misinformed people”. What is ‘evidence-based’? [more inside]
Tim Hortons: Canadian icon but also a bellwether for politics
"Tims is always going to be able to lean on the ordinary Canadians thing in their advertising. It is a habit.” [more inside]
Does that mean all music is good now? Is nothing tacky?
How did Creed, the most hated band of the 1990s, become so beloved—and even cool? [Luke Winkie] sailed the seas with thousands of fellow lunatics to find out. [more inside]
"It was that welcome feeling that every treehouse was your home."
Set to the music of recent Hawaiian artists, The Edge of Paradise (SLYT) is a quiet, contemplative documentary on Taylor Camp, a treehouse community of war veterans and hippies that thrived on a jungle-backed beach on Kaua'i in the 1960s and 1970s (cw: black and white archival stills of unclothed community members, oral recollections of police actions against the community).
In AI, it’s easy to argue about philosophical questions over-much
So please, remember: there are a very wide variety of ways to care about making sure that advanced AIs don’t kill everyone. Fundamentalist Christians can care about this; deep ecologists can care about this; solipsists can care about this; people who have no interest in philosophy at all can care about this. Indeed, in many respects, these essays aren’t centrally about AI risk in the sense of “let’s make sure that the AIs don’t kill everyone” (i.e., “AInotkilleveryoneism”) – rather, they’re about a set of broader questions about otherness and control that arise in the context of trying to ensure that the future goes well more generally. from Otherness and control in the age of AGI by Joe Carlsmith [more inside]
May 8
How King’s College Added 438 Solar Panels to a 500-Year-Old Chapel
How King’s College Added 438 Solar Panels to a 500-Year-Old Chapel. The project sparked debate over how to decrease carbon emissions while preserving the historic structure’s architectural beauty.
The Seinfeld Roundtable
I believe this is from 2007. The Seinfeld Roundtable [1h] has the core cast plus Larry David sitting around talking about the show. Michael Richards doesn't speak much. I enjoyed it enough to share.
"The noise of being online was becoming almost too much for even me."
Steve Albini, musician and producer has died
Steve Albini, lengendary producer (engineer) and musician has died of a heart attack at age 61. He worked with everyone from Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Nirvana, Pixies and The Breeders.
You are what ate you?
Eccentric conspiracist and Presidential candidate RFK, Jr. had brainworms. NYT: R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain.
"The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain." [more inside]
Purple Reign
A rare archaeological object – thought to be the only one of its type in the former Roman Empire – has been discovered in Carlisle, England. The remnants of the Roman bathhouse at the Carlisle Cricket Club have revealed an extremely rare chunk of Tyrian purple dye, the first of its kind ever discovered in northern Europe and possibly the entire Roman Empire. [...] Known as “imperial purple,” tyrian purple was an extremely valuable dye in ancient Rome because of its rich, vivid color, which denoted imperial authority, wealth, and status. It took a lot of resources and labor-intensive procedures to produce even small amounts, as it was made from thousands of crushed sea snails (Bolinus brandaris) from the Mediterranean. This rarity and exclusivity meant that it was more valuable than gold, sometimes up to three times as much by weight.Fun fact: If a buyer wanted to know if there was something fishy about their exquisite dye, they could always see if it passed the smell test -- read the straight poop inside. [more inside]
Is Cooking Classist? New video from Hoots
A solution that is only a solution for the people who can afford to be a part of the solution is not a solution A hour long video about cooking, food, race, gender, class and capitalism.
“...we are headed for major societal disruption within the next 5 years”
Guardian: World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target. “Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed. Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.” [Daily sea surface temperature]
Teaching others how to speak, a voice falls silent
Zoey Alexandria, voice actor, singer, and instructor for transgender voices, has passed away at the age of 29. She spent much of her adult life dedicated to helping other trans people navigate their way through finding new voices and addressing vocal dysphoria. Her YouTube channel is a valuable resource for others during and after transition. [more inside]
You are what you eat?
Perhaps you have heard of or watched the popular Netflix series You Are What You Eat: A Twin Study that launched earlier this year. The docuseries follows some participants in the Stanford Twin Nutrition Study (TwiNS): Vegan VS. Omnivore run by Dr. Christopher Gardner in which 22 pairs of twins ate an omnivorous or vegan diet for eight weeks. The results indicated improved metabolic health and received wide media coverage. [more inside]