January 14, 2018
Bullitt AND Seinfeld references!
It's safer to back into a head-on parking spot, and then pull out forward. Most Americans do just the opposite. Why?
“The ax has fallen.”
Moby Dick; Or the Whale.
There are bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) older than this whale of a tale.
EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian). It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.[more inside]
The Other Irish Stout
So Murphy's Stout is not Guinness, it's from the Republic of Cork, Ireland's southern capital. In 1997, to capitalize on the rising popularity of anime Murphy's broadcast a amazing anime ad on the UK's Channel 4, Last Orders. The ad was a homage to a famous (in Cork) ad from the early nineties inspired by Kurosawa. That ad also had an excellent follow up, "Old man with parsnip". Cheers!
Math rock, but with actual math
The sound of space-filling curves. Herman Haverkort presents sonifications, or musical representations, of space-filling curves in various dimensions. (Sonification previously.)
Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradisio - Python
In 2016, Anat Deracine wrote a piece and "hid it under a rock for reasons that no longer exist." Earlier this month, she declared that 2018 is going to be fearless and published her Divine Comedy of the Tech Sisterhood.
The Thing She Carried
"The cast-iron skillet is 13 inches in diameter and so heavy I have to use both hands to pour anything out of it. And it tells a story of Florida endurance and female endurance that I wanted with me in that moment, a thing I never want to lose. It belonged to my great-great-grandmother, the cook on a wagon train from Georgia to Florida in the late 19th century...She had packed up everything she could, including the skillet, an even more massive Dutch oven and a one-gallon soup pot, all of them iron, all built to last. The kinds of things you take when you can take only important things." From the Bitter Southerner's Folklore Project: Susannah Nesmith's The Skillet, a personal reflection on what to save when you must leave it all behind. [more inside]
“...barns are red primarily because tradition dictates it be so,”
Falu Red, The Color of Bucolic Barns and Mummified Swedes [The Awl] “According to legend, there was once a goat named Kåre who lived with his shepherd boy in rural Sweden. One day, Kåre returned home with his horns stained a bright, mineral red. Instead of being frightened by his newly Baphomet-looking livestock, the boy summoned all his entrepreneurial impulses and set to work figuring out how he could make money from this occurrence. His goat had fallen headfirst into a pile of earthly riches, discovering a patch of copper-laden land, russet soil and dusty yellow stones. This site would become the famous copper mines of Falun, the source of much of Sweden’s wealth throughout the Middle Ages and the reason we have the term “barn red,” for it was here that Swedes discovered the preserving and protective properties of copper, iron ochre, silica, and zinc. Mixed with linseed oil, these minerals became a deep warm red paint, which was applied to the sides of houses and barns throughout Scandinavia and later, the east coast of America.” [more inside]
The Story of Cats, from ITV and PBS
The Story of Cats is a documentary mini-series, first aired on ITV then re-cut with new narration on PBS: Nature, now as a two-part series instead of three, with a different narrative flow. Where ITV focuses on comparisons of wild cats with "our moggies," PBS traces the evolution of cats as they spread across the world, and into our homes. ITV [via YouTube] ep 1: Wild at Heart; ep 2: Cute Response; ep 3: Super Cats | PBS ep 1: Asia to Africa; ep 2: Americas
In a well-written romance it is super-gratifying when the 🍆 meets the 🍩.
When comedian Paul Scheer got snarky on Instagram about the cover of a romance novel, members of the romance community took him to task. In apology, he live-tweeted his reading of the first book in the series. Via SorryWatch: ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS, EXCELLENT CELEB APOLOGY NOT A DRILL. [more inside]
Southern Food: Old Ways, New Ways
Carolina Fish Camps were and are an institution. But new southerners, especially Mexicans, are adapting older recipes to their tastes and old southerners are loving the new foods, too. Here's a video on a new recipe for turnip greens Turnip Greens de Arbol and a new dessert melding old and new: Peach Empanadas. The South has always blended traditions from other cultures and it's still doing so.
The first adventure
It’s an intense and cult-ish thing to discover Pierce’s books as a young girl. For all their sorcerers and dragons, her books, at their core, are about young women growing up and figuring out who they are: how to be weird and stubborn and heroic and angry, how to deal with getting their periods, how to control their tempers, how to handle jealousy, how to decide whether to sleep with their best friends or their teachers, how to prevent pregnancy, how to navigate romantic relationships with men many years their seniors, how to challenge and defeat men many years their seniors, how to be women who don’t conform to the rigid expectations of their (entirely imaginary!) world and time.
Two very different approaches to magical realism in painting
Rob Gonsalves was a Canadian artist who produced a delightful series of paintings that were part optical illusion, part flight of fantasy.
Andrea Kowch paints magical realist pictures of women in rural landscapes. Her work has been described as like a cross between Andrew Wyeth and Alfred Hitchcock.
"If the Lord is good enough to send me wind on a Sunday"
"Do improvements in energy efficiency actually lead to energy savings? At first sight, the advantages of efficiency seem to be impressive. For example, the energy efficiency of a range of domestic appliances covered by the EU directives has improved significantly over the last 15 years. Between 1998 and 2012, fridges and freezers became 75% more energy efficient, washing machines 63%, laundry dryers 72%, and dishwashers 50%. " [more inside]
Trainspotting and Poptopping
British Rail, Rail Blue 1967-1980 Footage of British Rail trains accompanied by contemporary music hits and radio show clips (SLVimeo)
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