February 4, 2015
A Prayer For Gluten
God, you sent gluten into this world as you sent your own Son, to save us, not to torment us with vague and possibly imaginary physical symptoms. So please help certain people to remember, gracious Lord, even as they shun and revile gluten, that it is still a creation of your own Almighty hand, and that, being God, you probably knew what you were doing when you created it. Enlighten those of us in your flock, O Lord, who go about slandering gluten with great authority and volume, even though they never heard of gluten until last year. [more inside]
Jailed pirate Roberts
Ross Ulbricht AKA "The Dread Pirate Roberts" has been convicted on all seven charges for creating and operating Silk Road. It only took the jury three and a half hours to reach a verdict. He faces a minimum of 30 years in prison (maximum of life).
The Roundest Pickled Egg
A song about a pickled egg, by British comedy musician Elliot Mason, which devotees of Devo, Information Society, the Tiger Lillies, the sketch show Jam, and/or vintage Dr. Demento may enjoy.
I wish I could borrow the sun and light your darkened rooms.
Dear all the women who ever existed over the entire span of human history is a performance of the poem Letter to a wish by Emilie Zoey Baker, accompanied on the fiddle by The Man Who Wasn't There (Andrew Watson).
For all the travelers who have a free spirit.
Many people use the Midori Traveler's Notebook system as an organizer, planner, GTD tool; other people use it as a scrapbook-style journal (or journal-style scrapbook?). Because it is so simple, it's pretty easy to make your own. [more inside]
some damn fine music from Mauritania
Have you heard Noura Mint Seymali? She's a singer from Mauritania, and neither she nor her band pull any punches. Just fire up "Eguetmar", the first track on her album Tzenni, and dig that gritty, undulating electric guitar: Mauritanian through and through, but reminiscent of the blues and/or psychedelic stylings of the 60s, in just the right way. Then there's the beats: drumming so funky and syncopated, but in such a languidly relaxed way, that it harkens back to the way Ziggy Modeliste worked his drum magic with New Orleans funk legends the Meters. And, of course, Noura's voice: a bold, soaring and self-assured force of nature: stunning. Not to mention her masterful playing of the ardine, a 9-string Mauritanian harp providing delicate, spindly showers of notes that shimmer like droplets on a spider web. Please enjoy: Tzenni.
Strength Training
Riding Light
Follow the realtime path of a photon leaving the surface of our Sun
Music Video with thrash and humorous elements
IRON REAGAN - "Miserable Failure" (SLYT)
Neville Brody rebrands his studio after 20 years
World-renowned British graphic designer Neville Brody rebrands his studio "Research Studios" as "Brody Associates" after around 20 years of doing business. Reason? Clients misunderstood the services of the studio under its old name. [more inside]
Radio Shack: goodbye
Wire: Dear RadioShack, This Is Why We Adored You. Love, WIRED. "The time is near to bid farewell to that old security blanket, RadioShack. When the remote control broke, it was there. When we needed a cable or 20, it was there. But soon, it won’t be. The company is about to file for bankruptcy. Shares of its stock have been suspended from trading. We are forced to acknowledge that the era of personal electronics championed by the franchise stores that sold soldering gear and robots and had a Battery of the Month Club is really and truly over." [more inside]
A database of average home price by street name
Hot Dog: the Music Video
Shred Kelly, a "five-piece "stoke-folk," banjo-driven band from the ski-bum town of Fernie, B.C" have just put out a video for their song Sing to the Night, which may not be the most Canadian video of all time, but it's still a lot of fun, and a bravura piece of one-shot backwards-skiing stoke-folk film-making.
grey
A collection of paper cut-out models representing brutalist architecture of London from 1960s-1970s. See also Warsaw.
Worlds collide for Sci-Fi and LEGO fans
LEGO has announced that it will produce WALL•E and Doctor Who And Companions sets selected from submissions to the LEGO Ideas program. [more inside]
It's always the dentists.
Sadly no Thomas-Alexandre Dumas
My favorite parts of history (as might be obvious from my choice of subject matter when making books) are the ones that fall into easily-categorized genres, genres with associated visual iconographies. This is the sort of stuff I loved as a kid: pirates, knights, cowboys, explorers, romans and Egyptians and flying aces. Stuff you could find featured in a bag of toys or a generic costume.Chris Schweizer draws epic badasses from history, featuring Matthew Henson, the first man to reach the North Pole, Queen Nanny of the Windward Maroons, Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint George, Josephine Baker and ten more. Also available as a high resolution poster download for non-commercial purposes.
The software GPS
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for discovering how your brain creates a map of the space surrounding you, and how you navigate your way through a complex environment. [more inside]
"Old Man, take a look at yourself, I'm a lot like you."
Our hero is armed with tampons
Now you can shoot enemies with tampons on your phone, any time you want. In Tampon Run, a young lady fires tampons at her enemies instead of bullets. [more inside]
The internet must be fast, fair and open.
America's "Advanced Industries"
Some statistics and maps about jobs in "Advanced Industries", defined as industries that employ a higher percentage of STEM workers than the national average of all industries and R&D spending per worker above the 80th percentile of industries.
Everyday Life in Mao's China
A doctoral candidate in Chinese History at the University of Chicago collects and posts photos of everyday life in China during the Mao era. "I try to cover as many different aspects of life during this time period as possible. Where I can, I note the time and location."
Conventional Wisdom
Lincolns, Taxidermists, Ventriloquists, Bronies, Reenactors, Clowns, Santas, Furries, Merfolk - Photography by Arthur Drooker
I dynamite my personal life hoping to inspire my writing ✒
CBS could not give a fart
Want to hear Martellus Bennett's thoughts about fonts, including bold? Curious to see an impression of Regis Philbin doing an impression of Nicholas Cage eating too hot soup in Bangkok Dangerous? Ever wanted to find out what would happen when Adam "Not A Great Fit For Guest Host of the Late Late Show" Pally acted as guest host of the Late Late Show? During a snow storm? In front of no studio audience? With no laugh track but the muffled responses of the crew, who apparently hate him? With his trusted companion, Ben Schwartz, at his side, Adam Pally made a nearly unimaginable, nearly incomprehensible, at least partially unintentionally brilliant and absurd hour-long mockery of the late show format. Watch it all. [more inside]
The Noise and How to Bring It
The Quietus interviews Hank Shocklee on hip-hop production team The Bomb Squad and Public Enemy's legendary sound
I've got a big jazz background and listening to a lot of jazz records I got an understanding of how you can be eclectic, in terms of your musical scales. You could create melodies and rhythms that were atonal. It didn't necessarily have any real tone but the tone would be determined by what you layered on top of it. So, for example, because Chuck has this kind of baritone voice, Chuck becomes the melody, and the track becomes the accompaniment. If you take a Billie Holiday record, and a Public Enemy record, in a way they are very similar. This is where it gets crazy. And Flav, well basically Flav is a tenor. I read a Clive Davis interview. And to me, Clive is one of the greatest producers of all time. And he said something that was cool, he said the artist always has to be the star, and sound like a star. And the beautiful thing about the Public Enemy records is, Chuck and Flavor provide the melody, on all the records.
Which Country Reads the Most?
A map showing the reading habits of 10 countries. For comparison, number of books published per capita in Europe.
Do you read Sutter Cane? No? Oh, he's good, check him out. Well, bye
The Wall Street Journal celebrates the 20th anniversary of John Carpenter's In The Mouth of Madness. Meanwhile, at VICE, John Carpenter wouldn't explain his new album, so they got a bunch of artists to each provide their own interpretation.
The Complete Works: Ranking All 121 Billy Joel Songs
The Complete Works: Ranking All 121 Billy Joel Songs Vulture.com music critic Cristopher Bonanos spent the last three months immersed in Billy Joel's back catalogue. Here are his observations, along with links to many of the songs. As he says in the article, "Let the arguments begin".
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