August 17, 2008
Congratulations! It's a locomotive!
Following up to this post, the people at the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust recently completed their 18-year project to build a new steam locomotive. Congratulations are in order.
Escaped a disaster? Tell everyone!
Whether you're fleeing tropical storm Fay - which is currently heading for Florida - or you've just been airlifted out of the Grand Canyon due to the the recent flooding due to a dam breach, or even "none of the above/other", the American Red Cross has a way for you to let folks know you're Safe and Sound. You can search for people in the list by family name, pre-disaster phone number, and pre-disaster address. Also, the American Red Cross has a twitter feed. But I don't think twitter being down counts as a disaster...
Félix Fénéon's "Novels in Three Lines", via Twitter
There's the emergent practice of the posthumous diary blog (e.g. Mr. Pepys) and there's the recent adaptation of Hamlet as a Facebook feed.
Now comes Twitter, which is spooling out Félix Fénéon's "Novels in Three Lines" at some irregular clip. Translated by Luc Sante, described as narratives compressed into a single frame, these 3-line news items from Le Matin 'are the poems & novels Fénéon never otherwise wrote.'
Now comes Twitter, which is spooling out Félix Fénéon's "Novels in Three Lines" at some irregular clip. Translated by Luc Sante, described as narratives compressed into a single frame, these 3-line news items from Le Matin 'are the poems & novels Fénéon never otherwise wrote.'
African Kings photoset
pye dogs in India
Bluegrass Grows in Golden Gate Park.
Bluegrass Grows in Golden Gate Park. The line-up for the 8th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival has been announced for the first weekend of October in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, its traditional location since its inception in 2001. [more inside]
It's all pepe, all the time
The Afterlife of American Clothes. "From 2003 to 2007 [filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi] visited rag yards in Miami, dug through archives in London and Washington, D.C., and traveled to Haiti to see the international secondhand markets for themselves. The result is the recent documentary Secondhand (Pepe), which explores the global trade in used clothing."
Carolyn Drake Photography
All we have to do is touch it
Pac-Man The Movie (SLYT).
Who is Alexander Grothendieck?
Who is Alexander Grothendieck? [PDF] This lecture is concerned not with Grothendieck's mathematics but with his very unusual life on the fringes of human society. In particular, there is, on the one hand, the question of why at the age of forty-two Grothendieck first of all resigned his professorship at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES); then withdrew from mathematics completely; and finally broke off all connections to his colleagues, students, acquaintances, friends, as well as his own family, to live as a hermit in an unknown place. On the other hand, one would like to know what has occupied this restless and creative spirit since his withdrawal from mathematics.
Disaster Capitalism
"Like the dotcom bubble, the disaster bubble is inflating in an ad-hoc and chaotic fashion." Journalist Naomi Klein discusses how corporations and governments are working together more closely than ever, using the mandate of catastrophe — whether natural or man-made — to further concentrate power in fewer hands, with less oversight: from illegal sales of American police technology to China to avert hypothetical tragedies during the Beijing Olympics, to the privatization of water supplies in post-tsunami Sri Lanka.
George Carlin, 1957 - 1970.
George Carlins early career is often overlooked, though every veteran comedian worth his salt will tell you that it takes years, sometimes a decade or longer, until you have amassed enough stage time to fully develop your character, act, and jokes. [more inside]
Jerry Wexler
Legendary record man and music producer Jerry Wexler died on August 15, at the age of 91. His keen insight, and his deep love and appreciation for the artists he worked with resulted in an extraordinary enriching of American music. [more inside]
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