November 14, 2011
Hey, hey, hey.. Gooood-bye!
Occupy Wall Street is building the barricades at this very moment. NYPD has begun clearing Zuccotti Park.
From The Muddy Banks Of The Ottawa
It's smooth, it's stretchy, it's waterproof - Canada's new currency feels a lot like the celluloid film you used to load into your old-fashioned camera. [more inside]
Android 4.0 Source.
The source code to Android 4.0 has been released. The new OS, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich will be coming out on phones soon, but you can download the code today (using git). The popular cyanogen mod distribution should be updated to ICS in a couple months
Mayor of the Sunset Strip, Rodney Bingenheimer documentary
In Southern California in the 1980s, KROQ had this weird un-DJ-like guy named (seriously) Rodney Bingenheimer, who came on late at night on Sundays and played punk records and new bands like Blondie, The Ramones, X, Joan Jett, Devo and Cheap Trick. Did this weirdo really have some influence? A 90-minute 2004 documentary now on YouTube, Mayor of the Sunset Strip (Part 1) tells his story, and it's weirder than you may have imagined. [more inside]
Like to get to know you well
Howard Jones has posted scans of the music books for his first 4 albums (Human's Lib, Dream Into Action, One To One and Cross That Line) and two early EPs (Action Replay and Like To Get To Know You Well) for free .pdf format download. He asks that a donation be made to the Red Cross if you do decide to download. [more inside]
See you at the corner of West 15,903rd and South 14,437th St.
Harold Cooper’s Extend New York takes New York City to extremes, by extrapolating every street and avenue of the Manhattan grid to whole planet. What subway line stops at your front door, wherever you are? Why do all Avenues terminate in Shaytankuduk?
Britta'd it
The Xanadu Story
Regardless of the outcomes and foreshadowing, the lethal combination of the sudden musical revival and the roller disco fad that was freshly in the cultural air in the late 70’s was still too good to pass up. It was only inevitable that someone somewhere would make the explosive connection….and at this intersection, Xanadu would happen... [more inside]
The Fourth Truning, the fourth generation of the current saeculum is taking over...
The Fourth Turning is a book written by Williams Strauss & Neil Howe and published in 1997. Watch this 1997 C-SPAN interview of the two authors describing their theory. It is pretty shocking looking back 14 years, the turning is happening, but will the results be like Strauss and Howe predict it? You owe it to your self to check it out. [more inside]
If you thought ska kids pulled funny moves, watch this emu move...
Kangaroo vs. Emu. SLYT
PhDs and GEDs
This post contains Seasonal CBC awesome - Happy [safe] (upcoming) Holidays - Just Saying
This year the CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik.
His subject is winter - the season, the space, the cycle. Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter.
Listen to Winter: Five Windows on the Season Streaming files for this years lecture will be available until Friday, November 18. [more inside]
Strong social safety nets encourage entrepeneurship
Safety nets: hammocks or trampolines? Academic James Wimberley argues that the supposedly entrepreneurial USA fares poorly on business startups, and attributes this to the relative absence of a comprehensive social safety net.(via)
And the florist says, "White lily."
This one time in Edo Japan, Bashō got together with a bunch of his rich friends from Nagoya to make up a set of interlocking poems (renku) — 36 of them, to be exact (a format called kasen). Then, 320 years later, the complete cycle was animated by a diverse international team of artists. [more inside]
♫...Bus...Desert Bus!...♫
In 1995, Penn and Teller were the creative forces behind the-ultimately-unreleased Sega CD game Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors, which contained several minigames designed to prank or torture your friends...or yourself. The most notorious of these mini-games is Desert Bus, a game vicious in its intentional monotony. [more inside]
[insert wampa sound effect here]
What do you get when you cross a pug with the Wampa from The Empire Strikes Back?
Behold The Wampug. (SLYT 36 seconds of cute)
Spare the rod.
In Sweden, a generation of kids who've never been spanked. 'Numerous studies have been conducted in recent years to support the theory that physical forms of discipline do more harm than good' and the effects of physical discipline linger for adults. Most parents in the U.S. and many other countries firmly believe that physical punishment is an important tool in controlling their children. But in Sweden, there's now a whole generation that doesn't believe corporal punishment has any place in disciplining any child. In 1979 Sweden became the first country to ban physical punishment of children. [more inside]
What Are These Mysterious Lines In China's Desert?
Some Google Earth enthusiasts have found a strange and unexplainable grid pattern in the middle of China's Gobi Desert.
This is delicious made with squirrels when camping out on a hunting trip
JFK's Waffles, Adlai's Pie, Humphrey's Soup and 13 More Political Recipes. Political Pot Luck: A Collection of Recipes from Men Only, published in 1959 by the Peninsular Publishing Company in Tallahassee. It was edited by Meg Madigan, whose father was a Florida state comptroller and lobbyist. And she went all out for the cookbook, from governors to senators to media barons. Some of them can cook
John Ruskin's Elements of Drawing
The Elements of Drawing: John Ruskin's Teaching Collection at Oxford digitizes the drawings, engravings, and paintings that John Ruskin collected (and created) for use in teaching drawing. The objects can be viewed separately or in their teaching order and context, with Ruskin's own catalog annotations. The site also suggests how modern art students can put the collection to use, with instructional video and a variety of drawing exercises. Ruskin also assembled another fine art collection for working-class viewers in Sheffield; you can see that collection at the Museum of Sheffield, which also helps sponsor a digital reconstruction of the original museum building, the St. George's Museum.
Yellow Magic Orchestra on Soul Train, 1980
Let the robot dancing begin! Yellow Magic Orchestra performs the oft-sampled "Firecracker" on Soul Train, 1980. YMO --". . . presently the most popular band in all of Japan"-- also perform "Tighten Up".
She sells seashells etc.
Do you like bivalves? Do you like Britain? Then Marine Bivalve Shells of the British Isles is the site for you! [more inside]
Don't mention the f-word
Grandville and the anthropomorphic tradition by Bryan Talbot, a 59min youtube lecture and slideshow on the history of anthropomorphism in comics and the creation of his own graphic novel in the tradition, Grandville
Pass the Pimento Cheese, Please.
Pimento cheese, largely unknown outside of the Southern US, is an important player in the rich culinary tradition of the South. This short (15 min) documentary explores the history of the dish and gives a glimpse at just how passionate some folks are about their pimento cheese. [more inside]
EXTERMINATE
Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done their own transformations, which were fantastic, but we have to put that aside and start from scratch. Variety reports Harry Potter director David Yates wants to reboot Doctor Who. Topless Robot reacts.
Booksleuth provides further help finding "lost" books.
From IDEA to SOCIAL MEDIA.
Life Cycle of a Book: Writer. Editorial. Agent. Production. Design. Marketing. Publicity. Sales. Book Buyer. Distribution. Author Publicity. Full Life Cycle [PDF]
Is it time to lose faith in the Boomers?
I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way.”
Thomas Day, a 31-year-old Iraq War vet, Penn State alum, and product of Jerry Sandusky's Second Mile Foundation, reflects on what he calls the "failure" of the Baby Boomer generation to protect the world they inherited.
Studio 4°C: anime that is dense with substance
Studio 4°C is a Japanese animation studio, named for the temperature at which water is most dense, which they convey in their creative manifesto: "create only works that are dense with substance and extreme quality." The studio has produced a range of works, from commercials (Honda Edix | Nike iD REALCITY) and music videos (Ken Ishii - 'Extra' [prev] | Utada Hikaru - 'Fluximation'), to animated series (The Adventures of Tweeny Witches | Thundercats reboot [prev]) and feature-length films (Memories [1995] | Mind Game [2004]). More on their movies inside. [more inside]
The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan
Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. [more inside]
Something Tells Me To Stop With the Al-Qaeda. I Ignore It
Frank Miller is a giant among comic book creators. He gave us The Dark Knight Returns, which rewrote the book on Batman and comics in general. He also gave us seminal versions of Daredevil, Batman, and Wolverine. His Sin City and 300 books are a triumph of design, if not subtlety.
Lately, though, he's taken a different path. He recently released Holy Terror, which in 2005 was to have featured Batman, but now features a renamed stand-in fighting Al-Qaeda. It has been nearly universally panned as a piece of ugly, anti-Muslim propaganda.
Last week, Miller blasted the "Occupy" movement on his blog, describing the participants as, "louts, thieves, and rapists," who, "can do nothing but harm America" and pointing to the looming threat of Al-Qaeda.
"What if you could take children's dreams and insert them into the bowling ball?"
"Imagine a world where casual and hardcore gamers can enjoy games together? So instead of hardcore gamers pretending to like wii sports just so they can spend xmas with their family they actually prefer it as opposed to just going off and playing the best hardcore games such as Skyrim or Fable3." From the often hilarious fake Twitter account for "Peter Molyneux 2" comes cascore. Finally, bowling and survival horror come together. [more inside]
Amazing sixth grader gives TEDx talk
Sixth grader codes iOS apps, gives TED talks, and - generally - makes me feel like I've been lazy my entire life.
"Say hello to my little friend" AL PACINO in the new movie "Jack and Jill." :)
"On Friday, a group of comedians took to Twitter, creating a faux-official account for Jack and Jill under the name @JackNJillMovie, firing off a series of digs at the film disguised as a misguided and desperate promotional campaign."The Twitter account is suspended, but you can't take pee out of a swimming pool.
It's contemprary and it's good and it's in Barcelona
The Museo Europeu de Art Modern in Barcelona presently has an exhibition of contemporary art featuring many catalan and spanish painters and sculpters and is housed in a restaured palacio (click through the "plantas"). MEAM is associated with figurativas en red.
As this is contemporary art, nudes abound and this post is unfortunately NSFW in many places.
As this is contemporary art, nudes abound and this post is unfortunately NSFW in many places.
In for a penny, in for Santana's Abraxas
On June 29, 2011, the last remnant of what was once Columbia House — the mightiest mail-order record club company that ever existed — quietly shuttered for good. Other defunct facets of the 20th-century music business have been properly eulogized, but it seems that nary a tear was shed for the record club. Perhaps ... a new generation of music fans who had never known a world without the Internet couldn't grasp the marvel that was the record club in its heyday. From roughly 1955 until 2000, getting music for free meant taping a penny to a paper card and mailing it off for 12 free records — along with membership and the promise of future purchasing.
The rise and fall of the Columbia Record House club--and how we learned to steal music.
The rise and fall of the Columbia Record House club--and how we learned to steal music.
butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high
The Mystery of the Sherlock Holmes Stamps
In the cufflink of Sherlock Holmes, as depicted in this stamp, you will find the first clue. (It's the letter O.) In the remaining stamps in this collection you will find the remaining clues, which spell a five-letter word. [more inside]
The Legend of Doom House
Malpertuis (Belgium, 1971, aka ‘The Legend of Doom House’) is a movie that has been described as ‘bizarre, lurid and baffling;’ ‘a mysterious curiosity;’ and ‘exquisitely bonkers.’ An international cast led by Mathieu Carrière and Susan Hampshire (playing five rôles) also included Orson Welles. Its director, Harry Kümel, is otherwise best known for his stylish lesbian vampire flick Les Lèvres Rouges (aka ‘Daughters of Darkness’). The movie was adapted from an unusual gothic novel, first published in wartime Brussels—the work of Jean Ray (aka Raymond Jean-Marie de Kremer): a convicted embezzler & prolific hack, who was, nevertheless, one of the foremost exponents of the fantastique in French-language fiction. Please note that some of the links above are NSFW (some nudity) & several contain SPOILERS. [more inside]
"To elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness"
lululemon athletica, the "yoga-inspired athletic apparel company", has rapidly become a brand fixture in the Pacific Northwest since its founding by Chip Wilson in 1998. Recently, a strange ode to Ayn Rand appeared on their website, and a "Who Is John Galt?" advertising campaign has adorned company packaging this November. Meanwhile, one of their employees has been convicted in the bizarre murder of a co-worker, in which the employees of a neighbouring Apple Store ignored the victim's cries for help.
Going out to battle for freedom and truth
Look at my fucking red trousers! "A collection of photographs in celebration of the vibrant and burgeoning red-trousered communities of London and elsewhere."
On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
American Censorship Day is an internet protest against the oft-renamed Stop Online Piracy Act. [more inside]
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