November 5, 2015
Canada National Fillm Board: Wild Life (animation)
This animated short tells the story of a dapper young remittance man, sent from England to Alberta to attempt ranching in 1909. However, his affection for [polo and] badminton, bird watching and liquor leaves him little time for wrangling cattle. It soon becomes clear that nothing in his refined upbringing has prepared him for the harsh conditions of the New World. A film about the beauty of the prairie, the pangs of homesickness and the folly of living dangerously out of context. [SLYT Canada NFB] [more inside]
THE AGING FACE
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The Car, Thunder Charger, Plymouth Barracuda SSXR, Supervan, Batmobile, AMX-400 all rolled out of Barris Kustoms, home of car customiser and fabricator George Barris who passed away today at age 89. [more inside]
Ben Carson Gets Schwifty
"When cabbage and peas were often our best meal"
In late October 1716 Jacob Arend, a journeyman cabinetmaker, was 28 years old and at a crossroads. He and his fellow journeyman, Johannes Witthalm, had recently finished work on a writing cabinet.... The writing cabinet was a masterpiece but Jacob felt the need to write a letter and conceal it in the cabinet. He made sure it would not be easily found and he was very successful in this endeavor. The letter was not found until December 1967 and it wasn’t until 2014 that the letter was translated and studied.
"I would say there’s a lot of wariness among scholars."
Lamar Smith continues waging his three-year war on the National Science Foundation. If Congress has its way, the next round of grants by the National Science Foundation, a hallmark of government funding for graduate students and scientists, will no longer be based on scientific merit. Proposals would not be reviewed by panels of preeminent scholars across the United States as they have been for more than a half-century; instead, they would all be “in the national interest,” with strict new rules adopted earlier this month by a Republican House committee. Previously. This is not the first time Smith has tried to impose Congressional control on the NSF's budget.
"You mean that it was all a kid’s dream? I didn’t like it."
Norman Lloyd (Dr. Auschlander on St. Elsewhere and the professor who discovered the common root of life in the Star Trek universe) is still alive. In fact, he turns 101 on Sunday. And he's still working, so the AV Club sat down with Lloyd for its Random Roles feature, covering a career that's spanned from Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin to Don Adams to Judd Apatow.
Building Bones: rearticulating animal skeletons with Lee Post and others
In the late 1970s, a bicycle mechanic named Lee Post moved to Homer, Alaska to run a small bookstore with his mother. He also volunteered at the town's natural history museum, where he took on the task of assembling a beaked whale skeleton.This is the story of how a bookseller from Homer, Alaska became the an international animal skeleton re-assembly expert (Bay Nature). [more inside]
Post thought, well, I've repaired bikes — surely I can repair a whale skeleton if I have a book to follow, and conveniently, I run a bookstore. He searched for any books about reconstructing whale skeletons. “There was no such thing,” he says.
"Mature minors"
When A 14-Year-Old Chooses To Die Because Of Religion, Can Anyone Stop Him? Dennis Lindberg was 14 when he was diagnosed with leukemia. As a Jehovah's Witness, he declined the blood transfusions that could have saved his life.
Reform Judaism Now the U.S.A's Most Trans-Inclusive Religious Group
Today, the Union of Reform Judaism, the body that represents synagogues in the Reform movement —Judaism's largest U.S. branch — unanimously passed the most far-reaching resolution on transgender rights of any major religious organization. The resolution affirms the equality of transgender people and welcomes them into congregations, camps and other Reform Jewish institutions. [more inside]
Treasure chest
Scholars are beginning to examine an unprecedented collection of European correspondence from the late 17th and early 18th centuries--a chest belonging to a Dutch postmaster which contains some 2600 undelivered letters, 600 of which have never been opened.
Rap. Franco Arabic. Paris.
Hey! Watch it pal! She's Celibate!
In 1984, the comic book Evangeline's first issue was released, featuring the eponymous killer sexy secret-agent nun... in spaaace! #1: Guns of Mars. #2: Hate Boat. #3 Dinosaur Farm. Bonus Theme Song! Evangeline by Matthew Sweet.
a corporation's influence can persist long after the corporation itself
Empire tells of the legacy of the Dutch East India Company, and its cultural legacy, through online experience blending image, text, video, and audio.
You did not go into space that day
Remember that Antares rocket that blew up shorty after launch in October of 2014? NASA just released several startling gorgeous photos of it exploding. [more inside]
Disney To Retire All Slave Leia Merch
Disney To Retire All Slave Leia Merchandise Word has it from "informed sources" at Disney that they company will stop releasing or authorizing any merchandise featuring the famed Slave Leia version of the original trilogy heroine sometime in 2016. Even a fan movement to re-christen the look as "Slayer Leia" (because she kills Jabba with the chain in the pleasure barge fight scene) is not really in the cards for official use.
Desert Vision
In 1987, guitarist Paul Speer and pianist David Lanz teamed up with videographer Jan Nickman to create a video album inspired by the Southwest of the United States. Desert Vision is instrumental music that feels influenced by Vangelis, Trevor Jones, and Pat Metheney coupled with video that soars dramatically across the landscape or introspectively ponders nature from the ground.
Eagle's Path
Seguaro
Desert Rain
Sculptures
Canyon Lands
Carlsbad
White Sands
Stormlight
Tawtoma [audio only]
This is my ongoing horrified face
N is for Neo-Otyugh
For Inktober, an A-Z of D&D monsters.
It started with monogamy
Phylogenetic analysis (using DNA to figure out the family tree of life) of Hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps) has shown that eusociality (societies in which the many give up their own reproduction to support the reproduction of the few) first evolved, in every case studied so far, in monogamous species, in which all offspring have the same mother and father. [more inside]
“Houellebecq’s name is so rich with associations —”
Stoned suburbanites. The new normal in Colorado.
“Should we smoke before we pray?” Cynthia Joye asked, tapping the Bible resting on her lap New York Magazine profile on Centennial Colorado where weed is referred to as cannabis, and you don't get high, you get "lifted"
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
René Girard, literary theorist and religious historian, has died at the age of 91. The French-born academic and Immortel of the Académie Française first became famous for developing the idea of mimetic rivalry as a predominant theme in modern literature. Later, and more controversially, he argued for the centrality of violence and scapegoating in ancient religions, by which the sacrifice of a chosen victim restores peace in society. Most controversially of all, he argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is unique in exposing and refuting this scapegoating mechanism. (Previously, previously)
Tool of the Trade
By definition, any computing platform invented in the first half of the 1980s that has survived until 2015—and is an enormous business—has accomplished something remarkable. There's the Windows PC, which traces its heritage back to the original IBM PC announced in August 1981. There's the Mac, which famously debuted in January 1984.
And then there's the Bloomberg Terminal, which hit the market in December 1982. [more inside]
And then there's the Bloomberg Terminal, which hit the market in December 1982. [more inside]
Wrinkles The Clown
Hakuna Matata
Reader, I married them...
Tuesday night, after Amy Poehler had wrapped up her interview with Carrie Brownstein at a Pasadena, California event to promote Brownstein's new memoir, Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl, they turned to the audience to ask if anyone had any questions for Carrie. Two young women, Kendall and Genevieve, raised their hands and asked if Brownstein, who recently became a licensed wedding officiant in California, would marry them. She said yes.
Broadway Takes the Lead
At the A.V. Club, Caroline Siede examines how Hamilton and Allegiance might represent a new approach to historical drama.
"the TV set in my head was running constantly, never turning off."
"I think she's being railroaded"
"Facing criminal charges, relieved of her law license and threatened with removal by the Legislature, Pennsylvania's attorney general Kathleen Kane seems to have decided that if she has to go, she's going to take others down with her. As authorities began building the leak case against her, Kane started releasing chains of emails, saying the misconduct allegations against her were concocted by a corrupt old-boy network inside law enforcement to stop her from exposing their raunchy email ring." [more inside]
Four Months Hand-Cutting A Paper Microbe
“Cut Microbe” is a sculpture entirely hand cut out of paper. Measuring 44 inches/112cms in length, it is half a million times bigger than the ecoli bacteria upon which it is based. I wanted to create a sculpture that reflected in the process of being made the incredible scale and complexity of this microbiological world. I am amazed at the strange beauty of the natural world and wanted to open people’s eyes to aspects of it that they rarely see. -Rogan Brown
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