December 13, 2014
Library cats
Edinburgh University give library card to a cat. Library cats on Wikipedia. More and more library cats.
Merry Christmas from the "Sesame Street" Family, 1975
Song for an old-fashioned Christmas: "'Twas the night before Christmas on Sesame Street/And the people were sleeping, ‘cause the people were beat/The snow had been falling for most of the day/And it lay over everything, sooty and grey..." -- as performed by Sesame's own David (lyrics) for the 1975 album "Merry Christmas from Sesame Street" (cover; inside artwork; back cover). Please join me (and Bert and Ernie and Oscar and Big Bird and others) in revisiting a holiday classic. [more inside]
Nobel lecture by Patrick Modiano
Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge, but to keep going. It is a little like driving a car at night, in winter, on ice, with zero visibility. You have no choice, you cannot go into reverse, you must keep going forward while telling yourself that all will be well when the road becomes more stable and the fog lifts.—From Patrick Modiano's lecture when receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature [Original French, Swedish and video] which is about cities, old telephone directories but mostly about writing, how to do it and what it's like.
Radio Raheem Is a Broken Record
Do the Right Thing wasn’t ahead of its time. It was behind its time, and it’s ahead of ours. It came out in the summer of 1989, six months before Driving Miss Daisy, but if you can imagine it without hip-hop, it could have come out in 1939 alongside Gone with the Wind; without color, in 1929 with The Jazz Singer; without sound, 1915 and The Birth of a Nation. If you updated the soundtrack and the fashion a bit and released it next week, critics would praise its timeliness and how its depiction of police brutality and racial tension captures the angry zeitgeist surrounding the recent killings of unarmed black civilians by police officers. Some might even predict that it would ultimately end up feeling dated, as some did 25 years ago. If only. - Lessons from Do the Right Thing on Its 25th Anniversary
“Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?" Phrasing!!
"Today, most American adults can call up some memory of sex ed in their school, whether it was watching corny menstruation movies or seeing their school nurse demonstrate putting a condom on a banana. The movies, in particular, tend to stick in our minds. Screening films at school to teach kids how babies are made has always been a touchy issue, particularly for people who fear such knowledge will steer their children toward sexual behavior. But sex education actually has its roots in moralizing: American sex-ed films emerged from concerns that social morals and the family structure were breaking down." — Slut-Shaming, Eugenics, and Donald Duck: The Scandalous History of Sex-Ed Movies
Let's Get Together and Feel All Right
72 Hours in Detroit; on the decline and rebirth of (musical) Motor City
Electronic Beats interviews five Detroit residents (Michael Stone-Richards, a professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at CCS in Detroit; Mike Huckaby, an internationally successful DJ and longtime producer of Detroit techno; Cornelius Harris, aka "The Unknown Writer", the label manager and occasional MC for Underground Resistance Records; Walter Wasacz; a journalist and writer based in Hamtramck, an enclave in the center of Detroit; Mark Ernestus, the Berlin-based producer, DJ and co-owner of Hard Wax record store; Mike Banks of Underground Resistance [UR]; George Clinton, the founder and leader of Parliament Funkadelic; and Samantha Corbit, who has over a decade of involvement with multiple Detroit record labels) on the past and future of Detroit, and it's (electronic) (musical) history. 72 Hours in Detroit
Sit on my face and tell me that this parliamentary legislation is wrong
Why were people sitting on other people's faces outside the UK parliament recently? A variety of specific sexual acts were banned from UK-filmed online porn videos under the 2014 Audiovisual Media Services Regulation, which came into effect this month. Protesters say some acts that show women enjoying sex are now banned while similar restrictions do not apply to men. [more inside]
The first rule of Art Club? Don’t talk about how you run Art Club
An eternity with Tootie
Tor.com presents "As Good As New" a short story by Charlie Jane Anders about a girl, the apocalypse, and making sure those three wishes count.
"I made it so she wanted to sleep with me, which was totally a lie..."
She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge
She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College, that's where I caught her eye.
She told me that her Dad was loaded
I said in that case I'll have a rum and coke-cola. She said fine, and in thirty seconds time she said,
I want to live like common people I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people I want to sleep with common people like you.
Well what else could I do – I said I'll see what I can do. [more inside]
She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College, that's where I caught her eye.
She told me that her Dad was loaded
I said in that case I'll have a rum and coke-cola. She said fine, and in thirty seconds time she said,
I want to live like common people I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people I want to sleep with common people like you.
Well what else could I do – I said I'll see what I can do. [more inside]
I will fight you with a bat'leth to defend the episode “Spock's Brain”
Playboy's Every Episode of Every "Star Trek" Series, Ever, Ranked (all 695 of them). io9's The Top 100 Star Trek Episodes Of All Time!
Storytime with Thomas Sanders
Thomas Sanders has been doing Vines in which he narrates people's lives for them, often surprising the subjects with what is actually happening. A 2m30s compilation gives you a taste of what he does.
"Be brave but never take chances"
Jackson Lears is interviewd by Public Books on The Confidence Economy
Absolutely, the confidence games take the form of their setting. In capitalist settings, it’s multivalent. Not only does one need confidence to trust the merchant who’s selling you an item, but the merchant needs confidence to start his own business, he needs it to invest, and the market needs it to be propelled forward. Of course we’re sitting here talking about this in the shadow of the banking crisis and recession! The cultural feature we’re talking about may be common to human interaction, no matter the specific setting, but those specific settings—a Mississippi River steamboat in the the mid-nineteenth century, or Catholic Italy a half millennium before—give form to its expression.[more inside]
What Happened to the ‘Future Leaders’ of the 1990s?
In its December 5, 1994 issue, Time Magazine picked 50 people who would be leaders in the future. They decided to revisit what happened to each person on the 20th anniversary of their predictions.
The most bombastic Christmas No 1 since Mr Blobby?
Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars's 'Uptown Funk' takes over the UK. "Uptown Funk apparently took seven months to write and 82 takes before they hit pop gold. At one point Ronson – overwhelmed with anxiety – vomited."
The Hobbit: How the 'clomping foot of nerdism' destroyed Tolkien's dream
It's one of the great literary tragedies of our age that Lord of the Rings, not its sprightlier prequel, served as the blueprint for modern fantasy. Returning to The Hobbit is like visiting a lost world, one which 20th century fantasy left behind. It’s almost surprising in how much fun it is compared to the exhausting trudges that followed. So with the third and final Hobbit film now upon us, it’s worth asking: why was it Lord of the Rings, not this sprightlier prequel, which served as the blueprint for modern high fantasy?
1. Regis
"How do Letterman’s writers start a list, and how do they end one? What kind of jokes work best in the Top Ten format? What kind of jokes don’t work at all? Which political figures have found their way onto the list most often? And what’s with all the Regis references? To answer these questions, I performed a statistical analysis of every Top Ten List ever read on the air by Letterman."
Nothing new under the sun
So how did medieval readers locate books, especially when they owned a lot of them? The answer lies in a neat trick that resembles our modern GPS : a book was tagged with a unique identifier (a shelfmark) that was entered into a searchable database (a library catalogue), which could subsequently be consulted with a handheld device (a portable version of the catalogue). Here is how to plot the route to a specific book in the medieval library.[more inside]
"Did you know that the champagne coupe is modeled after..."
"Myth Busts: The Enduring Legacy of Breast-Shaped Glassware" On champagne, breast milk, and the enduring fascination with some women's bodies.
"East bound and down, loaded up and truckin'..."
Have you ever wanted to quit your job and head out on the open road? Perhaps long distance trucking might suit you? Yes? No? No worries. We can go on a trip right here and see what the life of a long distance trucker is really like. Being an over-the-road driver has the reputation of being tough and hazardous. Why do they do it? Schneider National 11 Western Regional. Cincinnati, OH to Toledo, OH. Jeffersonville, IN to East Chicago, IN. What truck driving is all about. A Truckers View. An Office With a View. The long haul - OTR truck driving. This trip will be North American-centric, because it's what I'm familiar with. So with that proviso in mind, let's ride. We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there. [more inside]
It's A Licensed Character Christmas
For use spreading misery and pain during this holiday season, have a heaping shovelful of bad bad 80s Chrismas cartoon specials. Hail Grinch!
He-Man & She-Ra's Christmas Special (YouTube 44m)
Christmas Comes To Pac-Land (Dailymotion 23m)
The Wacky 12 Days of Christmas (YouTube 24m) (with Phil Hartman)
And the one that inspired this post, the amazing Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls (YouTube 23m) That is to say, the Wacky Wallwalker Christmas Special. Written by Mark Evanier!
After the break... TWENTY-ONE MORE OF THESE THINGS. You're welcome! [more inside]
He-Man & She-Ra's Christmas Special (YouTube 44m)
Christmas Comes To Pac-Land (Dailymotion 23m)
The Wacky 12 Days of Christmas (YouTube 24m) (with Phil Hartman)
And the one that inspired this post, the amazing Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls (YouTube 23m) That is to say, the Wacky Wallwalker Christmas Special. Written by Mark Evanier!
After the break... TWENTY-ONE MORE OF THESE THINGS. You're welcome! [more inside]
The Fall of THQ
At its peak in 2007, the company owned more than 15 game studios, most of which were part of the well-oiled licensed games machine. It had $500 million cash in the bank and revenue exceeding a billion dollars. It was printing cash. By 2013, its shares had plummeted to 11 cents each.
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