March 28, 2011
There are two things in life for which we are never truly prepared
Twin baby boys have a conversation. Beside music & how-to videos, politics, and whathaveyou, YouTube is an excellent conduit for cute home movies about baby twins (and triplets). Here’s another interaction between twin siblings, here's some kissing, some dancing, some crying, some more laughing (here’s a clip with triplets). So much more inside – you can search for the rest yourself there
Still the spring winds come and the young girls walk by in their beautiful way. All is never lost. And in the face of eternity, what we consider all and everything is truly nothing
Joe Bageant, influential voice of the silent underclass and cartographer of the American Hologram, has died at 64. Bageant, author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War and a prolific essayist known for his humor and irreverent style (shades of Thompson at his most human echo), spent a career reporting the rise and fall of the American working class and documenting the colorful lives of the people therein. [more inside]
Roger Abbott RIP
One of the key members of the award-winning Canadian comedy institution Royal Canadian Air Farce, Roger Abbott died on March 26th after a 14-year battle with leukemia. [more inside]
"We, like you, have problems with hostile neighbors."
The Babylonian Talmud was composed in the historical region of Palestine and in (not surprisingly) Babylonia (modern-day Iraq) between ~70 C.E. and ~700 C.E. Many centuries later, it turns out that "there are more South Koreans with Talmud sets in their homes than Jews in Israel." (Hebrew original) [more inside]
Emboar, is a pig that is on fire that is also a professional wrestler.
Chris Sims offers up a blow-by-blow rundown of a My Little Pony vs Pokemon wrestling match, complete with fanart. Nostalgic for the old days of Internet fight-based nerdery? Than poke around the Comic Book Universe Battles archive. My Little Ponies previously
The New Jim Crow
“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.” [more inside]
A Murder Foretold
"My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano and, alas, if you are hearing or seeing this message it means that I’ve been murdered by President Álvaro Colom, with the help of Gustavo Alejos." Rosenberg went on, "The reason I'm dead, and you're therefore watching this message, is only and exclusively because during my final moments I was the lawyer to Mr. Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie Musa, who, in cowardly fashion, were assassinated by President Álvaro Colom, with the consent of his wife, Sandra de Colom, and with the help of . . . Gustavo Alejos."
The Ballroom Under the Lake
Chicken for us to no eat?
Tired of having Rebecca Black's Friday stuck in your head? Try Gang Fight, the song as interpreted by a bad lip reader. They also bring you Asian Baby.
Hand built Muppet Theatre Playset
When Palisades Toys went bankrupt in 2006, they ceased production of The Muppet Show collection of character figures, Lance Cardinal took it upon himself to craft an intricately detailed Muppet Theatre Playset by hand.
Vietnam Flashback: The Domino Theory
There is more than one way to knock down dominos: there are at least SIXTY-EIGHT of them. [more inside]
Start with a seed.
A Review of Sucker Punch
This Movie Made Me Feel Bad To Be Alive: A Review of Sucker Punch
A History of Skeletal Drawings
A History of Skeletal Drawings: Part 1 - pre-20th century, Part 2 - Bone Wars to the 1950's, Part 3 - Dino Renaissance to the present. Via Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs.
Jeff Koons Must Die
JEFF KOONS MUST DIE! Who said games can't be art?
Burt's Bees Co-Founder Wants to Donate National Park
In 1975, with $3,000 in savings Roxanne Quimby and her boyfriend moved to Maine. They bought a tract of land on which they built a cabin and an outhouse. Near her Guilford homestead, Quimby later met beekeeper Burt Shavitz and used his beeswax to create candles (making $20,000 in her first year selling at local crafts fairs) -- and later their (yes, the two cofounded a company together) best selling product Burt's Bees Lip Balm (it's Burt's image that still graces many of the company's products). With the phenomenal success that followed, she sold 80 percent of her shares in the company to New York investors in 2003 (eventually the company was sold to Clorox) to help fund significant land purchases. For years Maine sportsmen have been outraged with Quimby for forbidding hunters, loggers, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles on the 120,000 acres of woodlands she now owns. Quimby has recently offered a compromise. She wants to donate 70,000 acres to help create a new national park (Maine Woods National Park) while "setting aside another 30,000 acres of woodlands ... to be managed like a state park, with hunting and snowmobiling allowed." [more inside]
You can cover me
I Need the Darkness Someone Please Cut the Lights
Rameau for two harpsichords live
An entire live recital with Skip Sempé and Pierre Hantaï at the Paris Musée de la musique from 25 mars 2011, on two historical harpsichords in very good condition, with (modern) arrangements of orchestral and chamber music by Jean Philippe Rameau [more inside]
SLYT: Steve Martin: Hymn for Atheists
“ATENEO ATENEO!”
The Ateneo Grand Splendid Bookstore. "Argentinians are a famously literary people. In coffee shops, parks, on the bus and even while walking down city streets, their heads are often buried in a book. So it’s only fitting that Buenos Aires can lay claim to one of the world’s most incredible book stores: The Ateneo Grand Splendid."
The fan-flattering hall-of-mirrors
Was the latest episode of Community making fun of its fans? (spoilers in this link and others) [more inside]
The Lego Set of Civilization
Let's say just for a moment that you were ready to cash out. Quit your job. Sell your house. Take you and yours out of the rat race with a few hundred of your friends and family and relocate onto arable land. What tools would you need to sustain a livable—maybe even comfortable—lifestyle? Open Source Ecology suggests you start with ~2.6 million dollars and these | fifty | machines (← watch this first), collectively referred to as the Global Village Construction Set.
This is not a Gaga post
R.I.P. Paul Baran
The father of packet switching - Mr. Baran’s invention was so far ahead of its time that in the mid-1960s, when he approached AT&T with the idea to build his proposed network, the company insisted it would not work and refused.
Pauline Baynes
The Flowers are a Riot of Color ... and the Courtyard is a Riot of Peasants
In the summer of 1968, Jim Henson met Johnny Hart, the co-creator The Wizard of Id. The comic had been syndicated in US papers since 1964, and Henson and Hart discussed making a TV show based on the comic, featuring puppets by Henson and co. In early 1969, a short test pilot was shot and shopped around the TV networks. Over a year later, ABC supported the idea of a feature-length film, but by this time, Henson was busy with Sesame Street and other Muppet productions, so the program was scrapped. Earlier this month, the Henson Company posted the short test pilot on YouTube. [more inside]
On First Looking into Lovecraft's Homer
A Cyclops' cave the wanderers brave
And find much milk & cheese
But as they eat, foul death they meet
For them doth Cyclops seize.
From The Young Folks' Ulysses [PDF], by H. Lovecraft, poet, aged seven. One of the "freely available editions of obscure, outlandish and otherwise outré works of semi-fine literature" from the electric publishing wing of kobek.com.
And find much milk & cheese
But as they eat, foul death they meet
For them doth Cyclops seize.
From The Young Folks' Ulysses [PDF], by H. Lovecraft, poet, aged seven. One of the "freely available editions of obscure, outlandish and otherwise outré works of semi-fine literature" from the electric publishing wing of kobek.com.
So many jokes, so little space...
There's a map for that. If you're looking for a graphic (in a SFW way of speaking) of Penis size around the world...Read it and weep... or what's in the water in Bolivia.
This is the Internet. This is the Internet on drugs.
David Kraftsow is a visual artist and programmer, and maintains Don'tSave.com to showcase his work. You may be familiar with Yooouuutuuube (Example, Previously) which has added a new feature called "flux", which increases the transformations that can be applied to a video. But Kraftsow is also the mind behind YouTube Datamosh (example), which will remove keyframes from a video to give it a glitched out aesthetic, an automated service to find videos that are better than Justin Bieber, a live feed of QVC processed with hallucinogenic video effects, and first person Tetris (previously). [more inside]
When you roll over in bed, the jagged edges poke you in the side.
We all know what happens when you take Garfield out of Garfield, but what happens when you take the punchline panel out of Peanuts? A never-ending morass of melancholy and despair.
GIRP
Newly released GIRP is to rock climbing what QWOP was to running. (previously. also previously.) The games' creator, Bennet Foddy, appears to be a Doctor of Philosophy, focusing on biomedical ethics. His list of recent publications demonstrates an engagement with addiction studies. Proceed with caution. (via)
Female workers make gains but still earn less than men. It's 2011, right?
OK News Sobering statistics in 2011 America:
One in three families with children relied solely on the mother's earnings in 2010, but women's earnings accounted for only about a third of married couples' income.
Women still earn less — about 77 cents for each male dollar. [more inside]
Trans*POO*sion
Fecal transplants have been used with success to treat C.difficile infections, often acquired in hospital or nursing homes and notoriously difficult to treat. They have also shown some efficacy in treatment of ulcerative colitis (pdf). [more inside]
AI War: The Big Boost
AI War: The Big Boost has just been ...released? published? Up today on FS& (or "fsand") is the latest in The Continuing Time series by Daniel Keys Moran. The first book in this series, "Emerald Eyes," was published in 1988, and the last time new material in the series hit the stands it was in November of 1993, in the form of "The Last Dancer." So, it's been a while. [more inside]
Have a stroke of its mane, it turns into a plane
"Though I hadn't seen him in over twenty years, I knew I'd miss him forever"
"Most actors will go their entire careers without doing a movie like Stand By Me, or working with a director like Rob Reiner. I got to do both when I was 12. For a long, long time, I felt like I needed to top or equal that, and it wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I accepted that it’s unlikely to happen -- movies like Stand By Me come along once in a generation."The cast of Stand By Me(link has autoplaying sound,) recently recorded some interviews to promote the re-release of the movie on Blu-Ray. Wil Wheaton has blogged about reuniting with the cast and missing River Phoenix. (Via)
Tahrir Documents: The Revolution Will Be Translated
Tahrir Documents is an ongoing effort to archive, translate, and make available printed matter from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath. We are not affiliated with the papers’ authors nor with any political organization, Egyptian or otherwise. [more inside]
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