March 8, 2017
Music Detective, Baroque Edition
A lost Baroque Mass by an unknown composer was rescued from a merchant using the discarded paper to wrap vegetables by Kapellmeister Innocenz Achleitner in 1870. He sent it to the Mozarteum, who assigned it to the Italian composer Orazio Benevoli, 1628. It sank once more into obscurity until in 1969 a recently-minted Ph.D. glanced at it and recognized the handwriting of "Copyist no. III," who could not possibly have copied it in 1628. Chasing down handwriting, paper mills, watermarks, and the availability of large ensembles in European capitals of the 17th century, Ernst Hintermaier showed the Missa Salisburgensis was most likely the work of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, a prolific and innovative Baroque composer who remains to this day unknown to many Baroque fans. Links to music within! [more inside]
Fur and Loathing in The Yukon
You know, I don't normally read sites like "Buzzfeed." But when I do, it's because This Woman Makes The Most Delightful Taxidermied Squirrels.
Whose Streets? NYC 1980-2000
Yikes!
Good: Cat startled by cat sneeze.
Better: Prairie dog startled by human sneeze. Best: Dog startled by human touch and gas. More: startled animals reddit.
She Shreds, changing the way women guitarists and bassists are depicted
She Shreds Magazine is the world’s only print publication dedicated to women guitarists and bassists. In print form, there are 11 issues out to date, and online, there's much more content, including features, news and interviews, plus videos covering nuts and bolts of guitars and basses and the way, multi-faceted approaches to learning and playing guitar. For your listening pleasure: Idle Bloom's Little Deaths (related interview) and Shannon Wright's Division (related interview)
Blue Whale Tale
"In May 2014, a small ROM [Royal Ontario Museum] team travelled to Newfoundland to salvage a Blue Whale that had washed ashore. This unfortunate event presents an unprecedented opportunity to study one of the more endangered species of marine mammals -- blue whales are listed as endangered under Schedule 1 of the federal Species at Risk Act." Here’s how the ROM turned the tragedy of a blue whale death into one massive teachable moment. [more inside]
Kilted Yoga
"From cat yoga to paddle board yoga, we thought we’d seen about every niche yoga class out there. But then, we stumbled across kilted yoga." [Huffpo][NSFWish] [more inside]
One Hatchback, 68 Tons of Meat
Swiss customs officials have ended the career of a smuggler who admitted spiriting thousands of kilos of meat into the country over the past 15 years. While the 41-year-old man is accused of illegally transferring a total of 27 tons (59,000 pounds) of lamb, 18 tons of beef, 12 tons of chicken and 11 tons of pork, it was just 80 kilograms of fresh meat that tripped him up as he crossed the border in his hatchback car in the mountain town of Morgins. (TW: horses involved below the fold.) [more inside]
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's ... a whale shark?
In Hawaii the green sea turtle is considered a symbol of good luck and prosperity. So it makes sense that when ANA bought some new Airbus A380s to fly on the Tokyo/Honolulu route, they are to be painted to resemble a flying turtle. Decorating large airliners to look like animals isn't new, Southwest have "Shamu", the airborne Orca, Russian carrier Transaero have a Jumbo tiger, JAL have a whaleshark, Alaska Air a flying salmon. Azores Air have gone for, against all probability, a sperm whale, but sadly no sign of it's attendent pot of petunias.
Then of course there's the Pokejet (one of several)
What's important to you? Where will you steer us?
But budget decisions aren’t only about fiscal sustainability. They also shape the kind of country we live in. To win the game, you need to find a combination of policies that match your values and priorities AND set the budget on a sustainable course. How do you get people to understand the difficulty of balancing the federal budget with national values? How do you get people to see the long-term budgetary effects of policy decisions... and more importantly, how the hell do you get people to care? Turn it into a game.
"...history is just a collection of who everyone was sleeping with..."
One from the Vaults is a podcast series on trans history by performance artist and academic Morgan M Page. [more inside]
daughters don't touch their elder's feet for respect
A mother throws her daughter a surprise party for her first Women's Day. (In Hindi, English subtitles available)
I insist on the word feminist or feminism
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a new book out - Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions. Adichie has shaped her thoughts around 15 suggestions for raising a feminist first developed as a letter to a friend on raising a daughter.
The book is partly written to “to reclaim the word feminism from its abusers and misusers, a category within which she would include certain other progressives”. An extract published in the Guardian, along with an interview, includes Adichie’s realisation “in my anger about sexism, I often feel lonely". [more inside]
No fancy title here. The art speaks for itself.
I Love You So So So So Much
Dinner and a movie
The Best Food Scenes from Oscar-Nominated Movies of Yesteryear 🍒 The 50 best food-on-film moments of all time 🍔 Definitive Ranking of the 10 Funniest Food Scenes on TV 🍰 32 Movies With The Most Memorable Food Scenes 🍜 Top 10 Food Preparation Scenes in Movies 🍕 Bonus: The Ultimate Food in Movies - Supercut
Writer, With Kids
Author Cari Luna asked fellow writers to describe how they manage their lives as working artists while raising children. She shared the results on her blog in a series of posts called Writer, With Kids. The 70 respondents included Jane Smiley, the Yarn Harlot Stephanie Pearl McPhee, Susan Choi, and Elizabeth McCracken. The series ran between 2012 and 2015.
Intersectional foodies of PDX
Started as a reaction to the (mostly) so-white Portland Oregon food scene, Racist Sandwich is a podcast where Soleil Ho, Zahir Janmohamed, and a variety of guests take on both the local scene and broader topics exploring the intersection of food, race, gender, and class. They also maintain the PDX POC Food Directory of restaurants and grocery stores owned and operated by people of color.
Tale as old as time
‘Beauty and the Beast’: Inside Disney’s $300 Million Gamble"Disney already had other live-action remakes of animated classics on its assembly line, including “Cinderella” and “The Jungle Book,” which would both become critical and commercial hits. But “Beauty and the Beast” was special. The imagery and music from the 1991 version have never faded, in part because Disney used the score as the foundation for a blockbuster Broadway musical that ran for 13 years and toured 20 countries. “Beauty and the Beast” also parted with Disney’s princess formula — she saves him — and it has come to symbolize a creatively fertile period from 1989 to 1999 known as the Disney Renaissance." [more inside]
A Daily Data Feed For The US Treasury
Every day at 4pm, the United States Treasury publishes data tables summarizing the cash spending, deposits, and borrowing of the Federal government. These files catalog all the money taken in that day from taxes, the programs, and how much debt the government took out to make it happen. It comes from a section of the U.S. Treasury called the Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
We have created the first-ever electronically-searchable database of the Federal government's daily cash spending and borrowing. (Treasury.io) It updates daily and the data can be exported in various formats and loaded into a variety of systems.
Created back in 2013 by @csvsoundsystem, maintained on GitHub.
We have created the first-ever electronically-searchable database of the Federal government's daily cash spending and borrowing. (Treasury.io) It updates daily and the data can be exported in various formats and loaded into a variety of systems.
Created back in 2013 by @csvsoundsystem, maintained on GitHub.
Nevertheless, she posted
Flash fiction for International Womens Day: Inspired by the phrase "Nevertheless, she persisted", Tor books is presenting some short stories by women authors throughout the day today. [more inside]
Mise en abyme.... mise en Fieri
Is there something more behind the bleached hair, tattoos, rock n' roll, and diner food of Guy Fieri? "True things have depth" answers Fieri in a longform piece from Vice. [more inside]
"I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn't."
In 1955, at the age of 67, Emma "Grandma" Gatewood told her children she was going for walk. Then, wearing her Keds sneakers and carrying an army blanket in a homemade denim bag slung over her shoulder, she became the first woman to thru-hike* the Appalachian Trail. (TW: domestic abuse) [more inside]
It was Bitcoin that first caught the attention of IBM researchers
What uses could the Bitcoin-style blockchain have beyond digital currency? How about tracking supply chains?
Running in the theater is still prohibited
People aren't going to the movies enough? The Cinepolis theater chain has a solution: Why not put playgrounds in the theater? [more inside]
We should check for traps again.
Sue The T-Rex Is Running A D&D Game On Twitter & It Is Freaking Amazing. Come for the brigands. Stay for the dinosaur facts. [more inside]
Now they've gone too far!
Google's Algorithm Is Lying to You About Onions and Blaming Tom Scocca for It: It was one thing when Google's "featured snippets" (a.k.a. the One True Answer feature) was giving people obviously wrong answers to queries like "Is Barack Obama planning a coup?" or "Is MSG dangerous?" But telling people it only takes five minutes to caramelize an onion, citing as evidence an article (previously) that says the exact opposite? At long last, Google, have you left no sense of decency?!
Did you see the politics? It made me angry.
The President and his party continued their path of destruction, announcing a new travel ban, suspending new visas for citizens of six majority-Muslim countries and all refugees, along with a poorly-received new health-care plan, amid a string of unforced errors, including the President's explosive no-evidence wiretapping tweets (which we shouldn't take too literally), his staff's scramble to try to defend their boss's latest mess, and the continuing efforts to investigate Russia's role in the campaign and Attorney General Jeff Sessions for providing false testimony. [more inside]
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