April 14, 2018
Grow tender in the face of their fear.
they don't love you like I love you
Cameron Booth of transitmap.net (previously) is organizing the inaugural World Cup of Transit Maps (#wctransitmaps). The Round of 16 starts on Monday. London, Stockholm, New York, Chicago, Moscow, Vienna, São Paulo, Seoul, Berlin, Hong Kong, Beijing, Boston, Barcelona, Paris, Vancouver, and Santiago have made the cut. [more inside]
Wonderful film from other places, times
I don't know who this Guy is but his channel is wonderful. I was first drawn in by New York in 1911 with glimpses of the elevated railway, Chinese American shopkeepers and an African American chauffeur driving a white family around. [more inside]
Rezball
"Rezball" is a "transition-based" style of basketball "that forces tempo with aggressive play, quick scoring (or at least shooting) and assertive defense that looks to force turnovers through pressing or half-court traps," and has been a feature of reservation life basically since the sport was invented. [more inside]
We're sorry about the Internet...
Following Mark Zuckerberg's two days of Congressional testimony, which included such gems as Sen. Ted Cruz making it clear that he believes the GOP is Facebook's victim, Rep. Joe Kennedy III making it clear he doesn't understand the difference between selling data to advertisers vs. allowing advertisers to target users based on on data, and Rep. Billy Long juuuust making sure that Facemash wasn't still up and running, New York Magazine has published An Apology for the Internet. [more inside]
America's Neglected Middle Child
"The generation that is quickly occupying the majority of business leadership roles is one that's grown up playing video games, spends the most time shopping online, and uses social media more habitually than any other generation.
If you were thinking it's millennials, that's probably because they've dominated the media's focus for the past decade. But it's actually Generation X." [more inside]
Art Bell, mysterious narrator of the American nightscape, is dead at 72
"At Mr. Bell’s peak in the 1990s, his show, “Coast to Coast AM,” was on more than 400 radio stations. He took calls all night long, alone in the studio he built on his isolated homestead in Pahrump, in the Nevada desert. He punched up the callers himself, unscreened, keeping one line just for those who wanted to talk about what really happened at Area 51, the U.S. government reserve that for decades has been a locus of UFO sightings and purported encounters with alien beings." --Marc Fisher, The Washington Post
A Digital Bestiary
Dogowls are the cutest and the Sharktopotamus is the most fearsome, and in between are many other magical hybrids. (h/t madamjujujive NO WAIT THE PUGILLA IS THE CUTEST)
Sharky, survivor
Sharky wins The Stranger's First Annual Ugly Pet Contest Sharky shows me every day that it is okay to be a little weird, to never stop trying, and to not let the evil of the world make you bitter.
Scenes along the trail of the Green Chapel
It started with a mysterious marking on a map & led to a 'thin place', where slender divisions separate heaven and earth, past and present. A remarkable journey that took place over the course of an afternoon & ended up hundreds of years in the past.
Grandma & Grandpa Never Stopped Being Into Threesomes
Georges Delfau was a 20th C. French painter who painted older folk having sex. Lots of it. (XXX, NSFW)
“It's still not clear, however, why Mario's pictured with a carrot...”
This History of Super Mario Bros 2 Might Surprise You Inspired by the Japanese version of Carnival, Yume Kojo '87. [Motherboard] “Ever play Super Mario Bros 2 and realize how trippy that game is? Ever wonder why? It turns out that Doki Doki Panic was easier than the original Super Mario Bros 2, and basically fit the requirements for marketing to America. It was also horizontally based, unlike the failed prototypes of Super Mario Bros 2. So in essence, the Super Mario Bros 2 that eventually reached American gamers was a reiteration of Doki Doki Panic, only the four mascots were replaced with characters that were already familiar to Americans. Imajin became Mario, Mama became Luigi, Lina became Princess Peach, and Papa became Toad. The Doki Doki Panic-turned-Super Mario Bros 2 also introduced some new elements to the game, such as the ability to pick up your enemies and throw them, or the shells on the ground, that originally were meant to represent masks from the Yume Kojo carnival.” [YouTube][Super Mario Bros 2 Commercial] [more inside]
Prints of the 1911 Chinese Revolution
RIP Miloš Forman (1932-2018)
Miloš Forman, Oscar-Winning Director of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ dies at 86 (NYT). [more inside]
The prosthesis hypothesis
Archaeologists Find Ancient Knife-Hand Prosthesis On Medieval Warrior:
Even more fascinating than the survival of this man in an era before antibiotics is the possibility he had a unique prosthesis. Micarelli and colleagues examined the ends of the man's forearm bones and found that "there may have been a biomechanical force placed on the stump," such as the pressure of the bones against a prosthesis. The paper: Survival to amputation in pre-antibiotic era: a case study from a Longobard necropolis (6th-8th centuries AD) (pdf) [more inside]
The incredible shrinking lake
Just over 200 kilometres north of the Chadian capital, N'Djamena, Lake Chad is one of the oldest lakes in Africa. However, since the early 1970s, the lake has lost 90 percent of its original surface area to unsustainable water management and climate change. The basin itself has shrunk from 25,000 square kilometres to 2,000 square kilometres. [more inside]
Is a typewriter a musical instrument? Depends on how you play it
Old typewriters are noisy machines, but “one person’s noise is another person’s music,” as they say, and there have been people in the past who have taken the sounds of typewriters and made them part of musical compositions, including: Leroy Anderson, who wrote The Typewriter in 1950 (featuring a single typewriter, or many), which Liberace played on his TV show a time or two; Krzysztof Penderecki (previously) also composed pieces for the typewriter, as heard in his chaotic piece, Fluorescences; you can hear some typewriter percussion in The Lovin’ Spoonful's 1968 single “Money”; Dolly Parton was inspired by the sound her nails that sounded like a typewriter and used that in the theme to the movie 9 to 5; and then there's the Boston Typewriter Orchestra who really go all out.
Better than monopoly money
Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn are the artists and filmmakers who recently took over an old co-op bank on high street in Walthamstow in an ambitious project that is part art installation, part stunt, part charity drive and part education campaign designed to inform the public about the true nature of money and credit creation. The rebel bank with a cause.
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