April 30, 2009
iSnort
iSnort - that is all
"Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence."
Long before becoming a national treasure and celebrity Twitter addict the 16 year old Stephen Fry sent a letter to his future self, to which he has now responded, in a letter first published in the 25th birthday edition of Gay Times.
He wrote a score they couldn't refuse
One Hundred Years, One Hundred Scores. The Hollywood Reporter and a jury of film music experts select the 100 greatest film scores of all time. One of the jury is Dan Goldwasser, editor of Soundtrack.net, which publishers interviews with composers, reviews of soundtracks and keeps a valuable list of trailer music - for when a new trailer uses old film music and you can't quite remember where it's from. [more inside]
Stupid sexy spiders
Yet another reason to be spider-averse - traumatic insemination.
"Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound." - T. S. Eliot
[Ezra Pound] worked on and for poetry as others might work on a major scientific discovery or a drawn-out military mission. Thus, as Sieburth reminds us in his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, when, on May 3, 1945, Pound was arrested at his home in the hills above Rapallo, he immediately put a small Chinese dictionary and a copy of the Confucian classics in his pocket. Working as he then was on his Confucian translations, he knew that, wherever the military police were taking him, he would need these books.From Pound Ascendant by Marjorie Perloff. Ezra Pound's ability as a translator of Chinese poetry has long been disparaged by sinologists, such as George A. Kennedy in Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character. Other academics have sought to defend him. Two examples are Zhaoming Qian's Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos and Stephen Tapscott's In Praise of Bad Translations: Ezra Pound and the Cultural Work of Translation (pdf). Eric Hayot draws the contours of this long-running debate and explores its significance in Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China. Pound's Cathay in full and a public domain audiobook version (iTunes link).
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
EA games releases a new adaptation of the epic Italian poem The Divine Comedy that casts the player as Dante - a crusade veteran - who journeys through the Nine Circles of Hell to save his beloved Beatrice. [more inside]
A change of bard
British poetry has a mixed day: Carol Ann Duffy looks very much like she's going to be the first ever woman poet laureate. U.A.Fanthorpe sadly won't be there to see her awarded the terse of Canary Wine [more inside]
How to make 36$ an hour
Public Service Announcements
Growing up, Public Service Announcements were part of my Saturday morning cartoon TV experience. [more inside]
Canned Whole Chicken. Exactly what it says.
Canned Whole Chicken. Seriously, that's all it is. (photos are SFW, but not for the faint of stomach).
Debauchery in Dallas
What do you get when you mix, unisex bathrooms, drugs, Eurotrash music and thousands of horny yuppies? From 1984 to 1989 in Dallas, TX you got The Starck Club. [more inside]
Your Voice for Wildlife and Nature
OdyseeTV explores the pressures faced by wildlife and habitat. Featuring video content like the Plight of the Snow Leopard, or a feature about manatees, Can Gentle Survive?, by conservation organizations worldwide. Limited at present to about 30 programs, but growing as more groups come on board.
Louie Palu is a Canadian Photojournalist.
Louie Palu is a Canadian Photojournalist. His series, Goodbye, Guantánamo, is up for some big awards.
from bleached plant matter to glowing liquid crystal
"The reason many people worry that the written form is dying, and the reason most writers consider online publication second-rate, is that no journal has yet succeeded in marrying the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the internet." -- The new journal Wag's Review attempts to bridge the gap. Included are an interview with David Eggers and a near 30-page treatise On Douchebags.
Lost in Space
Lost in Space: What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space. "There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going." [Via]
Bust that Glum, Bust it good
Glum Buster is a charityware puzzle/adventure/exploration game developed over the course of 4 years by Justin Leingang. Kind of like a more linear Seiklus. Windows only.
Random Boner
A catalog of unfortunate moments in maleness courtesy of Awkward Boners (NSFW).
"They frankly own the place"
The second most powerful United States Senator admits, "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." [more inside]
"a hoax that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills."
"a hoax that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills." - Despite some vile rhetoric from North Carolina calling his death a hoax, the memory of Matthew Shepard was honored yesterday by passage of a Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Bill in the House. [more inside]
women must be the sex workers, if they're the ones who go on strike...
Kenyan women call to
mind
Greek comedy, though perhaps they have other reasons to take a week off...
Mmm, fully rugged.
Your laptop computer says a lot about you. Maybe my husband and I need to put more thought into our purchases. We'd want to make sure we're projecting the correct images, right? [more inside]
A Scary Thing Happened: The Coloring Book
After receiving complains from upset parents, FEMA took the PDF coloring book "A Scary Thing Happened" offline, and now the story is spinning around the internet. Created by the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team in 2003 as a tool for children to use with a responsible parent or adult to help cope with the disaster, the book has been used with children who have experienced disasters related to Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, floods and even the Interstate 35 bridge collapse, to name a few instances. There have even been international requests from the Australian Red Cross to use the coloring book as a model to aid Australian children. Looking for more than the offending page? The Smoking Gun has made the original PDF available, and FEMA still has three other coloring books online. (More coloring book fun inside) [more inside]
Youngstown = Steeltown
Steel Town is a pretty cool little film made in 1944 highlighting Youngstown, Ohio's steel industry and it's workers. The shots inside the mill are amazing. Now, much like other old steel towns, Youngstown is working to make a come back in new ways
Why do people get Rothko but not Stockhausen?
Music Journalist David Stubbs has a new book exploring why when the audience for modern art is huge, that for new music is tiny. The BBC, has an article about this with an interview with the author and some sound samples.
The food of Italy's Grandmothers
Is pr0n an appropriate metaphor for databases?
This presentation was given at the golden gate ruby conference. The author of the talk has posted an apology of sorts, but some people still aren't happy.
C'est la vie, says the old folks, it just goes to show you never can be too careful
The Tarantino Mixtape from Eclectic Method is not the first mashup to cross the audio/video copyright streams, but they are pretty good at it.
via the always excellent giavasan [more inside]
via the always excellent giavasan [more inside]
Wicked keyboarding skills
Vangelis: The Man And His Music (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) profiles prolific Greek keyboardist and composer Evanghelos Odyssey "Vangelis" Papathanassiou in a rare 1984 television interview. [more inside]
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