April 4, 2009
Recreating 600+ Years of Conspicuous Consumption
Ivan Day is both chef and historian. Using old equipment and original research in primary sources for recipes and descriptions, he can "cook a meal from any time from the Battle of Agincourt to the First World War," recreating historic banquets and collations in full detail. Galleries of his food exhibitions show that he can back that claim up, and that rapid changes in culinary trends are not of recent vintage. [more inside]
Jesus who?
The End of Christian America.
The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.
Silly bunny
Live bunny cam! Just in time for Easter.
Watch the Skies! Science Fiction, the 1950s and Us
Watch The Skies! Directors Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ridley Scott and James Cameron discuss the science fiction movies of the 1950s that influenced them. 1::2::3::4::5::6:: 1 hour.
MegaCity-One
An epic blog post on the evolution of the architecture of Megacity-One, the futuristic comic-book home of Judge Dredd, by Matt Brooker, showing influence of artists such as Carlso Esquerra, Mike McMahon and Ian Gibson over the years. Judge Dredds cover appearances on 2000ad from 1977 onwards (when each Prog cost 8p), and plenty other images from the world of Judge Dredd. As for that movie... [more inside]
How to avoid being sued
If anybody could ever put a soundtrack to an epileptic porno, it would be Uz Jsme Doma.
Music in Czech lands in the 20th was tumultuous, to say the least. The artistic freedom of the early 20th century shifted during World War I under Nazi occupation, flourishing again after the war. With the rise of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, arts were "destined to play a great role in the socialist education of the masses," which meant artists were to portray "life as it should be according to Marxist theory." Some bands shifted to more politically acceptable performances, while others went underground. The Velvet Revolution lifted limitations, and artists who had performed illegal shows in private now shared their underground sounds and sights with the world. The Plastic People of the Universe (who some credit with bringing the Revolution) could be considered to embody the Communist repression of the 1970s and 1980s in their gloomy, despair-driven music, with Už Jsme Doma showing a different side of Czech music, representing the exuberance of liberation. [more inside]
Hopes Dim
Obama administration seeks to avoid restrictions, including limits on pay "They are basically trying to launder the money to avoid complying with the plain language of the law," said David Zaring, a former Justice Department attorney who defended the government from lawsuits involving related legal issues. "They are trying to create a loophole to ignore Congress, and I think the courts will think that it's ridiculous." [more inside]
Its greatest tools and tests remain hidden from a vast majority of viewers and await discovery.
"Shown backwards it is a heroic film about human experience: A man trapped in the logic of ghosts, trapped in a grayscale 2-D flat world, a photograph inside history, frozen in spectral finity: is unfrozen, and is lured outside of a maze where both his wife and son proceed to ‘undouble’ him and assist him in his war with his self and is finally able to drive away from the Overlook, from the lunarscape of this unreal summit and into a perfect mirror, earthmade."An excerpt of a large-scale guide to the inner workings of The Shining. [more inside]
Field Force to Lhasa
Field Force to Lhasa 1903-04 Captain Cecil Mainprise accompanied General Sir Francis Younghusband's expedition to Tibet in 1903. He wrote 50 letters home which trace the expedition’s progress into Tibet. Read this insider's account on the day they were written some 105 years later. Final post is 18 November 2009. [Via]
Free Games and Videos
Play With Roger — action and adventure, puzzles and racing for your Saturday enjoyment. From the folks with iScrawl. [more inside]
The George W. Bush Presidential Librarium
Awkward first day back?
Ward Churchill reinstated. A jury has found that The University of Colorado wrongfully dismissed the controversial professor, author, and activist. After a day and a half of deliberation, they cited the tenured professor's infamous post-9/11 essay, wherein he compared technocrats who died in the World Trade Center to "little Eichmanns," as the "substantial or motivating" factor in the University's decision to fire him and awarded him $1.
(previously here and here.)
I know... is craaazy. But I love it.
Iceland, beauty and deja vu
In the early 1980s, Roni Horn travelled to Iceland and lived alone for a few months in the (supposedly haunted) lighthouse at Dyrhólaey. While there, she made rocky, earthy drawings. They formed the first volume of a currently incomplete, abstract encyclopedia of the country [flash navigation] which has now progressed to include beautiful photographs of hot pools, glaciers, lava and rivers. A river's surface has appeared in different guises within a university. She has even made a library of water in a little Icelandic town. However, those currently in or near London can visit an exhibition in Tate Modern. [more inside]
Break out the Crayons
Today 10,000 Pages: A Colouring Book of Abstract Line Art reached the 10% mark. Click on an image for a hi-res version for printing. All drawings are released under a Creative Commons Licence. [more inside]
We have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen.
The arena of the unwell
Novelist Chris Paling diary of his time spent on 'Beirut', a high-intensity hospital ward for the treatment of digestive diseases - where a third of patients are there due to the effects of long term alcoholism.
H0 Vehicles off the leash.
The people who drive the Motor City
Can Detroit be saved? Its future is in their hands . Meet Detroit city council president Monica Conyers, whose children are chauffered to the pricey Cranbrook Schools in suburban Bloomfield Hills daily by on-duty cops, and who recerntly publicly rebuked a white Teamsters official for daring to speak the name of President Obama during a meeting. She also wasn't interested in the estimated 16,000 jobs that would be created by the proposed Cobo Hall expansion because most of those jobs would be filled by people who "don't look like her." [more inside]
“…If you stand up straight, people can’t ride your back. And that’s what we did. We stood up straight.”
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated April 4, 1968, he was helping sanitation workers in Memphis form a union. In 1967, SCLC initiated the Poor People's Campaign to unify the African-American civil rights movement with working people's movements more generally. In MLK's words, "It must not be just black people, it must be all poor people. We must include American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and even poor whites." [more inside]
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