May 1, 2017
"Kiss me Frank, I'm going"
A century ago, abortion was on trial in Canada's capital. Megan Gillis, in the Ottawa Sun, writes about the trials of Dr. J.A. Ouimet, a prominent Hull doctor, and Annie Balcomb, who "together and separately [were] accused between 1911 and 1914 of murdering the abortion-seeking women who died and performing 'criminal operations' on the ones who lived." At the time "birth control was illegal, unwed motherhood meant ruin and only tuberculosis killed more young women than childbirth. In the 1920s, childbirth was killing four Canadian women a day." A window to the past and the desperate situation of women faced with an unintended pregnancy, as well as the racist roots of anti-abortion laws.
Princess Adelaide has the whooping-cough
Are We Having Too Much Fun? - And the metaphorical nature of television, Postman argued, has meant that TV and its very particular logic—its assumptions, its aesthetics, its image-oriented and episodic understanding of the world—have found their way into other areas of American cultural life. [more inside]
Bohemian Rhapsody- Pentatonix/Queen
Side by Side versions of Bohemian Rhapsody by Pentatonix and Queen. If you're going to cover a song....
and, a little extra.. Can't Helping Falling in Love With You.
love could be as fragile ... as a broken bead of glass
Making Love in an Iron Age: "The gulf between unspeakable feeling and meaningful action is ever present in the archaeological record. Behind the plexiglas and placards of museum displays are artifacts taken from cemeteries and graves. These are traces of people who gathered together for a final opportunity to express the things that words could no longer say. As a scholar who works with these artifacts, it’s often hard to know exactly what they mean—but sometimes it’s all too clear."
In the mix with Hunee: "My aim is always to maintain a certain freedom"
Hun Choi, the artist better known as Hunee, is a daring DJ -- he's gutsy enough to play classic tunes to a crowd of heads and adventurous records to packed dance floors. "My aim is always to maintain a certain freedom," he says. "Very early on I realised there are two kinds of paths with DJing. You can really specialise in what you play, but I knew pretty quickly that's not how I work. I've always liked to explore different sounds." Enjoy 2 hours of a curated musical journey with Hunee's recent Essential Mix (BBC; Mixcloud; Global DJ). [more inside]
Princess Leia's Stolen Death Star Plans
It's the Sgt. Pepper's/Star Wars mashup you didn't know you needed. Palette-Swap Ninja has adapted the entirety of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band into a long form musical adaptation of Star Wars: A New Hope. [more inside]
Music, he tells them, is painted on a canvas of silence
“I asked myself, if I had kids here, what would I want for them?” he says. That’s when Wilson started spending his own money.
Tom Wilson played trumpet for 36 years before being forced to quit his career as a musician or go blind. While studying to become a teacher he saw a documentary on Venezuela's El Sistema. "That’s social justice mixed with music,” he remembers thinking, “and I can do that.” Warning: may be dusty
With this change in place, the blobs look more interesting
A Better Way to Code – Mike Bostock – Medium
It’s great that journalists and scientists are sharing data and code. But code on GitHub is not always easy to run: you need to reproduce the necessary environment, the operating system, the application, the packages, etc. If your code is already running in the browser, it runs in any other browser; that’s the beauty of the web. Mike Bostock writes 4300 words for Medium (with LOTS of pretty pictures).
Butz Jokes: The Story of a Game That Got Left Behind
One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States. To play the 1992 Japanese game in English, you’d have to download a ROM, then install the unofficial fan translation patch that had recently begun circulating the internet. Myria knew about this patch because of the other unusual thing: she helped make it.
nothing like Saint Laurent
"The last time New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art honored a living designer with a retrospective, the year was 1983, and the designer was Yves Saint Laurent. It has taken a whopping 33 years for the institution—and Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor pulling strings behind the scenes—to deem another talent worthy of such an honor. This week, Rei Kawakubo will become the second living designer to have a monographic show inside the hallowed halls of New York’s largest museum." Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the In-Between [more inside]
A Photographer in Shanghai
The battle of Shanghai in 1937 was unique in many ways. For example, it was recorded more exhaustively in the western media than any other battle in China’s long war with Japan. This was because of the presence, in the city’s international districts, of foreign journalists and photographers. The latter left a treasure trove of photos, some of which are unknown to the wider public to this day, nearly 80 years after the battle. Bonus: Asians in WWII Poster Art
Falling Down, 25 Years Later
"It’s April 1992, and ABC commentator Judith Miller’s voice has an exasperated tinge as she reports to her audience that not one of the officers who beat Rodney King on that infamous videotape has been found guilty of any charges. Soon, riots break out in Los Angeles. Thousands of stores are destroyed. At least 55 people are killed. And less than a mile away, Joel Schumacher is directing Falling Down." April Wolfe writes for LA Weekly on the 25th anniversary of a film that remains as polarizing and provocative as ever. Hey, White People: Michael Douglas Is the Villain, Not the Victim, in Falling Down
...all manner of mealbreads, ripest canteloons...
Brian Harvey on politics and our collective responsibility
Speeches and papers from a Computer Science Professor that are even more relevant today. Dr. Harvey taught computer science for over 25 years at U.C. Berkeley and also led a course on the Social Implications of Computing. What follows are a few excerpts from his papers on computers and education. [more inside]
Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C.
Civic bankruptcy.
Drugs.
Sex.
Sleaze.
Gangs.
Dance.
The Son of Sam.
The Blackout.
Punk.
Hip-hop.
Disco.
NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell
"He's a genius, and I'm not saying that just to be nice."
"The product of a talented programmer who designed a hit shareware game while he was still in high school, NESticle was so good that everyone looked past the fact its name was basically a dick joke."
The end of Medieval good times
For about two centuries after the Black Death, workers in Europe had it good, medievally speaking. The medieval calendar was filled with festivals and feast days; dragons and church ales, carnivals and food fights, and an extra day off every week of the year. In bad years, it took only a few hundred hours of work to pay for the grain needed to feed a family; in good years, closer to a hundred hours. Then, in less than 50 years starting in the mid-1500s - and as quickly as the 10 years from 1540 to 1550 in at least one area - everything changed, almost everywhere in Europe. [more inside]
Because who doesn't want to talk out loud to their computer?
The Hound is Back
After a short twenty-year breather, former WFMU DJ The Hound, featured previously on Metafilter here and here, is back.
Cute-off of the day
Which is more squeeful, a puppy eating a banana or ten kittens being corralled for a family photo? [more inside]
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