October 29, 2007
Britain's Weirdest Tombstones
IN MEMORY OF
HANNAH TWYNNOY
Who died October 23rd 1703
Aged 33 Years.
In bloom of Life
She’s snatched from hence,
She had not room
To make defence;
For Tyger fierce
Took Life Away.
And here she lies
In a bed of Clay,
Until the Resurrection Day
In anticipation of Halloween, BBC History magazine announces the winner (pdf link) of its "Mysterious Memorials" contest. (It's not the one above.) View the complete list of runners-up here.
HANNAH TWYNNOY
Who died October 23rd 1703
Aged 33 Years.
In bloom of Life
She’s snatched from hence,
She had not room
To make defence;
For Tyger fierce
Took Life Away.
And here she lies
In a bed of Clay,
Until the Resurrection Day
In anticipation of Halloween, BBC History magazine announces the winner (pdf link) of its "Mysterious Memorials" contest. (It's not the one above.) View the complete list of runners-up here.
Found Art From Jail
Jail Finds is a flickr set of art found stuffed inside books by the account holder at the jail where they are a volunteer running the book cart.
Tibetan Eye Candy
Thangkas! what is a thangka? Look it up in this Encyclopedia of Buddhism pdf then take a tour in Darumsala with Werner Herzog [more inside]
In Search Of . . .
Project Pterosaur The goal of Project Pterosaur is to mount an expedition to locate and bring back to the United States living specimens of pterosaurs or their fertile eggs, which will be displayed in a Pterosaur Rookery that will be the center piece of the planned Fellowship Creation Science Museum and Research Institute (FCSMRI). Although, sadly, it may not be real.
The 2007 Japan Series
Now that the "World Series" is over, you can enjoy Joe Posnanski's coverage of the Japan Series in the Kansas City Star (on account of Nippon Ham Fighters coach Trey Hillman going to coach the KC Royals in 2008.) It's great to see Posnanski's perspective of Japanese baseball as he compares and contrasts American and Japanese baseball. It's also interesting to see American mass media cover Japanese sports when the Japanese mass media is going ga-ga over the US World Series (due to 3 Japanese players, Matsuzaka, Matsui and Okajima being in the finals.)
Slaves to Armok: God Of Blood, Chapter 2.0
Dwarf Fortress
Version 0.27.169.32a, released October 29, 2007 A.D.
You are now free to waste the remainder your life.(prev)
Version 0.27.169.32a, released October 29, 2007 A.D.
You are now free to waste the remainder your life.(prev)
Gov Gab: Your U.S. Government Blog
Haven't you ever wished the US Government had an official blog? Now they do. It's called Gov Gab.
Mouse, that is.
AIDS Invaded U.S. in 1969, Study Finds.
Long before storied 'Patient Zero' Gaëtan Dugas [previously] scientists now believe that HIV/AIDS "invaded the United States in about 1969 from Haiti, carried most likely by a single infected immigrant who set the stage for it to sweep the world in a tragic epidemic." A new study to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that researchers conducted a genetic analysis of stored blood samples from early AIDS patients and now believe that HIV first entered the United States in the 1960s -- and not the 1980s. Other "studies suggest the virus first entered the human population in about 1930 in central Africa, probably when people slaughtered infected chimpanzees for meat."
License to Murder
The State Department has promised Blackwater USA bodyguards immunity from prosecution in last month's murder of 17 Iraqi civilians. Richard J. Griffin, the head of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security which granted the immunity, announced his resignation effective last Thursday.
The REAL milkman of human kindness (sorry, carsonb)
The Big-Nosed Bastard from Barking has been very, very busy. In the past month, Billy Bragg has won the Classic Songwriter Award from Q, then collaborated with Beethoven (some of the B-Man's fans mutter darkly), and taken the hand of a small, matronly admirer before kindly giving it back to her, along with an autographed copy of the score. (He's prepared for the fallout: "I'll probably get struck off Morrissey's Christmas card list." ) [more inside]
Diskothi-Q: The Football Albums
The Football Albums. Music and football. Surely there's something better than "Hail to the Redskins" and "The Superbowl Shuffle?" One man believed there could be. That man was Peter Hughes, Inland Empire indie rock mini-star, sometime member of Nothing Painted Blue and the Mountain Goats, baseball diarist, and leader of the now-defunct band Diskothi-Q.
In 1999, Diskothi-Q released The Football Albums: a double CD of 32 songs, one for each team in the NFL. All are now freely downloadable as .mp3s: AFC and NFC.
(.mp3 links follow) Get ready for the big game this weekend by pitting "Colts" against "Patriots." Revel in the untamed savagery of "Eagles" or sympathize with the touching lament, "(Nobody Cares about the St. Louis) Rams."
MST3K is back on the air! Kinda, sorta.
Satellite News passes on the news that Best Brains, Inc. is back in active business, with new 'Bot content appearing online.
Beginning November 5th, BBI will be launching its very own website at MST3K.com. The site will feature brand-new animated adventures of Crow, Tom Servo and Gypsy. We're told the goal is to have one new adventure each week (though "some settling may occur with shipping," they added). The Web site will also feature work from the original series (which BBI is now calling "the legacy series"), behind-the-scenes footage and other material culled from the BBI vault. [more inside]
Iraq Out How
The focus of the current issue of Mother Jones is the Moral Dilemma of Leaving Iraq.
199 Peter Cook videos
199 Peter Cook videos (in case you don't know who Peter Cook is, he's often considered the funniest English comedian of the 20th Century, this myspace page has a concise biography).
Lines and splines
So You Want to Create a Font (Part 1, Part 2). For something with a less presumptive title, there’s this, this, this, this, this, or even this, Eric Gill’s An Essay on Typography.
Read Print.
Read Print. Online books, poems and short stories.
It's a Big World After All
It's a Big World After All. The Disneyland Small World ride is going to be closed for 10 months in 2008 due to refurbishing. The main reason for the refurbishing: the ride isn't built to accommodate today's average passengers' body weights.
The Man In Black
The Johnny Cash Show 1969-1971:
Ray Charles - Ring of Fire (this, my brothers and sisters, is how you cover a song and make it your own)/
Bob Dylan - I Threw It All Away/
Derek and the Dominoes (w/Carl Perkins)/
Roy Orbison - Crying/ The Cowsills/
Joni Mitchell - The Long Black Veil (sublime) [more inside]
The Unqualified Reservations of Mencius Moldbug
Unqualified Reservations is a fascinating ongoing commentary on society and governance in postmodernity. He's currently on about the pwning of Richard Dawkins, after writing about Mediocracy and Official Journalism. It might be best to first read his earlier posts in which he defines the self-invented terminology he's fond of using, like: Formalism, The Iron Polygon, Universalism, Neocameralism, and The Rotary System. [more inside]
Image our own paint-in!
It's good to touch the green green grass of home
Under the sea? A bounty of sealife!
Some lobsters have recently fled a German supermarket. Why'd they want to flee? Maybe they didn't want to be killed so they could live to be older then these clams. Maybe they wanted to run away and have wacky undersea reproductive hijinks! (Link safe for work, unless you work for the Krusty Krab.)
Im in ur city, burnin ur church
Paul David Addis has been arrested once again. You may remember him as the man that set The Man on fire 4 days early. This time he went after Grace Cathedral. This is the second SF church to be hit by attempted/successful arson in the past week.
RIP Robin Prosser
Robin Prosser was a former concert pianist and systems analyst who suffered from an autoimmune disease similar to lupus for over 20 years. The disease left her in constant pain and made her allergic to most pharmaceutical painkillers. Only medical marijuana brought her relief, but last spring the DEA seized her medicine. Unable to cope with the chronic pain any longer, she committed suicide on October 18th. [Via Andrew Sullivan.]
Flyin' high.
Reporter, Columnist, or Blogger
Last weekend, The Oregonian's Sports columnist John Canzano wrote about the two DUIIs by the son of the Oregon Ducks' coach. On Saturday, the Ducks football team beat the USC Trojans. The next day, Canzano wrote a story about the win. Before he wrote that story however, he wrote a blog post on what happened during the fourth quarter. Columnists are often held to different standards than reporters; and bloggers are often held to even different standards. It seems journalists are still learning the ropes of what standards they are held to under these different media. As a commenter JPound added to the post, "Before blogs, this unfortunate interaction would only have seen the light of day in a memoir."
Romance via vague, anonymous e-mail
ProposalToMary.com I will send out the proposal to Mary to 50 complete strangers, people I don't know – hoping, that they will forward my proposal to as many people as possible, which in turn forward it etc. And some day, I hope, it will reach Mary, after it has travelled a very long way. Guess this guy isn't in a big rush to be with his one true love?
We'll never have to go outside again!
The Last Supper is now available in high definition at the click of a button. Feel free to take a gander and then cross it off your list.
What's that tune?
iden.tify.us is like AskMe, but only for the question, "Hey guys, what is this song?"
Hi. Bye.
Hundreds of paintings, one masterpiece mural
Mural Mosaics! Artists come together to create beautiful themed murals, made of hundreds of relevant paintings. [more inside]
Come for the beaches - stay for the waterboarding
"...the locusts noisily thanked us and turned their jaws toward our crops, swallowing our greed whole..."
In 1958, Chairman Mao started a war. His foe: millions of hungry animals across China, particularly the sparrow. Villages and cities were mobilized to execute the birds en masse. Their crime: pecking away at fields and storehouses, stealing precious grain from the mouths of China's masses. Entire families brandished pots, pans, and other weapons of cacophonous warfare to panic the birds into forced flight, causing millions of them to drop from the skies. [more inside]
Poor Devils
Devil facial tumor disease has ravaged the population of Tasmanian Devils in the last decade. DFTD is a transmissible cancer, i.e. the tumor cells themselves (which differ genetically from their host animal) are the agent responsible. The disease is spread by biting and other contact, and the resulting grotesque tumors interfere with feeding and lead to starvation. Poor immune response may be partially responsible. This is actually not the only such disease: canine transmissible venereal tumor is an analogue that has been known to be contagious since the 19th century. (CTVT, however, gets a proper immune response.) [more inside]
Pencil me in
then we were niggy's band
Saul Williams releases his album with several payment options: $0.00 gets you 192k mp3s, and 5 bucks buys your choice of 192k or 300k mp3s, or FLAC. All DRM free of course. Trent Reznor, who was recently sighted complaining about the insane prices for his last album in new zealand, is to blame. Need a taster? Saul and Trent have leaked a track on pirate bay.
Dork Talk by Stephen Fry
Guys and Dolls revisited
Owen Smith, is a painter in the social realist milieu and has been commissioned among others by The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Atlantic Monthly.
His paintings recall the covers of Pulp magazines and paperback novels of the 1940's and 50's.
EveryScape
EveryScape launched this morning. It's a ground-level mapping service similar to Google's "Street View", only it offers you an "autodrive" feature that automatically moves you through a city or down a ski slope. There are links to information about stores and restaurants in the view and the ability to go inside buildings and look around. It currently features views from Aspen, New York, Boston, and Miami. And of course the obligatory view of a colorful mime with a man-bag. [via]
China Miéville says libertarianism's all at sea
Remember the Freedom Ship? (Previously). Well, it's still no nearer reality. China Miéville reckons it's due to the fact that it's a perfect example of the libertarian fantasy. Some libertarians take issue with his portrayal of the movement. Meanwhile the serious seasteaders think he must be talking about someone else. Maybe one of these guys?
Just like google maps, but more internetty.
The Online Tool for Precision Vectorization
VectorMagic is a new site that uses technology from the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to transform your bitmap images into vector art that can be scaled without becoming blurry of pixelated. Here's the first image I submitted, before and after.
Imaginary cities, the creatures that live in them, and the hats they wear
"Introducing the new Portable Halo, a device that will revolutionize lies." The art of Swedish illustrator Mattias Adolfsson, strongly recommended for fans of Gahan Wilson. Also check out his Flickr set of fictional cityscapes, sketchbook samples, and the rest of his sprawling real/imaginary world.
Nicod Lectures
Since 1993, the Institut Jean Nicod has awarded the annual Jean Nicod Prize to a leading philosopher or cognitive scientist for his or her work in the interdisciplinary study of the mind. The recipient is expected to deliver a series of lectures. The lecture series of this past year's winner, philosopher Stephen Stich, is entitled "Moral Theory Meets Cognitive Science: How Cognitive Science Can Transform Traditional Debates", and is now available online in video form. Also available is the lecture series of the previous year's winner, evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello: "Origins of Human Communication". [more inside]
Guitar + Trampoline
The most important Evangelical you've never heard of
Christianity is not just a series of truths but Truth -- Truth about all of reality. And the holding to that Truth intellectually... brings forth not only certain personal results, but also governmental and legal results.When the Religious Right cruised onto the cultural scene in the late 1970s, the road map was drawn by oddball Pennsylvanian Francis Schaeffer. Generally regarded as the first (perhaps only) Evangelical philosopher, Schaeffer's views on the fundamental clash between Christian and secular belief systems became the talking points for a generation of American Christians. The movement's trajectory, though, left many of Schaeffer's more nuanced beliefs by the wayside. His son's recent writings suggest that it didn't take long for the father of the Religious Right to regret what he'd birthed.
I say play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you are doing, even if it takes them fifteen or twenty years. - Thelonious Sphere Monk
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