The day in posts: 12/21/2014

December 21, 2014

Writing "Good Omens"

Neil Gaiman talks about writing "Good Omens" - "Terry Pratchett and I met in February 1985, in a Chinese restaurant. I was a young journalist. He was a former journalist and Electricity Board PR, and a writer who had just published his second Discworld novel. I was the first journalist who had ever interviewed him."
posted by marienbad at 11:54 PM PST - 52 comments

YOU COME ACROSS A CANDIED VIOLET

inflorescence.city is a generative text/art project by Katie Rose Pipkin and Loren Schmidt
a bit more info about it here [more inside]
posted by juv3nal at 11:38 PM PST - 4 comments

50 years of beeping

At 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving, James Galdo and his 22-year-old son made their annual trip to a Hess (HES) gas station on New York’s Long Island to buy the oil company’s latest holiday toy truck. It marked the end of an era for Galdo, who owns each retail toy truck Hess has produced since 1964, and the end of an almost 50-year family tradition. Come next year, the ritual of heading to a local Hess station will be replaced with a visit to Hess’s website. Hess’s toy truck business is moving online following the sale last spring of the New York-based energy company’s stations. [more inside]
posted by bq at 10:24 PM PST - 29 comments

In the arms of a stranger

In an emergency, would you hand your baby over to a stranger you had just met? This is the story of a mother who did just that.
posted by Admira at 8:36 PM PST - 48 comments

"it might warrant discussion from others."

Small Talk [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:04 PM PST - 16 comments

Freedom is the right of all sentient beings

An Argentina court has recognised an Orangutang as 'non-human person': “This opens the way not only for other Great Apes, but also for other sentient beings which are unfairly and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in zoos, circuses, water parks and scientific laboratories.” - A similar case regarding a chimpanzee in New York was recently thrown out of court.
posted by Artw at 6:52 PM PST - 71 comments

Redditor does the research behind the Sony Pictures hacking scandal.

Redditor CSMastermind composes an epic timeline of the Sony information breach. Well sourced, and in laymans terms. [more inside]
posted by butterstick at 5:55 PM PST - 100 comments

CCR, 'Born on the Bayou', live at Woodstock

Creedence Clearwater Revival performing 'Born on the Bayou' at Woodstock, 1969. Frontman John Fogerty, dissatisfied with the group's performance, famously prevented it from being included in the subsequent film or soundtrack album. But this, the opening number of their set, is an electrifying performance. Fogerty, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford perform as if they are plugged in to the electricity supply.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:34 PM PST - 54 comments

"She placed an order on the spot – and not a conservative one."

"Though there were manufacturers in several parts of the United States, the great preponderance of commercially-made aluminum trees were created by the Aluminum Specialty Company of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. When their 'Evergleam' line debuted in 1959, many embraced the shiny trees as an expression of the new Atomic Age. The trees appealed to a Jetsons-style notion of modern living where life was clean, automated and easy; with an aluminum tree, needles never fell, it could be stored compactly and re-used every year, with none of the fuss of a real tree." Etsy: History Lesson: The Aluminum Christmas Tree, by Jeni Sandberg. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:21 PM PST - 43 comments

Litigation Value in The Office: priceless (That's What She Said)

"That's what she said" is not only a much-used catchphrase in The Office (US edition), but also a blog about episodes of the US edition of the show from the point of view of HR litigation, starting with season 3.
posted by filthy light thief at 4:09 PM PST - 12 comments

“Colour is too noisy; the eye doesn’t know where to rest"

Bye Bye Jane; RIP
Jane Bown died today aged 89. Her portrait of Beckett is legendary.
The Observer ( Guardian on Sunday )editor, John Mulholland, called her "part of the Observer’s DNA”.
Obituaries: Guardian and Telegraph.
A brief look at her life in photography.
She gave her archive to he Guardian where she worked for 65 years.
Known mainly for her portraits of the great and the good here is the unseen Jane Bown
For over 40 years she used an Olympus OM 1 released in 1973.
Earlier this year a BioPic was released 'Looking for Light: Jane Bown'
posted by adamvasco at 3:37 PM PST - 16 comments

No one had the slightest suspicion of what beautiful things she had seen

Jean Renoir's "The Little Match Girl" ("La petite marchande d'allumettes") with Catherine Hessling. 1928 (31 Minutes) Silent movie with music and translated intertitles. Original Hans Christian Andersen story included under the video.
posted by The Whelk at 12:01 PM PST - 16 comments

2D, 3D, Whatever

Glass - Apple - Res Illusio - Squirrel - and more from artist Alessandro Diddi. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 11:42 AM PST - 5 comments

Panoply - Animating the Ancient World

What the Greek vasemakers would have done if they had had the technology [more inside]
posted by BWA at 11:40 AM PST - 6 comments

Execution

For the first time since 2011, two NYPD officers have been killed in the line of duty; PO Wenjian Liu and PO Rafael Ramos were shot, execution style, while sitting in their patrol car yesterday afternoon in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The suspect, who shot himself at a subway station nearby, had allegedly shot his girlfriend in Maryland yesterday morning, before posting on social media that he was going to kill cops in retaliation for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Pat Lynch, the president of the largest police union in New York City — the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, has blamed Mayor de Blasio for the murders, and the New York City police officers, already angry with the mayor for his comments about police violence, last night turned their backs on the mayor as he entered the police press conference to address the shooting deaths of two officers in Brooklyn.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:03 AM PST - 483 comments

D-Day to Germany, 1944 color home movies

D-Day to Germany, 1944. Color home movies by Allied pool reporter Jack Lieb. There is little to no combat, it's all behind the lines offering a different perspective from total war. Some famous actors and writers appear. The best part is the narrator, Jack, who is giving a viewing in 1976. His spontaneous narration and smooth style is enchanting.
posted by stbalbach at 8:11 AM PST - 9 comments

I was surprised when I saw this photograph in a colour supplement a few days after the demonstration. It was captioned “A West End shopper argues with a protester”, but that’s not what happened at all: I was trying to calm him down. I wrote to tell them truth, and to my astonishment they published my letter.

The truth behind one of the more famous photos taken during the 1990 London Poll Tax Riot. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 4:18 AM PST - 16 comments

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