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Youtube user Omahdon takes regular old comics and adds voices, sound effects, and incidental music, bringing them to life in a way that sometimes surpasses the mute originals.
comment posted at 6:11 AM on Aug-30-09

Getting Real About The High Price of Cheap Food. Why the food we're eating is hurting us, the animals we eat, our world, and what people are trying to do about it.
comment posted at 8:02 PM on Aug-27-09

Betty Nickell, a 72 year old resident of Mansfield, Ohio, recently received some unexpected news. Much to her surprise, she learned that she had been inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.
comment posted at 5:02 AM on Aug-27-09

A Saudi Prince tells America to give up futile dreams of energy independence. Op-Ed in the NYT says Peak Oil is a waste of energy and an illusion. Meanwhile, the OECD's energy advisors, the IEA are saying cheap oil will run out in ten years, a decade sooner than estimates made as recently as 2007.
comment posted at 3:42 PM on Aug-26-09

Ellie Greenwich, one of the foremost songwriters of the rock and roll era, has died at the age of 69.
comment posted at 2:01 PM on Aug-26-09

Old-time radio (often abbreviated as "OTR," also known as the Golden Age of Radio) refers to a period of radio programming in the United States lasting from the proliferation of radio broadcasting in the early 1920s until television's replacement of radio as the dominant home entertainment medium in the 1950s, with some programs continuing into the early 1960s. The origin of radio dramas in the United States is hard to pin down, but there is evidence of a remote broadcast of a play in 1914 at Normal College (now California State University at San José), and the first serial radio drama was an adaptation of a play by Eugene Walter, entitled "The Wolf," which aired in September 1922. Given the age of the programs and the fact that home reel-to-reel recording started in the 1950s (followed by Philips "compact cassettes" in 1963), it might be surprising that quite a few of these old shows have survived. Thanks in part to original radio station-sourced recordings made on aluminum discs, acetates, and glass recordings and other unnamed sources, many radio dramas and newscasts from decades past are available online, and more are being digitized and restored to this day.
comment posted at 4:33 PM on Aug-25-09

Johnny Cash impersonating Elvis.
comment posted at 4:14 AM on Aug-24-09

The Havoc of War: How Ramparts Magazine Challenged American Culture
comment posted at 4:25 AM on Aug-24-09

Even more about the Antikythera mechanism.
comment posted at 2:17 PM on Aug-23-09

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today that William Calley spoke to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus on Wednesday. During his remarks he apologized for his role in the My Lai massacre.

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley said. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”

The Kiwanis gave him a standing ovation, the first time the club secretary recalls that happening. (Previously)
comment posted at 1:57 PM on Aug-22-09

The Views From Your Sickbed: Andrew Sullivan's readers share stories about health care in the United States.
comment posted at 3:38 AM on Aug-18-09

Better than Radiohead.
comment posted at 2:39 PM on Aug-16-09
comment posted at 5:35 PM on Aug-16-09

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, or to give its official name, the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, a little get-together held at Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York. It's not like Woodstock hasn't been picked apart to death for every year around this time, but since this is the 40th year since it happened, there seems to be more than the usual nostalgia fest going on.
comment posted at 5:14 AM on Aug-12-09

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed, has for the past two months been writing a series of opinion essays in the New York Times that discuss poverty, both new and entrenched. The pieces, so far, are "Too Poor to Make the News," "A Homespun Safety Net," and "Is It Now A Crime to Be Poor?"
comment posted at 4:47 PM on Aug-10-09

...The narrative of the blues got hijacked by rock ’n’ roll, which rode a wave of youth consumers to global domination. Back behind the split, there was something else: a deeper, riper source. Many people who have written about this body of music have noticed it. Robert Palmer called it Deep Blues. We’re talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey’s ''Woman Woman Blues,'' his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, ''She got coal-black curly hair.'' Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening. For grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.'' It has no words. It’s hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar. We have to go against our training here and suspend anthropological thinking; it doesn’t serve at these strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor-white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the kind of people who don’t stop to wonder whether the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves.

From Unknown Bards: The blues becomes apparent to itself by one John Jeremiah Sullivan. I came across it while browsing Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers On The Albums That Changed Their Lives. For Sullivan, that album was American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897 - 1939), which is my favorite CD of the year. Which came out in 2005 while I just got around to buying it this year. Foolish me. It is a piece of art in itself in every respect--all CDs should have such production values.
comment posted at 3:45 PM on Aug-6-09

Love Me is a heartbreaking photo essay that follows the life of a 17 year old girl living in extreme poverty in Southeastern Ohio.
comment posted at 6:39 PM on Aug-4-09

Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel Inherent Vice, is causing quite a stir, and not just because all his novels cause a stir. It seems the author of epic novels of giant adenoids and invisible clockwork ducks has written a-gasp-detective novel, which weighs in at an astoundingly reasonable 384 pages. Some have noted confusion among Pynchon aficionados at the author’s choice to work in such a genre. One writer has used the opportunity to examine why supposed “literary” writers have turned to the crime genre with varying degrees of success, and at least one critic seems genuinely put out by Pynchon’s creative choice.
comment posted at 4:18 PM on Aug-3-09

Vortex Cannon : SLYT "Jem Stansfield builds a vortex cannon to pick up where the big bad wolf failed to blow over a house of brick." More details at the BBC.
comment posted at 4:00 AM on Aug-3-09

So you've tried to quit smoking, but after having a 30-a-day habit for more than 40 years, it's tough. Really tough. So what's a man to do? Well, one way is to keep cigarettes out of arm's reach. A long way out of arm's reach. Geoff Spice is marooning himself on Sgarabhaigh Island (pron: 'Scaravay') in the Outer Hebrides, an uninhabited islet where there are no people ... no buildings ... and no tobacco shops.
comment posted at 8:24 AM on Aug-2-09
comment posted at 10:51 AM on Aug-2-09

My Beat Club has a whole ton of classic rock perfomance videos, mostly from old German TV shows Musikladen and Beat Club. Among the videos on offer are Small Faces' Tin Soldier, Chuck Berry's School Days, Ike & Tina Turner's River Deep, Mountain High, The Who's My Generation, Country Joe McDonald's I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag, The Everly Brothers' All I Have to Do is Dream, The Ramones' Sheena is a Punk Rocker, Mungo Jerry's In the Summertime, T. Rex's 20th Century Boy, New York Dolls' Looking for a Kiss, The Byrds' So You Want to Be a Rock n' Roll Star, Thin Lizzy's Whiskey in the Jar, Slade's We'll Bring the House Down, The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Purple Haze and so much, much more!
comment posted at 4:33 AM on Jul-30-09

WIRED contributing editor Scott Carney interviewed an ocean-going hijacker for his story on the economics of Somali piracy.
comment posted at 1:01 PM on Jul-28-09
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comment posted at 4:23 PM on Jul-28-09

"Slather the holy hell out of the thing with a semi-ironic Beach Boys vocal pad." What if, every time you got stuck writing your next big power-pop hit, you could just call the Fountains of Wayne hotline to get you over the hump? Country singer Robbie Fulks imagines it, and records it, resulting in the best Fountains of Wayne song Fountains of Wayne never wrote. Meanwhile, the original Fountains of Wayne is no more. (No, not the band.)
comment posted at 4:19 AM on Jul-28-09

Beijing's underground: "Five years ago, none of my students at Tsinghua or Beida had any interest in what we would call countercultural stuff," says Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Beida's -- that is, Peking University's -- Guanghua School of Management who owns D-22 and the Maybe Mars label. Today Mr. Pettis estimates that a quarter of his students have been to rock clubs and maybe 5% to 10% "are really knowledgeable and sophisticated."
comment posted at 8:45 AM on Jul-26-09

Mindaugas Piečaitis has performed his "CATcerto," an original score written to accompany Nora The Piano Cat's piano improvisation. Here's the video of kitty with orchestra.
comment posted at 11:23 AM on Jul-25-09

Hymn 41 Harmony Grove New Britain Claremont Arlington Amazing Grace. The timeline links to a nice variety of recordings, traditional (1939: Mary Shipp; 1941: Shiloh Baptist Church) and otherwise (1975: The Amazing Rhythm Aces; 1992: The Lemonheads).
comment posted at 2:35 PM on Jul-24-09

The author of a new book on how rising oil prices will change America makes the claims that higher gasoline prices will make the country healthier and safer. Christopher Steiner asserts that, for every $1 that gasoline prices rise, obesity rates drop by 10% (as people walk more and eat out less). As for "safer", that comes in when high gasoline prices force police out of their cruisers and onto bicycles and foot patrols, where they can interact more closely with their communities.
comment posted at 5:31 AM on Jul-22-09

Conservatism Is Dead, Reagan Was Wrong
comment posted at 5:08 AM on Jul-22-09

Murder: New York City. A map pinpointing murders in the five boroughs of NYC from 2003-09. Broken down by time of day, weapon used, age, sex and ethnicity of both victim and perpetrator. Not surprisingly, in the heat of summer the body count rises.
comment posted at 5:51 PM on Jul-21-09
comment posted at 6:00 PM on Jul-21-09

Gordon Waller of British duo Peter and Gordon had died at 64 Gordon Waller, from the British duo Peter and Gordon has died of cardiac arrest in CT this past weekend. The songs I really like to listen to from them was the one Paul McCartney wrote "A World Without Love" and "True Love Ways". Sad to hear he's passed.
comment posted at 5:07 PM on Jul-20-09

There's just something about being read to out loud, even if it's over the radio. Wisconsin Public Radio presents Chapter a Day, in which listeners are treated to daily doses of literature (both fiction and non-fiction). The program presents one book at a time, giving listeners the chance to follow stories from beginning to end over a period of weeks.
comment posted at 4:13 AM on Jul-20-09

"On the evening of July 5th, several hundred Uighur youths went on a bloody rampage [in Urumqi, Xinjiang] following a peaceful demonstration over a separate incident of ethnic violence at a Guangdong toy factory. . . . In the days that followed, bands of roving Han vigilantes armed with kitchen knives, hammers, metal pipes and other improvised weapons sought to mete out revenge in the Uighur suburbs of the city. . . . Caught in-between these increasingly polarized and agitated ethnic communities is the Chinese state, which, rather than orchestrating the brutal oppression of the non-Han minorities, finds itself increasingly powerless to stop the spiralling circle of ethnic hatred which its policies helped to foster in the first place."
comment posted at 4:34 PM on Jul-18-09

Social Skydiving. An introverted programmer and student decides to overcome his social inhibitions by attempting a conversation with a stranger everyday for thirty days and (obligatorily) blogging the results.
comment posted at 4:45 AM on Jul-18-09

"I don't see where there's a story, I'm not the only one that does it." Such is the excuse of patriotic Atwater City (CA) Councilman (and Mayor Pre Tem) Gary Frago for sending out "at least a half-dozen e-mails to city staff and other prominent community members containing racist jokes aimed at President Barack Obama, his wife and black people in general." Frago received some of the e-mail jokes from ex-city worker Bob Rieger and forwarded them on "to various community leaders, 'including a county supervisor, a former police chief, a city manager, a former city council member, a former president of a veterans group, a former grand knight of the Knights of Columbus, among others.'" Rieger said the jokes he sent had no racial meaning. "As far as I'm concerned the e-mails need no explanation," he said. "I sent them out, I'm not concerned with it," he said.
comment posted at 5:04 AM on Jul-18-09

The conservative movement continues to suffer problems, within the Republican Party, without, and, well...
comment posted at 11:05 AM on Jul-17-09
comment posted at 12:05 PM on Jul-17-09

The lying down game.
comment posted at 1:52 PM on Jul-16-09

How to win in Afghanistan? Peter Bergen looks at the capability of the Taliban insurgents, NATO troops, and the Afghan army and police, compares the current conflict to the Soviet invasion, and weighs the dangers of civilian casualties and popular support. He concludes that renewed American effort in the fight will "produce a relatively stable and prosperous Central Asian state." (via Matthew Yglesias)
comment posted at 7:06 PM on Jul-16-09
comment posted at 4:36 AM on Jul-17-09

Tim Kreider muses on being judgmental and angry
comment posted at 3:38 PM on Jul-15-09
comment posted at 5:41 PM on Jul-15-09
comment posted at 4:40 AM on Jul-16-09
comment posted at 6:30 AM on Jul-16-09
comment posted at 1:23 PM on Jul-16-09

Bill Moyers Interviews Former Cigna PR Chief Wendell Potter Cigna's former head of Corporate Communications discusses about how Insurance companies have fought against public health care in the U.S, How wallstreet's demands drive up profits, how they do it, and why he quit. transcript
comment posted at 6:14 AM on Jul-12-09

Let's go back in time, to Wildwood, New Jersey. (SLYT)
comment posted at 7:01 PM on Jul-11-09