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| November 24, 2022 |
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
- Gifaanisqatsi -- random
'Koyaanisqatsi' [trailer] generator.
- Dollar Street lists family
portraits around the world, with their monthly incomes noted -- kind of an
abbreviated version of Peter Menzal's Material
World book from 1994.
- Gord McCaw's Vancouver
Neon collection at Facebook.
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| November 21, 2022 |
- Fantatstic -- Joni and Elton in dialogue
in a special
episode of Rocket Hour where at one point she explains 'the
hexagram of the heavens'... the part of that song which makes me think of
'King Nine Will Not Return':
Jets!
|
| November 20, 2022 |
- The first of her
most recent '13 Things Found on the Internet Today' is an amazing
collection of London Underground Posters from the 1920s assembled by
Messy Nessy. Don't miss the floating Londoners being drawn into an
entrance by The Lure of the Undergroud.
- She also reports
on the Mansion on O Street,
a space this DC native had never heard of.
- Politico report on transnational repression: Secret
Chinese 'police stations' to be investigated around Britain. They can
also be found, allegedly, in Canada, Chile, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Spain,
Sweden, and the US.
- One of their Reddit summaries posted at Bored Panda, 30
'American' foods that are nasty, according to Non-Americans, where
I learn you can now get Twinkies with flavored, colorful fillings.
- BBC: How
the great online toaster hoax was exposed, and the real inventor of
the toaster, identified at last.
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| November 13, 2022 |
-
I'm approaching 3D Printing by learning
TinkerCad,
with which I've created my first .stl file. Always been intrigued by CAD
software -- fascinating.
- Re-reading Look Homeward, Angel, this time in
its original form,
and am once again puzzled by Mr. Gant's railing against Mountain Grills. My
younger self's knee-jerk assumption was that it was just his way of saying Mountain
Girls but given the context, that doesn't make sense. And the expression wasn't
new to me when I first read this; just a few months previously I'd acquired Hawkwind's
Hall of the Mountain
Grill. But finally, an explanation, once published in the Thomas Wolfe Review:
Mountain
Grills and hoggish minds: W.O.Gant's allusive invective, which attributes the
expression to Edmund Spenser, who wrote about a Grylle in his epic poem,
The Færie Queene,
which was a man who'd been converted via some enchantment into a hog, who'd then
been given the chance to revert, but turned the offer down.
O
lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
- Now this is interesting: an ACLU map of
states with Criminal
Laws against Defamation -- 24 states have laws
that make it a crime to publicly say mean things about people, with penalties ranging
from fines to imprisonment. These laws violate the First Amendment and are disproportionately
used against people who criticize public officials or government employees. Before you
look, guess which states those might be.
- And since it keeps coming up, and I can't find a scan of it anywhere,
I'm posting Harvey Pekar's
Why I haven't visited the Rock'n'Roll
Hall of Fame from April 2001.
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| November 10, 2022 |
- About the Korean concept of
nunchi,
understanding also what's not being said, reading between the lines.
- Moss and Fog takes a look back at some
wild
retro futuristic cars.
- Used by me today, to make the $5 thrift store clock readable:
analog clock-face
generator at blocklayer.com, which has all kinds of
patterns available for printing out & etc.
|
| October 27, 2022 |
-
Photo from
/r/France, a French bakery sign [in English] describing the difference between Macaroon, Macaron, and Macron.
- Inside
a massive abandoned town of Disney-esque castles. What was supposed to be a luxurious
urban development for wealthy foreigners has become an eerie half-finished ghost town in Turkey. Not
my idea of castles, too small; these remind me of the old turreted townhouses popular in NE DC, and the boring
pseudo-Levittown in the Homer Price "Wheels
of Progress" story, where every house in the development is the same.
- Although similar products from the competition are available I can't find Planter's Peanut Block
anywhere, not even on Mr.Peanut's corporate
site. They aren't on Roger's
Discontinued Food (that I really miss) page, although
that delightfully 1.0 wwweb site does list (in addition to Noodles Romanoff recipes) Five Flavor Life
Savers with Lemon and Lime, essential flavors I didn't realize had gone missing until I reviewed their
history in
What Are the Flavors
of Five Flavors Lifesavers? which says Raspberry & Watermelon replaced Lemon & Lime in 2003.
|
| October 24, 2022 |
- Indie the Introvert -- "Cartoons,
often about dogs," by Sirin Thada.
- Incredible: Best
Microscopic Photos 2022 at Bored Panda. The ant's face, #8, is making the rounds; I really love the
colors of #10 and many others. Images of Distinction, indeed.
|
| October 13, 2022 |
- Trevor Traynor photographs Newsstands
of ten countries. On 5/27/22 Newsstands
was launched as a collection of 100 NFTs minted on the blockchain.
The collection sold out 10/02/22. Nevertheless, you
can see them all right there on his site.
- The World's
Water -- a visualization from the USGS.
- 'Time
Out' ranks the ten coolest neighborhoods. I've only been to one of them,
Shimokitazawa in Tokyo, so what do I know; but I might nominate another with
a similar sounding nick-name: the Kitsilano district of Vancouver.
|
| October 5, 2022 |
|
With my brothers at an Irish restaurant Sunday in Warrenton, Virginia
(click for bigger)
<alternate>
six years ago
| September 22, 2022 |
- The Morality or Religious Police
are really mixing it up in Iran, where they're
rioting and the women are burning their legally-mandated hijab head-scarves in protest. I
first learned about these 'police' from a co-worker who'd spent time in Saudi Arabia, said their cars have
green lights (instead of blue) and if they saw too much skin they'd mark it with green spray paint -- it's
the color of Islam; often the light at the tip of a mosque's minaret is green. Their actions in the
Kingdom have apparently been limited since 2016; this is the first I've heard of them in Persia (where
they're known as the Guidance Patrol). More at CNN, Iran
protests rage as Mahsa Amini's father says authorities lied about her death.
|
| September 17, 2022 |
- In 2020 NPR reported
the
Cruel Story Behind The 'Reverse Freedom Rides' of 1962, whose target was Hyannis,
Mass, and the Kennedys there. But what and who were those original Freedom
Riders? Hard to understand without context (interstate bus lines were segregated
illegally); as ever, there's a good
background in Wikipedia.
An editorial in the Washington Post, Why
our raging geography wars could make 2024 a nightmare says conservatives
are vibrating with glee over what DeSantis is doing, shipping refugees north.
(archive link)
- Vulture ranks the Marilyn
Monroe movies. Reading this, I've really got to catch up on some of the earlier films. I would
swap 'The Seven Year Itch' with 'Some Like It Hot' in this ranking, and Groucho's response to
her 'Love Happy' audition's worth repeating: "The whole room revolved when she walked."
- Slate says fast-food
is racing to ditch the dining room, shifting to drive-thru only (because nobody goes inside to eat
anymore). I remember when McDonald's was new, without inside seating, just a row of cold-tile benches
along either side; also realizing I never eat fast food anymore -- being retired, the only time is
while on travel (maybe, never my first choice).
|
| September 8, 2022 |
- All eyes on England, as Queen Elizabeth has passed away --
Operation London Bridge
Operation
Unicorn is in effect. In the UK and the Commonwealth, life stops for
two weeks. God Save the Queen!
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|
| September 5, 2022 |
After the cachophony of the Vegas airport, Sea-Tac
is an oasis. See these comfy chaise-lounge chairs we found facing the windows at the end of Concourse B, on
our way back home from the Alaska cruise? Other unexpected but welcome amenities: none of those tiresome
security announcements, plus easy-to-read digital clocks hanging from the ceiling every few gates.
- Speaking of US airports, at The Verge, the
Humiliating History of the TSA. Not even death can exempt you from TSA screening.
- While in transit, I picked up a discarded Financial Times and found an article about
one of the earliest songs I ever liked and the woman who wrote it (although I never heard her rendition,
until now): Freight Train -- how
Elizabeth Cotten's song was revived by the skiffle boom. We even have
video -- note how, unlike most southpaws,
who re-string their instruments and play them backwards, she just rotates a right-handed guitar 180°
and plays it upside-down, as Jimi Hendrix did.
- In the Atlantic, Foreign
candy puts American candy to shame. Who knew the Mormons had developed a Hi-Chew sweet tooth? It's
what I offer on Halloween, prompting one trick-or-treater to exclaim "He's handing out Hi-Chews -- this
is my new favorite house!"
(archive link}
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