We have been asked to point out that Stuart Kennedy, of Flat E, 38 Don Street, Aberdeen, who appeared at Peterhead Sheriff Court on Monday, had 316 pink, frilly garters confiscated not 316 pink, frilly knickers.
And this:
A film review on Sept. 5 about “Save Me” confused some characters and actors. It is Mark, not Chad, who is sent to the Genesis House retreat for converting gay men to heterosexuality. (Mark is played by Chad Allen; there is no character named Chad). The hunky fellow resident is Scott (played by Robert Gant), not Ted (Stephen Lang). And it is Mark and Scott — not “Chad and Ted” — who partake of cigarettes and “furtive man-on-man action.”
They also highlighted a Guardian typo: “Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude, not One Hundred Years of Solicitude”. I don’t know though…2006 and 2005 were pretty great.
Aired a few weeks before the 2008 election, The President’s Guide to Science is a 50-minute video featuring several prominent scientists — Richard Dawkins, Michio Kaku, etc. — offering their advice for the incoming US President, basically what they would teach the President about science. (via smashing telly)
I Am Sitting in a Room is a piece by composer Alvin Lucier. It consists of an audio recording of Lucier sitting in a room reciting a few lines. That recording is played in the same room and recorded. Then that recording is recorded. And so on.
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
Here’s a recording of the original performance:
Listening to it, I wonder how much of the distortion at the end is due to the “resonant frequencies of the room” and how much is just artifacts of the rerecording process. (via djacobs)
The frequency of the resulting sound is determined by resonant frequencies in the microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker, the acoustics of the room, the directional pick-up and emission patterns of the microphone and loudspeaker, and the distance between them.
After posting the video of the chickens from the Muppets clucking their way through the Blue Danube waltz, I couldn’t resist putting it together with the most iconic use of that tune in contemporary culture. Here, then, is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Chicken Cordon Bleu Danube cut.
The best selling Bible study text on Amazon right now is Bible Illuminated, a “286-page glossy oversized magazine style” version of the New Testament (look inside here).
The Green Bible will equip and encourage people to see God’s vision for creation and help them engage in the work of healing and sustaining it. With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth.
In a voice as rich as it is recognized, James Earl Jones lends his narrative talents to the King James Version of the New Testament. In over 19 hours on 16 compact discs enhanced with a complete musical score, James Earl Jones interprets the most enduring book of our time utilizing the acclaimed actor’s superb storytelling and skilled characterizations. Hailed as the greatest spoken-word bible version ever, and with almost half a million copies sold, this exquisite audio treasury is certain to enthuse and inspire.
The Message Remix 2.0 is a version for young people written in “today’s language”. Here’s the first few verses of Genesis:
First this: God created the Heavens and Earth — all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.
Inspired By The Bible Experience is a 85-hour audiobook of the entire Bible with over 400 different readers, including Cuba Gooding Jr., Denzel Washington, LL Cool J, and Faith Evans. Samuel L. Jackson plays God! I wonder if he gets to recite this bit from Pulp Fiction:
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
Even after he began writing fiction in college — he simultaneously completed a second undergraduate thesis, in English, that ultimately became his 1987 novel, “The Broom of the System” — it was still philosophy that defined him academically. “I knew him as a philosopher with a fiction hobby,” Jay Garfield, an adviser on Wallace’s thesis and now a professor at Smith College, told me recently. “I didn’t realize he was one of the great fiction writers of his generation with a philosophy hobby.”
Film Addict takes the top 250 films on IMDB and quizzes you on how many you’ve seen. My score is 53.6% (I’ve hardly seen anything made before 1970). Compare your score. (thx, mathowie)
Update: Since posting this, I’ve been urged to watch Rope; The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; M; The Third Man; Lawrence of Arabia; The Lives of Others; Roman Holiday; and Planet of the Apes. (thx, everyone)
Thank you to the kottke.org RSS sponsor for this week, Lawrence Shainberg, on behalf of his recent novel, Crust (@ Amazon). The main character of Crust is also a writer, afflicted with writer’s block until he starts picking his nose, at which point: pinpoint clarity. A movement is started, Nasalism, which counts among its adherents one George W. Bush. Sounds ridiculous, but most satires do. Jonathan Lethem had good things to say about Crust, as did the late Norman Mailer:
Crust is unique. I know of no other novel like it. The first words that come to mind are daring, daunting, irreligious in the extreme, an academic send-up, and a grasp with no small grin of the essential mindlessness and urge to power that beset humans and creates new ventures. It’s wild as sin and revolting as vomit and as exceptional as the lower reaches of insanity itself.
Sugar Daddy Online Dating, “where the classy, attractive, and affluent meet”. In my experience, use of the word “classy” means the opposite of what the speaker intends. The jarring “AS SEEN ON TV” graphic isn’t helping either. (Note: I saw the URL for this site on TV.)
I pulled up to the house around seven or eight And I yield to the cabbie your Halsey Smalley later Look at my kingdom I was finally there Consider my thrown as the prince of Bel air.
Now I had to write something on the bat. At Memorial Stadium, the bat room was not too close to the clubhouse, so I wanted to write something that I could find immediately if I looked up and it was 4:44 and I had to get out there on the field a minute later and not be late. There were five big grocery carts full of bats in there and if I wrote my number 3, it could be too confusing. So I wrote ‘F—k’ Face on it.
At the time, it was assumed by many that Ripken had intentionally sabotaged his card with the obscenity. I still have one of these somewhere… (via unlikely words)
Just Like the Movies is a short film by Michal Kosakowski that samples footage from movies that were made prior to September 2001 to recreate the events of 9/11. More info.
“It’s just like the movies!” was usually the first reaction of those watching the events of 9/11 in New York unfolding on their TV screens, no doubt recalling the endless number of catastrophes that Hollywood has proposed over the years. Now confronted with the reality of one such scenario — of unprecedented destructive and symbolic resonance — a feeling of deja vu arises while looking at these images.
If I am to maintain my current levels of productivity and balance in my life, I do not need a tower defense game on my iPhone. But if I *were* to bring such a thing into my life, Fieldrunnerslooks like a good candidate. I can’t wait until playing video games falls under the rubric of parenting. (Just kidding, Meg.)
Version 1.9 announced! I am working on an updated version DTD which will include multiplayer, extra modes and extra creeps. It will be released in the next few weeks so stay tuned!
Visually, sites’ presentation is often as sparse as the domain names are long. Many display only a few words. Although some sites use Flash to play an audio or video clip, very few offer the rich interactivity associated with Flash deployment in other contexts. Some sites incorporate design tropes from past online eras: gaudy 3D headlines, jarring repeated background images, looping audio clips, and centered text.
There are now 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is where they’re the thickest on the ground. It has 295 of these electromechanical marvels for every 10000 manufacturing workers — a robot density almost 10 times the world average and nearly twice that of Singapore (169), South Korea (164), and Germany (163).
When the war with the machines starts, Africa will be humanity’s last stronghold.
Update: The inbox consensus seems clustered around the opinion that this train is running on the contemporary 4/5/6 line. Here’s a 1904 map which shows the then-IRT line in question (in red). At 42nd St, the line runs crosstown to Times Square and then up the 1/2/3. (thx jason et al.)
Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want “the buzz you get from working that little bit harder”. This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. “When people talk and write about culture,” says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show “This American Life”, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”
Dueling book reviews! (Sort of.) First, a pair of books suggest, contrary to Robert Oppenheimer’s post-war views, that the US is the only nation to have developed atomic weaponry and that all the other nuclear nations have gotten their information from the US program.
All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.
Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China’s leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.
The book, in a main disclosure, discusses how China in 1982 made a policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic know-how. Its identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea.
Coster-Mullen’s book includes more than a hundred pages of declassified photographs from half a dozen government archives. Coster-Mullen, who is a truck driver by profession, sees his project as a diverting mental challenge. “This is nuclear archeology,” he says.
Coster-Mullen goes on to add that “the secret of the atomic bomb is how easy they are to make”. His hand-bound book, Atom Bombs, is available from Amazon.
“My process of interviewing people is I do not interview people,” said the cheerful Hustwit. “I’m trying to get them to forget that they’re being interviewed.” He accomplishes this by avoiding the word “interview” in his communications with subjects and going into a meeting with a list of conversation topics, never a list of prepared questions.
But Gene, I don’t think loves being directed in the first place, and I had a lot of particular ideas for the way some things were to be done. He just wasn’t getting a huge kick out of it — but I don’t know that he ever does. The main thing is that everything he was doing was great. Even though he can be belligerent, there’s a lot of emotion there. I was always excited to be working with him, even when I was a little scared of him, just because this character that I’d spent so much time working on and was so invested in was being brought to life — not only in all the ways that I’d wanted, but something quite beyond.
He said that, in a recession, people wanted hugs. This struck me as a pretty feeble explanation. Surely there are easier ways of getting hugs than putting one’s marriage on the line? Hugging one’s children or — if one is desperate — even one’s spouse might seem easier and safer.
He said that this was just the point: that the risk was the lure. That bankers are suffering from a risk deficit: their working lives have been derisked compulsorily and this could be a way of compensating by adding risk to their private lives.
Who’s gonna make the “Bankers Want Risky Hugs” tshirts? (via mr)
Today, we’re announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.
At least I think it’s a few magazines…it might be thousands but there’s no way (that I can find) to view a list of magazines on offer.
To bring over the style of the speech out of the slums or ghettos, we haven’t used very exact, grammatically correct German. Nobody says “Wegen des Fahrrads” (because of the bikes), rather “wegen dem Fahrrads” (‘cause of them bikes), for example there we use wrong German. Here and there we’ve used other phrases, sometimes with an English or American sentence structure.
The interview itself was translated from German to English. (via panopticist)
Can you suggest some replacements for standard, everyday household items that are far superior in terms of usefulness, luxuriousness and quality?
My wife and I are ardent upgraders. I rarely buy anything anymore but the things I do buy are usually better versions of things I already have. As things break or wear out, we’ve been replacing them with items that are nicer to use/wear/whatever and will last a whole lot longer than the cheaper stuff. Here are a list of things that we’ve upgraded over the years that I would recommend.
Knives - Cooking is Meg’s department but even a novice like myself has to admit: good knives are worth the extra money. The best part is that unless you cook all sorts of crazy stuff — in which case you likely don’t need this advice — you only need two or three knives. Get a good chef’s knife that fits well in your hand, a paring knife, and a serrated knife for slicing bread. Your impulse will be to skip the nice serrated. Don’t…slicing bread is so much easier than with that flimsy piece of crap you have and it does tomatoes wonderfully as well. Keep them sharp and they’ll literally last forever.
Miele vacuum - I have no idea which model we have — it’s the low-end canister model with just a few settings — but it is the greatest vacuum cleaner in the universe. I don’t mind vacuuming at all with this thing. Love it.
Tailored shirts - If you get yourself a tailor from Hong Kong, China, or the like, shirts tailor-made to your specific measurements don’t cost much more than stuff off-the-rack from Banana Republic or whatever. And lemme tell you, tailored shirts fit really well and look amazing.
Pots and pans - Again, Meg’s department, but proper cookware is really a pleasure to use. And it heats more evenly, you won’t burn yourself grabbing the handle, blah blah blah. They’ll last forever, even with heavy use.
Bed sheets - Flannel sheets for the winter are priced the same as regular cotton sheets but are way softer. For spring/summer/fall, go with something in the 400 thread count area. Sleeping and fooling around are so much better with nice soft sheets.
Mattress - Slate says that all mattresses are created equal but we got a firm mattress with a pillowtop and love it.
Headphones - Ditch those Apple earbuds and get yourself a pair of in-ear phones from Shure or Etymotic (or sound cancelling ones from Bose). They’re expensive, no doubt. But you don’t listen to crappy music so why listen to good music with crappy sound quality?
Coffee-making machine - I don’t drink coffee but getting some sort of coffee contraption for the home, even an expensive one like an espresso machine, saves you lots in Starbucks purchases down the road.
Wine glasses - If you drink wine at all, get some nice glasses, even if it’s only two glasses that you use for yourself when drinking casually around the house. Your cheapo wine will taste better.
Fleur de sel - Or Malden’s or whatever your preference is. Regular table salt isn’t ideal for salting food after it’s served. Malden comes in nice flakes that melt nicely on the food. Meg prefers fleur de sel but I find it too crunchy. A 4 oz. container will cost you $11 — 3 times as much as 3 pounds of table salt — but it’ll last for months or even years.
Shoes - Cheap shoes wear out quickly and can hurt your feet. A good pair of men’s shoes made from quality materials will last for years; just keep resoling them.
None of these items are super-expensive…I think the mattress cost the most and it was under $800. We bought this stuff over a number of years and it probably worked out to an extra couple hundred dollars per year total. The upfront expense is sometimes tough to swallow but over time, you break even or even come out ahead money-wise (i.e. you’ll never have to buy [item] ever again). The way I think about it is buying nice products that you’ll use for several years/decades is both a financial investment and an investment in your personal well-being, even if it’s just some nice salt to make your food taste a little better.
Jim Carrey will loom large in our shattered posterity, I believe, because his filmography amounts to a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self. Who knows how the self became such a problem, or when we began to feel the falseness in our nature?
Count me among the Carrey fans; I wish all his movies were of Cable Guy / Eternal Sunshine / Truman Show quality.
Seventeen-year-old Yamaguchi Otoya uses a foot-long sword to kill Japan Socialist Party leader Asanuma Inajiro on a public stage in Tokyo. Yamaguchi was upset with Asanuma’s support of a U.S.-Japan mutual defense treaty.
Henry Molaison — more widely known as H.M. — died last week at 82. Molaison was an amnesiac and the study of his condition revealed much about the workings of the human brain. He lost his long-term memory after a surgery in 1953 and couldn’t remember anything after that for more than 20 seconds or so.
Living at his parents’ house, and later with a relative through the 1970s, Mr. Molaison helped with the shopping, mowed the lawn, raked leaves and relaxed in front of the television. He could navigate through a day attending to mundane details — fixing a lunch, making his bed — by drawing on what he could remember from his first 27 years.
Molly Birnbaum was training to be a chef in Boston when she got hit by a car and lost her sense of smell. Soon after, she moved to New York.
Without the aroma of car exhaust, hot dogs or coffee, the city was a blank slate. Nothing was unbearable and nothing was especially beguiling. Penn Station’s public restroom smelled the same as Jacques Torres’s chocolate shop on Hudson Street. I knew that New York possessed a further level of meaning, but I had no access to it, and I worked hard to ignore what I could not detect.
In the first year of my recovery, I regularly visited both a neurologist and neuropsychologist who both disputed this claim. They told me that smell and taste, although related, are essentially exclusive. If anything, my neuropsychologist told me, smell is more integrated with memory.
In my experience, I’ve found this to be true: I have not lost my love of food; in fact, I feel like my appreciation for flavor combinations have been heightened. Milk does not taste like a “viscous liquid” to me and ice cream is certainly more than just “freezing.” Similarly, a good wine is more than tasting the acids, a memorable dessert is more than simply sweet, and french fries do not taste like salty nothing-sticks.
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