Entries for March 2009
A review of Cinderella, by Shanie, age six:
One day there was going to be a fancy ball. Cinderella wasn’t going to get to go, but then something very exciting happened. I liked to read this book because I like fairy tales. I also like to read about evil people. It’s exciting and a little scary. I would recommend this book about Cinderella to my mom because she likes to do chores.
The Spaghetti Book Club provides book reviews “by kids, for kids.” It’s incredible. The kid-crafted illustrations that accompany the reviews are just as fridge-worthy.
Peculiar little video by Keith Loutit for a song called “Clementine.” Utilizes tilt-shift photography to achieve its miniature look.
via Nothing for X
I’m a classy roustabout, but I’m not sure I’d want to accessorize my computer with the pink-accented Swarovski Crystal mouse.
By manipulating the design of an item used everyday into a sensual, feminine form, we have created a personal gesture for the urban lifestyle of the working woman.
Kind of the opposite of the more organic, but equally impractical Mouse Mouse.
via design bloom
A family in Porterville, California recently discovered that their new home has an unmapped addition. An underground lair.
They noticed what they suspected was a small sink hole at the corner of a concrete patio slab. As they checked on the hole, Edwards was pulling some weeds nearby.
“His foot just sunk,” Barton said, “and that’s when we thought we saw a dead body.”
Turns out it wasn’t a dead body, but some foam insulation. Beneath it, a large space. Everybody thinks it’s a subterranean grow room. They’re afraid their four-year-old son Ethan will want to play down there.
Also recently unearthed, tunnels belonging to crusaders were found under Malta. Unlike the marijuana-propagating sanctum, these structures are believed to have been designed to facilitate Crusades-era sanitation and to bolster the water supply for the Knights of Malta. Ethan, play here instead.
Sure, it looks like Astro Boy with heartburn, but Kenji Yanobe’s Giant Torayan is not the kind of toy you leave with just any kid.
This GIANT TORATAN doll is the ultimate child’s weapon, as it sings, dances, breathes fire, and follows only those orders given by children.
Masterminded at Nagoya Institute of Technology, its Command Device uses voice-recognition technology to differentiate between instructions given by adults versus those given by younger evil geniuses.
Half-dragon, half-Mary Poppins, all awesome.
Sea urchins have teeth so powerful they can munch through limestone. These teeth are composed of calcite, a form of calcium carbonate, which happens to be the same material in the limestone they’re snacking on. So how do they chomp through the rock without grinding down their tusks? By aligning the calcite crystals that make up their teeth.
The structure and composition of the tip, particularly the orientation of the calcite crystals, is exquisitely controlled.
Maybe as dentists investigate how to spur humans to generate teeth like sharks, they can devise a way to make them as strong as those of a sea urchin. A scary prospect when you think about playing hockey.
A list of the Top 10 Mascots of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
Though not completely relevant to March Madness, here’s a list of the worst mascots in college sports.
Archibald Query was the inventor of the pasty, sticky, somewhat offensive “creme spread” known as Marshmallow Fluff. The sugar shortage during World War I cost Query his confection. He sold the recipe to H. Allen Durkee and Fred Mower, two candymakers who quickly figured out that combining it with peanut butter creates the “Fluffernutter,” which in turn creates sandwich-obsessed mobs of thieving children. The Fluffernutter may soon be the state sandwich of Massachusetts, even though it was almost legally banned from school lunches back in 2006.
Marshmallow was originally used as a throat-coating precursor to the lozenge, but these days it’s molded into everything, from cereal squares to baby chickens and moon pies.
This Croque Madame is a fancy, sweet version of a fried ham-and-cheese, made with Nutella and Fluff on cinammon-raisin bread. Yum.
Barclay Prime, home of the notorious $100 cheesesteak, says that there’s no evidence of the recession hitting their sandwich sales.
Australia celebrated Toad Day Out this past weekend, resulting in the deaths of thousands of toxic cane toads.
Cane toads were introduced to north Queensland canefields from South America in 1935 to eat pest beetles. The slimy interlopers couldn’t jump high enough to reach the beetles at the top of the cane stalks and, instead, rapidly spread in search of food. Millions of them now threaten many local species and spread diseases such as salmonella across northern Australia.
Ick. The hallucinogenic amphibians were profiled in the documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History. Ribbit in peace.
Pull one of these out at a bar and jaws will start wagging.
Designed by Michael Häne & Remo Caminada.
A Las Vegas Weekly article about the realities of the fantasy job search for a model/bartender in Sin City highlights the hurt felt by those other sectors of the American Dream. For one, choosing what to wear to a job interview can be especially challenging when the uniform is a bikini.
After much deliberation, I chose a minimalist (cloth-wise) brown dress that matched my brown bikini and stilettos. To bring the look together, I chose a business jacket. Unfortunately, I only had non-matching black business jackets. My second choice, a leather jacket, made the outfit look oddly slutty. So I went with my jean jacket, which gave the ensemble a wholesome all-American look, but didn’t do much to make me look like a businesswoman.
Nomi Malone wouldn’t have survived an instant in this economy.
Petri Purho, the rapid-prototyping enthusiast and mastermind behind Crayon Physics Deluxe, talked to The Onion’s A.V. Club about the puzzle’s point, the process, and winning the prize.
“I didn’t want to do a cheery kids game, where you’d have bright colors and cheerful music.”
thx john
Crinoids, or sea lilies, are marine animals that resemble plants. Unlike its garden namesake, the sea lily doesn’t stay still, but creeps along to avoid becoming prey for sea urchins and other predators.
It seems they’ve also developed the ability to “shed” their stalk-like appendages.
“It’s the lizard’s tail strategy,” said Baumiller, who is also a curator in the UM Museum of Paleontology. “The sea lily just leaves the stalk end behind. The sea urchin is preoccupied going after that, and the sea lily crawls away.” And the speed at which they move—-three to four centimeters per second—-suggests that “in a race with a sea urchin, the sea lily would probably win.”
When on the move, they resemble graceful spiders in a hurry.
Crinoids are also the state fossil of Missouri, and inspired the design of Pokemon characters Lileep and Cradily.
80. Wear a sportcoat when traveling by plane. It has easily accessible pockets.
1001 Rules For My Unborn Son is a poignant idea that’s well-executed.
Related to ginger, galangal has been used since medieval times to spice food and quell digestive issues, but it doesn’t taste like your friendly, corner-store ginger candy.
If you were to bite into this tuberous rhizome, you would be very surprised at the slightly sweet, “perfumy” taste and scent of it, not to mention the spiciness factor. While not exactly “hot” like a chili, galangal has a sharp pungency to it that will make you gasp and perhaps cough a little.
Galangal’s role outside the kitchen includes a place in folk medicine and hoodoo magic, where it’s called “Chewing John.” If you’re entering litigation and require a favorable verdict, you’re supposed to chew it thoroughly before spitting it onto the floor of the courtroom.
If only Blake Griffin of the Sooners had hocked a ginger loogie yesterday, North Carolina would have been sent packing.
An excerpt from one of Galileo Galilei’s letters to Don Virginio Cesarini:
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.
Want more Galileo? The Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence is loaning out their exhibit, Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy to The Franklin in Philadelphia. It features one of the last two telescopes belonging to the astronomer, as well as his notes, paintings, and other instruments, including the cylindrical sundial and Michelangelo’s compass.
A gallery of not-famous twins and their celebrity siblings.
It must suck so much to have to explain that, no, really, you’re not that guy from Napoleon Dynamite.
Ian Curtis is as haunting made of tape as he is on tape.
The artist, known as iRI5, is in her mid-twenties and lives in Georgia. Her work features found objects like old magazines, books, playing cards, and trash that she turns into treasure.
via Noise Addicts
The coelacanth, a 400 million year old prehistoric fish once thought to be extinct, has undergone a CT scan. Forty eggs were found inside of the large, frozen bodies of the two coelacanth tested, originally caught off the coast of Tanzania and then shipped to Japan for study.
The coelacanth young are thought to hatch inside of the mother and grow to 30cm before their live birth, when they swim outside of her body, looking identical to their parents, only tiny and cute. The discovery of the eggs could contribute to evidence that the ancient ocean dweller is the missing link between fish and amphibians:
Many scientists believe that the unique characteristics of the coelacanth represent an early step in the evolution of fish to terrestrial four-legged animals like amphibians. The most striking feature of this “living fossil” is its paired lobe fins that extend away from its body like legs and move in an alternating pattern, like a trotting horse.
As far as fish go, it’s just a shade prettier than the sea wolf.
Just in time for Friday afternoon, a cedar beer cozy and a collection of beer sweaters. Wash it down with some beer soap.
Love at first sight apparently applies to men only:
Researchers believe that this difference between men and women can best be explained by the fact that the former use eye contact to seek fertile and fit mates. Meanwhile, the latter shy from making eye contact or drawing unwanted attention onto themselves for fear of unwanted pregnancies and single parenthood, it has been said.
The same study found that it takes approximately 8.2 seconds of eye contact for a man to decide if a woman is attractive. It’s hard not to stare at the eyes of photographer Rankin’s hypnotizing Eyescapes for a whole lot longer, but that’s a different type of beauty.
From the YesButNoButYes Guide to Dutch Women:
Yfke Sturm - It must have been hard for Yfke growing up. With a name that sounds like it came from Return of the Jedi, she was probably the subject of ridicule and name-calling. I too had those evils done to me, and I’d be happy to console her.
Educational.
Lebron’s full-court shot on 60 Minutes makes me grin like a 4-year-old with a fistful of candy.
Attention milk product enthusiasts: The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais has been released, and it won the dubious distinction of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.
The benefits of winning the award appear to be few. According to Philip Stone, The Bookseller’s charts editor:
“What does the future hold for these items?” Mr. Stone asked, speaking of fromage-frais cartons. “Well, given that fromage frais normally comes in 60-gram containers, one would assume that the world outlook for 0.06-gram containers of fromage frais is pretty bleak. But I’m not willing to pay £795 to find out.”
For those of you who are more into designer accessories than dairy almanacs, the Calf & Half pitcher lets you pour with udder abandon.
And if you’re looking for more clandestine cream, bring your own containers. Raw milk, once our only option, then treated as a potential health hazard, now finds itself on the black market.
From Schott’s Vocab: A Miscellany of Modern Words and Phrases:
Elephant Flyovers - Elevated crossings designed to protect Indian elephants from road and rail accidents.
While you’re there, be sure to check out Schott’s entries for Daggering and Fire Fatigue. Actually, they’re all fantastic.
Eno is an antacid produced by GlaxoSmithKline. It’s globally distributed, mainly across South America, India, and the Middle East, and it’s available as sachets and tablets in both Lemon and an ambiguous “Regular” flavor.
Ogilvy & Mather produced a stunning print advertisement for the company, featuring a gun made of food. Quite an improvement over Eno’s commercial from the 80s, although if the packets made me seem as effervescent as the actor, perhaps I’d take some on my down days.
via Coloribus
From a post that includes all 120 crayon names, codes, and trivia:
The name Crayola was coined by Alice Binney, wife of company founder Edwin, and a former school teacher. She combined the words craie, which is French for chalk, and ola, for oleaginous, because crayons are made from petroleum based paraffin.
I don’t remember ever having scribbled with sticks of Manatee or Jazzberry Jam, but I do distinctly recall meticulously practicing my hearts and starts with the dulled point of Carnation Pink.
via Colour Lovers
“Vocoders are an instantly recognizable synthesizer sound, having been used in popular music since the 1960s. They allow you to ‘talk like a robot’, which while fun, is often not musically useful.”
This from “Introduction to Vocoders,” proves the point that the vocoder does not, in fact, turn a song into music. The voice analyzer/synthesizer system that was originally developed in the 1930s to facilitate early telephony has now become a seemingly inescapable accessory to popular music.
Rapper Ice Cube also awkwardly reflected on the negative effects of vocoders on rap:
“Records sales really not concerned to me as much as doing it my way. And doing the kind of records I want to do. Without some A&R dude trying to tell me to go find T-Pain and get you a voice box. Ya know, all this stupid stuff that they do that mess up a lot of records, mess up a lot of artists.”
This clip of T-Pain v. His Vocoder is the audio equipment equivalent of Stephen King’s Christine, and it certainly backs up Mr. Cube’s claim.
Update: Turns out that the actual device Mr. Pain uses to alter his voice box is referred to as an Auto-Tune, and it’s the weapon of choice for Cher, Kanye, and T-Pain, who seems just as oblivious as this author was. The two machines are entirely different.
Thx jason freeman
Biogen is an art installation by Hanna von Goeler that’s inspired by the genetic engineering of tomatoes. Consisting of oil paintings, sculptures, a mobile made of tomato skin, and a model of a “tomato six pack,” von Goeler’s work is striking, and notably unappetizing.
Food Fray offers an equally fascinating, though less creative case against GM fruits and veggies. Both the art and the argument raise questions about the dangers of chewing with an open mind.
Brooke Inman’s Everything Color Circle is mesmerizing. As somebody with limited organizational skills, I find it mind-boggling that she was able to put this together. And to think that it could be destroyed in a nanosecond if a sugar-addled kindergartner armed with construction paper wandered into the room. (via design milk)
In response to a push for more tech literacy, British primary schools have proposed a new set of academic standards, including plans to study Twitter.
It seems to be going over fairly well with those at the head of the class. According to John Bangs, of the National Union of Teachers:
“Computer skills and keyboard skills seem to be as important as handwriting in this. Traditional books and written texts are downplayed in response to web-based learning.”
Let’s hope that history lectures don’t devolve into presentations on now-defunct MySpace pages and AOL screen-names.
via CNET
A refreshing take on aging, from across the pond, as expressed by 74-year-old Agnes McGroarty:
When Agnes - who already has an MP3 player - went into a music shop to ask about iPods, a young sales assistant couldn’t have been more helpful.
She joked: “It may come as a surprise to some that someone my age has a Bose sound system and MP3 player instead of a gramophone. I think older people should challenge attitudes and we should all have respect for individuals, whatever their age.”
Nowadays, it’s quite likely that grandma and grandpa will be updating their status updates on Facebook during their games of Bingo. There are even email services available to connect tech-savvy seniors with Internet penpals across the globe.
A less friendly view comes from Tremendosaur, who believes that it’s win, lose, or draw when it comes to Old People vs. Technology.
Santorio Santorio was an Italian physician in the 1700s who performed experiments so precise, they named him twice. He’s best known for Medicina Statica, a collection of research which, among other things, details his experiments with “insensible perspiration.” Santorio would weigh what he consumed both before and after it was digested. The results concluded that a fair amount of what he put into his body was lost through his skin.
Fascinating stuff from the University of Virginia’s vault of historical collections:
“Santorio made more than theoretical contributions to science and medicine. He is credited with inventing a wind gauge, a water current meter, the “pulsilogium” to measure the pulse rate, an instrument to remove bladder stones, and a trocar to drain fluid from cavities. Both he and his friend Galileo mentioned the thermoscope, a precursor to the thermometer. There is debate over the actual inventor, but it is known that Santorio was the first to add a numerical scale to the instrument.”
And putting him soundly in the “mad scientist” category is the fact that he invented a precursor to the waterbed. It’s unclear whether or not it was filled with insensible perspiration, but it was probably hard to hump on.
via Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
The winner of Jif’s Most Creative Peanut Butter Sandwich Contest this year was the Po’ Boy Peanut Butter Chicken Cheese Steak, created by Jordyn Boyer, age 10. Featuring ingredients like Worcestershire sauce, mozzarella, a hoagie bun, and chicken, that jar of strawberry jelly might find itself collecting dust in the pantry for quite some time.
Jordyn won a $25,000 college scholarship fund, and a lot of respect from Southern chefs everywhere.
One of the entries in the competition was called The Happy Hedgehog. I wonder how happy that hedgehog would be to find itself on Scanwiches.
Metafilter feeds our needs for time-lapse photography and nutrition by linking to a full plate of time-lapse vegetation growth. Beans may be good for the heart, but pepper plants know how to shake it.
The Prada Transformer building in Seoul was designed to accommodate events in the spheres of art, architecture, film, and fashion, and it does so in a wholly unusual way: the entire structure somersaults.
From the site’s press release:
The Transformer combines the four sides of a tetrahedron: hexagon, cross, rectangle and circle into one pavilion. The building, entirely covered with a smooth elastic membrane, will be flipped using cranes, completely reconfiguring the visitor’s experience with each new programme. Each side plan is precisely designed to organize a different event installation creating a building with four identities. Whenever one shape becomes the ground plan, the other three shapes become the walls and the ceiling defining the space, as well as referencing historic or anticipating future event configurations.
The building was designed by cranium-cracking architect Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. No word on whether the company that manufactures Dramamine was an investor.
[via Inhabitat]
Remember the gilded age before The Recession? Well, for those of you still untouched by the meltdown, there’s always the $75K rhinestone toilet by designer Jemal Wright.
Thanks to Luxury Property Blog, you can peruse a list of the Most Expensive Luxury Interiors to aid you in the always-fashionable sport of conspicuous consumption. My personal favorite is from designer Andre Kim: a garish Samsung washing machine featuring baroque paneling and a gilded thingamajig on the door.
For the more utilitarian aristocrat suffering from paranoia, or those who have committed investor fraud and fear angry mobs seeking money for better torches, why not build a panic room for your palace? Constructing a basic model in your home should only cost you about $50K, which is chump change compared to the price tag on the aforementioned sparkly loo.
Thanks for the introduction, Jason. It’s likely I’m not going to be able to fill your shoes with anything but pools of Love’s Baby Soft scented sweat, but I appreciate the opportunity. This is like rope climbing in junior high PE, in a good way.
These days, kids can choose between rope climbing and Dance Dance Revolution. Where’s the humiliation in that?
I’ll be putting in overtime on some other projects for the next week, so I’ve arranged for Ms. Ainsley Drew to edit the site while I’m away. You may know Ainsley from her entertaining Twitter account — she’s AinsleyofAttack, or her Jerk Ethic blog. She is also a partner in a two-person copywriting company called Ministry of Imagery and the assistant editor at The Rumpus, where she’s interviewed Mary Roach, Andrew W.K., and some schlub named Jason Kottke and failed to interview Susannah Breslin.
Welcome, Ainsley!
Timothy Ferris has some excerpts from a new book by Neil Strauss called Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life. The book is an “encyclopedia for those who want to disappear or become lawsuit-proof global citizens”.
I couldn’t believe classes like this even existed. In the last forty-eight hours, I’d learned to hotwire a car, pick locks, conceal my identity, and escape from handcuffs, flexi-cuffs, ducttape, rope, and nearly every other type of restraint.
The course was Urban Escape and Evasion, which offered the type of instruction I’d been looking for to balance my wilderness knowledge. The objective of the class was to learn to survive in a city as a fugitive. Most of the students were soldiers and contractors who’d either been in Iraq or were about to go, and wanted to know how to safely get back to the Green Zone if trapped behind enemy lines.
Like Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week, Emergency sounds both exhilarating and preposterous. I wonder if these folks might have been helped by such a book.
Recent additions to the official Scrabble dictionary — like za, qi, and zzz — have upset the letter distribution balance of the game, causing high scoring letters like z & q to become overvalued. The three-point line in college basketball and Monopoly’s Vermont Ave. are similarly mispriced.
The architect Robert Stern once remarked, “Can you imagine an elevated expressway at 30th Street just so Long Island guys could get to New Jersey?” Robert Moses could. A pair of Google Maps of Manhattan were redrawn to include the Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid Manhattan Expressway, two highways masterminded by Moses that would have cut across Manhattan through Soho and at 30th St., respectively.
This was true for me, at least, while I was making these; Hand erasing buildings through SoHo, TriBeCa, and the LES was an eery experience as I tried to imagine what these places would really look like if my brush was a bulldozer.
More information on the Mid-Manhattan Expressway and the Lower Manhattan Expressway on NYCroads. (via migurski)
Even after two weeks of letting Tetris HD play by itself, the screen is only about 2/3rds full. It’s a fun image to see but the browser chrome is perhaps just as interesting…the Google search for “fuck fuck fuck” and a tab containing the Wikipedia page for “Anal sex” for example. (thx, my main man dj jacob)
Some appliances are sold with a Sabbath Mode for those who observe the Jewish day of rest. Here are the notes for a Sub-Zero refrigerator:
- The door can be opened/closed at any time without concern of directly turning on or off any lights, digital readouts, solenoids, fans, valves, compressor, icons, tones or alarms.
- Any defrost cycle that becomes active will not be a function of the number of times or the length of time that the door is opened.
- The ice maker is disabled automatically. Ice cubes can then be made manually (using a standard ice cube tray) as needed for that Sabbath/Holiday.
- All dispenser functions are deactivated.
There are also special Shabbot elevators that stop on each floor so that no buttons need to be pushed. One could imagine a Sabbath Web Browser that would require no button pushing…it would just browse through a list of your favorite web sites automatically and you could dip in and read when you wanted.
Here’s a handy flowchart to figure out which new media blowhard you are. I am “Try Again”.
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