Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Thursday, September 23, 2010

"Bikes" starts with "B," "blue helmets" starts with "B."

This is the Republican candidate for governor in Colorado alleging that bicycles are a threat to the American way of life.

This is the sort of conspiracy theory the Amish would dream up.

Just imagine me shouting "Victoria!" along with Ray Davies



A collection of Victorian documentation for the enterprising and canny.

And a blog from the same.

Hallelujah

David Bazan of Pedro The Lion used to be the only good Christian rocker. Now he's not really Christian.

Music here.

Ride it, link dump!



Amy made the shirt but neither of us wants to actually pay real money for it. It's better to find it at a thrift store and imagine what the person who died in it's life was like.

My friend Malcolm's beats. He was my best bud from, like, fourth grade through middle school — his early claims to fame were that he could play an endless boogie vamp on the piano, and that he could sing in a deep voice, like Clarence "Frogmouth" Henry.

Computer scientists seem to rather miss the point of the philosophical term "Ontology," but it's a neat article nonetheless.

Aedui is the only druid we know by name. And he was likely a total douche.

Marc Augé wrote that book about non-places that I want to read.

When you bringin' the Phrygian Cap back, hipsters?

Stooges Wax Museum.

Hrm. I don't think this is exactly what I want, but maybe I'll want it later. I want an English language catalog of all the works at the first Salon de Refuse. I could muddle through a German one. French does me fuck all. Shame it happened in France.

Dictaphone parcel

The sounds of shipping.

(Please don't let this be a viral FedEx ad.)

Poster art


1880-1918 poster art archive, hi res

More from before

WaPo analyzes Republican platform.

The astute reader

In One: The Republicans claim that they can simultaneously spend more money on inane bullshit like a missile shield and cut taxes for the wealthiest, and that this will magically increase jobs. Their mendacity is matched by their brazenness.

In Two: A professor stumping for these policies makes swift habit of lying for his benefit, and to the detriment of you. His mendacity is…

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Tomorrow - Juba Dance

How many states?

Lost State catches conservatives clueless on number of states.

I guess maybe they count Puerto Rico already?

I think I passed that once

The story of Zzyzxx.

A fellow MetaFilter member also made the film mentioned in the article and sent me a copy. I don't remember it that well, (there was another movie around the same time with a similar name — honest! — and I always get them confused) but I think I still have the DVD around here somewhere.

We don't have to be like they are

Japandroid's Heavenward Grand Prix. That "We don't have to be like they are" is ripped from something else just outside of my memory box.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

So I can find it later without a lot of clicking around.

Advanced archive search.

To live and die a little bit outside LA



America's most dangerous forest is just a couple miles from here.

Just Google It

Making Future Magic

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.



My mother often refers to the mechanism of photography as "magic." She knows, at least intellectually, that it's silver halide ions filling their electron shells with photons, but that kind of explanation just doesn't do anything for her. "Magic" fits how she thinks better.

This is a fun little proof-of-concept video for Making Future Magic, who use the iPad to create animated light images. I do wish that they'd branched out a little further from just tossing their logo into different situations, but there's a tremendous potential here for someone who can take this technology and use it in an evocative way. The form recalls hallucinations, spirits, sprites, the whole panoply of late 19th and early 20th century occult experimentation with photography.

It's really quite magical.

He of the creepy Nanocomics

Rustin's creepy/funny "Bromance."

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Mister Band


Goddamn, I love some Achewood

Ten More Ways To Die In Canada

Posted by Corbin in "Travel Tips," Ten Ways To Die In Canada is a decent, if lackluster, start.

Bears? Sure. Rattlesnakes? Maybe… West Nile Virus? Aren't we pushing this a bit just to make ten?

Ten more ways to die in Canada:

1) Hockey fight.

Likely a pick-up game where the lone Wings fan keeps riding the lone Habs fan about the Richard Riots and gets shirted. To avoid this, you must concede that the last Wings season was pretty disappointing and that Guy Lafleur might be able to take Yzerman.

2) Drunk on mickeys and two-fors.

Chasing Alberta rye with Moosehead seems like a quaint local custom, but then you're being wheeled out of some basement in Surrey and dumped in the Serpentine Fen. It's like, whoa, slow down der den.

3) Brained with a Juno.

They're like the Canadian Grammy's, thus guaranteeing that the only place you will ever run the risk of an irate wife driving the glass head of the Tragically Hip's Junie (or whatever they call them) into your temple is Canada.

4) Ennui

Looking out over the plains of south Ontario just, you know, gets to you, especially in February, when you haven't seen the sun in months and everything is just gray…

5) Trapped on a burning bus with William Shatner, Michael J. Fox, Paul Shaffer and Ryan Reynolds.

This one pretty much explains itself, but it's one of the best reasons to avoid public transit while in Canada.

6) Contaminated homemade poutine.

Spoiled turkey gravy kills more people than scurvy in Canada, especially when ladled from an uncovered can left out on the counter. While it's often so cold that you have to wear three sweaters indoors, this is not a food safe temperature.

7) Killed for tire money.

Canadians are so confused by their looneys and their tooneys and their throonies and their foonies that they've retreated to the only common currency: Canadian Tire Money (CTM). Avoid being jacked by violent criminals that stray over the border from America at will, simply by keeping your CTM on a card or in convenient tire form.

8) Gored at a rodeo.

For some reason, Alberta has these huge rodeos that are full of ways to die, which you might as well, being at a rodeo in Alberta.

9) Choke to death on Timbits.

There's a dutchie Timbit lodged in your throat, and you're slapping the table, knocking over the other 17 from your pity pack onto the floor, and everyone's just politely ignoring you. They know you are an American, and thus not allowed to be helped by their socialist Heimlich maneuver.

10) In French.

Zut allors! Je suis mort! Au Québec!

Monday, September 13, 2010

Kibitz a bit

Canter's inspires font; Canter's finds font; Font designer wraps truck.

Couple of cool things in this, like finding out who actually makes the gourmet food trucks around town, as well as a pretty cool font.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Yo dog Greg Nog



On prompting from The Whelk, Greg Nog battered two slices of cheese, then used those as bread in a grilled-chese-cheese-cheese sandwich. While it's too much dairy for me personally, this is the type of attitude that gets science done, and I salute it.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Six months on a leaky boat

Bruise Cruise Launch! from BRUISE CRUISE FEST on Vimeo.



On the one hand, I totally want this—the idea of cruising around, listening to sweet-ass rock bands, and enjoying the Bahamas in winter (even if it'll still be pretty balmy here in LA). On the other hand, fuck this "In order to create a highly coveted experience" elitist bullshit. It just goes to underline the fact that the majority of indie rock is created by the privileged for the privileged. I know it may not be feasible to have a cheap cruise or many cruises so that anyone who wants to go could, but still, this language of exclusivity and elitism pisses me off.

If this is Hobbes, what's Rousseau?

Chris Thorne writes about how fast zombies subvert the horror paradigm.

Not Mythical



Someday, I will own this, preferably on a t-shirt.

OH NO ITS THE TOKEMONSTER



Comin' to smoke you up!

More fun vinyl weirdness from Cousin's Vinyl.

What Brown has done to them

I clicked on a Google Ad asking me to help stop the "Brown Bailout". I'd never heard of it, and I assumed it was something that Scott Brown (R-Mass.) was pushing.

Actually, it's an astroturf campaign run by FedEx, over changes to labor law in the FAA re-authorization bill. I scoured the site, but I couldn't find out anything about what the bill would actually do, except, you know, be good for UPS and bad for FedEx. It'd theoretically take away the ability of FedEx to provide reliable air service for packages, which does sound bad. It relies repeatedly on descriptions of FedEx and UPS as wholly different, and includes things like unsourced quotes labeling UPS the “biggest giver to U.S. lawmakers,” which seemed pretty fishy. Call your legislators?

No, not really. What the bill would actually do is shift FedEx ground employees to the labor regulations used for all other ground employees save railways, making them able to discourage local organizing—the RLA explicitly requires national votes. That's pretty far afield from the "Brown Bailout" claims:
Since the company’s founding in 1971, FedEx has worked hard to be a great place to work and build a career, as thousands and thousands have done, and some FedEx Express employees have chosen to be represented by a union, others haven’t. Unionization is still a matter of personal choice in America. Most FedEx employees like our existing partnership and open-door relationship, and want to keep things as they are. Under current rules that apply to both UPS and FedEx, employees can choose to join a union and unionized employees can leave their union based on the majority decision of the workforce. That’s America. So it’s clear that the labor argument is only a smokescreen for UPS’ true worries.


It's no secret that FedEx and most corporations are anti-union (to be fair, it's no real secret that I'm generally pro-union). But that's a pretty slick gloss on the systems that make union organizing possible. And the consistent drumbeat from FedEx is that they're entirely different in form than UPS (because UPS is slow and trucks and yucky and FedEx is fast and planes and awesome), but given the BusinessWeek article (hardly from a liberal source), the FAA Reauthorization Act wouldn't apply to people like pilots, but rather workers in local depots and trucks. Which are, sorry to say, exactly like the trucks and depots that UPS runs, though in a kickier color scheme.

So, I'm off to write my legislators (something I can do lying here on the ground with a bad back), asking them to ignore FedEx and their astroturfing and to broaden the protections for the American worker. I'm doing this for two reasons: first, I don't think that a 1927 law forced through by railroad barons should be the default for labor in America, and second, I really hate misrepresentation and faux-populist smear jobs, and I'm afraid that my legislators don't have the time or inclination to distinguish real concerns from sculpted, well, brown.

Thursday, September 09, 2010

Trenchcoat robbers

The wistful story of the two robbers who pulled off the biggest heist in US history.

Where my grant money at?



On one wall of an otherwise bare white room, a mounted speaker plays Prince's "Soft and Wet." Diametrically opposed, a synchronized speaker plays MC Hammer's "She's Soft and Wet." Visitors are instructed by placard to stick a pin/pom-pom/tassel on the floor or wall where they feel the mix of sound best describes their irony preference. A whiteboard will be provided so visitors can clarify their positioning.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Really, my blog is just how I remember to close tabs in my browser

Andrew WK's wife, Cherie Lily, has "invented" Houserobics. If Lily weren't obviously a different person from WK, I'd suspect this of being his ironic conceptual counterpart to WK's presentations of masculinity in rock, with the same values being funneled into a presentation of femininity in dance music. As it stands, they seem lucky to have found each other. Wish 'em the best.

For the Time Travel Blog I am now rapidly discarding ideas for (luckily, it's a group thing, so my stupidity and laziness won't inherently be fatal), this looks invaluable—a way to overlay historical maps over google's current ones. Crazy geo-cool.

And this Youtube search is how I've been reliving the weekend while I moan on the ground with back pain. If it hurts to much to really sleep, maybe Sleep's doom-metal stylings can numb me into a restful coma.

Low fiber foods?

Got a pal who needs food brought, but low-fiber food, which is, come to find out, about the opposite of how I eat.

We're thinking mac and cheese or potato soup or… uh, some kinda goddamn quiche thing. At least I know she won't look on with horror when I suggest that maybe, just maybe, beer for calories and gin for vitamins is a balanced diet.

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

I learned a word

Litfaßsäulen. I stayed home from work because my back was sore, but I learned what they call those columns on the quad, for reals.