May 8
This comes from the Way-Too-Much-Time-On-Your-Hands collection. Here is a guy who has created a miniature Main Street USA from Disneyland inside his own living room, with lights, floats, streets, trees and all, all mechanized.
via Mechanizing a Miniature Main Street Electrical Parade on Vimeo
In early 1964 Bob Dylan released his third studio album “The Times They Are a-Changin’”. A month before embarking on tour, the Canadian Broadcasting system offered Dylan a 30 minute concert on its TV program “Quest”. On February 1, 1964, Dylan performed the following program:
I think it’s Dylan at his best.
From the library of “people with way too much time on their hands” comes this great little guide to shooting rubber bands. Since no one else will do it, Tim Morgan has picked up the challenge and really run with it.
Because of a serious lack in government funding on topics such as the Study of the History of Rubber Band Shooting, not much is known about this yet compelling field. If you need to take a class to keep your GPA up, you’ve found your course. The textbooks are thin and jokes are numerous!
As far as the cutting-edge bandohistorians know, rubber band shooting started only a few decades after the first half-decent rubber bands were manufactured. It was a boon to mischevious kids: the worries of the slingshot were gone. You could easily conceal the weapon, you didn’t have to load it up before shooting, and the number of delivery methods provided effective warfare in any situation.
Rubber band shooting has come a long way from its early and pathetic roots. Kids would take the rubber band, mount it on their thumb, and shoot. This would lead to instability in flight and painful misfires, especially for chronic shooters.
Also, the Atlantic wrote an article today about Morgan and his answer to a question about airplane cockpits on Quora. He, the author explains, is part of a trend of people who inject unexpected passion into topics that would otherwise appear dry and boring.
It used to be that a key ingredient in human knowledge was the suppression of human passion. From science’s method to journalism’s, people claimed authority by proving how little they were able to care about the knowledge they were creating. But that’s changing, and quickly. Increasingly, it’s passion itself — messy, quirky, productive passion — that is guiding what, and how, we know.
Everyone occupies their own little niche on the web and Morgan is no exception, carving out a little world of information he finds valuable to himself and feels the rest of the world should know about. These are some of my favorite kind of people.
The Berlin Philharmonic has a beautiful set of photographs of the inside of musical instruments as part of a campaign for the philharmonic’s chamber orchestra. As Gizmodo says, it almost makes you want to live inside one.
ART DIRECTION: INSTRUMENTS FROM INSIDE on the Behance Network.
The New York Times has a wonderful new tumblr blog out today called The Lively Morgue. The New York Times Facebook page describes the purpose of the blog as following:
The New York Times photo archive contains five to six million prints and contact sheets and 300,000 sacks of negatives — at least 10 million frames in all. It also includes 13,500 DVDs, each storing about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery. Today we launched a new blog, on Tumblr, which will publish some of the photos from this vast treasure trove of imagery each week.
Each photo will typically link to the original article in the New York Times’ archive, which requires membership. Today’s first sample of photos are really very interesting. Enjoy!
Kind of an oldie, but still very worthy of posting here. Life has a really interesting photo gallery of rock stars with their parents. It’s easy to think their children really come from Mars when compared with their traditional and conservative looking parents.
Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, Elton John, and More: Pictures of Rock Stars With Their Parents – LIFE.
I was listening to the BBC last night on KQED radio and in a report on North Korean defectors caught in China, it was mentioned that if sent back, the defectors risked execution along with three generations of their family members. Nothing else was mentioned about it.
After some quick searching on Google, it turns out that Kim Jong-Un has issued this edict, although it’s not clear if it has been carried out on people caught trying to flee the country.
The particular concern is that North Korean regime has significantly tightened both control of the border and punishment for those caught crossing during the 100-day mourning period. Reportage on this remains a little sketchy. Dong-a claims that the regime has issued an edict that it will execute three generations of families caught crossing the border. This would seem over-the-top, but this is North Korea; it is well-known that the regime has used collective punishment and that whole families have been interred in the prison camps for the crimes of one member.
The news about killing three generations of families seems to originate from a December 23 Radio Free Asia (RFA) report which tells the story about a family from the city of Hyesan, Yanggang province. The family got caught by the border patrol attempting to cross the Yalu river on the very day North Korea announced the death of Kim Jong Il. One source, citing a local State Security official, said the family had become a high priority case that was reported all the way to an infuriated Kim Jong Un. Kim III personally ordered that border crossers be treated as “traitors” and that three generations of their families be executed. RFA said the captured family had 4 members, parents and two daughters who were under the age of 10. The source reports said that the parents and brothers of the captured family were arrested in the morning of the 21st and transferred to a prison camp.
I guess any hope that Kim Jong-Un would be more compromising than his father are now completely out the window. One would think that going to school in Switzerland would have softened him at least a little. Apparently not.
North Korea: Witness to Transformation | Chinese Repatriation of Refugees.
Back in college when I played the video game SimCity on my roommate’s computer, I loved to raise as much money as I could in tax revenue and completely remake the landscape by razing entire urban centers, filling in bodies of water, leveling mountains and rebuilding the city to make it look like a giant computer chip. I wish I still had a copy of the screenshots I made of those cities, but they are long gone. However when looking at this picture of Shenzhen, China, it would appear as if the government has recreated the city to its specifications by recreating the same tactics I took in SimCity. I would think the angles in each of these pictures are not identical, but nevertheless show a complete transformation of the city in just 30 years. Not even Los Angeles went through such a transformation over a similar period of time.
Once upon a time, an English antiquarian by the name of Captain Francis Grose compiled a dictionary of slang that served as the basis for the ’1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue’, which in turn was apparently influenced by the ‘1736 Dictionary of Thieving Slang.’ As written on the dictionary’s title page, it is a dictionary devoted to “Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence.” It is certainly a very colorful read, and a few terms have lasted to the current day (ballocks). Perhaps a candidate to add to the bathroom library.
Some of my favorites:
PUDDING-HEADED FELLOW – A stupid fellow, one whose brains are all in confusion.
CLY THE JERK – To be whipped.
KISS MINE A-SE – An offer, as Fielding observes, very frequently made, but never, as he could learn, literally accepted. A kiss mine a-se fellow; a sycophant.
And of course the term for the word ‘dictionary’ is “RICHAUD SNARY.”
Here’s a slightly odd yet cool gallery of pictures of a “flying” baby. I’m figuring it’s a melding of two photographs and some erasing of the mother in Photoshop. Reminds me of the levitating Japanese girl.
What other galleries might there be of flying objects? Pigs might be a good start.
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