Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Yes, it’s a Sony commercial, but nevermind that. Who would have thought that throwing a quarter million superballs down a San Francisco street could have such a gorgeous, calming effect?
Longer, higher-resolution version at Salon, and a very high resolution at the source.
He’s not juggling 19 plates or anything like that, but even with just three objects, this is some of the most graceful, awe-inspiring juggling I’ve ever seen — and in perfect grace with the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers.” The finale is intense. More at Chris Bliss.
Thanks Barry
Been a long time since your last quantum physics class? Lost touch with the essential weirdness of the double-slit experiment? Amazingly clear and enjoyable explanatory video, now visible inline thanks to the new “Put on site” feature at Google Video.
Thanks Oliver
Fascinating audio presentation by Marcia McNutt of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, comparing the challenges of undersea and outer space exploration. Making her point about how much incredibly surreal life still awaits discovery here on earth, McNutt described the (relatively) recent discovery of the Frankpressi worm, which has no mouth and no stomach. Found two miles undersea, the worm appears only during “whale falls” – when a whale corpse sinks to the bottom of the sea, delivering a 70-ton feast to the ocean floor. The worm attaches itself to the hull of the whale and grows “roots” which descend into the whale’s bone marrow, where they begin digesting food osmotically.
What really puzzled researchers was the fact that all of the worms appeared to be female — where were the males? Turns out the males live only inside the females. The males are tiny, yolk-like creatures that develop only to the point where they can produce sperm, at which point their growth is permanently stunted. Sounds familiar.
On the train tonight, a snaggle-toothed, bedraggled crazy dude threw candy at me. Handfuls of hard, multi-colored candies, from about 10 feet away. Sat in a corner seat, grinning at me from behind aviator shades and a hat with dangling earflaps, as if Amelia Earhart had been a drunken, bearded, male bum, and also very generous with her candy. “You like these? Like these little guys? Want some more?” Then he’d stop throwing long enough to pop a few in his mouth. Could hear his teeth cracking on them from across the train. “Little blobs of joy in your mouth!” he said, and he’d reach into a crumpled paper bag and throw another handful. God knows where he got them all. And then he stopped. After an interlude: “Hey, you messed up? I’m messed up.” Well, now that was news. The funny thing was, he was so happy that I just couldn’t be mad. Annoyed, sure, but his ecstasy was kind of contagious.
Pingmag interviews Oded Ezer, an Israeli typographer and designer who does absolutely breathtaking things with the Hebrew alephbet. Using nails, Fimo, cut paper, insect wings, and, yes — ink — Ezer does things with type I never dreamed possible.
When I saw an ant on the floor of my studio, I started to imagine what would happen if this was a creature half ant and half letter. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if nature had invented letters? And then maybe different letter-ants could gather, create words and communicate with us!?
Ezer on fontography inspired by the music of the Israeli composer Arye Shapira:
So the music sounds really hard, almost broken… What I then did, was to take the names of the music titles and cut up the individual letters. My intention was: how would the letters behave, if they were this music?
Al Lewis, aka Grandpa Munster, has died. If it were not for a trip to Cuba I made with an old girlfriend in the early 90s to see the International Film Festival, do some music writing, and see the country before the embargo was lifted and it became an American tourist destination, Al Lewis wouldn’t mean much to me. But at the end of that festival, we were invited to Fidel Castro’s palace to sip mojitos and consort with other attendees. And, in one of the more accidental/surreal confluences of my life, I ended up in a circle of people talking to Fidel Castro about the potential for hemp products to boost the Cuban economy, with Al Lewis standing across the circle from me, interjecting crazy talk into the conversation. Never watched much Munsters, but will never forget that moment. Have included here a pre-weblog journal entry from that day. Farewell Grandpa Munster!
Continue reading “The Day I Met Grandpa Munster”
File under Truth Is Stranger:
William Shatner recently passed a kidney stone … and put it up for auction. It gets better. The winning bidder, GoldenPalace.com, paid $25,000 for the rock, which Shatner said “Was so big you’d want to wear it on your finger.” Proceeds from the sale were donated to charity.
This is a bold new addition to our fleet,” GoldenPalace.com Chief Executive Officer Richard Rowe said in a statement. The money will go to Habitat for Humanity, which builds houses for the needy.
GoldenPalace.com is the same online gambling outfit that last year purchased the right to name a newly discovered monkey species, and bestowed the hapless creature with the name “GoldenPalace.com monkey.”
In 1992, I moved to Boston to become Pagan Kennedy‘s pre-arranged husband. Fun while it lasted, but, in retrospect, doomed to failure (I should have known in advance when she sent me a letter with a bug squished on the page, circled in pen and labeled with my name).
Anyway, Pagan had her own TV show on local cable access, and one particularly amazing episode was themed around William Shatner’s delicious 1978 reinterpretation of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards. At the end of the episode, a friend of the family re-created Shatner’s performance note-for-note, puff-for-puff.
If you’ve never seen the original, it’s worth five minutes of your life. Gawker has it. The highlight comes 3/4 of the way through.
snodgrass mcfudd jr writes:
foobar is
F-U-B-A-R
FOWLED “*****” UP BEYOND ALL RECOGNITION
SNAFU situation normal all fubarred up
asap as soon as possible please correct your spelling!!!!
Dear snodgrass: Since you failed to leave a real email address, I’ll use this space to send you here.
Foobar is a common placeholder name used in computer programming. It has been described as “the association of two metasyntactic variables: foo and bar”. These variables are often used in computer programming examples.
The entry goes on to explain foobar’s probable etymological roots in “fubar.”