Xeni Jardin
at 4:39 pm Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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Edgar Camago, aka DJ Overeasy, did an
amazing Breaking Bad remix
video we
featured recently on Boing Boing
. Edgar also teaches third grade at a school in San Francisco.
"My class recently created a song using nothing but objects and sounds found in the classroom or in school," Edgar says. And
here's the resulting video
.
Read the rest
A CIA report
released last week
"after eight years of prodding by a George Washington University archivist researching the history of the U-2" acknowledged the existence of a secret military testing base called Area 51. But the report "made no mention of colonies of alien life, suggesting that the secret base was dedicated to the relatively more mundane task of testing spy planes."
And that has a lot of alien enthusiasts disappointed
, writes Adam Nagourney in the
New York Times.
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Xeni
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Mark Frauenfelder
at 1:14 pm Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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Ben Marks of
Collector's Weekly
says, "Recently, in the course of building a new family for
Figurines
, staff writer Hunter Oatman-Stanford learned that the ceramic pieces coming out of
Staffordshire
from 1780 until 1840 often featured unsettling depictions of the crimes and scandals of the day. Inspired by this weird corner of ceramics history, Hunter interviewed author Myrna Schkolne for an article called "
Murder and Mayhem in Miniature: The Lurid Side of Staffordshire Figurines
," which we published today."
Read the rest
Mark Frauenfelder
at 1:10 pm Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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Matthew Kepnes, who runs a budget travel website called
Nomadic Matt
, wrote an article explaining why airline tickets cost so much these days, what leads to their price increases, and what consumers can do to find cheaper flights.
With fewer planes, less competition, and higher capacity, airlines can charge a lot more for tickets. There’s nothing to stop them and they don’t need to lower prices. United CEO Jeff Smisek said that only now are airfares priced appropriately. When you have a CEO say something like that, it means prices are not going to go down anymore, but only up.
According to Rick Seaney of farecompare.com, “Before 2008, things were in the favor of the passengers. After the 2009 crisis, the scale of justice tipped towards the airlines.”
Why Your Airplane Ticket is So Expensive
Mark Frauenfelder
at 12:49 pm Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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Ben Marks of Collector's Weekly says: "Drew Blanke, aka Dr. Blankenstein, is a circuit bender and music-effects guru who's devoted to analog electronics. As a kid in the 1980s, he made Heathkits; as an adult, he's built effects boxes and electronic instruments (one of his most popular devices uses the same chip that's found in stun guns...) for musicians as diverse as techno wizard Squarepusher and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio.
"To learn more about Blanke,
I spoke to him about his work
, and even installed one of his "mod kits" in my electric guitar, which now produces some of the most otherworldly sounds you've ever heard."
Read the rest
Mark Frauenfelder
at 12:37 pm Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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[
Video Link
] Here's a trailer for the upcoming book,
White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story
, by Phil Stanford. It's published by our friends at Feral House.
Heidi Rikan was a stripper, working for the mob in Washington D.C.
White House Call Girl
tells how a call girl operation she was running at the time led to the Watergate break-in, which brought down Tricky Dick Nixon himself.
Needless to say, this is not part of the Watergate story that has come down to us over the decades. It is also only fair to point out that this version of the story might be dismissed out of hand as being dangerous “revisionist” history. If you’re not careful, you might end up being called a “conspiracy theorist.”
You can also be called crazy – which is what happened to a young lawyer named Phillip Bailley, one of the principal witnesses to this ignored bit of American history. When he was foolish enough to blow the whistle on Heidi and her call girl ring, he was locked up at St. Elizabeth’s, the District of Columbia’s mental hospital, in the ward for the criminally insane.
For forty years we’ve only heard the Woodward and Bernstein perspective on Watergate. Now we’ve got the photos. What’s more, we’ve got Heidi’s little black book.
White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story
Xeni Jardin
at 11:06 am Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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David Pescovitz
at 10:55 am Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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On the heels of the horrible suspected
chemical weapons attack
in Syria in which more than 1,300 people were killed, National Geographic created a timeline about the history of chemical and biological weapons, dating back to AD 256 in, coincidentally, Syria:
Read the rest
Xeni Jardin
at 10:42 am Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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US-based Australian linguist
Carmel O'Shannessy
has documented what she believes are "the beginnings of what's been described as
the world's newest known spoken language
." Light Walpiri is described as a blend of one small indigenous Australian town's traditional Aboriginal language, Warlpiri, plus English and a form of Aboriginal English known as Kriol. Read more about Light Walpiri, and O'Shannessy's work,
at the professor's academic website
. And below, videos of an Aboriginal child reading a monster story in Walpiri, and in Light Walpiri. [
SBS.com
]
Read the rest
David Pescovitz
at 10:35 am Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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My favorite DJ, DF Tram -- who draws from far-out jazz, psych, experimental ambient, soundtracks, avant-garde classical, and myriad other genres -- just posted this glorious "
Movie Mix
" that he describes as "a "a selection of sounds from films that have inspired me, audio from scenes that I enjoy, scenes imagined, and scenes discovered along the way." What a fantastic way to lose yourself for 90 minutes.
Mark Frauenfelder
at 10:22 am Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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[
Video Link
] I love James Gurney's art. He is the creator of the beautiful
Dinotopia
series of books, and he's just made a video that shows the process he used to paint two illustrations of dinosaurs for
Scientific American
. This trailer shows how much careful planning Jim puts into his work -- sketches, color, studies, photography, and cool 3D models. Wow! I sure admire his devotion to his craft.
The 56-minute video is available at a
name-your-price starting point of $15
, which is a great deal. It'll also be available soon on
DVD with bonus features
.
Xeni Jardin
at 10:14 am Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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Aditya Mukerjee was treated like shit
by TSA, police,
and Jet Blue
because they thought the NYC-based data scientist, Linux geek, and Hacker-in-residence at @
qventures
was a Muslim terrorist. Mukerjee happens to be Hindu, not Muslim, not that it's reasonable to presume that Muslims are terrorists either. His blog post about a really awful experience at JFK recently is here: "
Don't Fly During Ramadan
."
Mark Frauenfelder
at 10:13 am Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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What a beautiful painting by Alex Schomburg, a Puerto Rican illustrator who was known for images that "filled every square inch with flamboyant characters, flames, knives, guns, explosions, Nazis, Japanese, and pretty girls in need of rescue." [
Wikipedia
]
This painting is called "What Need of Man?" and appeared on the February 1961 cover of
Amazing Stories
.
Fantasy Ink
has a bigger image.
1961 was around the time that chimps and other non-human animals were being sent into orbit. (Nate DiMeo of The Memory Palace did a great podcast episode about space animals, which you can listen to
here
.)
David Pescovitz
at 10:10 am Fri, Aug 23, 2013 •
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My entire family loves Peanuts, and these new
vintage-styled figurines from Medicom
would look fantastic beside our collection of the
Complete Peanuts anthologies
published by Fantagraphics. The release of the figurines is tied to a new Peanuts exhibition opening in October at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum. The exhibit is titled "
Ever and Never: The Art of Peanut
s."
The Army uses this name and address: Bradley E. Manning, 89289, 1300 N. Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 66027-2304. (via
Nathan Fuller
)
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