Ryan Eby and MAKE magazine alerted me to MIT’s student origami exhibit, in which Jason Ku’s ringwraith won the Best Original Model prize, and Brian Chan’s beaver — the MIT mascot — got special attention from the MIT News Office. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, beaver, competition, mit, nazgul, origami, paper, ringwraith » about 100 words
Ben Apfelbaum died before having the chance to see it all come together, but his quirky idea seems to be a hit. Here’s how Jerry Cullum described it for the Atlanta Journal Constitution: “The Ben Show” was the brainchild of beloved Spruill Gallery director Ben Apfelbaum, who asked one day, “What’s in a name?” and […] » about 200 words
Ryan Eby pointed out PodBop, a site that podcasts sample tracks from bands coming to your area (or any other area you select), and we both wished we’d thought of it ourselves. There’s nothing coming to Warren (of course). But they’ve got coverage for Denver, where I’ll be in May, so it immediately found a […] » about 300 words
The Bookseller magazine Friday announced the winner of the 28th annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Title. Bookseller deputy editor Joel Rickett appeared on Weekend Edition Saturday with the news, saying, as he did in a Telegraph story on the matter: “It has been a pretty good year for strange titles.” The winner is People Who […] » about 300 words
A friend forwarded this, from Fleur Adcock:
Things
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.
I just popped in The Constant Gardener (trailer) and discovered the preview for Brick. And even though I want to see almost every movie previewed for me, I really want to see this movie. The Constant Gardener, by the way, is good too. brick, movie, movies, preview, the constant gardener, trailer » about 100 words
I said previously that I drop my journalistic standards on Fridays. Today is no exception.
Background, from Mysterynet:
Carolyn Keene is a writer pen name that was used by many different people — both men and women — over the years. The company that was the creator of the Nancy Drew series, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, hired a variety of writers. For Nancy Drew, the writers used the pseudonym Carolyn Keene to assure anonymity of the creator.
Story, from Jens of Norway:
A sort of well-known movie director in Norway wrote an article in a norwegian newspaper (Aftenposten) today, stating that she thinks that J.K. Rowling does not really exist. That the woman we see on pictures and read about is none other than a paid actor and should be nominated for Oscar.
She links J.K. Rowling to the story of Carolyn Keene. [link added]
Wikipedia is rich with information about Rowling and the Harry Potter series, including the detail that “as of 2005, Rowling has written the last chapter of the seventh book.” But could these books have been ghosted?
I can’t get Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long, from The Magnetic Fields‘ 69 Love Songs, out of my head. This entry is an attempt to kill this earworm by posting the lyrics. If this doesn’t work I’m checking out Maim That Tune.
Fido, your leash is too long
You go where you don’t belong
You’ve been digging in the rubble
Gettin’ bitches in trouble
Fido, your leash is too long
Fido, your leash is too long
I don’t know where I went wrong
You scare me out of my wits
When you do that Shitzhu
Fido, your leash is too long
Fido, you’ve gone far enough
I must have all of your love
You just run out of luck
I don’t care what you foxhounds
do, but your leash is too long
Steve Wynn could probably have had any show he wanted, but he chose Avenue Q, the Sesame Street and Muppets-inspired show that has to include a disclaimer denying its roots in the program and advertising. What the show’s creators don’t have to disclaim are the three Tony Awards the show won in 2004 for best […] » about 200 words
I came across this story while doing research for a project, and I pass it along as it came to me. It goes like this... » about 1300 words
Simon Mahler did the audio for Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel‘s Trusted Computing movie. The movie is good, but I realized I was letting it play in the background just to hear the soundtrack, so I finally looked up Mahler’s fotone.net and found the three free song downloads.
It’s good stuff, but I’m wondering where the album is…
Thanks go to Jenny for the link to the They Might Be Giants podcast! And all that brings up something I was too lazy to figure out before. Interestingly, it became an issue now only because I was also too lazy to look for the TMBG podcast in the iTunes podcast directory. It turned out […] » about 200 words
Jon Link is among the smartest and coolest people I know, so when he decides to start up a press, and then decides to fund his startup with t-shirt sales, I get in line. jon link, astro dog press, small press, publisher, t-shirts, start up, literature, poetry, art » about 100 words
Via an IM from Ryan Eby: a pointer to Andrew Escobar‘s directions on how to install Apple’s Front Row.
Michael Sauers pointed out Q-Unit, a mashup of Queen and 50 Cent. They’re sure to have Disney (the rights owner for Queen’s catalog) on their back soon. At least, it didn’t take Disney long to shut down The Kleptones, whose “A Night At The Hip-Hopera” has a spot on my iPod.
And that’s where the story comes around, are we at the point where we can say Queen’s music has taken on the status of a modern fairy tale? And are these artists — The Kleptones and Q-Unit — the new Disneys, remaking old tales for new times?
Most of my reading is non-fiction, so I depend on Bob Garlitz to keep me current with the rest of the literary world and a bit of the art world.
We’ve all heard it before, but we just can’t get it out of our heads. Today’s movies make us feel dumb. Paulina Borsook joins the chorus and condemns contemporary cinema by praising movies of the 60s and 70s:
They were movies made for adults, even if they had been mainstream movies and/or nominally rated PG. They made presumptions about the intelligence of their audience, didn’t need things to be boldly spelled out, and they were predicated on the assumption that their audience was capable of making inferences. No semaphoring! No high-concept! Satire as opposed to scatology! Shades of gray in motive and character! Minimum numbers of car crashes! No fish out of water! No hilarious mixups!
Interestingly, she also found praise for The Interpreter:
The female characters didn’t simper, and didn’t seem like 30 going on 13 (hey, wasn’t there…). They were about themselves, subject rather than object.
The male characters had interior lives that made them seem human, creatures capable of emotional nuance.
So what else does she recommend? She’s made a list. Interestingly, all of this appears at GreenCine.com, a Netflix competitor I’d not heard of before it got a recommendation at O’Grady’s PowerPage.
Via Librarian Way I found the LiS Radio webcast of a conversation between Sandra Erdelez and Karen Fischer, two of three editors of Theories of Information Behavior from ASIS&T and Information Today. Unfortunately, the interview focuses on how the book came to be more than the content, but the description reads: overviews of more than […] » about 100 words
I’m here at NEASIS&T’s “Social Software, Libraries, and the Communities that (could) Sustain Them” event, presented by Steven Cohen. He’s suggesting we read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki first developed his ideas for Wisdom of Crowds in his “Financial Page” column of The New Yorker. Many critics found his premise to be an […] » about 200 words
WolframTones mixes hard science with social software in the form of a ringtone generator. Each click on any of the 15 style buttons yields a “unique [note: not random] composition.” Why not random? The FAQs note: Once WolframTones has picked a Rule to use, all the notes it will generate are in principle determined. But […] » about 200 words
So there I am trying to read things I can’t possible read and I stumble across a link to Daniel H. Wilson’s How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion. From th Amazon book description: How do you spot a robot mimicking a human? How do you recognize and […] » about 400 words
On NPR’s Weekend Edition today: an interview with Michael Segel, author of The Devil’s Horn, subtitled “The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool.” Adolph Sax’s instrument seems to have been controversial from the start. Other manufacturers tried to assassinate him, the Pope declared the church’s opposition to the instrument, Ladies […] » about 100 words
“John B,” from Omaha, NE writes regarding my post about conservatives, Freakonomics, and Bill Bennett’s racism: [I]f you had actually listened when Bill Bennett made the comment you quote, you would see it was NOT intentionally racist. You’ve taken the quote completely out of context. I’m willing to bet that you know you’ve taken the […] » about 700 words
This, from Chris Anderson: The Codex is a 20 episode series of machinimas made on Xboxes running Halo 2. The result caught the attention of his six- and eight-year-old children, and then him. Machinimas are computer animated in real-time, using video games to create the environment, and human “puppeteers” to drive the action. The action […] » about 200 words
Online tutoring in Japanese at udanstraight.com. Here, have some trial lessons.