Joshua sez, "Steve Lawson and the Library Society of the World are trying to raise money to help the Louisville Free Public Library, which was hit by horrible flash floods last week. Could you help us help the library out?"
So a lot of those books we sent them in the spring are now covered in water and sewage. And so are the bookmobiles. And the mechanical equipment for HVAC. And the data center. And $50,000 worth of new computers. The initial estimate is $1 million in damage, but they must just be guessing at this point.
Last night I had the extreme pleasure of attending the Hugo Awards ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention and of losing two Hugos to two of the nicest, most deserving people in science fiction: my friend and teacher Nancy Kress (Best Novella for "The Erdmann Nexus") and my friend and copyfight comrade Neil Gaiman (Best Novel for "The Graveyard Book"). Indeed, this may have been the strongest Hugo ballot in a decade. The pre-award reception was practically awash in awesomesauce, and the winners were, to a one, absolute mensches and geniuses.
I've pasted in the winners below, and thrown in a link to the Hugo Awards administrators' traditional infoporn dump of stats on who nominated and voted for what. My undying thanks to all of you who put Little Brother and True Names on the ballot. I've also thrown in the text of my undelivered Little Brother acceptance speech, because I can, and because it thanks a lot of people who deserve it.
Congrats to Boing Boing reader Jeremy Kratz on wiinning the Hugo Awards logo design competition!
Once I've got a fatter network pipe (this post is going out over the VIA Rail on-train WiFi), I'll upload my Hugo photos, which includes a shot of Neal Stephenson's undelivered acceptance speech for Anathem, which was translated into Ur by Jeremy Bornstein!
Best Novel: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Best Novella: ''The Erdmann Nexus'' by Nancy Kress (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008)
Best Novelette: ''Shoggoths in Bloom'' by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov's Mar 2008)
Best Short Story: ''Exhalation'' by Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
John W. Campbell not-a-Hugo Award for Best New Writer: David Anthony Durham
Best Related Book: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 by John Scalzi (Subterranean Press)
Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones Written by Kaja & Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: WALL-E Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter, story; Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon, screenplay; Andrew Stanton, director (Pixar/Walt Disney)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Joss Whedon, & Zack Whedon, & Jed Whedon, & Maurissa Tancharoen, writers; Joss Whedon, director (Mutant Enemy)
Best Editor, Short Form: Ellen Datlow
Best Editor, Long Form: David G. Hartwell
Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
Best Semiprozine: Weird Tales edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal
Best Fan Writer: Cheryl Morgan
Best Fanzine: Electric Velocipede edited by John Klima
This is one of the finest moments in my life, the fulfilment of a dream I've chased since I first put pen to paper and wrote a story, in 1977, when I was six years old. My friends know that I watch the Hugos like baseball fans watch the World Series, pounding my feet and shouting when the books and stories and writers and editors I love are recognized by the WorldCon members.
It's doubly rewarding that I receive this prize for Little Brother, a novel that is so near and dear to my heart, a novel that I tried to imbue with the hopes and fears of my comrades in the fight for technological freedom, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, ACLU, CIPPIC, and Open Rights Group to the thousands of hackers, librarians, activists, and dreamers whom I've had the fabulous privilege of working with over my career.
My sincere and everlasting thanks to my wife, Alice, who gracefully puts up with all the frustrations of living with a writer, even down to letting me get up at 5AM in our hotel room during our anniversary trip to Rome to finish this novel.
Also thanks to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and to the people at Tor from Tom Doherty to Dot Lin and Irene Gallo and Pablo Defendini who made this book the success it is.
Especial thanks to my friend Scraps DeSelby, whose sensitive and intelligent copyediting immeasurably improved Little Brother.
Thanks to my literary agent Russell Galen and my foreign rights agents Danny and Heather Baror and my film agent Justin Manask for helping get this book into so many people.
And finally, thanks to all the readers, copyers and remixers who spread this book so quickly and so well all over the world. Without you, why bother with any of it?
The age-old dreams of universal access to all human knowledge and cheap group coordination to act on that knowledge are upon us. If we can keep the network free and open, no matter how many times the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse -- child pornographers, pirates, criminals and terrorists -- are presented as a pretext for shutting it down, then we can do anything.
A reader writes, "This weekend, my wife and I traveled on a Random Road trip. It turned out great. We used a four-sided die (d4) when there were more than 2 routes to decide upon and a coin for the others. We didn't have any hard and fast rules when we started, but developed some as we drove deeper into the trip. I recommend it to anyone even if you don't have a d4 handy."
Near our starting point is the intersection of 2 highways 23 and 94 with convenient N (1), S (2), E (3), and W (4) options. I proposed that we eliminate the "east" option on our first roll, because I wanted to avoid the morass of highways around Detroit. Mrs. BBspot vetoed this idea and she promptly rolled a 3 (east) for our first direction. At this point we had to turn around and go back home to get our passports, because starting in Michigan there's always the danger that we'd end up in Canada. (see map at end of post for a look at our final route)
I was a bit miffed at the first roll, but headed east anyway. Approaching 23 Mrs. BBspot rolled a 1, which turned us north. Phew, I preferred moving away from Detroit. At our next intersection she rolled another 1 and kept us going North on 23.
Unfortunately, randomness pointed us back toward Detroit when she rolled another 3 and we headed east on 96. Mrs. BBspot started getting a little perturbed at my disappointment in her rolls.
The New Scientist's "Ten things we don't understand about humans" is a head-scratching tour of humanity's inexplicables from laughter to pubic hair:
Pubic hair: Scent radiator, warmth provider, or chafe protection? The answer to why humans have clumps of hair in private places is still open for debate...
Teenagers: Even our closest relatives, the great apes, move smoothly from their juvenile to adult life phases - so why do humans spend an agonising decade skulking around in hoodies?
A new generation of bone-conduction hearing aids have audio inputs for an MP3 player or phone headset. Wait until this goes bi-directional and allows its owner to start recording the ambient sound to a little drive -- just try to ban recording equipment from press-conferences, movie theaters and concert halls!
On Friday Mr Hughes had tiny titanium screws drilled into bone behind each ear during a 90-minute operation under general anaesthetic. Once the wounds heal and the screws have fused with bone, abutments will be screwed into the implants, and the processors, about the size of a postage stamp, are clicked into place.
Older-style hearing aids amplify all sounds, making it almost impossible for wearers to hear conversations in noisy environments. They also interfere with frequencies used by mobile and fixed phones and often emit high-pitched whistling sounds. But the newer processors, costing about $6000 each, shut out background noise, giving users up to 25 per cent better hearing, and can be attached directly to MP3 music players or wireless headsets for talking on the phone, Cochlear's territory manager, Katrina Martin, said.
An Israeli woman spent $38,000 to book the entire business-class cabin of an El Al jet from Paris to Tel Aviv so that her beloved dog could fly with her and be spared the trauma of the cargo hold.
A US Army judge has ruled that defense attorneys for Ramzi bin al Shibh, a Yemeni man accused of having co-conspired the 9/11 attacks, may not learn what "interrogation techniques" CIA agents used on him before he was moved to Guantánamo.
Bin al Shibh, 37, is one of five men charged in a complex death penalty prosecution by military commission currently under review by the Obama administration. He allegedly helped organize the Hamburg, Germany, cell of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers before the suicide mission that killed 2,974 people in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. But his lawyers say he suffers a ``delusional disorder,'' and hallucinations in his cell at Guantánamo may leave him neither sane enough to act as his own attorney nor to stand trial. Prison camp doctors treat him with psychotropic drugs. (...) [T]he judge ruled on Aug. 6 that ``evidence of specific techniques employed by various governmental agencies to interrogate the accused is . . . not essential to a fair resolution of the incompetence determination hearing in this case.''
We already know that techniques used on other detainees -- including Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, who is also a defendant in this trial -- included waterboarding, sleep deprivation and extreme sexual humiliation....
But Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, the Yemeni's Pentagon appointed defense attorney, said court-approved mental health experts -- as well as the judge -- need to know the specifics to assess her client's mental illness. If he suffers a long-standing psychosis, she said, he may never be made competent for trial. But if he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his CIA interrogations, there may be PTSD treatments that could make him competent.
...or are they just big old wusses? Let us ask science.
Spotted in the New York Times health blog "Well," an item about new research showing that redheads require larger doses of anesthesia and are often resistant to local pain blockers like Novocaine. A new study from The Journal of the American Dental Association says people with red hair tend to look forward to dental procedures even less than the rest of us, and are "twice as likely to avoid going to the dentist as people with other hair colors." Not because they're wimps, mind you, but because of mutant genes. Snip:
Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin.
The MC1R gene belongs to a family of receptors that include pain receptors in the brain, and as a result, a mutation in the gene appears to influence the body's sensitivity to pain. A 2004 study showed that redheads require, on average, about 20 percent more general anesthesia than people with dark hair or blond coloring. And in 2005, researchers found that redheads are more resistant to the effects of local anesthesia, such as the numbing drugs used by dentists.
Our friends at the Imaginary Foundation have just published a wonderful set of trading cards featuring their favorite big thinkers and sensemakers. The All-Star Pattern Seekers Trading Cards "pay tribute to 23 giants of pattern recognition -- pathfinders and ideanauts whose shadows loom large across three millennia of discovery." Included are the likes of Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Marie Curie, James Lovelock, Hubble Telecope, Joseph Campbell, and many others. Click the image above to see them all. The set, in an embossed box, is $18. Also available is a new t-shirt design: "To understand is to perceive patterns." Each shirt includes 7 of the trading cards. Imaginary Foundation
(Image from the CC-licensed Flickr stream of onurkiyak )
Snip from an op-ed by Barbara Ehrenreich (!) in the New York Times, which examines the moral and social impact of ordinances against the publicly poor. The op-ed is based on a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty which found that the number of ordinances against the "publicly poor" are rising. More American cities, according to the report, are enacting and enforcing laws against "the indigent."
How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, "An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive" public assistance.
That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it's definitely Al Szekely at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington -- the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants.
It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant -- for not appearing in court to face a charge of "criminal trespassing" (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. "Can you imagine?" asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. "They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless."
A few days ago I built my fifth guitar. As usual, I made a lot of mistakes (the frets aren't level, for instance, so I filed them down as needed) but the overall playability is pretty good. The thing I need to work on is volume -- it's not very loud.
I'm having a great time building them. I've got plenty of ideas for future guitars, but I better not talk about them or I might not do them.
Keni Lee Burgess has a very nice set of cigar box guitar playing lessons on YouTube.
Based in Vienna, Virginia, Kidtropolis designs and builds out amazing fantasy children's rooms. Seen above, the Magic Tree House and Carousel Room. If Richie Rich were real, I bet he'd be a client! Kidtropolis(Thanks, Bloggy!)
Strange Maps has this lovely antique map of London circa 1675, created by an adventurous man named John Ogilby:
The life of John Ogilby (1600-1676) can be qualified without exaggeration as rather eventful. He freed his father from debtors' prison by buying a winning lottery ticket, founded a dance school in London and later Dublin's Theatre Royal, got shipwrecked on his return from Ireland, produced a very successful English verse transaltion of Virgil, lost all his property in the Great Fire of London (1666), and towards the end of his life managed to produce the Britannia Atlas (1675), considered to be the first road atlas of Britain.
The atlas, which housed a series of road maps like this one used for traveling through the UK way back when, is apparently also responsible for setting the 1,760-yards-to-a-mile standard. A web site dedicated to Priddy's Hard, an area in Hampshire, England, has this and other old school maps worth checking out if you're a closet road geek like me.
Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."
In the dream life of 18th and 19th Europe, Italy and the Gothic were conjoined twins.
The first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764)---a spookhouse ride whose oubliettes, subterranean passageways, and doors that slam shut by themselves still stock the Gothic prop room---is set in Italy. In fact, the first edition purported to be a translation of a 16th-century manuscript by an Italian cleric named "Onuphrio Muralto," rediscovered in the library of "an ancient Catholic family in the north of England." Ann Radcliffe's hugely influential Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which provided seed DNA for all Gothic romances to come, takes place partly in Italy, in a gloomy medieval pile in the Apennines where Our Heroine is menaced by the sinister Count Montoni. (Radcliffe had used Italy as a backdrop before, in A Sicilian Romance (1790), and would again, in The Italian (1796), where a diabolical monk named Schedoni puts a twisted face on the terrors of the Inquisition.) To Northern Europeans, especially the English, Italy reeked of cultural atavism---the inbred depravity of a decaying aristocracy and the perversions of Papism (paganism in a reversed collar, as far as protestants were concerned).
It's as if the sheer antiquity of the place---all those Roman ruins, haunted by the godless shades of all those parricidal, pedophilic Caesars Gibbon described in such scandalous detail in the Decline and Fall (1776-1788)---deformed the Italian psyche, warping it under the accumulated weight of a thousand years of perversion and profanation, scheming and throat-slitting.
To the Enlightenment mind, Ancient Rome was undeniably the embodiment of classical virtues in philosophy and culture. But the brilliance of Seneca, Cicero, Horace, and Virgil had to be weighed against the horrors of Nero, Domitian, and Caligula. True, the Apollonian perfection of a Roman column was an inspiring sight, even in ruins. But it was also a melancholy reminder that even Rome, the sunburst of Western civilization, had succumbed to an epic fail. By the Middle Ages, the Eternal City had decayed into a necropolis of 10,000, abandoned by the popes. By day, the Forum was a pasture for grazing cows; after dark, wolves hunted the streets of the Vatican.
The Grand Tour of the continent impressed these lessons on England's upper class. Intended to certify the scions of the powerful as worldly wise and culturally literate, worthy of their perch high up the social pyramid, the Grand Tour was by 1700 "part of an English gentleman's preparation for life," as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin. Italy, more than any other country, was seen as indispensable in sanding the rough edges off entitled party animals, turning them into well-rounded gentlemen. (The term "Grand Tour" was first used in Richard Lassels's Voyage of Italy (1670).) The more studious Grand Tourists studied Italian and acquired a fashionable taste for Italian art and architecture: Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, remodeled his Oxfordshire home on the Villa Borghese in Rome.
But English Italophilia was darkened by the shadow of the gothic. "The broken magnificence which was to become integral to the gothic imagination fascinated the English in Italy," writes Davenport-Hines. "The morbidness in their approach was exemplified by two young gentlemen...whose grand tour in 1707 took them to Rome, where they were 'assiduous...in visiting...the remains of the superb Monuments of the Grandeur and of the Magnificence of the Ancient Romans.' The Catacombs held a horrible fascination for the English brothers, [which] 'is not very surprising for young Men who had heard it said that a Company of four German Gentlemen were lost there for some time, previously, with their Guide, [and] would not have appeared again, had it not been that Trumpeters and Drummers were led there several times to see if the sound of these instruments of war would enable them to find the right way again...' Dark and gloomy caves, subterranean labyrinths, the despair of incarceration---all these are staples of the gothic imagination."
If classical Rome's reason and rectitude made it a beacon for the Enlightenment, the eeriness of Italy's decrepit castles, the blasphemy of its Popish heresies and macabre relics and incorruptible saints, and the Medici murders and pagan depravities buried in its cultural basement proved useful to 19th century Romantics. Brandishing the Gothic like an upside-down crucifix against neoclassicism, the Romantics championed imagination over reason, excess over economy, a morbid obsession with the past over a utopian faith in progress.
The momentous discovery, in the late 14th century, of mysterious grotte, or underground chambers, in Rome's Aventine hillside had exhumed the Gothic's close cousin, the Grotesque. The caverns turned out to be Nero's Playboy Mansion, a party villa called the Domus Aurea ("Golden House") whose droll mosaics and frescoes captivated Renaissance artists: writhing vines; chimerical beings, gene-spliced from humans and animals; surreal landscapes. Inspired by these grotteschi, as the decorative elements in Nero's "grottos" were called, Renaissance artists such as Raphael borrowed the creative license of the pre-Christian Romans---"the capricious and bizarre designs of pagan painters who were given freedom to invent whatever they pleased" (Frances Barasch)---and decorated their friezes with wriggling tendrils and fantastic humanimals. In time, the style became known as grottesco, or Grotesque.
The Grotesque rejoices in excess, exhibiting a horror vacui reminiscent of the obsessive figuration of schizophrenic art. It delights in the subversion of the social and even the natural order, symbolized by misbegotten creatures whose bodies hybridized man and beast. In its playful perversities, it hints, with an absurdist wit its close kin the Gothic lacks, at unsettling truths behind the world we think we know. (The Grotesque is what the Gothic looks like after augmentation humor-plasty. Poe's Tell-Tale Heart and Fall of the House of Usher are Gothic; his Cask of Amontillado and Hop-Frog are Grotesque. Nick Cave? Gothic. The Tiger Lillies? Grotesque. Frank Miller? Gothic. Basil Wolverton? Grotesque. Stephen King's It? Gothic. Shakes the Clown? Grotesque.) The Gothic is here to tell us that the past is never really dead and buried, that it may rise again from its shallow grave in the cultural unconscious---or the individual psyche, for that matter. In that sense, the Gothic is reactionary---crypto-conservative, almost. The Grotesque, by contrast, is deeply subversive---carnivalesque, in the Bakhtinian sense. It mocks our insistence on lives that have purpose and a cosmos that makes sense, knocking received truths and established hierarchies ass over teakettle.
Think of these things as you make your way through the crypt of the Capuchin monks in Rome. From 1631 until 1870, the monks buried their dead here---some four thousand of them, reportedly. The musty, mineral smell of the hard-packed dirt floor mingles with the sweaty tang of your fellow Grand Tourists pressing close, their body heat turning the cramped corridor muggy. The corridor gives on six roped-off antechambers, or chapels. First up: the Crypt of the Resurrection, informs my helpful guidebook, Rinaldo Cordovani's Capuchin Cemetery (purchased in the Crypt's giftshop, naturally; we live in an age when even dust-mossed ossuaries have giftshops. I looked for the Capuchin Mummy Bendable Action Figure®, but was disappointed. With luck, some intrepid young monk with a knack for branding and marketing will read this post and take my hint...) Skulls and bones form an arch over a painting---Lazarus raised from the dead, fittingly. On the ceiling, skulls and what look like femurs, arranged in geometric shapes, simulate the effect of a coffered vault. Others explode in starburst patterns or tinkertoy themselves into trellises. Flanking the painting are two niches formed by arches of stacked skulls and leg- and thigh-bones; a skeleton, with just enough parchment skin still clingwrapping its skull to pass as a mummy, reposes in each, wearing the characteristic brown habit of the order. (Hence the term cappuccino.) In the second room, what might be scapulae and vertebrae describe crazy arcs across the ceiling; skeletons in habits, their empty-eyed skulls peering lugubriously out of the shadows of their cowls, stand propped against a wall of neatly stacked skulls. The third room, the Crypt of Skulls, features scapulae cascading down one wall, overlapping like scales on a suit of armor. In the fourth, the Crypt of the Pelvises, scapulae, pelvises, and assorted small bones form mescaline mandalas, turning the ceiling into a macabre kaleidoscope of fleurs-de-lis and rosettes (the central rosette being "formed by seven shoulder blades with appendages made of vertebrae, in a frame of sacral bones, vertebrae, and foot bones," notes my guidebook, in its anatomically exhausting way). The sixth and last chapel, the Crypt of the Three Skeletons, stars the skeletons of three children. (The guidebook strikes a philosophical note: "Death has no favorite age.") One, the skeleton of a Barberini princess, holds a scythe and the scales of judgment, a minikin Grim Reaper.
The Marquis de Sade came here, appropriately enough, in 1775; in his Viaggio in Italia, he describes "well-preserved" skeletons "in varying attitudes, some reclining, others in the act of preaching, others at prayer," all clad in the Capuchin habit, some still wearing their beards. "Never have I seen anything so impressive," the Divine Marquis enthuses, advising the Grand Tourist who wants to experience the crypt's jolt at full voltage to visit in the suitably sepulchral gloom of the evening, rather than during the day, when the sunlight "abates the horror." In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne thrilled with horror at the ossified monks:
The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special interest of the cemetery. [...] There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown in this queer way... In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life... Their skulls (some quite bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that has known the earth-damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning hideously repulsive. One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if he had died in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps is even now screeching through eternity.
By the last chamber, the brain is reeling. The claustrophobic confines of the crypt, the dizzy geometry of the anatomical arrangements, a Baroque delirium of rosettes and florettes and eight-pointed stars, all made of bones, bones, bones: it begins to feel like a bad-acid flashback, brought to you by Pol Pot. And then you come to appreciate the Spirograph rhythms of it all, the---gothic? grotesque?---aesthetic of the repeating visual melodies of capitals and crosses and cornices outlined in bones, and you remember something Francis Bacon said---"There is no excellent Beauty, that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion"---and it makes a certain mad sense, after all.
Cimitero Monumentale dei Padri Cappucchini, Chiesa Immacolata Concezione ("Santa Maria della Concezione"), at the intersection of via Veneto 27 and via Cappuccini. Open Friday-Wednesday, 9-noon and 3-6 P.M. Tel. 06-4871185. Metro: Barberini. Admission: voluntary donation. Note: The crypt is hallowed ground; appropriate attire required. Women in short shorts or plunging décolletage will be turned away. Church website
Images: Cemetery of the Capuchins, Rome, Italy. Postcard. Reproduced under Fair Use clause of copyright law.
In this short video Chris Matt shows you how to read faster. The trick, he says, is to repeatedly say "AEIOU" or "one, two, three, four," as you read. This prevents you from vocalizing the written words with your larynx. Once you train yourself, you can stop uttering "AEIOU," and you will be able to read much faster than before, or so he says.
Trunk Records has reissued Tubby Hayes's Voodoo Session, an ultra-rare soundtrack tune from a 1965 horror film that looks fantastic: Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. The 7" vinyl, limited to 666 copies ('natch), features the film's "voodoo jazz" number, performed by Tubby Hayes on tenor sax and flute, Sheake Keane on trumpet, Jimmy Deuchar on mellophonium (!), and other Brit jazz greats. Check out the jam at 6:54 in the video above. (Any similarities to authentic Vodoun is, er, likely coincidental.) The "Clean Living in Difficult Circumstances" has more on the recording:
The plot of the film involves five men on a train carriage having their tarot cards read by Peter Cushing, who reveals the horrible destiny of each of them. One of the stories that is revealed through the cards features Roy Castle (of later Record Breakers fame) in his first starring role as jazz musician Biff Bailey, who encounters a Voodoo ceremony whilst touring the West Indies.
Loving the Voodoo sounds, he makes the mistake of copying down the music of the Voodoo Lwa Dambala and doing his own Brit jazz arrangement of the spirit rhythms at a club in London. Occult peril quickly ensues as a result of having stolen the music of Dambala.
On Dinosaurs and Robots we like to feature side-by-side photos of familiar products and signs. The Holiday Inn sign is the latest in our "Then and Now" series, spotted by Kevin Kidney.
An article in Cannabis News by Harry G. Levine, a professor of sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, explains why New York City is the "marijuana arrest capital of the world." The law states that possessing a small amount of pot results in $100 civil citation for the first offense. Yet 40,300 people were arrested and jailed in NYC last year for possessing small amounts of pot. How so? By trickery on the part of the NYPD. Police officers convince people to pull their stash out of their pocket, promising to go easy on them if they do, then bust them on charges of having marijuana "open to public view," which means they can be handcuffed, fingerprinted, and jailed on a misdemeanor charge. (As you might expect, racial profiling figures heavily into the arrests.)
One of the recent images returned from the Cassini spacecraft, a school-bus-sized probe orbiting Saturn since 2004, includes an odd detail that is puzzling astronomers:
It's not exactly clear what's going on here, even in this slightly zoomed shot. But it looks for all the world - or worlds -- like some small object on an inclined orbit has punched through Saturn's narrow F ring, bursting out from underneath, and dragging behind it a wake of particles from the rings. The upward-angled structure is definitely real, as witnessed by the shadow it's casting on the ring material to the lower left. And what's with the bright patch right where this object seems to have slammed in the rings? Did it shatter millions of icy particles, revealing their shinier interior material, making them brighter? Clearly, something awesome and amazing happened here.
For 80 years, Charles Atlas Ltd. has been helping young men like the fellow above not get pushed around on the beach. But who was Charles Atlas anyway? The man has been dead since 1972 but his business selling a physical fitness program thrives over a nail parlor in Harrington Park, New Jersey. This month's Smithsoanian magazine has a deep profile of Atlas who spent his life trying to "Make you a new man!" From Smithsonian:
Born in Acri, a tiny town in southern Italy, he arrived with his parents at Ellis Island in 1903 at age 10. His name was Angelo Siciliano, and he spoke not a word of English.
He didn't look like much, either. Skinny and slope-shouldered, feeble and often ill, he was picked on by bullies in the Brooklyn neighborhood where his family had settled, and his own uncle beat him for getting into fights. He found little refuge at Coney Island Beach, where a hunky lifeguard kicked sand in his face and a girlfriend sighed when the 97-pound Atlas swore revenge.
On a visit to the Brooklyn Museum, he saw statuary depicting Hercules, Apollo and Zeus. That, and Coney Island's sideshow, got him thinking. Bodybuilding was then a fringe pursuit, its practitioners consigned to the freak tents beside the fat lady and the sword swallower. Alone at the top was Eugen Sandow, a Prussian strongman discovered by showman Florenz Ziegfeld. Sandow toured vaudeville theaters, lifting ponies and popping chains with his chest. Atlas pasted a photo of Sandow on his dresser mirror and, hoping to transform his own body, spent months sweating away at home with a series of makeshift weights, ropes and elastic grips. The results were disappointing, but on a visit to the Bronx Zoo one day he had an epiphany, or so he would recall in his biography Yours in Perfect Manhood, by Charles Gaines and George Butler. Watching a lion stretch, he thought to himself, "Does this old gentleman have any barbells, any exercisers?...And it came over me....He's been pitting one muscle against another!"
Atlas threw out his equipment. He began flexing his muscles, using isometric opposition and adding range of motion to stress them further. He tensed his hands behind his back. He laced his fingers under his thighs and pushed his hands against his legs. He did biceps curls with one arm and squeezed his fist down with the other. Experimenting with varied techniques, and likely aided by exceptional genes, Atlas emerged from many months at home with a physique that stunned school chums when he first revealed himself on the beach. One of the boys exclaimed, "You look like that statue of Atlas on top of the Atlas Hotel!"
Roboticists at the recent International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence discussed the frustrating lack of a common operating system among today's robots. From New Scientist:
This desire has its roots in frustration, says Brian Gerkey of the robotics research firm Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California. "People reinvent the wheel over and over and over, doing things that are not at all central to what they're trying to do..."
The challenge of building a robot OS for widespread adoption is greater than that for computers. "The problems that a computer solves are fairly well defined. There is a very clear mathematical notion of computation," says Gerkey. "There's not the same kind of clear abstraction about interacting with the physical world."
Nevertheless, roboticists are starting to make some headway.The Robot Operating System or ROS is an open-source set of programs meant to serve as a common platform for a wide range of robotics research. It is being developed and used by teams at Stanford University in California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, among others.
ROS has software commands that, for instance, provide ways of controlling a robot's navigation, and its arms, grippers and sensors, without needing details of how the hardware functions. The system also includes high-level commands for actions like image recognition and even opening doors. When ROS boots up on a robot's computer, it asks for a description of the robot that includes things like the length of its arm segments and how the joints rotate. It then makes this information available to the higher-level algorithms.
• We review Sony Ericsson's W518a cell phone. Verdict: "a good choice if you want a small, cheap phone that doesn't look like a toy."
• A newly-released, battery-powered, rechargeable neck warmer.
• We held a contest for a robotic space cock. The deadline was August 7, but we're going to give you one last shot. Enter to win by midnight EST August 11. So what is a robotic space cock? Good question!
Spotted on The Smoking Gun, this fascinating group of mugshots from 1903 depicts three gentlemen "photographed with hats on, with hats off, and finally, dressed and groomed for their new digs."
Continental Airlines diverted a Twin-Cities-bound plane to Rochester due to a storm, and then locked the entire planeload of passengers in the plane overnight for nine hours. The TSA had gone home, so the passengers couldn't clear security if they got off and left the airport, and the ground crew wouldn't let them get off and stay in the airport. So 47 people -- including babies -- were locked into the plane with no food and overflowing toilets, held prisoner until the airline could get its act together. Jesus.
"It's not like you're on a [Boeing] 747 and you can walk around,'' said Christin, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law. "This was a sardine can, with a single row of seats on one side of the plane and two rows of seats on the other. And they've got about 50 people inside, including babies, for the whole night. It was a nightmare...''
The airline crew on the plane reached their maximum work hours in the air, so another crew had to be flown in. The alternative of chartering a bus didn't work out. And letting the passengers into the Rochester airport was not possible because they would have to go through security screening again, and the screeners had gone home for the day.
What about just letting the passengers sleep in the airport terminal? "That was not provided as an option by ground services personnel at the airport,'' said Nicholas...
As light began to fill the cabin around 6 a.m., the plane doors opened and passengers were allowed into the airport terminal, Christin said. The airlines gave them one free beverage, he said. By about 9:30 a.m., the passengers were sent back on the same plane they had spent the night in -- which by this time had no functioning restroom. They landed in the Twin Cities about 11 a.m.
Based in Vienna, Virginia, Kidtropolis designs and builds out amazing fantasy children's rooms. Seen above, the 
To the Enlightenment mind, Ancient Rome was undeniably the embodiment of classical virtues in philosophy and culture. But the brilliance of Seneca, Cicero, Horace, and Virgil had to be weighed against the horrors of Nero, Domitian, and Caligula. True, the Apollonian perfection of a Roman column was an inspiring sight, even in ruins. But it was also a melancholy reminder that even Rome, the sunburst of Western civilization, had succumbed to an epic fail. By the Middle Ages, the Eternal City had decayed into a necropolis of 10,000, abandoned by the popes. By day, the Forum was a pasture for grazing cows; after dark, wolves hunted the streets of the Vatican. 
The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special interest of the cemetery. [...] There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown in this queer way... In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life... Their skulls (some quite bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that has known the earth-damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning hideously repulsive. One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if he had died in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps is even now screeching through eternity.
The plot of the film involves five men on a train carriage having their tarot cards read by Peter Cushing, who reveals the horrible destiny of each of them. One of the stories that is revealed through the cards features Roy Castle (of later Record Breakers fame) in his first starring role as jazz musician Biff Bailey, who encounters a Voodoo ceremony whilst touring the West Indies. 
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment