Saturday, November 15, 2003

James Boswell heads south
ABCNEWS.com : Woman Just Can't Shake Flock of Crows
Joey Ramone Place
bad map
"After a picture of the lobby of the still-under-construction building ran in the Citizen yesterday, eagle-eyed readers noticed that the Queen Charlotte Islands off the west coast were missing and that Vancouver Island had suddenly become a peninsula. Further, that new peninsula no longer dipped below the 49th Parallel.
Yet, while the map missed out on those bits of Canada, it did not fail to incorporate what appeared to be a new province: Alaska"
John D. MacDonald

Friday, November 14, 2003

Owl
The making of apple butter
Blue Ridge blog
Sir Charles Lyell (1797 - 1875) an eminent scientist
Happy Birthday Sir Charles Lyell:

"General Position of Drift with extinct Mammalia in Valleys.
Discoveries of M. Boucher de Perthes at Abbeville.
Flint Implements found also at St. Acheul, near Amiens.
Curiosity awakened by the systematic Exploration of the
Brixham Cave.
Flint Knives in same, with Bones of extinct Mammalia.
Superposition of Deposits in the Cave.
Visits of English and French Geologists to Abbeville and Amiens.

Fluvio-marine Strata, with Flint Implements, near Abbeville.
Marine Shells in same.
Cyrena fluminalis.
Mammalia.
Entire Skeleton of Rhinoceros.
Flint Implements, why found low down in Fluviatile Deposits.
Rivers shifting their Channels.
Relative Ages of higher and lower-level Gravels.
Section of Alluvium of St. Acheul.
Two Species of Elephant and Hippopotamus coexisting with Man
in France.
Volume of Drift, proving Antiquity of Flint Implements.
Absence of Human Bones in tool-bearing Alluvium, how explained.
Value of certain Kinds of negative Evidence tested thereby.
Human Bones not found in drained Lake of Haarlem. "
amazing snapshot archive
where lego comes from (flash)
Equanimity notes Canada's quiet one-party handover from Reaganesque "little guy" phony Chretien, who actually gets credit for keeping us out of the coalition as if it was some brave thing, to Paul Martin, who probably wouldn't have.
film moratorium in home of realism (olefactory?): "DUMBO - Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass - has become an extremely popular backdrop, thanks to its gritty urban realism, old factory buildings and sweeping views of Manhattan and the East River. "
Newswriting.com - The 100 Worst "Groaners"

Thursday, November 13, 2003

walking all of Manhattan
Bender in Vegas
Catalog of Birds: "'Then comes a further difficulty, the reproduction of timbres. If I want to reproduce on piano, let's say, the song of a garden warbler or a nightingale, I need to find a complex of pitches for every melody-note. Each note of the melody is furnished with a chord. It consists quite simply of conforming to reality, not only to the birdsongs, but also to everything surrounding them: the landscapes, fragrances, colors, and above all, the passing of the hours during the day and night. It's very complicated. "
And a nice pic too: "As snails are wont to do, these sulfide-armored creatures live sedentary lives. This species doesn't even bother to eat. Instead, the animals gain energy from symbiotic bacteria that live within the cells of a gland in their esophagus, says Waren."
bad toon rising
from "Breathless"
SAINT JEAN Seberg, actress hounded to death by the FBI, born today
Let them sing it for you
flash Omelet Recipe

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Orange Penguins
Burying brutal truths about war:

"Noticeably absent, though, has been the New York Times, which, according to an electronic search, has never even referenced the Blade series or its historic findings in its print pages. Asked about the omission, a Times spokeswoman did not return calls by deadline.

The Times' peculiar silence has raised eyebrows in some journalistic circles. 'I'm appalled the New York Times hasn't run anything,' says investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. 'Not even a wire story?' Additionally, for three weeks none of the network news operations or all-news cable channels picked up the Blade's report. Asked if he's surprised by the lack of media pickup, Hersh answers, 'I'm enraged, are you kidding?' Hersh, who won a Pulitzer for uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre, where U.S. troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, suggests the Blade's work has been ignored because of a chill that's in the media air today, with troops on the ground in Iraq, and the White House claiming too much attention is being paid to bad news. "
Tiger Force must read Vietnam series from Toledo Blade
NPR : Sewer Cleaners, Dirty Work: "Americans' perception of sewer workers, Speer says, 'is largely defined by one 1950s-era television show' -- The Honeymooners, in which comedians Jackie Gleason and Art Carney played bus driver Ralph Kramden and his pal Ed Norton, a sewer worker. Real-life sewer workers 'aren't above joking about the work they do,' says Speer -- but they contend their lives are nothing like a TV sit-com. "
The Wine of Life: The Meaning of Drainage:
"This alligator was pinto: pale white, seaweed black. It moved fast but clumsy. It could have been lazy, or old or stupid. Profane thought maybe it was tired of living.
The chase had been going on since nightfall. They were in a section of 48-inch pipe, his back was killing him. Profane hoped the alligator would not run off into something smaller, somewhere he couldn't follow. Because then he would have to kneel in the sludge, aim half-blind and fire., all quickly, before the cocodrilo got out of range. Angel held the flashlight, but he had been drinking wine, and would crawl along behind Profane absent-mindedly, letting the beam waver all of the pipe. Profane could only see the coco in occasional flashes.
From time to time his quarry would half-turn, coy, enticing. A little sad. Up above it must have been raining. A continual thin drool sounded behind them at the last sewer opening. Ahead was darkness. The sewer tunnel here was torturous and built decades ago. Profane was hoping for a straightaway. He could make an easy kill there. If he fired anywhere in this stretch of short, crazy angles there'd be danger from ricochets. "
Brooklyn Bound
The Norton Anthology
Neil's Garage
Happy Birthday Shakey!!

You wake up
in the morning
And the sun's comin' up.
Its been up for hours
and hours
and hours
and hours
and hours
and hours
It's been up
for hours
and hours
and hours
And you light up
the stove
And the coffee cup, its hot.
And the orange juice is cold,
cold, cold
Monday morning,
Wake up,
wake up,
wake up,
wake up
Its time to go,
Time to go
to work.

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

New Marianne Moore collected
Drew Gardner's Blog assays Wilder's "Apartment" as well as George and I's reading
Armor-Plated Snail Discovered in Deep Sea: "Waren said that when he first examined the sea snail, the animal's magnetized scales kept sticking to his forceps. He guessed that an iron mineral was involved. "
Songs of ourselves: " In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument -- the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us -- specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us."
Happy Birthday Rene Clair!
No Nanaimo record stores reviewed but still a good resource
Alberta Wheat Pool
Grain Elevators
Buffalo Grain Elevator Project : "When LeCorbusier saw the pure cylindrical forms of Buffalo's concrete grain elevators he exclaimed: 'The first fruits of the new age!' "

Sunday, November 09, 2003

wild boys of Vernon: "'I spent a lot of my former life in the bush,' Stinson told the Vancouver Province. 'I once met a person who hadn't been out in society since 1918. We took him out in 1976 and he flipped out seeing cars and stoplights. So is it possible, you bet it is.' "
Happy 18th Brumaire!
"But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk. "
Colour Order Systems in Art and Science