Waterloo Sunset

2010-05-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

There should be a new post in a week or so.

Wolves of Ellesmere Island - new update

2010-04-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

It was confirmed that Brutus is dead.

http://internationalwolfcenter.blogspot.com/2010/04/brutus-confirmed-cead.html

Update to "Wolves of Ellemere Island" post

2010-04-23T13:06:00.000-07:00

It looks like something bad may have happened to Brutus.

http://internationalwolfcenter.blogspot.com/2010/04/serious-trouble.html

Tumblr link corrected

2010-04-09T13:49:00.000-07:00

I've started a Tumblr blog.

http://prarieramblings.tumblr.com/

Hats Off to the Roaring 20's! - A Special Guest Post from Cyndy

2010-02-18T08:10:00.000-08:00

A big thanks to Cyndy for writing this very interesting post

Let's go back in time to the flapper era of the Roaring 20's!

As an avid vintage hat collector, restorer and hairstylist I find this era to be exciting, sultry, and dramatic.

Milliners offered their gorgeous creation, "The Flapper Cloche", which was first created in 1908. This had a helmet-like appearance. It became the iconic hat of the 1920's. The hat was worn correctly by pulling it over eyes and fitting it snugly. The body of the hat was primarily felt, and the summer cloche was primarily made with sisal, a fine straw. They cloche was embellished by varnishing for a shiny appearance , and by adding raffia or gorgeous ribbon . When the hat needed a revamping, it was frequently painted.

Normally the appliques or other adornments were applied to one side only. Glorious "feather fans" fell to one side , usually the right. Glimmering trimmings such as diamond clips, platinum and diamond brooches were worn by the the prosperous and stylish on their cloches.

Casual brimmed felt cloches were combined with stylish day wear for a day at the beach , sporting events and offered a neat and tidy look.

Many cloche hats were influenced by the art deco movement, and had gorgeous appliques and zigzag seaming The crowns often included a beret-like top, or a bell top (bulbous crown). which made the wearer appear taller.

In 1922, a cloche with a small brim at the front was introduced. In 1926,a new design featured a reduced brim, and by 1928, it had disappeared.

The acceptability of the harsh, dramatic style of the cloche was enhanced by the use of sophisticated, chic makeup and self-assured hairstyles. One would often see a woman in public places such as a restaurant or dance hall open her glamorous compact and touch up her makeup. I believe that this was a new symbol of refinement and feminine grace. A luscious ox blood red lipstick with only a hint of rouge was an absolute, must, and the hair was cropped short to accommodate the close fitting cloches, which were a statement of the "new woman". By 1923, the bob, a pageboy style with a bit of length, was seen everywhere, The razor cut shingle style began in 1924.

The Marcel wave and the finger wave (which I learned and are quite time consuming and challenging) began in the mid-20's. These waves became the "norm" and helped conform to the contour of the cloches. The Eton crop, introduced in 1927,was the most extreme hairstyle. Hair was greased, slicked and had a brilliant sheen. A particularly lovely example of this style was that worn by the great singer and dancer Josephine Baker. I've included some photographs and music of Ms. Baker for your enjoyment,.

One of my other loves is the music of the 20's. I shall let the videos of fashion and music take you on a marvelous journey. You also might want to rise up from your chair and do the new low down !

By late 1928 women wanted to rid of the cloche and show their hair and facial features to the world. That would open a whole new world of hats, hairstyles and makeup which would lead me to the 1930's and another blog post.

Many thanks Bob for inviting me to share my love of vintage hats and hairstyles ! This is my very first blog post and I truly enjoyed every moment !

Here are several pictures of cloches. First, the brimless cloche.

The bell-shaped cloche.
The beaded, embellished cloche.

Two clips of Josephine Baker:

Two short flapper films.

Louis Armstrong's great "Muskrat Ramble"

A History of the World in 100 Objects

2010-02-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

BBC Radio 4 has started an excellent new series, "A History of the World in 100 Objects", which will be broadcast throughout 2010. Rather then telling history in the standard way by focusing on documents, it uses objects from the collection of the British Museum, and covers 2,000,000 years of human history. The radio shows, which can be streamed or downloaded, are 15 minutes long.

The podcasts are narrated by Neal MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, and includes the voices of many contributors. One of the great things about the project is that it's interactive, and anyone, provided they meet the project guidelines, can add an object to the website.

Here's a description of the project.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/2009/11/history_of_the_world_100_objects.html

The homepage for the project:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/explorerflash/#/object_TnAQ0B8bQkSJzKZFWo6F-g

Here are two objects from the collection. The first is a sculpture of swimming reindeer, found in France, from about 11,000 B.C.

The second is a Mesopotamian clay tablet from about 300o B.C., with information about beer rationing.

The podcasts:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow

This video explains how to add an object to the site. Registration with the BBC is required.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ahistoryoftheworld/

Wolves of Ellesmere Island

2010-01-27T12:30:00.000-08:00

I've been following an interesting blog lately that tracks the movements of a pack of 23-25 wolves on Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands, located in the Canadian High Arctic. The research team, lead by Dave Mech and Dean Cluff,was able to place a GPS/ARGOS radio tracking collar on Brutus, the leader of the pack, in July 2009, making following the pack much easier, particularly during the long winter. Tracking data is stored in the collar and Emailed to the project team every four days.

The packs home area is centered on Eureka, where there is a weather station. They feed primarily on musk-oxen, caribou, and arctic hares.

Here is the "Wolves of the High Arctic" blog

http://internationalwolfcenter.blogspot.com/

An article by Dave Mech on arctic wolves:

http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_mech.html

Here's a photo taken of Brutus at the wolves den.

This photo , and many others taken by the expedition can be found here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/intlwolfcenter/

Brutus exhibits dominant behavior towards an offspring.

Summertime on Ellesmere Island.

I'm not sure if this is this is Brutus's pack.

A few linguistic treats

2010-01-18T12:19:00.000-08:00

Here's another short blog post with some interesting links.

The all too infrequently updated blog "grow-a-brain" has some interesting links to unusual language sites.

http://growabrain.typepad.com/growabrain/languages/

Here are three particularly interesting links.

"One Sentence" posts true stories, concisely told. Many of the best ones seem more like the opening line of really intriguing story.

http://www.onesentence.org/

Here's a collection of sixteenth-century jokes:

http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/jokes.html

This is great collection of "shaggy dog" stories and Feghoots. The name "Feghoot" comes from "Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot", a series of short-short stories that appeared regularly in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" from the 1950's into the 1970's. They all end with painful puns, similar to those in "The Adventures of Peabody and
Sherman" episodes on "Rocky and Bullwinkle".

http://www.awpi.com/Combs/Shaggy/

Great and Odd Photos

2010-01-10T13:26:00.000-08:00

I'm going to slowly start blogging again.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, one of my favorite blogs is PCL Link Dump.

http://easydreamer.blogspot.com/

Through a link there I discovered a great photo blog, Black and WTF.

http://blackandwtf.tumblr.com/

Here are three photos. Check the blog for many more great ones

The British Library Archive of Recorded Sound

2009-12-15T09:10:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since the last post, and I'm slowly going to try to blog more.

Yesterday I was reading about major updates to the online sound archives of the British Library. This is an amazing collection. Access to the collections varies according to geographic location; more files are available to residents of the United Kingdom, and even more to those who are associated with a UK institution of higher learning. Over 23,000 sound files are available to everyone.

The archive includes spoken word and musical recordings, and includes both field and commercial recordings. The files can't be embedded, so links are provided instead.

My favorite part of the collection is the archive of world and traditional music. Of particular interest are 952 recordings from Decca's West Africa yellow label series. These are commercial recordings, made between 1948 and 1958, and include many rare performances that are unavailable elsewhere.

Here are Adeolu and his Rio Lindo Orchestra from this series:

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=025M-1CS0043775XX-0100V0.xml

The archive also contains 244 ethnographic wax cylinder recordings, made between 1898 and 1919. The sound quality is poor, but they are well worth hearing.

Here is the beautiful and disturbing "Death Wail", recorded in 1898 during the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, which is located between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=025M-C0080X1104XX-0100V0.xml

Mr. Seagalman calls horses, cows, sheep, and fowl. (UK, 1910)

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=025M-C0037X1639XX-0100V0.xml

This is the blog for the Sound Archive, which features a Recording of the Week.

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/archival_sounds/

The archive also contains a collection of regional sounds and dialects from many locations in England, This recordings are interesting not only for their preservation of dialects, but because they are also oral histories, and provide a record of a way of life that no longer exists.

A resident of Cheshire discusses traveling through the area with his threshing machine. This was recorded in 1966. The speaker was 76 at that time.

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C0908X0011XX-0300V0.xml

Fox Movietone news and newsreels

2009-12-05T12:51:00.000-08:00

I will probably have a more comprehensive post later in the week, but for now here are several interesting Fox Movietone Newsreels and news shorts:

Thomas Edison dies; with clips from an interview of Edison on his 84th birthday.

The first sound recording of Gandhi. The sound is rough here, but there is a transcript on the original YouTube page.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY9Avdn2Z38&feature=related

Shaw swims, discusses the U.S. Constitution, etc.

The 1932 Presidential campaign; the death of Rin Tin Tin

And now for something completely different.

The Great Cranberry Crisis of 1959

2009-11-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

Here's a belated Thanksgiving post, although is probably works better as a post-Thanksgiving post, since it's about food contamination.

I was listening to a great podcast from Angel Baby's show "Lost in Paradise" (November 23 show). She played a superb rockabilly record that I wasn't familiar with: "Cranberry Blues" by Robert Williams and the Groovers, a song about the Cranberry Crisis of 1959. I started researching the crisis, and that led to this post.

http://lostinparadise.podomatic.com/

The herbicide aminotriazole, introduced in the mid 1950's, had been effective in controlling weeds in cranberry bogs. In 1958, in spite of concerns about the possible carcinogenicity of ATZ, it was approved by the Department of Agriculture, but only for use after the end of the growing season,, so as to avoid contamination of the cranberry crop. Most of the 1957 crop turned out to be contaminated, and was voluntarily taken off the market. I'm not sure what happened with the 1958 crop.

The problem was not resolved, as a small percentage of the 1959 cranberry crop from Washington and Oregon was contaminated. Following the advice of the FDA, Arthur Flemming, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, recommended against eating cranberries from these states. This of course was really bad timing for the cranberry industry, as it was close to Thanksgiving. Since it was diffiult to determine the origin of cranberries, sales dropped nationwide. Many supermarket chains refused to carry cranberries. This had a long term impact on the cranberry industry , and it took a long time for it to fully recover.

This crisis occurred during the early stages of the 1960 presidential campaign, and candidates Kennedy and Nixon did their part in demonstrating the safety of cranberries; Nixon by eating lots of cranberry sauce and Kennedy by drinking several glasses of cranberry juice in front of reporters.

These articles discuss the cranberry crisis.

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091124/OPINION/911240321/-1/OPINION07

http://www.library.wisc.edu/guides/agnic/cranberry/faq.htm

There is an extensive discussion of the crisis in"A Scientist at the White House", the diary kept by President Eisenhower's science adviser George Bogdan Kistiakowsky. Sorry for the long URL.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ImUIKBl5hlgC&pg=PA208&lpg=PA208&dq=cranberry+crisis+1959&source=bl&ots=OhpFrx0CLL&sig=u1JvRDpH-tB5CRO06bZ2xSNEIVA&hl=en&ei=6R0US_C8J8PZnAePy4XOAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CB0Q6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=cranberry%20crisis%201959&f=false

The November 23, 1959 issue of Life magazine had an interesting article on the crisis, with some great photos that I can't embed, including one of "Secretary Flemming" being carried to an ambulance after being hung in effigy.

http://books.google.com/books?id=XlUEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=cranberry+crisis+1959&source=bl&ots=R0PYPXIHQQ&sig=GUcKe7RnuMa1zZDcN-8K_HJqTEU&hl=en&ei=thoUS-CRHIHdnAep6czCAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBEQ6AEwAjgU#v=onepage&q=cranberry%20crisis%201959&f=false

The Census of Marine Life: bizarre creaturesof the deep

2009-11-24T10:30:00.000-08:00

The Census of Marine Life project, scheduled for completion in October 2010, is discovering and cataloging as many species as possible. Five of the fourteen census projects are related to deep sea life. "Deep sea" is defined as below the level which light penetrates, which is about 200 meters. The observed species are located as deep as 5,000 meters (three miles). A total of 17,500 deep sea species have been cataloged so far, of which 5,722 are found below a depth of 1000 meters.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091122161740.htm

Here are some of the most interesting and bizarre species found so far.

A new species of "Dumbo", a finned octopod.

Clione lamacina, a snail found in Arctic and Antarctic waters.

Here is another polar species, Mimonectes sphaericus, a polar crustacean.

http://english.cctv.com/20090916/103799.shtml

The image gallery at the Census of Marine Life website has some great photos, but they can't be downloaded.

http://www.coml.org

An exceptionally strange group of deep sea creatures are members of the Osedax genus (bone-eating tubeworms). They devour whale bones in association with symbiotic bacteria that help in the digestion process.

They are small; their length ranges between 0.2 and 05. millimeters, and live in tubes that they build. Only the females feed on whales, The males live inside the females and feed on yolk contained inside their bodies. One female may contain dozens of males. Osedax may play a major role in carbon recycling in the deep sea.

http://www.mindfully.org/Water/2004/Bone-Eating-Osedax30jul04.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/09/050926082721.htm

Here are two videos on the deep sea projects.

A few interesting film and music clips

2009-11-19T12:10:00.000-08:00

I thought I would post few interesting videos I've seen lately.

Eugeniuz Bodo was one of the great stars of Polish cinema in the1930's. He died in a Soviet labor camp in 1943.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugeniusz_Bodo

Here he is in the 1937 Polish film "Pietro Wyzej" (Upstairs).

The quality is pretty poor in places, but this is great!

"Snake Hips" - sung by Sharon Lynn, with Ann Pennington dancing. This is from the 1929 film "Happy Days", which was the second wide screen film ever made. However the wide screen print no longer exists.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020949/

The best known version of "Mack the Knife" (Moriat) was recorded by Bobby Darin in 1958 , but the first recorded version was by Harald Paulsen from 1928. The song is from "Der Dreigrochenoper" (The Threepenny Opera). Paulsen played Mack the Knife in the original 1928 production in Berlin.

http://www.originalsproject.us/

The Originals Project is a great site with lots of information on obscure original versions of songs that later became hits for other performers. There will be a post soon on some very interesting original versions.

Idioglossia - Poto and Cabengo

2009-11-13T11:57:00.000-08:00

Secret languages are often developed by siblings. They develop most frequently in identical twins. They typically fade away over time, and disappear by the age of three. However, special circumstances, such as social isolation, can lead to these languages persisting. This phenomenon is known as idioglossia, or cryptophasia.

The best known incidence of idioglossia was the language developed by the identical twins Grace and Virginia Kennedy, who referred to themselves as Poto and Cabengo.

The twins were born in Savannah. Georgia in 1970. They suffered severe convulsions shortly after birth. Although tests showed no brain damage, their father said a neurosurgeon told him it would take years to conclusively determine this.

The family moved to San Diego. Grace and Virginia did not socialize and rarely left the house. They spent most of their time either alone, or with their maternal grandmother, who spoke only German. They spoke very rapidly, and no one else could understand what they were saying. Neither spoke any English at the age of six. Private languages may have their own grammar and syntax, though that is very rare.

Phrases spoken by Virginia and Grace include:

La moa Poto - (here more poto)

Pinit, putatrahletungay (finish, potato salad hungry)

A documentary about the twins, "Poto and Cabengo", was released in 1980. Here is a brief clip.

A combination of speech therapy, psychotherapy, and the work of psycholinguists and speech pathologists helped to decipher the girls language. Over 100 hours of their playtime was taped and analyzed. It turned out that much of their language consisted of mispronounced and garbled English phrases,with a bit of German, that were spoken very rapidly. Most of their speech became somewhat intelligible after being slowed down. Their language contained 30 different words for potato.

Virginia and Grace managed to learn basic English.They were sent to separate schools to help facilitate their learning of English. Their IQ's tested as below average (around 80) but it's exceedingly difficult to tell what their real intelligence is.

According to Wikipedia, Ginny now works on an assembly line,and Grace works at a fast food restaurant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_twins

Here's an interesting article on Grace and Virginia

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912582-1,00.html

The abstract of a scholarly article on idioglossia. It mentions that most of what is known about idioglossia is "folk knowledge" and that more scholarly research needs to be done.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED252287&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED252287

Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms

2009-11-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

Ant colony optimization algorithms (ACO) are used to solve problems relating to finding optimal paths towards a given goal.

In their search for food, ants wander randomly,and lay down a trail of pheromones while they are returning to their nest after finding food . The pheromones evaporate over time, so that the shorter the path to food, the greater the pheromone density. The pheromones attract other ants, so that what was a random path to food becomes an optimal path, and the ants will travel the shortest possible distance to the food supply. This is an example of "swarm theory", where a group achieves an optimal result even though there is no formal leadership.

This algorithm is applicable to a wide variety of problems, including finding the best landing gate at an airport. and the "traveling salesman"problem in mathematics.

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) originated in the nineteenth century. In its simplest form a salesperson has a number of cities to visit. What is the shortest possible path they can take where all cities are visited, but only once. Additional constraints are sometimes placed on the system such as cost and time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

I can't find a non-technical paper of article that discusses this in detail, but here is an important research paper that discusses how the ant colony optimization algorithm provides good solutions to the TSP ,and with some modifications, could provide even better ones.

http://www.idsia.ch/~luca/acs-bio97.pdf

A strategy similar to the ACO was developed by financial analysts at Southwest Airlines to facilitate quicker arrivals and departures of aircraft. The algorithm they developed, based on the fact that pilots looked for the best available landing gate, led to quicker arrivals and departures of aircraft.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2008/0406-planes_trains_and_ant_hills.htm

The ACO has also been used to model military strategies. Scientists at the University of Granada developed several algorithms designed to enable a military unit to achieve the greatest amount of security and speed in achieving their goals. They modeled the battlefields in their research on the ones used in the video game "Panzer General"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091106102658.htm

Here is a simulation of foraging ants.

http://www.nightlab.ch/antsim.php

The music of Harry Partch

2009-11-02T08:34:00.001-08:00

Harry Parch has always been one of my musical heroes, due to his unique and uncompromising vision.

Parch was born in Oakland in 1901 to parents who had been missionaries in China. He was interested in music from an early age, but by the time he was in his late teens, he became disenchanted with traditional Western music. He developed what became a lifelong interest in non-Western music, and in primitive and ancient cultures.

Partch developed a unique system of musical tuning, based on a 43 tone scale rather then the tradition Western twelve tone scale. He also developed a series of handmade instruments to play his music on. Partch thought that this allowed music to more accurately portray the patterns of speech. He valued these instruments for their beauty as well as the music played on them.

Partch ran out of grant money, and spent the depression as a hobo, riding trains around the U.S., and keeping a journal of speech patterns. He frequently converted these into musical patterns, a practice he used throughout his career. Following the depression, help from grants and benefactors enabled him to focus on his music.

Compositions by Partch include "Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po" "Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales", 'The Bewitched" and "And on the Seventh Day the Petals Fell in Petaluma".

The Wikipedia article on Partch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Partch

Here is a list of Partch's compositions:

http://www.harrypartch.com/partchworks.htm

Here are three of Partch's instruments:

The Adapted Viola, a viola with a cello neck.

http://www.corporeal.com/instbro/inst13.html

Cloud chamber bowls - these were originally designed to be used in devices to detect ionized particles and study nuclear reactions.

The Boo (bamboo marimba) - this can play all the chromatic pitches in Partch's 43 note scale.

The two photos above show some of the instruments in the possession of Newband , a microtonal band, and artists in residence at the Harry Partch Institute at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Dean Drummond, the co-director of Newband has legal custody of the original Partch instruments.

http://www.newband.org/

Here is Partch demonstrating some of his instruments

Most of Partch's music was intended to accompany dance, theater, or film. Here is Newband's staging of "Daphne of the Dunes",.

Here is "Barstow", Partch's 1941 composition. The text comes from grafitti that Partch saw on a
highway railing.

This is an excellent BBC documentary on Partch.

Happy Halloween! - horror films from the silent era.

2009-10-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

For my Halloween post I thought I would focus on some early horror films.

Here's a good introduction the the genre.

http://www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms.html

Many of you may be familiar with the French director Georges Melies, whose pioneering films include "A Trip to the Moon" (1902). His directed the very first horror film, "Le Manior du Diable",from 1896.

Here is a brief excerpt, with modern narration.

Three more by Melies:

The first version of Frankenstein was filmed by Edison Studios in 1910. The quality is poor in places, There is only one known surviving copy, and it remained unseen by all except for its owner for many years.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0001223/

Here is F.W. Murnaus's 1922 film "Nosferatu", the first filmed version of the Dracula legend. Murnau was successfully sued by Bram Stoker's widow for copyright infringement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Murnau

There are several very interesting films from the silent era here.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=91D988B577595EA6&page=1

This is a great bibliography of horror films, from 1895-1950

http://www.classichorror.free-online.co.uk/azmovies.htm

I will discuss the Carl Dreyer film "Vampyr" in a separate post on Dreyer.

Martin Gardner turns, 95 - recreational math, flexagons and "The Annotated Alice"

2009-10-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

I've always loved the writings of Martin Gardner, who turned 95 this week. He has long been the best known recreational mathematician. He has written on many different topics, but most of his writings focus on puzzles and puzzle solving. He has written over 70 books, including a puzzle and essay collection that was released this month.

Here's a good article on Gardner's career.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/science/20tier.html

A few of Gardner's puzzles.

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/monday-puzzle-martin-gardners-birthday-celebration/

My favorite article by Gardner is a very early one (from 1956) which introduced me to the wonderful world of flexagons. They were invented at Princeton in 1939 by a graduate student, Arthur Stone. A "Flexagon Committee" that included fellow graduate students Richard Feynman, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics, and Bryant Tuckerman, was formed.

I first made flexagons with my dad on the kitchen table, but later started making them at school (this was fifth grade) during boring classes. Sometimes I would sell them, and use the money to buy junk food at lunch.

This picture comes from a great, comprehensive site on flexagons.

http://www.flexagon.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=31

The Wikipedia article doesn't provide much information about flexagons, but it does show how to make tetraflexagons and hexaflexigons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexagon

There area number of technical articles on flexagons. This one provides a good overview.

http://delta.cs.cinvestav.mx/~mcintosh/comun/gonafle/gonaflex.pdf

There are many videos of flexagons online. This one is silent, but has some pretty nifty flexing.

height="344">

Gardner's "The Annotated Alice" is terrific. It provides detailed information on the many obscure jokes and references in "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass". The "Definitive Edition" contains "The Wasp in the Wig" , a chapter that was left out of "Through the Looking Glass".

Amazon has some interesting editorial reviews of this.

http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Alice-Definitive-Lewis-Carroll/dp/0393048470

A Gardner bibliography:

http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/gardner-booklist.html

Zebroids: zorses and zonkeys

2009-10-23T09:34:00.001-07:00

I wrote a post a while back about quaggas, a subspecies of zebra that were once thought to be separate species, that became extinct in the nineteenth century. There is an effort underway to "recreate" the quagga through genetic engineering. I thought I would write about some odd and interesting zebra hybrids.

The zorse is a horse-zebra hybrid. It's the offspring of a zebra stallion and horse mare. Like other hybrid equines (such as mules) it is sterile. The offspring of a zebra mare and horse stallion is called a hebra, though there are multiple names for equine hybrids. They are collectively known as zebroids, and are found both in the wild and in captivity.

http://www.lifeinthefastlane.ca/a-zorse-is-a-horse-of-course/offbeat-news

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-464723/Meet-Eclyse--amazing-zebra-crossing.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorse

Here's a zonkey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonkey

Here is another zonkey, referred to here as a zenky.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/28/1062050609625.html

A list of hybrid equines:

http://www.messybeast.com/genetics/hybrid-equines.htm

Fish and the evolution of speech

2009-10-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

Recent research has shown that sound arose quite early in the evolution of vertebrates. dating back about 400,000,000 years. It first arose in fish, and many fish today use vocalization as part of the process of social communication.

A team of researchers at Cornell, lead by Dr. Andrew Bass ( talk about a fitting name) focused their research on midshipman fish, which are found in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of the U.S. and Canada. Males hum to lure females and grunt and growl to scare away other males from their nest. Female midshipmen fish growl to claim and protect territory, but don't make the other sounds males do.

The most interesting part of the teams research showed that the neural networks responsible for vocalization in fish and had the same location as that in other vertebrates, indicating that not only was vocalization something very ancient, but that its form, structure, and function have been highly conserved throughout time.

This research could be useful in helping to develop treatments for those who have had damage to the neural network that controls speech.

This is an interesting article on this research.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7510443.stm

Another good article, which includes the picture at the beginning of the post:

http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2008/nemo-arent-the-only-fish-that-talk.html

The abstract for the original research article:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/321/5887/417

Here is a video of humming and grunting midshipman fish:

Here is a link to a speech by Dr. Bass about his research:

http://www.cornell.edu/video/?VideoID=261

Strange book and comic book covers

2009-10-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

Today's post is on strange and bad book and comic book covers.

Here are three from

http://punkrockpenguin.net/waste/amuse/badcovers

These look like good candidates for the Museum of Bad Art.

A bizarre comic book cover:

http://my-retrospace.blogspot.com/2008/06/bad-comic-book-covers.html

and...

http://comiccoverage.typepad.com/comic_coverage/worst-covers-ever/

Old English, Furthoc, and Caedmon's Hymn

2009-10-14T12:16:00.001-07:00

Old English is a very different language from modern English, and was spoken from the fifth into the twelfth century. It was a northern Germanic language, and later was influenced by Old Norse after the Viking invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. It was also influenced by Latin, as the influence of Christianity grew, and the presence of clergy who knew Latin increased. It originally had a series of grammatical cases, as Latin and Greek did, but eventually these began to die out.

There were four main dialects of Old English - Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon, but the Wessex Dialect spoken by Alfred the Great became dominant after he unified Anglo-Saxon England in 878.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English

Old English was originally written using the Futhorc variation of the Runic alphabet. Runic was used to write many Germanic languages. Futhorc was eventually replaced by the Latin alphabet.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm

http://www.lore-and-saga.co.uk/html/anglo-saxon_futhorc.html

One of the earliest surviving works in Old English is by Caedmon, a late seventh century monk and poet. Although he was said to be highly prolific, his only surviving work is "Caedmon's Hymn", which supposedly came to him in a dream.

There are versions of "Caedmon's Hymn" in Northumbrian and West Saxon.

The Northumbrian version:

http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a32.1.html

Here are the West Saxon, Latin, and Modern English versions:

http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Caedmon%27s_Hymn_(Peter_Bird)

A recitation:

All our knowledge of Caedmon comes from St. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People."

http://www.heorot.dk/bede-caedmon.html

The Lord's Prayer in Old English:

The most famous work in Old English is "Beowulf", which I will leave for a separate post. For now, here are a couple of great (and very extensive) Beowulf sites:

http://www.beowulftranslations.net/benslade.shtml

http://www.heorot.dk/beo-intro-ms.html

Here is an Old English to Modern English Translator:

http://www.oldenglishtranslator.co.uk/

Nobel Prizes 2009 - Physics - optical technology

2009-10-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

Nobel Prizes are often given for work done a long time ago that has proven to be highly valuable in the ensuing years. This years Nobel Prize in physics was given to three inventors for their work in optical technology from the 1960's.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2254803/nobel_prize_in_physics_2009.html

Willard S.Boyle and George E. Smith were given their prizes for the invention of the charge-coupled device, (CCD), which revolutionized the development of imaging devices by capturing images of light electronically. It led to the development of the digital camera, bar codes, and medical imaging technology and other devices.

CCD's work by converting pixels into electronic charges, which are linked to a corresponding color.

Charles K. Kao shared in this years prize for his pioneering work in the development of fiber optics. He was the first to calculate how light could be transmitted over long distances

Here's a basic description of a charge coupled device:

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci295633,00.html

Boyle and Smith discussed the invention of the CCD during a presentation at Bell Labs in 1978. The basic design of the CCD only took an hour! It took three more days for a prototype to be built, and another week for some basic testing.

A fiber optic strand, which is bundled into a cable, consists of three parts: 1) the core where the light travels 2) the cladding, which reflects light back into the core and 3)a protective buffer coating. The entire cable is protected by an outer jacket.

Light in optical fibers travels a long way due to the cladding reflecting the light back into the core, but the signal does degrade. It's boosted by a set of optical regenerators, which are specially coated optical fibers whose signal is amplified by a laser. The incoming signal is then decoded and sent to an electronic device, such as a computer or phone.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/fiber-optic3.htm

How fiber optics fibers are made:

Rube Goldberg: cartoons, games and devices

2009-10-08T10:15:00.000-07:00

The cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg was best known for creating "Rube Goldberg machines", which were complicated machines designed to perform simple tasks. Goldberg's machines led to the development of the popular game "Mouse Trap", developed in the 1960's, and to a series of competitions at Purdue University, in Japan, and elsewhere, to build the best Rube Goldberg device for a certain task, such as putting a hamburger together.

Here is Goldberg's alarm clock:

http://campus.queens.edu/depts/english/rube%20goldberg%20pics.htm

http://www.anl.gov/Careers/Education/rube/rubeback.html

Purdue University's Rube Goldberg Contest:

http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/rube/rube.index.html

The 2007 competition at Purdue:

The original version of the Mouse Trap game was released in 1963. The object is to build a Rube Goldberg style mouse trap, and then capture all of your opponents mice.

http://wesclark.com/am/mouse_trap.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Trap_(board_game)

There are many videos of Rube Goldberg devices online. Here is one of my favorites.

Nobel Prizes 2009 - Part One - Physiology or Medicine

2009-10-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

This will be the first of several posts on this years Nobel Prize Awards.

Congratulations to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack Wzostak, winners of this years prize in Physiology or Medicine. Their work involved understanding the synthesis and function of telemeres, which are a structure found on the ends of chromosomes that protects their integrity. in eukaryotic cells. Telemeres replicate, but ultimately the process stops because one of the strands of the double helix grows a little shorter with each replication. This relates to the aging of cells, since when one of the strands grows too short, the cell can no longer divide.

The researchers who won the Nobel Prize discovered and worked with the enzyme telemerase, which controls the adding of sequences to the shorter strand so that the two strands remain of equal length. Telemerase is only active early in a cells life, and its inactivation is what causes cells to stop growing. It was discovered, quite surprisingly that the replication of these added sequences is controlled by RNA.

Understanding how telemerase works is important in understanding cancer. In order for a cell to replicate again telemerase must be reactivated. Reactivated telemerase is found in most cancer cells, and researchers are working to find drugs that inhibit it.

Here's a good article on the prize winners and their research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/science/06nobel.html?hp

The website for Dr. Blackburn's lab is:

http://biochemistry.ucsf.edu/labs/blackburn/index.php

Here is the announcement of the prize, and the winners discussing their work.

ScratchBot - robots and rat whiskers

2009-10-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

Here's the first of several posts on advances in robotics. Let's start with a robotic rat.

A team of researchers at the Bristol Robotics Lab, in association with Professor Tony Prescott of the University of Sheffield, have developed ScratchBot, a robotic "rat". This tactile sensing device is based on the processes a rat uses when its whiskers sense its environment, and on computer modeling of the rat brain This technology would allow robots to be used in areas where vision is poor, such in smoke filled areas or under the sea. ScratchBot is part of a European project to develop artificial intelligence systems modeled on biologic ones.

Rat whiskers serve as an excellent model for robotic sensing. They are able to accurately locate and determine the size, shape and texture of an object. The hope is that damaged robotic whiskers can be easily and cheaply replaced, thereby lowering maintenance costs for a highly complex system.

A video of ScratchBot:

Here are two articles on the ScratchBot project.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630163538.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630163538.htm

(this includes the embedded video)

A gesturing robot from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory:

Sound and color in early film

2009-10-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

From the beginning of film history, there were attempts to incorporate sound and color into film. The early attempts are very primitive by today's standards, but very interesting.

Edison's first attempt at incorporating sound and film involved the use of the kinetophone, in which film was watched a film through the peepholes of a kinetoscope. The cabinet of the kinetoscope contained a phonograph, and the viewer/listener heard the sound through a pair of ear tubes.

Information about kinetoscopes and kinetophones can be found here.

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bledison_kinetoscope.htm

http://inventors.about.com/od/kstartinventions/a/Kinetoscope.htm

Here is the earliest Edison sound film, from 1894.

I don't know anything about this film, but it's very cool.

Sound films really came of age through the development of "sound on film" where the sound was optically recorded on the side of a film strip. The helped solve the problem of synchronization, which was poor in earlier sound films. Several researchers developed a "sound on film' process but it was the one developed by Lee De Forest that became commercially successful.

Although the first full length film to use De Forest's process was "The Jazz Singer" from 1927, it was used in several shorts, starting in 1923.

Here's a great one, featuring Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake.

Here's a preview of a future post on color in early hand painted film, from 1895.

The Wikipedia article on the history of sound in film is really good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film

The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices

2009-09-29T13:12:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, now closed, contained over 250 items. Some of these are now on display at the Minnesota Science Museum in St. Paul.

Here are three devices from the collection.

The Battle Creek Vibratory Chair:

http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/k-chair.htm

This is from around 1900, and was created at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, directed by Dr. John Kellogg, of Corn Flakes fame. It was designed to stimulate intestinal peristalsis, and cure back pain and headaches. it looks about as comfortable as an electric chair.

The Radium Ore Revigitator:

http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/revig.htm

From 1925, the idea behind this was many health problems stemmed from "denatured' water lacking an essential ingredient : radioactivity! A little radium was the ingredient needed to keep you healthy. Um, not exactly.

Here is another painful looking device, the Prostate Gland Warmer, "designed to stimulate the abdominal brain".

http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/images/1918lg.jpg

Here is Bob McCoy, curator of the museum, on Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1998)

Many more videos can be found at the museum's You Tube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MuseumofQuackery

A tribute to William Safire

2009-09-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

William Safire, the political columnist, presidential speechwriter, novelist, and arbiter of language died today. I thought I would do a brief tribute here.

Although I strongly disagreed with his politics, I always saw him as a charming , interesting ,and decent guy. I loved his "On Language' Column for the New York Times. How could you not like someone who managed to come up with the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism", albeit for Spiro Agnew.

I talked briefly on the phone with him several years ago, pretty much by mistake. I ran across something I thought he might be interested in for his language column. I called the New York Times re where to send it. They put me through directly to Safire. I apologized, and said I didn't mean to bother him. He laughed and told me where to send my information.

Here is the obituary from the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/us/28safire.html

A column discussing the origin of my favorite term from the financial crisis: "zombie banks".

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/magazine/17wwln-safire-t.html

One of the most interesting speeches Safire wrote,which fortunately never had to be delivered, was a "what-if" speech for President Nixon, , in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to be abandoned on the moon after the first lunar landing.

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2007/11/10/in-event-of-moon-disaster/

Pet cats in Neolithic Cyprus

2009-09-25T12:11:00.000-07:00

All house cats are descended from one of five females of the wild species Felis silvesteris lybica, which originated in the Middle East. cats likely first became domesticated as they moved into human settlements, and were efficient at rodent control in homes, and in fields of wheat. and barley. There's no indication that a "Tweety" bird accompanied Felis Sylvesteris:).

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/science/29cat.html

The origin of the domestication of cats goes back far beyond ancient Egypt. A grave where a human and cat were buried together that dates back 9500 years was discovered on Cyprus in 2001 in the Neolithic village of Shillourokambos. Cats are not native to Cyprus but appear to have been brought to the island about this time, as were pigs, goats , deer and cattle. Cats likely served a dual function; as pets and as a means of rodent control. It's clear that cats did have a special meaning, due to the proximity of cat and human in the grave. The grave also contained a number of ceremonial offerings, such as ochre and seashells.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0408_040408_oldestpetcat.html

Here is the grave.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3611453.stm

Here is a recent video of cats in Cyprus.

Some 1950's film trailers

2009-09-23T12:17:00.000-07:00

This post was inspired by Steven Hill's great"Movie Screens Title Page".He has asked that images not be directly linked to, but I would encourage everyone to check the images for the film title pages in this post, and other images on his site.

http://shillpages.com/movies/index2.shtml

Here are trailers for three 1950's Technicolor films.

Be sure to check out the great title page for the 1954 black and white version of "Them".

Bhutan and unusual stamps

2009-09-21T11:39:00.000-07:00

I was working on this post when I heard news about today's strong earthquake in the beautiful, remote country of Bhutan, located in the Himalayas.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/09/21/bhutan.quake/

Bhutan, as many very small countries do, derives significant income from the sale of postage stamps. Many of these stamps are highly unusual, and intended for collectors rather then for use.

Here are some record stamps from Bhutan, at the Internet Museum of Flexi/Cardboard/Oddity records:

You can listen to a couple record stamps here:

http://www.wfmu.org/MACrec/onebhut.html

Last year Bhutan began a series of CD-ROM stamps:

http://shitalphilately.blogspot.com/2008/02/worlds-first-cd-rom-postage-stamp.html

Here are two interesting and unusual stamps from the "Stamps of Distinction" blog.

This stamp actually has finely pulverized pieces of the Rock of Gibraltar in it.

This Austrian stamp contains .003 grams of meteorite dust.

http://www.stampsofdistinction.com/2008/06/8-of-worlds-most-unusual-postage-stamps.html

Quantum computers

2009-09-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

This is the first of at least two posts relating to quantum mechanics.

Although quantum mechanics, is weird , extremely abstract, and difficult, it does relate to the everyday world in some ways. One of these concerns the development of quantum computers. Practical quantum computers are still a couple of decades away however.

Standard computers are limited in the amount of data they can hold and transmit. Each binary bit is either a zero or one. In quantum mechanics, the principle of superposition holds that for very small particles under certain conditions, multiple states or positions coexist. Therefore a quantum bit or "qbit" can have the states zero and one at the same time. This allows for an exponential increase in computing power. The technology has developed to the point where a 16 qbit computer has been developed.

Here's a good introductory article on quantum computers:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/quantum-computer1.htm

An introductory video on quantum computers from Scientific American:

Another interesting video on quantum computers:

Quantum computers will be useful for solving problems that are well beyond the reach of standard computers. This has advantages and disadvantages, one disadvantage being is that current encryption systems, which cannot be broken by standard computers, could potentially be broken by quantum computers.

One function that quantum computers will be very helpful with is searching through large, complex, databases. Here is a demonstration of a 16 qbit computer searching for complex molecular information in a database.

Some great images from Flickr

2009-09-15T13:22:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite websites is PCL Link Dump.

http://easydreamer.blogspot.com/

There are great new links there every time I check it out. It's where I found a link to Steve Chasmar's Flickr page>

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opiummuseum/

Here are a few great images from his photostream:

An anti-opium illustration from China, circa 1930

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opiummuseum/3653674430/in/set-72157601035562361/

RSROA is the Roller Skating Rink Operators Association.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opiummuseum/3524130545/in/set-72157601032697276/

From Burma:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opiummuseum/1413743652/in/set-72157606864662128/

and my favorite:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opiummuseum/3703499622/

Abner Jay, one-man band

2009-09-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

http://swayingwires.blogspot.com/2009/07/abner-jay.html

Abner Jay was a unique figure in American music. He was a one-man band, playing banjo, guitar, cymbals, and harmonica. His music is a mix of folk and blues with a unique "outsider " element, that's hard to describe.

Born in Georgia, Jay was a member of Silas Greens Minstrels in the 1930's, and led the WMAZ Minstrels , who appeared on Macon radio in the 1940's and 50's. He then toured the country, traveling in a small portable home. He sold recordings that appeared on his own label, Brandie Records. Jay died in 1993. Some of his recordings have been reissued on CD.

An informative blog post on Jay:

http://surenuffnyesido.blogspot.com/2009/03/abner-jay-true-story-of-abner-jay.html

Here is a reminiscence about Jay and a comment by Jay's daughter Brandie. Unfortunately, the audio link is broken.

http://waxidermy.com/?p=2191

Abner Jay at the Grassroots Festival, 1993

Links to a couple Abner Jay songs:

http://purpleheadphones.blogspot.com/2007/01/abner-jay.html

Historic menus

2009-09-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

Restaurant menus can be interesting for their artwork, general design, and as a historical artifact. It's interesting to look at prices, unusual items, and different cultural sensibilities. I'm going to start with five menus for this post.

A special game dinner help to honor president Theodore Roosevelt, the Bozanta Tavern, Hayden Lake, Idaho, 1909

Menu details from a reception for the International Hotel Alliance by French government officials:

http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/library/collections/menus/menu-images.html?lm_menuid=909140

More menu details can be found here:

http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/library/collections/menus/menu-images.html?lm_menuid=926104

Check out the other great menus from the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.

http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/library/collections/menus/detail.html?id=909140

Three from the Colorado Menus Collection:

http://www.coloradocollege.edu/Library/SpecialCollections/Colorado/Menus.html

Easter Dinner at the Alamo Hotel, Colorado Springs, 1895:

Drink all your milk and get a free lollipop at the Holiday Inn Hotel. (children's menu, 1970?)

Some typical 1950's menu items with typical 1950's prices - just don't get drunk or rowdy at the Holland House in Golden. (1958)

The complete menu can be found here:

http://www.coloradocollege.edu/Library/SpecialCollections/Colorado/menus/hollandhousemay1958.htm

The Museum of Bad Art

2009-09-09T09:32:00.000-07:00

I thought a good place to start a series of posts on outsider art would be the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA).

The Museum was established in 1993 by Scott Wilson. It started when Wilson found a painting in the trash. His friends Jerry Reilly and Marie Jackson wanted the painting, and decided to exhibit it, along with another painting, in their basement. The basement museum grew, and eventually moved to the basement of theater in Deedham Massachusetts. A second museum was later in another theater basement in Somerville, another Boston suburb.

The museum's purpose is not to collect art that's kitschy (such as velvet Elvis paintings), but paintings and sculptures that are a serious attempt at good art, but have failed in a way that's truly distinctive and noteworthy albeit due to sheer awfulness. It's reminiscent of the best of the "song-poem" records discussed in an earlier post. The paintings come from the trash, thrift stores, and donations.

Here is "Lucy in the Field With Flowers", the painting that started MOBA. The painting was identified by Susan Lawlor, who read a newspaper article about MOBA, as being her grandmother, Anna Lally Keane.

"Peter the Cat"

"Juggling Dog in a Hula Skirt"
"Inauguration Day, 1961"

All pictures are from the MOBA website.

http://www.museumofbadart.org/index.php

A tour of MOBA:

An ABC Australia story on MOBA: (embedding disabled)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQJ6w9q3zVo

The Wikipedia post on MOBA is excellent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Bad_Art

The wonderful species of the Mount Bosavi crater

2009-09-08T11:07:00.000-07:00

I'm always fascinated by the discovery of new animal species. The recent discovery of over 40 new species of animals in the crater of Mt. Bosavi, in Papua New Guinea is tremendously exciting. The volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago, and is well isolation form other environments. Since isolation leads to speciation, its not surprising that many previously unknown species were discovered there, but the variety and uniqueness of some of the species discovered there is remarkable. The discovery is also significant because it strongly demonstrates the need for saving what rain forests remain.

The project was filmed, and photos were taken by the BBC Natural History Unit.

Here is the official report on the expedition:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/springwatch/llotv_finalreport_20090907.pdf

The BBC website for "Lost Land of the Volcano" , showing this week. I can't get the videos to play, and the show can only be watched online in certain areas, but it's still worth checking out.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m82h7

Here are some of my favorite animals that were discovered.

The Bosavi woolly rat. A cat sized rat, with no fear of humans. One sat quietly amidst a group of explorers when it was being filmed and photographed. Here's one with BBC producer Steve Greenwood.

A video of the giant Bosavi rat. It's so gentle that the explorers can easily pet it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8210000/8210394.stm

The Bosavi Silky Cuscus, a tree dwelling marsupial:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/images/bank/programmes_tv/factual/446volcano_cuscus.jpg

A new species of frog:

A hairy caterpillar:

These photos, and others from the expedition, can be found at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1211554/New-frog-rat-species-discovered-Papua-New-Guinea.html

Great and not so great LP covers and picture sleeves

2009-09-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

I love record covers.

One of the great things about record collecting are all the great - and not so great - covers and picture sleeves out there. They make collecting even more fun and interesting. Here are a few examples.

First, two records from Asia.

Here is the cover for a cover version of Steam's 1969 hit "Nah Nah Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" by Julie and the Emeralds.

http://www.pbase.com/sid_presley/image/116690940

I've never found a copy of this record or even heard it. here's a different recording by Julie and the Emeralds. Unfortunately, it's not embeddable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaW8QeD78D8

Here's a cover by the great 60's and 70's Indonesian garage band Dara Puspita:

Here's one of their recordings:

The story of Dara Puspita:

http://www.garagehangover.com/?q=DaraPuspita

Here are two religious LP's with "unusual" covers.

This record is fairly common around here, since it's a local recording. I have three copies of it at the moment. I've talked to several people who remember seeing "Mr. Bat" perform wearing this costume. The music is pretty standard sacred music with organ accompaniment.

http://www.regrettablemusic.com/65/mr-bat-sings/

One of the many creepy ventriloquist LP covers.

http://blog.sixwise.com/photos/images/images/210/original.aspx

I've read that this record is pretty dull musically, but what a cover!

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BaxMlnoKZyY/SVBR2lgnIYI/AAAAAAAAA6I/BJUS0oIseuM/s400/foster-edwards-orch-what%27s-next.jpg

One of the many great polka LP covers:

http://www.funnyalbumcovers.com/2008/12/happy-louie-julcia-and-boys.html

"The Bloop" and other strange sounds from under the sea

2009-09-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

I read an interesting article yesterday about two mysterious signals picked up by hydrophones, acoustic listening devices that were placed by NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in the ocean. Hydrophones were originally developed as part of a program by the U.S. Navy as part of the SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) used to track Soviet submarines during the Cold War.. The hydrophones were attached to telecommunication cables so that the sounds picked up could be heard "real time" on land. They were effective but very expensive.

After the Cold War ended in 1991, this technology was turned over to civilians. Portable hydrophones were developed that were self contained, cheaper, and could be dropped anywhere in the ocean. However, data obtained was not real time, and could not be retrieved until the devices were picked up by a ship.

NOAA's VENTS program, which examines underwater hydrothermal venting systems, makes use of these devices. The Acoustic Monitoring Program, which has monitored ocean noises since 1991, picked up the sounds discussed here.

The first of these sounds, known as "The Bloop", was heard several times during the summer of 1997. It has not been heard since. Its origin is uncertain, but the frequency of the sound is consistent with one made by a large animal. The problem is that there is no known whale or other sea creature large enough to have made this sound. It was heard from sensors 3000 miles apart.

Here are two sound files of "The Bloop"

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/sounds/bloop.html

Another sound picked up by the Acoustic Monitoring Program is known as "The Slow Down" sound. It was recorded on May,19, 1997 Lasting for seven minutes, and heard over a range of 2,000 miles, It was never heard again

The "Slow Down" file:

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/sounds/noise97139.html

Two articles on "The Bloop":

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327246.500-13-more-things-the-bloop.html

http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/sound01/background/technology/technology.html

Some more ocean sounds from NOAA:

http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/sound01/background/seasounds/seasounds.html#Anchor-1515

The wonderful world of vintage paperbacks

2009-09-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

In addition to collecting records, for many years I collected vintage paperbacks from the 1940s , 50s and 60s. I collected these largely or their artwork, although there were many, particularly by "Noir" writers such as Jim Thompson and David Gaddis that were well worth reading . There were others I liked for their bizarre plots, poor writing, or because of the way they sensationalized issues of the time , such as juvenile delinquency.

Here are some great covers from the golden age of paperback art.

Three from the website "Good Girl Art"

http://www.goodgirlart.com/gallery.html

Williamson was a prolific science fiction writer with a PH.D. in English who taught for many years at Eastern New Mexico State University.

Brown was one of the great writers of the vintage paperback era. He was primarily a writer of science fiction and mysteries.

The early works by writers who later became well known sometimes started out as paperback originals. The first edition of Kurt Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" was released in 1959. The first hardback edition didn't come out until 1961.

Frances Crane was a mystery writer, who wrote a series of novels featuring the exploits of Pat and Jean Abbott. She wrote regularly for the New Yorker, and had an interesting life. She lived in Nazi Germany for several years, and was eventually expelled for her views.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Crane

The cover of an early Charlie Chan novel.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16007871@N00/1270631622/

"Daisy Bell" - synthetic speech and a space odyssey

2009-09-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

As readers of this blog can tell, I'm very interested in the origins of just about everything, particularly when it relates to music.
The first electronically synthesized speech was created using an analog device, the "Voder", which was demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair.

Digitally synthesized speech probably originated at Bell Labs in 1962 on the IBM 704 computer. These computers had an estimated 18 bytes of memory, and were the first to use core memory rather then tubes to store binary information.

The song "Daisy Bell", also known as "A Bicycle Built for Two", was digitally synthesized by John L. Kelly, with accompanying music by Max Mathews. It was a major moment in computer history.The writer Arthur C. Clarke was present at this demonstration, and used it in "2001: A Space Odyssey", when the HAL 9000 computer sang it.

The Wikipedia article on the IBM 704:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704

An article by Bell Labs on text-to-speech synthesis:

http://www.bell-labs.com/news/1997/march/5/2.html

A photo of an IBM 704:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/704.html

Daisy Bell", "sung" by the IBM 704.

The notes here refer to the computer used as an IBM 7094, a later model. It seems that the IBM 704 however was in fact the computer used, since it's referred to that way in the Bell Labs article.

Computer speech from Bell Labs - this also includes "Daisy Bell"

http://www.wfmu.org/365/2003/062.shtml

Some music from the "Music for Mathematics LP". The cover for this LP was designed by Alex Steinweiss, the first album cover designer.

http://www.wfmu.org/365/2003/260.shtml

The Collyer Brothers, Disposophobia, and excessive hoarding

2009-08-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

I've always been interested in the phenomenon of disposophobia, or "excessive hoarding". Long thought to be type of obsessive compulsive disorder, it now appears more likely that it's a separate disorder. One the causes appears to be damage to the part of the brain associated with decision making.

I collected records for many years, and still do in a much more limited way. I never got anywhere close to the excesses I'm talking about here, but I always had more then I could ever listen to.I sold off a couple storage lockers full of records when I moved last year. Many, if not all of them would have sat there for many years, without being listened to.

Hoarding is often associated with isolation and extreme eccentricity, and can be tragic. We have all heard stories of people who have kept large numbers of animals in deplorable conditions.

The most extreme case of hoarding what basically is junk, is the famous case of the Collyer Brothers. They lived in Manhattan in isolation, extreme filth and in a horde of junk that was estimated at 100 tons at the time of their deaths.The disorder disposophobia - the fear of throwing things away - is often referred to as "Collyer Brothers syndrome"

Homer (1881-1947) and Langley (1886-1947) Collyer were the sons of an eccentric New York gynecologist, Herman Collyer, and an opera singer, Susie Gage Frost. They were well educated but never worked regular jobs. Dr, Collyer left his family in 1919, and Susie Collier died in 1929. The brothers remained in the old family home in Harlem,,and increasingly withdrew from the world. Their home was frequently the target of burglars who falsely thought the house was filled with valuables. Langley then boarded up the windows, and set a series of booby traps throughout the house.

Homer went blind in the early 1930's and Langley took care of him, wandering the city searching for food. He also brought piles of junk home with him. Langley once claimed that he was saving the mountains of newspapers stored in the house so that Herman could read them when he regained his sight.

None of the bills owed by the Collyer's were ever paid, and this led to a shutoff of all utilities. Eventually the Bowery Savings Bank, which owned the mortgage on the house began foreclosure proceedings, In 1942 police tried to evict them, following Langley's refusal to allow a cleanup crew sent by the bank into the house. The police could not get past all the junk piled next to the front door. The crisis ended when Langley then wrote a check paying off the entire mortgage.

On March 21, 1947,an anonymous call stating that someone had died in the Collyer house led to the police entering the house through a second floor window,as it was impossible to get in through the first floor due to the piles of junk. A strong stench permeated the house. They found Homer's body, He had been dead only a few hours. Speculation mounted as to the whereabouts of Langley An extensive search for Langley ended when his body was discovered in the house,. It turned out that Langley had died only feet away from Homer. . He had been the victim of one of his own booby traps. Homer had starved to death as a result of Langley not being able to procure food for him.

The hundreds of tons of junk removed form the house included, in addition to massive amounts of books and newspapers, Many bizarre items, including the chassis of a Model T Ford, fourteen pianos, and mounds of trash. The chair Homer died in became a morbid collectors item.

Obsessive hoarding is different from collecting in several ways, most notably that the objects accumulated have little or no intrinsic value. Objects are accumulated with the sense they might be used or become useful someday to one's self or others, no matter how illogical that may be (i.e. Langley holding on to years of newspapers so that someday Homer could read them when he regained his sight). Objects are seen as providing a sense of security, or as a substitute for friends.

Those suffering from disposophobia are often isolated from others. This isolation often helps trigger the hoarding process, and it's perpetuated as the hoarding becomes increasingly obsessive, and living quarters become increasingly filled with possessions

Treatment for disposophobia often involves cognitive-behavioral therapy. Anti-depressant drugs used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder are generally not effective.

Here are some links:

The Wikipedia article on the Collyer brothers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyer_brothers

An interesting, detailed article on the Collyer Brothers and compulsive hoarding in general:

http://www.ocfoundation.org/hoarding/case-studies/langley-collyer-the-mystery-hoarder-of-harlem.php

An article by Franz Lidz, author of a book about the Collyer Brothers, "Ghosty Men........"

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/nyregion/26feat.html

The psychology of hoarding:

http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/psychology-of-hoarding/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

Some photos:

Langley Collier

Part of the Collyer house:

Another photo of the Collyer house:

http://neatorama.cachefly.net/images/2007-03/collyer-hoard.jpg

The chair that Homer Collyer died in:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_XBzdQo4oISk/ScvfrrEdF4I/AAAAAAAACNI/p381s8_7jc0/s400/collyer+death+chair.jpg

Axolotls - Mexico's endangered salamander

2009-08-29T14:35:00.000-07:00

I ran across an article the other day about axolotls, an exotic species of salamanders I didn't know much about. They are now nearly extinct in their native habitat, the Xochimilco Valley of central Mexico. Only about 700-1200 are estimated to survive. The reduction in population is due to a number of factors, including the continuing expansion of Mexico City, which has reduced both the available habitat and quality of water needed by axolotls. The introduction of exotic species, such as tilapia, which compete with axolotls for resources, and eat their larvae, also has been a factor.

They are interesting for many reasons, including their often exotic coloring, their ability to regenerate limbs, and perhaps most of all because they are neotenic, which means they ordinarily remain in a larval stage throughout their lives, and remain strictly aquatic.

Here are several varieties of axolotls.These photos are from:

http://www.axolotl.org/genetics.htm

The "wild type"

The "white axolotl"

This has black eyes and it not a true albino.

An albino axolotl:

A great axolotl site:

http://www.axolotl.org/index.htm

An article on the danger of axolotl extinction:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8220000/8220636.stm

Axolotls as pets:

http://exoticpets.about.com/cs/amphibians/a/axolotls.htm

Lots of axolotls here:

http://www.caudata.org/photoplog/index.php?c=118

and some videos:

Photographic hoaxes

2009-08-26T11:34:00.001-07:00

I'm going back to hoaxes briefly, before moving on to another topic.

Here are four interesting examples of photographic hoaxes. All are from the Museum of Hoaxes.

First, a political hoax from 1865. when Jefferson Davis was captured by Union forces, The true story is that when Davis stepped outside that morning he grabbed his wife's coat by mistake,. This was satirized by the Connecticut photographers, the Kellogg Brothers. The posted photos of Davis's head onto the body of a model wearing a hoop skirt.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/image/petticoat_politics/

The famous Surgeon's photo" of the Loch Ness monster from 1934, which turned out to be a model of a sea serpents head on top of a toy submarine. The story of this hoax is really interesting, and involves a noted British surgeon, Colonel Robert Wilson, and his father in law, a famous big game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell (what a great name!).

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/image/the_surgeons_photo/

A celebrity composite photo from 1989. TV Guide had a photo of Oprah on the cover, but it was really Oprah's head placed on a photo of Ann-Margaret's body, taken in 1979. This was done without the knowledge or permission of either woman.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/image/oprahs_head_transplant/

Sometimes photos are edited in a way that while it might improve their composition it distorts the meaning of the photo and misrepresents the scene photographed. A Diet Coke can was digitally removed, from this photo.. This is a picture of Ron Olshwanger, an amateur photographer, who was celebrating being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for spot-photography, in the offices of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. He was a teetotaler, so he was celebrating by drinking a Diet Coke.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/image/the_disappearing_coke_can/

Here are the before and after photos.

Chocolate wrappers of the world

2009-08-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd do a small post on chocolate wrappers. There are lots of beautiful, interesting, and strange wrappers from all over the world. Here are just a few.

The largest collection of wrappers is from the Chocolate Wrappers Museum.

http://www.chocolatewrappers.info/collection.htm

Here are four I really like:

From Brazil:

From Bosnia:

From Uzbekistan:

From Lithuania:

Here's a wrapper from Marcel's Swiss Chocolate Wrapper Collection:

http://www.zumbo.ch/choco/gallery.html

The Great Spaghetti Hoax

2009-08-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

Why not an April Fool's post in August?

I'm going to do a series of posts on hoaxes, and a good place to start is the great "spaghetti harvest" hoax from 1957.

Charles de Jaeger, a cameraman for the BBC news show Panorama, had a reputation as a practical joker. He had wanted to turn a joke one of his teachers had often made about his students being dumb enough to believe spaghetti grew on trees into a visual story. He and Panorama writer John Wheeler convinced Michael Peacock, Panaroma's editor, to approve the idea. The story was filmed in Switzerland where de Jaeger would be on assignment anyway, so costs were minimal.

There were problems preparing the spaghetti so that it would hang from the trees. The solution turned out to be keeping the uncooked spaghetti damp until it was time to hang it. The film showed the spaghetti being harvested and set out to dry.

The story appeared at the end of the April 1, 1957 broadcast. It was narrated, in a tone in keeping with the rest of the newscast, by Richard Dimbleby, the highly respected and trusted anchor for Panorama.

Many viewers got the joke, but some didn't. Others were angry that that An April Fools prank had been part of a serious newscast. The BBC issued a statement later that evening acknowledging the hoax. One probable reason that many fell for it was that at the time,spaghetti wasn't yet a popular food in Britain. Even Sir Ian Jacob, the director-general of the BBC had been fooled.

Here's the film.

An article on the spaghetti hoax, from the great Museum of Hoaxes website:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_swiss_spaghetti_harvest/

The BBC News "On This Day" article about the hoax. This also contains the film of the story.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/1/newsid_2819000/2819261.stm

The Museum of Hoaxes spaghetti hoax story:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_swiss_spaghetti_harvest/

A list of BBC hoaxes:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/af_database/display/category/bbc/

Ephemeral Films: Jim Morrison gets rejected at Florida State University; The Prelinger Archives

2009-08-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

The Prelinger Archives were established in 1983.They are a collection of "ephemeral films", including home movies and educational films. The Library of Congress acquired them in 2002. Over 2000 of the 60,000 films in the collection are available online through the Internet Archive. I'm going to be featuring these films from time to time . It's an amazing and very varied collection.

I'm going to start however,with an clip of a promotional film from Florida State University. An archivist looking at some of the films in their archives a couple years ago realized that the young man in the film who gets rejected from FSU was played by Jim Morrison, who was a student there at the time

Here is the clip with Morrison.

A link to the entire film:

http://www.floridamemory.com/photographiccollection/videofilm2/video.cfm?vid=22

From the Prelinger archives:

An amateur film of the 1941 Mardi Gras week activities - silent, and in color. It's all well worth watching; the Mardi Gras parade coverage starts at about 5:30 into the film.

A 1953 film on auto safety: "A Cool Hot Rod"

From 1928, a silent film: "Teeth: A Film Lesson in Health and Hygiene"

A 1946 etiquette film: "Arranging the Tea Table"

A 1962 animated film from Bell Labs- "A Missile Named Mac" - a Cold War film about guided missiles that never mentions nuclear weapons or war.

Folk taxonomies : naming nature

2009-08-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

This post will serve as a springboard for several others on taxonomies, neurobiology, and philosophy.

I worked as an indexer for several years, and am very interested in taxonomies and their construction. I indexed articles from a wide variety of publications including military, legal, scientific and financial publications.

While reading updates in the New York Times science section ., I ran across a really intriguing article by Carol Kaesuk Yoon on folk taxonomies and the the loss of interest in the classification of living organisms. Yoon was the only student in a class in biological taxonomy that she took in graduate school She laments this loss of interest in taxonomy, as the ordering and naming of life is essential to an understanding of the world.

Every culture has a "folk" taxonomy for classifying living organisms, and these all bear a certain structural similarity to each other. All population groups have categories corresponding to mammals birds, fish, "crawling things", and various categories of plants, so recognizing, classifying and naming living things is a basic human trait. For example, binomials are the common way of identifying species, i.e.. rainbow trout. Studies of individuals who can no longer recognize living organisms due to brain damage show that they are totally lost in an incomprehensible world.

Yoon claims that the lost of focus on classification has led to an indifference towards the natural world and the ignoring of major problems such as extinction She believes that by rediscovering and refocusing on the naming and ordering of the living world, starting with a focus on a particular organism one can regain their sense of connection to it.

Yoon is also interested in "umwelt" - the idea that each organism - human and non-human - has its own model of the world.More about that in another post.

Yoon's article in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science/11naming.html?pagewanted=1

Comments on Yoon's book "Naming Nature"

http://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm?ezine_preview_number=4055

"Cypress Grove Blues" : Skip, Geeshie, John, Pink and Floyd

2009-08-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

The URL for this blog comes from "Cypress Grove Blues", one of the best songs from the great delta blues singer Skip James. James recorded this in the early 1930's. His records from this period are among the rarest of all records; only a handful survive of each. James's career was revived in the 1960's as part of the the great rediscovery of several significant blues performers from this era. He recorded several LP's at this time, but to me, while they are well worth hearing, they lack the power and intensity of James's earlier work.

Here is "Cypress Grove Blues"

Geeshie Wiley's "Last Kind Words" is one of my favorite blues records. Haunting, somber, and intense, it was recorded in 1930, and is also extremely rare. Wiley and James recorded for the legendary Paramount record label, owned by a furniture manufacturer in Grafton, Wisconsin. There will be a post on the Paramount label at some point.

"Mississippi" John Hurt was another great blues musician of the 1920's. His records, while still very difficult to find, are not quite as rare as the Skip James or Geeshie Wiley recordings from this period. They have a much softer, gentler sound. Hurt was also rediscovered in the 1960;'s. Here is his variation of "John Henry", called "Spike Driver Blues".

James, Wiley,and Hurt were all from the Mississippi Delta, but country blues recordings were made in hte1920's and 1930's throughout the South. The musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council were associated with the Piedmont style of the blues. Syd Barrett took the name "Pink Floyd" from Anderson and Council.

Pink Anderson was born in Lauren, South Carolina in 1900. He spent much of his life. touring with medicine shows. . Although he also recorded in the early 1960's, His most interesting performances are the duets he recorded with Simmie Dooley in 1928.

Here is CC & O Blues.

Floyd Council was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1937. He was featured on several recordings, and also backed up Blind Boy Fuller.

Here is "Runaway Man Blues" by Floyd "Dipper Boy" Council, , from 1937.

Wikipedia articles on Pink Anderson and Floyd Council:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Anderson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Council

The next post will be on folk taxonomy.

Mammoths, steppe bison, and very frozen food

2009-08-17T12:38:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking, per the post on bog cheese, if the stories about explorers and scientists eating mammoths and other prehistoric animals that were "flash-frozen " are true.

As is often the case , Cecil Adams's great website, The Straight Dope, is the best source for unusual information. According to Adams, there is credible evidence that a few "morsels" of mammoth and and steppe bison have been sampled. Most prehistoric carcasses that have been discovered are rotted, to a degree I'm not sure I want to know about in detail. Many of the stories about eating frozen prehistoric mammals are likely apocryphal.

Dale Guthrie wrote a book on the discovery of Blue Babe a 36,000 pound steppe bison, who appeared blue in part, due to the reaction of chemicals on his skin. His hindquarters were gone; most likely he was eaten by lions. Guthrie mentions that flesh from Babe's neck was put into a stew. He described it as "well-aged but a little tough, ..." . The writer James Oliver Curwood described eating a frozen mastodon in 1912.

The story of Big Babe

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717275.400-death-on-the-steppe-the-case-of-the-frozen-bison.html?full=true

A photo of Big Babe:

http://books.google.com/books?id=3ppgxkKtWeMC&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=big+babe+steppe+bison+guthrie&source=bl&ots=MrlFOQKZ3n&sig=_bjGoZfMACrrktGz0U5Bq5R8m6A&hl=en&ei=TrOJSuXaLYyMMvaVhOYE&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=big%20babe%20steppe%20bison%20guthrie&f=false

www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2725/prehistoric-its-whats-for-dinner

Again, sorry for the long URL's here.

Parts of Guthrie's book "Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe" are here:

An interesting article on steppe bison:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.beringia.com/research/images/02bison2.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.beringia.com/research/bison.html&usg=__Q3Hh84W61GfgPU0vtselh3mZOCE=&h=185&w=225&sz=11&hl=en&start=1&sig2=R3noshrVHULOR1lM0au3uw&um=1&tbnid=wJB9Ve7wUVMDZM:&tbnh=89&tbnw=108&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dblue%2Bbabe%2Bfrozen%2Bbison%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=3qKJSrS1A5OCNqS20fIO

Interesting but technical article on prehistoric arctic climate by Guthrie, with a great title.

Origin and causes of the mammoth steppe: a story of cloud cover, woolly mammal tooth pits, buckles, and inside-out Beringia

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/seminars/pdfs/Guthrie_2001.pdf

Three year old Kaleb Kidd, holding a mammoth tooth he found in La Crosse, Wisconsin

http://www.lacrossetribune.com/articles/2007/11/06/news/00lead.txt

What did the songs of the Bible originally sound like?

2009-08-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

One more post an ancient music, then on to something else. I've often wondered what the music of Biblical times sounded like. What did the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and other parts of the Bible sound like sound like when they were first sung?

At my Bar Mitzvah, I chanted my Torah and Haftorah portions as everyone does. The sounds of the notes though come from one of a series of oral traditions, and their relationship with the actual way these were originally sung is unclear.

Suzanne Haik-Vantoura, a French musician, began studying the cantillation marks, which appear both above and below the Hebrew text of the Masoretic Bible. This Bible was compiled over several centuries by scholars, and completed in the eleventh century. She concluded that the eight cantillation marks appearing below the Hebrew text (which are always present) represented a series of hand gestures that were used to indicate performance of a musical value. This is known as chironomy, and was used throughout the ancient world particularly in Egypt. Her work has had a mixed scholarly reception

Here's an overview of Haik-Vantoura's work, from NPR's "Morning Edition" (1986)

Psalm 23 from Haik-Vantoura's "Music of the Bible Revealed" (1982)

Many "Music of the Bible Revealed" clips are available here.

http://www.youtube.com/user/teamim

Psalm 29 in the Masoretic text:

http://www.rakkav.com/biblemusic/pages/intro.htm

An article on chironomy in the ancient world:

\http://www.rakkav.com/biblemusic/pages/chironomy.htm

Biblical style harps and lyres have been created by Harrari Harps.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/126936

An ancient melody played on an ancient lyre.

Don't step on my sandals of sky-blue leather

2009-08-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

Following the last post I thought I would do a post on the translation of contemporary music into ancient languages.

I stumbled onto what looks like something I would love to hear, but i can't find any samples online. It looks so great though, that I wanted to do a post about it anyway. - Dr. Jukka Ammondt, a literature professor at Jyvaskila University in Finland, who had previously recorded several Cd's of Elvis songs in Latin, decided to collaborate with Simo Parpula,, a professor of Assyriology at the University of Helsinki. Ammondt recorded a CD of three songs sung in Sumerian including "Blue Suede Shoes", translated by Parpula. It comes as close to the 1950's meet the 1950's B.C as is possible. Ammondt once met Carl Perkins, who wrote and recorded the original version of "Blue Suede Shoes".

Parpula was interviewed by Reuters in 1999, when the collaboration was in progress, He avoided the temptation to incorporate modern words and phrases into the translations. The rhythm and meter of English and Sumerian are similar enough so translating them wasn't a problem. "Blue Suede Shoes" translated as "E-sír kusv-za-gìn-g-á"."on my sandals of sky-blue leather do not step". He thinks that Elvis's music would have fit in well with the cult associated with the Goddess Inanna

Here's the interview with Simo Parpula.

http://www.helsinki.fi/science/saa/sumercd.html

Some excerpts of Elvis songs sung in Latin.

http://www.artistdirect.com/artist/songs/doctor-ammondt/537986

Dr. Armont's Cd's seem to only be available from his website.

http://www.drammondt.com/english/index.php

"Ur's answer to Elvis.

http://www.archaeology.org/0111/reviews/elvis.html

Another interesting article:

http://www.atrium-media.com/rogueclassicism/Posts/00006629.html

Here's Carl Perkins singing "Blue Suede Shoes"

"Cattus Petasatus" Dr. Seuss goes Latin

2009-08-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

I started out writing a post on Pig Latin, which I probably will still do, but this post is about translations of modern children's literature into Latin.

The earliest example that I know of is the 1960 translation of "Winnie the Pooh" into Latin by Alexander Lenard. "The House at Pooh Corner" was translated into Latin in 1980 by Brian Staples. I used to have a recording of excerpts from "Winnie Ille Pooh", but it's long gone. "Winnie Ille Pooh" is a lot of fun even if you don't know Latin (I don't) when you follow along with the English version.

Here's an article in the satirical linguistic journal Specgram that quotes from Winnie Ille Pooh

http://specgram.com/CXLVIII.4/04.buendia.pooh.html

Maybe someone will turn "Winnie The Pooh" into a lipogram. "Winni A Pooh". Ursus would be used for bear, and for a touch of Latin. It might be hard to come up with a name for Eeyore though.

For Dr. Seuss there's the wonderful "Cattus Petasatus".

http://www.amazon.com/Cattus-Petasatus-Cat-Hat-Latin/dp/086516472X#reader

"Green Eggs and Ham"has also been translated into Latin.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/989557/posts

And of course there is Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis:

http://www.amazon.com/Harrius-Potter-Philosophi-Lapis-Philosophers/dp/1582348251#reader

Monkeys. language, and learning

2009-08-10T14:44:00.000-07:00

I've always been interested in studies that evaluate the ability of non-human primates to learn the basics of language. I'll write about the use of sign language by Koko the Gorilla at some point, but for now I'm going to focus on a study which demonstrated that cotton-top tamarind monkeys can learn the basic affixation rule (the proper use of suffixes and prefixes).

It's important to clearly state what the researchers believe that this study. has shown. It's doesn't show that the monkeys have linguistic capabilities such as understanding the rules of grammar, but that they possess an ability to understand patterns of temporal ordering.

The monkeys in the study were familiarized with a syllable that, depending on the group, was consistently used as a suffix or a prefix. In this study the syllable"shoy"was used as the affix syllable during the familiarization stage, and a group of two letter stem syllables such as "be" " ba" and "pu"were also used. there. For example,words for the prefix group would be shoy-be and shoy-ba, and be-shoy and ba-shoy for the suffix group. There was no formal training process, nor were rewards given

During the test phase of the study one syllable words such as wasp and swan were used instead of the nonsense syllables. When the temporal order of the words was switched (i.e. be-shoy instead of shoy-be) the monkeys acted surprised, based on a change in head orientation. The researchers concluded that the monkeys possessed a psychological mechanism for learning and memory that allowed them to determine affixation patterns,but couldn't' link them to syntax, semantics, and linguistic elements as humans can.

The results on this study relate to another important issue to me: the misreporting and and exaggerations that often happen when the press reports on advances in science. An excellent post on the "Motivated Grammar" blog summarizes the results of this study, then discusses a BBC article on it entitled "Monkeys recognize 'bad grammar". That's not what they are doing though - they are demonstrating an ability to learn temporal ordering patterns.

The article also contains a link to the draft of the original research paper.

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/quotes-and-grammar-monkeys-at-the-bbc/

Here's the abstract of the article:

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/07/08/rsbl.2009.0445.abstract?maxtoshow=&HITS=1&hits=1&RESULTFORMAT=&andorexacttitle=and&andorexacttitleabs=and&fulltext=%2522evolution+of+language%2522&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1&usestrictdates=yes&resourcetype=HWCIT&ct

The BBC article on the study:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8139322.stm

Here's another interesting article:

http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_dawn/2009/07/shboy-shboy.html

Ray Dennis Steckler

2009-08-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

My favorite cult/"incredibly strange" film director is Ray Dennis Steckler, who passed away this past January. Steckler's best work is from the 1960's and includes films such as "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies", (hereafter referred to as "Creatures"), "The Thrill Killers", 'Wild Guitar" and "Rat Pfink A Boo Boo". He also directed videos for Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin , Jimi Hendrix, and others

Steckler's best films are fun, unique, and just plain crazy. He was wildly innovative, given the small budgets he had to work with. "Creatures" was advertised as as "the world's first monster musical". It became a musical not because that's what Steckler had in mind when he started the film, but because it fit well the the available costumes. The dancing is really uncoordinated because the numbers weren't even rehearsed. Steckler also saved money by using family members and friends as stars of his films. Steckler ( often under the name of Cash Flagg) and his ex-wife, Carolyn Brandt, starred in many of the films. I remember reading that there was a scene in "The Choopers"where his kids were scared by a monster.The scene is only there because he didn't have a baby sitter that day so he worked them into the film.

"Rat Pfink a Boo Boo" is my favorite Steckler film. It's,fun,bizarre and unique. It features some of the great classic cheapness of his films. The title was supposed to be Rat Pfink and Boo Boo, but he couldn't afford the $30 it cost to have the title changed in the print. The movie completely changes course in the middle as well. What starts out as a thriller about a kidnapping becomes a comedy featuring "Rat Pfink" and "Boo Boo"dressed in cheap, weird, Batman and Robin type costumes. Steckler admitted that he thought the thriller part of the movie was pretty boring, so he finished it by changing it to a Batman and Robin parody. The obscure rockabilly singer Ron Haydock, who also appears in "The Thrill Killers" and other Steckler films, plays Rat Pfink, aka Lonnie Lord. This film also contains Steckler's most outrageous low-budget stunt - Rat Phink and Boo Boo appear at the back of a parade at the beginning of the film. The parade however has nothing to do with the film . Steckler just had Rat Phink and Boo Boo in full costume, stand at the back of the parade. One wonders what the organizers of the parade thought.

Although Steckler himself didn't achieve any commercial success, two who worked with him did. Lazlo Kovacs and and Vilmos Zsigmond. Both had fled Hungary after the 1956 uprising, which they had filmed extensively . They worked together on a number of "B" films, including "Creatures", and moved on to more mainstream films. Both worked on "Easy Rider" and numerous major films . Zsigmond won an Academy Award for "Best Cinematographer" for his work on " Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Some clips from Steckler films:

The trailer for Wild Guitar, starring Arch Hall, Jr, who made six low-budget films in the 1960's and will be the subject of a future post.

The trailer from "Creatures"

Riding the Pfinkmobile

The song "You are A Rat Pfink"

The "Incredibly Strange Film Show" Steckler episode (1988)

Filmography

http://raydennissteckler.blogspot.com/

Michelangelo, St. Anthony, and rye mold

2009-08-06T15:14:00.001-07:00

I corrected the Wampus cat post by taking out a stray phrase I forgot to edit out.

Recently , the Kimbell Museum in Dallas acquired a painting , "The Torment of St. Anthony " , which may have been painted by Michelangelo at the age of 12 or 13, when he was a student of Domenico Ghirlandiao's studio in 1477 and 1478.Although the painting is clearly from Ghirlandiao's studio, there is a great deal of scholarly dispute as to whether or not the painting is Michelangelo's. it's based on a lithograph by Martin Schongauer. The painting is not an exact copy of the lithograph, it's larger, and has added features, such as fish scales.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/arts/design/13pain.html

The Schongauer lithograph

The painting is reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch. Here's Bosch's St. Anthony triptych. (Sorry for the really long URL here).

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/70/BoschPaintingTheTemptationOfStAnthony.jpg/300px-BoschPaintingTheTemptationOfStAnthony.jpg&imgrefurl=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony_(Bosch_painting)&usg=__3RZYAJT6-7PSp1QXg9SrSSPwN7E=&h=428&w=300&sz=51&hl=en&start=6&sig2=Z_TBmKjCXq2d23dwOy0I1g&um=1&tbnid=TnTXz9H2E_NavM:&tbnh=126&tbnw=88&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpaintings%2Bst%2Banthony%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=ZUp7Sq_1Hc-3lAfKrJ3iAQ

St. Anthony was a third century Christian ascetic and monastic who spent his adult life in the Egyptian desert, largely in solitude. His time there included living in a tomb and twenty years living in solitude in a small cell in a fort. Food was slipped into the cell through a small crevice. No one was allowed to actually enter the cell where he lived. He had visions of being attacked by wild animals and scorpions, but overcame them. He is credited with a number of miraculous healings of those suffering from ergotism, which became known as St. Anthony's Fire. This is represented in the Bosch triptych shown above. The symptoms included hallucinations , severe pain and gangrene. Amputation was usually required.The disease was caused by ergot, a fungus found in moldy rye flour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St._Anthony

Here's a 1946 painting of Salvador Dali's "Temptation of St. Anthony".

http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/Salvador_Dali/The-Temptation-of-Saint-Anthony

Historic voices

2009-08-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

Here are a few links to historic recordings of famous voices. .The first clip is from 1889, the others are from 1890, except for the Tolstoy clip, which is from 1907.

Robert Browning - This is barely audible, but there are subtitles.

Martin Lanfried - He plays the same trumpet he played to lead the Charge of the Light Brigade, during the Crimean War in 1854.

Edwin Booth - Shakespearean actor and brother of John Wilkes Booth, The sound quality, is pretty poor, but better then the one that's on the Internet Archive, which has the text of the soliloquy Booth is reciting.

http://www.archive.org/details/OthelloByEdwinBooth1890

Leo Tolstoy - from the book "Wise Thoughts for Every Day".

This is my favorite of these clips. Julius Block recorded several composers and musicians, including Tchaikovsky.

The story of the Block recordings is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/arts/music/26waki.html?_r=2

There are many other early recordings at

http://www.youtube.com/user/transformingArt

Cryptozoology, wampus cats, and rockabilly

2009-08-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

Last night while surfing around, I ran across an article on acid spitting Mongolian death worms, a cryptozoological creature I was totally unfamiliar with. I posted the link to Twitter, and this started me thinking about music,as most things do. Here's the link again:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25874136-5013016,00.html

I remember running across several songs that mentioned "wampus cats". I had no idea what a wampus cat was, but I discovered that it derived from an old Cherokee legend. In the Cherokee legend, a woman disguises herself by wearing the skin of a mountain lion to spy on a hunting party. The medicine men punish her by changing her into a half cat/ half woman forever. There are several high schools in the South whose sports teams are known as the Wampus Cats

There were some pretty good records made by Kitty Gray and her Wampus Cats, who featured the great slide guitar player Oscar Woods, made in the late 1930's. The group featured risque blues songs such as "I Can't Dance, I've Got Ants in My Pants".There may be songs by them with lyrics about wampus cats, but not in any of their songs I've heard.

There are rockabilly songs from the 1950's by Howard Chandler and Johnny Burnette called "Wampus Cat" These songs, rather then referring to wampus cats in the way they are referred to in legend, refers to males who are tough ,on the prowl and not to be messed with. The Chandler song has lyrics such as "I'm a wampus cat and I'm going to hunt tonight". The Burnette song starts with "A lonely wampus cat came to town, took my woman tore my castle down" He vows to find his baby no matter where she is. Wampus cats in rockabilly are more like the prowling tomcat discussed below.

Here's Howard Chandler's "Wampus Cat" - on the Wampus label no less.

An extremely cryptic phrase found in a number of songs is "dead cat on the line", which may have derived from "dead catfish on the line" This lyric shows up primarily in blues and gospel songs. Suggested meanings for the phrase include, 1) a dead fish on a fishing line indicated negligence 2) a dead cat on a power line indicates something is wrong, that can't be covered up - often infidelity. The unfaithful "tomcat" is electrocuted, and it's obvious the unfaithful woman has been with him and 3) as a symbol of sin - needing to clear the dead cat off your line so your call to God can be heard (as in the J.W. Gates sermon).

There are "dead cat on the line" recordings by the preachers Elder Beck and J.W. Gates , and the blues singers Tampa Red and Marion Williams.

Here's the Marion Williams song with the haunting ,mysterious lyric "If a child don't favor his father some day, it's a dead cat on the line".

The definition of "dead cat on a line" from the "Dictionary of American Regional English:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vAr2T4Bh7nkC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=dare+dead+cat+line&source=bl&ots=yO8oduT5vA&sig=JPcnJ-xH8NBCvTn4YT3beDvhRWE&hl=en&ei=JY94SvjrHZHQtgO8xe3UBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#v=onepage&q=dare%20dead%20cat%20line&f=false

Bog butter and cheese

2009-08-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

I remember reading a few years ago about a 1400 year old piece of cheese being found in Ireland, and wondered if anyone had actually tasted it.. I started researching and learned a little bit about old cheese, but i learned far more about "Bog Butter" , which was made and stored in Scotland,and Ireland from about 2000 years ago until the eighteenth century.

Peat bogs, due to their acidity, cold temperatures,and anaerobic conditions,are excellent for preserving, not only butter and cheese, but also human remains. i will have a post on "bog people" at some point,

It turned out that the cheese may actually have been butter; no one is really sure. Helen Lucy Burke tasted the cheese at the Roscrea Heritage Center, located in an old castle in Tipperary, which stores old cheeses. She described it as cheesy, having an unpleasant but not revolting taste, granular, and like a dried out Wensleydale cheese. I've never had a Wensleydale cheese, but they are described as crumbly, and only good when moist. The aftertaste was described as a "sour cloying,sensation".

Bog butter is waxy,hard, and yellow-white. It's described as rancid tasting - not very surprising.
Approximate dates of burial are determined by the container the butter is buried in. Analysis of the 'butter has shown that while some"butters' are made from dairy products, others are made from animal fats.

There are several theories as to why the butter was buried. Theories include general food preservation, preservation as a means of enhancing flavor, and protecting valued food supplies from invaders. Much of the butter was flavored with garlic, and garlic butter was a special food, usually eaten during Lent.

Here are some students at the Barnderg National School in Ireland with a keg of 300 year old butter.

http://www.ipcc.ie/infobogbutter.html

The article on the cheese tasting is at the bottom of the page.

Found audio

2009-08-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

There are endless records that I'm looking for, but it was always exciting, when walking into a record store, thrift store, or record show, to know that there was a pretty good chance I'd find something great that I never knew existed.

I've always loved homemade recordings. Whether recorded in a drugstore, recording booth, professional studio or at home , these recordings provide an interesting glimpse into others lives, and include everything from families talking and singing,to audio letters, many of which were made by soldiers. They tend to be in poor condition, but are usually worth hearing in spite of that. Some are boring, but many are amusing and touching. There are a few that are extremely sad. The advent of the audio cassette in the 1960's made home recording much easier, and tapes of home recordings sometimes show up in thrift stores.

Some the the most interesting ones I have found are a really decent version of the Hank Penny/ Wynonie Harris song"Bloodshot Eyes', the theme song from a a local 1950's TV show, and a 1948 recording of the reunion of a platoon of World War II veterans talking and singing. I've often wondered how these recordings end up in thrift stores, particularly the ones that are very personal.

Here are a few examples.

"The Audio Kitchen", hosted on WFMU by"the Professor", ran for several years. Many of the episodes are archived online. It featured various types of found audio. Some of my favorites were the long tapes that were aired in segments over several episodes. One particularly charming one was the "Grandma Jones" tape, which consisted of a series of letters written to her grandson. One of the episodes discusses the grandsons upcoming visit to see her in Florida. It begins at 7:15 in the 9/10/03 show, and runs until 17:10. All the episodes of 'The Audio Kitchen" are worth checking out.

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/AK

The 365 Days Project, which I will write more about, in future posts. archived this homemade recording of "Home Sweet Home" by Henry and Mom. It's really strange and dreary, but ends with laughter and warmth.

http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/2003/137.shtml

Ross Campbell's 21st birthday party

http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/2003/283.shtmlSw

Sweet Thunder is another good site for found audio. Here's are two brief answering machine recordings.

http://www.sweetthunder.org/tapes/weekonehundredandeight.html

http://www.sweetthunder.org/tapes/weekonehundredandtwelve.html

One of the saddest tapes I've ever heard was played on "The Audio Kitchen". I'm revising this a bit, as I located the recording I was talking about, and it's a bit different - and even more interesting - then I thought it was. Most of the tape consists of messages from politicians. business associates, etc. to "John" including one deal that seems really sleazy. There are also messages about a scheduled court appearance. The tone completely changes and it's clear, from listening to John's sons their dad had a suffered a major medical event, and it in intensive care, although it's unclear exactly what happened.

The tape is the "Wealthy John"segment at the end.

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/7928

Vintage typewriters, Mark Twain, and the Paige Typesetter

2009-07-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

The history of typewriters is really interesting. Some early typewriters looked very strange. The "Sholes & Glidden Type Writer" was first marketed in 1873. Only 5 000 were sold over the next five years. It did use the QWERTY keyboard, but only typed capital letters. It took a while for the QWERTY keyboard to become standardized. In 1878, it was replaced by a quieter model that type both lower case and capital letters., It took a while but it sold much better then the original model.

The full story of the early Remington typewriters can be found here.

http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/firsttw.html

Mark Twain was a very early user of the typewriter, and typed this letter to William Dean Howells on December 9, 1874.

You needn't answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing. I notice I miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters & punctuation marks. I am simply using you for a target to bang at. Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it just right.

Twain's 1883 novel, "Life on the Mississippi" ,was the first typewritten novel, although Twain didn't type it himself

www.typewritercollector.com is a great site for information about old typewriters, with lots of photos.

Here are photos of two early typewriters from the site.

The Edison

The Crandall

Twain invested heavily in ,and eventually bought the rights to the Paige typesetter., It looked great, and had over 18,000 working parts. However some of the parts didn't work so well, and it lost out to the more efficient Linotype machine.The failure of the Paige typesetter contributed heavily to Twain's bankruptcy.

http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/yankee/cymach6.html

First Disney post - Disneyland opens

2009-07-28T17:44:00.000-07:00

As often happens, I was looking up information for a potential post, and was sidetracked in an interesting way.

Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955 to a specially invited group of guests, and to the public a day later. The special opening was plagued by multiple problems, including heels sinking into melted asphalt due to the excessive heat, food shortages, water fountains with no water, drink stands that had run out of drinks, broken rides, etc.

One of the most interesting things about opening day was how scarce Mickey and Minnie Mouse were..Later to be come the iconic Disney figures, they appear in the coverage only briefly in the parade, and for three minutes towards the end of the event.

Here are a very different looking Minnie and Mickey Mouse.

The highlights of opening day were broadcast on an ABC special. I'm not sure how many of you will want to watch it due to it's length (It's well over an hour long) it drags in places, but overall it's really worth watching. It's filled with bloopers, as live coverage from multiple vantage points was fairly primitive at that time. Numerous celebrities appear, including Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr, and Gale Storm .There are three hosts for the show: Bob Cummings, Art Linkletter and.... "Ronnie" Reagan.

You can link to the rest of the segments from here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf2TMwtCUr4&NR=1

One-syllable word versions of "Pilgrim's Progess" and Robinson Crusoe"

2009-07-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.lib.washington.edu/speciaLcoll/collections/books/children.html

John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress", first published in 1678, is considered the greatest Christian allegory in English, and one of the great works of literature. It's long .complex, and difficult to read. In order to make Pilgrim's Progress accessible to children, Lucy Aikin, using the name Mary Godolphin, created an "in words of one syllable" version of Pilgrims Progress in 1894. She also created "one syllable word" versions of other works,including " Robinson Crusoe". Names in these works are kept "as is" rather then recreated as one syllable words..

I can't find any formal term describing works written with one syllable , though of course they remind me of lipograms. Lipograms are poems,paragraphs, or longer works written without using a certain letter of letters of the alphabet, An earlier post of mine discussed Gadsby, a 50,000 word novel written without using the letter E.

Here's the one-syllable Pilgrim's Progress".

http://www.freebookstoread.com/pilos10_1.htm

and "Robinson Crusoe"

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6936

Acoustic recording and Edison's 125 foot recording horn

2009-07-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

From the dawn of the recording era in 1877 until the development of electrical recording by Western Electric in 1925, recordings were made through the use of a horn, which connected to a diaphragm. The vibrations caused a stylus to etch a pattern in wax. Recordings were made on both cylinders and flat disks. The singers and musicians gathered close to the horn. Sound reproduction was entirely mechanical; no electricity was used in the recording or playback process. Sound quality did improve over time, but it never reached the quality of electrical recording.

Here's a photo of an orchestra session conducted by the composer Edward Elgar in 1914.

http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/history/p20_4_1.html

Some of the greatest records of all time were made during this period, including performances by singers such as Caruso, whose voice recorded particularly well using the acoustical recording process, Other great recordings were made in spite of the limitations. King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band featured a young Louis Armstrong on cornet. Armstrong's playing was so powerful that he had to stand at the back of the group, farthest away from the recording horn, in order not to drown out the playing of the other musicians

Here is "Dippermouth Blues" from 1923.

In 1919, Edison decided to try to improve the process of acoustical recording so that a full orchestra could be accurately recorded. He thought that the way to do this was by constructing very long recording horns in order to "untangle" the mix of sounds from the recording process. The first attempts, using a 40 foot horn, didn't work out, so Edison tried again, this time building a 125 foot horn in 1923. The piano recorded well ,but not orchestras as a whole, so the project was abandoned in 1925 because it was too expensive, and not very successful. The need for a device like the horn was also superseded by the invention of electrical recording that year. The horn ended up being donated in 1942 to a World War II scrap metal drive by the Governor of New Jersey.

In 2005, Jerry Fabris, host of WFMU's show "Thomas Edison's Attic", devoted a show to Edison's experiments with long horns, It includes some of the experimental recordings and parts of talks given in 1973 and 1975 by one of the engineers who had worked on the the project and by Edison's son Theodore.

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/15231

Some more experimental recordings made with the 125 foot horn.

http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/experimental-recordings.htm

Making Darfur a Topic on Twitter

2009-07-25T12:51:00.000-07:00

I'm encouraging everyone who reads this blog to check out Mary's blog at:

http://hailmary-fullofgrace.blogspot.com/2009/07/make-darfur-topic.html

She's long been active in the effort to make everyone aware of the genocide in Darfur, and the insufficient effort to stop it. She is organizing a campaign re this by making it a topic on Twitter., starting this Wednesday.

Martha Washington and Educational Currency

2009-07-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

This will probably be my last post until Sunday, since I'm working on an article I need to finish.

When I was growing up I collected coins. I bought a few, but most of my collection consisted of coins I found in change, or got from family members. Every time I saw my uncle I would always ask him if I could "check his coins". It became a running joke with us, and I always asked him that long after I stopped collecting.

I discovered a few years ago the world of U.S. paper money. I've never collected this myself, since most of the really desirable currency is really expensive, but I've seen a couple collections of it. It's filled with wonderful engraving, particularly the paper money of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Those of us in the United States see $1 bills with George Washington's picture every day, but what amazed me was discovering an 1886 $1 bill with Martha Washington's picture on it.

The 1896 series of "Educational Currency" is considered to be the height of U.S.money design. The bills were issued in $1, $2 and $5 denominations. Here are the fronts of the $1 and $2 bills. For the $5 bill, and the backs of all three bills, check the Wikipedia article, which provides a good description and discussion of the meaning of the bills.. George and Martha both appear on the backs of all three bills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_Series

This is a good summary of the history of educational currency.

http://www.harrybassfoundation.org/curintro.asp

Song -Poems

2009-07-21T11:43:00.000-07:00

"Song poems" have been a favorite musical genre of mine, since I discovered them years ago on a collection called "Beat of the Traps: MSR Madness Volume 1"

Song poem recordings are roughly analogous to the vanity publishing industry, where anything you write, and are willing to pay to have published, will be accepted by the publishing company. Owners of song-poem labels would place ads in the back of comic books, tabloids etc. to send in your poems. Some potential customers would send in music as well, though usually they would just send lyrics. No matter how poor, strange or unmarketable the lyrics were, the customer would get a letter saying that that their submission was excellent and potentially a hit. For a fee the company would press up a small quantity of records, and promise to promote them,although records were never properly promoted since the likelihood of the record actually becoming a hit was near zero. None of the vast number of song-poems out there has ever become a hit.

Once the deal is made, the music is quickly composed,arranged and recorded. The musicians on the recordings are often top-notch studio musicians, since they are recording music they haven't really rehearsed or in some cases have never seen before. The vocalist often hasn't even read the lyrics until he or she is singing them. Some fit broadly into another genre, such as the disco song poem "Jimmy Carter Says Yes", but others seem to sound like nothing except for other song poems. Most song poem recordings have insipid and banal lyrics and aren't worth hearing, but there are a number I love either because they have totally bizarre lyrics, ideas, and subject matter in combination with the hard to describe music.

PBS made a pretty good documentary on song poems called "Off the Charts" The film includes an interview with Gene Marshall ,who is featured on countless song poem records. Marshall worked with a number of successful musicians, including Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. A song poem recording session is included.in the film. The highlights of the film are the interviews with several writers of song poems. None of the people l interviewed seem overly concerned that their records didn't sell; they are happy just have their songs recorded, The movie is touching; sad and funny in places. It's a tribute to the human spirit, and well worth watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOqn-I5u1MY

Here are several song poem recordings:

A Gene Marshall recoding with indescribable lyrics/ "We are the men counting sheep... we're not Little Bo Peep..."

Gene Marshall - "Jimmy Carter Says Yes"

Rodd Keith was considered the best song poem performer. He was extremely talented, and eccentric, and had major substance abuse issues. he either fell or jumped from an overpass onto the Hollywood Freeway in 1974. Rodd's son, Ellery Eskelin, is featured in "Off the Charts" and wrote this article about his dad.

http://home.earthlink.net/~eskelin/Rodd.html

Rodd Keith - Space

Rodd Keith - "Like the Lord Said"

One of the few song-poem records collectible for it's musical value, it's a major "Northern Soul" collectible

WFMU's Beware of the Blog has posted many the song poems that used to be on the American

Song-Poem Music Archive

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2009/02/songpoem-archived-music-volume-1.html

A good overview of song poems from the American Song-Poem Archives

http://www.songpoemmusic.com/what_is.htm

Moon Landing Anniversary

2009-07-20T16:18:00.000-07:00

Since today is the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing, I thought I would do a small tribute.

The parents of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, appeared on "I've Got A Secret" on September 17, 1962, the day their son became an astronaut,. Interestingly, Neil's mom was asked how she would feel if her son became the first man on the moon, a full seven years before he turned out to be.

The Straight Dope takes a look at whether or nor Armstrong muffed his first words on the moon.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/820/did-astronaut-neil-armstrong-muff-his-historic-one-small-step-line

Bart Sibrel,, who believed that the moon landings were a hoax, aggressively confronted Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, in a hotel. Aldrin, 74 at the time, responded by punching Sibrel in the face. No charges were ever filed.

Bargain barn

2009-07-19T20:21:00.000-07:00

I was in a pretty down mood earlier, but this really cheered me up. WFMU's "Beware of the Blog" just posted this clip from a public access station in Shawnee, Oklahoma from the mid 90's. The host does a a great job of pitching merchandise ranging from the incredibly shoddy to the totally broken.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/

Weird patents

2009-07-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

I've always liked odd things in general, and strange and unusual inventions in particular.

Here are a few favorites.

"Device for Waking Persons from Sleep"

http://www.lightlink.com/bbm/walarm.html

"Gas Powered Pogo Stick"

http://www.lightlink.com/bbm/wpogo.html

A novel use of horsepower
http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=GB&NR=1405575&KC=&locale=en_ep&FT=E

One of the great patent drawings: "Voice Communication With a Local Entity"

http://www.google.com/patents?id=cNp6AAAAEBAJ&printsec=drawing&zoom=4

A new application for a plant patent.

Patent title : Dianthus plant named 'WATERLOO SUNSET'

I presume the name for the plant comes from the song,since the same breeder patented a plant named "Ruby's Tuesday".

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090077698

Thirty five years after Watergate

2009-07-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

August 9th will be the thirty-fifth anniversary of the resignation of Richard Nixon and the culmination of the Watergate scandal. It was a truly transformative event in American history, marking perhaps the most cynical time in twentieth century America.

The break-in at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington occurred on June 17, 1972. Discovered by a security guard, it quickly became apparent that Nixon campaign officials and other members of the administration were involved, and that there had been a pattern of illegal activity engaged in by the Nixon administration.

It was unclear how much the president himself was involved, John Dean, the White House attorney, testified to the Senate Watergate Committee that Nixon was personally involved. On June 13, 1973, Alexander Butterfield, who had been Nixon's appointments secretary, revealed to the Watergate committee that Nixon recorded all his White House phone calls.This resulted in a long legal struggle and the decision by the Supreme Court that Nixon needed to turn over all of the subpoenaed tapes. The content of these tapes, the passing of three articles of impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee, and political pressure from both Democrats and Republicans led to Nixon's resignation.

Here's a concise Watergate timeline.

http://watergate.info/chronology/brief.shtml

This is Nixon''s "I am not a crook statement". This was made three weeks after the "Saturday Night Massacre" where Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, was fired. This was followed by the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. ( sorry for the poor quality)

The "smoking gun" tape was the clearest indication that Nixon had conspired to obstruct justice. From June 13. 1972, this is the tape with the "18 1/2 minute gap". Rosemary Woods, Nixon's secretary, claimed she had accidentally erased this segment. The tape is well worth hearing, in spite of its poor quality. The link also includes a transcript of the conversation. Mark Felt, who is mentioned as "ambitious" here turned out to have been "Deep Throat", the mysterious source for Woodward and Bernstein in theior investigative workon Watergate for the Washington Post.

http://watergate.info/tapes/72-06-23_smoking-gun.shtml

Part of Nixon's resignation speech:

A complete archive of all the released Nixon tapes.

http://nixontapes.org/

The Enchanted Highway

2009-07-17T14:20:00.001-07:00

I love the "Enchanted Highway ".Gary Greff , a teacher and principal, began building a series of giant roadside metal sculptures along a 32 mile stretch of highway north of his hometown of Regent , a small town in western North Dakota, in order to promote the town as a tourist attraction. The sculptures include "Geese in Flight", which at at 110 feet tall and 154 feet long is the worlds largest metal sculpture.

I've driven along the Enchanted Highway. There are seven sculptures in all; one every few miles. I kept wondering what someone would think if they just happened to drive by, and knew nothing about the project.

I love the "Pheasants on the Prairie" sculptures.When you drive through the back roads of western North Dakota, you see pheasants everywhere, often sitting on the road.

"The Tin Family" is also wonderful. These sculptures are 23, 44, and 45 feet tall.

http://www.enchantedhighway.net/

30 Year Anniversary of "Disco Demolition Night"

2009-07-16T19:04:00.000-07:00

A story in PCL Link Dump this week discussed one of the strangest events in music and baseball history - the "anti-disco" riot at Comiskey Park in Chicago. on July 12, 1979. Steve Dahl, a Chicago DJ on WLUP, arranged for a promotion, "Disco Demolition Night" in which fans were to bring their unwanted disco records to that nights double header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. In return, they would be admitted for 98 cents. The expected crowd was 12,000 but 90,000 showed up. Comiskey Park could only seat 52,000.

Between the games, a pile of disco records was blown up on the field and soon an out of control disturbance developed. The White Sox ended up forfeiting the second game of the double header. This event is cited as the end of the disco era by some, but that's quite a bit overstated.

PCL Link Dump
http://easydreamer.blogspot.com

This is a video of local TV news coverage of the event.

Here is the trailer from a 2004 documentary on the riot

.

Quaggas

2009-07-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite extinct animals has long been the quagga. Native to southern Africa, it was hunted to extinction in the late nineteenth century. The last surviving quagga died in the Amsterdam zoo in 1883. The quagga was long thought to be a distinct species but DNA analysis showed that it was actually a subspecies of zebra.The Quagga Project, started in South Africa in 1987, is attempting to "breed back" the quagga from a zebra.

The Quagga Project:

http://www.quaggaproject.org/

The only known photo of a quagga was taken at Regent's Park Zoo in London in 1870.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quagga_photo.jpg

The Cathedral of Junk

2009-07-15T16:44:00.000-07:00

And now for a change of pace.

This is the wonderful Cathedral of Junk, in Austin, Texas. I think it would be worth a trip to Austin just to see this. Vince Hanneman , the builder of the cathedral, started the project in 1988, and estimates it includes about 60 tons of junk.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/7816

Second Sotomayor post

2009-07-15T12:18:00.000-07:00

This post will focus on the Ricci case, for which Judge Sotomayor has been harshly criticized by her opponents.

The Wikipedia article on Ricci provides a nice summary of the facts of the case.

Ricci v. DeStefano is a 2009 decision by the Supreme Court of the United States arising from a lawsuit brought against the city of New Haven, Connecticut by eighteen city firefighters alleging that the city discriminated against them with regard to promotions.^[1] The firefighters, seventeen of whom are European-American and one of whom is Hispanic, had all passed the test for promotions to management. City of New Haven officials invalidated the test results because none of the African-American firefighters had passed the exam, stating that they feared a lawsuit over the test’s disparate impact on a protected minority. The complainants claimed they were denied the promotions because of their race—a form of racial discrimination.^[2] ^[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano

The firefighters appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, The court affirmed, in a per curium opinion, the ruling of the district court. A per curium opinion is one issued by the court as a whole, rather then an opinion authored by a particular judge..

To me at least this criticism is unfair for several reasons.

1) The case was a close call legally, in that it required a balancing of the "disparate treatment" of racial groups and the "disparate impact" on them. In this case the plaintiffs argued that they were discriminated against because they were not promoted due to their race, and the city argued that they if they certified the results of the test they would be subject to a lawsuit from the African - American and Hispanic firefighters, given that so few on them passed. There would be a disparate impact on them consistent with previous case law, therefore the city was likely to be sued.

2) The Supreme Court changed the standard of review here to a"strong basis in evidence" standard that was not in effect at the time the case went before the appeals court that Sotomayor was on.

3) There was substantial disagreement in this case among the members of the Supreme Court, not only over what the standard of review should be, but also to the facts (were there other tests the city should have given that had less of a disparate impact, etc.) Justice Ginsberg in her dissent, argues that even given the new stricter standard of review, the city's decision to cancel the test results was valid.

4) The one area where criticism of Sotomayor might be justified is that the appeals court ruling was extremely short, and provided little detail as to her reasoning and that of others on the court, for affirming the district court ruling.

5) Although the Second Circuit's decision in Ricci was reversed by the Supreme Court, it did so in a 5-4 ruling, further indicating how much of a legal split there is on this issue.

Here are some links.

The headnote issued by the Supreme Court in Ricci:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-1428.ZS.html

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision:

http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/ca4649bf-2360-4eb9-a227-79fccae85535/4/doc/06-4996-cv_opn.pdf#xml=http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/ca4649bf-2360-4eb9-a227-79fccae85535/4/hilite/

Two interesting articles:

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/analysis-ricci-without-the-rhetoric/#more-10110

A couple posts coming up in areas outside of law.

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/what-ricci-says-about-the-supreme-courts-views-of-judge-sotomayor/

Supreme Court robes

2009-07-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered about how the robes for Supreme Court justices (and other judges) are made? I really hadn't, but I thought this clip was pretty interesting.

First post on Sotomayor hearings

2009-07-13T15:16:00.000-07:00

The Senate Judiciary Committed confirmation hearings on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court began today. In spite of the strong opposition of some of the Republican members of the committee, it's all but certain that Sotomayor will be confirmed. Although at times she has made statements that were ill-considered, such as her statement about "wise Latina" judges making better decisions then white men, Sotomayor's record is solidly in the judicial mainstream . Overall her reocrd is slightly more liberal then the average judge nominated by a Democrat, but there's nothing at all indicating she's an extremist.

Here's a good article that discusses just how much in the mainstream Sotomayor is.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/from-sotomayor-rulings-a-wealth-of-data/

An article on how moderate her record in criminal law is

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/69086.html

She has been endorsed by over 1000 law school professors.

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/over-1000-law-professors-join-letter-endorsing-sotomayor/

Sotomayor's rise from a poor childhood in the South Bronx to a likely Supreme Court Justice has frequently been discussed, This article provides a brief biography.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/nyregion/10sonia.html?_r=1&hp

Significant Objects Project

2009-07-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

While surfing the other day I ran across the Significant Objects Project. Here's how the project works. The project curator buys a (usually kitschy) object from a flea market or thrift shop. The object is turned over to a writer, who then writes a fictional history of their association with the object,thereby giving it significance. It's then listed on eBay, along with the fictional history. It's made clear to potential buyers that the story is fictional.

Here are the stories re the Santa Claus Nutcracker and the Creamer.. The eBay bid history can be linked to from these pages.

http://significantobjects.com/2009/07/10/santa-nutcracker/

http://significantobjects.com/2009/07/06/creamer/

The death of Emmett Till

2009-07-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

Emmett Till was in the news recently due to the events at Burr Oak Cemetery near Chicago, where Till is buried. I thought I thought I would provide a recap of who Emmett Till was, and the role his murder had in the civil rights struggle

The details of the story are too long to go into here, but Till, a 14 year old black male from Chicago, was murdered in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman while spending the summer there with his uncle. His body was dumped din the Tallahatchie River, and was found several days later. The killers were acquitted in a 67 minute trial, and admitted to Look Magazine after their acquittal that they had in fact committed the murder. The outrage generated by Till's murder and the acquittal of the defendants was a major spur to the growing civil rights movement.

Wikipedia has an excellent article on the case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

This is the Look article based on the confessions of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who were acquitted of Till's murder.

http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/Look%201956.htm

Bob Dylan wrote and performed the great song "The Death of Emmett Till.This video contains lots of photos about the case, and a couple (of Till's body) are pretty gruesome.

78 RPM label designs

2009-07-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

As you can see from the previous entries, I'm interested in almost everything, and I'm open to suggestions for future posts. In the next few days I will be posting on the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings that will begin next week, Watergate, Emmett Till, albino buffalo, and various other topics.

One of the great things about record collecting, in addition to discovering great music, is running across rare and unusual record labels I've never seen before. I really like these two, thought I've never heard the music here or seen these labels. Ted Staunton has many other great label images on his website

http://www.tedstaunton.com/labels/

The Stadion label depicts the stadium that was built for the 1912 Olympics, held in Stockholm. The record is from 1915.

The Busy-Bee record is from 1906.

The very large and the very small

2009-07-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

Two pictures here: one of the very small and one of the very large.

The first photo shows the Sloan Great Wall, arguably the largest structure in the universe. Not a very glamorous photo, but what it represents in astounding. It's over one billion light years long.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071107.html

The second photo was taken with a scanning tunneling microscope of an array of nickel atoms.

http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/physics/microscopes/scanning/gallery/2.html

Fashion, futurology and Mr. T

2009-07-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

One thing that has changed for me over the past year, is that I'm now quite interested in fashion, something I had never previously paid a lot of attention to. This is mostly due to the influence of all the great fashion blogs I've been reading over the past few months.

Here are three clips re fashion history.The first is a great slice of 80's tackiness: a clip of a fashion show hosted by Mr. T. The other two clips are projections of what fashion will be like in the year 2000, one form the 1930's and one from 1967 - very strange .

Text messages from plants?

2009-07-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

I wonder what my mom would have thought of this story. She never really understood how cell phones could do so many things, and I wonder what she would have though about getting a text message from a plant.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2009/0101-thirsty_plants_text_for_help.htm

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronics/add2/images.

Now I'm following the adventures of a plant in Germany on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/botanicalls1

Some podcast links for you

2009-07-08T11:17:00.000-07:00

Here are three of my favorite podcasts.

Two of these are from Slate Magazine

I've been a big fan of the Political Gabfest for quite a while now. It's from the (moderate ) left, and is highly informative, fun and thought provoking.

Slate also has a Cultural Gabfest, which is also very interesting . These podcasts have many cool links to the topics being discussed. Slate also has a new Sports Gabfest, which I haven't heard yet.

The Political Gabfest: (posted on Fridays)

http://www.slate.com/id/2221846/

The Cultural Gabfest (posted on Wednesdays)

http://www.slate.com/id/2221848/

"Truckers, Shuckers, Freeks and Geeks", hosted by Mark Allen, used to be a weekly show, but now appears more irregularly. The shows focus on country and rockabilly music from the 50's, with a more general 50's and 60's show on occasion. My favorite shows are his oddball ones, including a two hour episode of Elvis tribute records, one of the strangest,and most difficult to listen to genres. but a great slice of Americana.

http://hasilatemyjerky.mypodcast.com/2008/08/ELVIS_HAS_LEFT_THE_BUILDING_THE_TRAILER_PARK_BEHIND_GRACELAND-133464.html

The wonderful Life of Nicholas Slonimsky

2009-07-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

This is the first of several posts re the 365 Days Music project,. The project started in 2003, and featured clips of unusual, and rare audio in various genres, including homemade LP's, "found" recordings , school bands, and just plain weirdness., The project was revived in 2007, and, given the widespread availability of high-speed Internet, often featured entire LP's..

Nicholas Slonimsky was an amazing guy. He knew a wide range of musicians including Stravinsky, Ives, and Zappa, compiled "Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians", and only spoke Latin to his daughter until she was five.

Slonimsky , while in his nineties, recorded some advertising jingles he had written in the1920's. No one actually wanted to use them at the time they were written. Here are three recordings by Slonimsky including his ode to a laxative, "Castoria"

http://wfmu.org/365/2003/070.shtml

I read Slonimsky's autobiography, "Perfect Pitch" several years ago, and there were many interesting stories about his family as well as Slonimsky himself. His grandfather Hiam invented , but did not patent a form of the electric telegraph, and came up with the "Slonimsky meridian" to mark the start of Shabat.

http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=1184826&tstart=0

Slonimsky also recounted a story involving his relatives ( I can't remember whom) who did something that could have come from Woody Allen's "Love and Death". They were trying to resolve an ethical problem regarding the firing of a servant, and realized they were near Dostoevsky's house. They went to see him, and he helped them resolve the problem.

Bulwer-Lytton bad writing awards

2009-07-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

This years winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest have been announced. The contest rewards bad writing and is named after Edward-Bulwer Lytton, the Victorian novelist best known for his novel "The Last Days of Pompeii', and for actually starting a novel with the words "It was a dark and stormy night". The prize goes to the writer who comes up with the worst opening sentence from an imaginary novel. Here is this years winner, from David Mackenzie, of Federal Way, Washington.

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

Here's an article about this years winners.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_odd_worst_writing

There are so many great category winners, dishonorable mentions etc. One of my favorites is

"Their relationship hit a bump in the road, not the low, graceful kind of bump, reminiscent of a child's choo choo train-themed roller coaster, rather the kind of tall, narrow speed-bump that, if a school bus ran over it, would cause even a fat kid to fly up and bang his head on the ceiling."

Michael Reade, Durham, N.C

The complete list of winners is here:

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2009.htm

Of course I needed to try some bad writing of my own:

"While contemplating whether or not he should post on his blog he was suddenly inspired by the congealed remnants of a Proustian madleine laying on the table, the kind of decadent treat that could have been found in the ruins of ever so decadent Pompeii if there had been a really decent bakery there, which there wasn't."

Tony Schwartz, media pioneer

2009-07-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

This will be the first of several posts, on Tony Schwartz (not to be confused with the "peak performance" expert with the same name). Schwartz was a pioneer in ambient sound recording. political advertising, and in communications in general. He was an agoraphobic, but lectured and taught classes all over the world remotely by telephone. He rarely left his home neighborhood (ZIP 10019) in Manhattan .Marshall McLuhan called him "the"guru of the electronic age".
.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=10019&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=us&ei=ttNQSrHMCYjUNc-PyPUP&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1

Schwartz started recording the sounds of his neighborhood, and his home,starting in 1945. His recordings are a great slice of Americana, braodly portraying the life of his neighborhood. His projects included "A Dog's Life" - which documented the first year in the life of his dog., "The New York Taxi Driver" and various sound collages of life in his neighborhood.

You can hear sample clips and download the liner notes to some of Schwartz's recordings here.

http://www.smithsonianglobalsound.org/containerdetail.aspx?itemid=1244

http://www.smithsonianglobalsound.org/containerdetail.aspx?itemid=1060http://www.smithsonianglobalsound.org/containerdetail.aspx?itemid=1065

Schwartz is best known for the"daisy commercial", from the 1964 Johnson presidential campaign. Although it's clear that Schwartz came up with the idea and did the audio for the commercial , it's unclear how much help he received with the final product, considered by many to be the best political commercial ever made. Even though it was only shown once, it received tremendous publicity, and helped clarify for many the deep unease they felt about Goldwater's candidacy.

I can't find a good embeddable copy of the" Daisy" video so here is a link to it from the LBJ library website.

http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/media/daisyspot/

There's a great website re the :"Daisy" commercial,which includes audio excerpts from the recording session

http://www.conelrad.com/daisy/audio.php

Schwartz made recordings of his niece Nancy for many years, then spliced them into a two minute collage of her first 12 years in the 1940's and 50's . As far as I know, he was the first to do something like this. (audio only)

Christmas in July with the Colonel

2009-07-04T13:14:00.001-07:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/s4xton/2148354403/

Here's a bit of Christmas in July for today's post, and a Tijuana Picnic with the Colonel.

One of the legendary bizarre LP covers from the 1960's capitalized on the "Tijuana" sound craze of the mid-60's. It was exemplified by the Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass LP "Whipped Cream and Other Delights",which may be the most common thrift store record. There's a joke that the first thing astronauts who go to Mars will see is a copy of of the Whipped Cream" LP.
I will post again on Herb Alpert.He's had quite an interesting career that goes well beyond the Tijuana Brass and his MOR hits later on. "Whipped Cream" was originally done by the Stokes, a pretty good New Orleans band. I've only heard one track form the Col. Sanders record,, which consists entirely of covers of Tijuana Brass songs.It's typical of the cheap rip-off records associated with many musical fads. I love cheap rip-off records:)

I found the cover and liner notes for the LP at:

http://talgleck.blogspot.com/2007/04/fried-chicken-and-other-delights.html

Here's the story of Colonel Sanders and KFC.

http://www.corbinkentucky.us/sanderscafe.htm

Origin of "The Star Spangled Banner"

2009-07-03T19:30:00.000-07:00

Here is the last of my holiday posts.

Although The Star Spangled Banner was the unofficial national anthem of the U,.S. for many years , it didn't become the official national anthem until 1931. The melody was taken from an 18th century drinking song, The Anacreaon Song". The Anacreon was a club, based in London, of amateur musicians.

Here are the lyrics to "The Anacreon Song"

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw234.html

One of my favorite songs that mentions Independence Day is "Tears of Rage" .I prefer the Dylan version,,backed by The Band to the Band's version from "Music From Big Pink".

"How About a Little Firecracker Scarecrow?"

2009-07-03T12:49:00.000-07:00

Here's one of many great images from a set of Chinese firecracker wrappers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/exposur3/sets/72157602218128838/

Photos of Revolutionary War veterans

2009-07-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

I was amazed when I first learned this, but there a number of photos, taken in the 1850's and1860's, of some of the few remaining survivors of the Revolutionary War.

Alexander Milliner, pictured here, was a drummer boy in
Washington's Life Guard. He was present at many of the major battles of the war, including Valley Forge. He shook hands with Cornwallis the day after the British surrender at Yorktown.

Milliner's story along with other stories and photos of Revolutionary War veterans can be found here on the great History Channel Revolutionary War website.

http://www.americanrevolution.org/lastmen.html

Sometimes it really is rocket science

2009-07-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

Good afternoon! There might be another post later on.

The last post started me thinking about physics, and rocket science in particular. I've also been thinking about cliches, and how sometimes they are literally true.

One time, back when I lived in Maryland, my cousin come into Baltimore for a Bar Mitzvah. My mom and I were talking with him in the lobby of the hotel he was staying at. We were having a private conversation, which i thought was pretty obvious. A relative I didn't know sat down and started talking to us. The cliche "Well he's not a rocket scientist " crossed my mind. However, he was in fact a rocket scientist. He started talking about a mission to a comet he was working on, and ironically it was far more interesting then what my mom, my cousin and I had been talking about, so I was glad he stopped by.

When I was growing up we went on a family trip to Boston. We got lost,and my dad said " "We are really out in left field here". We actually weren't far from the left field bleachers in Fenway Park..

A friend recounted that one time she was traveling with a friend of hers. They were about to board a train. It was really busy, and her friend said "It's like Grand Central Station in here". She reminded him in fact, that they were in Grand Central Station.

The birth of the Web, particle physics, rapping about the LHC

2009-07-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

Happy Canada Day everyone!

Today's post focuses on the very early days of the Web, and on the CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland

This is the very first picture ever "clicked"on in a web browser. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, requested his friend Silvano de Gennaro FTP him photos of Les Horrible Cernettes,, who were fellow employees at CERN,, the Swiss particle physics research center. Here's the picture, from 1992.

http://musiclub.web.cern.ch/MusiClub/bands/cernettes/firstband.html

Les Horrible Cernettes are still performing. They are OK musically, and maybe the only group to use particle physics imagery in their love songs. There will be more posts later about scientific imagery in music.

http://musiclub.web.cern.ch/MusiClub/bands/cernettes/songs/strong_int.html

The first website, info.cern.ch, is still active, though now it's just a brief introduction to the origins of the Web

There was quite a controversey re the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's new, intensely powerful particle accelerator. The fear, which was unfounded, was the the LHC could be a doomsday machine that would produce an expanding black hole that would destroy the Earth. The LHC launch date has been postponed a couple times due to technical problems
.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html

Alpinekat, joined by the CERN dancers, raps about the LHC.

There will be another post later today, or sometime tomorrow.

Lou Reed's doowop, John Cale's secret, the Gutenberg project , Sumerian poetry

2009-06-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Thank you everyone for all the nice comments.

I know many of you are Velvet Underground fans, as am I. Here are clips of Lou Reed and John Cale in their pre-VU days.

From 1958, here is a pretty good - and well known to collectors - recording of "So Blue" by the Jades. Lou Reed wrote, played guitar, and sang background on this, though you can't distinguish his voice.

The great John Cale, amazingly enough, appeared on the quiz show "I've Got a Secret" in 1963 re his participation in an 18 hour 40 minute piano performance of Eric Satie's "Vexations". Joshua Rifkin, who was a major player in the revival of interest in Scott Joplin's music in the 1970's,was another one of the pianists.

I love the Gutenberg Project. Sometimes I will browse through the intriguing book titles, well over 99% of which I'll never read. It reminds me of times I'd be in a large academic library, and randomly walk over to a shelf, close my eyes, pull out a book and browse through it. And I wonder why I frequently failed to get work done.

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

The worlds oldest known love poem is over 4,000 years old and from Sumeria. Here it is.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/caner/314998602/

The album cover of the day is:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NFGqfqiGBEQ/SklXTWzpqaI/AAAAAAAAC08/fmtfEU1aa7c/s1600-h/album+153.jpg

2009-06-28T12:48:00.001-07:00

Communist chic, singing mice, and photography

I'm going to be talking quite a bit about history, fashion, nostalgia, and political culture. Here's an interesting article on "communist chic" that combines all of these.

http://www.trenddelacreme.com/2008/11/rise-of-communist-chic.html

And for something totally different. Here's a somewhat bizarre article from the February 1937 issue of Natural History magazine on three singing mice

http://naturalhistorymag.com/index_archivepicks.html

One more record to add to my million record want list is "Famous Photographers Tell How".

Here's the interview with "Weegie",an amazing new York crime and street photographer form the 1930's and 40's. The voice Peter Sellers used in Dr. Strangelove is based on Weegies. There is also an interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson here.

http://boogiewoogieflu.blogspot.com/2009/06/weegee-speaks.html

Many more posts coming soon. Thanks for reading everyone.

Lipograms

2009-06-27T17:13:00.000-07:00

Lipograms are poems, paragraphs or longer writings where one or more letters are not used, The most common lipograms omit the letter "e", the most commonly used letter in English.

Here are some well known poems rewritten as lipograms.

http://www.curiousnotions.com/home/lipo1.asp

The best known lipogram, which omits the letter "E", is the 50,000 word novel Gadsby, written by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939. . Wright taped down the "E" on his keyboard so that he wouldn't use it by mistake. It surprised me to find it online. I've read about 1/4 of it (it's best read in small segments). It's pretty bizarre, frequently funny, and quite an achievement.

http://www.spinelessbooks.com/gadsby/