I’m stealing this link from my brother’s twitter stream (@c0dyskinner) – thirty beautiful info-graphics from Designer Daily.
One item, The Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music, I’m seriously considering ordering for the lovely Jessica May – it’s the kind of thing your eyes can swim in for days.
There’s a midget on my desk named Work, and he won’t stop punching me in the face.
While this Transit map (from Discovery, via Warren Ellis’ site) makes me happier, it doesn’t solve the problem.
Very busy day, but consider this the first installment on a larger thought I’ve been meaning to coalesce :
Members of the New Tribes Mission, a fundamentalist missionary organisation based in the US, carried out a clandestine mission to make contact with the Zo’é of Brazil to convert them to Christianity. Between1982 and 1985 the missionaries flew over the Zo’é’s villages dropping gifts. They then built a mission station only several days’ walk from the Indians’ villages. Following their first real contact in 1987, 45 Zo’é died from epidemics of flu, malaria and respiratory diseases transmitted by the missionaries. – Survival International
At that point War Of The Worlds had been in print for nearly 90 years.
Dear Pop Music,
The 1980s sucked the first time around too.
Stop it,
My Ears
P.S. Aqua isn’t a proper colour for clothing.
A bit of interesting randomness:
Eye rhyme, also called visual rhyme and sight rhyme, is a similarity in spelling between words that are pronounced differently and hence, not an auditory rhyme. An example is the pair slaughter and laughter.
Many older English poems, particularly those written in Middle English or written in The Renaissance, contain rhymes that were originally true or full rhymes, but as read by modern readers they are now eye rhymes because of shifts in pronunciation. An example is prove and love. – Wikipedia
Was Love, Louve, or was Prove, Pruv?
Living in the country is weird.
I’m out walking the dog early on a Sunday evening and I pass my neighbour from down the road standing by his truck.
I throw him a wave, hoping he’ll see I have headphones on and won’t try to start up a conversation.
It’s then that I realize that he can’t wave back – he’s loitering behind his truck to conceal the fact that both of his hands are busy keeping his pants dry while he relieves himself.
To bring back an ancient tradition:
It was the third day of Alfred and William’s thirty-first harvest as neighbours. Both hoped it would be their last – as they had for two decades.
Their time was split. Half was spent staring at the other, either in the eyes or in the back, droning along their rows of wheat. The other half was a blessed relief: their tractors carried them away to the furthest ends of their fields.
Unknown to either, they had each spent long hours prowling around the other’s home, shotgun in hand. In the end both men were too stubborn to surrender by being the one who pulled the final straw.
Without warning each man’s engine stalled.
At that same moment, in a small off-off-Broadway theater, the men’s ex-wives were holding hands and watching a terrible play. Despite the poor acting and pretentious script, they were smiling.
In the distance dogs and cows began to howl, in Alfred’s chicken coop his two dozen hens dropped dead.
Gouts of dirt began to erupt in each man’s field.
Hay bails, at least a hundred pounds a piece, were tossed into the air and became grassy bombs as they shattered on the earth.
This day, their last, both men would know the horror of Cthulhu.
Anything with the power and weight of religion, which can bring humanity to create great art, can also inspire the ridiculous. I’m still not sure how I label the Louvin Brothers.
Are you (are you) ready
For the great atomic power?
Will you rise and meet your Savior in the air?
Will you shout or will you cry
When the fire rains from on high?
Are you ready for the great atomic power?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6h6FWMxH8E]
Ira Louvin was a great example of the dual personality that seems to permeate rural religion:
Their songs were heavily influenced by their Baptist faith and warned against sin. Ira Louvin was notorious for his drinking and short temper. Married four times, his third wife shot him three times in the back after he tried to strangle her. – Wikipedia
I need another three or four hours of sleep, so this is going to be a pretty light day. I did want to be sure to once again publicly shame myself though, as it seems to be serving the useful purpose of keeping me on task.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y94584UUw1Q]
Pink Panther, probably because of the lack of dialogue, animation, or sensical jokes, always had a laugh track that stood out.
No one uses canned laugh tracks anymore of course, but until recently I’d forgotten how many cartoons used to have one.
A recent viewing of teletoon retro – with a micro-midget in the crook of my arm – brought up some odd memories: as a kid huffing Scooby Doo it wasn’t long before I realized that not only were the laughers repeating themselves, they were also apparently heading over to Josie and the Pussycats and laughing at those jokes in pretty much the same way.
It was only once I’d asked wikipedia that I realized how prevalent the problem was:
Critics took note of the inferior sounding laugh track permeating Hanna-Barbera’s Saturday morning fare. The same prerecorded laugh can be heard after nearly every punchline, which does not go unnoticed by the astute viewer. The fact that the treble was mixed far too high for the soundtrack it accompanies only drew attention to the falsity of the practice. Several shows that are victim of the abridged laugh track are The New Scooby-Doo Movies, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, Dynomutt, Dog Wonder, Jabberjaw,Hong Kong Phooey, Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space, The Flintstone Comedy Hour andHelp!… It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!. – Wikipedia
I think the modern/adult version of this is, unfortunately, the Letterman audience. I sometimes wonder if the crowd handlers are dressed like lion tamers with high voltage stun sticks.
I greatly enjoy the first half hour of The Late Show, but every quirky tick gets measured applause, every half-gag elicits a short homogeneous laugh – the quality of a joke can be judged by length, but not by intensity, there seems to be no exuberance or extremity permitted by the electro-rod carriers. It may not be the tinny guffawing of Scooby Doo, but the crowd response is so predictable I find it difficult to understand the difference.