The Bulgarian Dahlia
An interesting stylistic choice for a new film trailer. But if the movie is about LA, then why did they shoot it in Bulgaria?
Seeing Music
Juice Cuts Risk of Alzheimer’s
“Animal studies and cell culture studies confirmed that some polyphenols from juices showed a stronger neuroprotective effect than antioxidant vitamins. So we are now looking at polyphenols,” Dai said.
Buff Humpty
Dylan Interviews
If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers.
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I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad.
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Oh, it’s about, uh — just about all kinds of different things — rats, balloons. They’re about the only thing that comes to my mind right now.
Where Babies Come From In Germany
Meet the Flockers: Sheila Ryan
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Cooper Renner, without whom I would not be here within the Flock.
Cooper Renner is my father.
Now that he’s down . . .
. . . I can’t resist one more kick. (See Deron Bauman’s Painter of Light post and related commentary.)
Thomas Kinkade’s rural scenes have always struck me as being set somewhere in Stephen King territory, or as illustrations of some weird blend of ‘In Cold Blood’ and one of the unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales. As for the urban scenes — well, those cityscapes resemble no city on this planet. Come to think of it, though, some do suggest fifties- or sixties-era sci-fi book covers or National Geographic ‘artists’ renditions’ of Neptune’s surface.
Love Letter
He failed to notice that the first letter of each sentence in one section of the letter spells out “A.N. Wilson is a s—.”
Bag Lady Syndrome
“It cuts across women of all social groups; it’s not like wealthy women don’t have it,” says Mellan. “Heiresses, women who have inherited wealth, have big bag-lady nightmares because they really feel like the money came to them magically and can leave them just as magically.”
16
In 1907 a Massachusetts doctor conducted an experiment with a specially designed deathbed and reported that the human body lost 21 grams upon dying. This has been widely held as fact ever since. It’s not.
link (thanks, boingboing)
Pretty Cool
Yesterday we got a direct link from Kottke to Brian Beatty’s Meet the Flockers post.
It did wonders.
It’s okay, I’m with him.
European-drawn borders have failed; European models of statehood and statecraft have failed, and, in global terms, European civilization has failed. Unable to see beyond those models, the United States fails to exert influence commensurate with its power, except in the field of popular culture (even Islamist terrorists like a good action flick). With the end of the colonial vision and the swift crack-up of postcolonial dreams–not least, of a socialist paradise–there is a worldwide vacuum of purpose that the glittering trinkets of globalization cannot fill. From the fear-mongering of our own media to the sermons of Moktada al-Sadr, the real global commonality is the dread of change. Whether in Tehran or Texas, the established orders have gone into a defensive crouch.
Kitsch?
The Green Lady is one of the most popular paintings ever made and yet many art critics dismiss it as just so much kitsch. The death of its creator Vladimir Tretchikoff has again cast a spotlight of attention on the painting.
Anger Lung
“This study is one of the first to show prospectively that hostility is associated with poorer pulmonary function and more rapid rates of decline among older men,” said Dr Rosalind Wright, of Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, in a report online in the journal Thorax.
Techno-Weenery
I recently discovered a greasemonkey script which converts all mp3 files into a streamable flash mp3 player. Considering the amount of music blogs I read, this is a necessity I never knew I needed. It has completely revolutionized my browsing.
Of course, you have to use Firefox and the greasemonkey extension to reap the benefits. (hat tip to Lifehacker)
PostSecret
The Ice Maiden, In Danger
Geraldine
One morning Gerald awoke transformed into a woman
The Painter of Light
“They really knew how to bait the hook,” said one former dealer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. “They certainly used the Christian hook.”
god spots
A new study at the Université de Montréal has concluded that there is no single God spot in the brain. In other words, mystical experiences are mediated by several brain regions and systems normally implicated in a variety of functions (self-consciousness, emotion, body representation). The study published in the current issue of Neuroscience Letters was conducted by Dr. Mario Beauregard from the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal and his student Vincent Paquette.
Red & Yellow: Hazard or Hamburger?
Why do we use red and yellow to alert us to fast food and danger? One 1989 theory posits that mammals developed the ability to distinguish between red, yellow and orange in order to identify ripe fruit. If this is true, then do we glimpse the red of a stop sign and salivate for cherry pie? And why, then, are poisonous snakes and frogs as brightly colored as any still life by Matisse? Fortunately, the brain doesn’t encode experience with the binary inflexibility of a machine. We are more than what is dreamt of by primates and professors.
Will we change the name of “Labor Day” to “Corporate Profits Day”?
Harold Meyerson hits the nail on the head, decrying what has happened to the American work force as corporations grow ever wealthier.
Meet the Flockers: Cindy Scroggins
I’m on Inside the Actors Studio, being interviewed by James Lipton. Actually, since I’m pretending, I’d prefer to be interviewed by Will Ferrell doing James Lipton doing Bernard Pivot doing Marcel Proust.
Epistemological Ascesis
Ivan Illich proposes an “epistemological ascesis,” a purging of corrupting concepts that give reality to abstraction, and tear us away from our roots in embodied, local, communal realities.
When we live immersed in the modern world of generalized communication, where every natural boundary is violated, we are constantly assaulted by images, messages, ideas, all of them having their origins outside the boundaries of our responsibility and control, all of them having been crafted by someone for some purpose of their own, and all of which in the end serve to manipulate us. The profound and magical news of the human that Shakespeare once brought, has now degenerated, at the end of literacy, into advertising and mere “news.”
–Tom Cheetham, from Green Man, Earth Angel, p. 116.
