And by the way, where’s my award?
Paula Abdul receives Germany’s “Artist of the Year” award from Bruno.
“So I walk in and there was no furniture except for a chair. And I’m waiting and waiting,” she continued. “And this guy Bruno introduces himself, and I said, ‘Hi.’ And he said, ‘Here, have some food.’ And the food looked horrible! And I said, ‘No, I’m fine.’ And he said, ‘It’s very, very, very good.’ I said, ‘That’s Ok, I don’t want to have it.’”
Abdul said Bruno then apologized for not having furniture for the interview.
“He snaps his fingers and says, ‘Gardeners!’” she recalled. “And these two Mexican guys come in, and they drop down to all fours. I see him paying them like 10 bucks. They drop down to all fours and he says [to me], ‘Sit down.’” And I said, ‘I’m not doing that!’”
After all, Abdul said, she was in a dress.
“So I’m tipping and holding my core muscles to not sit on them. And he pushes me down on them, and I’m like, ‘I’m sorry!’” she said.
It got even more bizarre, Abdul said, when he kicked one of them and they all fell on the ground.
The Red House
If you watch only one racially inclusive furniture store commercial today, make it this one.
Bannock Street Books
I’ve just received two new publications from the micro-press Bannock Street Books: Rough Beast: Stories of Exile and Skip, Patch, Eye, Brownie, Chalk: Coming of Age Stories. Both of these are chapbook-length anthologies of flash fiction by various authors, including Meg Pokrass, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Randall Brown, Sarah Black, David Erlewine and others. They are big–8.5 x 11 inches–and hand-stitched and illustrated. The Publisher says, “I want the art and the stories to be big. Big enough to enjoy, which means I don’t have to strain the bifocals. [...] I want the books to have something of the handmade, so writers could participate again in every part of book-making. . . . I want the books to have the energy of the old underground zines. . . .” Artwork separates the stories, at least in these two. Take a look at the website, linked above.
Blog Grants: Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation
The Arts Writers Grant Program supports the continuation of existing blogs and the creation of new blogs (including those proposed by first-time bloggers).
Read on.The Arts Writers Grant Program also offers funding for articles, books, new and alternative media, and short-form writing.
A new paradigm for the web?
Wolfram Alpha has been working on a new web tool that will “be as important as Google.”
The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers. This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.
For example, a relatively simple search, such as “who was the president of Brazil in 1923?”, will return the answer “Artur da Silva Bernardes”.
This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.
If this actually works like they say it does, then it would make the ultimate iPhone app.
Deluxe Hugs $2.00
(via marginal revolution)
something, 28
I shot a UFO that turned into a helicopter.
Google Chrome Commercial
(via Waxy)
World Digital Library
The Library of Congress, with support from organizations around the world, has put together an online resource of the world’s oldest texts.
A Web site in seven languages — English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian — leads readers through a trove of rare finds from more than a dozen countries.
Among them: a 1562 map of the New World; the only known copy of the first book published in the Philippines, in Spanish and Tagalog; an 11th-century Serbian manuscript; and the oracle bones — pieces of bone or tortoise shell heated and cracked and inscribed that are among the earliest known signs of Chinese writings.
It also has early photographs, films and audio tracks.
two from ffffound!
Kevin Devine – Brother’s Blood
Baby and Bucky
The late afternoon sun broiled the self-storage units’ flat rooftops. A mirage effect created the illusion of a cool lake floating atop wide, low block buildings. Bucky leaned back until his plastic deck chair quivered on the blacktop.
“Why do they call it late?” Bucky said to Baby and no one in particular. “It’s here at the same time every day, more or less.”
Baby’s hair permanently screened her right eye like a curtain of fine blonde steel wool.
“You are the mighty oak that shades my babbling brook, King Dynamite,” she said with a yellowish smile. “I dream constantly of your stout trunk and overspreading limbs.”
Leonard “Bucky” Sawtooth was not handsome, unless he stood in a crowd of ugly men. Bucky did not seem to be particularly intelligent, unless he was packed into a room full of idiots. He was tolerated and mostly adored by his common-law wife, Doreen Shaker. Bucky called her “Baby.”
Million Writers Award
I’ve just learned that “Christmas in Burma” by Christopher Luppi, published last year in elimae, has been named one of the “Notable Stories of 2008″ at storySouth’s Million Writers Award. Bravo, Chris! (And thanks to Kaelan James for cluing me in.)
Pack it up.
And furthermore, I don’t like your trousers.
Stendhal
Yes, monsieur, a novel is a mirror which goes out on a highway. Sometimes it reflects the azure of the heavens, sometimes the mire of the pools of mud on the way, and the man who carries this mirror in his knapsack is forsooth to be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shows the mire, and you accuse the mirror!
The Red and the Black (trans. by Horace B. Samuel; p. 375; Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005)
something, 27
The water in the toilet was warm.
Stand by me
(via @robertsloan)
cold fusion redux
A few weeks ago, 60 Minutes ran a story on the newish developments in cold fusion. The US Navy laboratory has been instrumental in the latest studies.
“Our finding is very significant,” said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.
“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device,” added the study’s co-author in a statement.
Of course, many are still skeptical.
Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss’s published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.
“It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons,” he told the Houston Chronicle.
“The whole point of fusion is, you’re bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow.”
John Daly, camouflage
Dream
A man at the exact center of a park was selling long brown balloons. They were sort of rootbeer colored. He never smiled, but I was delighted.
Inexpensive Fun (for Dave Vogt)
“Had I not moved some fifteen times over the past thirty years,” said Sheila, “my own mild form of ‘Collyer brothers syndrome’ might have rendered me housebound.”
Update: Thank you, Deron, for categorizing me, and thank you, Dave, for playing along. You will receive a home version of the game and a one-year supply of Tofurky.
I feared you might suggest that it was time for my appointment at the rendering plant.
Note: Technical difficulties not only prevent me from categorizing my own posts but from commenting on them, so please bear with me, friends. I could ramble on, but I won’t.
zeitgeist
Roman Millefiori Bowl
The “millefiori” dish (a thousand flowers), believed to date from around the 2nd to 3rd century A.D., is a mosaic of hundreds of indented blue petals with white bordering.
“For it to have survived intact is amazing. In fact, it is unprecedented in the western Roman world,” said Jenny Hall, curator of the Roman collection at the Museum of London.
Hacker Space
Last night I went to possibly the most only exciting meeting I have ever been to. It was a group of STL folk who want to start a community hacker space, a place for DIY freaks (no, not phreaks) to do whatever they do in a shared space. Wired had a great article in March talking about the movement:
At the center of this community are hacker spaces like Noisebridge, where like-minded geeks gather to work on personal projects, learn from each other and hang out in a nerd-friendly atmosphere. Like artist collectives in the ’60s and ’70s, hacker spaces are springing up all over.
Located in rented studios, lofts or semi-commercial spaces, hacker spaces tend to be loosely organized, governed by consensus, and infused with an almost utopian spirit of cooperation and sharing.
“It’s almost a Fight Club for nerds,” says Nick Bilton of his hacker space, NYC Resistor in Brooklyn, New York. Bilton is an editor in The New York Times R&D lab and a board member of NYC Resistor. Bilton says NYC Resistor has attracted “a pretty wide variety of people, but definitely all geeks. Not Dungeons & Dragons–type geeks, but more professional, working-type geeks.”
For many members, the spaces have become a major focus of their evening and weekend social lives.
Since it was formed last November, Noisebridge has attracted 56
members, who each pay $80 per month (or $40 per month on the “starving hacker rate”) to cover the space’s rent and insurance. In return, they have a place to work on whatever they’re interested in, from vests with embedded sonar proximity sensors to web-optimized database software.
Why more things like this don’t exist everywhere is beyond me.
The Collyer Brothers
The incredible story of the Collyer brothers who barricaded themselves in their Harlem brownstone and hoarded a 100 tons of this and that while outside the neighborhood around them transformed.
After their gas, telephone, electricity and water were turned off in 1939 because of their failure to pay the bills, the brothers took to warming the large house using only a small kerosene heater. For a while, Langley attempted to generate his own energy by means of a car engine. Langley began to wander outside at night; he fetched their water from a post in a park four blocks to the south. Langley would also walk miles all over the City to get food, sometimes going as far as Williamsburg, Brooklyn to buy as little as a loaf of bread. He would also pick food out of the garbage and collect food that was going to be thrown out by grocers and butchers to bring back to his crippled brother. He also dragged home countless pieces of abandoned junk that aroused his interest. In 1933, Homer, already crippled by rheumatism, went blind from hemorrhages in the back of both of his eyes. Langley devised a remedy, a diet of one hundred oranges a week, along with black bread and peanut butter.
In 1942, the New York Herald Tribune interviewed Langley. In response to a query about the bundles of newspapers, Langley replied, “I am saving newspapers for Homer, so that when he regains his sight he can catch up on the news.”
(thanks, Chris)