clusterflockstock, 1
Sometimes, Life Weighs Very Heavy.
From an occasional series ‘old people shot from the hip’.
Life with Nina
The Atlantic Ocean
had no business being invented. It just makes trouble six ways to Sunday.
What would you think of a man you heard say, “I am afraid of my wife?”
What a wussy, right?
Coveted Object at the Texaco
I have no use for a lighter, but I couldn’t resist this for $4.50 at the Texaco. I’d been eyeing it for about a week, and yesterday I had to have it.
Margaux Lange Jewelry
I have a love/hate relationship with Barbie, but Margaux Lange‘s jewelry is amazing.
The Espresso Book Machine
The Guardian focuses on how this machine may save the indie bookstore, but I think the implications for the indie author are even greater:
The brainchild of American publisher Jason Epstein, the Espresso was a star attraction at the London Book Fair this week, where it was on display to interested publishers. Hordes were present to watch it click and whirr into action, printing over 100 pages a minute, clamping them into place, then binding, guillotining and spitting out the (warm as toast) finished article. The quality of the paperback was beyond dispute: the text clear, unsmudged and justified, the paper thick, the jacket smart, if initially a little tacky to the touch.
Audio for Andrew
I’m contributing $50 towards audio equipment for Andrew. I also created a paypal donation if anyone else wants to contribute. If we collect more than Andrew needs, we’ll buy someone else something.
Why the Arduino Matters
Greg Borenstein compares the Altair 8800 to the Arduino board:
Recently, our Altair arrived. It’s called the Arduino. This is 2009 so instead of being built by two engineers in Albuquerque, it was built by an open source international cabal of programmers and professors.
A lot of people complain that it’s underpowered and overpriced (even though it only costs $8.64 in 1975 dollars). But you don’t need special hardware to program it. It lets you do all the basic tasks with just a line or two of perfectly comprehensible code. And there’s a thriving community of people busily using it to do all the useless, fun, creative things they’d always dreamed of if only they could get their hands on a computer that could sense and control the world around it. They’re using it to teach houseplants to call for help if they need watering. And they’re using it to play music on glasses of water.
The Altair 8800 is before my time (yours truly was born in 1980), but it is clear to me the Arduino is magic. There are tons of open source code templates and its hooks up to any computer via USB. For example, a friend cobbled this together, after a conversation about a twitter/morse code project, in just a few hours. He had never used one before. See? It’s magic.
My Dream Machine
WANT:
Falcon Motorcycles are custom built, original bikes, that begin as the salvaged frames and engines from vintage British motorcycles and are then rebuilt entirely from the ground up.
Nearly every part and every portion of the frame is remade, refurbished, customized and/or altered. The engines are re-machined, polished, lightened, ported, re-engineered and fitted with modern upgrades, leaving no detail overlooked.
Original parts are sculpted and machined from raw blocks of reclaimed metal. Though you can see the Triumph engine or Norton backbone still framing the machine, the spirit is undeniably Falcon. The final goal is to create a wholly new motorcycle that is timeless, inimitable and understated.
(thanks, dale)
movies in frames
(via kottke)
quote out of context
Those legs are now closed forever.
bitch, I will cut you
Ruth Padel, the first woman in 301 years elected to Oxford’s poetry chair resigned after admitting she spread allegations of sexual harassment against Derek Walcott, her main competitor.
Ms. Padel’s admission that she sent e-mail messages to two reporters last month alerting them to allegations of sexual harassment against her main rival for the Oxford post, the Nobel literature laureate Derek Walcott, was a stunning turn in a saga of skullduggery that had opened a bitter schism in Britain’s literary world.
More interesting to me were the transgressions listed for Britain’s pantheon which called to mind India’s This City Would Be Illegal in This City post.
Michael Deacon in The Telegraph cited Lord Byron (“womanizer”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“drug fiend”), John Keats (“smackhead”), Rudyard Kipling (“imperialist”), T. S. Eliot (“lines that could be construed as racist”) and Dylan Thomas (“drank like a drain, begged and stole from friends”), among others, and concluded, “Not one of them, were they alive today, could hope to land the Oxford post — they just don’t meet the exacting moral standards set by people who conduct smear campaigns.”
The Anatomy of a Weekend
The Flockers clustered here in Northeast Texas this past weekend and it was fascinating to watch as a participant and observer. What underlies the weekend is the blogging phenomenon that as India said, “…brings disparate people together who would otherwise never have known each other.” But what is also crucial is that this phenomenon also appears to have produced a longing in the human psyche for person to person contact beyond the virtual world. This desire for both virtual and real community was in full force this weekend as some fourteen Flockers gathered for a (re)union in real time-space.
The inspiration for the gathering began last year when Cindy Scroggins suggested it. The synergy began to build when Deron took up the cause and began to formulate a strategy for a gathering here in the countryside of rural Texas. It was clear to me as I watched folk arrive from across the U.S. that this was a microcosm of sorts, and watching that microcosmic community form I came away with some lasting impressions of its overall anatomy.
The first was that each person arrived carrying into the setting their own fundamental goodness—that same goodness which is shared by every human being on the planet but which was fully mirrored in this collection of singular individuals.
Second, as they came to know each other more directly and personally they did so with great care, recognizing the need for (and importance of) every age and type of human there as essential to the community. Over the course of the weekend, they practiced deep respect for one another through hours of intense listening and sharing enveloped in a cloud of good will and humor.
Third, the sheer joy of human community was profoundly evident but only possible when something that could only be identified as “loving-kindness, care, and compassion” became the glue that bound the whole together. Love, in some fashion “showed up,” and the Flocker community jelled.
Fourth, for the weekend to work, there had to exist a prior “constructed universe,” an open space available to allow the possibilities to emerge. You might think of it in terms of a kind of “embedded hierarchy of higher-order realities.” The first and foremost of those realities was nature itself without which we would never be—but which held us all so powerfully. Then there was the forethought of a decades-long tradition of co-housing and experimental living in intentional community which built the retreat space and made it available, and finally there were those of us committed to hospitality and the need to “get out of the way” long enough for something new to arrive and happen. It was a grand synergy that worked thanks to many minds, heads, hearts and hands. I am grateful for each person who came, for their care of each other, the land, and the human community. Each one now is very dear to me.
Daryl and Cindy Scroggins
It has been said that Cindy attracts schizophrenics. Below are a few more stories caught on-the-fly by my iPhone. The quality is as good as you might imagine (i.e., not), so I recommend headphones to hear it best.
Direct Download [.mp3]
Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Sets
Coming soon.
via Uncrate.
Birds
I am reasonably certain these are finches, but any insight would be appreciated.
And I’m not what I appear to be
Tongue poked firmly in cheek. And my best stab at a Scouse-American accent.
Forgotten Sounds
Being one of them thar city folk, I find myself not only subconsciously drowning out the urban white noise, but consciously avoiding the noise around me with those ubiquitous and culturally invisible white earbuds. The country quiet, by contrast, underscored sound: frogs croaking, feet squishing in wet shoes, the cadence of a person’s voice, and the camera click. It reminded me to listen (again).
So: after reviewing my sounds from the Loop experiments and finding the iPhone a clumsy tool for the process, I began researching on more serious sound equipment. A quick googling yielded a lengthy, useful guide on Digital Audio Field Recording Equipment for ethnographers, but any advice from folks out there in the æther to a poor urbanist who is looking to take this seriously would be greatly appreciated.
Urban outlaws
One thing I mention frequently but which some seem not to believe is that just about everywhere in this country it would be illegal to build the kind of dense residential urban neighborhoods one associates with, well, urban living. My block, a completely typical South Philly block . . . , could not be built today without an unlikely to receive zoning waiver.
—”This City Would Be Illegal in This City,” Atrios
Read more
Meme Scenery
Andy Baio removes the subjects of internet memes from the photos and videos with striking results.
Saturday night was kinda odd.
I slunk in the house around 3:30 am. There was a dead bat at the front door.
terse, but not curt
Clusterflockstock was a gathering of the most brilliantly funny and aggressively honest people I have ever met. There is so much to process that I took an extra day off.
I hope there wasn’t
a shortage of bathrooms in Telephone, Texas.
