Ponderosa Stomp | The Film
Lil Buck, Roy Head, and Classie Ballou. You might not know them, but they’re good people to meet.
The Ponderosa Stomp Foundation began with an annual blowout show, triumphantly returning hundreds of the architects of blues, R&B, soul, rockabilly and garage rock to the spotlight. Over eight years of shows, the Stomp saw musicians who thought they were forgotten re-launch dormant careers – and rediscover their own importance to legions of fans.
Lego Taj Mahal
character doesn’t exist.
Or, more aptly put, character is contextual:
But, as Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher, notes in his book “Experiments in Ethics,” this philosopher’s view of morality is now being challenged by a psychologist’s view. According to the psychologist’s view, individuals don’t have one thing called character.
The psychologists say this because a century’s worth of experiments suggests that people’s actual behavior is not driven by permanent traits that apply from one context to another. Students who are routinely dishonest at home are not routinely dishonest at school. People who are courageous at work can be cowardly at church. People who behave kindly on a sunny day may behave callously the next day when it is cloudy and they are feeling glum. Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call “cross-situational stability.”
Dungeons and Dragons on a Microsoft surface
I haven’t played in many, many years, but this still gives me chills.
a dead genre resurrected
Brandon Boyer makes a list of contemporary point and click games:
As alluded to last week with the release of Amanita’s hand-drawn opus Machinarium, the era of the point and click adventure — which reached its pinnacle throughout the 90s thanks to genre-defining works by LucasArts, Sierra and Cyan — seemed all but forever over in the decade following, as PC prowess pushed first- and third-person to the fore.
But a new wave of adventures has recently arisen, ushered in by the re-introduction of more cursor-y consoles and handhelds (think: the literal pointing and touching of both the Wii and the iPhone), the proliferation of digital distribution channels (lowering the barrier away from gun-shy publishers unwilling to invest heavily in ‘nostalgia’), and a dedicated core that’s never let the classics die (via grey market ports of Lucas’s SCUMM engine to basically every piece of hardware with a display device).
Mr Eaves
Mrs Eaves, the font upon which my tattoo is based, has been released as Mr Eaves in Sans and Modern versions.
we built this city
A pre-Columbian pyramid in Bolivia may lose its World Heritage status because its walls are being reconstructed with adobe rather than original stone.
They decided to go free-hand with the (new) design … There are no studies showing that the walls really looked like this.
The Middle Ear
And its importance to mammalian evolutionary biology:
Imagine what a dinner conversation would be like if you had decent table manners, but the ears of a lizard. Not only would you have to stop eating whenever you wanted to speak, but, because parts of your ears are now attached to your jaw, you’d have to stop eating whenever you wanted to hear anybody else, as well. With no fork action on your end, your waiter would soon conclude that you were obviously “done working on that” and would whisk your unbreached baked ziti away.
one more for the bard
Using plagiarism detection software Sir Brian Vickers, a literature professor at the University of London, has determined The Reign of Edward III to be a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, a popular playwright of the time.
With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in Edward III that matched phrases in Shakespeare’s other works. Usually, works by two different authors will only have about 20 matching strings. “With this method we see the way authors use and reuse the same phrases and metaphors, like chunks of fabric in a weave,” says Vickers. “If you have enough of them, you can identify one fabric as Scottish tweed and another as plain gray cloth.”
-Word_of_God- Welcome Abstruse to #christian I am a Bible Bot.
*** Now talking in #christian
-Word_of_God- Welcome Abstruse to #christian I am a Bible Bot. For more info type: /msg Word_of_God !info
<Abstruse> !kjv numbers 22:21
<Word_of_God> Numbers 22:21 — And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, and went with the princes of Moab. - (KJV)
*** SageRider sets mode: +b *!*@c211-30-208-111.rivrw3.nsw.optusnet.com.au
*** Word_of_God was kicked from #christian by SageRider (Please dont Swear)
<Abstruse> I know I’m never going to be able to come back in this channel again after this, but damn was it worth it to see that…
Puppy pimping, a Hallowe’en special
As it turns out, there’s big business in sexy Hallowe’en costumes for pets. Dogs, mostly. I’d like to see you get your gerbil into one of these outfits. I googled ‘sexy pet costumes’ and I can’t bear to share the results. Oh ok, then. Unfortunately, it turns out that not all dogs can actually do sexy.
This infomercial is brought to you via Chris W.
from the bus window
Trees and fields as seen from the bus, as I returned to Pittsburgh after a brief trip out of town.
I get nervous in social situations, muthafucka
Thanks, Sternfeld.
An interview with John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats
Some great discussion of Jim’s new album, The Life of the World to Come, in Paste Magazine:
Paste: You’ve said that you don’t believe in God, but you’ve also said that you maintain a cultural connection to Catholicism. So does that make this cultural exercise a literary endeavor?
Darnielle: It’s all of those, but it’s first and foremost a personal and creative exercise. We were working on a bio for the album, and there was a lot of personal stuff in there. I’m always hesitant to say, “Well, here’s what was going on in John’s life, and here’s how it came out in the song,” because I know when I get sent records for review, and the press kit says stuff like that, I think, “Dude, don’t sell it to me like that.” It seems kind of cheap, I would want my words to stand on their own merits. But at the same time, last year and the year before, I’ve been dealing with some tough stuff that was all figuring very heavily in my mind. And continued ripplings from the death of my stepfather, which is something I don’t want to write about again, because I feel like I’ve said what I have to say. But that’s the kinda stuff that revolves around these thoughts. It was actually my stepfather who taught me to be an atheist in the seventh grade, so I would go to school and tell people they were stupid.
(thanks, Autumn)
an actual Chamber spokesman showed up and yelled: “This is fraudulent!”
This makes me really happy.
“The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a parody of itself in running circles around its own position on climate,” said Sievers. “So Yes Men took the opportunity to parody them.”
The Fat and Short of It
If we are going to make being fat a national issue, then we also need to worry about being short:
Many problems associated with being overweight correspond to being “underheight.” The shorter you are in America, the more likely your chances to develop coronary heart disease, diabetes or stroke. Fat people and short people lead briefer lives, and they put an increased burden on the health care system. Economists estimate that excess weight alone accounts for 9 percent of the country’s medical spending. There’s no such figure for insufficient height, but we do know that obesity and shortness play out in similar ways across the socioeconomic landscape.
Weird, right?
The Mountain Goats – Psalm 40:2
There is something about this song.
Making the grade isn’t about race. It’s about parents.
After a recent state report on test scores in California schools, Jack O’Connell, the state’s superintendent of instruction, said the gap is “the biggest civil rights issue of this generation” — a very popular phrase in education circles.
But focusing on a “racial achievement gap” is too simple; it’s a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.
While I agree with the article’s premise*, I found myself wondering why the emphasis on fathers. I’d hedge that it’s having two parents, two incomes, and two role models that make the difference, and not just some problem with ‘soft’ single mothers.
* I spend my forty-hour work week advocating for more parental involvement to close the aforementioned achievement gap.
Not sans comedy
Life drawing
1967 Shelby GT500
One of my favorite favorite cars.
the ‘rationalizer’
I like that rationalizer is in quotes.
Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) and the Dialogues Incubator, an initiative by ABN AMRO, are pleased to announce the ‘Rationalizer’ concept, an emotion sensing system targeted at serious home investors who trade online. It acts as an ‘emotion mirror’ in which the intensity of the user’s feelings is reflected. Research shows that home investors do not act purely rationally: their behavior is influenced by emotions, most notably fear and greed, which can compromise their ability to take an objective, factual stance. This insight led to the Rationalizer concept in which online traders are alerted when it may be wise to take a time-out, wind down and re-consider their actions.
(via marginal revolution)
we create the weather
The Mayor of Moscow intends to use the Russian Air Force to spray a chemical mist on the clouds before they reach the city, keeping Moscow snow free all winter.
“You know how every year on City Day and Victory Day we create the weather?” Luzhkov asked a group of farmers outside Moscow in September, according to Russian media reports. “Well, we should do the same with the snow! Then outside Moscow there will be more moisture, a bigger harvest, while for us it won’t snow as much. It will make financial sense.”
the fish are really striking
I had a conversation with Brad Humphreys and Jane Ruseski as to why an activity must have an intrinsically competitive aspect to qualify as a sport, thus ruling out bass fishing.
where the wild things are
The movie has a libertarian sub-theme that I don’t recall from any of the 10 sentences in the book.
