“It has a non-human appearance because the head is triangular and big, almost the same size as the body. At first we believed it to be a child’s body until Spanish and Russian doctors came and confirmed that, yes, it’s an extraterrestrial being.”
Renato Davila Riquelme, an anthropologist working at the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco on the 20 inch tall remains.
More here.
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Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Try Geocache online by putting in your postcode here to search for Geocaches near you.
The iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4G use a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi positioning and cell towers to determine your approximate location. Groundspeak’s iPhone Application then queries the Geocaching.com database in real-time and provides a list of geocaches near you.
iPhone App here
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The seemingly infinite number of vintage record jackets that convey their message with only simple shapes and typography never cease to amaze.
Project Thirty-Three is the personal collection of Jive Time Records, a Seattle-based store specializing in used vinyl. It’s a shrine to circles and dots, squares and rectangles, and triangles, and the brilliant designers that made them come to life on album covers.
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Dr Cabot is a genius. A must-see.
Spend an hour with The Liver Doctor, Sandra Cabot MD, while she explains how your liver works and how best to maintain a healthy liver and even reverse some liver diseases. Learn why your liver health is so important and how some simple changes in your diet can greatly improve your health and increase longevity. This one hour long presentation is your personal consultation right in your own home. Learn why successfully treating various forms of hepatitis with drugs alone can be so difficult and how, with nutritional medicine, your chances of avoiding liver disease are much higher. Love your liver and live longer !
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Part 1
Paul Cronin’s mesmerizing documentary In the Beginning was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead is a long, continually surprising film about a remarkable Englishman who turned his back on film. A debonair, charismatic workaholic, Whitehead, now nearly 70, is a dream subject: as an independent-minded cameraman in 1960s London, he recorded key moments of cultural upheaval with an eye as keen as his intellect. With retrospectives slated for Anthology Film Archives and the Rotterdam Film Festival, a re-discovery of Whitehead’s underseen oeuvre is underway to which this ambitious docu, world-preemed in Vienna in October, is an invaluable companion piece.
Whitehead has lived so many lives, cats are jealous. No additional commentators weigh in for this docu. It’s just gifted raconteur Whitehead — whose adventures in publishing, music recording, high finance, lensing et al. fairly drip with historic serendipity — relating his life and his work. But in Cronin’s deft hands, that’s more than enough to profitably fill more than three hours of sometimes contradictory screentime.
Well-edited visuals – mostly drawn from Whitehead’s own drool-worthy archives – accompany the subject’s non-stop flow of anecdotes and pithy, tantalizing observations. Cronin, whose previous sprightly excavations of film lore include a doc on Amos Vogel and one about the making of Medium Cool, put this only slightly overlong portrait together for a mere $6,000.
Whitehead was working as a newsreel cameraman for Italian television when he shot Wholly Communion, a unique record of the night in 1965 that the leading American beat poets – Ginsburg, Ferlinghetti, Corso – read to a capacity crowd of 7,000 at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Forty minutes worth of black-and-white film stock edited down to 33 minutes got a commercial release and put Whitehead on the map.
When, as a direct result, the Rolling Stones’ manager hired him to shoot the Stones on tour in Dublin and Belfast, Whitehead “had never heard a single Stones song.” Whitehead was apparently the first person ever to film Jimi Hendrix and became the first ever to record Pink Floyd. All the same, Whitehead insists ’60s London was not swinging except to the headline writers at Time magazine.
The leading foreign filmmakers of the day had a huge impact on Whitehead, who watched Godard’s Alphaville “in a trance” and was “demolished and psychologically ill for weeks.” Determined to publish the screenplay in English, Whitehead offers an account of meeting Godard to arrange a translation even though “there was no script” that’s a hoot.
Living in New York from October 1967 through May 1968, Whitehead caught footage of the student occupation of Columbia University that shows, among other things, a young Paul Auster listening to a young Tom Hayden.
Andy Warhol approached the textbook handsome Whitehead about appearing in a film that would entail having sex with Viva. Whitehead declined, but was intimate with an exciting roster of artistic women from Nico to Nathalie Delon to Niki de Saint-Phalle.
Questioning film’s ability to depict reality and concluding that “the technology was standing between me and authentic experience,” Whitehead quit filmmaking after six years.
The two-part docu looks at the layers of Whitehead’s richly varied life including his adventures as a painter, mutual funds wiz, compulsive diarist and aspiring novelist. The first half lasts 100 minutes.
Second half, clocking in at 98 minutes, examines how Whitehead morphed from an urban media maven into a truth seeker at one with nature. Cronin orders the information so as to keep viewers guessing about his mercurial subject – just as we think we “know” who he is, we have the figurative rug pulled out from under us.
The polar opposite of an ivory tower academic or flippant playboy, Whitehead possesses a restless energy and obvious work ethic that save him from being a dilettante. Seeing Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal had a life-changing impact on the man; it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that seeing this doc and watching Whitehead’s small but seminal body of work might send some unsuspecting lad or lass careening off on hitherto unimagined adventures.
Lisa Nesselson, Variety, 18 December 2006
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
PW on Pink Floyd
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“I’m inside the bunker (deep below the surface in the president’s nuclear proof bunker beneath the White House). answering phones, its 9:52 I pick up the phone I heard on the other end: “this is the White House situation room, (upstairs in the White House), we have another hi-jacked plane 15 miles south of Pittsburgh, inbound Washington D.C….”
Sept. 11, 2001. Like Pearl harbour and the Kennedy assassination before it, if you were alive that day you remember where you were. Our guest today remembers where he was as well. He was at the centre of the US command control in a sealed bunker below the White House. Beside sat Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice and directly behind him stood Vice President Dick Cheney.
Lt. Col. Darling takes us step by step, blow by blow throughout all the shattering events that unfolded that day. The sheer volume of information flooding the bunker; how they discerned what was a real threat and had to be dealt with immediately; the real world order to scramble two F-15s to down Flight 93 heading on a collision course with the White House and the leaders of the free world.
This is a story that non of us have had access to before. This is real history by a man in a command seat on the most horrible day in recent history. This is living history; it doesn’t get anymore real than this.
Download Part 1 of 2 (30:00)
Download part 2 of 2 (30:00)
From the Brent Holland Radio Show.
Here’s the book on Amazon.co.uk.
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Made by Everynone (in Collaboration with WNYC’s Radiolab & NPR)
Directed by Daniel Mercadante & Will Hoffman
Supervising Producer: Robert Krulwich
Original Score: Keith Kenniff (unseen-music.com)
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The track is composed of a sine wave bass, custom drum sequences, and sounds recorded from the Disney film ‘Mary Poppins’.
Composed using chords and vocal samples recorded from the Disney film ‘Alice In Wonderland’.
Composed using chords and vocal samples recorded from the Pixar film ‘Up’.
More at pogomix.net
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by Ian Dowding
It’s not as if I’d discovered the double helix or cold fusion, but it has been a phenomenon that this simple pudding has become world famous. I don’t talk about it much these days in case I sound like one of those old rock stars who only ever had one hit and insists on telling everybody at every opportunity. But if I’m asked I usually say this, which I happen to believe is true: Nobody ever invents dishes – they evolve. It may be a bit more mundane than most people think but I’d like to put the record straight . This then is how it happened.
In the late 1960’s there were the seeds of a food revolution sprouting. Foreign travel and Elizabeth David were getting through to the British public that there was more to food than boiled beef and plum duff. I had completed a two year catering course at Swindon college, reasonably competently and had got a job at a small restaurant in Berkshire as an assistant sous chef. Actually there were only two chefs so I was also first commis, last commis and kitchen skivvy.
Russell used to do all the important things like main courses, pates and patisserie – I did all the rest. Russell had his secret recipes one of which was a dessert he had brought back from America called ‘Blum’s Coffee Toffee Pie’. However it was no secret that it rarely worked. The toffee was made by boiling sugar, butter and cream together to produce a smooth, thick toffee which was poured into a pastry case and topped with coffee flavoured whipped cream. Sometimes it didn’t set at all, other times it dried like concrete. The tantrums Russell threw when it didn’t work schooled me well in the art of profanity if nothing else.
I moved on to a head chef’s job at a small restaurant just opening in Sussex. I took all Russell’s secret recipes with me but quietly forgot about BCT pie as it was known in kitchen chit abbreviation (the BC standing for something else entirely). When I say head chef what I really mean is the only chef – so I now got to do the main courses along with everything else. This was the early seventies and the food revolution was in full swing. There was more to life even than Prawn Cocktail and Steak Garni. I was encouraged to get inventive so ratatouille, taramasalata and moussaka appeared on my menus. Then in a conversation with my sister she told me about boiling cans of condensed milk unopened in water for several hours which produced a soft toffee. A light bulb lit up in my head – I would resurrect BCT pie.
The owner of this restaurant, a Mr Nigel Mackenzie, was never one to let me bask in the light of inventive glory for long. The words ‘surely we can make this even better’ still ring in my ears today. He decided that it required something else, a new dimension, a bit of a tweak here and there. We tried some different variations, some were OK, some were downright disgusting, but I have to say that the day we made it with a layer of bananas we knew we had a hit on our hands.
Now of course it couldn’t be called BCT any more and Nigel came up with the word ‘Banoffi’. We thought it was incredibly silly but this was in the days when ‘Lucy Moxon’s Lemon Posset’ and ‘Tipsy Pudding’ were common menu parlance. Without that name we would not have been able to trace the rise in popularity of this concoction. It started by feedback from customers who rang to book and to check that it was still on the menu so it got to the point when we couldn’t take it off . Within a couple of years I began to see it on a lot of menus of other restaurants, (chefs always check out menus wherever they are – you can read a lot more than just food from a menu). People we knew coming back from abroad reported seeing it on menus in Australia and America and there were even stories of it being served at No 10 and Buckingham Palace.
That was a long time ago and now every supermarket has a version and there are Banoffi ice creams, biscuits, chocolates and sundry other items – and no, we have never made a penny from it. Even if one of us had been canny enough to trade mark the name, and besides any firm wanting to use the idea would have just thought up another name. You can’t get a royalty from an invented dish, although I can’t see that it would be any more unenforceable or complicated than in the music business. But that is not the point, I just don’t mind. OK it would be nice to get a penny for every Banoffi made world wide. I don’t even mind that I won’t be remembered I just like the fact that many years hence someone somewhere will be making a Banoffi pie. Anyway I didn’t invent it – it evolved.
Nigel Mackenzie eventually had a blue plaque made to go on the outside of the restaurant saying Banoffi pie was invented there and when asked, usually tells a different story every time about how it came about, probably out of the boredom of repetition. My favourite is the one about how a can of condensed milk accidentally fell into a stock pot one day – bless him. For the original recipe click here.
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In this short video, Trevor Corson, self-styled ‘Sushi Concierge’ and author of The Story of Sushi—explains why you shouldn’t mix wasabi into soy sauce and how to season sashimi without overpowering the flavor of raw fish.
If that’s not enough, he explains some of the finer details, such as the angle at which to tilt your head when eating nigiri, here.
from Good.
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‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are ‘injected’ into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is open to participation. If you want to install a dead drop in your city/neighborhood follow the ‘how to’ instructions and submit the location and pictures.
The ‘Dead Drops’ project was initiated by the artist Aram Bartholl and started during the artist in residence program at EYEBEAM in NYC in October 2010.
Dead drop (Wikipedia)
There are 5 Dead Drops in NYC so far … to be continued
87 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, NY (Makerbot)
Empire Fulton Ferry Park, Brooklyn, NY (Dumbo)
235 Bowery, NY (New Museum)
Union Square, NY (Subway Station 14th St)
540 West 21st Street, NY (Eyebeam)
‘Dead Drops’ is open for participation. If you want to install a dead drop in your city/neighborhood follow the ‘how to’ instructions below and submit the location and pictures when you are done.
How to:
Get a USB flash drive.
Dismantle the plastik cover.
Wrap it in plummers tape to seal it off.
Load the readme.txt below in it.
Use fast setting concrete to cement the stick in a crack or whole.
Optional you could use epoxy putty to glue the flash drive to other objects.
Submit pictures and exact location below.
Download
the Dead Drops readme.txt to include on the USB flash drive.
Submit
your dead drop location, pictures and authorship/credits info here.
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This article was published on October 4th before the the hysteria over the Yemen printer bombs. How strangely prophetic.
Terrorism: The Midterm Game Changer
by Chad Pergram | October 04, 2010, Fox News
Elections are rife with possible “game changer” scenarios. They’re blockbuster events that could fundamentally alter the political tectonics in ways no one anticipated. A precipitous Wall Street slide. An political assassination. A major terrorist hit.
Terrorists?
You don’t say?
So how is it that the U.S. issues a cryptic terrorism alert about travel to Europe less than a month before the most-pivotal, midterm election in years and barely a politician even twitches?
Better yet, with control of the House teetering on the brink and the Senate in play, why hasn’t someone tried to blame one side or the other about ginning up terrorism fears for political gain immediately prior to an election? I mean wasn’t that what Democrats accused the Bush Administration of doing right before the 2004 political conventions?
Have terrorism warnings jumped the shark when it comes to politics? Isn’t one party or the other promising to keep the country safe this fall? If terrorism is such a crucial issue, why aren’t the sides calculating how a terrorism attack between now and the election either boosts the Democrats or assists Republicans at the ballot box?
In fact, the war on terrorism is credited with helping Republicans add eight House seats to its majority in the 2002 midterms. A gain of two GOP seats returned the Senate to Republican control. This bucked the midterm tradition where the party that controls the White House usually loses seats in Congress.
The country is nine years past September 11th. Could it be that after all of the color-dolloped terror alerts, bin Laden cave-side chats, attempted shoe and Fruit of the Loom bombings and countless three-ounce shampoo bottles on airliners that the U.S. is inured to terrorism when it comes to the ballot box?
“We’re suffering from terrorism fatigue,” said one intelligence source about the latest terrorism alert. “You can only deal with so much of this.”
In short, there can be too much of a bad thing. But until now, no one was talking terrorism.
“(Politicians) will only make noise about it to the point the question might be on the test,” said John Pike, who studies terrorism and runs the website GlobalSecurity.org. “Isn’t the election about jobs, jobs, jobs?”As Pike says, so far, no one has put terrorism on the test for the midterm elections. And the everyone is trained on the economy and issues like smaller government, reduced spending and health care.
Granted, the European terrorism alert comes as Congress is out of session to campaign for the elections. So Capitol Hill is a bit more quiet than usual. But few lawmakers were chattering about terrorism before the State Department issued the European advisory. Even as the House and Senate both quietly approved a bill to reauthorize intelligence programs for the first time in six years.
“Everyone is focused on the election,” said a senior Republican aide who asked not to be identified. “If something goes ka-pow, then people get interested.”
To wit: It became clear over the weekend that the U.S. was going to issue an advisory cautioning American travelers in Europe. But when FOX contacted the offices of multiple, senior lawmakers for information about the alert, most had little if anything to offer. In fact, the spokesman for one key lawmaker with an intelligence portfolio indicated this was strictly a State Department matter.
Only a few others weighed-in at all.
“The fact that so many other governments reacted so strongly is an indication of the seriousness of the threat,” said Rep. Pete King (R-NY), the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee.
“This alert is no cause for alarm, nor is it cause to change travel plans,” said Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-CT) in a statement. “But it is reason to be more cautious than usual.”
“The terrorist threat to this nation and our allies in Europe remains a cause for concern. I encourage all Americans traveling outside the country to carefully follow any applicable State Department advisories,” said the top GOPer on that panel, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).
Other than that, Congress didn’t make a peep about this. And so far, no one is seizing the terrorist threat for possible electoral gain.
“I’m learning more about it watching you guys,” said one Congressional aide after viewing news coverage of the threat and alert on Monday.
There may be good reasons why no one has jacked-in the threat matrix to the electoral matrix. One reason is that no one knows who this could benefit. In other words, the Democratic and Republican national campaign committees think they’ve already developed winning strategies. No one knows what drifting off message from jobs and into terrorism would mean at the polls. Secondly, Democrats are afraid to touch the topic because Republicans historically own security and defense issues. But with a Democrat in the White House, Republicans are leery of messing with the power of the presidency. September 11th proved to be the transformative event in the presidency of President George W. Bush, a leader whom few had confidence in when it came to international affairs.
But perhaps most prominently, neither side wants to be seen as exploiting the issue. So they steer away.
It’s important to note that the vagueness of the threat could be why both sides are largely reticent about this now.
“We are saying to American citizens, continue with your travel plans,” said State Department Spokesman PJ Crowley. “But be cautious and be aware that we are following, you know, multiple streams of threat information.”
“We don’t have information about a particular place, a particular time,” said Attorney General Eric Holder.
However, GlobalSecurity.org’s John Pike says all one needs to do is recall a recent terrorism scenario that was successful: the coordinated attacks on Mumbai in 2008 that killed 173 people.
“That is a plan that was been demonstrated to be effective,” Pike said. “The underpants bomb was not effective.”
With the election creeping closer, what’s really understated here is not what COULD happen. But what IF something happens.
That’s a game changer. A major terrorism attack that targets American citizens or American interests within the next month would immediately transform the midterm campaign. And no one can handicap the electoral repercussions of a hypothetical like that.
So a month before the election, candidates are campaigning about jobs and the economy. They’re defending their votes. Some are running away from President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Others are distancing themselves from the tea party movement. But the phantasm of this election is terrorism.
Few politicians are talking about it now. But if something happens, everyone’s sure to be spooked.
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