Tuesday, March 31, 2009

"Muscan of girly music"


Somebody's been pranking Founding Father and Brigadier General William Whipple's Wikipedia entry! Talk about bored.

"After the war he became a painter and a muscan of girly music of the Superior Court of New Hampshire."

Monday, March 30, 2009

Zooming with Errol Morris


One of the many, many things Thee New York Times web site does so smartly is to create a space for things like Zoom, an irregular blog/feature by Errol Morris that (and this is my lame-ass explanation) examines how photographic images capture and distort moments from the real world. A new Zoom began on Sunday: Morris is attempting to track down the identity (both in a basic and a more conceptual sense) of the father of this boy in this photo, who was an unknown fatality at the Battle of Gettysburg.

The photo (an ambrotype, to be precise) has its own history. As an October 19, 1863 Philadelphia Inquirer put it:

"After the battle of Gettysburg, a Union soldier was found in a secluded spot on the field, where, wounded, he had laid himself down to die. In his hands, tightly clasped, was an ambrotype containing the portraits of three small children, and upon this picture his eyes, set in death, rested. The last object upon which the dying father looked was the image of his children, and as he silently gazed upon them his soul passed away. How touching! how solemn! What pen can describe the emotions of this patriot-father as he gazed upon these children, so soon to be made orphans!"

This marks part one of five in the series; check out this three-parter about a famous Crimean war photo.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Curious Cabinetry


From Morbid Anatomy, "the last surviving fragment of the once famed cabinet of Bonnier de la Mosson."

Complete flickr set of the images.

(via boingboing)

Thursday, March 26, 2009

24 Hour Party People


"James Mann got interested in writing about Ronald Reagan when he discovered that, while Reagan was president, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld used to sneak off to undisclosed locations to prepare for Armageddon."


-The Washington Post, 3/26/09

Presenting Hakodate Japan: Where history is felt and beautiful spectacle enclosed by sea



This is how you entice people to visit your city, which in this case is Hakodate, Japan (home of the Comfortable Hakodate Tram Course).

(Endadget via Pink Tentacle)

Malexicon

Brobvious (brōb'vē-əs)
adj. - Apparent or easily understood but only to dudes.

"It's brobvious that hottie is scoping my lats. She's just pretending to read Pynchon."

"What do you mean, 'Should we rent
Ladies in Lavender or Vanishing Point?' The answer is brobvious."


Tracking sushi shot




This is late, I know, these sushi-conveyor-belt movies are already over now. This is the first one I ever saw: It's Lost in a Moment from Dennis Wheatley. Shot back in 1998, I think. There's a chillaxing musical score.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

When Toy Sets Were Better and More Irradiatey


Behold the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab:

"The set came with four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106), a gamma source (Zn-65?), a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an electroscope, a geiger counter, a manual, a comic book (Dagwood Splits the Atom) and a government manual 'Prospecting for Uranium.'"


(as seen on BoingBoing)

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Friday, March 20, 2009

We Should All Be So Lucky


"Sometimes I go backstage during the drum solo and check my fantasy standings."

-Rush bass player and baseball aficionado Geddy Lee (pictured here, just left of center, in his regular seats, wearing sunglasses in the oft-domed Rogers Centre, touching his own Geddyness with his left hand) to EW, 3/20/09

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Throne of Kirk


From yesterday's Thee New York Times Home & Garden section, a profile of people (oddly, all men, like Tod Sturgeon, shown here) who build/own their own Star Trek (TOS) command chair:

“You sit in the chair,” Mike Paugh said, “and you’re watching an episode and pushing buttons and you find yourself saying, Fire photon torpedoes or whatever, and you’re making the sounds yourself because I don’t have the sound effects yet.”

“Personally,” said his wife, Barbara, “I think my husband is a nerd.”


And it turns out that a former employer's vast conglomerate of companies includes one operation that sells these chick magnets.

"For those willing to be a little less hands-on, Diamond Select Toys & Collectibles, a company in Timonium, Md., that specializes in science fiction and comic-book novelties, has just begun selling a ready-to-use model for about $2,700. This version — which the company says it plans to limit to 1,701 pieces, in honor of the Enterprise’s Starfleet registration number — includes light and sound effects emanating from the control knobs, push buttons, rocker switches and a mock intercom on the chair’s boxy armrests."

And lest you think I am mocking, allow me present my credentials, left. That's right.
The rare forest green tunic. Which my parents let me wear to photo day FTW.

Set phasers to "ruthless elementary school beat-down."

PS These are sweet.




Top photo: Susan Seubert for The New York Times

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Rules are rules, bub: No clearance, no putting out the fire next to the liquid hydrogen tank.


From the March 8 LA Times Magazine, some tales of how (not) to run a top secret and volatile-chemical-abundant airplane factory in the middle of Burbank--and how private security personnel have always had great judgment:

"The engineer in charge built what he called his 'own hydrogen-liquefaction plant.' At first, tests began in Dixie cups, but before long the place was producing more liquid hydrogen than anywhere in America. 'We wore grounded shoes and couldn’t carry keys or any metallic objects that might spark,' he recalls. 'We installed a nonexplosive electrical system and used only nonsparking tools.'

Still, storing liquid hydrogen presents a very clear danger. And in the spring of 1959, a stove only 700 feet away from the tank caught fire. Extinguishers were ineffective. When local firefighters showed up, they didn’t have top-secret security clearances, so according to the engineer, the facility’s guards wouldn’t let them on site."

Monday, March 9, 2009

Great Moments In DVD Commentaries For Movies I Will Never See


Via Neatorama:

At one point during the commentary, Baron Davis, point guard for the Clippers, randomly comes in and starts chatting with Adam McKay, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. A good 30 minutes of non-movie related basketball talk ensues, in which I discovered that Baron feels Shaq is the scariest dude to encounter on the court in the NBA. He also does some commentary even though he wasn’t there and had never seen the movie. He refers to John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell as “Adult Cabbage Patch Kids”. Also, Baron did not have bunk beds growing up; he slept on the floor in the living room. You know, just FYI.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Links to the Past


These completely stupendous Baltimore Colts cufflinks belonged to the late, great John Paul Fromm.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

The Laser Pants Books of the Month Club Revue: February


Each month in 2009, I am reading two books (minimum), and posting reviews. One of these books must be "real," in that it cannot be about zombies or musicians.

I will rank the books on a zero to five Laser Pants Bookie Icon scale, zero being the nadir of the written word.









This month: Mollie & Other War Pieces by A.J. Liebling, and Silent Steel by Stephen Johnson.
Look for an independent bookstore at which to purchase these tomes here. I like Atomic Books in Baltimore best.


Mollie & Other War Pieces
288 pages
by A.J. Liebling


Laser Pants Bookie Rating (0 to 5):




Legendary New Yorker correspondent Abbott Joseph Liebling covered a variety of manly topics for that publication starting in 1935, from boxing to politics to war. This book is a compendium of some of his World War II coverage from 1943 and 1944, in northern Africa and the English Channel. The character (literally) who gives the book its title is Karl ("Molotov" or "Mollie") Warner, a peculiar sort of soldier whom Liebling learns about only upon his death. Warner hated rules and the drab uniform of the Army and following orders; he loved making deals, playing cards, dereliction of duty, and using his head in that most illogical of situations, war.

One soldier related Mollie's most legendary exploit to Liebling:

"Like this one time on the road to Maknassy [in southern Tunisia], the battalion was trying to take some hills and we were getting no place. They were just Italians in front of us, but they had plenty of stuff and they were in cover and we were in the open. Mollie stands right up, wearing the cape and the beret with the feather, and he says, 'I bet those Italians would surrender if somebody asked them to. What the hell do they want to fight for?' he says. So he walks across the minefield and up the hill to the Italians, waving his arms and making funny motions, and they shoot at him for a while and then stop, thinking he is crazy. He goes up there yelling 'Veni qua!' which he says afterward is New York Italian for 'Come here!,' and 'Feeneesh la guerre!,' which is French, and when he gets to the Italians he finds a soldier who was a barber in Astoria but went home on a visit and got drafted in the Italian Army, so the barber translates for him and the Italians say sure, they would like to surrender, and Mollie comes back to the lines with five hundred and sixty-eight prisoners."


Liebling researches this tale and discovers that it was, essentially, true.

The second recommended part of the book recounts Liebling's coverage of the D-Day operations on June 6, 1944, aboard a small troop carrying ship. It's tense and horrific and compact, and a fine snapshot of the largest amphibious invasion in history.

The rest can't hold up to the legend of Mollie, alas. In fact, the final section of the book, in which Liebling painstakingly recreates the events leading up to the oafish murder of a small group of French civilians by confused and stupid German troops, proved to be such a tiny stain upon the vile tapestry of travesties and nightmares that the Nazis would later be discovered to have inflicted upon humanity that it seems almost rude.

So, read this book for the legend of Mollie, and the D-Day sections. I'm only rating it on those parts, which is a cop out, but I make the rules around here.


--#--


Silent Steel
The Mysterious Death of the Nuclear Attack Sub USS Scorpion
294 pages
By Stephen Johnson

Laser Pants Bookie Rating (0 to 5):




On May 22, 1968, the USS Scorpion suffered some sort of fatal incident that sank the nuclear-powered submarine, taking the lives of 99 sailors. A definitive reason for the accident has never been established, despite many men and women having devoted years to the investigation. Stephen Johnson, who wrote about the disaster for the Houston Chronicle, has followed the most promising trails to their ends in this book. Suspects include a torpedo that somehow circled back and destroyed the boat; a malfunctioning torpedo; a reactor problem; and even a crappy garbage disposal (one that literally chewed up the mess hall's garbage and ejected it from the sub. Really? They couldn't just keep it in a bucket? I mean, this thing has a tube that leads to the hull! For garbage! I know!).

The research Johnson undertook for this book is beyond reproach; if any question ever arose in either testimony or the written record, it seems that he chased it down. And there's lots of great detail and recreation of what life was like for the men who crewed these nuclear-powered behemoths during the Cold War, often through ocean floors that had not been properly charted (the Scorpion suffered several dings as a result of plowing into unmarked undersea mounts).

While the research and the recreations are great, too often it seems that Johnson is leading us down the path to the real reason for the sub's demise only to have it revealed as yet another dead end or faulty theory. After the third instance of this, I started to get a little cranky as we investigated (very, very thoroughly) what I knew to be an ultimately fruitless idea. It kinda ticked me off. The U.S. Navy's secrecy (warranted) in the matter doesn't help things, as Johnson manages to reveal a lot of previously unknown pieces of information, but must deal with redacted and secret elements that stymie the investigative work.

But there are plenty of interesting, arresting, and humanizing elements in this book. The sailors and officers are filled in as real people, with quirks and fears and opinions and flaws that make the ultimate reasons for the accident as unclear and gray as life in general.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Into the Ovoid



From the YouTube blurb:
The most daring piece of public art ever commissioned in the UK, Turning the Place Over is artist Richard Wilson's most radical intervention into architecture to date, turning a building in Liverpool's city centre literally inside out. One of Wilson's very rare temporary works, Turning the Place Over colonises Cross Keys House, Moorfields. It runs in daylight hours, triggered by a light sensor.

Turning the Place Over consists of an 8 metres diameter ovoid cut from the façade of a building in Liverpool city centre and made to oscillate in three dimensions. The revolving façade rests on a specially designed giant rotator, usually used in the shipping and nuclear industries, and acts as a huge opening and closing 'window', offering recurrent glimpses of the interior during its constant cycle during daylight hours.

Check out Liverpool Biennial for more.


Via Neatorama