Saturday, February 16, 2013

Genius may have its limitations...

Film & Art

What outcome would you expect from splicing together bits and pieces of vintage documentaries and other films into a new and un-narrated film? Granted, I'm a sucker for vintage documentary film like old newsreels or Cold War era nuke stuff or even those films we used to watch in elementary school about any old topic. But Panorama Ephemera is a most interesting creation for the next time you have 90 minutes. I find it simultaneously and paradoxically soothing with an undercurrent of tension.

Are you ready for a CGI remake of How The Grinch Stole Christmas? Look at it this way, it couldn't be any worse than Ron Howard's horrific live action remake from 2000.

Maybe I should be as nonchalant as Julie Andrews is about the remake of Sound of Music.

Piet Mondrian, Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red and Gray, 1921
In a review of MoMA's Inventing Abstraction exhibit we read that artists sought to discard materialism and seek the essence of truth through color.

Come you creative types, share your sins on the Creative Confessional. For example, "I think clip art is gorgeous."

Sips & Nibbles

Bacon couldn't make bourbon taste any worse, right? Coming soon, Old Major Bacon Bourbon. I want to see this reviewed on Booze Dancing.

How many brew quaffing vessels do you really need? Seirra Nevada and Dogfish Head think you need one more beer glass designed specifically for IPAs.

Bits & Bytes

Interested in a computer you wear on your wrist? StormFly is a bootable computer in USB format. Walk up to any computer, plug in the StormFly, and reboot. You can fund their Kickstarter project which is about half way to their goal of $100,000.

Just how good of a programmer are you? Test yourself with this very complete and very descriptive programmer competency matrix from Starling Software. Starling uses this in their interview process which is equally rigorous.

Macula - a typeface and an illusion in one.
Multicolr image search from TinEye Labs is pretty amazing. Choose some colors and the search results consist of Flickr images that use those colors predominantly.

The four hardest computing problems on earth include topics from computational biology, chemistry, cosmology and one other field. (I thought the hardest computing problem was uninstalling Norton Antivirus.)

Take this quiz to find out how geek you really are. Believe it or not, I'm only 52% geek.

Odds & Ends

Map fetish revealed: The United Equally Populated States. I guess I live in the state of Trinity.
Hitler's food taster reveals all. OK, not all. But some. Like he was a vegetarian.

How empty is a vacuum? Not empty enough to preclude the possibility of flashes of light.

What relevant advice could matronly author Amelia Barr have? Seems quite a bit as exemplified by her list of 9 rules for success. #4 Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them.

Music & Lyrics

Vsauce asks the question "Will we ever run out of new music?" Mathematically it seems the answer is no. But practically, the answer seems like we already have. This 10 minute video includes links to several other resources that are worth pursuing (including the bizarre Stairway to Gilligan's Island that I'm listening to now.) But to answer Vsauce's question, I believe it was Quincy Jones who famously said that all melodies have already been written - all that changes is the rhythm.

wajobu reviews Celer's Black Vinyl Series and loves them but I must've missed the boat. I like a good ambient drone as much as the next guy but the first couple of listens didn't raise my sails.

Get out your tie die and your bong for this collection of rare and vintage Pink Floyd videos.

Laurie Anderson has a little chat with Brian Eno about his latest album, Lux.

Whack & Crack

Hawt slug on slug action. The sea slug amputates its disposable penis after mating but has two spares as backups.
With one exception, these 50 things shouldn't be done by anyone regardless of whether they're over 50 or not.

With Valentine's Day in the rear view mirror I'm wondering how many of you fell for the old "diamonds are a girl's best friend" line. Cuz hold on, diamonds are a dude's best bro too. Or more specifically sperm really likes diamonds.

Who is Urjnasw Xkfjjkn and why do you want to know him?

...but stupidity is not thus handicapped. ~Elbert Hubbard

3 comments:

Joel said...

Thank god I can still open a craft beer can by bashing it against my head.

Many. I have about 50 craft beer glasses. Roughly 8-9 of different shapes designed to accentuate the qualities of certain styles. On the fence about the new DH/Sierra Nevada IPA glass though.

Is he Kaiser Sosei?

John said...

I suppose drinking from the bottle is out of the question.

He is... enigmatic.

Urjnasw Xkfjjkn said...

Thank you very much for the shoutout in your blog post.

If I had to describe myself I guess I'd say that I'm just Urjnasw Xkfjjkn, someone who's trying to share their thoughts about things with the world.

If you wanted to know more about me, you could follow me on twitter: @afakeLadyGaga (aren't we all fake Lady Gagas?)