Un-Pimp My Ride

This just in from the "Corporate World Co-opting and Mainstreaming Ghetto Subculture But Going One Up On It" department... Yup. The viral marketing geniuses over at VW have done it again with these three totally genius spots for the new VW GTI Mark V. @#$@kin' GREAT ads. This time, unlike the "Polo suicide bomber" ads, they're legit.

Here's hoping these "lame" ride drivin' pimp daddies take Deutschland Snoop's advice and "drop it like it's hot."

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Cool Gizmo: Podzinger

Podzinger. So many pods, so little time. Why not use their proprietary voice recognition algorithm to search for and find relevant things you're interested in? This sort of reminds me of TVEyes, which sort of does the same thing for TV, radio and finds video clips on the 'net.

Know any other cool gizmos? Modify this post...

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Neutral Milk Hotel

I just saw this over on MetaFilter: Neutral Milk Hotel demos, videos, and bootlegs. Brainchild of enigmatic, now-reclusive singer/songwriter Jeff Mangum (not Magnum!), the "fuzz-folk" project known as Neutral Milk Hotel began and ended in the 90s and only released two LPs, but is still held as a touchstone by many indie rock critics. More live recordings can be found at the site for Elephant 6, the collective which included NMH and other bands like Beulah, Circulatory System, Elf Power, and Apples in Stereo. The complete discography and more MP3s. Some lyrics. (Previously)

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Cool: Holograms

|ƒvƒ‰ƒYƒ}‚Ì”­Œõ‚ð—p‚¢‚āgƒŠƒAƒ‹‚È‚RŽŸŒ³(3D)‰f‘œh‚Ì‹óŠÔ•`‰æ‚ɐ¬Œ÷|!

Oops, I mean: Technology of carrying out the focus of the laser beam all over space, plasma-izing air and making it emitting light The technology which controls the luminosity, contrast, and generation distance of the plasma to generate is developed. It succeeds in displaying "a real 3-dimensional (3D) image" on the space which does not exist at all except air for the first time in the world.

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Dante, the Hypnotist

This is easily one of the most fascinating articles I've ever read.

What is it like to have someone attach themselves to the essence of who you are, and feed off that essence for the rest of your life and beyond, like a vampire sucking your nourishment? And what if you became rich and famous and this vampire on your essence also became rich and famous, so that no one could ever remember you without remembering them?
Once upon a time in the west there was a stage hypnotist named Dr Michael Dean...

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Neverland, Amerika

That Old Chimp Called Himself Sarge
Originally uploaded by xylonets.

This is the most amazing, surreal, filmlike set of photos I've ever seen on Flickr. Somewhere between beautiful and terrifying, this guy's imagination impresses me no end.

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The truth about cowboys...

Willie Nelson tells all.



(I used to like Pansy Division's version of the song, but Willie's version beats it by a mile.)

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Rasterbator

Want a poster the size of [insert 'size of' here]? Enter: Rasterbator. It allows you to "Posterize" or, rather, "Poster Size" just about any image, even if it's a relatively low-res JPG. This is especially amazing as usually, larger images require huge resolution/file sizes or, more often than not, require large committments to layout and vectors.

.

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Damn, Mexico City is BIG!

Damn, Mexico City is BIG! These pictures totally remind me of Sim City (cool fan site). Speaking of SC, I can't wait to play SuperPower 2, the "global geopilitical simulator."

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What a great house!

Oh man... I can so totally see myself living here:

"The Round House," Richard Foster's architectural masterpiece, rotates 360 degrees at the push of a button to offer lovely views of the pond, rolling landscape & reservoir

A bargain at $2.5 million!

Actually, I think it's cool that the place is still available for someone to live in. I've always been kind of torn on that point about Fallingwater... I think it's so cool that the Kaufman family wanted to share it with the rest of the world, but it's also kind of sad that only one family ever lived in what may be the perfect residence.

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The Soft Bulletin 5.1

So I got The Flaming Lips' surround sound 5.1 version of The Soft Bulletin as a birthday present to myself, and it's as awesome as one would expect. :)



The track listing is slightly different from the original album, including one song that isn't on the original, and not including the remixes of "Race For The Prize" and "Waitin' For A Superman" (which makes sense, with the whole album being one big remix).

I'll list both in the complete post.



BTW, the 5.1 version also comes with an audio CD of the album (in stereo, not surround, obviously) and it uses the new tracklisting as well.

ORIGINAL ALBUM LISTING:

1. Race For The Prize (Remix)
2. A Spoonful Weighs A Ton
3. The Spark That Bled
4. The Spiderbite Song
5. Buggin' (Remix)
6. What Is The Light?
7. The Observer
8. Waitin' For A Superman
9. Suddenly Everything Has Changed
10. The Gash Listen
11. Feeling Yourself Disintegrate
12. Sleeping On The Roof
13. Race For The Prize
14. Waitin' For A Superman (Remix)

5.1 VERSION TRACK LISTING:

1. Race For The Prize
2. A Spoonful Weighs A Ton
3. The Spark That Bled
4. Slow Motion (not on the original album)
5. What Is The Light?
6. The Observer
7. Waitin' For A Superman
8. Suddenly Everything Has Changed
9. The Gash
10. Feeling Yourself Disintigrate
11. Sleeping On The Roof
12. The Spiderbite Song
13. Buggin'

Also included are the "Waitin'" and "Race" videos, 4 radio sessions, and three album outtakes, all in stereo, plus the aforementioned audio CD as a separate disc.

I'm hoping their next album, At War With The Mystics, was recorded with the 5.1 version as a part of the original process, so both will be released at or near the same time, but I haven't heard if that'll be the case or not.

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MMMmmm, astroturf

Okay, some of the little cakes and bon-bons on this page look tasty, but this is just scary-looking. Babelfish provides this translation of the text:

Fragrance of powdered tea or roll cloth
* Commodity explanation...
�吾�с�����若�冴�帥�ゃ�� to burn politely moistly it was fragrant in �� dust cloth and mixed the high first class powdered tea, color the refreshing roll cake. Fresh winding the black bean of the Tanba product in the raw cream.

OK, make that "Mmmm, roll cloth."

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Look what I found....

nickel
Originally uploaded by lee_3dhighway.

...in my pocket after eating at a Mexican restaurant with my mom. A real buffalo nickel, from 1919!

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Cool Gizmo: Laser Record Player

Want those records to last forever? The laser record player is here to save the day. It'll play recods without even touching them. Nifty (my only criticism here is, though, that the thing won't play laser discs, too).
.

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Bubble

Wow... I've just seen Steven Soderbergh's new movie, Bubble, which has gotten some press for being released in theaters, on DVD, and on cable TV all in the same week. I picked up the DVD last weekend at Target.



(More in the complete post)

In a word: brilliant. It's not going to be to everyone's taste, particularly because the plot is very slowly paced, and the editing is extremely spare. But if you give it time, this movie will burn itself into your brain, for many reasons.

Visually, the film is wonderful. All the locations used are real, and most were shot with available light, but the framing (most of the time the camera remains static) makes fast food restaurants, mobile homes, a bakery, and the doll factory look like monuments. Some of the scenes of doll manufacture are surreal and unsettling.

The actors are all non-professionals, cast from the small Ohio town where Soderbergh and his team found the doll factory that the characters work in. The film was shot sequentially, and the actors often didn't know about plot points that were going to unfold in the scene they were about to shoot. The acting can be a little awkward at times, but the characters these people are playing are also awkward, so it comes across as natural. Two of the scenes, one where a character is accused of a murder, and another where an elderly man hears of the first character's arrest, are so subtle and powerful that I had to jump back and watch them twice. (In fact I watched the whole film twice this afternoon, and may very well watch it again tomorrow.) Having spent a lot of my growing-up years in a small town, I thought this movie had one of the most realistic depictions of small-town life I've ever seen on film.

I'd highly recommend this to anyof y'all looking for something a little unusual and very, very effective.

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Was 9/11 CIA Orchestrated? Uh, No.

We've all seen the stupid little movies and Flash animations and whatnot about whether the government orchestrated 9/11, so many times so in fact that I'm not going to bother linking them all here. But I found this article titled How To Stalk Your Girl/Boyfriend, James Bond Style (which of course I would never do), which, appropriately enough, is self explanatory when I throw in the terms "GPS" and "CELL PHONE."

-*YAWN*-

But still, I was curious about the technology, how it's being used and what its ethical ramifications might be, etc., and I did a wee bit of snooping around. OK, it can catch bank robbers. Or track other things (like dogs, children, trucks, employees and other assets? How about a fascinating way to track air pollution?)... we all know this. And, uh, so you might be wondering, how does this relate to my opinion that the CIA wouldn't have had the brains necessary to have planned and executed 9/11? Oh, just a hunch...

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It's... CLAMP MAN!

Pre-Blog Note: Appparently, I'm 2 years off on this post (and it's already been on CNN, but this still kills me. --C5)

Who's going to take on the 'cowboy clampers'? It's Clamp Man! (a must-see link)

That's right. Apparently in the UK there's a problem with hooligan businessmen who'll clamp your car and then demand an outrageous fee to release your car. Apparently, "clamping" (what we call the 'Boot' here) is unregulated there as long as it's on private property. But, as usual, a few people take it a bit too far.

Clamp Man's answer? Just call him. He'll cut your clamp for free. And that's not all!

"I may not be able to single-handedly and totally cast off the repressive shackles of a corrupt government - but I can cut off your wheel-clamps for you."

He's not the only amateur superheroes, either.

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Mathematics is elegant, romantic

To most people, getting emotional about mathematics makes about as much sense as being moved by a tax return. But to Justin Mullins, equations can contain a profound personal beauty. An exhibition of his "mathematical photography" opens in London Wednesday.

According to Mr Mullins, what mathematicians traditionally call beauty is not visual but a conceptual elegance - for example, an equation that uses few assumptions or gives an original insight. And plenty of others seem to agree. His three-month-old website has already received nearly 2m hits.

Check his site out. It's really cool, especially with the little blurbs here and there. I especially liked the one about entanglement. And what is an Aleph? Why, it's a transfinite number, of course.

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Everest 1924: Where's the Camera?

Everyone knows that Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tensing Norgay were the first humans to reach Earth's highest point: the summit of Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Right? We all know that. After all, I've seen, personally, Sir Edmond's axe on display at the Explorer's Club in New York City (where I three months trying, unsuccessfully, to convince them to re-do their website).

On June 8, 1924, one of the first real assaults on the Everest summit met with... mystery.

George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine left their tent high up on the slopes of Mount Everest and climbed into history. They were seen at 12:50 pm just 800 feet from the summit and "going strong for the top". Within minutes, Mallory and Irvine had disappeared in a snowstorm and were never seen alive again.

What happened to these two pioneering climbers is perhaps the most famous mystery in the history of mountaineering. For over 75 years there has been fierce debate over whether they were the first to reach the summit, doing so 29 years before Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. In March 1999 an expedition primarily sponsored by the BBC climbed to the North Face of Everest. The discoveries of this expedition became front page news around the world.

Did George Leigh Mallory Summit Mt Everest? What happened? George's climbing partner Sandy had a Kodak VPK camera (pictured below) with him. Is it still on Everest? According to experts at Kodak, the film inside the camera recorded only blue and green light wavelengths, so it could still potentially produce a salvagable image. A 2005 expedition to the top did not find the camera, but as you can see above, they did find George.

Although it all made for an interesting book (and a damned cool Web page, with audio soundbites), the mystery endures. The camera that Mallory is reputed to have taken up with him was not found with his body. It is quite possible that he gave it to Irvine, who was much more practical than Mallory. Somewhere on the North Face of Everest still lies the body of Andrew Irvine, undisturbed since 1975, and possibly still holding the secret of their remarkable and heroic attempt on Everest in 1924.

Footnote: The Una Tropical Hand Camera belonging to John Noel (pictured,right), the explorer who took the last known photo of the pair, was recently sold at auction(cool pic) by Christie's of London.

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New Orleans: Dark Tide II

I'm sure a lot of people on the list have heard about the 1919 Boston Molasses Flood, but I was reading a book review about the flood by Stephen Puleo, titled, "Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919." And whatever I read in the book's review, the most fascinating thing was that, although the flood that happened almost a century ago, to me, the conclusions drawn by the Boston flood investigation seem pretty darned relevant to Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans.

There's a quote about halfway through this book review that particularly jumped out at me. Judge Wilfred Bolster, in his report on the criminal inquest into the events of January 15, 1919 (which led to the eventual lawsuit against US Industrial Alcohol), "blasted the public for its failure both to adequately fund its city inspection departments and to insist on qualified people to staff them":

"The chief blame rests upon the public itself [ ... ] This single accident has cost more in material damage alone than all the supposed economics in the building department. Laws are cheap of passage, costly of importance. They do not execute themselves. A public which, with one eye on the tax rate, provides itself with an administrative equipment 50 percent qualified, has no right to complain that is does not get a 100 percent product - and so far as it accepts political influence as the equivalent of scientific positions which demand such attainment in a high degree, so long it must expect breakdowns in its machinery."

Why is that interesting to me? And what does that have to do with New Orleans? From the "relevant" link above (which I read a good while back but did not then see the correlations between Katrina and the Boston disaster), this quote jumped out at me:

The problem is the US is full of dozens if not hundreds of such "0.5%" events. Each one, if it happened, would be a monumental loss; each one, taken separately, has a favorable ROI if that event happened. For example, fortifying all of California to handle a Richter 9.0 earthquake. Or even a Richter 8.0. Fortifying the middle of the US to handle a Richter 8.0 if (when) the New Madrid fault lets loose again. Closer to (my) home, fortifying most of the Midwest to better withstand a Category 5 tornado. Fortifying the East Coast to withstand a tsunami of the magnitude of the last Indonesia tsunami. And so on and so on and so on...

But the US can't afford to budget for each and every one of these events. As one pundit reported, politics is the sordid business of, however unfairly, setting priorities with limited funds in a world of unlimited projects. We can't plan and build for every "once in every two centuries (99.5%) events" that might happen anywhere in the US.

Was the Katrina disaster the fault of political bungling, underfunding and public negligence as well? In the end, is the public itself culpable, with FEMA, the Federal and state and local governments serving their intended purpose as scapegoats?

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