[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GYW5G2kbrKk&w=700] Saw this on Blackie's FB wall. Lovely. Made me well up. And then I found out it's a fake.
By Ross Murray on McSweeney's:
2035 hours: Engine of Zodiac is cut as Navy SEAL unit arrives at rendezvous point, 16.2 miles off coast of Somalia where pirates have commandeered private American yacht. In abrupt silence, suddenly feel self-conscious and stop singing 20-minute rendition of “Wavy Wave Wave” song.
2038 hours: Commander recaps rescue plan for unit: don swim gear, approach captured American yacht by stern, board vessel, discharge small explosives, disable Somali pirates by lethal force, rescue two hostages below deck, rendezvous with helicopter support. Commander calls for questions. Complain that no dolphins have yet been sighted, as promised.
2042 hours: Put on flippers but refuse to insert snorkel. “It’s spitty.” Commander repeats order. “No, it’s yucky. I’ll puke.” Commander issues menacing threat. Insert snorkel while making exaggerated gagging sounds.
2043 hours: Sulk in corner of Zodiac.
2047 hours: Waiting for deployment, Ens. Klemphorn talks quietly and nervously about mission, how he’s prepared for death but is more worried about disappointing comrades and never being able to tell his family that he tried his best; wonders if it was all a mistake. Reply, “I’m going to kill smelly pirates! Look: duck feet!”
2050 hours: Commander gives “go” signal for unit to begin dive. Slowly descend feet-first into water because getting bellybutton wet is the worst.
2051 hours: Begin surface swim towards stranded yacht. Quickly suffer fatigue. Remove icky snorkel and ask Klemphorn if he’ll piggyback swim. Climb on teammate’s back. Ask Klemphorn to dive to bottom like a whale.
2103 hours: Unit glides silently to stern of yacht. Night is still, save for lapping of waves against hull and muffled sound of music from radio on board. Make bum bubbles in water. Try to suppress giggle. Fail.
2104 hours: Commander looks over, makes circular motion around eyes, points forward. Wave back.
2106 hours: Controlled military assault begins on captured yacht. SEALs scale side of boat. Ask for boost.
2108 hours: Manage to get on board. Flashes, screams and explosions punctuate the darkness. Feel all drippy. Yell “I’m wet!” to no one in particular. Conveniently find towel lying on deck. Sound of running and gunfire. Tie corner of towel around neck. Announce, “I’m Batman!”
2115 hours: Commander rushes over with sidearm drawn. Screams in face about focusing on mission and retrieving hostages below deck. Notice commander has boogers. Reply, “You’re a grumpypants.”
2118 hours: Descend cabin stairs on bum. Open door to find hostages cowering in corner. Hostages ask, “What’s happening? Who are you?” Reply, “I’m a SEAL. But not like a seal at the zoo. I went to the zoo once and there were this many seals.” Hold up both hands. “They swimmed fast. I can swim fast but I get tired. I know what ‘seal’ is in French. It’s ‘phoque.’ Phoque, phoque, phoque, phoque, phoque, phoque. We’re killing the smelly pirates. Is this where there’s treasure?”
2121 hours: With captors eliminated, hostages scramble above deck as helicopter support arrives. SEAL team straps hostages into rescue harness. Tug on commander’s jacket. Ask where the treasure is.
2133 hours: Return to base in helicopter. Tell Klemphorn, “This is two times I’m in a helicopter!” Assuage disappointment over lack of pirate treasure with well-chilled juice box. Stare out window, scanning ocean for dolphins. Mermaids will also do. Feel excited because commander has mentioned something about a courtmarshmallow.
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Read more of these here.
Nice bit of Yeats for a Friday: [youtube=http://youtu.be/wejEEciHlDQ&w=700]
HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
Down the side alley by the covered bit of Portobello market there used to be a dude selling mix tapes. He had a panama hat, one speaker turned up quite loud, and would whack away on a tambourine whilst purveying the purest funk and rare groove. He looked a bit like Norman Jay (maybe it actually was him). In 1994 I bought a tape off him. Not just any old tape either. It had some serious belters on it, including one funk track that was well over 10 minutes long. I put it in my auto-reverse Walkman when I left on my travels, backpacking around the world. I listened to it on Samosir and by lake Maninjau in Sumatra, I cruised to it in Waihi and dozed to it in Fiji.
And then one day, a few years later, the tape disappeared. With it went the song. Echoes of it stayed with me - I'd hear it at the oddest times, bouncing round and round in my head, a real ear worm.
Until just now when I typed the lyrics into Google (which I'd tried every so often for years) and it turned out that last year some absolute genius had added them to a lyrics database, and HEY PRESTO, Tim Maia sings "Rational Culture". Not the full version but a good 9.57 of it. The cycle is broken, I'm free of the ear worm at last! Sometimes I just LOVE the internet.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCgB30cWX3A&w=700]
Listen to it. It's marvellous. Turns out poor Tim Maia died back in 1998, but he was a goody, and he deserves to be played as much as possible.
EDIT - Here's another version, this time with the intro. Doesn't seem to be a full one up there:
[youtube=http://youtu.be/u1hN-vJ3HsU&w=700]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpRb63Sm4L4&w=700] "Cool Water" was written by Bob Nolan and first recorded by his group, The Sons Of The Pioneers, in 1941. Since then it has been recorded by many others, among them The Andrews Sisters, Eddy Arnold, Gene Autry, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Walter Brennan, Bing Crosby, Fleetwood Mac, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Lorne Greene, Burl Ives, Tom Jones, Patti LaBelle, Frankie Laine, Nellie Lutcher, Billy May, George Melachrino & his Orchestra, Vaughn Monroe, Johnnie Ray, Tex Ritter, Marty Robbins, Roy Rogers, Kate Smith, Hank Snow, Wesley Tuttle, Slim Whitman and Hank Williams.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/xusdWPuWAoU&w=700] View this at 1080 and full screen if you can.
This visualisation shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 to Decemeber 2007. The goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience.
It was produced using NASA/JPL's computational model, Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II or ECCO2. ECCO2 is a high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice. ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans. The ECCO2 model simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualisation.
The dark patterns under the ocean represent the undersea bathymetry. Topographic land exaggeration is 20x and bathymetric exaggeration is 40x.
My favourite bit is the equator at around 1.39.
"The oceans thru the eyes of Van Gogh", says one viewer.
credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Things
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public. There are worse things than these miniature betrayals, committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things than not being able to sleep for thinking about them. It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.
This is by Fleur Adcock. She wrote it in December 1973 - right in the middle of the Winter of Discontent. As she says in "Poem for the Day 2" (where I spotted it): "There were power cuts, a rail strike, shortages of every kind (a note in my diary on the 15th says that I managed to buy the last oil lamo in East Finchley). I had a cold, an elderly friend had just died, and all was bleak. The occasion for the poem was probably some minor cause for embarrassment that was keeping me awake, bet then all the more serious matters came crowding in. I thought other people would recognise the sentiments."
But then, you read something like this and look out of the window on a nice sunny day, and think about the walk you're going to have by the river or the lovely family you're about to see, and it seems a little silly to let those things come stalking in. I love this poem. You can read it in a funny way too. It makes me feel better.
Charming series by Charles Paul Wilson III on Deviant Art.
Click on a pic below to launch the gallery. I think "Werm Hole Exparimunt" is my favourite.
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[youtube=http://youtu.be/e8P1Y1a7-L4&w=700]
Says the artist, Rob Rickett "A series of informative posters detailing how some of the most notable drum sequences were programmed using the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine. Each sequence has been analyzed and represented as to allow users to re-programme each sequence, key for key.
"If you would like an A3 print please send a mail to shop@robricketts.co.uk and I will email you as soon as some become available."
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Below is extract edited from an excellent article in the Smithsonian magazine. I strongly recommend you read the whole thing.
The executioners of the Ottoman Empire were never noted for their mercy; just ask the teenage Sultan Osman II, who in May 1622 suffered an excruciating death by “compression of the testicles”–as contemporary chronicles put it–at the hands of an assassin known as Pehlivan the Oil Wrestler. There was reason for this ruthlessness, however; for much of its history (the most successful bit, in fact), the Ottoman dynasty flourished—ruling over modern Turkey, the Balkans and most of North Africa and the Middle East—thanks in part to the staggering violence it meted out to the highest and mightiest members of society.
Seen from this perspective, it might be argued that the Ottomans’ decline set in early in the 17th century, when they abandoned the “law of fratricide” drawn up by Mehmed II in the middle of the 15th century. Under the terms of this remarkable piece of legislation, whichever member of the ruling dynasty succeeded in seizing the throne on the death of the old sultan was enjoined to murder all his brothers (together with any inconvenient uncles and cousins) in order to reduce the risk of subsequent rebellion and civil war. Although it was not invariably applied, Mehmed’s law resulted in the deaths of at least 80 members of the House of Osman over a period of 150 years. These victims included all 19 siblings of Sultan Mehmed III—some of whom were still infants at the breast, but all of whom were strangled with silk handkerchiefs immediately after their brother’s accession in 1595.
For all its deficiencies, the law of fratricide ensured that the most ruthless of the available princes generally ascended to the throne. That was more than could be said of its replacement, the policy of locking up unwanted siblings in the kafes (“cage”), a suite of rooms deep within the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. Ottoman royals were kept imprisoned there until they were needed, sometimes several decades later, consoled in the meantime by barren concubines and permitted only a strictly limited range of recreations, the chief of which was macramé. This, the later history of the empire amply demonstrated, was not ideal preparation for the pressures of ruling one of the greatest states the world has ever known.
For many years, the Topkapi (above) palace itself paid mute testimony to the grand extent of Ottoman ruthlessness. Visitors had to pass through the Imperial Gate, on either side of which were two niches where the heads of recently executed criminals were always on display. Inside the gate stood the First Court, through which all visitors to the inner portions of the palace had to pass. This court was open to all the sultan’s subjects, and it seethed with an indescribable mass of humanity. Any Turk had the right to petition for redress of his grievances, and several hundred agitated citizens usually surrounded the kiosks at which harassed scribes took down their complaints. The focal point was a pair of “example stones” positioned directly outside the Central Gate, which led to the Second Court. These “stones” were actually marble pillars on which were placed the severed heads of notables who had somehow offended the sultan, stuffed with cotton if they had once been viziers or with straw if they had been lesser men. Reminders of the sporadic mass executions ordered by the sultan were occasionally piled up by the Central Gate as additional warnings: severed noses, ears and tongues.
Capital punishment was so common in the Ottoman Empire that there was a Fountain of Execution in the First Court, where the chief executioner and his assistant went to wash their hands after decapitating their victims — ritual strangulation being reserved for members of the royal family and their most senior officials. This fountain “was the most feared symbol of the arbitrary power of life and death of the sultans over their subjects, and was hated and feared accordingly,” the historian Barnette Miller wrote. It was used with particular frequency during the reign of Sultan Selim I—Selim the Grim (1512-20)—who, in a reign of eight short years, went through seven grand viziers (the Ottoman title for a chief minister) and ordered 30,000 lesser executions.
The job of executioner was held by the Sultan’s bostancı basha (left), or head gardener — the Ottoman corps of gardeners being a sort of 5,000-strong bodyguard that, aside from cultivating the Sultan’s paradise gardens, doubled up as customs inspectors and police officers. It was the royal gardeners who sewed condemned women into weighted sacks and dropped them into the Bosphorus—another Sultan, Ibrahim the Mad (1640-48), once had all 280 of the women in his harem executed this way simply so he could have the pleasure of selecting their successors—and the tread of an approaching group of bostancıs, wearing their traditional uniform of red skull caps, muslin breeches and shirts cut low to expose muscular chests and arms, heralded death by strangulation or decapitation for many thousands of Ottoman subjects down the years.
When very senior officials were sentenced to death, they would be dealt with by the bostancı basha in person, but — at least toward the end of the sultans’ rule — execution was not the inevitable result of a death sentence. Instead, the condemned man and the bostancı basha took part in what was surely one of the most peculiar customs known to history: a race held between the head gardener and his anticipated victim, the result of which was, quite literally, a matter of life or death for the trembling grand vizier or chief eunuch required to undertake it.
How this custom came about remains unknown. From the end of the eighteenth century, however, accounts of the bizarre race began to emerge from the seraglio, and these seem reasonably consistent in their details. Death sentences passed within the walls of the Topkapi were generally delivered to the head gardener at the Central Gate; Godfrey Goodwin describes the next part of the ritual thus:
It was the bostancibaşi‘s duty to summon any notable.… When the vezir or other unfortunate miscreant arrived, he well knew why he had been summoned, but he had to bite his lip through the courtesies of hospitality before, at long last, being handed a cup of sherbet. If it were white, he sighed with relief, but if it were red he was in despair, because red was the color of death.
For most of the bostancıs’ victims, the sentence was carried out immediately after the serving of the fatal sherbet by a group of five muscular young janissaries, members of the sultan’s elite infantry. For a grand vizier, however, there was still a chance: as soon as the death sentence was passed, the condemned man would be allowed to run as fast as he was able the 300 yards or so from the palace, through the gardens, and down to the Fish Market Gate on the southern side of the palace complex, overlooking the Bosphorus, which was the appointed place of execution.
If the deposed vizier reached the Fish Market Gate before the head gardener, his sentence was commuted to mere banishment. But if the condemned man found the bostanci basha waiting for him at the gate, he was summarily executed and his body hurled into the sea.
Ottoman records show that the strange custom of the fatal race lasted into the early years of the nineteenth century. The last man to save his neck by winning the life-or-death sprint was the Grand Vizier Hacı Salih Pasha, in November 1822. Hacı — whose predecessor had lasted a mere nine days in office before his own execution — not only survived his death sentence, but was so widely esteemed for winning his race that he went on to be appointed governor general of the province of Damascus.
(do read the whole article here)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvHOXiP9O_Y&w=700] Clement Freud has perfect timing.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/38840688 w=700&h=380] "The limits of the Kinect's unintended uses are explore again in this beautiful experimental piece by Daniel Franke. Using three Kinect's, Daniel recorded a dancer going through a routine before feeding the point data into a visualizer, adding sound distortion, random seeding of frames and post processing. The final performance is an uncanny visual spectacle, featuring a flowing form attempting to maintain a solid shape with every reset."
"The three-dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective. The camera also reacts to the sound and supports the physical imitation of the musical piece by the performer. She moves to a noise field, where a simple modification of the random seed can consistently create new versions of the video, each offering a different composition of the recorded performance. The multi-dimensionality of the sound sculpture is already contained in every movement of the dancer, as the camera footage allows any imaginable perspective."
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...in today's FT. Coverline and everything!
In 1966-7 my Dad got a job as a young reporter for the Daily Mail's Manchester office, just as it was made Newspaper of the Year. All staff received the memo below from editor Mike Randall. When Dad sent it to me, he added: "Mike Randall left the paper soon afterwards. It became a tabloid and in ethical terms its downhill slide began. However, I think Randall's statement still stands as the model of propriety to which all journalists working for all media should aspire."
I couldn't agree more - and it's certainly how I'd hope people expect writers to behave. I'd add though that in the 15 years I've been writing, I haven't noticed nearly as much awareness of the dangers of libel, sensationalism and indiscretion in young journos as was drilled into [my generation of] pre-internet trainees. I don't think Twitter and the pressure of instant comment helps much though.
[EDITED TRANSCRIPT] 1. No member of the staff intrudes or is called to intrude into private lives where no public interest is involved.
2. No ordinary member of the public is lured, coerced or in any way pressed by a Daily Mail representative into giving an interview or picture which he is clearly unwilling to give.
3. It remains our duty at all times to expose the fraud and reveal the mountebank wherever public interest is involved.
4. In the reporting of Divorce Cases we use our own and not the Judge's discretion. We give details only where the case and the summing up are of valid legal or public interest. We do not at at any time carry reports which merely hold either party up to ridicule or reveal aspects of their private lives which cannot be any concern of the public.
5. No member of the Daily Mail invents quotes or uses subterfuge to obtain quotes.
6. We are not in business to suppress news. Where anybody is guilty of withholding information that ought to be made public we use every legitimate method to give our readers that information.
7. Daily Mail staff do not allow themselves to be used as vehicles for the promotion of publicity stunts which have no legitimate news value.
8. Anyone who works for the Daily Mail should be watchdog of ours standards and a person who commands public respect.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/35962187 w=700&h=390] Visualtraveling presents 'Holy Cow' a short ten minute piece summarizing a month long journey through the chromatic & chaotic countries of South Asia. Some really rocking shots in here.
Pushing and on board were Walker Ryan, Laurence Keefe, Michael Mackrodt and Kenny Reed.
Directed, filmed & edited by Patrik Wallner
For more info go to visualtraveling.com
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/18022468 w=700&h=700] [vimeo http://vimeo.com/36330801 w=700&h=470]
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(Via LikeCOOL)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kir3jsBfRCk&w=700] Take Away Show medley.
Jump in at 01.47 to skip the preamble, then again at 07.50ish (last one's a slow burn, in fact it's not that good, just watch the first one).
[youtube=http://youtu.be/Uk9ptueTDwY&w=700] Apart from anything else, this is a fantastic look at the ISS - mind-boggling!