Friday Ephemera
A mirror made of wood. No, really. Watch the video. // An impressive collection of navel lint. // African frog with “Wolverine” claws. // Fish acoustics. // The 56K modem emulator. // Musical furnishings. (h/t, Coudal,) // Vintage Bang & Olufsen. // Botanical gardens, Medellín, Colombia. More. // Bicarb: clears drains, detects cancer. (h/t, AC1.) // “Medieval waste studies” – an exciting new arm of academic enquiry. (h/t, Cookslaw.) // The Medieval Sourcebook. // Early visual entertainments. The anorthoscope, the choreutoscope and other phantasmagorias. (h/t, Drawn!) // Build your own Galactus, parts 1 & 2. Not actual size. // Bird’s nest, enlarged somewhat. // The biggest self-portrait on Earth, drawn using GPS. // The International Space Station, seen from 360km below. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // Good news about bad guys. // Terry Glavin on the politics of opposition. // Theodore Dalrymple on multicultural Britain. // Do women really get paid less than men? // Impressive bank vaults. // View any website as a graph. // The UfoCap. // Designer gasmasks. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Xiao-Peng Jiang and the Chinese Orchestra of Shanghai Conservatory.
The navel fluff is so wrong. 😀
I can’t help thinking it would make excellent nesting material.
Isn’t the wooden mirror more correctly a wooden screen or monitor?
A mirror is just one application. Still cool, though.
From Medieval waste studies:
>The perspective he used was the postmodernist discipline of “cultural studies,” which means pushing works of literature (or movies or television shows or ad campaigns or whatever) through a Marxist cheesegrater as examples of the way society conditions its members to accept the views of a dominant class. In Persels’s view, the wine-bottle farce marked a stage in the development of what he called the “bourgeois fecal habitus.” Translated out of postmodern-ese into plain English, that means the tendency of uptight middle-class people not to want to talk in public about matters pertaining to the bathroom and to assume that those who do are kind of crude. “The excretory experience became associated with the proletariat,” Persels explained.< lol
Liamalpha,
Yes, it’s mechanically pleasing, but perhaps not ideal for shaving.
Anna,
That’s the wonderful thing about postmodernist “analysis”. No matter what fine meats you start with, the end result is almost always a nasty pseudo-Marxist slurry.
Brilliant as always.
I should note that the self-portrait using GPS was a hoax – or at least, shall we say, a conceit – as the guy has updated his page to reflect.
“Their true function as defensive weapons only became clear when naturalists first described actually picking up and handling live animals.”
Ah, scientific discovery was more fun back in the old days… 😉
“That’s the wonderful thing about postmodernist ‘analysis’. No matter what fine meats you start with, the end result is almost always a nasty pseudo-Marxist slurry.”
I envisioned “Cloaca” (the machine) turning out PoMo dissertations and other Cyberfeminist bollocks. In one end goes Marx, Kant, Feminism, Culture, etc.; out the other end comes Caroline Guertin prose. Yes, there are interesting bits stuck in the mixture, but only until you realize that you are trying to find the metaphorical corn husk in the fecal prose.
David, you might like these Guardianista comments about Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear.
“Top Gear is just a fifty minute party political broadcast for UKIP.”
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_harris/2008/05/reverse_gear.html#comment-1381862
“Clarkson is the icon the little minds of Little England deserve.”
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_harris/2008/05/reverse_gear.html#comment-1383070
Heh. They do convey the unrealism and resentful condescension we’ve come to know and love. I wrote about the Guardianista hatred of Top Gear, and Clarkson in particular, a while ago:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/11/misery-and-joy.html
George Monbiot, the Guardian’s Grand Poobah of po-faced eco-twattery, accused Clarkson of criminal incitement, which was inadvertently funny. Actually, I think Monbiot and Harris are being disingenuous. I suspect their feelings have more to do with the fact that Clarkson doesn’t pretend the things they feel he, and the rest of us, should pretend. Clarkson’s critics at the Guardian, who are very often male, also object to the programme’s unabashed masculinity, which is, in their eyes, primitive. I suppose that tells us much of what we need to know about at least one strand of Guardianista self-loathing.
“George Monbiot, the Guardian’s Grand Poobah of po-faced eco-twattery, accused Clarkson of criminal incitement, which was inadvertently funny…”
Not half as funny as his feeble stunt to try to arrest John Bolton for ‘war crimes’ at the Hay Festival…
Still, it got him publicity for his next book, which I suppose was what he wanted all along.
Julia,
Yes, I saw. It was a whole new level of preening fatuousness. I was hoping to see Monbiot having his throat trodden on, quite firmly, while Bolton combed his moustache.
http://207.114.86.27/images/darthbolton.gif
“It was a whole new level of preening fatuousness.”
When even Conor Foley thinks your publicity stunt is a waste of time, and devotes his column to attacking you, you know you are on a hiding to nothing:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2008/05/monbiots_silly_stunt.html
I love blue-on-blue incidents in the pages of ‘Comment is Free’… 😉
Incidentally, the same John Harris who takes such a disliking to poor Jeremy Clarkson seems to have become rather smitten with….John Prescott!
He’s a ‘sensitive soul’, it seems.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_harris/2008/05/not_what_i_expected.html
Sensitive, reactionary and incompetent. A winning combination.
Art project done tastefully shocker!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00675/foliage-elephant_675856n.jpg
A herd of life-size elephant sculptures, made of recycled cars and clover foliage, are seen at Inchydoney Island in West Cork, Ireland