One for camera enthusiasts. A Nikon D3 very neatly cut in half. 

(h/t, Dr Westerhaus)

Baby, toys and time-lapse. // A year in photographs: 1, 2, 3. // Age your photos. // Zoom into this 1,474 megapixel image. (h/t, TDK) // Leap between buildings on Google Earth. // It’s a rainbow, or a cloud with a tractor beam. // Your very own Louis Vuitton caviar case. // How bacon is made. // Unfeasible teapot. // Fun with centrifuges. // Red square, a game. (h/t, Tim) // The perils of electrocution. (h/t, Things) // The scourge of cello scrotum. (h/t, Ephemeral Zed) // The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. (1962) // The eyeballing game. // Jazzmutant. More. (h/t, Coudal) // TV science fiction from the Seventies. // Asian film posters. // Alan Moore, avert your eyes. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Henry Mancini. 

Readers with an interest in visual culture should visit the blog of Eye magazine. While you’re there, you could even take a minute or two to read my post on the art world’s rhetorical flummery:

Take artist Aliza Shvarts, for example, who rose to fleeting prominence last year with a work that purported to involve “repeated, self-induced miscarriages”. She described her efforts thus: “This piece – in its textual and sculptural forms – is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a [sic] independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse… It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership.”

It isn’t clear how form or function can ‘converge’ on the body, not least because the human body is already a form with numerous functions. Can function, strictly speaking, ‘converge’ on anything at all? Can ambiguity be a ‘focus’ and ‘isolate’ something else – something that is terribly important but unclear and at no point explained? Despite such mysteries, one thing is unambiguous. Ms Shvarts believes that the extract above is itself a work of art: “The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above…”

The rest.

More musical oddments from the ephemera archives.

Valaida Snow: Caravan. (1939)

Margaret Whiting & Johnny Mercer: Baby, It’s Cold Outside. (1949)

The Vince Guaraldi Trio: Linus and Lucy. (1965)

Astrud Gilberto: Agua de Beber. (1965)

Burl Ives: Ugly Bug Ball. (1963)

Ray Charles: It Should Have Been Me. (1954)

Lalo Schifrin: Shifting Gears. (1968)

The Flying Lizards: Money. (1979)

Les 5 De l’Harmonica: In the Mood. (Circa 1947)

Annette Lajon: Chanson Gitane. (1942)

By all means add your own. Previous mixtapes here, here and here. 

Having noted this site’s frequent references to fine meat products, Anna thinks we should see how hot dogs are made. Brace yourself for the “liquid smoke shower” and alarming quantities of thick, pink slurry, otherwise known as “meat batter”.

Don’t look directly at it, children.