How Wings are Attached to the Backs of Angels is a wonderful animated (short) film by Craig Welch and the National Film Board of Canada (nfb). The nfb has a reputation for releasing great animation such as this. “How Wings…” reminds me of Edward Gorey, but it stands on its own.
See:
Note: this film comes in standard and high quality. The high quality shows through here, so watch that version.
While many of the videos from the 80s seem…well, so 80s.. this one has always seemed timeless to me. It’s quite a simple video, but the water and the motion and the minimal setting make it captivating. I also wondered what it must have been like to be so cold — see their breath — and yet so soaking wet.
Great band, great name, great song. Enjoy Heaven (how could you not?):
CNN has striking footage of Turkish journalists being shot while recently covering the outbreak of war in Georgia.
Turkish journalists attacked in Georgia – CNN.com
It’s a terrible reminder of how dangerous war coverage is for journalists. It also never fails to amaze me how quickly and awfully things can turn out in such places.
If you like LOL Cats, you will like LOL Bush. And even if you have NEVER heard of LOL Cats, check out:
LOL Bush: The president at the Olympics
Thanks to guardian.co.uk
One thing I’ve always liked about Style at Home magazine was their articles on small spaces. I went there today to check out doing some new things with their web site (like the blog written by my friend, Laurie! 🙂 ) As I was exploring the site, I found numerous articles on small spaces, all here:
This is great, as is the site in general. Go take a look!
An interesting fact about how keeping Pigeons on the pill in California dramatically decreased the number of them in the city.
I wonder if this would work for rats, squirrels and racoons?
Bell (Canada) is doing a number of good things lately. One I particularly approve of this: Bell Internet customers now get free Wi-Fi Internet access with no time limits at over 650 Starbucks locations.
It’s a very appealing offer. Better still, the page describing it:
Bell Sympatico Internet at Starbucks- bell.ca
..is clear and easy to understand.
So, full marks for Bell on this.
Catherine Feeny has some lovely music, including one of my recent favourites, “Mr. Blue”. She also has a well made site on MySpace.com. For people who hate the look of MySpace, consider hers here:
MySpace.com – Catherine Feeny – Pop / Folk / Rock – www.myspace.com/catherinefeeny
Go see. And listen, too. Your eyes and ears deserve it.
I honestly don’t know what to say. See for yourself at Gizmodo:
Olympic Fail: Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird’s Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting
James Fallows is a blogger over at theAtlantic.com who is great source for anyone interested in the Beijing Olympics. However, he also wrote this article on how he bypass the restrictions placed on him by the Great Firewall of China:
James Fallows (November 16, 2007) – The best $39.99 I have spent in China (China)
I often wondered how restrictive the firewall is: I have a better idea now.
It’s a very interesting post, as are most of his other posts on China. I’d be curious to know what people who know China much better than I think of his writing.
This is good advice at any time, but if it is something you are interested in doing, it might be easier to do in the summer when just being outside and enjoying the weather is a fun (and cost free) activity. Regardless of when you do it, the article 100 Things to Do During a Money Free Weekend from The Simple Dollar blog is packed with interesting and creative ideas. It’s a good blog generally.
(Nicely done Flickr.com photo from the Vaguely Artistic’s photostream)
Hamlet is timeless. Sometimes in serious ways. And sometimes…well…if you’ve seen the trailers for “Hamlet 2”, you have a sense of the not so serious way.
Speaking of not serious interpretations of Hamlet, Sarah Schmelling has put together a very clever facebook version of Hamlet, here: Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition).
I think Ophelia gets the best part in this version. But judge and laugh for yourself.
(Photo credit: FlySi’s photostream on flickr.com)
At least according to this article: A Week In John McCain’s Shoes — His $520 Ferragamo Loafers, That Is
And why not? He is rich, after all.
Not too long ago, in Ontario at least, it was hard to get a good bottle of rose. Nowadays, rose/blush/pink wines are all the rage, and you can get plenty in the LCBO. To me, most of these new wines taste very serious, and one of the things I liked about the old roses were that they were not serious. They were meant to be fun summer drinking wines, the way sangria or vinho verde or even sparkling wine should be.
One rose that manages to be both fun and serious comes from Beringer, makers of many a fine wine. When they made their 2007 White Zinfandel from their California Collection :
“the focus was to highlight the fresh red berry, citrus and melon aromas and flavors and round these out with subtle hints of nutmeg and clove. The wine has a youthful exuberance that is appealing to anyone looking for an uncomplicated wine to accompany a meal”
See? it has all those great flavours, plus it is “youthful”, “uncomplicated”, possessing “exuberance”; that all adds up to “fun”! 🙂
It costs a mere $7 in the US and goes for $10 in the general section of the LCBO. So, skip over all those roses in Vintages section and grab some of this. And pick up so vinho verdes while you are at it.
For more info, go to Beringer Vineyards California Collection
Update: you can find more posts I’ve made on wine here
This youtube video shows why. It’s a commercial, but it’s also amazing.
P.S. If you go to YouTube, you can see the “Making of…” the video.
It seems hard to believe, but read this article and see for yourself:
BusinessWeek has an interesting article on how Cheap Photo Sites Pit Amateurs vs. Pros.
The article is interesting for alot of reasons, but one reason in particular for me is this: it is a good example of the long tail in action, with thousands of suppliers of photographs, and aggregators (like flickr) bringing it all together. Professional photographers can complain about this, but it will be in vain, at least in the short term.
I see this spreading to other things as well. I see music next. With sites like MySpace, last.fm and others, the barriers to entry for musicians will become lower and lower, and over time people will listen to a wider variety of artists as greater socialization of music occurs. Eventually it will even happen for books and other forms of writing, although you could argue it has already happened with the proliferation of blogs. Anyone publishing any media now is going to be overwhelmed by the tidal wave of vast amount of new material being created.
At the blog gapingvoid, the author talks in one posting about “Cheap. Easy. Global. Media.” The combination of digitization of material and social
computing technology will make it dead simple for people to create, publish,
and share their work with others. And soon it won’t be just media. Anything that can be digitized is open for this to happen.
The world is becoming open source. Soon it will be open source hardware. Then chemistry. Then biology.
After Twitter, Apple joins the growing number of service providers who are less than stellar in their performance: Were Really Sorry, Says Apple, Really We Are – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog
Infrastructure is hard to do well. Not just physical servers, but the underlying technology that supports your application or service. You’ve got to do the fundamentals really well. I would be willing to bet that the companies that fail haven’t considered or taken the time to think about the fundamentals.
(Flickr photo by Johnnie W@lker)
Simple. Follow Sacha Chua’s great little presentation: How to sketch with the Nintendo DS
Even if you DO know, this obituary in the NYtimes.com will likely tell you things you don’t know. And if you don’t know, you will be glad you read this:
You just snap a photo with your digital camera-phone, email it to twitpic, and voila:
Saturday coffee at Indigo at yonge and Eglinton, Toronto on TwitPic
This is also a feature you can get at tumblr, as you can see here
With blogs, everyone could be a journalist. With sites like twitpic and tumblr, we can be photojournalists, too.
I am a big fan of The Long Now AND Edward Burtynsky! And here, in this blog post, The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Edward Burtynsky, “The 10,000-year Gallery” is news they are working together! This is thrilling! See the post and the web site to see why.
The nytimes.com regularly has great travel advice for cost conscious travellers. The latest article is on one of my favourite cities: Charleston, South Carolina.
The article is worth visiting, and so is the city. See Visiting Charleston, S.C., on a Budget – NYTimes.com
(Great photo by Stephen Morton for The New York Times)
I like creative uses of tumblr. 52 Books is one of those fine examples. What’s it about? Well, books, but a whole lot more. In fact, it’s like a good bookstore: you want to go there, linger, and soak it up.
And this man is responsible.
If you want to understand WHAT he was thinking at the time, read Metropolis Feature: The Man Behind the Cubicle
Like email, it is easy to criticize the cubicle. What is important to consider is the context.
Geek And Poke is a great comic blog on IT. This is just one great example of the humour. And of course, there is xkcd. And it goes without saying there is Dilbert. If you work in IT or have to deal with IT — and who doesn’t — it pays to check them out.
When I read it at andrewsullivan.com, I was skeptical too. But it makes sense. If you are like me, and you’d rather eat a sandwich over installing plumbing, you now have some rationalizations to do so! (Though I’d recommend you do both).
Even if it doesn’t amount to much, like chicken soup, it can’t hurt. And hey, PB&Js (and other veggie sandwiches) are delicious. What’s not to like? See Your PB&J Impact
A very nice remake of the song and the video here:
My only comment: where’s the Count!?
Those grand old men of the Muppet Show get the internet. See here for proof.
There’s lots more good clips of them on YouTube, also.
Scientifica American does a rundown on what it would take for a “real” person to be Batman. Even though Batman hasn’t the superpowers of most superheroes, it’s still a big stretch. Read this to see why:
Dark Knight Shift: Why Batman Could Exist–But Not for Long: Scientific American
In this blog is an excellent analysis on why people buy the wrong house. In short, they underestimate the drawbacks of commuting and overestimate the value of extra space.
I might like this because based on this analysis, I bought the “right” house. Actually, commuting WAS a major factor in choosing my house, but I had other criteria, and our house met them. I am sure others do the same thing. I am sure people who pick the bigger house also have many more criteria that matter than just size. But it is likely they still underestimate the impact of commuting.
See the blog post and decide for yourself by going here: The Frontal Cortex : Buying the Wrong House
Thx to Andrew Sullivan for the link.
I’ve blogged about the Fail Whale before. Even folks who aren’t interested in twitter in the least will find this interesting: The Story of the Fail Whale
Thx to Andy Piper for pointing out the link.
…can be found here with this web app: Apple – Web apps – Countdown to Change
There’s also a flavour for McCain, Clinton, and Ron Paul. Pick up your favourite here:
TERMINATOR SALVATION is a blog dedicated to the making of the new Terminator movie. It is interesting to see a blog for a film outlining some of the process. We have seen “the making of” documentaries before, but these tended to be seen after the film was made. With the blog, we get to be ‘armchair producers’, in a way.
Very interesting.
Tim Gunn is smart: smart about fashion, but smart generally. Time has a great 10 question interview with him here. Anyone who can talk about the semiotics of fashion is worth listening to. Plus, he’s funny and seemingly down to earth. Needless to say, he’s also stylish. See:
You can listen to it here.
It makes me think of John Lennon’s “I’m Only Sleeping”. Enjoy. And sleep well.
It looks like that famous doctored photo of the Iranian missiles has launched some creative responses, as can be seen in this Wired blog post: Attack of the Photoshopped Missiles (Updated)
This is my favourite:
I mean, if Iran wants to really scare people, why not go all out?
Tinyurl is all fine and good, but get the blood flowing — and the braining munching — send them a link via ZombieURL. They’ll be glad you did! Or not! 🙂 See:
ZombieURL – The #1 zombie-infected URL redirection service on the Web.
Smart People I Know 