Amy Winehouse’s big hair in the YouTube thang below got me remembering another clip I ran across quite some time ago while looking for Bo Diddley performances. The Originator is my favorite early rock ‘n roller – and he did it all with rhythm (hmmm – a pattern seems to be emerging). This performance has everyone at top form – Bo doing his thing and 3 backup singers (Lady Bo, Duchess and Cookie?), one also on guitar, driving any young men in the audience crazy. Ignore the screaming:
Category Archives: random stuff
Earworm
I first heard this song on the radio about a week and a half ago and almost drove off the road – alternately tapping out the beat on the steering wheel and laughing. The backstory is here on Wikipedia – I also guess from the dates on the wiki entry that this is a whole lot of no news for any readers on the other side of the Atlantic. Three things I love about this – the beat (yeah, I know, simple), the growl in her voice, and the tubular bells/chimes. Amy Winehouse sings Rehab:
Update – live version substituted – BIG hair & BIG voice!
Another update – added the music video version back – I missed the chimes and electrons are cheap (it’s YouTube’s bandwidth).
Photo dump
… or more posts about buildings and food. Some pictures from a trip to Brooklyn my son and I took to attend a new student’s day at Pratt Institute. While in Brooklyn I reconnected with a good friend who I’d fallen out of touch with – we all went out for BBQ and had a good time. I’m sad that E and I haven’t talked in a long time, but very happy that the lull is over.
A couple pictures of what I think counts as the lower end of Park Slope:
*
I liked the odd brickwork and 60’s vibe on this front:
*
And some pictures from the Pratt campus. Great late 19th/early 20th century architecture and a ton of interesting outdoor art (who woulda thunk it – art school and all).
*
*
Duty now for the future
A couple of hilarious visions of the future (or the present, depending on how you look at it).
First, via MeFi, the engineering triumph of the modern age. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the Alameda-Weehauken Burrito Tunnel.
*
More practical, and preferable in my book, would be a NYC-Portsmouth (NH) Bánh mì tunnel. All silliness aside, I’m hoping to spend time visiting Babylon-on-the-Hudson in the near future (more than once, I hope) – on the gustatory agenda will be Bánh mì, Korean-style fried chicken and (mythical?) Cuban-Chinese food.
Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while know that Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation played a big part in my childhood. From Coop via BoingBoing we get this Peter Cook/Dudley Moore sendup of the whole genre: Superthunderstingcar.
*
The underlying question remains unanswered – where’s my dang flying car (I’d settle for a jet-pack)?
One more level of nesting
The title of the blog post is The best lede ever written – I couldn’t agree more. The lede in question:
A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi. *
A universe of weird in one sentence.
Obvious h/t to Blake Hounshell at Foriegn Policy.
I think that’s called…
Saab 96
One of the best rides I ever got back in my hitchhiking days was a short one – one town to the next one over, here in NH – in an old Saab. It was powered by their three cylinder two-stroke engine, sounded like a pack of angry chainsaws (and smelled like one too) and was driven by a tiny woman with a salt and pepper braid about 3 feet long. She pulled over, I hopped in – noticed the box full of cans of two-stroke oil in the back seat – and we passed a pleasant 10 minute ride talking about cars and who can remember what else. Pointless reminiscence inspired by metacool – also, check out his Flikrstream (this is not a Saab!):
Later – I can’t believe my friend Eliza’s pea soup green 96 slipped my mind – what a good car!
Even later – I remembered another great set of Saab pics driving home tonight – Coop’s from La ’06 Carrera Panamericana. Click through and scroll down just a bit. Check out those Minilite wheels (and that chainsaw exhaust)! More info from el equipo Saabpearl Svenska here.
Various and sundry links
A few things I’ve run across that I wanted to post…
- One of my very favorite web cartoonists (graphic web-page-ist?) visits the Google campus. Personally, I would have risked failure and filled my pockets at the hundred dollar bar. Also, Echo and Siouxsie Sioux? Awesome!
- A brief trip down memory lane courtesy of Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber. The linked post on ’embodied energy’ (and the subsequent link at the Yorkshire Ranter) are interesting in and of themselves, but it’s the reference to Piero Sraffa and theories of value that takes me back. In the mists of prehistory, when I was finishing my BA in Economics and doing an ill-fated year of graduate work on same, the big battle royale among the theory types on campus was Neo-Ricardians versus Marxists (forget the neoclassicists – boooring >grin<). Ah, good times...
- Inexpensive book scanner. The Plustek Optibook is optimized for scanning bound material – the glass runs right up to the edge, cutting down on shadows and the amount of squashing (grits teeth just thinking about it) one must do to get a good image. Maybe with one of these I could scan some of the books I really ought to cull, making me a little more likely to do so. Haaa, ha, ha, gasp, snort – who am I fooling… h/t BoingBoing
- Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Lot’s ‘o Lovecraftian fun on the interwebs over the past few days – if Darren Naish is going to venture into the biology of Howie’s critters, I can help out with research on the Old Ones – Arkham isn’t too far away and I assume the Miskatonic University archives still have material from the ill fated Pabodie expedition. Semi-seriously, though – I re-read At the Mountains of Madness and The Call of Cthulhu recently – spurred on by Charlie Stross’ A Colder War (you can read it on line by following the link) – and I think that Rucker’s Hollow Earth needs to get queued up on my nightstand. Incidentally – the edition of Mountains of Madness I linked to above is a two-fer – it’s got a great introduction written by China Mieville.
That ought to do it for now…
Danger can happen!
From the sublime (Andy Goldsworthy) to the ridiculous (Kaiju Big Battel) in honor of Darren Naish’s foray into the science of Godzilla.
Nice to see my merely three-dimensional earth relative get some YouTube time, and jeez, that Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle has got some moves!
Later – just in case anyone misinterprets – Kaiju Big Battel = ridiculous (in a good way); Darren’s post = great stuff.
h/t Steve for the Naish link
A Nation Mourns
Offered without comment:
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: Is Anna Nicole Smith still dead, Wolf?
BLITZER: Yes, we’re going to — updating our viewers coming up shortly on…
CAFFERTY: I can’t wait for that.
BLITZER: … the mysterious circumstances surrounding that, Jack. Thank you.
From Anna Nicole Smith Dies; Iran Shows Off New Missiles via Foreign Policy.
Saturday AM cleanup
Some loose ends and tid-bits…
Boston vs. the Mooninites. I watched Boston news last night. The Mooninite story was not mentioned. I may have missed it, but it for sure was not one of the leads and was not mentioned in the ‘and next we’ll tell you about’ teasers. I’m shocked! shocked! (internet sarcasm alert) that having been a major player in the effort to make Boston an international laughing-stock, Beantown media is now pretending nothing ever happened. Later – here’s how to use LEDs!
Iran. Check out today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day – the Alborz Mountains by moonlight. Another place I’d love to visit, but it’s probably not a realistic goal. I try to keep current events/politics off this blog with the exception of security/privacy topics, but I can’t hold back on this one. The signs have been there for a while (see Sy Hersh’s reportage) – it’s looking likely that we (the US) are getting ready for a ‘flight forward’ involving Iran.
What we are witnessing (through rips in the curtain of official secrecy) may be an example of what the Germans call the flucht nach vorne – the “flight forward.” This refers to a situation in which an individual or institution seeks a way out of a crisis by becoming ever more daring and aggressive (or, as the White House propaganda department might put it: “bold”) A familar analogy is the gambler in Vegas, who tries to get out of a hole by doubling down on each successive bet.
Classic historical examples of the flucht nach vornes include Napoleon’s attempt to break the long stalemate with Britain by invading Russia,the decision of the Deep South slaveholding states to secede from the Union after Lincoln’s election, and Milosevic’s bid to create a “greater Serbia” after Yugoslavia fell apart.
We – US citizens – now have 6 years experience to guide us. If we fail to stop the Executive Branch from unleashing military disaster and geopolitical chaos, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
My brush with show-biz. Last fall I searched Flickr with Turfan as my search term – part of the nosing round I did getting ready for my Sphinx post. I came across Kate James’ photostream and enjoyed the heck out of it. A week or so ago, I wandered through again and noticed something about one of the pictures. Click here and read the comments for the story – short version: Penn Jillette mentioned the picture on his Feb. 1 radio show, Kate’s picture is getting lots of views and hopefully her book, Women of the Gobi, is benefiting. My copy is on it’s way from Amazon – I’ll keep you apprised. Also – for those of you who haven’t guessed, my Flickr ID is Don Coyote. It should really be spelled Don Kiyote – it’s a nod to the inhabitants of George Herriman’s version of Coconino County, but I worry sometimes about being too obscure…
Shorthairs.
Sire?
Dam?
Stay tuned.
Soma and synchronicity
*
An interesting coincidence: I’ve been on a bit of a soma jag recently (research, not use) because of a brief mention of it in Helen Macdonald’s excellent Falcon. I started by re-reading Brave New World for old time’s sake; back in high school it added soma to my vocabulary; college brought R. Gordon Wasson and the idea of entheogens. Soma has been off the back burner and on a slow simmer in my head for a while; there seems to be a connection between the bowls found in Central Asian burials and either soma or Amanita muscaria use (allowing that A. muscaria might not be soma). The picture at the top of the post is a handle for one of these bowls. Falcon brought the simmer to a boil, so – in preparation for (maybe) writing a long soma post – I’ve been spending the past couple days reading things like The Soma-Haoma Problem. Now comes the coincidence – last night I was lying in bed reading The Areas of my Expertise and laughing my head off (not a great way to get to sleep, I discovered); page 87 consists of the following:
WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?
The famous Cole Porter tune “I’m In, You’re In” was actually Porter’s typically wry response to the urine-drinking craze of the 1920s.
The practice originated with the fierce reindeer herders of Siberia known as the Koryac, who centuries ago had devised a means of purifying the hallucinogenic toadstool known as fly agaric. A local shaman would eat the mushroom, using his body to filter out the poisonous muscarine; its mood-altering compounds were preserved in his urine, which was then ritually consumed by other Koryac and also some of the more favored reindeer.
Marco Pensworthy, a monocled young libertine and staff member of the American Museum of Natural History, who was later dismissed for seducing the skeleton of a giant ground sloth, introduced the custom to New York. During Prohibition, many a tuxedoed, thrill-thirsty swell attended one of Dr. Marco’s private “Siberian Tea Parties,” beneath the frozen gaze of the stampeding elephants of the Hall of African Animals, where, wrote Porter…
There isn’t any shame in
Meeting with the Shaman
And making like the reindeers do…
It’s just a little wonder
That will unfreeze your tundra
I’m in, you’re in. You’re in too.After his disgrace, Pensworthy would wander Central Park humming Porter’s tune and offering passersby swigs from a suspicious flask. Finally arrested and institutionalized, he trepanned himself to death in 1952.
Like a lot of good tall tales, there’s a grain of truth in there – the Koryac references are accurate regarding the mushroom and the urine (I’d be surprised if they shared their pee with the reindeer – but I could be wrong).
I’m running into these kind of coincidences more and more frequently (the one before this was putting Lost World of the Moa down, flipping the teevee to Animal Planet, and falling into the middle of a segment on Haast’s Eagle). I’m developing a hypothesis that rests on two factors – both Internet related – the immediate availability of information and the number of personal contacts with like-minded people that communication technology provides us with. I’ll do some more thinkin’ on it – perhaps a later post.
Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I’m in a coma:
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love’s as good as soma. *