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- Educated clock chimed dirges for America's martyrs throughout the day
- Bee-wearing competition
- Zahi Hawass fired
- Territorial rights and the Internet: "This Painting is Not Available in Your Country"
- Plush dismemberable zombie toy
- Made by Hand: Japanese edition
- Dune with no dialog
- London's police chief resigns
- Fox & Friends lash out at News of the World critics
- Rebekah Brooks arrested
- 1970s NASA video about colonizing space
| Educated clock chimed dirges for America's martyrs throughout the day Posted: 18 Jul 2011 02:36 AM PDT  70 year old Marvin Shearer, a "crippled inventor" from Akron, OH, spent the decade from 1920 to 1930 building an "educated clock" that chimed a different tune to commemorate "America's martyrs" around through the day, for example, "e time of President McKinley's burial is marked by a playing of the old hymn, 'Lead, Kindly Light.' At the hour of President Garfield's interment, the remarkable timepiece plays 'Gates Ajar.'" Educated Clock Sings, Talks, and Plays the Pipe Organ (Jul, 1934) |
| Posted: 18 Jul 2011 04:26 AM PDT  Beekeeper Lv Kongjiang, 20, stands with bees covering his body on a weighing scale during a bee-wearing competition held last week in China. Competing against fellow beekeeper Wang Dalin in Shaoyang, Hunan province, the two wore only shorts and bees; Wang won the competition after attracting 57 lbs of bees on his body in 60 minutes, while Lv had 50 lbs, local media reported. Photo Reuters/China Daily Previously: The Beekeeper's Lament: Must-read book on bee life, and death  |
| Posted: 18 Jul 2011 03:56 AM PDT Egypt has fired its voluble antiquities minister, Dr. Zahi Hawass. Among the few top government officials to keep his position through the revolution, his overbearing, Discovery Channel-friendly style and a recent graft conviction ultimately saw him out of his job: "He was the Mubarak of antiquities," said one archeologist.   |
| Territorial rights and the Internet: "This Painting is Not Available in Your Country" Posted: 18 Jul 2011 01:09 AM PDT  Paul Mutant's "This Painting is Not Available in Your Country" is a pretty snappy and trenchant commentary on the incoherent absurdity of territorial rights enforcement in the age of the Internet. |
| Plush dismemberable zombie toy Posted: 18 Jul 2011 02:39 AM PDT  Neatorama is selling a plush zombie doll that uses velcro to furnish it with detachable limbs and a "pull-apart torso" complete with undead intestines. |
| Made by Hand: Japanese edition Posted: 17 Jul 2011 06:29 PM PDT  The Japanese edition of my book, Made by Hand, came out a couple of weeks ago. I like the way it looks. It includes color photos and fun line drawings at the beginning of each chapter. More photos after the jump
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| Posted: 17 Jul 2011 07:28 PM PDT  I took all the dialog out of the first scene of Dune. Let me explain. Fascinating but flawed movies draw strength from alternative universes where more perfect versions exist. Among them, Dune is one of the most famous: denied final cut, director David Lynch distanced himself from the confusing theatrical release and had his name removed from an extended TV cut. All the extant versions fade (at least in our imagination) before his legendary rough cut, reputed to be 4 hours long. Should it be rebuilt? The persistent belief is that something can be made better by adding more; but each thing added must contribute to a coherent, satisfying whole. Wouldn't it be easier to simply remove those elements that made the movie so confusing? For example: all the words. Click the pic for the first scene of the movie that is not itself spoken exposition--with all the dialog removed. YouTube appears to have a license with Universal that allows this experiment so long as I make a "fair use" declaration, but it prevents it from being embedded. I've also put it on Vimeo if that doesn't work for you. I think it's pretty promising! By removing all that talking, we could transmute the 3-hour epic to about 45 minutes of Lynch's imagery, unburdened by the need to make a story out of 650 pages of verbose political maneuvering by people who spend half the book analyzing their own superhuman, chess-like conversations. Instead, loads of robed witches, psychedelic space travel, freaky monsters, and the Toto and Brian Eno soundtrack. Though, actually, I think more Eno than Toto would be for the best. Video links: YouTube, Vimeo.  |
| Posted: 17 Jul 2011 02:27 PM PDT  Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson resigned today following Britain's phone hacking scandal. Hitherto unmoved by his force's failure to adequately investigate misconduct at the News of the World—even after it admitted making payments to police officers—the commissioner finally stepped down when it emerged that he hired a NotW executive as an "advisor" at Scotland Yard. [BBC]  |
| Fox & Friends lash out at News of the World critics Posted: 17 Jul 2011 07:42 PM PDT People keep accusing Fox News of running a blackout on the hacking scandal that recently buried the News of the World, a fellow subsidiary in Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Not true! In fact, it just had on a PR man, Bob Dilenschneider, to explain how NoTW was the real victim, subjected to an inexplicable "piling on" by its enemies. Bob: The NOTW is a hacking scandal, it can't be denied. But the real issue is, why are so many people piling on at this point? We know it's a hacking scandal, shouldn't we get beyond it and deal with the issue of hacking? Citicorp has been hacked into, Bank of America has been hacked into, American Express has been hacked into, insurance companies have been hacked into, we've got a serious hacking problem in this country, and the government's obviously been hacked into, 24,000 files. So we've got to figure out a way to deal with this hacking problem. Host: The company has come forward to say that it happened a long time ago, at a tabloid, in London, someone did something really bad and the company reacted. They closed the newspaper, all those people got fired, even though 99 percent of them didn't do anything. Bob: And if I'm not mistaken. Murdoch, who owns it, has apologized, but for some reason, the public and the media going over this, again and again. Host: The piling on! Bob: It's a little bit too much. The bigger issue is really hacking and how we as the public going to protect our privacy and deal with it. I would also say, by the way, Citigroup, great bank. Bank of America, great bank. Are they getting the same attention for hacking that took place less than a year ago, that News Corp is getting today. [They recap other news; China, martians, debt default, etc.] Host: ... We're teetering on default, and what to they do? They're talking about this. Bob: ... and we're dealing with something that happened in London over a decade ago. I don't quite understand it.Indeed not. But I'm happy to explain it to you, Bob. Murdoch's newspaper, the News of the World, was the perpetrator in its hacking scandal, whereas the Pentagon and the banks were victims in theirs. Whereas the Pentagon hack is claimed to be an example of state-sponsored espionage conducted by foreign spies, the News of the World's hack was a simple caller ID spoofing trick used to listen in on a murdered child's voicemail messages; one among countless similar events so exploited. Though we all use the term "hacking" broadly, punching in a default PIN number isn't quite the same thing as the skills required to hack into banks and governments. You can't pretend these are the same class of problem, unless you're happy being ignorant of the crisis management issues on which you are being presented as an expert. Also, it's about more than "someone who did something really bad", and it did not end "over a decade ago." These are the specific lies, told to investigators, that have now ensnared Murdoch executives. The discovery that these claims are untrue is why the scandal flared up again! It's why three former editors of the newspaper (forgive me if I have lost count) have been arrested. Fox's smarmy whitewashing of its sister company's escapades will get a lot of flack, but Bob also embodies an approach to PR that's failed Murdoch so spectacularly these last few weeks: "All the right things have been done from a crisis point of view," he says, so immaculately clueless that you have to wonder if Murdoch's fall, such as it is, was precipitated by spending too much time in rooms full of Bobs. Video Link [Newshounds] More evidence about News Corp. on News Corp. [Washington Post via The Atlantic]   |
| Posted: 17 Jul 2011 07:58 AM PDT Rebekah Brooks, fresh from resigning as chief executive of News International, was arrested today and remains in police custody. The BBC's news editor described it as an "extraordinary development," but also points out that this may make her unavailable to attend her scheduled public grilling in parliament. How about that.   |
| 1970s NASA video about colonizing space Posted: 17 Jul 2011 05:59 AM PDT [Video Link] More from the Ames Research Center's mid-1970s gathering of artists and academics, tasked with designing space colonies able to accomodate 10,000 people. Scientific optimism wears tinted shades indoors. [SpaceRip via Metafilter] Previously: Totally awesome space colonies   |
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