Life Imitates Art

Oh! Doesn't it recall those peevishness Al Jaffee usually did for MAD magazine?

Sensory World

"The Ney is a poison". Jelālu-'d-Dīn Muhammed Er-Rūmī.

New Toy

Finally, I've found a new toy to dive into. Mr. Pynchon has made a favor to write a book as good as the previous ones, a book with a scent of The Hardy Boys, The Rover Boys and Punch, or the London Charivari. Yet, the book has a blog.
UPDATE (11/2): Way better than the (honorable, but not constantly updated) blog, is Thomas Pynchon Wiki: Against the Day.

DIY Chopter

The Nigerian home-made helicopter was extensively boingboinged and slashdoted, but very few know about Mr. Tran Quoc Hai, a 44 year old mechanic of Tay Nienh province, in Vietnam, who in 2004 has created a similar beast to help evacuate people in emergency situations and farming usages. This story turned into a 15 min documentary (and a 3 channel video projection installation) named The Farmers and the Helicopters, directed by Dinh Q. Lê who, in his youth, witnessed the AH-1 Cobras burn entire peasant villages.

Factoring the 300

History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. But sometimes, the tragedy is recursive, as so the farce. Take for instance the history of Treinta y Tres, a kind of Uruguayan Thermopylae remake. Its past is backed on the history of the thirty and three privates who, commanded by Juan Antonio Lavalleja, insurrected against the ruling coalition that was in charge of Provincia Oriental (today Uruguay). Not that there was a farce in the historical narrative, be it counted by the ones who triumph or not, but the controversy is about the number of men who really were there in the Latin fight.

Princess of Benin

Xeni Jardin, cyber-starlet, is in West Africa. Some readers have made some appropriate traveling suggestions.

The Munster from Minnesota

This service really creeps me the hell out! I don't know exactly what drove me to write THAT name and THAT last name...

Young Landis

Dr Arnie Baker, a friend of Tour de France winner Floyd Landis, has the proof that the French anti-doping lab may have "mislabelled" the champion urine sample. I've seen this flicker! What was the name? Abby Normal. You gave me a brain that's abnormal!?

Lovely Lovely Lovely Singers

Hanne Hukkelberg

Henriette Sennenvaldt

Stina Nordenstam

Sarah Assbring

Natasha Khan

Joanna Newsom

Anja Garbarek

Ane Brun

The Six Burgesses of Calais

The blog BibliOdyssey, one which awakes in me a sense of wonder, has compiled The Comic History of England. One of the engravings particularly calls a certain passage:

The Siege of Calais, or rather the blockade (for it was shut up both by land and sea), was the most memorable, as it withstood the efforts of Edward the Third a whole year, and was not terminated at last but by famine and extreme misery; the gallantry of Eustace de St. Pierre*, who first offered himself a victim for his fellow-citizens, has ranked his name with heroes.

* Eustace de St. Pierre (1287 - 1371), leader of the six burghers of Calais who, bareheaded and barefoot, with hopes around their necks, presented themselves to Edward III of England as hostages for the safety of Calais; they were pardoned at the instance of Queen Philippa.

From The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne

Hyper High-Tech

Walter Isaacson is optimistic about the "print" technology, in Edge's World's Question Center. And he is not veering towards a metaphor. Future electric energy outages will be more usual as no wasting water programs. So, books and moleskines should be the new trend in advanced technology. Everybody should stop the machines, sit onto a comfortable chair and, at a reach distance of natural light source, read post-post modern literature, as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (past-post-post, I admit) or the best sci-fi book ever written: Codex Seraphinianus.

Digression

What kind of motivation forces someone to spend hours looking for a supposedly Utrillo’s reproduction which has been shown in a scene of The Last Man on Earth (1964)? I was grasped by the remembrance feeling when I saw it at the first time behind Vicent Price… But the closest the free association of ideas could get was an Eglise de Pont-Saint-Martin: There is the spike, but not the two stories alley.