Friday 30 November 2012

Friday Fun to start your weekend off the way it should be!!

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Price Hill Incline: 1906
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Price Hill Incline: 1906
“Price Hill Incline”
Part of the Cincinnati streetcar and freight elevator system circa 1906
8x10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Co.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Hoover and Reagan. The FBI director trusted few but found a comrade in the former-actor-turned-politician. For a time, they shared a foe: UC Berkeley... more

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Strange Death of the English Gentleman
via 3quarksdaily by Azra Raza
From Standpoint:
One of the distinguishing marks of a gentleman was that he did things because he knew they were the right thing to do, not because they would bring him personal advantage. Captain Oates was a very gallant gentleman. The idea of a gentleman was a more inclusive one than it sounds to modern ears. One of its greatest advantages was that you could define it so as to include yourself. You could behave like a gentleman, without possessing any of the social attributes which a gentleman might have: there was no need to possess a coat of arms, or a country estate, or engage in field sports, or wear evening dress. At least since Chaucer’s time, there had been a distinction between the social meaning of the word, and the moral. It was evident that well-born people, who ought to know how to behave like gentlemen, did not always do so, while others sometimes did.
Philip Mason, whose perceptive study, The English Gentleman, was published in 1982, argues that “the desire to be a gentleman” runs through and illuminates English history from the time of Chaucer until the early 20th century. He suggests that “for most of the 19th century and until the Second World War” the idea of the gentleman “provided the English with a second religion, one less demanding than Christianity. It influenced their politics. It influenced their system of education; it made them endow new public schools and raise the status of old grammar schools. It inspired the lesser landed gentry as well as the professional and middle classes to give their children an upbringing of which the object was to make them ladies and gentlemen, even if only a few of them also became scholars.” This was a subject that interested so great a man as Cardinal Newman. In The Idea of a University he said that a liberal education makes “not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman”, and went on: It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life; these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University … but they are no guarantees for sanctity or even for conscientiousness; they may attach to the man of the world, the profligate, the heartless.
More here

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Beautiful Pre-Production Drawings for Disney’s Cinderella
via Flavorwire by Alison Nastasi
If you’re a friend of Flavorpill, then you know how much we appreciate a clever twist on Disney films, characters, and other behind-the-scenes goodies from the animated classics. That’s why we were elated to come across these pre-production sketches of the Mickey Mouse studio’s Cinderella at website Deja View, by way of Film School Rejects. The rich, detailed drawings range from loosely composed to fully realised scenes we instantly recognised from the 1950 movie. Deja View speculates that the works were created by legendary Disney artist Ken O’Connor, [now corrected on Deja View] who brought the fairy tale’s pumpkin-turned-magical coach to life. O’Connor contributed his talents to Disney’s biggest pictures, including Snow WhiteLady and the Tramp, and Fantasia (the dancing hippos are his creation). See beautiful sketches for the timeless Disney love story in our gallery. The forethought that went into every tiny detail makes you realize how committed Disney was to shaping their magical universe.
See all of them here
and my personal favourite is ...


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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Queer kids used to be cool. Now they're boring and banal. If gay men are to recover their panache, it'll take some practice. Here's where to start... more

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J.R.R. Tolkien Recites “Namárië” Poem in Elvish
via Reading Copy Book Blog by Beth Carswell
People have often commented on the genius of J.R.R. Tolkien, frequently citing the elaborate depths he went to when creating Middle-earth.
Maps, languages, political systems, races – Tolkien’s level of detail allowed readers a deeper immersion into a fantasy world than any author before him.
An excellent example – here is a rare recording of Tolkien in 1952, reading a Quenya (High-elven; one of the Elvish languages) poem from The Lord of the Rings.

The full poem, in both Quenya and English is here on the Abe Books blog

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Your friendly neighbourhood boring machine
via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Check out this great interactive map of the London subway system, showing the real-time location of the giant boring machines that are currently digging new tunnels beneath the city.
Via Nicola Twilley

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
From the Greek for “sneer at or taunt”, sarkasmos is among man’s great achievements. Can it survive our sensitive, oh-so-sincere age?... more

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biblioguerilla: Claricia, 13th century German illuminator
via Girl in the Moon

Claricia, swinging from the letter Q. She wrote her name above her own head.
From the Walters Art Museum

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Fun commercial for Sugru repair putty
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
This is a cute commercial for Sugru, the delightful moldable repair compound that I use to fix suitcase zippers, dishwasher rollers, headphone strain reliefs, and many other things around the house that break.


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