via Boing Boing by MaryKate Smith Despres
The Hans Christian Andersen classic, The Snow Queen, is a quick and enjoyable read, made all the more so with printmaker Sanna Annukka’s gorgeous illustrations. You’ll likely recognize the textile designer’s aesthetic from Marimekko and, not surprisingly, many of her illustrations make full use of her bold, geometric patterns through the characters’ dress. Her landscapes look like fabrics, too. A panel that shows a wintry countryside looks like it could be a weaving and I wish I could buy another, a garden in full bloom, by the bolt.
Continue reading
=============================
via OUP Blog by Art Hobson
Particles by geralt. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay
Some say everything is made of atoms, but this is far from true. Light, radio, and other radiations aren’t made of atoms. Protons, neutrons, and electrons aren’t made of atoms, although atoms are made of them. Most importantly, 95% of the universe’s energy comes in the form of dark matter and dark energy, and these aren’t made of atoms.
Continue reading
=============================
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Heavy rains on the west coast have caused rockslides like this behemoth blocking an Oregon highway south of Eugene. Oregon DOT set up a camera as they blasted it into manageable chunks.
Continue reading
=============================
via the Guardian by Melinda Salisbury
Melinda Salisbury: ‘I always thought she would be imprisoned for a hundred years in a tree, or turn into a bird, or just step into the next life.’ Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian
When I was young, I believed my grandmother was a witch. I’m not sure why; maybe it was her wiry grey hair, her wicked cackle and the mischievous glint in her steely blue eyes. Perhaps it was that she seemed to know what I needed or wanted before I had even realised it, as if by magic.
Continue reading
=============================
Many famous scientists have something in common – they didn’t work long hours.
via Arts & Letter Daily: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in Nautilus
When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: they organize their lives around their work, but not their days.
Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours.
Continue reading
=============================
via the Guardian by Ian Sample and agencies
Well preserved T rex fossils have revealed new insights into the dinosaurs’ sex lives. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
It made its name by terrorising Earth at the end of the Late Cretaceous, but Tyrannosaurus rex had a sensitive side too, researchers have found.
The fearsome carnivore, which stood 20 feet tall and ripped its prey to shreds with dagger-like teeth, had a snout as sensitive to touch as human fingertips, say scientists.
T rex and other tyrannosaurs would have used their tactile noses to explore their surroundings, build nests, and carefully pick up fragile eggs and baby offspring.
But the snout is thought to have served another purpose. Experts believe that males and females rubbed their sensitive faces together in a prehistoric form of foreplay.
Continue reading
=============================
via Boing Boing by Gareth Branwyn
It's no secret that Boing Boing (along with over 4 million other netizens) loves the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube. We've covered this channel numerous times (about a guy making primitive tech in the wilds of Far North Queensland, Australia with nothing but the gym shorts on his ass). I anxiously await each episode and am like a kid at Christmas when I get the alert that a new one is up.
Continue reading
=============================
His name is synonymous with serial seduction but Casanova's memoirs reveal a man greater than the sum of his ‘conquests’
via Arts & Letters Daily: Laurence Bergreen in AEON
Everyone thinks that they know about Casanova, the legendary lover who proceeded from one romantic conquest to another, but almost no one really does. They believe that he was handsome, distinguished and practised in the arts of love, a virtual Zorro of the boudoir. That he was a wealthy member of the upper class, and celebrated in his lifetime for his exploits. So runs the fable of the great lover.
Continue reading
=============================
via the Guardian by Janet Watts
Mona Washbourne (left) and Glenda Jackson in the play ‘Stevie’. Photograph: Nick Rogers/ANL/REX/Shutterstock
Glenda Jackson met Stevie Smith on a poetry-reading platform in the 1960s, when the poet from Palmers Green came into a late-blossoming fame. “This extraordinary little figure stood directly in front of me – which was odd, because people usually approach you at an angle – and I remember these eyes boring into me, and this grin, and a strange skirt and sandals and ankle socks. Then she romped on to the stage and did Not Waving But Drowning: and I thought, Well, lady, you’re not as strange as you look.”
Continue reading
=============================
Backstage With Billie Holiday
via 3 Quarks Daily: John Leland in The New York Times
Billie Holiday with Carl Drinkard on Broad Street, receiving a gift from a fan.
Jerry Dantzic
Jerry Dantzic
Billie Holiday was a great American storyteller and a great American story. Her working materials were simple pop songs and standards – rarely blues – but her medium was her body itself: her voice, her back story. The past imprinted its lines on her skin; the future seemed to be running out. Few voices in America have announced themselves as unmistakably as hers, and few have carried as fully formed a narrative load.
No comments:
Post a Comment