Accept no substitutes

Category: Amusements (Page 22 of 31)

Things that are amusing

Best of NextFest

Quickly before I hit the sack. The Best of NextFest were for me:

  • Philip K Dick robot from Hanson Robotics, Fedex Institute of Technology at University of Memphis, and UTexas-Arlington ARRI
  • Panoscope 360 from University of Montreal (elumens dome turned to a dish)
  • Chroino from Kyoto University’s Robo Garage
  • Mobile Feelings from Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences
  • Moller Skycar from Moller International
  • Innespace Dolphin from Innespace
  • Robolobster from Northeastern University
  • Saturn Sky (sportscar) from Saturn

In Chicago – day 1

We’ve been in Chicago since about 10 am CDT. So far we checked in sorta — our room wasn’t ready yet. We checked out the neighborhood which is the begining of Michigan Ave and the Miracle Mile as well as State Street going down to the Chicago River. Sally and folks who care deeply about architecture have strong opinions about most of this area often building by building. I wasn’t that upset that the Disney Store hails back to a time that doesn’t really exist so I’ll stay out of that one.
We did have deep dish Chicago pizza for our first meal here at lunch at Pizza Due which is still using the airconditioning installed by Bret’s grandfather (thanks for the suggestion, Bret).
We took the bus down to the Museum of Science and Industry, the building there are from the World Columbian Exposition of the 1890s. From there we strolled through the park and through the University of Chicago area until we reached the Robie House, a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the midst of restoration. We took the tour and learned how every family that tried to live there met with some misfortune — bankruptcy and divorce, sudden unexpected death, premature death — until the house ended up in the hands of the University of Chicago who is leasing it to the National Preservation Trust while a Frank Lloyd Wright group restores it.
We have tickets for Second City tomorrow night (thanks Fred for that suggestion) and tonight we’ll be off to a reception for Wired’s NextFest.

Dr Fun Book and Middlesex

Dave Farley’s Dr Fun book is now on sale from Plan 9 Publishing in Greensboro. Dave has been doing Dr Fun, a single frame daily color comic (hosted at ibiblio), for over a decade now. Now you (and I) can own a whole big bound collection of Dr Fun.

Less than two chapters from finishing Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex. This has to be one of the smartest and best written and most sweeping books that I’ve read in a long while.

Sincerest form of flattery

Keith Henderson has been doing his “Illusions of the King” Elvis show for 26 years. I saw him first as the young Elvis not long after he started. Keith has a great voice and great family support over the long haul; his grandmother makes his elaborate costumes and his mother adds the stud work, his daughter sings a great soprano.
He also has a great band. Any band with Will McFarlane as lead guitar is going to be good.
As I listened to Keith hold a verrrrrry long note on “Rags to Riches,” I was reminded that Sam Phillips of Sun Records had latched onto Elvis when he was looking for a young white boy who could sing and sound like the great black artists that were hitting on the R&B charts. Now, according to Henderson, the number of Elvis-sounding acts and Elvis tributes has grown at such a rate that if the grown continues apace 1 out of every 4 persons in the world will be doing Elvis tributes by 2020.

Hog Day approaches – The True Q

Keith Henderson as Elvis
This weekend is the 23rd Hillsborough Hog Day. There will be True BBQ there (both days since Hog Day has grown like a pig and now takes two days), there will be great live music, there will be antique cars, there will be hog-calling, there will be arts and crafts — And there will be a great Elvis Tribute by Keith Henderson.

The center piece of the Day is still eatin’ pig. That’s the best. As the Hog Day site describes:

When day breaks on Saturday, Hog Day is already bustling with activity. While vendors, who sell everything from video games to handpainted stained glass, set up in the General Merchandise, Food, and Craft areas, you hear a persistent “thunk, thunk, thunk” and you know the pig is ready. The cooking teams chop all their cooked pig and sauce a portion for the Barbecue Tasting Judges. In 2005, the judges will include Jonathan Childress and Damon Lapas of Chapel Hill’s That BBQ Joint. Led by Chief Judge David Hunt, the judges will compare notes and make their final decisions as to the top 5 barbecue cooking teams. They are to be saluted for tasting 36 different barbecues at 8:30 am!

The rest is shuttled to the main tent, where it’s made into sandwiches and pounds of the freshest barbecue in the state. Cash prizes and trophies are awarded for best barbecue.

BBQ is a three letter word

And those letters are P-I-G (although H-O-G is also acceptable). Never is BBQ a verb. That’s final. No debate.

My Texan brother-in-law sends me a link (not to be confused with Hot Links which are grilled sausages sold under the name barbecue in parts of Texas) about some poor deluded folks in Athens, TX. The secret to their non-pig, non-hickory-smoked burnt brisket “the right amount of black pepper and brown sugar.” The right amount of those ingredients is none, you misguided poor chillin!

When I was nearly held over in DFW on Friday night, I decided that even in my panic about travel, I would try to eat some food from Dickie’s BBQ Shack at the Food Court in honor of my Texan in-laws and of my friend Betty Adcock who flew in Texas food the other weekend to a party that I had to miss.

The meal was no meal. They had no coleslaw. They did not offer pig. They did offer turkey, hot links or brisket. The brisket which Texans seem to prefer and which I had on a white bread bun was dry as shoe leather. Even though it had burnt edges, it was edible once drowned in a sauce made of corn starch, sugar and catchup. No greens of any kind were available. I now understand cause of the stern and firm looks on the faces of the native Texans in the airport. You understand that the smirk of George Bush is not so much a smirk as a look of, well, constipation.
You need sweet moist pig, red peppers, and enough greens to keep you moving!

JCDL: One Minute Poster Madness

Everyone of the 50 poster presenters is given 60 seconds to describe their project as presented on their posters. After 60 seconds, an annoying sound begins. So far everyone has been on time. Very close to the limit too. Several persentations from the Digital Library for Earth Science Education, nearly 10, here in Colorado. Xerox PARC will be doing a demo of a zooming information tree. Also their UpLib systems a personal digital library. 7 million PDFs scanned by SETI@home like techniques. M2K from Indiana and EVIADA for ethnomusicial videos (need to talk to them about folkstreams); part of their work is with annotations of the video etc. Several from Indiana on Music projects. Michael Khoo is very funny. Aihara has videos of arts and crafts masters — a reciprocal platform? Video recommenders from includes work by Gary Geisler and Mike Nelson using Open Video. NCSU has a wood anatomy database — giant project as far as wood goes. Small image library for PDAs in booth 32. 33 is annotation for health portal from UNC SILS. More than one BioPortal in the world — this one is in Arizona. The mic wasn’t on for John when he started talking so he lost maybe 8 seconds. He still came off well and folks seemed interested. We’ll see if they stop by later. We are near the food so chances are high.

Hotel Peeves – Marriott edition

Michael Khoo and I were talking about the small things that hotels get wrong. We don’t want HDTV especially. We do want:

  • Better in-room coffee. It’s great to wake up and make coffee in the room, but why why why is it always crappy coffee? Only a few cents more and you would have some pleased people.
  • Thick sides the shampoo bottles. This is really annoying. You stand in the shower pinching the sides of the shampoo and nothing or next to nothing comes out. Those of us with luxuriant flowing hair are particularly annoyed. Better packaging please!
  • Annoying charges for Internet access. $10/day isn’t so bad, but at home we pay less than $10/week. Just roll the charges into the room fee and forget it. The hotel will pay less and we will be less annoyed. Everyone I’ve spoken to has been annoyed by this. Doc went on a rant in our room what the Emerging Tech Conference about this.

Carnivores – plants and lives

Not the Ritchie Bell Pitcher
The Celebration of Pitcher Plants and Bog Gardening at the NC Botanical Gardens today was really a surprise celebration of Gardens founder Ritchie Bell. Bell had been invited to come and sign copies of the new edition of his book, Wildflowers of North Carolina and to heard a talk about pitcher plants by Larry Mellichamp of UNC-Charlotte. What Dr. Bell had actually been invited to was the announcement of the naming of a special hybrid pitcher plant in his honor. Over half a century ago, Bell was already recognized as one of the world’s greatest experts on Sarracenia (aka pitcher plants). He later prompted and created the Botanical Gardens even to the point of signing the bank note with his home as collateral to pay for the current Totten Center.
As Mellicamp announced the hybrid, he noted that the plant like Bell was hardy, robust, showy and tall. Bell, himself interjected that he noticed that it also has a very big mouth and that that mouth is wide open and gaping.
Mellicamp then treated us all to a slide show of pitcher pictures, puns, personal tales and interesting facts with occasional commentary from Bell.
Among them:

  • Pitchers weren’t discovered to be carnivorous until 1875. Early botanists reported that the plants existed as shelters for small tree frogs. (Mellincamp showedNot Larry M's pica great picture of a tree frog in a pitcher — not this one).
  • Most pitchers, the exception being the purple, don’t like to get rain inside their pitchers. The varieties of hoods act in part to keep out raindrops.
  • Pitchers hybridize easily. Hardy hybrids even occur often in nature. Because all species of pitchers have the same number of chromosomes, the hybrids are fertile. The period of maturity assists those, who like Mellicamp and Rob Gardner, specialize in hybridization — only 3 years. “If we had decided to work on oak trees, we’d still be at work on the first generation.”
  • The nector found on the lips of the pitcher contains a mild narcotic which both attracts insects and makes them clumsy enough to topple into the pitcher. If, according to Mellicamp, you rub your finger on a nector moist pitcher then rub your lip with that finger, you will feel some numbness.
  • Pitchers tend to specialize in which insects they eat. The result is that there are a variety of insects to go around between species in the same area. Also they have adapted ways to keep their food insects separate from their polinators. The hooded pitcher, for example, thrives on ants and is difficult for other insects to enter.

The plants in my own bog garden that have succeeded are Mellicamp-Gardner hybrids, Marti Gras, ladies in waiting and others.

ibiblio in 30 Seconds

If we are announced as winners of the Computerworld 21st Century Achievement Award, I’m supposed to give a 30 second thank you speech. In theory, this is simple. But in practice, we have a few problems. First, as a college professor I never speak for less than 50 minutes so we’re cutting by a factor of 100. Next, we’re covering over 12 years of sunsite/metalab/ibiblio in which many many good folks helped out even if they were here for a very brief time. Third, we have over 1500 contributors; many of these folks could have won the Award entirely on their own. Fourth, we’ve had great partners who gave and still give us hardware, software and support — most notably over time Sun Microsystems and The Center for the Public Domain and IBM.
Can I say all of that and be amusing too?
Yes I asked for an extension (only good in the case of our winning of course) and got an additional second.

The future from 1956

Set for sales in 1956 when the future was consumed by promises of consumerism where the men announce the cars whilst the women announce the costumes (including silk casuals), where the dream trip to the motorama is interupted by a visit to the kitchen of tomorrow, where the mildly erotic Dance to the Future celebrates a cake having been cooked, where the Firebird is a turbo-electric spaceship like car is designed for the electric highway — “Design for Living” from the Prelinger Archives. Get your future on!
Having Danced to the Future Shadows of 1958 Dancing for Kitchen Improvement Balloons for the Touch of Magic

Note the phone in this Populuxe tribute to the American Look. (and see article below).

Wilbur the hipster yet balding cherub uses his wireless phone to talk to his boss in heaven in “Once Upon a Honeymoon” while trying to help Mary and Jeff, who’s honeymoon is delayed. Mary interestlingly enough doesn’t pine over the honeymoon, but moons instead over her kitchen. Her house is magically redone to include colored phones and in the bedroom — twin beds separated by a telephone table. Then Jeff is inspired by a busy signal to compose a new song freeing him from a work assignment so he can go on their honeymoon — a year late.

Prelinger has many more films on the American Look and the Future from the 1950s from Populuxe.

Caligari!

Caligari poster
After a rather odd series of attempts to get DVDs from the campus library — too long to tell, but let’s say I was inspired to ask for the Matrix once Crouching Tiger became to complicated to obtain, but then the Matrix was even more complicated to find a copy of so I asked for Brazil which seemed fitting the situation as it was evolving, but then Brazil although in the catalog as available was not or was only viewable within the building, so I asked for Ken Russell’s Kafka, that I could have, so inspired I asked for the 1919 Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, that was in as well — we watched the Caligari film tonight. Rather I watched the film while my family fell asleep.
The version I ended up with had a complex dissonate sound track; the original was a silent. The copy was a bit faded and glaring alternatively. But the odd Expressionist sets, completely painted in stark black and white and built with no right angles instead favoring sharp unsettling acute knife-like whenever possible, came across nicely or better jarringly. The film is told by a young man sitting in the garden of an asylum. The story of the reappearance of the evil 11th Century monteback magician and his somambulant zombie-like slave who can see into the future but will only predict deaths — murders that he will himself commit — were meant to address the insanity of the World War in which old men had just sent young men off to kill for them. But through a series of false endings and perhaps false ends the story is turned on its head several times over. The framing for the film was added over the objections of the writers/director at the insistance of the producer, Erich Pommer. Many argue that the framing story while completely changing the story’s intent and message actually created a more memorable film.
One interesting note: the somambulist, Ceasare, was played by Conrad Veidt, who would much later appear as Maj. Strasser in Casablanca.

Mighty Times: Children’s March

This year the winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject was “Mighty Times: The Children’s March.”
The showing in Carrboro at the Century Center tonight followed closely the burning of three large Klan-style crosses in nearby Durham.
The Carrboro showing was very very well attended the Century Center filled to near overflow. I would guess over 200 people there. The showing was followed by a panel made up of Chuck Stone, Reginald Hildebrand and Tim Tyson. The panelists provided some acute descriptions of the contexts, events and people elided or left out of the movie as well as praise for its strengths. Frankly the movie is a triumphalist tale aimed at children and young adults and focused on the role, the very important and pivotal role, that children played in the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement. As Tim Tyson noted, the running time of 40 minutes is perfect for showing to a class, then to have a 20 minute discussion afterwards. The film is part of the Teach Tolerance series from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I understand from the Cybrarian that the DVD will be available for checkout from the Cybrary.

Among those in the audience were Lois and T J Anderson. T J, an avant garde composer, was just inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters last week.

New Van CD (or slightly used)?

The wonderful long-lived Van Fan site describes and dissects the new Morrison CD, “Magic Time,” which was just released last week in the US. Briefly the good news is that if you liked the last two Van releases, “Down the Road” and “What’s Wrong With This Picture,” then you will like this CD too. The bad news is that the “new” CD looks to be mostly outtakes from and/or music recorded at the same time as those CDs with the same personel, at least one of whom is now dead, Foggy Lyttle (2003). Speculations by long time fan, Dave of Tasmania make sense to me.

Poetry and NAACP

Spent most of the afternoon at the Carrboro International Poetry Festival hearing about 10 of the 40 poets scheduled to read there. Organizer Patrick Herron and I will both be reading tomorrow. I had to leave just after Tonya Olson’s wonderful set which included a piece in which Joyce’s The Dead is rewritten to be about the breakup of an affair between the author and Lisa Marie Presley over the author’s refusal to become a Scientologist. I cannot explain any further except to say I recommend this piece be it poem or short story or performance piece.
Later Sally and I went to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP banquet. There among the entertainers was a terrific a capella group called “the Sons of Bethel.” The Sons have been part of the Music on the Terrace program at UNC’s Johnston Center in the past year or so. Tonight they were playing to a home crowd.

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