Daft Punk already sort of sounds like they make their music using vintage video game systems but Da Chip is what that would actually sound like. Better than I expected. (via @shauninman)
Tags: Da Chip Daft Punk music remix video gamesWednesday, February 29, 2012
The music of Daft Punk revisited on vintage video game systems
The music of Daft Punk revisited on vintage video game systems:
The rollercoaster of compassionate death
The rollercoaster of compassionate death:
The Euthanasia Coaster is designed to thrill the hell out of its passengers just before it kills them.
Each inversion would have a smaller diameter than the one before in order to inflict 10 g to passengers while the train loses speed. After a sharp right-hand turn the train would enter a straight, where unloading of bodies and loading of passengers could take place.
The Euthanasia Coaster would kill its passengers through prolonged cerebral hypoxia, or insufficient supply of oxygen to the brain. The ride's seven inversions would inflict 10 g on its passengers for 60 seconds -- causing g-force related symptoms starting with gray out through tunnel vision to black out and eventually g-LOC, g-force induced loss of consciousness. Depending on the tolerance of an individual passenger to g-forces, the first or second inversion would cause cerebral anoxia, rendering the passengers brain dead. Subsequent inversions would serve as insurance against unintentional survival of passengers.
More information on the project is here.
Tags: deathTen commandments for con men
Ten commandments for con men:
Con man Victor Lustig shared a list of commandments written for aspiring con men. Among them:
Tags: crime how to lists Victor Lustig1. Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con-man his coups).
8. Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Aspire to awesomeness. (Jan and Stan Berenstain - creators of...
Aspire to awesomeness.
(Jan and Stan Berenstain - creators of...:
(Jan and Stan Berenstain - creators of...:
Aspire to awesomeness.
(Jan and Stan Berenstain - creators of the Berenstain Bears)
Friday, February 24, 2012
Honk for Honk
Honk for Honk:
By Wallyhood
Honk Fest West, the fabulous, boisterous bacchanal of tubas, trumpets, accordions and drums put on by street musicians from all four corners of the country, will be returning to Gas Works Park and other spots around Seattle this June 1st – 3rd.
To help you get in the spirit (and to help put it on), they’re holding a fundraiser this Saturday night over in Fremont. Tina touts:
The fundraiser is called Honk! Around the World! and is being held Sat 2/25 at Hales.
This is HONK! Fest West’s first sponsored event of 2012. Join as we celebrate the amazing artistry and noise which comes when music and dance from all over the world slams together in a burst of powerful intensity!
We are pleased to present musical sets from Tubaluba, VamoLá, Nu Klezmer Army, and the brilliant gypsy-inspired Makedon, alongside performances from Lesley Rialto, Whisper De Corvo, Skin Deep Dance, award-winning bellydancers Mecia andMelody Anderson, and the Emerald Rain dance troupe.
The event is all-ages! Tickets will be sold in advance for $15, and at the door for $20. Kids under 15 are $10.
BOOM!
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Join the conversation! Visit the comments section of this article and share your thoughts.
Wallyhood thanks our sponsors, including Taylor Gardens, for their generous support.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Neil Young Busking In Glasgow In 1976
Neil Young Busking In Glasgow In 1976:
Oh my God! Watch this video of Neil Young busking, with a banjo and harmonica, in front of the Bank of Scotland in Glasgow in 1976. He plays one of his greatest songs, "The Old Laughing Lady," and still some silly Scot says he thinks it's "a lot of rubbish." Almost as good for the fashions and accents on the Glaswegian street as it is for the music.
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See more posts by Dave Bry
Stefon's Illustrated Guide to New York's Hottest Nightclubs
Stefon's Illustrated Guide to New York's Hottest Nightclubs:
For the last four years, Stefon Zolesky, created by Bill Hader and John Mulaney, has been every SNL fan's favorite drugged-up club-hopper. Without his New York City party suggestions, we would never know about the glory of Furkles, Jewpids, human bathmats, Teddy Graham people, and Gizblow the Coked-Up Gremlin. Stefon made his first appearance not on Weekend Update, but in a sketch with host Ben Affleck, in which he and Hader played the Zolesky Brothers. Together, the siblings pitched coming-of-age movie ideas...with gay porn angles. A year and a half later on April 24, 2010, Stefon made his first appearance as Weekend Update's city correspondent, and the rest is history.
We love Stefon, which is why we asked very talented illustrator friends to draw up some of his hot spots. We gave our artists a transcript and clip of each sketch, and left them to do the rest. Sometimes they went literal, sometimes they focused on a single character, sometimes they tackled the whole scene, and some of them didn’t even know what SNL was before the assignment. But all of them delivered Stefon-inspired masterpieces, so consider this Splitsider's very first curated group show, Zolesky-style.
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Beirut, "Vagabond"
Beirut, "Vagabond":
The new Beirut video looks like a Belle & Sebastian album cover. Which, of course, is a very good way to look. There's a also a funny man-trying-to-catch-chicken scene like from Rocky II. And, since it's Beirut, lovely, lovely horn arrangements. So all, in all, pretty great!
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See more posts by Dave Bry
Exclamation marks up the minister's arse.
Exclamation marks up the minister's arse.: Cassetteboy vs The News [SLYT, maybe NSFW]. A seamless mashup of fifteen BBC News episodes.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue
1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue:
From Project Gutenberg, Francis Grose's Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue was published in 1811 and gives the reader a full account of the slang, swears, and insults used at the time.
FLOGGING CULLY. A debilitated lecher, commonly an old one.
COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.
TWIDDLE-DIDDLES. Testicles.
TWIDDLE POOP. An effeminate looking fellow.
ROUND ROBIN. A mode of signing remonstrances practised by sailors on board the king's ships, wherein their names are written in a circle, so that it cannot be discovered who first signed it, or was, in other words, the ringleader.
A modern copy is available on Amazon.
Tags: books Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue languageTuesday, February 21, 2012
Peter Cook and 'Derek and Clive's' Last Album
Peter Cook and 'Derek and Clive's' Last Album:
With some friends working on a Peter Cook / Dudley Moore project recently, my mind wandered back to thinking about the many hilarious and truly outrageous things that they had filmed and recorded over the years. Someday I'll do a long article about them but for today I just want to talk about one of my favorite comedy albums as a teenager - Derek and Clive / Ad Nauseum. My record-buying budget was slender in those days (1979), and I recall vividly how upon seeing the new copy of Ad Nauseum in the store, with its cleverly designed cover and special screen-printed clear bag I had to have it. But as usual with my "going up to the city to buy new records" trips, this meant that some cheaper lps would be sacrificed altogether in order to get the higher-priced import vinyl (Ad Nauseum was on Virgin Records, right when they went from the sweet little painting of a virgin on the label to the more punk 'side one RED and side two GREEN' format).
Here's a (NSFW) sample of one of the few fully pre-scripted scenes from this record: Horse Racing
Little did I realize then that this project would STILL stand this many years later as one of the most borderline-(and over the) offensive comedy records ever waxed. In further exploration of things Peter Cook related I found this lovely website about him, which also contained an excerpt from an interview with amazing British engineer Hugh Padgham (in two parts: here and here), who, along with spending a great deal of time with Peter Cook assembling this lp, also worked with loads of other artists I admire (Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and I believe he has some Monty Python lp credits as well) who brings into focus how the album was made and dispels some myths that have accrued around the famous sessions.
It's actually hard to not wax enthusiastic here about the 100 other projects that they worked on together or seperately that I also love, but like I said - I'll try and cook up a longer article soon. In any case, I highly recommend giving the lp a listen - there are six bonus cuts on the (probably well out-of-print) CD version as well to enjoy. It was a jaw-dropper at the time and still has some power to shock. Below, however, is a 'clean' clip from the boys, taken from an episode of their TV programme "Not Only, But Also", and featuring (along with a special guest cameo) a wacky lip-synched version of their then-current single "The L. S. Bumble Bee", which as regular readers know, has been featured on WFMU before, and so there's the vinyl version for you as well.
10 Seconds from Every Top-100 Song Ever + A Free Cut-up Software!
10 Seconds from Every Top-100 Song Ever + A Free Cut-up Software!:
1959 | 1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011
In 1959, Billboard began releasing their annual charts of the top 100 songs of each year. Here are mp3s with 10 seconds of every single top 100 song ever. Follow the lists along with the music on this site. There are some errors here, so bear with me and do point out major imperfections in the comments. If you've been following my column in the past, all of these mp3s are improved versions, with crossfades in between tracks and smarter choices of clips.
I produced these supercuts with a software that Frederic Cornu and I developed together. Fred is a genius and I'm eternally grateful to him. This software is VERY SIMPLE to use and 100% FREE. It simply takes a music playlist of your choice (from iTunes or a similar program), finds the loudest point of each song and stitches all the songs together. These supercuts are useful to condense information and I think they're totally beautiful too.
In a few minutes, you can easily make supercuts of your music collection, even if you are a luddite. Download the file below, unzip the folder and click "Run Supercut-O-Matic"...there'll be a button to press in the program to give you further instructions.
Download Supercut-O-Matic for Mac (2mb zip file)
Download Supercut-O-Matic for Windows (3mb zip file)
Once you've made your files, send them to me (contact info is provided in the program's helpme file) and I will release YOUR MUSIC on a CD! Do you have a completist collection of yodeling music, blues singers, minimal-synth, presidential speeches or tuba solos? Use Supercut-O-Matic and SEND ME THE RESULTS! Please do contact me with any feedback.
"Supercuts Supercut", a CD with the best submissions I get, is available to anybody who pledges $75 or more to my radio show in the current WFMU fundraising marathon! Use the widget below to pledge to the greatest radio station on the planet and help us broadcast for another year. Also, if you pledge $30 or more to my show, I will remix a top 100 song of your choice LIVE on the air.
46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace's 50th Birthday
46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace's 50th Birthday:
Today would have been David Foster Wallace's 50th birthday, and if you'd like to mark it, here are some things that might interest you to read (or watch) and revisit. The list isn't intended to be comprehensive; for that there's the Howling Fantods, not to mention this, this and that. This is more like an old trunk, some favorite things that got packed away and today's maybe a nice day to take them out and rummage around a little: Remember when Frank Bruni peeped inside DFW's medicine cabinet? etc.
PIECES FROM AROUND
1. "Roger Federer as Religious Experience" at The New York Times (2006).
2-3. The fiction and essays for Harper's, including: aboard the cruise ship Nadir, "Ticket To The Fair," "The Depressed Person," "Laughing With Kafka" and "Tense Present." You can lose your morning here even if you've read them all before, and why not? "Just about every class has a SNOOTlet, so I know you've seen them—these are the sorts of six- to twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and whose response to striking out in T-ball is to cry out 'How incalculably dreadful!' etc." Or: "Hall shakes his gloves at the ceiling as several girls call his name, and you can feel it in the air's very ions: Darrell Hall is going to get laid before the night's over." (Related: Jonathan Franzen's disclosure that Wallace may have been loose with facts in his reportage.)
4. "Consider The Lobster" for Gourmet (2004).
5. "The Host" for The Atlantic (2005).
6. "Good Old Neon" isn't available online (it's in Oblivion); see instead this Ask MetaFilter question, "How do I stop being Neal from 'Good Old Neon'?"
CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE
7-8. "The Viking Poem," written age 6 or 7, and "My mother works so hard," probably earlier. (Via.)
9. An early, early 1987 profile of Wallace, written by Bill Katovsky, wherein he recalls childhood thusly: "It was an exceptional academic household. I remember my parents reading Ulysses out loud to each other when they went to bed. My father read Moby-Dick to my younger sister and me when we were 6 and 8. There was a near rebellion halfway through the novel. Here we were—still picking our noses—and learning the etymology of whale names."
10. On his college self in "Brief Interview with a Five Draft Man," an interview with Amherst's alumni magazine: "I was one of those people they had to flicker the lights of Frost Library to get out of there on Friday nights who’d be out there right after brunch on Sunday waiting on the steps for them to open the doors."
11. Some of his college humor writing with friend Mark Costello (co-writer on Signifying Rappers).
"HOW'S IT FEEL TO BE FAMOUS?"
12-13. Michael Pietsch's editor letter to Wallace re: Infinite Jest; and a 2009 essay by Pietsch on what it was like to edit the book.
14-17. Michiko Kakutani's mixed-but-engaged review of Broom Of The System was followed by the mixed-but-still-engaged review of Infinite Jest. In a Salon interview with Laura Miller, Wallace mentions the objection of the "very charming Japanese lady from the New York Times" to the novel's heft. (The Pale King got a mixed-but-engaged reception, too.)
18. The big Frank Bruni Times Magazine profile, "The Grunge American Novel" (oh, grunge), that described riding in a taxi with Wallace to the packed KGB reading: "I have no saliva." At the reading, Elizabeth Wurtzel was up front, "Ethan Hawke lurked in the back." Back in Illinois with his friends: "Do you guys know 'The Charlie Rose Show'? Would you think it was whorish if somebody went on it?"
19. On "The Charlie Rose Show" a couple months later with Jonathan Franzen (denim button-up with sports coat) and Mark Leyner (mob suit). Rose's big question: In the age of the Internet, what's the future of the novel? (Spoiler: the novel gives it all up to explore the jungles of Brazil.) The dynamics of male friendship and rivalry on display here are riveting; and Jonathan Franzen's hair makes me regret that no one makes plaster busts of authors anymore.
20. Wallace, with the white bandanna, was on the show again a year later to talk about A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Rose remains concerned about the novel's chances against "the allure of technological advancements." My favorite bit here is when they talk about movies.
21-22. These Bookworm interviews are also really great.
23. While on assignment for Rolling Stone, David Lipsky spent five days with Wallace at the end of the Infinite Jest book tour. Wallace was a few years older than him. He talked about the "greasy thrill of fame" ("how's it feel to be famous?" asked a FedEx guy as he was signing a package). Lipsky recounted his time with Wallace in "The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace" for Rolling Stone (not offered online); and then more fully in Although Of Course You End Up Being Yourself, which is based almost entirely on their conversations. (It's excerpted here, but you're better off reading the book.)
24. This 1996 online conversation with Word e-zine is a hundred kinds of charming; there are maybe five or six youngish people in the chatroom with Wallace, and he's really unguarded and fun with them.
dfw: In my very first seminar in college, I pronounced facade "fakade." The
memory's still fresh and raw.Marisa: Keats, I don't want to know about your problems and feelings.
dfw: I'd like to hear more about keats's carbuncle, though.
Keats: *sniff* I only mentioned it because I thought it was relevant.
Keats: It's actually more like a welt.
INDISPUTABLE FAME MARKER
25. Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20, at The Onion (2003).
DISPUTABLE FAME MARKER
26. Being interviewed by German TV ZDF that same year.
THE 2005 KENYON COMMENCEMENT SPEECH
27-29. There's a point (and maybe it's already approaching) where this speech will seem too needlepointed and sampler-like to remain moving, but for now let's say it's not here. (Audio of Wallace delivering the speech, parts 1 and 2.)
FRIENDS, SLEEPING COMPANIONS AND ACQUAINTANCES
30. "Just Kids" by Evan Hughes, about the intertwining relationships between Jeffrey Eugenides, Franzen, Wurtzel, Rick Moody, Mary Karr, Costello and Wallace in the 80s.
31. 2001 piece by Zadie Smith for Eyeshot, then in the U.S. for her White Teeth book tour—if you've read it before, re-reading it may give you a whirling feeling of time-travel back to millennial-era Internet:
“So, says Lorrie [Moore], “Is there anyone you really like, who you really wanted to meet?”Charged by caffeine, I tell her I want to meet David Foster Wallace. I want to meet him so much it’s giving me a hernia. I want to meet him so much that I have had a dream where I meet him sitting on the pavement and he says that we’ve already met and it wasn’t so great and neither of us had much fun and he doesn’t want his hair cut so why don’t I just go home and stop bothering him. In the dream I try to convince him that he could afford to lose at least six inches from underneath that bandana. Maybe we could even do something with the colour. But he walks away without a word. In this dream, I am around thirteen years old, and Mr. Foster Wallace is in his mid-twenties.
Lorrie Moore looks at me queerly. She says, “You know, he’s a perfectly nice guy—I’m sure it wouldn’t be so hard to meet him of you really wanted to.”
I also felt this way in 2001, Zadie.
32. A 2003 interview with Dave Eggers.
33. Above, video from the literary festival Le Conversazioni in 2006, where he appeared with Smith, Franzen, Eugenides and Nathan Englander.
34. Remembrances by former students, longtime readers and correspondents, fellow writers, people who had met him at readings—and a guy who played tennis against him in fifth grade.
DFW'S READING RECOMMENDATIONS
35. "Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels > 1960," compiled for Salon:
“Wittgenstein’s Mistress” by David Markson (1988)
“W’s M” is a dramatic rendering of what it would be like to live in the sort of universe described by logical atomism. A monologue, formally very odd, mostly one-sentence 6s. Tied with “Omensetter’s Luck” for the all-time best U.S. book about human loneliness.
36. Circling back here to the interview by Laura Miller mentioned earlier, because it includes a really nice short riff on the writers whose stuff "historically… sort of rung my cherries": "And, my God, there’s poetry. Probably Phillip Larkin more than anyone else, Louise Glück, Auden."
37. "David Foster Wallace's 10 favorite books," topped by The Screwtape Letters.
38-39. Further reading can be cadged from this '94 syllabus for Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction (Jackie Collins!) or this one for a Spring '05 Literary Interpretation Syllabus (Coetzee and Silence of the Lambs).
(40. Related to his teaching, a 1987 student evaluation: "Jessaymyn has more or less mastered, in the two best stories I saw, a kind of jaundiced, hostile young voice that is both completely convincing and engaging to read.")
UNBEARABLE
41. D.T. Max's New Yorker essay about Wallace's struggle with depression. It came out, you'll remember, six months after his suicide, and it catches everyone—Karen Green, his parents and sister, friends—in the mid-freefall of their grief, and it's really incredibly rough going—even with Mary Karr zinging up the place—and yet it feels wrong not to include it here. Max's biography Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life Of David Foster Wallace comes out this fall; I'm sure the book won't lack for blurbs, but if for some reason one's needed, "Unbearable … incredibly rough going" is now available.
IN THE ARCHIVES
42. The inventory of what's at the Harry Ransom Center.
43. Some highlights of the archive:
In the margins to his personal copy of Lost in the Funhouse—written by an early pope of American postmodernism, John Barth—you can read along with Wallace as he bristles at the limitations of the high-academic style. Barth’s writing seems to him “Talmudic—obsessed w/its own interpretation”—a line that winds up, nearly verbatim, in the mouth of a Wallace character in the novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. (Wallace also wrote character names and plot elements for Westward into the margins of Funhouse, making his copy of the Barth book both a mashup first draft and a vortexlike wormhole of 20th-century American fiction.)
44-45. "Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library" by Maria Bustillos, published here last spring. (The books talked about in the piece have since been removed from the collection.)
THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE
46. And if during this list-making I've lapsed into any Wallace-ish phrasings I pretty much wouldn't be the first.
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See more posts by Carrie Frye
Sanya's Cat
Sanya's Cat: 
I bought this print from Sanya Glisic and it looks even better in real life (as most things do). Via her etsy shop.
I featured Sanya's Struwwelpeter on 50 Watts last year.
I bought this print from Sanya Glisic and it looks even better in real life (as most things do). Via her etsy shop.
I featured Sanya's Struwwelpeter on 50 Watts last year.
(515): She said we could only have...
(515): She said we could only have...: (515): She said we could only have sex if she got to keep her fake moustache on during.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
François Truffaut’s Big Interview with Alfred Hitchcock (Free Audio)
François Truffaut’s Big Interview with Alfred Hitchcock (Free Audio):
The great French filmmaker François Truffaut would have turned 80 today, and to celebrate, we’re bringing back a wonderful series of audio recordings — Truffaut’s lengthy interview with another legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock.
Back in 1962, François Truffaut, the inspiration behind French New Wave cinema, met with Hitchcock. And, assisted by a helpful translator, the two directors talked through Hitchcock’s life and vast filmography, moving from his early films shot it Britain (Blackmail, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent), to his later Hollywood productions – North by Northwest, Psycho and Vertigo. In total, Truffaut and Hitchcock talked for over 12 hours, and, several years later, Truffaut published a now classic book based on these conversations: Alfred Hitchcock: A Definitive Study (1967).
Thanks to the Hitchcock Wiki, these original audio recordings now appear online. 25 recordings, each separated into 30 minute chunks. Below, you can revisit a selection of these recordings. The full set appears here (and here), and meanwhile don’t forget to visit our collection of 21 Free Hitchcock Films Online.
- Childhood through to his early years in the film industry
- Final years in Britain through to his move to America
- Arrival to Hollywood through to “Notorious”
- Initial discussion about the “The Birds” through to “Rear Window”
- “North by Northwest” through to “Psycho”
François Truffaut’s Big Interview with Alfred Hitchcock (Free Audio) is a post from: Open Culture
“What are you going to do with all this lube?! Wrestling...
“What are you going to do with all this lube?! Wrestling...: 
“What are you going to do with all this lube?! Wrestling match? Biggest adult party ever? If you are looking for a simply jaw-dropping amount of lube, Passion Natural Water-Based Lubricant is ready to get the fun started with this 55 gallon drum! With its superb formula you will have a natural feel that keeps you moist longer and also works great with all toy materials. Easily washes away with warm water and mild soap. You may never run out of lube again!”
(via Amazon.com: Passion Natural Water-Based Lubricant - 55 Gallon: Health & Personal Care)
As ever, the comments are priceless.
moviesinframes:Pi, 1998 (dir. Darren Aronofsky)By...
Friday, February 10, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory: finally listened to this stunning This American Life episode; it led to this response from Apple
Through destruction, a washing machine achieves transcendence
Really starts at 1:30, and becomes amazing by 3:00.
Through destruction, a washing machine achieves transcendence:
Through destruction, a washing machine achieves transcendence:
You've seen one washing machine self-destruction video, you've seen them all, right? Maybe not. Back in August, I posted this short video of a washer destroying itself (with some help from a brick) but this longer video is mesmerizing and almost poignant at times.
At times, it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself, a Cubist sculpture manifesting itself over time. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Tags: video
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
“Made from a door found at a outdoor market in Modena,...
“Made from a door found at a outdoor market in Modena,...: 
“Made from a door found at a outdoor market in Modena, the table is outfitted with a custom steel frame and new hinges that enable the shutters to open and close at will. When flat, the table can accommodate up to 8 diners, while lifting the back panel open reveals an instant-work desk, complete with rawhide pockets to hold your empty leather-bound sketchbooks and drawers to keep that super 8 camera you’re planning to restore (never going to happen). In the words of the makers, “it’s a table, it’s a desk, it’s a streetdoor.” When it’s time for dinner just lower the top half and lock up.”
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