December 2009 Archives

Absofacto - Paper Crane from Absofacto on Vimeo.

I've known Jon a while, mostly though his interaction with the elusive #mattthompson and his role in Mason Proper. His music and that of Mason Proper has always impressed me by its forward looking nature. It is the kind of music that knows how to be progressive without losing sight of the music.

Jon and the rest of the Mason Proper guys are an inspiration for a work-a-day like me, who has aspirations of artistic...well, anything.

Also: Jon has a bunch of music on his site available for the very reasonable price of whatever you want to give him. KEEN!

There is something about a martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth
I think that perhaps it's the gin.

By Ogden Nash, sent to me by Aunt Ba.

The Remnants of Joona is a short film, apparently performed with a live electronic accompaniment ala the old silent flicks with the organ playing along. The film is comprised of several line drawings on muted, colored backgrounds with very basic animation to spice up the scene.

The video follows a team of interplanetary scientist as they explore the planet Joona, and discover the strange species that live there. It has a very hard-sf feel with the technical-style drawings and the focus on flora and fauna, but the art also has a kind of whimsical surreal quality to it.

I find the overall effect very pleasing. It actually reminds me a lot of the weird indie sf comics from the late 1980s, which I've always been mysteriously drawn to.

Playlist is here, individual episodes embedded below. I highly recommend watching the playlist on a large sized player, since you have to do a fair amount of reading.

Depending on how long you've known me and how long you've been following this blog, you're either about to start rolling your eyes or staring in disbelief as I peel back the layers and reveal a whole other kind of nerdy.

Sometimes, I get bored on Google Maps. I'll roll around the old test ranges in the American southwest, or look for neat boats around major port cities. One of my proudest moments was zeroing in on the HMB-1, the submersible drydock used to steal a russian sub and later house the Sea Shadow.

Another favorite was stumbling across this amazing man-made island in Baltimore Harbor called Fort Carroll, originally designed by Robert E. Lee.

Having a girlfriend and a job have kept me away from this kind of thing for sometime, but last night I was at it again. This time I was trawling for aircraft, and the best way to do that is to find the boneyards.

Boneyards are were older aircraft are stored indefinitely, and usually broken down for spare parts or recycling. Probably the largest is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) near Tucson, Arizona, located on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Views of this site are amazing, and it's hard to not wax poetic when outrageously deadly and exorbitantly priced weapons sit rotting in the sun en masse. You really ought to take a look at it.

There are thousands of aircraft in this facility, and after some browsing I came across these handsome fellows:

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The distinctive wedge shape stirred something in the my mind, and after sleeping on it, I remembered what they are. These appear to be the Lockheed D-21 drones developed from the design and technology of the SR-71. Strange little things with a bizarre and troubled history, certainly worth reading the wikipedia article. My favorite part:

When Ben Rich, Kelly Johnson's successor at the Skunk Works, visited Russia in the 1990s after the fall of the USSR, a contact gave him a package that contained parts of the D-21 that had disappeared on the first operational flight. It had crashed in Siberia. The Soviets had apparently been puzzled as to what it was, but it appears that they also obtained the wreckage of the D-21 lost on the fourth operational flight. The Tupolev design bureau reverse-engineered the wreck and came up with plans for a Soviet copy, named the "Voron (Raven)", but it was never built.

I took a closer look around google maps and found a total of 7 such aircraft at the Tuscon boneyard. Wikipedia says that 17 were mothballed at the site, so 10 have already been broken down or moved to permanent display elsewhere.

Now, I'm happy to admit that I have no background in aircraft design or identification, and could be completely wrong. But hey, even if I am, maybe you learned something today.

The New Yorker made a bad layout decision, and this is how I read their review of The Princess and the Frog:

Disney's first classically animated African-American heroine (voiced by Anika Noni Rose) gets short shrift in this new twist on an old tale, in which a young girl in Louisiana bayou country kisses a frog that was once a prince, and turns into a frog herself. The nineteen-twenties jazz-age setting in the film, we watch Viggo Mortensen, as the Man, and Kodi Smit-McPhee , as the boy, walk though a dichromatic gray-brown post-apocalyptic landscape, peopled only by a few survivors (some of them cannibals feasting on human captives). The grimly punitive monotony of hte leafless, colorless, humorless production may fool some people into thinking it's art. With the golden Chralize Theron, as the Man's wife (seen in flashback to better days), and Robert Duvall, as a bitter old coot waiting to die. Shot in a wrecked industrial landscape near Pittsburgh.

As I was reading this, I was thinking, "wow, this movie is not at all what I expected." Apparently my reading of the review got jumbled with a neighboring review for The Road, an adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel.

I'm almost disappointed that this was a mistake. It sounded kind of cool! Maybe I'll start intentionally mashing up NYer reviews.

Posted on Flickr by His Noodly Appendage

Just think about this for a minute:

What would the world be like if David Lynch had directed Return of the Jedi?

The New Republic has a great article on urban revitalization, and the lessons that Detroit could learn from cities like Belfast and Turin.

This is one of the few articles on Detroit that have done more than just bemoan the current state of affairs (a trait that I noticed in the TIME magazine cover-story, and greatly disappointed me) and offers actionable ideas.

Some frightening statistics from the article.

Even if Detroit were to rebuild its economy, it would still face a fundamental obstacle to recovery. It is just too big for itself, with a landscape that even locals compare to postwar Dresden. Nearly one-third of the land in the city is empty or unused, and some 80,000 city homes are vacant. ... Detroit has to change physically because it simply cannot sustain its current form. It was built for two million people, not the 900,000 that live there today. Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston could all fit within Detroit’s 139-square-mile boundary, and there would still be 20 square miles to spare.

I always knew things were bad and that Detroit was weirdly laid out, but that really takes the taco.

The article places a lot of emphasis on what the Federal Gov't needs to do for the city, which I am personally in favor of. There's so many big things that need to happen there, and they seem beyond the ability of the residents or the state government.

The article ends with this statement, which I could not agree more with:

To allow Detroit to continue its march toward death would come at significant costs, both human and economic. For Detroit to die, especially in the face of such tested methods for saving cities, would be an American tragedy.

I really don't know anything about these delightful little strips, but I enjoyed them.

In which a snake named Fox and a bird named Bear try to out-nerd each other. I just really like the image of a large snake on the steps of MIT.
Comic.

In which flavors of lemonade are discussed.
Comic.