Sunday, August 30, 2009

GBTI - Wax Cylinders Edition.



"Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. They have long held the fascination of collectors and have presented challenges for playback and preservation by archives and collectors alike.

"On this site you will have the opportunity to find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound."


This "Cylinder Preservation" website is the sort of internet-only use of technology that I absolutely adore (see my April 23rd post about old van Gogh).

Want to hear a Sarah Bernhardt recitation? Want to hear the first recording of Thomas Edison? Want to hear Enrico Caruso's actual singing voice? All this & more just a few clicks away, for free, to explore as deeply as you want.

I also groove on the idea that those wax-cylinder recordings represented 'cutting edge' technology when new, about a hundred years ago; a century from now what technology will people use to learn about a little thing we called 'the internet'?


Monday, August 24, 2009

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

An elegant solution, but....




"The prints we make for our 'daily use' not only use paper, but also ink. According to SPRANQ creative communications (Utrecht, The Netherlands) your ink cartridges (or toner) could last longer. SPRANQ has therefore developed a new font: the Ecofont.

"Appealing ideas are often simple: how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses
up to 20% less ink. Free to download, free to use.



"The picture illustrates how the Ecofont was created by omitting parts of the letter. At the shown size, this obviously is not very nice, but at a regular font size it is actually very usable. Naturally, the results vary depending on your software and the quality of your screen. The Ecofont works best in OpenOffice, AppleWorks and MS Office 2007. Printing with a laser printer will give the best printing results.

"The Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux."


I like the idea behind a font specifically designed to save on ink, but I get the same results (that is, trading legibility for toner-conservation) when printing text by setting the printer to 'Black & White' and 'Fast (as opposed to Quality)'.


Monday, August 10, 2009

Seattle is UTTERLY HUMORLESS about its trees...


...and because of it I couldn't be prouder to call Seattle home.

This stone "memorial" is on the Burke-Gilman Trail near my apartment. The only other stones on the trail like this are on Memorial Benches erected by families for their loved ones.


The text reads, after the 'Seattle Parks And Recreation' logo:

"In memory of seven trees: three silver poplars and four Douglas firs, approximately 70 feet in height, that were fatally damaged by illegal herbicide application in August 2008.

Whenever a tree is intentionally killed, the whole community feels its loss."

I mean come on, has your town ever erected a plaque commemorating murdered trees?!

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

The price of Freedom?



Worldwide Military Spending,
from the CIA World Factbook, Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation.

( Click on the map for full size).


America spends almost half of all of the world's military spending. The next closest level is all of Europe combined at less than half of what we spend.

Where does all that money go? Quite frankly I think I'd feel 'safer' if that money were going instead to end this Great Recession.


Sunday, August 2, 2009

Happy 77th to Peter O'Toole, the last great reprobate!


"For me, life has either been a wake or a wedding."


"Booze is the most outrageous of drugs, which is why I chose it."



"I can't stand light. I hate weather.
My idea of heaven is moving from one smoke-filled room to another."



Here are some of his career highlights, all worth knowing:

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Becket (1964)
Lord Jim (1965)
What's New Pussycat (1965)
How to Steal a Million (1966)
Casino Royale (1967)
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969)
The Ruling Class (1972)
Man of La Mancha (1972)
Zulu Dawn (1979)
Caligula (1979)
The Stunt Man (1980)
Masada (1981)
My Favorite Year (1982)
Creator (1985)
Club Paradise (1986)
High Spirits (1988)
The Rainbow Thief (1990)
Bright Young Things (2003)
Troy (2004)
Venus (2006)
Ratatouille (2007)

When Noel Coward saw his "Lawrence of Arabia" he said to Peter, "If you'd been any prettier they would have had to call it "Florence of Arabia."


Nominated 8 different times for an Academy Award, but never won. Finally in 2003 at the age of 71 the Academy awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award. This is how he described the night:

"I enjoyed it. The only thing that wasn't enjoyable was in the green room. I said, 'Can I have a drink?' 'We have lemon juice, apple juice, still or sparkling.' I said, 'No, I want a drink. No drink?' I said, 'All right, I'm fucking off. I'll be back.' A man with earphones said, 'No! No!' Eventually this vodka was smuggled in."

My hero.