So, I just came across this over at Bay of Fundie,
and wanted to share the awesomeness. Go check out the more.
Evolutionarily Repurposed WWII Propaganda Poster
Category Archives: Reflected Glory
Reflected Glory: Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues
So, according to YouTube, 133,000 people have already seen this.
This post is for the other 6.8 billion of you.
This awesome video features the poem The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, as read by Allen Dwight Callahan. The visuals are of Cab Calloway. If you’re older than me, or if you’re a big-band buff, you’ll know Calloway as one of the great bandleaders of the 30s and 40s. Otherwise, you’ll recognize him as the Hi-De-Hi-De-Hi-De-Ho dude from The Blues Brothers.
This is part of the Moving Poetry Series by Four Seasons Productions.
Also, apropos of nothing, here’s a little Cab Calloway fun fact. He apparently fired trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie from his band in 1941 following an “incident” between the two. According to Gillespie’s wikipedia page,
Calloway did not approve of Dizzy’s mischievous humor, nor of his adventuresome approach to soloing; according to [band member Jonah] Jones, Calloway referred to it as “Chinese music.” During one performance, Calloway saw a spitball land on the stage, and accused Dizzy of having thrown it. Dizzy denied it, and the ensuing argument led to Calloway striking Dizzy, who then pulled out a switchblade knife and charged Calloway. The two were separated by other band members, during which scuffle Calloway was cut on the hand.
I wonder what ever happened to Gillespie’s “Chinese music” style.
What do you think of Wilkins Coffee?
So, here’s a thing. Apparently, back in 1957, a young Jim Henson did a series of television commercials for Wilkins Coffee. In addition to providing an important life lesson about NEVER DOUBTING THE WILKINS, these commercials provide a glimpse at a sort of proto-Kermit.
There’s more interesting information about Henson’s early career at Network Awesome, including a bunch of other early commercials. Most are just as strangely violent as these, and you’ll find ur-forms of other familiar muppets. I came across this via Boing Boing.
Sketch Chair, or maybe SketchChair
So, here’s a cool thing. These folks at an outfit called Diatom have a project called SketchChair, maybe with a space, I’m not sure. They’re developing software that will allow you to design your own chair, and virtually test it for structural stability and comfort. Then, you can have it digitally fabricated and shipped to you. The software will be open source, with the aim of allowing designers to share and collaborate.
The other cool thing is that it is being crowd-funded through this outfit called Kickstarter. What Kickstarter does is collects funds to support creative projects like this one. They set a pledge goal and a time limit. If enough people pledge to support the project, they get the money. The pledges turn into donations only if the pledge goal is reached in the time limit.
The idea is that donors only actually give money if there are enough people giving to make the project go. These are donations, not investments, although it sounds like the project fundees typically offer something to donors. For instance, a donation of more than $300 to SketchChair will get you a chair.
If you’re interested in supporting SketchChair, you can check it out here.
Kickstarter funds all sorts of projects, from film to writing to dance to food. If you want to see if there is anything that tickles your fancy, you can check them out here. I’ve just stumbled across this, so if I find anything particularly cool, I’ll post it here.
Reflected Glory: Pokémon PSA
So, if you’re young enough to be or have been a Pokémon fan. Or if you’re old enough to have kids at Pokémon-relevant ages, you should enjoy this. If not, it’s only like a minute long, and the ending is still worth it.
Pokémon. They’re like herpes simplices. You gotta catch em all.
Reflected Glory: The Fap Store
So, if you haven’t seen this, it’s awesome. If you have, you already know that it’s awesome, so you’ll probably want to watch it again. Introducing the app store for your Brother IntelliFax 2800. Enjoy.
I can’t wait for the thermal-paper version.
Tsunami Relief AND a Crazy Watch
So, for the next couple of days, Tokyoflash is running a special promotion, where they are donating the money from all purchases to tsunami relief. Note that this does not seem to be the usual bullshit pseudo-charity thing that companies do to exploit disasters, where they donate a portion of the proceeds, meaning that they still make themselves a nice profit. According to their website, Tokyoflash is donating 100% of the purchase value, including the shipping costs, to the disaster relief fund at the Japanese Red Cross.
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| Just one of the many wacky watches you can buy now, . |
The only thing that makes me wary at all is the use of the phrase “purchase value,” which could conceivably mean something different than “purchase price.” Or, that could simply be an artifact of this being the English-language website of a Japanese company.
So, if you’ve ever wanted one of these, now would be a good time to buy. This promotion runs through 5pm Japan time on March 24, which is 8am in London (which is not yet on summer time), and 4am in New York (which is).
Reflected Glory: Agha Shahid Ali
So, I’m a few days late with this post, as I had intended for it to coincide with Agha Shahid Ali’s birthday, but there you have it. Had he not passed away in 2001, he would have turned 61 on February 4.
Although I never had the opportunity to meet him, I feel personally indebted to him, and sad that I did not know him. My poetry book was published last year after it won the 2009 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. Since then, I have had a number of conversations with people who did know him, and they invariably go on and on about what a fantastic human being he was. And it’s not at all in the way that people tend to speak well of the dead. In every one of these conversations, people speak in an almost trance-like state. Their voices and eyes soften, as if his immense kindness were channeled through them.
He was born and raised in Kashmir, attended the Universities of Kashmir and Delhi, and then came to the United States, where he earned a PhD from Penn State and an MFA from the University of Arizona. He taught at creative writing programs across the country, leaving behind a trail of devoted students and colleagues.
He wrote several books of poetry, but is perhaps best known for his championing of the ghazal, an ancient Arabic poetic form that dates back to like the 6th century. It long ago spread across southern Asia, and has become a common form in Persian and Urdu poetry. He translated a collection of ghazals by Faiz Ahmed Faiz into English, and his best-known work is probably his posthumously published collection Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals.
The ghazal form consists of a series of couplets, where the second line of each couplet ends with a sort of extended rhyme. What I mean by that is that there are one or a few words at the end of the line that are repeated exactly in each couplet, preceded by a conventional rhyme. It also conventionally contains the poet’s name in the last couplet. Agha Shahid Ali’s most famous ghazal is the title(ish) poem “Tonight” from his posthumous collection. You can find it easily on the internet, and you should.
Here is his poem “Land,” where you can see the ghazal form as well as the soul of the man who was so well loved.
Land
For Christopher Merrill
Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land –
There is no sugar in the promised land.
Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love,
I’m already drunk in your capitalist land?
If home is found on both sides of the globe,
home is of course here – and always a missed land.
Clearly, these men were here only to destroy,
a mosque now the dust of a prejudiced land.
Will the Doomsayers die, bitten with envy,
when springtime returns to our dismissed land?
The prisons fill with the cries of children.
Then how do you subsist, how do you persist, Land?
“Is my love nothing for I’ve borne no children?”
I’m with you, Sappho, in that anarchist land.
A hurricane is born when the wings flutter …
Where will the butterfly, on by wrist, land?
You made me wait for one who wasn’t even there
though summer had finished in that tourist land.
Do the blind hold temples close to their eyes
when we steal their gods for our atheist land?
Abandoned bride, Night throws down her jewels
so Rome – on our descent – is an amethyst land.
At the moment the heart turns terrorist,
are Shahid’s arms broken, O Promised Land?
Reflected Glory: Picture Songs
So, we all know that you, Cathy, and Garfield all Hate Mondays. But that’s probably just because you haven’t been watching Nice Peter’s Picture Songs. They’re songs. That he writes about pictures. Every monday. I honestly don’t know how he does this every week, especially since he appears to do other things. Here is last week’s:
And links to some previous editions:
Enjoy!
Reflected Glory: Axe Cop
So, you may be familiar with the opening of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, where he describes the three metamorphoses: spirit becomes camel, camel becomes lion (and slays dragon), and lion becomes child. I think that Nietzsche’s metaphor works really nicely in a lot of circumstances. I most strongly associate it with biology graduate training, but I think that similar reasoning probably applies in a lot of other fields.
In the early stages of education, through high school and college, and into the beginning of graduate school, the student is like the camel, who has to develop a strong back by learning to carry all of the received knowledge. Then, starting typically in grad school, you learn that all of the things that are in the textbooks you’ve been using are not strictly true. This is like the transformation into the lion, who has to slay the dragon covered with scales, where each scale has golden letters that read “Thou Shalt!” It is only after passing through these two stages that the third transformation occurs (maybe while you’re a postdoc?), where the lion becomes the child. The child is innocence and creativity, and it is this child who advances knowledge by possessing skills and knowledge, but no longer being beholden to them.
Now, one of the problems with the system is that not everyone makes it all the way through the transformations. Many scientists never fully shed the camel phase. They are quite skilled at the type of incremental research that NIH and NSF love to fund, and are often successful, but are excessively (IMHO) tied to the dogma and assumptions that define their discipline.
Other people get stuck in the lion phase. These are the compulsive paradigm shifters. They are Don Quixotes who spend their lives slaying imaginary windmill-dragons. In evolutionary biology this is the phenomenon responsible for the perennial “Darwin was WRONG!!” headlines.
That last step is really the hardest one. It requires us to recapture the innocence and creativity of childhood, but to wield it tempered with skill and knowledge. Unfortunately, the implementation of most science education is such that the camel and lion stages are coupled with a soul-crushing strangulation of the childlike curiosity that we are all born with.
So, what does this all have to do with Axe Cop? Axe Cop is a web comic (and now a book) written by a pair of brothers, Ethan and Malachai Nicolle. The twist? Ethan is 29 years old, and Malachai is 5. Ethan has clearly absorbed the illustrating and storytelling skills of the comic-book camel, and has slain the comic-book dragon. The comic itself is just bursting with a child-like creativity that is easy to recognize but difficult to produce. How do they do it? I suspect that Ethan was able to retain and/or recapture his creativity and innocence better than most, but the biggest thing is probably the co-authorship with Malachai, who has not yet entered the camel phase.
There is undoubtedly a lesson here about how to do great science, although I can’t quite figure out the mechanics. One possibility is this.
So, in the spirit of understanding Nietzsche, and biology graduate school, and education reform, and dragons, and ninjas, unicorns, avocados, vampires, dinosaurs, and robots, go read Axe Cop.
Also, it’s AWESOME!