"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing people together."
Sand animation is the art of storytelling through continuously created and recreated images in sand, and there may be no one better at it than Kseniya Simonova. In the video above, she steals the show on Ukraine’s equivalent of the America’s Got Talent TV show, and has the judges and audience in tears as she tells the story of a peaceful pre-WWII Ukraine, Germany’s ensuing occupation, and the restoration of independence. The medium, sand on a backlit tabletop, is just gorgeous — and made all the more dramatic as she builds into a frenzy of sand and emotion and long black whirling hair. You’ve really got to see it.
Though you wouldn’t know it, Simonova is new to the art, having decided to become an artist after the credit crisis sent her business belly-up. Since her TV victory though, the art world has started to take her seriously, and YouTube’s lower-brow art-lover community has noticed too, as the Guardianreports:
Her war story has over 400,000 views on YouTube [actually more like four million now] and is provoking an interesting debate in the comments section. Jgoo24 notes that “sand is her bitch” and few would argue with this. “Maybe the most magnificent master piece of art of all time” says DevinsDad90, not a man prone to hyperbole. And also “i just jizzed in my pants” (thank you, deaddevil6).
You can watch the full-screen version of her WWII recreation here, or check out some of her other work.
BTW, somebody help me with this — she looks exactly like a celebrity whose name I can’t remember for the life of me. Who’s her famous twin?
After an impromptu beatboxing lesson from a pro, Paul MacInnes, the Guardian’s slightly disheveled entertainment editor, takes the stage and delivers a valiant if somewhat silly-looking live performance. I gotta say: it’s good to see a reporter who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
“They’ve got a special bit for me in the second half,” he says in the video. “It’s going to involve all my noises.”
Thankfully, it doesn’t.
His tutor, incidentally, is Kevin Fox, the Toronto-born baritone and member of the storied Swingle Singers a cappella octet. Oddly enough, the band was founded way back in 1962 by a hip cat named Ward Swingle, who had to be the only Alabaman in Paris at the time. Swingle and his crew made a name for themselves — and scored five Grammies — doing strangely awesome things like scatting the works of J.S. Bach.
Today’s Swingle Singers make a living selling their sound to big-name TV shows like Sex and the City, The West Wing and Glee. They also put out a CD every year or so, but really — and I’m not trying to be mean here — would you pay £10 or $17 for a cappella versions of Christmas carols and Air on a G String? Maybe I’m just uncultured.
In case you didn’t catch this back in December, an apparently homeless man named “Mustard” recorded a pretty damn fantastic cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” on the sometimes controversialOpie and Anthony show, broadcast on XM Radio and Sirius Satellite.
Little-known fact: “Creep,” now one of Radiohead’s biggest hits, sold just 6,000 copies as a single in the U.K., as local media thought the song was too depressing to broadcast. The band was moving on to other projects when Israeli Army Radio became the first station to give it significant radio play. It took off from there, and Radiohead built a tour around the song, with Tel Aviv the first city they played outside of the U.K.
This has been one of my favourite YouTube videos for ages now — six drummers wait until an elderly couple leaves their apartment to walk the dog, then breaks in and proceeds to turn each of their rooms into a distinct and remarkable musical instrument. Truly odd and wonderful, and I never did figure out what country it was from.
Some other neat videos of people hitting things in a musically pleasing fashion…
Seven young’uns with a bunch of mikes, a sound board and a Jeep Cherokee that they slap, whack, click and slam to make music: link(Thanks Fatts!)
Brazilian band with a dedicated rubber-duckie player: link
Best drummer under ten years old you’ll ever see: link
An octopus has a highly complex nervous system, only part of which is localized in its brain. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in the nerve cords of its arms, which have a remarkable amount of autonomy. […] Some octopuses, such as the Mimic Octopus, will move their arms in ways that emulate the movements of other sea creatures.
In laboratory experiments, octopuses can be readily trained to distinguish between different shapes and patterns. They have been reported to practice observational learning, although the validity of these findings is widely contested on a number of grounds. Octopuses have also been observed in what some have described as play: repeatedly releasing bottles or toys into a circular current in their aquariums and then catching them. Octopuses often break out of their aquariums and sometimes into others in search of food. They have even boarded fishing boats and opened holds to eat crabs
The U.K. has even decided that although they lack a spine, octopuses’ extreme cleverness makes them “honorary vertebrates,” which means researchers and pet-owners must follow the same animal cruelty laws for them as they would for mammals and other intelligent backboned critters.
So, with octopuses as bright as they are, it should be no surprise that a British octopus named Louis has grown extremely attached to his Mr. Potato Head toy — so attached that he gets violent when his handlers tried to take it away. Louis has even figured out how to get hidden food out of the toy’s spare parts compartment.
Over the course of my extensive scholarly research for this post, I came across this and asked myself the age-old question: “Is it possible to stumble upon a Wikipedia article on ‘Octopus Wrestling’ without stopping to read it?” Answer: No. Apparently, wrestling matches between divers and octopuses attracted up to 5,000 spectators in the 1960s. Now they watch NASCAR.
Incidentally, and because I know you were all wondering, Wikipedia also says the acceptable plural forms of “octopus” are “‘octopuses,’ ‘octopi,’ or ‘octopodes,’” and that “[c]urrently, ‘octopuses’ is the most common form in the US as well as the UK; ‘octopodes’ is rare, and ‘octopi’ is often objectionable.” It doesn’t say what’s so objectionable about “octopi.”
Thanks, B! Top image via Apex/Metro Side image via Wikipedia.
Why does it always have to be “Death to so-and-so”? Is there no middle ground between “Long live Imam Khomeini” and “Death to the dictator”? Why not something a little more constructive, like “Stop beating and killing unarmed protestors for no damn reason”?
With temperatures dipping to a nippy 3°C on National Students’ Day, tens of thousands of Iranians showed that they haven’t forgotten about the June election stolen by incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad — even if the world has.
They waved Iranian flags shorn of the Islamic Republic’s emblem, burnt posters of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and chanted “Khamenei is a murderer; his rule is illegitimate” — unthinkable before the Ayatollah backed President Ahmadinejad’s dubious election victory in June.
They demanded the release of detained students and taunted members of the Basij volunteer militia who are supposed to monitor their activities. They waved banknotes at them and chanted: “Mercenary agents, get lost!”
Elsewhere in Tehran security forces used teargas, plastic bullets and baton charges to disperse demonstrators and prevent them from reaching the University of Tehran, the epicentre of the unrest. They fired warnings shots in the air, beat anyone caught filming with mobile phones and made numerous arrests. The film clips showed demonstrators clad in facemasks throwing stones, setting fire to rubbish skips and shouting: “Death to the dictator,” and “Don’t be scared, we’re all together.” Some were bloody from beatings.
After six months of brutal repression by soldiers and pro-government gangs, the confiscation of a human rights activist’s Nobel Prize, and likely far more arrests than the Iranian government is admitting to, the protest against the June election results is still going strong.
But the unrest has become about much more than a stolen election, and protestors are now attacking the Ayatollah, Iranian theocracy, and the country’s whole system of government. And there’s more than the future of Iran at stake: if the pro-democracy momentum dies down and Iranians become unwilling to endanger their families and careers by fighting an unjust regime, repressed peoples around the world will get the same strong and dangerous message: that citizens’ movements, no matter how strongly supported by the masses, simply can’t topple well-armed governments that are willing to beat, torture and kill to keep power. For that reason, despots the world over are rooting for the Ayatollah and his allies, and hoping that a crushed rebellion in Iran will make it that much easier to steal an election in Zimbabwe, or keep a Burmese human rights activist under house arrest for another 14 years.
But if Iran’s “Green Revolution” succeeds, and if a dictatorship finally manages to depose its dictators through demonstrations, protests and generally peaceful means, the shock wave will be felt throughout the region and far beyond. Already there have been anti-Ayatollah demonstrations in the authoritarian United Arab Emirates and tightly controlled Malaysia — countries that don’t generally tolerate public protests. If the Ayatollah actually falls, who knows who’ll be next…
Burning corpses generates a lot of heat, and a crematorium in East Sussex plans to convert that energy into usable electricity to reduce its own power costs — essentially turning dead bodies into a renewable energy source.
“A crematorium uses vast amounts of energy,” says Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead. “We buy about £25,000 worth of gas a year. Clearly we want to be as energy efficient as we can be.”
That sounds reasonable, and there’s something to be said for efficiency, but I’m not sure how I’d feel about my charred remains powering a desk lamp in a funeral director’s office — though I guess it’s not any worse than being worm food.
Some other novel renewable energy ideas that you may be hearing more about soon:
A “wind dam” (artists’ conception above) may one day sail over Lake Ladoga in northern Russia. The architect, Laurie Chetwood, says it ” looks like a bird dipping its beak into the water.” I happen to think it looks like a sail on a evil ghostly pirate ship. Chetwood also says the dam is “highly effective at capturing the wind because it replicates the work of a dam and doesn’t let the wind escape in the way it does using traditional propellers.”
The Netherlands will churn out 36.5 megawatts by burning chicken poo.
The U.S. Air Force purchased “600,000 gallons of renewable jet fuel made from weeds, algae or rendered fat from animal corpses” in October.
Researchers in Idaho have created inexpensive photovoltaic plastic sheets with nanoantennas that collect waste energy from factories and power plants as well as the sun. They store energy 24 hours a day — whether the sun is shining or not.
The sidewalks of tomorrow just might be able to convert the energy from your footsteps into usable electricity to power traffic lights, street lamps, electronic parking meters and more.
Pacific Gas & Electric, a major player in California’s energy industry, is backing a Canadian-made power plant prototype that will harness the power of the waves to generate enough electricity for 640 homes — apparently a world first. If all goes well, the project will go 50 times bigger.
A new data farm in a cave beneath a Finnish cathedral will funnel the heat generated by its servers into a network that heats 500 homes.
A prototype lamppost/compost bin encourages pedestrians dump their half-eaten burgers, banana peels and other food waste into a bin at its base. The lamp is powered by methane produced by the food’s decomposition.
In awesomely unrelated news, a 59-year-old woman named Jesus Christ was summoned for jury duty in Alabama, only to be released for “being disruptive.”
Best line from that story: “Efforts to reach Christ were unsuccessful.”
A Scottish study is shedding light on ways to safely manipulate hormone levels in men to decrease — or increase — sperm production. The result could finally lead to a long-elusive birth control pill for men, as well as new fertility-enhancing techniques for men with low sperm counts.
To make this discovery, Welsh and colleagues performed studies in two groups of mice.
The first group of mice was normal, but the second group of mice was missing a gene from the peritubular myoid cells in the testis. This gene that was missing codes for the androgen hormone receptor, and when missing, sperm production was significantly decreased when compared to the normal group. The result was infertility.
[…] Although the research was conducted in mice, a similar effect is likely to obtain in other mammals, such as humans.
This summer, the Iranian government brutally suppressed citizen unrest following an election that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won in a landslide. The consensus — on the left, on the right, and everywhereinbetween — is that the election was rigged.
Five months later, the anti-Ahmedinejad protests have become more muted — probably due in part to the hundreds or thousands of protesters who have been killed or arrested. But Iranians are still seething about the stolen election, and the government seems to be worrying about its weakening grip on the Iranian people. Dissidents and reformers are still being arrested and sentenced to death, and last week Iran took the unprecedented step of seizing a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to one of its most famous dissidents: Shirin Ebadi. They also froze her bank account, claiming that she owes some $400,000 in taxes on her Nobel prize money, and according to the Norwegian officials who award the Nobels, have arrested her husband and beaten him badly. Her human rights group says Iran has no tax on awards, and that in any case, Ebadi has already used the prize money to support Iran’s many political prisoners and their families.
Last year, I wrote that my favourite books are usually the ones that make me angry, and that Shirin Ebadi’s Iran Awakening is one of those books. Since losing her job as a judge — women were no longer allowed to fill important posts after the Revolution — Ebadi has fought hard to secure divorce and inheritance rights for Iranian women and children, freedom for political prisoners, and tolerance for religious minorities like Iran’s much-persecuted Baha’i community. In spite of jail time, death threats, constant surveillance and intimidation from the authorities, she has been a vocal and visible champion of basic human rights in a country where those rights are trampled on a daily basis. She’s no fan of the West either, and I can’t say I agree with her defence of Iran’s nuclear program. But for some 20 years she has been a brave, lonely champion of citizens’ rights, pointing out the many flaws of a country that could and should be a model for human rights in a region that sorely needs an example to follow.
Before the Revolution, Iran showed the world that deep-seated faith can co-exist with night clubs, miniskirts and a healthy respect for personal freedom, and if it ever does again, it will be due in large part to Ebadi’s decades-long struggle. But by confiscating the most visible symbol of her work, Iran only shows us that there’s a long way to go yet.
When I started this little site back in February 2008, I swore I’d never write a post like this one — all apologies for an extended lack of new posts, and all promises for more consistent posting in the future. I told myself I was serious about this blogging business, and that no matter how busy I got, I’d never let life get me sidetracked enough that this blog fell by the wayside.
After a year and a half of posting at least a few times a week, life happened anyway, and for the last couple of months I’ve been preoccupied with an unexpectedly busy time at work, wedding plans that have been more complicated than I expected (who knew weddings were complicated?) and a really brutal, possibly swiney cold, to the point where I’ve been exhausted pretty much since September. I’m feeling a little better now, the most pressing wedding planning is done, and while my communications work still shows no signs of slowing down, I think I’m out out of the woods.
I really do love this little piece of Webdom, and it’s always been a great outlet for me, letting me do a kind of writing that my regular job doesn’t have a lot of use for. So here it is then, a promise that I’ll make a real effort to do a more consistent job of this. If you’re still around, I’m glad to have you.
