Great when they were silent and great when they talked, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy spend time together for the final time ever in this home movie, likely shot in 1956, the year before Hardy died. (ThanksOpen Culture.)
From Hardy’sLos Angeles Times obituary: “Oliver Hardy, rotund film comedian, died yesterday. He was 65. Death came to the portly half of the famed Laurel and Hardy comedy team from the effects of a paralytic stroke he suffered last September 12. So severe was the stroke that it left him almost completely paralyzed. He was unable to speak and could hardly move one arm. He had wasted away to a comparative shadow from his comical bumbling bulk which at the height of his fame bulged to 350 pounds.”
comodities trading skills for??? (Upper East Side)
HI all,
This is an Indian guy living in Manhattan… i am a Trader by profession (trade commodities if u wanna know) and i trade from home with i make my own hours…so i have all the monetary enjoyment if i want to… that also includes travelling and living at nice places and eating at nice places…..just came back from o doing Route 1 trip from San Fransisco to Los Angeles….in 2 weeks plan to go to alaska then later new hampshire and someplace else…love to dance ….Come to my apt u will see lot of books and lot of computer trading screens….love to read…..
But living and working alone brings a problem that i don’t have big social circle…i cant meet new people cant make new friends… and being single doesn’t help either….so here is what i am looking for…
I will interview u …..i like to have some company around me that is why this project is created………i like to meet some new people and help them get financial sound….
Please send me what u bartering for….
this is a post from a simple guy who through his own sheer hardwork has made himself independent from corporate america and its greed….
U will be needed to burn mid night oil and work ur butt off….and more u think u know more u need to unlearn..
Ben Ehrenreich’s “The End.“ is an excellent 2010 Los Angeles magazine article which examines the act of dying in L.A. County. It rightly won a National Magazine Award. An excerpt:
“So here you are, dead and alone. Chances are you didn’t want this, but your wishes were ignored. Whatever happens to the part of you that you recognize as somehow quintessentially you (call it soul, self, spirit, spark), the other part isn’t finished yet—the fleshly part, the limbs and guts that ached and pleased you in so many ways, the meaty bits that you vainly or grudgingly dragged around for all those years. That piece is still of interest to the bureaucrats. It is still a potential source of profit. In your absence its journey is just beginning.
The path forks before it. Which way it goes will be determined by the cause of your demise. All the state wants is a death certificate: Think of it as a letter from your doctor excusing you from paying income tax forever. The county, though, wants to know why you died and if there might be a reason to push the cops and the courts and the jails into motion. The coroner holds the key to all that machinery. The key itself is what you once called you. If you have not been under the care of a physician for six months, if you die during surgery or as a result of injuries sustained in an accident or an assault (self-inflicted or otherwise), or if there’s any suspicion that your death might be something other than ‘natural,’ your next stop will be the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner—which is, assistant chief coroner Ed Winter tells me more than once, the busiest such department in the country.”
“Did you see him as a prophet of the revolution in global communications?
Douglas Coupland: No. Like most people, I only knew his three clichés: Medium equals message, global village, and the scene from Annie Hall. I’ve found that most people truly would like to know more about the man, but it’s almost impossible to do. His language is a universe unto itself and is astonishingly dense and hard to navigate. He died the year I started art school [1980], and his stock was at an all time low. His name never came up.
Why did you believe he was still relevant?
Douglas Coupland: Well, I didn’t. I had to figure that out myself. It took months of reading and rereading his stuff to realize that in Marshall we had a classically trained scholar realizing that there’s this thing coming down the pipe—the Internet—yet because he didn’t understand the ultimate interface, he was frustrated in his inability to describe it clearly. I think that’s what people really respond to in Marshall: the almost vibrating sense of being in on one of the biggest prognostications of all time, yet having news of its arrival coming from this fuddy-duddy guy in 1950s Toronto. How on earth did that happen?”
Have you noticed that Google searches done from two different locations or on two different computers will return markedly different results? Or that Facebook will feed you what its algortihms have decided you want to the exclusion of all else? Personalization is all the rage, as targeted information can maximize online advertising revenue. But is there a danger in algorithms fragmenting the news we receive based solely on potential profits? Are we getting what we want rather than what we need? Because of the diversity of material online, I’m not so sure this is as huge an issue as it might seem. But Internet advocate Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, believes it’s a critical flaw in Web 2.0 and took on the issue in his recent TED Talk.
In this classic 1916 photograph, ethnographer Frances Densmore appears to use an early phonographic device to make a recording of Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot Indians at the Smithsonian. The Minnesota native Densmore specialized in preserving Native American music, beginning her alliance of several decades with the Smithsonian in 1907. According to a post on the Institution blog, the photo was likely staged and wasn’t the actual recording session.
“Mountain Chief recalled that when the Assiniboines and Crees began to retreat, he mounted his horse and raced after those who were trying to cross the Oldman River. He ran down two enemy warriors on the trail, then dismounted to face a Cree armed with a spear who was starting to enter the water. Mountain Chief stabbed him between the shoulders with his own spear, took the man’s weapons and went back to his horse. Then he ran over another enemy who was armed with a gun; the man grabbed the bridle, but the Piegan swung his horse’s head around to shield himself then struck the man with the butt of his whip. As the Cree fell back, Mountain Chief jumped off his horse and killed him. ‘When I struck him,’ recalled the Piegan warrior, ‘he looked at me and I found that his nose had been cut off. I heard afterward that a bear had bitten his nose off.'”
A digital coin of the realm, which emerged during Web 1.0 and collapsed when the Internet bubble burst, is trying to take root again in the form ofBitcoin. From Duncan Geere’s Wired UK article: “Bitcoins can be saved on a personal computer in a wallet file, or stored on the web in a third-party wallet service. On the one hand, that means that you’re not holding onto it yourself; on the other, it means that it’s safe if your hard drive fails.”
"Evidence of the city’s decline was everywhere: subway cars bruised with graffiti." (Image by JJ Special.)
Jonathan Mahler, author of the incredible book about NYC in crisis during the 1970s,Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, wrote a New York magazine article in 2005 that recalled how Rupert Murdoch’s rise to media domination was largely driven by the Aussie’s gambit that the beleaguered city would return to prominence. An excerpt:
“The year was 1976, and evidence of the city’s decline was everywhere: subway cars bruised with graffiti, arson fires that swallowed whole ghetto blocks, soaring murder rates, and annual six-figure job losses. The city put on its best face for the Democratic convention, hastily enacting an anti-loitering law that enabled cops to round up most of the prostitutes in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden. For a few days anyway, even Times Square was more or less hooker-free. But the area soon returned to being America’s most infamous erogenous zone.
Around the country, cartoonists poked fun at New York in its apocalypse: The city was a sinking ship, a zoo where the apes were employed as zookeepers, a stage littered with overturned props. Central Park had become a running joke in Johnny Carson’s nightly monologues (‘Some Martians landed in Central Park today . . . and were mugged’). The syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak understated the matter considerably when they wrote, ‘Americans do not much like, admire, respect, trust, or believe in New York.’
It’s easy now to look back at this moment and see it for what it was—a classic market bottom. But at the time, few recognized it as such. One man who did was Murdoch. Where others saw a city in financial distress, he saw a place ripe for entrepreneurship. Where others saw a failed experiment in social democracy, he saw an opening for simple supply-and-demand capitalism.”
••••••••••
Walter Cronkite on New York City’s financial emergency, 1976:
Life in London from 1500 to 1800, courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard:
“What’s harder to understand, for me, at least, is why anyone would have moved to London in the years from 1500 – 1800, the years in which it experienced rapid, continuous growth and became the greatest metropolis of the 19th century. First, the city had an unfortunate tendency to burn down. The Great Fire of 1666, which left as many as 200,000 in the city homeless, was merely the largest of a series of ‘named fires’ severe enough to distinguish themselves from the routine, everyday fires that imperiled wood and thatch houses, packed closely together and heated with open coal or wood fires. It’s likely that more Londoners would have been affected but for the fact that 100,000 – a fifth of the city’s population – had died the previous year from an outbreak of the bubonic plague, which spread quickly through the rat-infested city. (It didn’t help that the mayor of London had ordered all cats and dogs killed for fear they were spreading the plague – instead, they were likely keeping the plague rats in check.)“
Midge MacKenzie 1966 film, “Neon,” profiles Pop Art sculptor Billy Apple, who made good use of the titular gas. Tom Wolfe, seen here in those sad years before the white suit had been invented, is featured.
From a March 18, 1966Time magazine piece: “BILLY APPLE, 30, a New Zealander (real name: Barrie Bates) who works in Manhattan, believes ‘neon is the purest, hippest color in the world; Day-glo phosphorescent paint looks 1929-ish next to it.’ In Auckland, he wanted to be an engineer, now carefully varies the diameter of his neon tubes to produce different hues. Apple turned to art and working in a paint factory, he contracted dermatitis and a lasting dislike for turpentine. Even before he arrived at London’s Royal College of Art, he says, he found his solution in electric colors. While experimenting with them, Apple learned to make highlights by bathing bronze objects in neon. The bronze tints are erased and only the fluid splash of reflected neon remains like a cloak of many colors.”
A triumphant Wanjiri in Beijing. (Image by 正在休渔期.)
In a sad and bizarre story, the great 24-year-old Kenyan long-distance runner Sammy Wanjiru, who became the first marathoner from his country to win Olympic gold, apparently killed himself in a leap from his home’s balcony after a domestic dispute. From the just-published Reuters report:
“Jaspher Ombati, the regional police chief for the area, said Wanjiru appeared to have sustained internal injuries after the fall and was confirmed dead by doctors at a nearby hospital.
‘It is not yet clear whether it was a suicide or if he jumped out of rage or what caused him to fall to the ground,’ Ombati said of Wanjiru, who also won the Chicago and London marathons.
Ombati said Wanjiru’s wife, Triza Njeri, had come home to find Wanjiru in bed with another woman and locked the couple in the bedroom and ran outside. Wanjiru then leaped from the balcony, Ombati said.
••••••••••
Wanjiru in 2009, as he prepared to run the Chicago Marathon, which he won:
"Are you having paranormal activity and need honest trustworthy investigators?" (Image by Paul Sapiano.)
Got Ghosts? We Can Help…Contact us.. (Ny/Pa/Nj/Va/De/Md)
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Physicist Leonard Susskind presents a TED Talk about the Richard Feynman he knew, the person and the scientist.
Feynman was the rare physicist famous enough to be featured in People magazine. From a 1985 piece: “As a young scientist at Los Alamos during the development of the A-bomb, Richard Feynman delighted in exposing security lapses by picking the locks on safes and filing cabinets that contained top secret information, leaving behind notes signed, ‘Same guy.’ But there were even earlier warning signals that the Nobel prizewinning physicist and California Institute of Technology professor had, as one friend says, ‘a mind that works differently from other people’s.’ As a toddler in Far Rockaway, N.Y., his father, Mel, a uniform salesman, read him excerpts from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And as a teenager he read advanced calculus for pleasure.
Now Feynman, 67 and considered one of the world’s top theoretical physicists, can claim another achievement: his deliciously amusing autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W. Norton, $16.95). Co-authored by Ralph Leighton, a math teacher who started taping conversations with his friend Feynman seven years ago, the book spent 14 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, a surprise to practically everybody—including the author. ‘I had no purpose in doing the book other than to amuse my friends,’ says Feynman.
A picturesque, unscientific collection of anecdotes, including instructions for picking up a woman in a bar, Surely You’re Joking has earned Feynman $56,000 so far and has elicited reaction from some unexpected quarters. ‘I got a call from a topless dancer,’ he says, ‘who claims we had a mutual acquaintance 15 years ago.'”
"The man threw the bone in the cart, also an old shoe that had been brought to him by another dog."
Horse and cow bones were scattered all over Brooklyn in the 1870s. In its July 21, 1877 edition, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle used its customary sensitivity in profiling one bone collector who made his living from such refuse. An excerpt:
“A seedy looking German, with tangled hair and beard, propelled a small handcart slowly up Flatbush avenue on Thursday. At his sides were three large dogs of mongrel breed. When near the corner of Dean street the man spoke to the dogs, and they immediately quitted his side and began running through the gutters of the neighborhood streets. Soon one of the dogs returned with a large bone in his mouth, and this he deposited at the feet of his master. The man threw the bone in the cart, also an old shoe that had been brought to him by another dog. It commenced to rain and the man and his dogs sought shelter under a neighborhood shed. An Eagle reporter had his attention attracted to the man, and after considerable trouble engaged him in conversation.
The man gave his name as Herman Groschel, and said he resided in the Sixteenth Ward. Picking up a large bone from his wagon, Groschel said, ‘Bones like that are very best. I can get about a dollar and thirty cents a barrel for them. That is what is called a shank bone, and they are much sought after by bone dust manufacturers. When it is made into dust the bone is sold to sugar refiners. Rib bones are not good for making bone dust to be used in refining sugar; when they are burned they cannot be worked into as fine dust as the shank, head and back bones.’
‘Are the bones of all kinds of animals made into bone dust?’ queried the reporter.
"In neighborhoods where there is a large poor population I do very well."
‘No,’ replied Groschel, ‘the bones used are principally those of horses and cows. Common bone dust is made of all kinds of bone, but the small bones generally find their way to the fat renderer. Some of these bones in my wagon look very dry, but the bone boiler will manage to get fat out of them.’
‘Do you find many bones by traveling through the streets with your dogs?’
‘In neighborhoods where there is a large poor population I do very well. Take them wards where there is a large tenement population and a great deal of refuse is thrown into the streets, as the poorer classes very seldom enjoy the luxury of owning ash barrels.’
‘Do you pick up anything else but bones?’
‘Old iron or bottles,’ replied Groschel. ‘I used to do a little in rags, but some years ago I brought home some rags which were infected with smallpox and my girl caught the dreadful disease. Since then I haven’t picked any rags.’
‘What do you do with those old shoes I see in your wagon?’
Groschel smiled. ‘I burn them,’ said he. ‘They do me instead of coal.’
The stench arising from old leather when burning is almost unbearable, yet many of the rag pickers and bone gatherers use no other fuel. Without exception the bone and rag gatherers are either German or Italians. They live cheap, are generally saving, and many of them have accumulated considerable sums of money.”
Robert D. Kaplan’s famous 1994 Harper’s article, “The Coming Anarachy,” imagined a future of global scarcity, environmental disaster, overpopulation, crime and tribalism, with nations lacking genuine boundaries and central government control. It would be a vast divide of haves and have-nots. Some of it has proven true, some not. Kaplan’s most spot-on prognostication foresaw terrorist organizations operating without regard to borders, existing as their own sovereign nation across nations. An excerpt:
“Also, war-making entities will no longer be restricted to a specific territory. Loose and shadowy organisms such as Islamic terrorist organizations suggest why borders will mean increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic identity and control will mean more. ‘From the vantage point of the present, there appears every prospect that religious . . . fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict” in the West than at any time for the last 300 years,’ Van Creveld writes. This is why analysts like Michael Vlahos are closely monitoring religious cults. Vlahos says, ‘An ideology that challenges us may not take familiar form, like the old Nazis or Commies. It may not even engage us initially in ways that fit old threat markings.’ Van Creveld concludes, ‘Armed conflict will be waged by men on earth, not robots in space. It will have more in common with the struggles of primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war.’ While another military historian, John Keegan, in his new book A History of Warfare, draws a more benign portrait of primitive man, it is important to point out that what Van Creveld really means is re-primitivized man: warrior societies operating at a time of unprecedented resource scarcity and planetary overcrowding.” (Thanks to The Electric Typewriter.)
Hunter S. Thompson in all his glory in Vegas and Hollywood in 1978.
From Lucian K. Truscott IV’s review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vagas in the July 13, 1972 Village Voice: “Hunter Thompson lived in Aspen then, and his ranch, located outside town about 10 miles, tucked away up a valley with National Forest land on every side, was the first place I stopped. It was late afternoon and Thompson was just getting up, bleary-eyed and beaten, shaded from the sun by a tennis hat, sipping a beer on the front porch.
I got to know him while I was still in the Army in the spring of 1970, when he and a few other local crazies were gearing up for what would become the Aspen Freak Power Uprising, a spectacular which featured Thompson as candidate for sheriff, with his neighbor Billy for coroner. They ran on a platform which promised, among other things, public punishment for drug dealers who burned their customers, and a campaign guaranteed to rid the valley of real estate developers and ‘nazi greedheads’ of every persuasion. In a compromise move toward the end of the campaign, Thompson promised to ‘eat mescaline only during off-duty hours.’ The non-freak segment of the voting public was unmoved and he was eventually defeated by a narrow margin.
In the days before the Freak Power spirit, Thompson’s ranch served as a war room and R&R camp for the Aspen political insurgents. Needless to say there was rarely a dull moment. When I arrived last summer, however, things had changed. Thompson was in the midst of writing a magnum opus, and it was being cranked out at an unnerving rate. I was barely across the threshold when I was informed that he worked (worked?) Monday through Friday and saved the weekends for messing around. As usual, he worked from around midnight until 7 or 8 in the morning and slept all day. There was an edge to his voice that said he meant business. This was it. This was a venture that had no beginning or end, that even Thompson himself was having difficulty controlling.
‘I’m sending it off to Random House in 20,000-word bursts,’ he said, drawing slowly on his ever-present cigarette holder. ‘I don’t have any idea what they think of it. Hell, I don’t have any idea what it is.’
‘What’s it about?’ I asked.
‘Searching for The American Dream in Las Vegas,’ replied Thompson coolly.”
"Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump." (Image by littleBits.)
Anand Giridharadas has a really good piece in the Sunday Times Magazine this week about littleBits founder Ayah Bdeir and the American culture of manufacturing things, in the wake of the credit-default swap scheme that made nothing and left us nearly bankrupt. An excerpt:
“If you lived in Detroit in 1961 and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at a drive-in, you might have caught a 30-minute trailer called ‘American Maker,’ sponsored by Chevrolet. ‘Of all things Americans are, we are makers,’ its narrator began, over footage of boys building sand castles. ‘With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form and we fashion: makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers.’
Fifty years on, the American maker is in a bad way. Such is the state of American industry that waste paper is among the top 10 exports to China, behind nuclear equipment but far ahead of traditional mainstays like iron and steel. Manufacturing employment has fallen by a third in the last decade alone, with more than 40,000 factories shutting down. More Americans today are unemployed than are wage-earning ‘put-it-togetherers.’ But the American romance with making actual things is going through a resurgence. In recent years, a nationwide movement of do-it-yourself aficionados has embraced the self-made object. Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump. America will make things again, they say, because Americans will make things — not just in factories but also in their own homes, and not because it’s artisanal or faddish but because it’s easier, better for the environment and more fun.”
••••••••••
The 1961 “American Maker” trailer mentioned in the article:
From “Invasion,” Tom Junod’s 2010 Esquire piece about his house being besieged by an army of those tiny colonists known as ants:
“A few years ago, I interviewed the great biologist E. O. Wilson right before he and his colleague Bert Hölldobler published their magnum opus, The Superorganism. The book, a study of ant societies, was an exploration of the notion that ants are such organized organisms that they almost don’t count as individual organisms at all but rather as cells of the colony they serve. The colony is the superorganism, and as Wilson told me, ‘an ant colony is far more intelligent than an ant.’ I’ll say. An ant by itself is an inoffensive creature, at worst a crunchy annoyance, smidgeny and obsessively clean and, above all, dumb, with a pindot of a brain. An ant by itself is not going to get any ideas… the problem being that it’s rarely by itself, that it’s representative of something, and that what it represents not only has ideas — it has designs. Wilson’s book proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so. Well, once they start accumulating in your house in sufficient numbers, you get a chance to see that accumulated intelligence at work. You get a chance to find out what it wants. And what you find out — what the accumulated intelligence of the colony eventually tells you — is that it wants what you want. You find out that you, an organism, are competing for your house with a superorganism that knows how to do nothing but compete. You are not only competing in the most basic evolutionary sense; you are competing with a purely adaptive intelligence, and so you are competing with the force of evolution itself.” (Thanks Atlantic.)
“A World for Women in Engineering” is an excellent 20-minute doc made by Bell Labs in 1975. It’s a look at a multicultural collection of women working for Bell during the age of feminist ascendancy and the push for the Equal Rights Amendment. A testament to the times as well as a love letter to science.
Annie Lowrey’s Slate piece, “Let in the Super-Immigrants!,” argues that America’s quickest path to economic turnaround is to fast-track educated alien workers to citizenship status, favoring the highly skilled over the poor, huddles masses. The opening:
“This winter, George Mason economist Tyler Cowen publishedThe Great Stagnation, an ebook arguing that the United States has exhausted all its easy sources of growth. We have, Cowen says, no more low-hanging fruit: no more cheap frontier land to farm, no more places to build new interstates, no rural homes to electrify, no more girls to send to school and then add to the workforce. From now on, Cowen says, growth will be slower, and transformative innovations like toilets and telephones will be rarer.
Cowen is alarmingly convincing, and The Great Stagnation received a round of queasy applause from the chattering classes—including from this publication. But maybe there remains one last shiny, fat apple hanging right in front of our faces, one last endeavor that would bring us fast, costless, and easy growth. It is immigration reform. The United States can grow faster by stealing the rest of the world’s smart people.
Today, the Obama White House is reaffirming its pledge to do just that.”
"I am well groomed gentleman." (Image by Herbert Ponting.)
Magic Sex Bed – $100 (Norwalk, CT)
I am moving selling my magic sex bed. When I moved to Connecticut I purchased this bed from a guy who ran his “store” out of a room below a Dunkin’ Donuts. I checked out the floor model, liked it and decided to buy it. The next day I picked up the bed at warehouse in Wilton and the legend began… This bed has been amazing. I had my fair share of lady friends before the bed, but things really took a turn for the better once I got this bed. I am not sure what the actual count was, but let me tell you it was nothing short of respectable. I am moving now and tried everything to take this bed with me, but things have fallen through at the last minute. If you are looking to turn things around in your own life and need a bit of luck consider this bed your knew rabbits foot!!
The bed is not dirty. I am a well groomed gentleman and even if it was dirty you would probably still want to buy this bed.
