Would be nice to have a little color around here. You’ll learn something, too.
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Posting will be slow, er, slower, until the home internet thing is straightened out.
Sorry, sorry. I haven’t had a chance to update here lately, and now Jeremy Rue’s comment on my Twitter/blog redundancy is coming into stark relief. Any suggestions for a solution? I guess I could just post more here.
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I recently saw a scene from a film called The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed), accompanied by original score, on an arts channel a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a short clip of what I saw, with a new score by the Khoury Trio. Achmed has escaped to China with the princess. The villain is, of course, in pursuit.
The film was made by a German artist named Lotte Reiniger. It is the oldest animated feature in existence (even older films, created by an Argentine animator, are reportedly lost). The images are silhouettes of cardboard and thin lead sheeting; the look is reminiscent of Asian shadow puppetry.Reiniger finished the film with her husband in 1926. As leftists, the pair fled Germany as the Nazis rose to power and bounced around Europe in the 1930s before settling in London for the rest of their lives.
There are a few Reiniger works from the 1950s on YouTube, fairy tales she animated for BBC. Jack and the Beanstalk, for example:
But they don’t quite have the audacity of a scene like Prince Achmed visiting a harem.
The franc is back in France, at least in one little village. After switching to the euro in 2002, France’s franc became obsolete. (The Swiss continue to produce their own last francs of Europe.)
But some of the businesses in Collobrières are accepting the old francs in lieu of euros. According to the story in the International Herald Tribune, the villagers thought of this after hearing of a similar effort in a town called Le Blanc, which apparently did not merit international coverage.
The story reminds me of a professor of mine from college. We met up before I graduated in 2001, and I asked him what he was going to do over the summer. He and his family were going to Paris, he said. His daughter wanted to visit France before the franc disappeared.
[Image of 20 franc piece from Monnaie de Paris.]
An unusual video showed up on the Ifgogo blog that’s created a ripple on the internet over the last few days. It’s a video of a Chinese farmer piloting a flying machine that he is supposed to have built on his own. The shanzhai huaxiangji, or little mountain village glider, if the translation’s any good (山寨 滑翔机), has sparked some debate as to its veracity. Here’s the video that YouTube commenters claim is a fake:
Fair enough. It’s hard to know based on the perspective; and I didn’t watch closely enough to tell if there was much inconsistency between the pilot’s bumpy ride and the background. But Ifgogo blogger Aw Guo has updated his post to include more video to back up the story. The YouTube video is helpfully titled “I don’t think the farmer-made plane is fake.”
Not the primary. Chris Matthews on why San Francisco isn’t a newspaper town:
“It looks like an Eastern city,” he says. “But it’s pretty hard for people to read newspapers when they’re riding a bike.”
From last Sunday’s Times Magazine profile of Matthews. One of the funnier pieces of reporting I’ve read in any magazine. Mark Leibovich [...]
Here’s my backyard on Thursday morning.
The roses are blooming. There’s a nice, warm light here. But what is it about this air that’s so familiar?
Take a look at the government’s air forecast map for this weekend:
California doesn’t look too good. All those little fire icons are making the air here “moderate,” at best, “very unhealthy,” [...]
Would be nice to have a little color around here. You’ll learn something, too.
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Posting will be slow, er, slower, until the home internet thing is straightened out.
They’ve made the rounds, but in case you missed them, here are a few wedding photos taken during and just after the earthquake. More here.
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