The Luzzone dam in Switzerland has been made into a climbing wall. Here’s a panoramic image at the base of the dam where you can look up and see the 700ft man-made route.
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Posts for Past 60 Days
Monthly Archives: June 2008
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Monday, June 30, 2008
The LA Times has a nice profile of Billy Goat, a hiker who has finished off 32,000+ miles of hiking, including the Appalachian Trail, Continental Divide Trail, and where he’s best known, the Pacific Crest Trail. I’m thinking about heading for the PCT next summer, so I found this bit pretty interesting: “Each year about […]
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Monday, June 30, 2008
When I heard that milk jugs are being redesigned for better efficiency, I felt a sort of witless glee. Part of that is my usual response to efficiency. And also because most of my high school employment was in the local Kroger, stores #444 and #432 (I still remember that…?). I mostly did night stock, […]
≡King Corn
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
King Corn is a documentary about 2 guys that move to Iowa to grow an acre of corn. With today’s agro-tech, the actual farming takes just a few minutes. The bulk of it is their interviews and exploration of the food chain from seed to cobs to cattle to what we get in stores and […]
≡In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (review: 2.5/5)
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
By now you’ve probably heard Michael Pollan’s seven words of advice from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the book he spends 150 pages talking about nutritionism, reductionist food science, and the negative health effects of the Western diet. In the last 50 pages he finally […]
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Saturday, June 21, 2008
Rob Giampietro started a collection of imagery from the New Yorker fiction pages, 48 so far. Lots of good stuff there.
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick:
The strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title “science fiction” is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star […]
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
I’m joining the group working up to 100 push-ups over the next few weeks. Seems like a fun arbitrary goal. Should be cool. [via Get Fit Slowly]
≡Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me (review: 2/5)
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
I wanted this to be better. It starts off well, introduced by Nick Hornby. With a few exceptions, most of the other 40-something essays in the book didn’t do much for me.
Rodney Rothman’s piece—”I Still Like Jessica”—is probably my favorite. It’s a transcript of an interview with an old sweetheart (hear the interview and see […]
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Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Josh Brolin on working with the skimpy dialogue in No Country for Old Men:
You have to figure out different ways to convey ideas. You don’t want to over-compensate because the fear is that you’re going to be boring if nothing’s going on. You start doing this and this and taking off your hat and putting […]
≡No Country for Old Men (review: 4/5)
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Llewelyn, I dont even want the money. I just want us to be back like we was.
We will be.
No we wont. I’ve thought about it. It’s a false god.
Yeah. But it’s real money.
I don’t have much to say about No Country for Old Men other than that it’s every bit as good as the excellent […]
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Monday, June 16, 2008
MagCloud is a new print-on-demand service just for magazines. I’m surprised this didn’t exist already.
≡The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain
Monday, June 16, 2008
I’ll call an end to the Stevens binge with this one. It’s been fun, especially for something that I took up on impulse. Sometimes it’s best to just pick something and start it and see where it leads.
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when […]
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Monday, June 16, 2008
Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other “territorial markers” not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express […]
≡Dallas, TX
Friday, June 13, 2008
The last time I was in Texas I was maybe 1 or 2 or 3 years old. It’s going to be an awesome weekend with friends, without computers.
≡Restatement of Romance
Friday, June 13, 2008
Going to a wedding this weekend.
The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and […]
≡The “thirteen ways” meme
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Selections from a couple dozen pages of Googling…
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Super Mario Bros.
Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. I linked this a while back (almost 2 years ago!). Very good essay.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ingmar Bergman
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript, some tips before you submit yours for publication.
Thirteen […]
≡Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Thursday, June 12, 2008
I haven’t shared any of Wallace Stevens’ longer works that I like because it doesn’t seem like a good context for it. But I can’t overlook this one. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was the focus of one of my research papers back in college. I remember finding it when class was looking […]
≡The Snow Man
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Wallace Stevens reads The Snow Man. Jay Keyser reads it on NPR (less dreary, more enthusiasm) and praises it highly before dissecting a little bit. Keyser also has this crazy idea of writing the poem out on notecards and making a hanging mobile out of it a la Alexander Calder.
One must have a mind of […]
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Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Joshua Heineman has a cool little project going where he takes old photos and makes them wiggle* so they look 3D.
[*this is the preferred technical term]
≡This Is Just to Say
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
I have stolen
the idea
that I saw
in RSS
and which
you maybe have
already
seen today.
Forgive me
it is hilarious
and I
can’t help it.
[via austin kleon]
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Alex Ross on Wallace Stevens:
Stevens’ grandeur is an inch away from absurdity, if not in the thick of it. This is by intention. He liked to deflate solemnity with silliness. His humor is his least noticed attribute, probably because it is so widespread. Even his titles—”The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”—undercut their […]
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008
This bothers me more than it should:
The parking meters reduce the walking width of the sidewalk. Without room for two people to pass comfortably, someone gets forced off onto the grass. Thus, long dead streaks of dirt. It’s a car’s world.
≡The Brave Man
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
A good wake-up poem from Wallace Stevens:
The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.
Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.
The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.
Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.
That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave […]
≡Bring on the Wallace Stevens
Monday, June 9, 2008
I’ve been going back and reading Wallace Stevens lately. I first came across his poetry a while back in a college modernist lit class, and keep coming back every so often. For the next couple days I’m going to go on a little Stevens bender around here, sort of like my Frans Masereel festival a […]
≡Old photos from the Brooklyn Museum
Sunday, June 8, 2008
The Brooklyn Museum has some great photos on Flickr. Currently in the commons are a great set of old lantern slides in Egypt, and a lot of images from the 1900 Paris Exposition.
In the Paris set, it’s cool how the primitive coloring job kind of flattens the images. They look almost like paper cut-outs or […]
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Sunday, June 8, 2008
New York Times Magazine has a feature on guerrilla gardening. The Guardian has a short video of the gardening guerrillas in action before a little confrontation with the police.
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Saturday, June 7, 2008
I’ve really been loving The Big Picture, the Boston Globe’s photojournalism blog.
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Saturday, June 7, 2008
The existence of welfare state is one of the main rationalizations for undercutting the greatest anti-poverty campaign the world has ever known: immigration. …And unlike the welfare state, immigration has and continues to help absolutely poor people, not relatively poor Americans who are already at the 90th percentile of the world income distribution.
≡Travels with Herodotus (review: 3.5/5)
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
“If reason ruled the world, would history even exist?”
On his first trip outside of Poland, an editor gave Ryszard Kapuściński a copy of Herodotus‘ The Histories (which I’ve never read or read much about, besides this recent New Yorker article). The book became his off-and-on companion for the rest of his career in journalism. Kapuściński […]
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Tuesday, June 3, 2008
A wiki with a list of academic blogs divided by field. I love the category for “Professions and Useful Arts.”
≡Men Made Out of Words
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?
Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,
By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.
The whole race is a poet that writes down
The […]
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Tuesday, June 3, 2008
I like the idea of a corporate artist in residence. Surely a few companies would buy into it?
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