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The NY Times on the town and village courts of NY state.
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‘John reads 700 Hobo names aloud, all in one take.’ via Coudal
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Tokyo street fashion
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A week later, hundreds of Phares’ neighbors received an anonymous postcard of a mangled fetus. This is abortion! read the big block letters. “Your neighbor Sara Phares participates in killing babies like these.” Via Sherry Chandler
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“Sixteen hundred laborers built hieroglyph-covered walls 110 feet tall, flanked by four statues of Ramses II and 21 sphinxes, 5 tons each. DeMille populated his city with 2,500 actors and extras, housing them in tents on an adjacent dune.”
Month: September 2006
I do enjoy reading biographies. Not just to learn more about people I have a special interest in, but as a more entertaining way of reading about history.
There can be something a bit stifling about the careful thoroughness of the conscientious historian trying to lay out all the strands of a complicated subject. The joy of a biography is that it just picks out one strand. The subject’s life offers a route through a period. And even though it’s often a rather erratic and contingent route, it forms a natural narrative.
And because these narratives are immune to certain kinds of criticism, they can be full of the kinds of unexpected twists, bizarre coincidences, heavy-handed irony and acts of heroism or villainy that might seem vulgar in mere fiction. I mean who could make up a character like T. E. Lawrence? Or Emma Hamilton?
Links
Links
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‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Do Breast and Pelvic Exams’ – the volunteers who take the role of patients to help students learn how to do it.
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Interesting. via MetaFilter
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via MAKE
Sorry, I forgot yesterday, so Flickr set of the week is a day late, but worth waiting for. It’s the remarkable Digital Dendrology by phyredesign.
“I’m fascinated by how things are structured in nature. This year, I have begun taking samples from the branches I collect, and preparing slides for viewing under a microscope. After identifying the type of tree to which the branch belongs, I use a digital camera attachment on my microscope to photograph the samples. Piecing together over fifty photographs for each sample, each final image is a 100x magnification of a glimpse of life not seen by the human eye alone. They become abstract structures reminiscent of any number of things.”
White Mulberry:
Unidentified:
Links
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via Coudal via 30gms
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‘an online birthday party for Wallace Stevens that will occur throughout the entire month of October’. Obviously.
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Check out ‘Paper Pixels’ and ‘Random Screen’. Via Interactive Architecture dot org.
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Martin Amis offers his thoughts, at length, on Islamism.
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all the simpsons episodes online. Legal?