Lego iPhone
Lego workmen unpacking an Apple iPhone. By Flickr user ntr23. I love that the little Lego hands fit around the iPhone’s sync/charge cord.
Lego workmen unpacking an Apple iPhone. By Flickr user ntr23. I love that the little Lego hands fit around the iPhone’s sync/charge cord.
Death Cab for Cutie’s video for their latest single “I Will Possess Your Heart” is REALLY GOOD. I usually complain how the video distract from the song… but this complements it quite nicely. Oh, the song’s from their upcoming album Narrow Stairs.
Today, online, I saw the most beautiful bike I have ever seen in my life. Before I link to that, a bit about the man who makes these bikes. A certain Joshua Muir in Santa Cruz, California runs a shop called Frances Cycles. He builds your frame. From scratch. By hand. From steel (or something more exotic). The results are stupendous. Consider his innovative Smallhaul design, allowing one to carry large amounts of stuff in a cargo hold between the handlebars and (rather distant) front wheel. Using that design, you can do things like carry your dog with you on your bike (also… click that last link, seriously).
Certainly, introducing novelty into the monotony of bike design is a good thing. But taking the basic lines and functions of a bike and stripping them down to the core, the essence — that’s particularly cool… and it exposes Muir’s brilliant craftsmanship.
With that in mind: back to this bike I mentioned at the outset. The photo of it is titled “Stuyvie’s #3”, which I imagine means the third bike built for Stuyvie… I believe the bike is a “Bici Corta fixed-gear.” Feast your eyes upon the gorgeous simplicity of handcrafted, pedal-powered transportation.
Keep your eye out for live webcasts April 25-27 from the 2008 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. A quick description of the festival from wikipedia:
Coachella is a three-day (formerly a one or two-day) annual music and arts festival held at the Empire Polo Fields in Indio, California. The event features many genres of music including alternative rock, hip hop, and electronica as well as large sculptural art
Beat the heat and watch online! Jack Johnson will be live online April 25 at 11am Eastern (12 pm here in CST). Other acts: Autolux, Chromeo, Datarock, DeVotchKa, Architecture in Helsinki, Hot Chip, Animal Collective, Shout Out Louds, Sia, VHS or Beta, Slightly Stoopid.
Now, I don’t know all those bands, but I do know that Slightly Stoopid has a flat-out fantastic song called “Collie Man.” Pull that one up on iTunes (don’t search YouTube, etc… all the live versions and covers of it kinda stink), you won’t be disappointed.
Rates of Caesarean sections are climbing, according to a Time magazine article that raises more questions than it answers:
Rates of C-sections have been climbing each year in the past decade in the U.S., reaching a record high of 31% of all live births in 2006. That’s a 50% increase since 1996. Around the world, the procedure is becoming even more common: in certain hospitals in Brazil, fully 80% of babies are delivered by caesarean. How did a procedure originally intended as an emergency measure become so popular? And is the trend a bad thing?
After Mykala described the ripping and tearing that can happen (ouch ouch ouch), I never really thought about childbirth the same. Compare a woman giving birth (the incredible pain, physical trauma, etc.) to an animal giving birth… I mean baby giraffes literally fall out and everybody keeps on truckin’. Anything that gives the mother more options is a good thing, as far as I can tell, as clearly the “natural” way needs some improvement. Keep in mind that the “natural” way also used to involve dying of all sorts of infectious diseases or making it to 40-something on average.
I wonder if any social stigma around preemptively choosing a C-section was an attempt by the author to fabricate conflict for this article.
The English language has the word happenstance, which is a chance happening or event. I propose a modified version of this word as an addition to the language. When something bad happens, it’s crappenstance.
Impress your friends, etc.
If you do your hair when the mirror is foggy, you’ll always love the way it looks.
The New York Times has an article about a family in Akron, Ohio who restored a 1913 house over 12 years:
It was, in fact, as the couple learned only at the closing, about to be condemned. There were large holes in the roof, various furry woodland animals in residence, a barely functional heating and plumbing system. The roof over the master bedroom leaked so badly that the previous owner had placed 55 aluminum baking pans on the floor to catch the rain.
The photo gallery, featuring before and after pictures of the home, offers some more tidbits:
Early in the renovation, Mr. Giffels and the contractor stumbled upon a treasure, $14,000 in $20 bills, wrapped in bank wrappers stamped March 15, 1930.
This Mr. Giffels fellow has written a book about the entire experience, called All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House. It will be released late May of this year.
Cabel Sasser recently posted Japan: Muscle Park & Ninja Warrior; it illustrates some interesting differences between there and here, partly by discussing a TV game show called “Sasuke”:
And to give you an idea of how challenging the fourth and final course is, Sasuke has run for twenty seasons, and only two people have ever actually won. (Cultural note: can you imagine how quickly, say, Deal or No Deal would have been cancelled if there had only ever been two winners in 10 years? But it’s genius: when someone fails you feel it in your gut, and if someone wins it feels like you’ve just watched history unfold.)
As usual, I must ask if Sagert has seen this show? Thoughts?
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