Some links

The del.icio.us harvester seems to be misbehaving. Here are some from the last few days:

Policy Map “…an innovative geographic information system which allows you to easily create custom maps, tables, and charts.”

Thorazine shuffle from Bonkers Institute for Nearly Genuine Research and their “Online Gallery of Modern and Vintage Psychiatric Drug Advertising”

Mapping the Human ‘Diseaseome’ from NY Times: “a map linking different diseases, represented by circles, to the genes they have in common, represented by squares”

Gitwithit’s photostream from Flickr: portraiture, ads with 1950s flavor

Tsk tsk

This one somehow escaped me in my sheltered youth, but I’m making up for it:

say the Notes: from “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, written by Dr. Seuss himself, we have this musical number featuring the film’s villain Dr. Terwilliker getting dressed to conduct his 500-boy piano symphony…” and there’s mooore:

How did this ever get made? Here’s some more context:

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid it thus far, it’s a very ’50’s, very Seussian musical. Simply put, it’s the story of a boy falling in love with a plumber while trying to escape from a maximum-security piano camp. It’s also the story of how movie-making can go awry.

As it turned out, Ted ‘Dr. Seuss’ Geisel hated the experience of being involved in the movie, and detested the final product. He forbade any other Seuss material to be adapted to the big screen during his life time. (Sound reasoning, as it turned out.)

In turn, Columbia Pictures lost faith in the film mid-production, yanked promotion, cut the budget, and cut huge portions out of the finished movie.The plans for an epic children’s fantasy along the caliber of Wizard of Oz were dashed, and the film received tepid reviews upon release.

And yet there’s still something there, and it’s a movie that needs to be seen. Especially if you’re a Seuss fan.
(from I’m Learning to Share)

Prophetic or what?

Cleaning up the Desktop led me to this image
Harry Grant Dart 1911
(see larger)
a Harry Grant Dart cartoon snagged from Paleofuture (who got it from Life 1911). Note that the multimedia User is pointing with his left hand to “Son Willie” on the menu, and that a real-time image of Son Willie’s doings is projected (other choices are “The Office”, “Golf Matches”, “Aeroplane Races”, “Theatres”, “Tennis” and so on), and that the sign to the left says “International Wireless Home News Service Events As They Transpire Accurately Recorded”

Chabon reads from the Yiddish Policemen’s Union


followed by Q&A session from the same reading.

I picked up the book in the Pittsburgh airport and have been enjoying its improbabilities. Not surprising that it’s a Nebula Award winner, and up for Hugo and Sidewise awards too. An example of its descriptive and analytical astuteness:

A pine box slick with rain pitches and tosses on the surf of weeping men. Satmars hold umbrellas over the heads of Verbovers. Gerers and Shtrakenzers and Viznitzers link arms with the boldness of schoolgirls on a lark. Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they’ve been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a yid who was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a yid –the shell of a yid, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty-year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gathered in the rain to lay it in the ground. (pg. 197)

I’m interested to see that Christianne Alarmist-Librarian identified the very same passage as the quintessence of the book…