Back again

A several-days outage due to some server snafu… teaches me that the Blog matters to me, and I have a considerable backlog of stuff ready (or almost ready) to post. I note that the feed from my del.icio.us collections hasn’t updated, so that’s another thing to try to fix manually:

U.S. Gas Temperature Map temp=$$

NY Times archive, 1851-1922 “All the news that was fit to print”

1973 Sears catalog progress has been made…

Chris Harrison’s Amazon book map “…10,316,775 connections (edges) between books Amazon believed were related. This allowed me to throw the data into my old wikiviz engine to spatially layout a huge mosaic of books (I let it run for a 140 hours). Items that were noted as being similar had attractive forces, bringing them together, often into large groups.”

Teddy bear stuffer from Shorpy brrrrrr…

Duckies on parade: “On January 10 1992, a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores.”

YouTube takedowns by requester

links for 2008-05-15

Wooten Bros

Darryl Landry sent me the link to this, in response to yesterday’s excess:

…and I’ll bookend it with

I don’t find these as incomprehensible or inaccessible as the Die Like A Dog example, perhaps because I dimly grasp what the musicians are doing.

The outer limits

or maybe outré… Peter Brotzmann (alto & tenor saxophones, tarogato), Toshinori Kondo (trumpet, electronics), William Parker (double bass), and Hamid Drake (drums, percussion) are the Die Like a Dog Quartet. Their performance at the Berlin Jazz Festival 1995 is available, 9:31 of it. I know precisely ONE person who is equipped and inclined to appreciate this sort of thing. All I can do is shake my head in wonder. Can’t say I like it, let alone understand it, but I guess I’m willing to accept that there’s something to understand. From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.