My money is on this movie:

There are hundreds of pages of photos, too many to even begin to scratch the surface here. Bookmark it, visit again and again. Great stuff.

And, if you’re interested, the name Shorpy has an interesting history.

This is part of a British Film Institute series on “King Coal” and the British coal mining industry. But thank goodness they decided to take a detour into the “local” (pub) and show us how coal contributes to brewing beer circa 1959.

BFI has a ton more films on their YouTube channel.

(via A Continuous Lean)

It’s nearly nine minutes, but it’s worth it. Oh, Jesus and your arbitrary moral demands.

(Pinched from Facebook)

March 14 — or 3/14 in the notation — is Pi Day. It’s a day to celebrate the mathematical and geometric constant known as pi (or more properly π). And pi, of course, is 3.1415…. (it continues forever).

If you slept through high school geometry, π describes the relation between a circle’s diameter and its circumference. That is, if you have a wheel that’s got a diameter of, say a foot, each full rotation of that wheel will go about 3.14 feet.

Wikipedia has a fuller discussion, and graphics. And the, to really burn your brain, you can wiki-hop on over to their treatment of other irrational and transcendental numbers (π is both).

Some people suggest that you should mark March 14 as Pi Day by memorizing the digits of π — do it here, in a “fun” online game.

Others suggest that you should also mark Albert Einstein’s birthday.

Most popular, of course, is the phonetic celebration — celebrate π by eating pie.

That sounds right to me. Now, hmmm, what kind of pie? I suppose I will have to sample a few. Perhaps three and a bit?

(Photo by Amy of the bubble fun that always takes place among the audience at the Winnipeg Folk Fest main stage, from 2008)

Today was the day that the Winnipeg Folk Fest announced its lineup. This always gets Amy excited, Last year, I read her some of the highlights from a newspaper article while we coffee’d in a Starbucks, and she slapped her palm down on the table and shouted “shut UP!” she was so thrilled. That was for Iron and Wine, who fulfilled her excitement with a great performance last year.

This year’s performer list looks, if anything, better and more exciting than last year. Some of the names that made Amy go “squeeeee!” on her Facebook are, Andrew Bird, The Avett Brothers, Emmylou Harris, The Swell Season and Sarah Harmer, but there’s too many to list here.

But I’ve always appreciated Winnipeg Folk Festival for the opportunity to explore new-to-me artists as well, and it’s some of the names I don’t yet recognize that intrigue me the most.

I’m considering a 100-day blogging project, wherein I (and perhaps Amy) explore each of the artists coming to Folk Fest, and post about each of them individually. With 65 artists currently on the list (and they often tweak the list, adding a few as they get contracts signed) that’s more than one every other day. That’s ambitious, I know, since it would include listening to albums and trying to be fairly good about giving them the consideration they’re due.

Are readers interested in that scope of a project? Or is it too far outside what Absurd Intellectual is to you? I’d also consider dropping a few emails/phone calls in the right direction to see if I could score interviews with some of the performers. (Shout-out here to Curtis at Endless Spin, who has done an excellent job on the political front with his candidate interviews during the provincial NDP leadership race and the recent byelection in his home riding.)

One year I covered the Winnipeg Folk Festival in a moderate way for the Brandon Sun, and while a press pass had its advantages, lugging a laptop and camera gear from stage to stage wasn’t exactly the best way to spend the weekend. So Amy’s kiboshed any live-blogging of the festival this year, but I could probably get behind some tweeting, if I can ever get my phone set up.

Thoughts?

You are looking at a “standing pee” aid for women, so they can be as free as a man, when it comes to voiding their bladders. From the description of a folded-up paper cone, I suspect it’s something like peeing into a coffee filter. But from the very lengthy (and glowing) review I just read on Salon, it works like a charm:

I am not a scientist. I have absolutely no clue how a mere paper product can handle a full stream of lady pee and maintain its integrity, and I don’t care. I would refer skeptics to paper towel commercials depicting a towel completely soaked, yet still able to hold various objects. If we can put a man on the moon, we surely can allow women to pee standing up. All I know is these babies work, and I love them. They are the best thing to happen to vaginas since beltless pads.

Yes, the rest of the review is as over-the-top in its language. You can buy them on Amazon, but they’re pricey. The reviewer makes mention of DIY solutions, involving construction paper and tape, but I’m not sure how well that would work. Still, if you’re hard up for a crafty way to spend a Saturday afternoon….

There are great slide-shows out there, collections of really awesome pictures, but they tend towards the easy-to-curate. That is, someone will put together a slide-show of images from the Olympics, or scenes from Haiti. Some of the photos can be jaw-droppingly good, but they sort of stand alone.

Well, msnbc.com’s Bill Dedman has changed the game. He’s an investigative reporter, but his latest work isn’t a 10,000-word opus, in fact it isn’t a story at all. No, Dedman’s latest work is an investigative slide-show.

With a staggering 47 slides, Dedman tells the story of Huguette Clark, daughter of what you might call a “robber baron” from the Gilded Age. Yes, the 1920s. He rivaled Rockefeller as the richest American, lived on Millionaire’s Row beside the Vanderbilts, and pretty much bought himself a U.S. Senate seat.

His daughter (from his second marriage — a scandal in itself) inherited something over a billion dollars, in today’s money. She has several mansions, owns the largest apartment on New York’s storied Park Avenue, and once bought a castle in Connecticut but never spent a night there.

In an interview on Poynter, Dedman shares how his investigative feature turned into a slideshow — and how it’s turned out great:

I like to talk stories through before I write them. As I was collecting photos of the Clarks, I kept showing them in a little slide show to my family, to my mother (81) and my daughters (7 and 10). It really helped tell the story.

I put the photos online to show our projects team at msnbc.com, and photographer Jim Seida said, why don’t we just publish it as a slide show? I was skeptical at first — would that crimp the writing? — but in the end I was advocating doing it this way when the photo team was skeptical. I thought far more people would read through it this way, and it would be worth an experiment.

We’ve done slide shows for years, of course, but the slide show is not our usual medium for telling an investigative or in-depth story.

I clicked through just so I could get a look at it and pitch the idea at my own newspaper, but I ended up reading the whole thing. As Dedman noted in the interview, he had to lose as a lot of depth and context from the story, because the captions were limited to about 50 words. But in other ways, that terse approach also focused him on what was most important or most interesting.

It’s a great tale about a forgotten famous family. And a great way to tell it. Check out the slideshow here: “The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery” (Click launch to launch the pop-up slideshow.)

Give the behind-the-scenes interview a read, too.

Enter Stereomood:

behind every song there’s always an emotion. we don’t know why but maybe that’s why we love music.

so we’ve created a way to suggest songs that follow your feelings: stereomood is the emotional internet radio, providing music that best suits your mood and your activities.

You just go to the website, pick your mood, and it generates a playlist for you! And it could be any kind of mood, from sexy, to cool, to elegant.

Because the sun is shining for the first time since I can remember, I chose my mood as “sunny day.” The playlist popped up with a collection of up-beat, happy-sounding (sunny, if you will) songs, with artists ranging from The Strokes and Vampire Weekend, to Creedance Clearwater Revival and Talking Heads. And unlike many music websites, Stereomood plays the entire song, and not just clips.

Awesome.

New favourite website.

(via)

It has a simple story, a quirky gimmick and some actors you’ll probably recognize (though this last point is not necessary).  In all likelihood, this film was a lot of fun to make.  At least, it seems like it would have been.

You can watch the film embedded here or slip on over to the official website.

Hey, who wants to make a short film?  We’ll call it “Absurd Intellectual.”

I was walking past the cheese counter in a lacklustre mood when, suddenly, this bright, sparkly blue package caught my eye. I’d never seen this shimmery foil-wrapped cheese before. It was the only one of its kind in the stack of cheeses, and I couldn’t find a price tag on it, or on the shelf above it.

But the price didn’t matter — I had to have it.

Caronzola. What kind of cheese was that? Obviously a gorgonzola homage, but I whipped out my phone to Google it and all I got was a social networking profile for one Caron Zola.

Mysterious! Alluring.

I had to make it mine.

Bereft of its evening-gown attire, the Caronzola lay there, coated in a white rind, looking for all the world like an average, ordinary, everyday brie or camembert — and yet, there was something enigmatic about it.

The words on the package said “blue-veined”, but there was nothing blue about this cheese. And yet, that sparkly package hinted at something out of the ordinary.

Aha! Despite the modest exterior, the plain white rind, the exciting package was right — this was a cheese with a surprise inside!

Streaked with blue, the cheese revealed itself to the knife as a hybrid: part brie, part blue.

It looked for all the world like a brie, but it was so much more. It was stiffer than a brie, for one thing, almost aged. And of course, the blue veins running through it gave it a distinctive blue-cheese-aroma.

And yet, it wasn’t overpowering. Someone has gone to great trouble to make these two very different cheeses play well together.

Thinking of the pungent nature of blue cheese, we popped it on a sturdy, salty Triscuit. But we didn’t need to. This was a very mild blue cheese — hardly blue at all, you might say. And yet it wasn’t very brie-like either. The nuttiness was there, but the harsh, almost ammoniac flavour wasn’t. And, as I said at the start, it was much firmer — without the tendency to get liquidy that some really nice bries do.

I couldn’t believe how brie and blue could come together, and produce something so different, yet so mild, and so enjoyable. Definitely a cheese that you could serve as a conversation-starter, or if you wanted to introduce a new cheese-o-phile to the world of blue.

And sometimes, when I read a book, I can daydream about what might occur in the days or months after the end of the book.

And sometimes, when it’s a really great tale, and the author comes out with a sequel, or a prequel, I will get totally into it, and tear through anything related. And that’s kind of how I was with “Lord of the Rings” — I mean, I devoured the appendices, and even in junior high, I tried to read The Silmarillion (but it was way too hard).

However, I can’t hold a candle to these people, a worldwide cast who came together to make a feature film, based on a few paragraphs of text, but fleshed out to tell the tale of Arathorn (you may know him as Strider’s dad). It’s called “Born of Hope,” and it looks really, actually, kind of awesome. Here’s a trailer:

I love that the Internet is starting to really kickstart these fan-sourced productions. And computer technology is now getting to the point where serious film-quality CGI is possible on a home desktop.

You can watch the whole film online at their website, bornofhope.com. There’s also a great article about it on The Guardian.

Basically my whole computing life has been tied up with the evolution of the Civilization series of games. Right from the first ever Civilization through CivII, Civ3 and Civ 4, I’ve played long into the night, shepherding my Zulus (I love being the Zulus — or the Russians, sometimes the French) through to world domination.

Usually, I go a military route, but sometimes I try the space race, other times I aim for a diplomatic victory. But I gotta say, even when I try to out-culture my opponents, I tend to get frustrated and end up switching to a military footing, churning out some heavy tank units, and demolishing my nearby opponents (until then, my allies and friends) before they know what’s hit them.

Damn — I wanna play some Civilization right now!

Well, luckily I don’t have long to wait before a new(!) version of Sid Meier’s classic comes out. There’s plans afoot for Civilization V — and both Gamespot and IGN have previews.

Some of the changes include hex tiles instead of squares, plus the addition of ranged units, and the new inability to “stack” units. I am finding myself strangely excited.