This set includes material originally released from 1976 through 1980.
This period of Fela's storied career saw his Kalakuta Republic increasingly under siege from the Nigerian government, and the clear rise of his vitriol as it fermented into scathing musical diatribes. (...)
Tracks such as "Authority Stealing" and the international hit "Zombie" are great examples of Fela's unfiltered outpouring of raw anger towards the oppressive Nigerian government. Interestingly, the 1976 album Upside Down features the vocals of Sandra Isadore - the American woman who introduced Fela to the Black Power Movement. Music Of Many Colours is collaboration with American vibraphonist Roy Ayers.
I would add that significantly, it was during this same period that Fela's Kalakuta Republic compound burned to the ground (February 18, 1977) after a thousand armed soldiers attacked its residents. During that assault, Fela's mother was thrown from a window by soldiers. She fell into a coma, and died two months later.
The titles that are being released are: Zombie (1976), Upside Down (1976), Music of Many Colours (1980), Stalemate (1977), Fear Not For Man (1977), Opposite People (1977), Sorrow, Tears and Blood (1977), Shuffering & Shmiling (1978), No Agreement (1977), V.I.P. (1979), Authority Stealing (1980).
Here's a neat bit of paper ephemera: A brochure of the Soviet pavilion at Expo 58, also known as the Brussels World Fair—which was the first World Fair after World War II. The Soviet pavillion brochure includes period-perfect illustrations, a neat map, and promises of love 'n' leisure in the land of the Reds: "Sputniks and Rockets! Soviet Women!"
A camera crew for the show Into the Drink was filming Mantas off the coast of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii when one of the giant Pacific Manta Rays took a camera off one of the divers. After swimming around for a bit with the camera still rolling, the Manta dropped the rig off on the sea floor under their boat. Another diver filmed the camera equipment being taken by the Manta.
Al Jazeera will be broadcasting "The Colony," a documentary about "the onslaught of Chinese economic might and its impact on long-standing African traditions." Filmmakers Brent Huffman and Xiaoli Zhou traveled to the West African nation of Senegal to explore these themes. I am familiar with the subject, having witnessed it in other West African countries I've spent time in—as the promo says, the massive influx of Chinese citizens and China-owned businesses and capital has sparked tensions, and even violence. I haven't seen the film yet, but it sounds interesting. (shared with Boing Boing by the filmmaker himself, Brent Huffman, via BB Submitterator)
— Xeni • Comments: 9
Mayor Mike says: "Looks like the folks at Vivitar are squeezing the last drops of blood out of this withered industry . . . Plus, a free roll of film!"
Richard Lorenc, 33, of Kansas, wanted to find his birth mother who had been separated from him right after birth. He put in a request with the state for help and after just six weeks, he learned that his mother is Vivian Wheeler, 62, a famous bearded lady. An Internet search led him to Marc Hartzman, author of American Sideshow, who helped reunite the mother and son and wrote about it for AOL News:
According to Wheeler, doctors examining her for Guinness said she has a male bone structure, with half her hormones being male. Doctors thought it would be impossible for her to give birth, but she became pregnant, and baby Richard was delivered by cesarean section in 1977.
For Wheeler, a Seventh-Day Adventist, it was a miracle. But she says the father, a carnival ride operator she had met in Nebraska, took the baby away from her soon after the birth.
Lorenc didn't learn all this until later. After learning his birth mother's name, he set out to find her. He started by looking her up on the Internet.
"I knew it was her as soon as I saw the picture online," he said. "We have a resemblance."
Today, you're going to learn about "Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment". Better yet, it's going to make sense, because Maureen McKeague—a chemistry Ph.D. candidate at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada—turned her complicated thesis into an easy-to-follow dance routine.
It's part of the third annual Dance Your Ph.D. competition put on by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. McKeague's video is one of this years' four finalists, and my personal favorite of the bunch. To me, McKeague did the best job of making her Ph.D. dance make sense without having read the Ph.D. Plus, I love her depiction of how a Taq Polymerase chain reaction makes copies of DNA.
You're looking at a mass fish die-off. These don't happen every day, but they're also not particularly rare in southern Louisiana, where this photo was taken. The BP oil spill wasn't to blame for this die-off. Instead, it's the result of a very large number of fish getting trapped by the tide in a very shallow pool of water on a very hot day. All of those factors added up to not enough oxygen to go around, and the fish suffocated.
Technically, Rabalais said, nitrogen and phosphorous are good things. Without them, you don't get life. In fact, a little extra nitrogen and phosphorous actually improve fishy existence, by plumping up the plankton population. Plankton feed on nutrients, fish feed on plankton and people serve the fish up in a nice butter sauce.
Those nutrients are also food for plants. In fact, that's a big part of why we get excess nitrogen and phosphorous in the water system to begin with, because both are used as fertilizer on American farms. For example, in 2007, American corn farmers used more than 5 million tons of nitrogenous fertilizer.
But, while corn may have big appetite for plant food, but it's about as efficient at "eating" as a toddler with a bowl of spaghetti. You know the kid will wear as much food as she eats. And a corn field will often use as little as half the fertilizer it's fed. The rest just sits on the soil until it's washed away into the nearest creek by rain or irrigation. Several river systems and thousands of miles away, the Mississippi Delta vomits out water saturated with the nitrogen runoff of every corn farm in the Midwest. In the Gulf of Mexico, the nitrogen becomes a buffet for another plant--algae--which, in the sort of natural cycle that completely fails to inspire Disney song writers, first cut off light needed by underwater plants and animals and eventually die off in numbers so large that their decomposition consumes every drop of available oxygen, suffocating aquatic life for miles around. It's the Circle of Death. And it doesn't make a great musical number.
National Geographic's feature "Being Jane Goodall," includes an unprecedented gallery: every image of Goodall that has ever appeared in NatGeo; 50 years' worth of Goodall portraits.
When she started out studying chimpanzees in Tanganyika, Jane Goodall didn't have a graduate degree in animal behavior. She didn't even have an undergraduate degree: she'd just graduated from secretarial school. But in her first few weeks of observing the chimps, she "she made three observations that rattled the comfortable wisdoms of physical anthropology: meat eating by chimps (who had been presumed vegetarian), tool use by chimps (in the form of plant stems probed into termite mounds), and toolmaking (stripping leaves from stems), supposedly a unique trait of human premeditation. Each of those discoveries further narrowed the perceived gap of intelligence and culture between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes.
Freeway signs warning of upcoming drug checkpoints are actually a ruse: the local sheriff sets up a checkpoint at the next offramp and searches panicky motorists who pull off to ditch their stashes. An accompanying map on the original post (click through below) gives the locations of similar checkpoints all over the USA, and warns, "if you see one of these signs, don't fucking exit."
EBay seller Photo-arsenal-worldwide is flogging this mint-in-package NASA Hasselblad camera; bidding now stands at nearly $34,000. I love how everything in space looks like it was descended from a Tonka truck.
Intel has confirmed that the rumored master key crack for HDCP (the high-definition video "copy protection" used in Blu-Ray, high def consoles, and many game consoles) is real. Blu-Ray and other systems that rely on HDCP are now terminally compromised.
As a practical matter, the most likely scenario for a hacker would be to create a computer chip with the master key embedded it, that could be used to decode Blu-ray discs. A software decoder is unlikely, "but I'd never say never," Waldrop said.
"It's really hard to predict 100 percent, but that seems to be the prime scenario," Waldrop said of the possibility that a chip might be created.
Carl Paladino, a Republican nominee for the NY governorship, sent voters a garbage-scented flier featuring "photos of seven Democrats, six of whom have been investigated and two who have resigned in scandal in the past four years."
Paladino spokesman Michael Caputo told The Associated Press on Thursday that the mailer is scented with a "landfill" odor.
He says the smell will get worse the longer it is exposed, just like Albany.
Dark Patterns is Harry Brignull's catalog of " user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn't otherwise have done." For example, Privacy Zuckering (named for Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg): "The act of creating deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces which trick your users into sharing more info about themselves than they really want to." Forewarned is forearmed.
San Francisco's Tachyon Books (publisher of my book of essays, Content, and conveners of the excellent SF in SF reading series) is celebrating its 15th birthday this Sunday at Borderlands Books in the Mission, with writer guests including Peter Beagle, Michael Blumlein, James Patrick Kelly, Jim Kessel, and Madeline Robins.
— Cory • Comments: 2
Here's an extremely modest product claim from the paleolithic era of face-cream ads: Jonteel proudly boasts that its special cosmetic "will not grow hair on the face." Which makes you wonder what the competition's cream contained -- testosterone? I like to think that this was part of a whole series of ads explaining the side-effects they'd licked: "Will not dissolve skin on face!" or "Will not cause total blindness!"
These ancient, official BBC build-your-own-Dalek blueprints were rescued from the defunct Doctor Who FTP archive. Distributing out of print Dalek blueprints is arguably what the Internet was made for.
"I've got this pasta sauce coming out called 'Marky Ramone's Brooklyn's Own Pasta Sauce. You see, I made it with my grandpa; he was a chef at 21 Club. I watched him as a little boy, and then when I got older, I lived alone at 18, and so pasta sauce and spaghetti was the cheapest thing around. I got really good at making it, and so I am excited I get to share my recipe with others. And I got to do the artwork on bottle, and it's really cool looking. Soon it will be sold in stores..."—Marky Ramone, legendary punk drummer, formerly of the Ramones. (Submitterated by Jwallace242)— Xeni • Comments: 16
So, interesting news today: "Brody is doing a live action role playing game based on self-actualizing seminars," says Mark Allen of Machine Project. "They just did a round in LA and are going to do another one soon in Santa Jose."
Spotted today at my school-visit in Gutersloh, Germany: these swish laser-cut glasses-frames, all lacy and 21st century. As worn by Frau Corsmeyer, proprietor of the remarkable Buch Handlung Markus, a bookstore in a 17th-century, half-timbered building that dates to the 30 Year War. Don't know the manufacturer -- do you?
"A Man Like Putin" has become the Russian prime minister's theme song played at his rallies. It is really quite a pop anthem: "I want a man like Putin, who's full of strength. I want a man like Putin, who doesn't drink. I want a man like Putin, who won't make me sad." PBS profiled the artist behind the tune, old-school Soviet rocker Alexander Yelin who initially meant it as a gag. But then Putin got really into it. From Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders:
Yelin says he wrote "A Man Like Putin" on a $300 bet to see if he could create a hit. "All I needed was the right message," he says. "What can a girl sing about? She can't sing that Putin is great. That would be stupid and it wouldn't be funny. But she can sing that everything around her sucks, and she needs a man like Putin."
Apparently, as your ability to control impulses declines with age, so does your ability to smooth over other people's feelings via white lies and omissions. The upside to this: Advice from old people is more likely to be honest ... if a little on the painful side.
Researchers recruited 19 undergrads and 32 adults in their 60s and 70s. They split the older adults into two groups, based on the adults' abilities to control their behaviors and impulses--called executive function, which naturally declines with age. Then the researchers showed all three groups a photo of a visibly obese teen, along with a list of her complaints, like trouble sleeping and lack of energy--symptoms associated with childhood obesity.
What advice could they offer this girl? Well, only half of the higher functioning adults and a third of the college kids brought up the girl's weight as the possible source for her problems. But 80 percent of the adults with cognitive declines mentioned weight. They also gave twice as many helpful tips, like more exercise, a better diet, and delivered them with more empathy.
Sadly, I'm not sure we can declare this an unequivocal win for cognitive decline. After all, "honesty" is a relative thing, dependent on your own beliefs. The same process that might prompt your Grandma to offer useful and empathetic weight-loss advice is probably also the driving force behind somebody else's Grandma's tendency to yell racist epithets at the mailman.
Both old ladies are telling you what they really think—which seems to be what this study is actually about. But being willing to tell people what you really think doesn't necessarily equal good advice.
This is an LED kite from Ingenio Electronico. It's not Ernest Sawka Jr's kite. But it sure is cool!
Cinemajay says: "Man arrested for 'disorderly conduct' flying a kite rigged with LEDs after St. Paul, MN residents reported a UFO. After repeated flights an officer told Sawka, 'If I catch you doing this again, I'll come and find you and put you in jail.'"
Sawka said he'd like to fight the citation.
"Hopefully, the judge will say, 'You're here for flying a kite?' and drop the case," he said.
Sawka said in August that he'd been sending lighted kites into the sky around St. Paul for about two years. He would put a "kite up a couple hundred feet and then start tying lights to the string," he said. They're "little LED bullet lights," Sawka said.
Nice poster for The Fantasy of the Deer Warrior, a 1961 movie from Taiwan. The trailer has some nice singing and costumes, too. Poster tagline: "Natural scenes, Animal (beast) suits, Taiwanese fairy tale movie".
Collin Cunningham is Make: Online's triple threat. He produces, edits, and scores the terrific how-to videos we run on the site. In this one, he shows how to make a nice wire spool organizer.
I've posted previously about The City Sage, an excellent interior design blog by my friend Anne Sage. Earlier this year, Anne and Crystal Gentilello of the Plush Palate blog hunkered down in secret to create a new, full-on interior design magazine, called Rue. The first issue 250+ page issue launched today and it's magnificent. Rue looks and reads like an opulent print magazine, only no trees were harmed in its creation. Congratulations, Anne! Rue Magazine
Behind the Mask is a short documentary about "two everyday guys who, on the weekends, turn into masked lucha libre wrestlers. From the sport's roots in Mexico, to the backyards of America, lucha libre wrestling is a Latin American tradition alive and evolving in the United States."
It's against the law in Zimbabwe to ridicule President Mugabe. The South African band Freshlyground (who wrote the official song and performed at the World Cup) have been banned from Zimbabwe because they made a video that shows Mugabe turning into a chicken.
Something Awful's "WTF D&D;?!" column held a contest for its readers, asking them to send in entries for an "Erotic Monster Manual." Lots to like here, but the bikini-clad gelatinous cube by Mason takes the cake (or the jelly mould).
Indulge your dead media nostalgia with this trompe l'oeil hand-labelled VHS cassette skin for your laptop's lid from Hollis Brown Thornton: I'm more of a ten-million-stickers-in-layers kind of guy, but this is pretty sharp. $20-$30.
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This period of Fela's storied career saw his Kalakuta Republic increasingly under siege from the Nigerian government, and the clear rise of his vitriol as it fermented into scathing musical diatribes. (...)
According to Wheeler, doctors examining her for Guinness said she has a male bone structure, with half her hormones being male. Doctors thought it would be impossible for her to give birth, but she became pregnant, and baby Richard was delivered by cesarean section in 1977.
Paladino spokesman Michael Caputo told The Associated Press on Thursday that the mailer is scented with a "landfill" odor.
He says the smell will get worse the longer it is exposed, just like Albany.
These ancient, official BBC build-your-own-Dalek blueprints were rescued from the defunct Doctor Who FTP archive. Distributing out of print Dalek blueprints is arguably what the Internet was made for.
Indulge your dead media nostalgia with this trompe l'oeil hand-labelled VHS cassette skin for your laptop's lid from Hollis Brown Thornton: I'm more of a ten-million-stickers-in-layers kind of guy, but this is pretty sharp. $20-$30.
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