Transportation

This is the cutest scoot­er. Ever. Red and yel­low, and it has tail fins
— and a rudder.

The Ghezzi-Brian web­site is pret­ty bro­ken and this par­tic­u­lar Furia
ver­sion of the V11 seems to have dis­ap­peared from it’s galleries.
S’okay this black ver­sion shown at Top­Speed looks bet­ter than the red
one on G‑B’s sites.

I know that a num­ber of you take advan­tage of Bike Ban­dit’s impres­sive
on-line col­lec­tion of parts fich­es. For the fan­bois there’s now an
iPhone app. That’s right, you can now look up and order parts right
from the break down lane on the free­way. It works pret­ty darn well and
it’s free.

—————–

Science and Society

The Smith­son­ian reports on the exca­va­tions at  Gob­ek­li Tepe and what
the find­ings might mean for the the­o­ries about the tran­si­tion from
hunter/gather soci­eties to agri­cul­tur­al societies.
“… these new find­ings sug­gest a nov­el the­o­ry of civilization.
Schol­ars have long believed that only after peo­ple learned to farm and
live in set­tled com­mu­ni­ties did they have the time, orga­ni­za­tion and
resources to con­struct tem­ples and sup­port com­pli­cat­ed social
struc­tures. But Schmidt argues it was the oth­er way around: the
exten­sive, coor­di­nat­ed effort to build the mono­liths lit­er­al­ly laid
the ground­work for the devel­op­ment of com­plex soci­eties.…” Read
more:

Do you remem­ber the movie “Val­ley Girls” and how we all made fun of
the odd­i­ty of adding the ques­tion­ing inflec­tion to each and every
sen­tence? The plague has spread into every nook and cran­ny and we are
now a nation that sounds as if we aren’t sure where we parked our
selves. Tay­lor Mali wrote a poem about it and Ron­nie Bruce made some
type dance for it.

————-

Music

I’m get­ting kick out of lis­ten­ing to these 3 and half minute duels
between John Kessler and John May­nard as they pit their col­lec­tion of
obscure and whacky vinyl against the clock, a theme, and each oth­er. Record Bin Roulette.

——————–

Art, Images, and Design

Weapons design for the cubi­cle slave/warrior. When the Zom­bies come
I’m bar­ri­cad­ing myself in the stock room at Staples.

Paper and stop motion ani­ma­tion. Yay! Like the G wag­on as well. (Video
with sound)

The line between live action and ani­ma­tion in big bud­get movies is
con­tin­u­ing to blur and purists are up in arms. James Cameron insists
Avatar isn’t ani­ma­tion despite the enor­mous num­ber of ani­ma­tors who
worked on his film. This is nice sum­ma­ry of the ker­fluffle with links
to Cameron’s state­ments and a well rea­soned response by Kristin
Thompson.

Blocky bod­ied, bendy armed, charm­ing, robots and oth­er crit­ters. The
near­ly anony­mous Exit man.

hang in there my dears, only one more day to go.