Morning Linkage (Nov 10)

Transportation

Adventure does not require expen­sive gear, mas­sive bikes, or exot­ic locations.

Somewhere between WTF and the most insight­ful por­trait of the motor­cy­clist’s soul ever. A detail from Akira Yamagucchi’s The Nine Aspects. (If any­one can find a pic of the entire paint­ing please let me know.)

This one is a lit­tle bit of a gimme. I know at least two read­ers who will love any Triumph Scrambler I post.

Science

Time lapse pho­tog­ra­phy seems to have fall­en out of favor. Why? Did the won­der of watch­ing plants grown and bloom and die some­how leave the world? It’s a beau­ti­ful plan­et — all the more so because it hous­es some­thing as love­ly as the snake gourd plant or the white egret flower. Plants of Japan. (video with music)

Art, Images, and Design

These “tank totes” are a com­mon sight around here. They are car­ried around in the back of pick­up trucks by folks with less than reli­able water sup­plies. But I did­n’t know they were so cheap. Here’s a good re-use. Signal lamps. Any oth­er ideas?

Ramshackle hill­side apart­ments with too many win­dows and too few doors? No, not some sort of hell­ish slum. Nina Lindgren’s mag­i­cal card­board houses.

Video

I have been self­ish­ly keep­ing this one to myself for the last cou­ple of days. Alice Herz-Sommer is some­one who you have to hold in the pri­va­cy of your own heart and con­sid­er qui­et­ly before you can share her.
Trailer for the doc­u­men­tary Alice: Dancing Under the Gallows (Video 12:11) More on Alice and the film.

Morning Linkage (Nov 9)

Transportation

No mat­ter how you feel about cig­a­rettes and smok­ing and adver­tis­ing, if you’re over 35 you’ll always asso­ciate the Camel brand with motor­cy­cles. This col­lec­tion of Camel ads has too many of the car­toon camels but there are a cou­ple of prizes. A rough side­hack on the beach, a full page of army motos from the 40’s, and AMA Pro dirt bikes (60’s?)

Washington State Transportation Department is one of the finest exam­ples of a gov­ern­ment agency using social media in its out­reach. Yeah, yeah, I hear you ask­ing what’s this doing in the trans­porta­tion sec­tion… the WSDOT blog recent­ly announced that their Flickr stream, begun in 2007,has reached the amaz­ing mile­stone of 10,000,000 views. That’s right 10 mil­lion. Go have a look around, you’ll find some­thing that astounds you. I promise.

I have nev­er seen the BMW R7 pro­to­type based on the 1930’s star frame before. I am smit­ten. Also a Type 255 Rennsport. The Vintagent’s excel­lent round-up of BMWs pre­sent­ed at the Paris pho­to equip­ment trade show.

Science

Ten love­ly images of the struc­tures of the brain. The start­ing point for Carl Shoonover’s new book Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. And again remind­ing us that Richard Axel was right when he “sci­ence with­out enchant­ment is noth­ing! (via my friend T and Simon Mainwaring)

Art, Images, and Design

Making a virtue of neces­si­ty. If you have to run con­duit and wires on the sur­face of con­crete walls you may as well make an aes­thet­ic state­ment with it.

Koikoikoi selects 28 black and white por­traits from Nobuyuki Taguchi’s large vol­ume of work.

If you pre­fer some­thing in col­or, how about this set, also from Taguchi. Making pointe shoes at the Freed of London factory.

Reliquaries are one of my favorite for­mats for art. Coilhouse fea­tures three new paint­ings in the form of reli­quar­ies by Madeline von Foerster.  A much larg­er image of The Red Thread is cur­rent­ly on the front page of the artist’s site. (NSFW — artis­tic nudes)

We are remind­ed that in some parts of the world, autumn is a time of fine, soft light rather than murky gray.

Tuesday — at least it’s not Monday and I used to like Mondays :(

Morning Linkage (Nov 8)

Transportation

Mooneyes, Yokohama Custom Show. Yeah — none of us are gonna be there but this getting-ready video gives a nice overview of cus­tom bike and rod builders in the US at the moment. “Demo reel” for this year and last year. Nice video — nasty music.

Much more fun can be had on the Mooneyes web­site. The loud, crowd­ed feel of a 60’s hot rod mag­a­zine in a brows­er. And they sell dog toys? (Hidden Diaz bonus: pho­tos from a VW Type 2 par­ty in Sept.)

A lit­tle clas­sic Ducati to get your moto week off to a good start.

Food and Science

Truffles, black truf­fles not the choco­late kind, have com­pli­cat­ed sex lives. And same-sex dorms.

The sweet irony of find­ing dinosaur fos­sils in church mar­ble is too hard to pass up. And the bonus of the rec­om­men­da­tions for a cou­ple of cool urban geol­o­gy books makes this a must-link for a Monday.

Art, Images, and Design

Explosions of organ­ic shapes and col­or. Many lay­ered cut paper cre­ations of Simone Lourenco. Much, much more in the port­fo­lio.

Apparently I am hope­less­ly out of date. Not only can’t iden­ti­fy most of the musi­cians asso­ci­at­ed with these clothes when I looked up the answers I did­n’t know who a good hand­ful of them were. Can you do bet­ter? Ensemble: The Style of Music, 20 musi­cians iden­ti­fied by their clothing.

More images from music. This essay on Elvis Presley fea­tures some of the best rock and roll pho­tog­ra­phy. Black and whites from the 50’s and 60’s.

We make our cities in our own images. And when we make films we make new cities to express our new vision. A look at a hand­ful of icon­ic cin­e­ma cities going back to 1927 (Metropolis.)

alright my dears, let’s make this week just a smidgen bet­ter than last week shall we?

Morning Linkage (Nov 5)

Transportation

I have no expla­na­tion for the face paint that match­es the hel­met. But it’s the nicest B&W bike pic I’ve seen this week.

Vintagent pulls togeth­er a brief his­to­ry of a 1938 BSA Gold Star for sale in Oz. Bonus pic of the “movie-star hand­some”  Wal Handley who earned the cov­et­ed gold star at Brooklands for BSA.

None of the rac­ers I know has this kind of class. The FIAT trans­porter that fer­ried around the Ferrari cars in the late 1950s isn’t exact­ly with­in the bud­getary con­straints of most of my rac­er mates either.

Officer Silent is sneak­ing up behind you. First it was the elec­tric cars in the NYC fleet. Now Utah based ATK would like to sell your local LEOs some elec­tric bikes.

Science

The physics of the wet-dog shake (as well as mice, rats, and griz­zly bears.)

Why do gigan­tic pump­kins always look like they were left in the sun and melt­ed? All squat and squashed? There’s an answer to that. It’s a bet­ter shape than round for grow­ing out sized squash.

Art. Images, and Design

Animalarium high­lights the ani­mals por­trayed in the work of two Finnish illus­tra­tors. Sanna Annukka whose work for Marimekko you can find on her web­site. (The look into the pro­duc­tion process for Marimekko fab­rics is cool.) And Klaus Haapaniemi whose large-scale pic­tures of fan­ci­ful ani­mals always make me smile.

The Book or Revelations is puz­zling to even the most devote of schol­ars. Commentaries have been writ­ten through­out the cen­turies. Bibliodyssey brings images from the Beatus Apocalypse. Noah’s ark fea­tures some par­tic­u­lar­i­ty unset­tling animals.

I have to agree. The posters for Black Swan are so unlike the usu­al run of actor’s faces poor­ly pho­to­shopped onto stand-ins’ air­brushed bod­ies in front of CGI explo­sions that at first I did­n’t real­ize that Black Swan was a movie. (It’s a ballet/psychological thriller movie. Who’s going with me?)

Lovely cal­lig­ra­phy exe­cut­ed on video. Legacy of Letters pro­mo piece. Luca Barcellona’s econ­o­my of motion while let­ter­ing is amaz­ing. (Video)

Animation

When you have a band named the Kandinsky Effect. the best pos­si­ble pro­mo video would fea­ture a piece (or two) of Kandinsky art, no? (Video)

But is you need some­thing a lit­tle less high-brow you can’t go wrong with the episode of Saari. A preschool pro­gram designed by a Finn and pro­duced in Spain. Charming. (Video)

And that’s it for this week. be hap­py, have fun, be safe.

Morning Linkage (Nov 4)

Transportation

I am utter­ly uncon­vinced that I want to see Green Hornet in January. The trail­ers made me cringe. On the oth­er hand this video extolling the won­ders of Black Beauty, the Crown Vic based auto­mo­tive star of the film may change my mind. Bonus is that there’s footage of the art of film­ing chase scenes here. (video — loud music. 2:51)

Church of Choppers brings us pic­tures of a Sunday of dirt/mud rac­ing spon­sored by the Blackheads MC in Finland. Proving that bikes and mud are fun on any con­ti­nent. (anoth­er tip-off from one of the fab mag­pie spotters.)

One for the orange kool-aid crowd. Cyril Despres rides the new KTM 450 on his pri­vate test track in the Pyrenees moun­tains. The man has his own test track in the moun­tains. Good god.

I like this BMW R60 striped back to the essentials.

Sweet lit­tle Triumph.

Technology and Science

Real time video manip­u­la­tion. It’s now pos­si­ble to make some­thing dis­ap­pear from the CCTV mon­i­tor are it’s hap­pen­ing. Cool…and a lit­tle frightening.

I apol­o­gize in advance for the num­ber of point­less Lego posts. But damn, frog dis­sec­tion.

Soooo geeky. Here’s a PDF of the “Space Shuttle Weather Launch Commit Criteria and KSC End of Mission Weather Landing Criteria” Yup, exact­ly what it sounds like. Fascinating look into the minu­tia of get­ting big things off the ground and into space. (BTW NASA has sev­er­al inter­est­ing twit­ter accounts. Things like this show up.)

Art, Images, and Design

This quick pen­cil sketch that been fol­low­ing me around all day.

Archeology meets street-art. Um, no that’s not quite right. The arche­o­log­i­cal inter­est is decades away. Street-art meets pop-up gallery? Nope. Pop-ups are tem­po­rary. An aban­doned sub­way project is hard­ly tem­po­rary. Well any­way, under New York there’s a big space that has been filled with the work of many of the best street artists. Underbelly. It was opened to a select few recent­ly. And now has been closed up again.

I’m an ani­ma­tion fan. I spend a lot of time crawl­ing around the web look­ing for rare bits and pieces. A lot of what I like and find isn’t pro­duced in the US. I get a lot of leads to links that serve up to a notice read­ing “This video is not avail­able in your region.” How far behind the real­i­ty of glob­al cul­ture are we here? And is it only going to get worse?

Animation

A month or so ago I wrote a note to myself about a link: “Someone has got to stop these peo­ple. Once again a fab­u­lous piece of ani­ma­tion might nev­er see the light of day because it was cre­at­ed with­out obtain­ing the rights to the music. Enjoy this trail­er for the imag­i­na­tive Hendrix inspired The Experience and hope that the cre­ators can come up with the scratch to license Voodoo Child so that we can see the rest.” But today when I want­ed to post the item I rechecked the link and it seems that they did secure rights. So I’m a lit­tle slow to get this post­ed and you reap the ben­e­fit of see­ing the full video of the roller coast­er trib­ute to the man. (Video. Music. 8:06)

Go do some­thing sur­pris­ing, it will make me happy.