Morning Linkage (Aug 17)

Transportation

My dreams of roman­tic, retro get-aways always include a fly­ing boat. I thought I was SOL for this life­time. I am not. Dornier is bring­ing the fly­ing boat back into production.

Wood on a bicy­cle. Very nice set of han­dle­bars.

Southeast Asia and tiny bikes. The new world order in cus­toms. So many of the bikes fea­tured here begin with CB, but they rarely go on to fin­ish up with 100.

“Or Glory: 21st Century Rockers” a book of pho­tographs by Horst A. Friedrichs of mod­ern Rockers. (Publishes in September; avail­able for pre-order on Amazon now)

Science

Tidal tur­bines. Like wind­mills for gen­er­at­ing elec­tric­i­ty from the con­tin­u­ous motion of water. I’m sor­ry for link­ing to the NYT; the com­ments are so dull.

Culture

In 1974, Philippe Petit and a few com­pa­tri­ots slung a wire between the World Trade Centers and M. Petit walked it.  That sort of bal­ance and focus is unimag­in­able to most of us. Or is it? You can sign up for a work­shop to learn to walk on wire from the mas­ter. Details on your next oppor­tu­ni­ty when I can find them.

Art, Images, and Design

From Retro Age Vintage Fabrics. Upholstery fab­ric fea­tur­ing a design by Picasso of a lady on a horse. I can’t quite see­ing doing my sofa in this print… or maybe I can.

BTW if you like the aes­thet­ic of the pho­to­graph of the wood­en han­dle­bars on the bicy­cle there’s an entire tum­bler full of sim­i­lar­ly airy images.  Is this the pho­tog­ra­ph­er him/herself? Or some­one with a very good eye for a style curat­ing the net for us?

Chas Laborde was a French illus­tra­tor of the 1920’s and 1930’s. The blog Adventures in the Print Trade takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty of a new book about him to show a few of his illus­tra­tions of every­day life. I keep think­ing that I want to see a graph­ic nov­el of some­thing by Fitzgerald done this way.

Morning Linkage (Aug 16)

Transportation

That gasp you just heard, that was my sweet baboo when he saw this fine Norton in BRG.

Oshkosh Trucks, mak­ers of severe duty firetrucks. 0–50 in 35 sec­onds? That’s slooooow. But it has roof mount­ed water cannons.

H2 resto. If you know what this is you’re gonna be real­ly hap­py. If you don’t, well then ask…

Science and Cooking

If you have any young boys in the room you might want to send them out to play. At least until you fig­ure out a gen­tle way to explain this to them. The heart break­ing news from dino land is that there might not actu­al­ly be a tricer­atops. Uh huh. The three horned sav­age might actu­al­ly be the juve­nile form of the big­ger but some­what dull torosaurus.

O’Reilly is often the pub­lish­er of first resort for geek­i­ness. Now they are stretch­ing the bound­ary of what’s geeky. With recipes. A tech-ish review of Jeff Potter’s “Cooking for Geeks” by James Kalbach.

Art, Images, and Design

Linked to by sev­er­al friends on Facebook. Early col­or pho­tographs, many repro­duced from slides. Very effec­tive depic­tions of a time in American his­to­ry that most of us have only seen in black and white.

Looking at our­selves. The idea of doing a cou­ple of 50’s “look­ing toward the future” style ads for Facebook et al sounds like a lot of fun. Add in a lit­tle Russian per­spec­tive and you get some of the best sound­ing par­o­dies ever.

This past week­end was a good week­end; camp­ing, cook­ing, mete­or watch­ing, etc. Lawrence Cox has cap­tured the sense of adven­tur­ous free­dom bril­liant­ly in his illus­tra­tion of a run-away dog.

so off you go into your week,

Morning Linkage (Aug 10)

Transportation

1960’s show cars on post­cards. Start with the Fireball 500. Total morn­ing waster on flickr.

Moving more freight, but not on the inter­states. Marine Highways, inter-modal freight, short sea ship­ping, and RoRos.

The world’s only Muzeti 250. (1983 GSX 250) Sweet lit­tle bike.

Classic of the Day. AJS 18.

Science

Astronomy pic­ture. The eclipse shad­ow cone — I’ve nev­er seen this so clear­ly. No date?

Ordinary super­pow­ers. First off — I love the image that io9 chose to illus­trate this. Okay, so did you know that you can train your­self to rec­og­nize Haidinger’s Brush. This allows you to detect polar­ized light. Um, I’m not sure how this is actu­al­ly going to be use­ful to any­one, but hey, you nev­er know…

Personality isn’t as sim­ple as your high school guid­ance coun­selor told you when she gave the results of you Meyer-Briggs tests and sug­gest­ed that trade school was your best option. And any hope that there might be genet­ic basis for per­son­al­i­ty seems to have been squashed by these find­ings from Australia.

But most­ly the above arti­cle is a link to this piece in the New Yorker about Walter Mischel. The man behind the one marsh­mal­low now or two marsh­mal­lows lat­er exper­i­ments. And the follow-up work with the kinder­gart­ners who were his first subjects.

Art, Images, and Design

Photographer Mark Tucker is back from Tennessee and work­ing on the lat­est Jack Daniels commercials/ads. He’s pro­vid­ed some very nice pho­tographs and a cou­ple of “mak­ing of” video out­takes. If you watch the first video with the piglets turn the sound down — they squeal some­thing fierce.

Coralie Bickford-Smith is a book design­er for Penguins books. She is respon­si­ble for the jack­et and cloth bind­ings of the Penguin Classics series. Some of the loveli­est books to be pro­duced late­ly. Be sure to look at her work for the Red Classics Boys’ Adventures series as well.

Nicely done pic­tures from Tara Hunt’s pho­to stream of the New Zealand farm that served as the loca­tion for Hobbiton in the LoR movies. Door and win­dows are gone but the sheep have a place out of the rain.

Morning Linkage (Aug 9)

Transportation

Superimposed time-lapse pho­tog­ra­phy. Stoner does the corkscrew. I’m dizzy.
So here’s the thing. We all know about art cars. (and most of them are sht) But what about art bikes? No past­ed on dolls heads or racks of bub­ble machines here. Just an R‑80 with some excel­lent met­al work and a cou­ple of bits of jet­sam that got caught in the backwash.

H‑D. 883. Details are every­thing. Check the heat shields and the mat­te black fin­ish with the glossy black pin­stripes. Rough Craft out of Taiwan. Spend some time with their blog as well.

The venue is a toy mod­der’s forum. That’s about all I can tell you oth­er than that this moto toy is six kinds of night­mare induc­ing awe­some.

Art, Images, and Design

Japanese posters from the 30’s. Showing the influ­ence of both west­ern design and west­ern com­mu­nism in mes­sages for the proletariat.
More posters. The movie genre that brought you Reefer Madness pro­duced 100’s more, equal­ly sala­cious, movies in the 40’s and 50’s. Golden Age Comics col­lect­ed the lob­by posters for you. Cat women of the Moon, Juvenile Jungle, and Alimony — gasp. (NSFW — squicky)

Classical themes and com­po­si­tions Francois-Emile Barraud paint­ed in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. An unde­served­ly obscure painter. (NSFW artis­tic nudes)

Book arts and ani­ma­tion. “This is Where We Live” by ATP and Asylum Films. Take a walk through a world of books.

Morning Linkage (Aug 6)

Transportation

Watching moto-cop drill teams is always a hoot. Please note that this team is lit­tle extra spe­cial. *Tokyo* motor police and all women. 2 videos, a bunch of stills.

Givin’ away the goods. Visual grat­i­fi­ca­tion is a reli­able source of good-looking and good to look at bikes. It also has a “com­mu­ni­ty” page fea­tur­ing oth­er bike blogs. Here’s a run down of some of the best of the bunch. Along with sam­ple pics from each.

Again from Visual Grat. Over the top details of the Confederate P120 as revealed in a spe­cial email to subscribers.

More fine details. This time on a XJR 1200. Triples, fork brace, and blue on the calipers.

From huge to tiny. The Suzuki EN125 pop­u­lates S.E. Asia like fruit flies on old bananas. And some­times gets used to cre­ate nifty lit­tle buzz-bombs like this one.

Tech and Science

Again with the hack­ers, def­con, and the sup­posed high secu­ri­ty locks. Always a good sto­ry and always a good reminder that secu­ri­ty is more than a bet­ter lock.

Goby. With a name like that it’s got­ta be a weird fish — and it is. Trash-eater.

Art, Images, and Design

I did­n’t know that those vicious­ly ugly con­crete build­ing of the 50’s and 60’s (and their even worse revival in 70’s aca­d­e­m­ic set­tings) had a style name. Brutalism. Perfect fit. Andy Spain is not so dis­mis­sive as I am. His black and white pho­tographs bring as much beau­ty to these build­ings as any­one ever will be able to.

Day dream­ers hide-away. I can’t find the orig­i­nal image but this is too won­der­ful to pass up.

Photoshop is the most overused tool in the uni­verse. Somedays. And then oth­er days you see it put to use to reveal the world in a new light.  The ghosts of WWII merge with the present in these dual image pho­tographs cre­at­ed by Sergey Larenkov.

Nice lit­tle joke with your morn­ing cof­fee if you slop a bit over the edge of the cup.

Friday Animation

A three­some. All with some con­nec­tion to Gooby Herms.

El Kabong — done for Cartoon Network. A horse, some more hors­es, and a bad guy.  Mexican cin­e­ma lam­poon. Look for the National Steel near the end. (1:57)

5 words that sound dirty but aren’t. For Chicklets. I’m all over the gum and ink draw­ing style. (0:15)

Lovely and lyric, ani­mat­ed intro for a doc­u­men­tary film about danc­ing in PR. Bomba y ple­na. (1:30)

now go play out­side if you’re to make all that racket.