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The Ecstasy of Influence

A plagiarism

Posted on Wednesday, January 31, 2007. Originally from February 2007. By Jonathan Lethem.


All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .

John Donne

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There’s a lot of water in the air. It rises from the surface of the oceans to a height of almost 100 kilometres. You feel it in high humidity, but there’s almost as much invisible moisture in the air above the Sahara or the Nullarbor as there is in the steamy tropics. The water that pools beneath an air-conditioned car, or in the tray under an old fridge, demonstrates the principle: cool the air and you get water. And no matter how much water we might take from the air, we’d never run out. Because the oceans would immediately replace it.

Trouble is, refrigerating air is a very costly business. Except when you do it Max’s way, with the Whisson windmill. Until his inventions are protected by international patents, I’m not going to give details. Max isn’t interested in profits – he just wants to save the world – but the technology remains “commercial in confidence” to protect his small band of investors and to encourage others.

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One of the three Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the Puget Sound area is on the market, a perfect time to wander through it and wonder why its ideas are being neglected in this century's thirst for reasonably priced, modestly scaled homes.

Although the asking price of just under $2 million is a giant step out of the middle-class leagues, this house wasn't conceived as a baronial estate. Original owners Ray and Mimi Brandes wrote to Wright in 1951, asking him to design a small house for a "simple unaffected servant-less life." Jack Cullen, Ray Brandes' stepson and the present owner, says they envisioned it as a showcase for their contracting business.

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out of the blue from roxy music's 1975 album country life

via jz
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beatlesuits

via vz
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anton maiden eternal player

Anton Gustafsson (February 24, 1980 in Kinna, Västergötland, Sweden – November 1, 2003 in Borås, Västergötland) achieved minor Internet fame around 1999 by singing over MIDI and MOD-versions of Iron Maiden songs. He got famous as a phenomenon of geek and DIY culture.
He started by publishing some songs on the Internet for a small group of friends. After being encouraged by them, he made some songs available to the public in his album Anton Gustafsson tolkar Iron Maiden, which was distributed under Lunacy and Nihilism record labels.

Apparently led by feelings of depression, Anton Gustafsson committed suicide in November, 2003, and was found dead in Borås after having been missing for a week. Before his death, in an interview with the Swedish newspaper Expressen (dated June 2000), he told journalist Martin Carlsson that Iron Maiden fans "think that my interpretations are a disgrace to Iron Maiden. But that was never my intent."

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By this definition, a culture cannot be aware of its own mythology for that mythology to be effective. It could be argued that the artists, political leaders and educators within a culture may be aware of the unconscious influence of the prevailing mythology, but this doesn't need to be the case. The best artists, politicians and educators may be those who have most completely internalized the mythology.

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greer lankton


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Some residents of Katonah, N.Y., are miffed that their neighbor, Martha Stewart, is trying to trademark the village's name. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia is selling some furniture as part of a "Katonah Collection."

The company has said Stewart named the line to honor her new hometown. But not everyone feels honored.

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"Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America With the Center for Land Use Interpretation," a coffee-table chronicle of land-use curiosities edited by Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons with an essay by Ralph Rugo

The hallmarks of this 264-page, 8-by-10-inch paperback volume (Distributed Art Publishers; $34.95) are deadpan descriptions and anonymous photography, all detailing weird, wonderful and (mostly) horrific things Americans have done to their landscape, including deliberately flooding the town of Neversink, N.Y., and practice-bombing Nevada.

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Drive through some of the 80 percent of New Orleans that was inundated by flood waters after Hurricane Katrina, and you'll notice life is slowly ebbing back, one house at a time, one neighborhood at a time.

You'll also notice something else: signs advertising demolition services—across billboards, on phone poles, and along the roadways.

"You can't escape them," says Laureen Lentz, a law librarian and preservation activist. "Yesterday I was stuck behind a bus with a big 'demolition' ad plastered across the back of it."

While many of the city's homes were wrecked beyond salvation and clearly need to be demolished—Lentz's own historic house in the Tremé neighborhood was partially knocked over by Katrina winds and subsequently carted away—Lentz and others are becoming alarmed that so many of the city's homes in historic districts are being torn down, often with flood damage used as a pretext. It's as if New Orleans is now at risk of being ravaged by another flood—that of demolitio

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man this place is sweet

A demolition permit has been issued for the Moore House, designed by Ohio architect Woodie Garber in 1952 for Alfred Moore. Moore sold the 5,160-square-foot wood-and-glass house and its 5.4-acre site to his son, who has built several houses there.

Last weekend, Moore allowed preservationists to salvage woodwork and other details from the house. He gave its original blueprints to a University of Cincinnati professor, whose students videotaped and photographed the house.

"To be able to document and salvage the house is, of course, a last resort," says Chris Magee, co-president of Cincinnati Form Follows Function, a nonprofit that formed in November 2005. "We got involved too late to find another buyer."

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mid-century exurban landscape fabric


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trailerpark wallpaper

via justin
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It is thus desirable to demonstrate, by a slight alteration of the usual procedures, that everyday life is right here. These words are being communicated by way of a tape recorder, not, of course, in order to illustrate the integration of technology into this everyday life on the margin of the technological world, but in order to seize the simplest opportunity to break with the appearance of pseudo-collaboration, of artificial dialogue, established between the lecturer "in person" and his spectator. This slight discomforting break with accustomed routine could serve to bring directly into the field of questioning of every day life (a questioning otherwise completely abstract) the conference itself, as well as any number of other forms of using time or objects, forms that are considered "normal" and not even noticed, and which ultimately condition us. With such a detail, as with everyday life as a whole, alteration is always the necessary and sufficient condition for experimentally bringing into clear view the object of our study, which would otherwise remain uncertain -- an object which is itself less to be studied than to be altered.

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citroen sm (car porn)

ringing rock bolder field

via jaschw
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open-source homes


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"Modernism has been popularly depicted as something that really is not very popular," Sies says, "that is very cold, that is alienating and that sort of insists on a kind of design purity that makes it not necessarily amenable to human habitation."

Many of the notable Modern structures built in the Baltimore-Washington corridor are more "down to earth," she says. Custom and tract homes built in some parts of the suburbs were sited and designed to fit into the landscape, and used lots of wood and stone in addition to glass to establish visual connections with the surrounding environment.

"We really use the term 'baby boom Modernism' to summarize the kind of houses and churches and office buildings and shopping centers that went up in post-World War II suburbs," Sies says. "Architects told us that is where the money was, where people were moving."

While some notable Modern structures in the state have been recognized, including Frank Lloyd Wright homes in Baltimore and Bethesda and a Neutra building at St. John's College in Annapolis, the University of Maryland professors' survey highlighted lesser-known sites such as Baltimore's Highfield House condo building, designed by Mies van der Rohe; Goucher College's Towson campus; and several synagogues and churches in the suburbs.

Some exceptional Modern buildings have undergone alterations over the years, Sies says, but few in the state are as important as the Comsat building. She says it is one of the most significant early works by Pelli, an Argentina native who designed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as well as some of the world's tallest buildings. His structures often feature curves and metal, and the Comsat building "sort of telegraphed his style," she says.

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I've [Fatherflot] been working in my spare time on two projects near to my heart: a freeform webcast station for my university and a "Media Ecology" course with a large online database of readings.

As I've moved towards the stage of justifying each project I've begun to see a lot of connections. A true freeform radio station is a kind of educational institution, after all, serving as an evolving commentary upon/critique of commercial radio (in the case of WFMU, with its world-class "faculty" and "facilities," that critical engagement extends pretty much to the entirety of mass culture). The freeform ethos, in other words, is collective cultural criticism in practice. And while my main response to this practice is to encourage it, support it, tell others about it, and finally, to emulate it, there's nothing like a little theory to illuminate the practice.

Thus, I thought it might not be totally out of place to share some of the links I've found to the more important short works of cultural theory which are available on the web. If you like, we can use the comment section to discuss these texts and to suggest others if you know where they can be found. Here, in no particular order, are some of the biggies I've found:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer - "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"
Georg Simmel - "The Metropolis and Mental Life"
Guy Debord - "The Society of Spectacle"
Jean Baudrilliard - "Simulacra and Simulations"
Clement Greenberg - "Avant Garde and Kitsch"
Walter Benjamin - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Susan Sontag - "Notes on Camp"
Roland Barthes - "Myth Today"
C.P. Snow - "The Two Cultures"
Neil Postman - "The Humanism of Media Ecology"
Neil Postman - "Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change"
Marshall McLuhan - "The Playboy Interview"
Marshall McLuhan - "Understanding Media - Chapter One"
Steve Talbott - "Computers, The Internet, and the Abdication of Consciousness"
Steve Talbott - "Owen Barfield: the Evolution of Consciousness"
Umberto Eco - "The Future of the Book"
Walter Ong - "Orality, Literacy, and Personality"
Walter Ong - "Media Transformation: Electronics and Printed Books"
Susanne Langer - "A Note on The Film"
Alfred Korzybski - "The Role of Language in the Perceptual Process"
Jacques Ellul - "The Humiliation of the Word"
Jacques Ellul - "The Technological Bluff"
Jose Ortega y Gasset - "The Revolt of the Masses"
Slavoj Žižek - online links page at Lacan.com

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another set...
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dwg
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Now DJ Drama is yet another symbol of the music industry’s turmoil and confusion.

On Tuesday night he was arrested with Don Cannon, a protégé. The police, working with the Recording Industry Association of America, raided his office, at 147 Walker Street in Atlanta. The association makes no distinction between counterfeit CDs and unlicensed compilations like those that DJ Drama is known for. So the police confiscated 81,000 discs, four vehicles, recording gear, and “other assets that are proceeds of a pattern of illegal activity,” said Chief Jeffrey C. Baker, from the Morrow, Ga., police department, which participated in the raid.

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Mr. Kaczynski, 64, is in a legal battle with the federal government and a group of his victims over the future of the handwritten papers, which include journals, diaries and drafts of his anti-technology manifesto.


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sanford and son t-shirt


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The first thing everyone tells you about the New Canaan, Connecticut, house Eliot Noyes built for his family is that you have to go outside—outside!—to get to the bathroom. In 1954 architect and industrial designer Noyes made the separation of public and private life complete—bedrooms and baths on one side of an open courtyard, kitchen-living-dining on the other. “We used to tell our friends there was a tunnel from one side to the other,” says Fred Noyes, third of the four children. But really that walk outside was no big deal—short, covered, and from one radiant-heated stone floor to the other. “Try it sometime if it snows,” his brother, Eli, says. “Take your shoes off, run out into the snow for ten seconds, and run back in. It is actually cold and refreshing. We used to do that all the time.” Nonetheless, when Marcel Breuer’s client Edith Hooper requested a similar house, she made it clear she wanted the simplicity of Noyes’s design—but with a breezeway that could be enclosed in winter.

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The empty streets, deserted avenues and abandoned houses prompt a gnawing question, nearly 17 months after Hurricane Katrina: Is this what New Orleans has come to — a city half its old size?

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modern mechanix


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terry manning savoy truffle


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stone farmhouses bucks county pa

sellerville $249,900.00 (pros:pool)

newtown stone modern (cons: surban setting) $399,900.00

ivyland $399.900.00

green lane $349,900.00

quakertown stone barn $335,500.00

map codes


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on now streaming

Wednesday, January 17th, 7pm - 8pm: Sounds of Soviet Animation
From the 1950s-1990s, the USSR was home to an immense body of remarkable animated films. Whether surrealistic, political, or dreamlike, they utilised a stunning array of techniques and ideas in the midst of a brutal political climate. The January 17th edition of Phuj Phactory will comprise a one-hour mix of music and sound-design taken from over thirty Russian animations, including 'Tale of Tales', 'Liberated Don Quixote', 'Butterfly', 'A Man in the Frame', and 'Mountain of Dinosaurs'.

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extrude-o house - its back!

robohse

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plug and play house construction

"Look at that," Kieran says, leading me into a small, tidy space filled with neat bundles of flexible orange tubing. Bolted to the wall is a row of black manifold boxes, each the size of a coffee cup. "It's beautiful. It's like the engine of a car." He's right; it looks less like a typical utility space – meters and junction boxes crammed with wires that splay off in all directions – and more like a piece of industrial design, crafted with planning and precision. And for good reason: This room and two more like it hold the house's high tech systems. It arrived at the site as a single unit stuffed with a tankless water heater, pumps, and other equipment ready to hook into the air, water, data, and power systems.

[....]

In 2001, after studying how the automotive, aircraft, and shipbuilding industries had revolutionized themselves over the previous 15 years, Kieran and Timberlake realized that architecture needed the equivalent of an integrated circuit. They began to combine glass, drywall, pipe, and wood frames into finished units, each precision-engineered for cost, beauty, and sustainability. In the Loblolly house, the walls and floors are made of panels (some as tall as 21 feet) that were manufactured with wiring, insulation, plumbing, and ductwork already in place. And the main power systems of the home, including two bathrooms and the galley kitchen, were delivered to the construction site in preassembled, plug-and-play units. After the site was prepared, the 2,200-square-foot house took three weeks to assemble.


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memo to self - need a guy who can restore a couple of fifty cent piece size chips in a great tub - not re-coat - i saw an ugly tub truck on the block today.


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bob brunquists worlds largest skateboard ramp vid from nyt


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allentown hippies


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b48485


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I call them elephant droppings,” he said. “Fuller’s idea was that of a machine-made object, a pure geometry.”

Most dome dwellers are not so picky.

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nesthesia
Robert Stone reflects on how the 1960s changed him, and the rest of the country, in Prime Green.


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While many of the city's homes were wrecked beyond salvation and clearly need to be demolished—Lentz's own historic house in the Tremé neighborhood was partially knocked over by Katrina winds and subsequently carted away—Lentz and others are becoming alarmed that so many of the city's homes in historic districts are being torn down, often with flood damage used as a pretext. It's as if New Orleans is now at risk of being ravaged by another flood—that of demolitions.

"New Orleans' incredible inventory of historical structures forms its single most valuable resource," says Richard Campanella, associate director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane University and author of a much-praised book, Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm. "Tearing them down when other options exist is a lazy, short-sighted decision that will be regretted by future generations."

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generic names for soft drinks

via vz
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its a clean machine


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steinberg at the morgan


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marc newson gagoisian pieces


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This is the fertile territory explored by Professor David Edgerton of Imperial College in his new book, The Shock of the Old. In it he eviscerates our obsession with novelty. It's time, he argues, to look at the history of science and technology in a new way. It's blindingly obvious, really. Instead of recording the history of when devices and processes were invented or predicted, why not look at the way we really use things?

I find him in Buenos Aires for Christmas - he was born in Uruguay, of an English father and Argentine mother. He knows that Fray Bentos is a real place, not just a brand of corned beef. And not just a real place, but a remarkable example of 19th and 20th century industrialized food production whose scale and efficiency - without need even of refrigeration - rivals anything in the world today. Our shops are still full of such canned food, an alternative, older technology we never stop to think about.

We are both alive to the irony of the fact that, in an online age, we are talking to each other by telephone, a 19th century invention. I mention the fact that outside my window is an ancient wooden pole sprouting copper wires in a way the Victorians would have recognised, and that our words are passing through it. 'Ah yes,' he shoots back, 'But you'll find that the wires have changed, the exchanges are different. It's like today's airliners. They're no faster now than they were in the 1950s, but they're more efficient'.

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At the moment when Pablo Picasso shook up the art world in 1907 with his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — considered to be the first Cubist painting — there was a contingent of Czech artists working in the French capital. A number of these Czech artists were ignited by the Spaniard's discoveries and quickly conveyed the movement eastward, turning Prague into Cubism's "second center." Then something remarkable happened: Czech artists translated the French-born style not only into paint and bronze, but also into brick, concrete and stone, creating the world's first — and only — Cubist buildings.

The exhibition introduces the primary players in Czech Cubist architecture, along with the best-known Cubist buildings, some lesser-known examples, and some designs that never made it off the drawing board. In the center of the room are architectural models of four choice buildings, and there is additionally a small selection of Cubist decorative art.

Leading the procession of Czech Cubist architects is Pavel Janák, who broke away from the established Mánes Association of Fine Artists to become a founding member in 1911 of the more avant-garde Group of Artists and start the magazine Artistic Monthly. His influential essay, "The Prism and the Pyramid," published the same year, is translated into English in the book accompanying the exhibition. Janák also holds the distinction of being the first to complete a Cubist building, the Jakubec house in the central Bohemian town of Ji?ín in 1912.

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in amongst the 50 best cartoons list i recently linked to is thurbers unicorn in the garden. with these youtube files i like to click full screen option then push my chair back till the pixels recede.


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i think i may change my blog picture to this :

Oa871
i got it in the mail today small but nice. minus the camera water mark.


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godzilla building


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schwarz top 10 2006

1) pirate ballads
2) cady noland aproximately
3) rip wfmu message board and im not lisa
4) bartok radio
5) youtube stooges no fun
6) vinalhaven deck demo
7) grubby clark
8) colbert speaks truth to power
9) parrino in geneva
10) NO rebuilds

honorable mention: ambergris
and dems taking back congress


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hawk mountain (out by my brothers house)


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s9yard


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b50098



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Leibniz, himself no stranger to strange ideas about language, is said to have recognized the transcendent quality of this work by coining the French verb goropizer ("goropize") to mean "invent absurd etymologies". So it's fitting that in honor of Dr. Goropius Becanus, an anonymous benefactor has endowed the prestigious Goropius Becanus Prize, awarded to people or organizations who have made outstanding contributions to linguistic misinformation.

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sheeler in doylestown

BARTLETT COWDREY: When you came to New York, what were the art galleries? When, you went looking for paintings, what did you see, what was then contemporary?

CHARLES SHEELER: ...not only to see, but find one of them that would take their, foot out of the door and let me in.

BARTLETT COWDREY: I suppose Steiglitz...

CHARLES SHEELER: I never had anyone. Steiglitz was interested in a sort of semi-remote way, but I never was represented in any of his shows.

BARTLETT COWDREY: I mean in your spare time, if you wanted to see (American) paintings, what was new in your time?

CHARLES SHEELER: Well it seemed to me at that time, this couldn't be final necessarily, but living in Philadelphia, there would be super-colossal exhibitions, you know, where old masters and all the great names among collectors would have loaned pictures, and I would, if I could get the railroad fare together, and a dollar for overnight in a (New York) rooming house I would come over and spend a couple of days seeing...

BARTLETT COWDREY: What about Kraushaar and Knoedler?

CHARLES SHEELER: Of course I saw and was also a participant in the Armory Show.

BARTLETT COWDREY: 1913.

CHARLES SHEELER: And the First Independents.

BARTLETT COWDREY: 1917. Can you make a comparison between the Armory Show and the First Independents? The Armory was international, I realize, but...

CHARLES SHEELER: Yes, well it was; the eye-opener, the great eyeopener. The Independents just gave a chance to some of the local boys to...

BARTLETT COWDREY: But that was the wonderful thing.

CHARLES SHEELER: Yes, it was important, but the Armory Show gave the green light that it was all right to exhibit pictures like that.

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05202


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New York’s urban architect recyclers, LOT-EK, have recently designed a library in Guadalajara made entirely of refurbished airplane fuselages. Apparently when airplanes are put to rest, most of their parts are easily recycled. However, according to Noticias Arquitectura, the fuselages are the only parts that are rarely reused, because “the cost of its demolition exceeds the profit of aluminum resale.” Because of this, there are a ton of discarded fuselages strewn all over deserts of the western states. Boeing 727 and 737 are the best-selling commercial planes and therefore the most common fuselage types in these graveyards. The fuselages are sold completely stripped, and at a ridicously cheap price - lending themselves to a great building material.
mets cap tip to DF
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its pretty bad form to hotlink directly to an mp3, so scroll baby scroll till you find this:


Buchanan & Goodman - “The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 & 2)

In 1956, Dickie Goodman and Bill Buchanan pioneered a new kind of record called the “break-in” with their massive hit single “The Flying Saucer.” It utilized snippets of other performers’ work, including Chuck Berry, Don Cherry, Etta James, Smiley Lewis, Nappy Brown, Little Richard, and Fats Domino, and resultantly Goodman was taken to court on multiple counts of copyright infringement. In the end, Goodman’s song was declared a work of parody, and the matter was settled out of court. Although many people consider Goodman the father of sampling, musique concrete composers were the first to employ the idea. However, it is doubtful that the technique would’ve gained such widespread popularity, especially its use in radio bumpers, without Dickie Goodman’s contribution. Over the years, Dickie managed to record quite a few break-in records. One such record, a Jaws send-up entitled “Mr. Jaws,” would even grace the pop charts in 1975. Goodman took his own life in 1989, but his son Jon has continued to promote his father’s work, even releasing a break-in record of his own, “Return of the Flying Saucer.”
via clayton counts
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For the first time, scientists have produced a photovoltaic (PV) cell with a conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reported on December 7. The collaboration of DOE and Spectrolab, Inc. (a subsidiary of Boeing) led to the achievement of a decades-long goal: to break the 40-percent efficiency barrier on solar cell devices. “We are eager to see this accomplishment translate into the marketplace as soon as possible,” Alexander Karsner, assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at DOE, said.
via justin from the fablists
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bootliquor was pre-installed with a link in the radio section of my brothers i.tunes program. it provided very good (real) country music for christmas in the country this year. its hosted by somafm online streaming radio. looks like they have some other interesting selections as well ie. lounge, assorted beats and spy music. spy music?


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photo: cabin man jug


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