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I forget just how I stumbled upon David Hoffman's 1962 film Bluegrass Roots, which was the first authoritative documentary on the subject. Top left is a segment of the doc, which features plenty of clogging (really! this style was called clogging!) and old timey playin'. The documentary gives a lot of weight to the elderly "Appalachian Minstrel", Bascom Lamar Lunsford, whom you'll see dancing with his wife about four and half minutes in. Lunsford had already been filmed about 30 years earlier, however, in a scene featured in The Times Ain't Like They Used To Be, a too-good-to-be-true folk video compilation with performances from 1928 to 1935. The DVD is in print but if, as with these depression era performers, hard times have got you in a squeeze, all the contents are on youtube. Top right is that clip of Lunsford's band with a cool introduction in which Lunsford hilariously obsesses about gettin' first prize in some music contest.
rip odetta
Her hope to sing at the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama had helped keep her alive for weeks when medical experts had despaired of her prospects for survival, Yeager said.
work chairs at workalicious
im talking to you dave.
The Empire State Building archive, which includes more than 500 items, is going on sale at the Wright auction house in Chicago on December 11. Wright’s low estimate for the collection, which includes elevation renderings, working drawings, models and maquettes, and other ephemera, is $470,000. The drawings of the building, arguably one of the most recognized in the world and the most loved in New York, had been stored at the homes of the last partners of the successor firm of Shreve Lamb & Harmon, the firm that designed the building. The office closed in 1995, having never surpassed the glory of the 1931 tower. The partners declined to be named.
In February 1958 they announced plans to re-establish the Irish Georgian Society, a group that had created a photographic record of Dublin’s best Georgian buildings earlier in the century; this new version, Mr. Guinness wrote in The Irish Times, would “fight for the protection of what is left of Georgian architecture in Ireland.” The following month they began restoring a building of their own, Leixlip Castle, a dilapidated 12th-century fortress on 182 acres west of Dublin, which would be their home and the group’s headquarters.
Now observing its 50th year with a series of celebrations and a lavishly illustrated book, the revived Irish Georgian Society has been credited with restoring dozens of architectural gems across Ireland, from a former union hall for Dublin tailors to the country’s oldest Palladian house. (The society’s early preservation efforts focused on Georgian Dublin, but in later years it expanded its mission to cover noteworthy buildings from any period.) Perhaps more impressively, the group has helped bring about a national change of heart regarding Irish architecture.
repurposing closed box-store boxes
Lu-Mi-Num company bikes of St. Louis
via zoller
A growing number of Steve McGreens are souping up their gas-electric hybrids to make them go faster and handle better, while delivering stellar fuel economy. It isn't just gearheads busting their knuckles, either. A lot of the hybrid hackers are tech geeks whose innovations may well appear in the cars we'll buy tomorrow.
"The gearhead of today has evolved. People today want performance and fuel economy," Paul Goldman, the 46-year-old CEO of the hot-rod hybrid shop Juiced Hybrid, tells Wired.com. He sells more than 500 items ranging from suspension kits and chassis stiffeners to body kits and floor mats. Most of his customers are "educated people who care about the environment" and modify their cars "because they're tech savvy, not necessarily because they're car savvy."