literature « Tikkunista!

9. Major Distractions

Dec-16-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: It’s holiday time, and everyone’s come home: from the other side of the country, from prison, from college, from that place whose name one dares not speak. And now you have to amuse them. For hours! Let’s face it, you need a major distraction. Fortunately, Tikkunista is at the ready. Here are three large time-fillers.

* Panoramic Images: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Tilt, swivel, and zoom into the following galleries: Rotunda, Fossils: Dinosaurs 1, Fossils: Dinosaurs 2, Fossils: Dinosaurs 3, Fossils: Dinosaurs 4, Ancient Seas 1, Ancient Seas 2, Fossil Lab, Early Life, Fossils: Plants 1, Fossils: Plants 2, Fossils: Mammals 1, Fossils: Mammals 2, Ice Age 1, Ice Age 2, African Cultures, Discovery Room, Sant Ocean Hall: Shores & Shallows, Sant Ocean Hall: Coral Reef, Sant Ocean Hall: Open Ocean, Sant Ocean Hall: Whale, Sant Ocean Hall: Journey Through Time 1, Sant Ocean Hall: Journey Through Time 2, Sant Ocean Hall: Diversity, Mammal Hall: Entrance, Mammal Hall: Africa 1, Mammal Hall: Africa 2, Mammal Hall: South America & Australia, Mammal Hall: North America, Orchids 1, Orchids 2, Geology, Gems & Minerals: Hope Diamond, Geology, Gems & Minerals: Precious Gems, Geology, Gems & Minerals: Minerals 1, Geology, Gems & Minerals: Minerals 2, Geology, Gems & Minerals: Minerals 3, Geology, Gems & Minerals: Mining, Geology, Gems & Minerals: Rocks, Geology, Gems & Minerals: Earth, Geology, Gems & Minerals: Space, Western Cultures 1, Western Cultures 2, Bones: Mammals, Bones: Reptiles, Bones: Fish, Insect Zoo, Butterfly Pavillion,

* Isaac Asimov – The Foundation Trilogy: Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive 8 hrBBC Radio

The Foundation Trilogy is an epic science fiction series written over a span of forty-four years by Isaac Asimov. It consists of seven volumes that are closely linked to each other, although they can be read separately. The series is highly acclaimed, winning the one-time Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966.

* Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs) YouTube

One of my favorite things about the Star Trek franchise are all the great ambient sounds that represent the engine noise on the various ships. My favorite ambient noise from the whole series is the engine idling noise in TNG. I have cleaned up a sample from the show and then looped it for 24 hours. Great for ambiance and imagining that you’re in deep space (Download link available)

9. Funny Storytellers

Nov-25-2011 | Comments (0)

* Andy Borowitz: Twisted Colon

Three years ago I had an experience I can only describe as nightmarish. But when it was over, I was thankful to be alive, and I still feel that way every day. I’m sharing my story with you this Thanksgiving week in the hopes that it might lift your spirits if they need lifting. Warning: the story contains “strong language,” as they say on NPR. But there are laughs, too, and an ending that I hope will make you feel good. If you know of anyone out there who needs some cheering up, please share the story with them.

* Charlie Brooker: Television

Comedian Charlie Brooker uses a mix of sketches and jaw-dropping archive footage to explore the gulf between reality and television.

* Eric Idle*: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Paranoia? Of course not. It’s alternative scholarship. What’s wrong with teaching alternative theories in our schools? What are liberals so afraid of? Can’t children make up their own minds about things like killing and carrying automatic weapons on the playground? Bush was right: no child left unarmed. Why this dictatorial approach to learning, anyway? What gives teachers the right to say what things are? Who’s to say that flat-earthers are wrong? Or that the Church wasn’t right to silence Galileo, with his absurd theory (actually written by his proctologist) that the earth moves around the sun. Citing “evidence” is so snobbish and élitist. I think we all know what lawyers can do with evidence. Look at Shakespeare. Poor bloke. Wrote thirty-seven plays, none of them his.

* (Most likely Michael Palin, really.)

6. Sex and Guilt

Nov-18-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Guilt can come in many ways. We start with a wonderful piece of brave writing by Shalom Auslander (This American Life, Foreskin’s Lament, Beware of God) who can’t stand that he gets turned on by things of which he disapproves, and he feels guilty about that. Great reading, though nsfw (not safe for work). Then a brilliant GLBT action to make straight people conscious of what feeling guilty about clothing choices is like.(“TIL” is computerese for “Today I learned”) And a fine study contrasts American parents and the results of their (generalization alert!) attempt to demonize teen sex with the Dutch experience.

* Hard-Core Porn Obsession(NSFW) Shalom Auslander GQ

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in New York, where the Old Testament was believed to be the literal word of the Almighty God and where we obeyed, as closely as we could, all 613 commandments elucidated within its holy pages. To us, God was not simply a concept, but a very real, everyday presence in our lives and our community. Which is to say, I know pornography. Hard-core, graphic pornography. My father had it buried beneath his mattress. My brother had it hidden under his dresser. Pornography, like God Himself, was everywhere. Sex was dirty. Pornography was worse.

The really bad news was this: God, my rabbis told me, could only grant me forgiveness for the sins I had committed against Him; sins I had committed against my fellow humans could only be forgiven by them personally. If they didn’t forgive me, my rabbis said, when I died and went to heaven, God would cause me to suffer in the exact way I had caused them to suffer.

At the time, though only 14 years of age, I had already tired of the porn magazines I found in my house and decided it was time for full-motion video. I went to Times Square, where a group of women stood outside a porn shop, protesting and carrying placards. On one placard was a picture of a naked woman tied to a bed. She had a ball gag in her mouth and clamps on her nipples. I ducked into the store, spent every dollar I’d stolen from my father’s wallet, hurried home, and hoped the videos wouldn’t work.

They worked.

* TIL about “wear jeans if you’re gay day.” Actually it’s kind of brilliant. via Reddit

The organizers of Gay Jeans Day at CMU analyse the action in this way.

To let GLBT students on their campus know there is a supportive community.
Jeans are chosen for this event because most people have a pair, and because deciding what to wear causes everyone — no matter what their sexual orientation — to think about how other people will react to their choice of clothing.
Allow straight people to think about how others will react to their perceived sexual orientation, and to experience having to alter their normal behavior to avoid being perceived as gay.

* Dutch Vs. American Parents’ Views On Teen Sex

When 16-year-old Natalie first started dating her boyfriend, her mother did something that would mortify most American parents: She took her to the doctor’s office to get her contraceptives. Her mother wasn’t weirded out by the fact that her teen daughter was about to have sex — in fact, she fully supported it. She merely wanted to make sure that she was doing it safely, and responsibly. A couple of months later, when it finally happened, her parents were totally accepting. As her father put it, “sixteen is a beautiful age” to lose your virginity.

If that seems like an unfamiliar attitude toward sex and parenting, it might have something to do with the fact that Natalie’s parents aren’t American — they’re Dutch. They are one of dozens of Dutch families interviewed by Amy T. Schalet, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, in her new book, “Not Under My Roof.” Schalet’s book compares the sexual attitudes of American and Dutch parents and her findings are nothing short of staggering: Whereas most American parents panic about the idea of allowing their kids to have sex with other kids under their roof, for many Dutch parents, it’s not only fine — it’s responsible parenting.

7. Brainworks

Nov-18-2011 | Comments (1)

Bird’s Eye: The more we learn about the brain, the more our models fall apart. I’m been sharing the gedanken experiment in part one with about a dozen folks: none of us have gotten it right. See how you do. Losing It is a hilarious/tragic piece that will evince a shudder of familiarity is some of us, and may serve as a warning to younger readers. And Brain Comics are hilarious cartoons on how the brain works. I chose one to give you the flavour, but there’s a link for the whole dozen.

*Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize Discover Magazine

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing. Consider the simple act of changing lanes while driving a car. Try this: Close your eyes, grip an imaginary steering wheel, and go through the motions of a lane change. Imagine that you are driving in the left lane and you would like to move over to the right lane. Before reading on, actually try it. I’ll give you 100 points if you can do it correctly.

It’s a fairly easy task, right? I’m guessing that you held the steering wheel straight, then banked it over to the right for a moment, and then straightened it out again. No problem.

Like almost everyone else, you got it completely wrong.

* Losing It: The lament of an aging professor William Ian MillerChronicle

I am 65, and I think my brain just hopped a bullet train heading south, leaving a shadow of itself behind, just enough to let me worry whether it is time to close up shop, before the people in gray close it up for me. Will I know when I am an embarrassment? Do my younger colleagues, sometimes very much younger, already know? Am I missing the hints that they are sending my way? Will anyone show up for my retirement dinner? Will I? Will my memory still be good enough to recall everyone who did not show up, so that I can even up the score? And just how would I, feeble and without the wit, manage that?

What of my clearly decaying scholarly capacities? Of being unable to continue learning or, if able, then unable to retain what I have recently learned? I can’t even come up with words like “refrigerator” or “kitty litter” and must endure my wife’s hand gesture of irritated impatient contempt to “get on with it.” Can I ever get lost in a book again without my mind wandering?….Everything distracts me. I interrupted the writing of this paragraph to play a game of Solitaire, and then when I lost, I allowed myself to play until I won, and then one more in case I won two in a row, and then I kept on until I won two in a row.

* Lying Brain (from the larger set of Brain Comics)

Click to enbigify.

9. Story Time

Nov-18-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: A Spike Jonze film about love after death starts story-time rolling, a wonderful TED talk will shake up your ideas about how stories get told, and the Guardian offers a set of 21 graphic short stories, some of which are very good.

* Mourir Auprès de Toi Spike Jonze, Olympia Le-Tan (video, 5 minutes)

Designer Olympia Le-Tan’s embroidered clutch-bags spring to life in director Spike Jonze’s tragicomic stop-motion animation Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side). On a shelf in famed Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, the star-crossed love story of a klutzy skeleton and his flame-haired amour plays out amidst Le-Tan’s illustrations of iconic first-edition book covers. “It’s such a beautiful and romantic place,” offers Le-Tan of the antiquarian bookstore. “The perfect setting for our story!”

* Shake Up Your Story Raghava KK Video on TED.com (Thanks, Diana!)

Artist Raghava KK demos his new children’s book for iPad with a fun feature: when you shake it, the story — and your perspective — changes. In this charming short talk, he invites all of us to shake up our perspective a little bit.

* The Best Of Our Graphic Short Story Prize The Observer (21 stories)

The Cape/Observer/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize has been running for five years, discovering and publishing the writers and artists of the future. Here, competition judge and graphic novelist extraordinaire, Bryan Talbot has brought together his favourite entries

10. Animal Life in the News

Nov-11-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: A smorgasbord of animals here: stories of, stories about, and a few photos to fill it out. We start with a Rashomon Atwood story: multiple perspectives reveal and obscure what really happened under the bushes. Then it’s on to the politics of gay penguins (Would you, could you, for your species? Would you covered with bird faeces? How ’bout in some Mitsubishis?), a surreal wander through Kitty City, and more news stories of animals.

* Margaret Atwood: Underbrush ManGuardian

Light returns, oh how simple faith is justified! I do count on it and anyway there is always hunger, even if it stayed as dark as holes, as coals, as under the sofa, hunger would come back regardless and tell me what to do. Up, up, one foot and then the other. Mouth wide in a yawn, teeth bared to the air, tongue curled out and downwards, rump on high, stretch of the forearms forward; then a subsidence, a wriggle of the spine, a realignment. Bailey is still asleep, dreaming, legs twitching, uttering small yelps. I nip him and he groans. Even in sleep he knows who is top dog.

Up the stairs, clickety click, scratch and whine at the closed door. No response. Hark! Hark! Hark! Hark! A twist of the shoulder, a push, the door flies open, the pillow hurtles out; I dodge it, rush inside, leap onto the bed and apply the wet and delicate and appreciative tongue lavishly to the face of She-who-ought-to-be-a-dog.

* Zoo Splits Gay Penguins The Mark

Two male African penguins at the Toronto Zoo who have a “special relationship” will soon be separated so that they can breed with females. Since coming to the Toronto Zoo from Pittsburgh, Buddy and Pedro have spent nearly every night together, defending a shared nest and imitating the signals of a mating couple. Same-sex relationships aren’t unheard of among birds, but zookeepers say they will have to put Buddy and Pedro’s little bromance to bed for a stretch while they attempt to get the two to help boost the African penguin population. Only 60,000 or so African penguins exist in the wild, down from more than 200,000 a decade ago. To get the population back up, researchers have carefully mapped out the family trees of penguins in captivity to maximize genetic diversity among mates, and now it’s Buddy and Pedro’s time to fulfill their biological obligations, even if they appear to be much happier living with each other.

* Welcome to Kitty City – new video from Cyriak - Boing Boing

This is why Cyriak is my favorite animator on the net. Sometimes, I suspect that he is the internet, trying to communicate with us in a language it thinks we understand.

* Animals in the News Alan Taylor - In Focus – The Atlantic

* The Lonely Seal No-One Wanted Mail Online

Sitting all alone on a beach, this little seal is an outcast from the colony.

Its crime? Having reddish-brown fur and the palest of blue eyes. The rest of its sleek black family took an instant dislike to the ginger pup, leaving it to fend for itself.

12. Quote of the Week

Nov-04-2011 | Comments (0)

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” G. K. Chesterton

11. Eyecandy: Halloween

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Candy of any kind and Halloween just seem to go together. Need some inspiration for next week’s decorations? Here, you’ll find pumpkins beyond belief, the world’s greatest lawn accessory, and a short epistolary story about a pre-school celebration gone terribly wrong.

* The Best Pumpkins Faces

* Scary Halloween Carving Pumpkins Zuza Fun

* Ray Villafane Carves the World’s Largest Pumpkin

Last week, we brought you news that the world’s largest pumpkin was going under the knife, and now we have actual photos of the carving in action! We were on the scene yesterday at the New York Botanical Garden, as carving master Ray Villafane whittled away sections of the 1,818.5 lb pumpkin to reveal an incredibly intricate three-dimensional scene of zombies and demons busting out of the orange shell. Click through our gallery to see our photos of the hair-raising sculpture, including close-ups of all the chilling details.

* Radio Controlled Crawling Zombie The Presurfer

Wouldn’t you like to have this Radio Controlled Crawling Zombie on your front lawn at Halloween?

* Day of the Dead or Halloween? The New Yorker

6. Author, Author

Sep-30-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: We start with a wonderful piece on Michael Ondaatje, both as author and as a person and on his new work “The Cat’s Table”. It makes you understand how he stole Paul Quarrington’s girl. Then we move to a flow chart based on PBS’ top 100 SF novels. You make choices, and it directs you to the book you need to read. And we end with the words that 25 famous writers ended with. A lot of classics there.

* Michael Ondaatje: The divided man The Observer

An interview with Ondaatje is a playful compendium of anecdote, on-the-hoof cultural criticism and crafty conversational shape-shifting. “Charm” is a dangerous word, but an hour or two with Michael Ondaatje is a beguiling experience….

This no man’s land between real and invented lives is one in which Ondaatje is quite at home. In 1983, he published Running in the Family, a highly entertaining and evocative semi-autobiographical account of a journey he made into his family’s past, a palimpsest of Tamil, Dutch and British colonial mayhem. Recalling the reckless years of 1920s Ceylon, Ondaatje describes gun fights over a game of croquet, compulsive horse racing, and epic nights of dancing, drinking, skinny-dipping and chemin de fer, in which anyone could have “drowned or fallen in love.”

Ever the fabricator, he was at pains to stress that his exhilarating portrait of his parents and their families – the elopements, unrequited loves and vendettas of the Ondaatjes – was unreliable. “In Sri Lanka,” he writes, in a kind of credo, “a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.”

* How To Choose The Right Sf Novel (graphic)

click to enbigify

* The Last Words Of 25 Famous Dead Writers

When asked by a priest to renounce Satan, Voltaire’s last words were, “Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.

7. The Future of Writing

Sep-30-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: It’s all very well to eulogize authors, but is there any future to the book? Depends what you mean by “the book”; if you mean reading long pieces of prose, the answer is unquestionably ‘yes’. If you mean treeware, (paper-based books) probably not. Learn what ‘wifing’ is… and where to buy an aerosol spray with the smell of a paper book, in a range from ‘The Scent of Sensibility’ to ‘Crunchy Bacon’.

* Is This The End For Books? Sam Leith The Guardian

In some ways, though, the question of whether we do our reading off paper or plastic is the least interesting one. More interesting is what we’re reading, and the manner in which we do so. A large number of literate westerners spend most of their waking hours at computers, and those computers are connected to the web. The characteristic activity on such a computer has been given the pleasing name “wilfing”, adapted from the acronym WWILF, or “What was I looking for?” You work a bit. You check if it’s your move in Facebook Scrabble. You get an email. You answer it. You get a text. You answer it. Since your phone’s in your hand, you play Angry Birds for five minutes. You work a bit. You go online to check something, get distracted by a link, forget what you were looking for, stumble on a picture of a duck that looks like Hitler, share it on Twitter, rinse and repeat.

Sci-fi author Cory Doctorow has called the internet “an ecosystem of interruption technologies”. TS Eliot’s line “distracted from distraction by distraction” seems apt. Zadie Smith, among other writers, has said that the key to the sustained attention required to create a novel is to work on a computer that isn’t online. You could call wilfing multitasking, or parallelistic cognitive layering – or you could call it cocking around on the web. Whatever, it’s fair to wonder what, if anything, it is doing to our heads.

* The New New Journalism, circa 2011 Robert S. Boynton Byliner

….The second thing I tell my incoming students is to distrust anyone who claims he knows what the future of journalism holds. At the risk of falling into this category, I have a prediction of my own. In the future, journalism will be either very short, or very long. Nothing in the middle will survive.

The short news will be information and stories that register immediately, and carry no expectation that an audience will stick around. It will consist of financial news, summaries with links (as with Twitter), and updates of past stories you have read (like Google alerts on subjects you follow). Information technology has become very good at churning out this kind of information, and because so much of it is done by machines, according to algorithms, it is quite inexpensive to produce.

At the other end of the spectrum there will be long news: in-depth articles, short books, videos, audio podcasts—all of which can command the consumer’s attention for a long, long time. Long journalism is everything short journalism isn’t. It is expensive and laborious to create. It takes a lot of time to consume. It is unpredictable…. Regardless of the medium, it will most likely include arresting photography, video, audio—or some creative combination of them all.

* Smell of Books

Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?

If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book. But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.

Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book.

8. Books

Sep-02-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: What could be better than a combination of a lovely image of how books work, a wonderful Le Guin exploration of Homer, and the Guardian’s top 100 non-fiction books? (Can you beat your editor’s total? Probably) Yes! You’re right! A political action so wonderful you’ll want to rush to the nearest bookstore and do it. Go.

* How Books Work picture

* Papa H Ursula Le Guin from The Book Club Café

I was thinking about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the Journey….The Iliad is The War (actually only a piece of it, close to but not including the end), and the Odyssey is The Journey (There and Back Again, as Bilbo put it). I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on The War, by not taking sides.

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be The War of Good vs Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seem characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of them from him? — His impartiality is far from dispassionate, the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs orcs. It’s just people vs people.

* The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books The Guardian

After keen debate at the Guardian’s books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organised by category, and then by date. (Editor’s note: My score? A not too impressive 21/100)

* Move Cheney’s Book to the Crime Section of Bookstores! CODEPINK

War criminal Dick Cheney’s new book, In My Time, is scheduled to hit the shelves of bookstores across the country on August 30th! We think Cheney’s book belongs in the Crime section… move it there. Participants who move the books in their local bookstores, then can send us their pics to enter our photo contest and win a deck of war criminal playing cards.

10. The Appeal of Dogs

Aug-26-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Adam Gopnik is my all-time favourite essayist, and his New Yorker essay on dogs is a great one: full of entertaining stories and fascinating information (including a quick summary of John Bradshaw’s “In Defence of Dogs”). Then a fascinating film on how baboons kidnap feral puppies and raise them as pets, and a look at the US Army and its dogs. (Can you get your dog to skydive with you? )

* How Did The Dog Become Our Master? Adam Gopnik via Almost 50

A year ago, my wife and I bought a dog for our ten-year-old daughter, Olivia. We had tried to fob her off with fish, which died, and with a singing blue parakeet, which she named Skyler, but a Havanese puppy was what she wanted, and all she wanted. With the diligence of a renegade candidate pushing for a political post, she set about organizing a campaign: quietly mustering pro-dog friends as a pressure group; introducing persuasive literature (John Grogan’s ‘’Marley& Me”); demonstrating reliability with bird care.

…My wife and I looked at each other with a wild surmise: the moment parents become parints, creatures beyond convincing who exist to be convinced. When it carne to dogs, we shared a distaste that touched the fringe of disgust and flirted with the edge of phobia. I was bitten by a nasty German-shepherd guard dog when I was about eight – not a terrible bite but traumatic all the same – and it led me ever after to cross streets and jump nervously at the sight of any its kind. My wife’s objections were narrowly aesthetic: the smells, the slobber, the shit. We both disliked dog owners in their dog-owning character: the empty laughter as the dog jumped up on you; the relentless apologies for the dog’s bad behavior, along with the smiling assurance that it was all actually rather cute. Though I could read, and even blurb, friends’ books on dogs, I felt about them as if the same friends had written books on polar exploration: I could grasp it as a subject worthy of extended poetic description, but it was not a thing I had any plans to pursue myself “Dogs are failed humans,” a witty friend said, and I agreed.

We were, however, doomed, and knew it…

* In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw – review The Guardian

As a canine expert and dog-lover, Bradshaw is dismayed that our treatment of dogs is based on so many mistaken beliefs and assumptions. He wants to set the record straight now because canine science has made huge advances in recent decades.

He starts by demolishing the notion that dogs are essentially aggressive creatures seeking dominance, which is based on discredited research into wolf packs. It is now known that wolves – the direct ancestors of dogs – actually live in harmonious family groups. Packs are not dominated by “alpha wolves”, but are fundamentally cooperative. Bradshaw is determined that the “dominance theory” be banished. But while enlightened trainers and owners have got the message, many more still subscribe to techniques aimed at ingraining fear and subservience into dogs. For Bradshaw, these are not only misguided and cruel, but joyless.

* Baboons Kidnap Feral Puppies To Raise As Pets Youtube 5 minutes

* War Dog – An FP Photo Essay Rebecca Frankel Foreign Policy

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