Archive for the 'Culture' category

I am a great fan of miniature model railways. But this one is all railways, locomotive, trains geeks want. It’s ok for kids as well as adults.

Free ad for friends in concert in Paris in a few weeks.

Gabriela Ungureanu / Anne-Elisabeth Halpern - Schubert

Schubert Concert on Sunday 24 May 2009 @ 12h30.

From GraphJam.

This is so nice: A Stop-motion video that is very well done, funny.

Masque

An advanced civilisation if there was one, Aztecs lived in Central America from IXth Century to XVth Century (when their decline was essentially precipitated by their encounter with the Spanish conquistadores). Many facets of this civilisation stay unknown principally because they were wiped out wy the first European colonizers.

But one aspect stayed deep in the minds because it was an immediate shock to those who were meeting it for the first time: Aztecs practiced extensive human sacrifice when Cortés arrived in America. Rare are the Europeans who observed it first-hand, because it stopped quickly then, but many traces are left for the historian.

Generally, religious reasons (”gods are asking for peace brought to them through human bloodshed in their honor”) are shown as the main driving factor. I found a group of articles quite intersting because they discuss the vertus and weaknesses of another theory: That Aztecs needed to enrich their meals with meat that could only be obtained from cannibalism.

• The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice, by Michael Harner (April 1977)
• Aztec Cannibalism: An Ecological Necessity? by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano (May 1978)

I can’t guarantee the quality of the scientific arguments by myself, but -for the reader with a strong heart- the LatinAmericanStudies.org web site contains historical data about the Aztecs grouped in a quite enthralling scientific package.

Additional references:

1. Wikipedia article on the Aztecs.
2. Photos about the Jaguar and Ocelotl, the jaguar Aztec god.

…up to the point of creating a chocolate-inspired video?

…or up to the point of sacrificing chocolate for the sake of pure art?

No fish for 1st of April!
These are bunnies.

We all love when things come free to us. Here I found a treasure trove of movies that are free to download. Legally.

Thanks to the Canadians of the National Film Board of Canada. They give us feature-length movies, documentaries, animated short movies. Everything, of the best quality, at the best price: Free.

If you want to meet dinosaurs, not only paintings or sculptures, go to the USA, fly to Los Angeles, California. There, in the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, there are free-roaming dinosaurs in the corridors. Not only are these automatons sized impressively, but they intereact with people and kids around them.

Woah! Stunning!

News reaches a British sub and a French sub regardnig the satellite collision last week.

UserFriendly.org

*Snort* American and Russian dorks.

I nearly rolled on the floor laughing with this one. But, generally speaking, UserFriendly.org is one hell of a good comics web site.

Airport by El Fotopakismo

After several months when we all heard that corporate jets were the mark of the truly immoral bank or corporate CEOs, it seems that private jet companies are starting to take notice: All this bad press is putting more pressure on them than they would like to in difficult times like ours.

Hawker Beechcraft and Cessna Aircraft (the Empire, here) are fighting back with advertising to support the idea that it’s only true visionaries who are able to forget about all this and will keep using and buying their corporate business jets. Say that to Richard Wagoner Jr or to Dick Fuld! Or speak of stimulus ads!

According to the International Herald Tribune and Reuters, Cessna Aircraft is saying “Timidity didn’t get you this far” or “True visionaries will continue to fly” in their message. Hawker Beechcraft is also promoting its King Air 350 as “the world’s greenest and highly efficient aircraft“.

I am not sure whether this will really boost sales abck to stratospheric levels, but it’s an example of companies which are decided not to let the business go down the drain, despite bad times and worse PR.

Thanks to BibliOdyssey again, we can see magnificent reproductions of XIXth Century engravings of parrots, maccaws and other Psittacidae birds.

Macrocercus ararauna - Blue and yellow maccaw

But there are also interesting modern parrots. Go and watch the videos and photos from the Perroquet project from fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø. Did I say impressive?

I recently met a couple of fine underwater movies. One shows a dive to find a nautilus at great depths; The second shows a phosphorescent amalgam of abyss animals. Always a source of great surprises.

In our short series of “How do you make…”, here is the industrial manuacturing of terrestrial globes How would you do it? The same way as described here?

Note: I said globe, not blog…

According to the Guardian, change was long overdue. 8 years of Democrat presidency in Washington was much too much. Now that Al Gore is leaving the oval office, it’s time to go to more serious stuff.

You can appreciate it if you read the first paragraph:

No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds – all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we’ve gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla.

Go to the Guardian for the rest…

This Hungarian short movie is in English. I recommend waiting for the end (after 11 minutes).

Copyright (C) Peter Nowacki

Peter’s web site.

For sure, YouTube has always been crouded with rip-offs of the Monty Python sketches. Unfortunately, these were both illegal and -in general- of poor quality. The guys from Monty Python decided that enough is enough, and there is now a Monty Python channel/group on YouTube where you can see excellent quality videos of their Monty Python’s Flying Circus.