TED Talks for Friday
June 27, 2008
Usually on Friday’s I work on the cartoon for the next weeks Londoner. This week an early deadline to allow for the Canada Day holiday obliged me to have very little to do today, so I caught up on some TED talks.
Wade Davis: Cultures at the far edge of the world
Wade Davis: The worldwide web of belief and ritual
Phil Borges: Documenting our endangered cultures
Stephen Petranek: 10 ways the world could end
The True Adventures of Robin Hood
June 26, 2008
There remain a few days left of performance for this wonderful play, an original production. Creative, funny, superbly cast and well acted, and so obviously written for the very actors performing it. Spriet Theatre in the Covent Market is, not just physically, but metaphorically, too small a stage for this production. It wants to be much bigger.
Performance times link cribbed from Theatre in London 7:30 on June 27, 28; 2 pm on June 29. And it’s only $12.00 folks! and better than Mel Brooks.
There is so much fresh and funny stuff all through that the rescue scene, packed with Pirates, Ninja’s, Monks, though funny, flags - it is a short but acceptable state of idea fatigue.
The writing is sharp, the characters well realized. I have my own ideas on resolving the rescue scene; neither here nor there. But keep in mind that these young people are all folks to watch and you will hear about them when they grow too big for this (ha ha) creative city.
Robots on Time
June 26, 2008
Image from a photoessay on robots at Time.com, just in time, of course, for Wall-E. Hey! I’m on board!
Joy in the World
June 20, 2008
Kate Beaton
June 15, 2008
Courtesy of Comics Curmudgeon, Nova Scotian, Kate Beaton. I am happy to be on the same planet with her.
Random Nexts 7
June 7, 2008
dorion55.blogspot.com/
you shoot i score not hockey, but music actually
rfa unplugged
modern howl
magic of the ordinary
An excellent cartoon!
June 3, 2008
an excellent cartoon swiped from http://bgtroll.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/wellcome/
Quick and cheap time-lapse photography
May 24, 2008
FrameByFrame is a cool little app that will allow you to make stop-motion animation’s with any connected webcam, and it’s free.
Boinx iStopMotion will do time lapse. They offer a free five day demo, and it does lots of very useful things with all kinds of different settings. It’s also $50.00 US
FrameByFrame isn’t scriptable, though iStopMotion is.
Apple’s Automator is a great little wrapper for a lot of system functions. The Loop action affects only the connected action, not the whole workflow, and the Watch Me Do is tediously slow. I didn’t bust a nut trying to get a very simple workflow working which was supposed to launch FrameByFrame, click the Capture menu item, pause and repeat. This shouldn’t be this hard. Read the rest of this entry »
Get your personal jet wings now
May 16, 2008
Strap on the wings and fly. From Scientific American Video.
“A Swiss man stuns onlookers by flying a jet propelled wing for nearly ten minutes at a peak speed of 300 km/h (186 mph).”
Longer story at Yahoo.
God’s location
May 6, 2008
Very funny twist on those “You are here” cartoon clichés.
You resonate at 7 mhz so does the earth
Google maps London Ontario
Self and Brain
Kate again
May 1, 2008
From this tiny link discovered on the new Kate Bush forum at the homeground and kate bush news and info forum. Since this blog is alos about stuff I like :-). Kate’s birthday is coming up soon, a week after my daughter’s and for whom she has one of her names.
I too can’t bear to leave the washing up in the sink. :-) So much living gets in the way, doesn’t it?
The chariot for Bisket Jatra
April 12, 2008
Just moments ago we received an email from Narayan Chitrikar, the Thangka artist living in Bhaktapur, who is visiting his children in Michigan. He included this photo of the great chariot rolled out for Bisket Jatra. Sunny’s Guest house is to the left of this great temple in the background. The wheels for the chariot were stored across the road from the guest house, just behind the temple. Happy New Year 2065!
In the Realm of The Hungry Ghosts
April 11, 2008
Practicing a deeply Buddhist understanding, Dr. Gabor Mate works on the ground in the Hell Realms
For over ten years Gabor Maté has been the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. His patients are challenged by life-threatening drug addictions, mental illness, Hepatitis C or HIV and, in many cases, all four. But if Dr. Maté’s patients are at the far end of the spectrum, there are many others among us who are also struggling with addictions. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, work, food, sex, gambling and excessive inappropriate spending: what is amiss with our lives that we seek such self-destructive ways to comfort ourselves? And why is it so difficult to stop these habits, even as they threaten our health, jeopardize our relationships and corrode our lives?
I listened to Sounds Like Canada this Friday; April 11, 2008 am where he was interviewed regarding the new book In The Realm Of The Hungry Ghosts Close Encounters With Addiction. Links to his other books are at his own web site.
CBC podcasting will, I hope, have a podcast up soon of this interview, which should show up here very very soon. (no, It doesn’t seem likely) From the preface of the book:
The inhabitants of the Hungry Ghost Realm are depicted as creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs and large, bloated, empty bellies. This is the domain of addiction where we constantly seek something outside ourselves to curb an insatiable yearning for relief or fulfillment. The aching emptiness is perpetual because the substances, objects or pursuits we hope will soothe it are not what we really need. We don’t know what we need and so long as we stay in the hungry ghost mode, we’ll never know. We haunt our lives without being fully present. …
Some people dwell much of their lives in one realm or another. Many of us move back and forth between them, perhaps through them all in the course of a single day. …
No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side. I believe there is one addiction process, whether it is manifested in the lethal substance dependencies of my Downtown Eastside patients, the frantic self-soothing of overeaters or shopaholics, the obsessions of gamblers, sexaholics and compulsive internet users, or in the socially acceptable and even admired behaviours of the workaholic. …
