I’ve seen some pleasantly odd things on Flickr this year. First was the kid in Ontario who takes pictures exclusively of police cars and emergency vehicles. A month or so later, I found the guy who collects Pyrex and 70’s kitchenware.
But today. Today I was introduced to the guy who seems obsessed with looking like Yul Brynner.
Reading through my new favorite site, DamnInteresting.com, I came across some things for which I’ve been searching a couple of years now: the collected recordings of the Conet Project, an out-of-print assemblage of numbers station broadcasts.
Numbers stations are repeated, anonymous, apparently encoded shortwave broadcasts emanating from various points across the world in various languages. The most likely explanation for them is that they carry encoded messages for use in espionage. Given the permanently looped nature of many of the transmissions, it’s likely that they’ve been abandoned and are still running only because they haven’t lost power. Prior to today I’ve only heard a few examples, but thanks to DamnInteresting.com, a link to mp3’s of all four discs of the Conet Project was provided at the end of their article on the subject.
So I downloaded all of them and have been listening to them for an hour now. Spooky stuff. It’s fun to wonder about their sources, who set them up, what they mean, and who receives them. And, given that I’m the type of person who tends to have sympathy for inanimate objects, I find a certain romance in the idea of a small transmitter, sitting in the middle of nowhere, lost forever, constantly sending out its odd little signal.
The Atlantic is now free online. There are popups now, of course, but if you’ve got Firefox, that will hold them at bay. I highly recommend you start investigating their site with this article, “First, Kill All the School Boards.” It’s an eye-opening proposal that sheds some light on why American schools are the way they are, and what might be done to fix them.
I’m almost done digging through all of Atticus’s images on Flickr. Sometimes his image titles are more revealing than their pictures. This one sent me to Google and I found this excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams:
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
It’s good to be reminded of what is Real.
Atticus Wolrab is a figure shrouded in mystery. All that I really know about him is that he is an artist who does all of Mike Keneally’s album art. I just discovered his Flickr stream today, and it’s one of those goldmines of creativity so deep and brightly lit that I have to tell everybody about it. Check him out.
Here are some of my favorites: breakfast face (one of several), dumped, and Bernal Hill (which I myself have photographed, although in somewhat less flattering light). But his stuff is endless, really. And he likes to put song lyrics in the descriptions and write strange, lengthy tags (see the right column of this picture).
Oh, and he just sent me a message. Isn’t that nice?
If you don’t already visit The Onion A.V. Club on a weekly basis, you really should. I hesitate to write about it because it’s such a given for me (like fark.com or achewood.com), but I wanted to make sure you know about it. It’s really the Entertainment Weekly for thinking people. It’s also a snarky hipster hangout, full of pop culture list-making (17 Dangerous Cinematic Computers, 12 Delightfully Odd Concept Albums).
In a recent blog article, “I Have A Little Guitar,” author and Arkansan Noel Murray said, “the guitar has always been a mysterious instrument to me.” So naturally I emailed him to see if he’d be interested in a free guitar lesson sometime. He said he would, but it may be awhile before he has any free time. He also said it might be good material for another article. Hopefully we can hook up before I leave the state.
If you’re like me, you don’t wear a tuxedo often. So me telling you about a tuxedo website would seem fairly pointless, and more than a little suspect[1]. This is a client of mine, but in my defense I’m just writing about them because they have some freaky bargains and I’d tell people about them regardless. I mean, where the heck else are you going to get a tuxedo coat for $15? The catch is they’re all specific sizes, and they’re rental inventory, so they’re used. They’re still in great condition, though. I almost bought one just because of the bargain factor. I now know where to go if/when I’m ever in the market for a tux.
1.) I promise that blogging about my clients will not become a habit, as I generally consider it to be soul-chillingly opportunistic in these blog-marketing-heavy times. I’m declaring special circumstances because of my congenital interest in bargain hunting. Feel free to call shenanigans on me.
I keep forgetting to mention Bryan Jones’s blog, “The Dude Abides”. Bryan featured my blog on a list he made of 30 Little Rock blogs, of which there is a decided dearth. I’m #10. Thanks, Bryan.
My friend Aly is a freelance writer in NYC and she writes a blog for SheKnows.com, a site apparently dedicated to hip girly swag. She writes about various new widgets and sundry whatnot, and offers free samples and giveaways pretty regularly. Check it out here. I already got a gift certificate to Panda Express which, by the way, doesn’t serve panda[1].
1.) Yes, I realize this joke amuses only me.
I joined. del.icio.us/coltermac
Featuring my latest piece for the Times on my hero and yours, Ted Ludwig.