In late May, The Seattle Public Library set a world record for the Longest Book Domino Chain, according to the World Record Academy. Watch as 2,131 books — all part of an upcoming book sale — fall one by one. Apparently, it took 27 volunteers seven hours — and five failed attempts — to pull off this feat for the ages. h/t Metafilter
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Spider-Man, he was apparently a Protestant. The Hulk, a lapsed Catholic. Thor, a worshipper of a Teutonic deity. The X‑Men, an assemblage of Catholics and Episcopalians. And Stanley Lee, the creator of these famous comic book figures, he’s Jewish. If you’re a comic book fan with a thing for trivia, you can peruse this database of over 10,000 characters and figure out the religious affiliation of Batman and Wonder Woman, plus lesser-known characters like Chameleon Boy, Swamp Thing, and Poison Ivy.
P.S. The creatures in the image above, they’re atheists, a category also tracked by this most thorough database.
They toyed with the idea of a donkey, but they went with four sheep instead, and now four ewes are mowing the grounds of Paris’ Municipal Archives. It’s all part of a pilot program where, if successful, sheep will trim the grass of Parisian public spaces and burn no fossil fuels along the way. The New York Times has more on this old school solution to a modern environmental problem.
Unlike the typewriter, the lowly fax machine never pulled itself out of the hive-like existence of utilitarian office machines and into literary celebrity. With their bland, functional styling, fax machines will not have their impending obsolescence capped with museum exhibitions. And as little more than conduits for wonky, unglamorous communiqués, fax machines rarely conduct a piece of text that inspires people to savor, and want to save, the words, as with personal letters. While we often feature historic correspondence of a time before email from one of our favorite sites, Letters of Note, the risible, profound, and shocking sentiments expressed by famous figures when they think that no one’s looking rarely make it into office memoranda.
However, inspired by our recent post on Mark Twain’s typewriter, a reader alerted us to a Letters of Note subgenre of sorts, “faxes of note.” These oddball messages defy the workaday conventions of the fax. Take, for example, the fax above sent by Iggy Pop to Plazm magazine writer Joshua Berger as an addendum to a 1995 interview. Scrawled with his fevered thoughts, on Delta Airlines stationary, Pop’s fax amounts to what Letters of Note calls “a rant so rich with quotable lines, it’s amazing he was able to contain it all on a single sheet.”
You can click here for a full transcript of Iggy’s take on American cultural decadence, but here are just a few highlights from his faxed get-off-my-lawn moment: Pop—on tour in Europe at the time—calls his home country “a nation of midgets,” and decries the ‘90s rehash of ‘60s and ’70s music (“none of them have fuck-all to say”); he rails against the Calvin Klein aesthetic, adding “our gods are assholes” (maybe some professional jealousy here—Pop more or less invented heroin chic). Finally, he signs off with some cranky onomatopoeia: “i hate it all. heavy metal. hollywood movies. SCHPOLOOGY! YeHEHCHH!” This is archival-worthy vitriol, for sure.
Another fax of note uses the medium to opposite effect; Stephen Hawking’s fax (above), also from 1995, responds to a request from erstwhile British music and fashion magazine The Face for the formula for time travel. Hawking replies, via his personal assistant, “Thank you for your recent fax. I do not have any equations for time travel. If I had, I would win the National Lottery every week.” Unlike Iggy’s explosion of handwritten bile, Hawking’s missive retains all the formal properties of the fax—appropriate institutional letterhead, “from” and “to” lines, etc—which makes his pithy retort all the more incongruous.
While the 1980s and ’90s were boom times for fax transmissions, the machine actually dates back to 1843, when it was patented by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. As early as 1902, fax technology allowed photographs to be sent over telephone lines. And yes, as every frustrated administrative assistant knows too well, the humble fax machine is still in use in offices around the world, transmitting blearingly boring messages, as well as the occasional flash of individuality. For more on famous faxes, see this helpful infographic from our reader.
From the annals of Why Smart People Do Dumb Things: The New York Times has a long piece on Paul Frampton, a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who meets a Czech model online, then, rather gullibly, travels to South America to get to know her in person. Instead of finding love in La Paz, Frampton winds up in a dilapidated Buenos Aires prison. It’s a bizarre tale, a story of hubris, naivete, lust, and deception all rolled into one. Grab a coffee, set aside some time, and have a read.
If you’re applying to Stanford, this is what you’re up against. Undergrads like Ravi Fernando (Class of 2014) who can solve a Rubik’s Cube … while juggling. You might want to have a safety school!
French post-structuralist philosopher/sociologist Jean Baudrillard—usually identified with his postmodern theories of simulacra—is a little bit of a fringe figure in pop culture. Known to hip academic types and avant-garde-ists, he’s maybe the kind of thinker who gets name-dropped more than read (and he’s no easy read).
But in the audio clip above, Baudrillard reads to us, from his poetry no less, while backed by the swirling abstract sounds of The Chance Band, an all art-star ensemble featuring Tom Watson (of The Missingmen), George Hurley (of The Minutemen and fIREHOSE), Lynn Johnston, Dave Muller, Amy Stoll, and guest vocalist, theorist Allucquère Rosanne (“Sandy”) Stone. It’s an odd, one-time, assemblage of artists and thinkers UbuWeb describes as “unbelievable but true!”:
Recorded live as part of the Chance Festival at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in Stateline Nevada, 1996. You’ve never heard Baudrillard like this before! Music to read Nietzsche to.
Look at what Neels Castillon unexpectedly captured on film while doing some shooting at a Marseille airport. Birds doing a pretty incredible ballet in the sky. If you enjoy watching murmurations, you’ll want to watch this other footage shot in Rome and especially this breathtaking (no hyperbole here) clip from Ireland. It’s all quite stunning.
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