May 2010
21 posts
History of Elephants in London...
From Londonist:
“With all the attention heaped upon the 250 plastic pachyderms of the current Elephant Parade, we thought we’d give some space to their predecessors. The first recorded elephant in town came over with the Romans around 2000 years ago. Since then, we’ve seen vicious elephants, robotic elephants, famous elephants and even drunken elephants.
— 43 AD: Emperor...
The Greatest Movie Review Ever Written? →
How Cheetos Are Made →
The sun rose at 7:37 am on the day I was born, Wolfram Alpha tells me.
“The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this by taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect”. Via Music Machinery
Don’t Stop Believin’ (Swing Version) by plamere
Every Breath You Take (swing version) by TeeJay
New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh,... →
The Snapping of Foucault's Pendulum →
Oh no.
One evening, during the second world war, TS Eliot read from The Waste Land to the Royal Family. Years later, the Queen Mother recalled the evening:
“We had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem… I think it was called The Desert. And first the girls [Elizabeth and Margaret] got the giggles and then I did and then even the King.”
Alas.
“And what a vast background he lights up! What flowing aeons mark the ascent from...”
– The NY Times reviews The Origin of Species, March 28 1860
“The outcome is of course a major blow to the centre-left, both short-term and...”
– The coalition government: Sweetening the pill | The Guardian
"Will the Real Avatar Please Stand Up" →
Woody Allen’s latest piece for The New Yorker.
So I Interviewed A Pirate Who Is Standing For... →
