“The remote settlement of Burketown, in Australia’s northern Queensland, is not the sort of place you’d expect people to travel thousands of miles to visit. With a population of just 178, Burketown sits in one of Australia’s most remote shires. But every September and October, a small group of individuals journey from all corners of the country for the appearance of a remarkable and dramatic cloud called the Morning Glory. Clouds don’t usually have names, nor are they normally linked to a particular location, but then the Morning Glory is no normal cloud. (…) it stretches up to 600 miles (about the length of Britain) and sweeps over Burketown at speeds of up to 35mph. The visitors who come to marvel at this beautiful and awe-inspiring meteorological phenomenon are an intrepid group of glider pilots (…) Each year they come to this sleepy town in the hope of ‘soaring’ the Morning Glory, an exhilarating gliding adventure that can only be described as cloud-surfing.”
(Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloud Appreciation Society)
LINK [Gavin's essay (w/ pictures) on his encounter with the "Morning Glory"]
Four three-minute shorts aired in the UK about Gavin’s trip to Burketown with footage of “some of the most dramatic and exciting gliding conditions in the world”. While his site has them available for watching, the second episode has already been taken down due to overwhelming demand. I grabbed the last two episodes (the most interesting ones) and put them on CN’s server:
VIDEO [Episode 3: Waiting for the Perfect Cloud]
VIDEO [Episode 4: Cloud Surfing]
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“Icaro Doria, a Brazilian designer, has done some amazing graphic interpretations of common flag designs for countries around the world (…) comparing sections of each color on the flags to segments of their population. The campaign is called Meet The World, and has been running in Portugal since January.” [...]
iTunes 4.9 was released today [download], with added support for Podcasting. What does this mean? Thousands of hours of free public radio and public-radio-esque white noise are now available for subscription and automatic synchronization to your iPod, with paid content coming soon. Not that podcasting hasn’t already been around for some time, but now that it’s gotten the thumbs-up from our silhouetted neon-dwelling friends, its sure to receive a lot more attention. But how will we break dance to NPR? Clearly Apple didn’t think this one through [...]
Julian Beever creates pavement drawings that give a false impression of depth and realism. He skews his images so that when viewed from the correct angle, the brain interprets the drawings as three-dimensional. His technique is closely related to Ames rooms: slanted rooms that appear cubic when viewed with one eye from a particular point.
IMAGES [flickr gallery]
LINK [Julian Beever's website]
LINK [information on Ames rooms]
Update: It turns out that some of the images I had attributed to Julian Beever are actually the work of Kurt Wenner, another street artist. I’ve updated the gallery above to give proper credit.
LINK [Kurt Wenner's website]
“After heavily touring, the time came for the next chapter in the Jaga Jazzist history, ‘What We Must’. After months spent on writing new material, the band ripped it all up, went into an isolated studio out in the Norwegian woods and recorded the demo now known as the Spydeberg Session. Put down in one take in one day, it was a breakthrough moment for the group. A sound that was closer to their live sound than ever before.” [...]
“Co-founder Danny Hillis escorts me down a hallway that dead-ends into an old-fashioned red phone booth. The phone rings. He places receiver to ear. ‘The blue moon jumps over the purple sky,’ he says, and hangs up. Suddenly, the booth becomes a door, swinging out to reveal a vast, open room filled with engineers, gadgets and big ideas. It’s as if Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory just yawned wide to welcome us. Only here, all the candy plugs in. ‘This is where the secret laboratories are,’ Hillis says.” [...]
“A puppy with two extra legs and a second penis is drawing curious stares at a temple in Pandamaran (…) The puppy, found by a temple caretaker at the entrance on Thursday morning, is being cared for by the temple committee.” [...]
This may or may not be new material to some of you, but as long as I’m posting about DJ Vader, I have to mention the late-1970’s-to-early-80’s history-themed German disco group, Dschinghis Khan. [...]
Might as well get right into it, and I can think of few better ways to do so than Darth Vader scratching Star Wars records (DJ Keltech, actually). [...]
Welcome, at last, to Centripetal Notion. While the idea has changed a bit since inception, we still have all kinds of badassery waiting in the wings.