Browsing the archives for the Coolest Shit Ever category
This song is great. It’s wonderful. It stands on its own. Robert Plant may have been a bit strident with his “Led what?” bullshit of his early solo career, but that’s because he had an honest solo career for years before he gave in and starting squeezing lemons again (lighten up, baby. I’m in love [...]
Til Human Voices Wake Us And We Drown Poetry is not just for pussies. Some of it doesn’t even suck, like this one. Seriously, I really enjoy TS Eliot. I know he’s kind of the mayonnaise of poetry, I don’t care. I don’t pretend erudition in verse. I know what I learned in high school, [...]
12/31/82 Oakland Coliseum In honor of Miss Etta’s passing, I present you with one of the neatest little surprises I’ve found. On New Year’s Eve 1982, the Grateful Dead (a pop music combo) played a gig in the land of Bill Graham. Apparently, from the comments I read in myriad (more than you would think) [...]
Break Glasses, Wreck a Laptop, Set Fires All To Turn A Newspaper Page This is just fucking great. Remember the beginning of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure? The breakfast machine? It’s like that but better, because it’s clever as hell. Joseph Hersher is the genius behind this contraption. All hail. Thank you to my antipodean friends [...]
I like it that the Stones are delving through the archives, and releasing some of the cool stuff they find. Things like the expanded Exile On Main Street, or Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones (1972 concert film) are actually worth the release. They have a vitality that’s their own. The latest Rolling Stones release, [...]
Coolest Thing Ever MIT’s Media Lab Let’s hear it for Femtophotography. What it is, is crazy complicated, with lasers and algorithims, and various maths and sciences. What it does is easy. It allows video recording of a nanosecond event, in slow motion. A half trillion frames per second. Yikes. Check out the Camera Culture webpage, [...]
It’s been awhile, but I have sung the praises of James Brown before. There was no one like him, and his music was so intricate and fast… like Motorhead meets Miles Davis. There’s nothing like funk. It’s deep, and from the hips, but it’s not raw, like the blues, or stupid, like metal. The band [...]
“Why Can’t You Be More Like Roger Daltrey?” Because I’m Not Queer! Ah, British 80′s comedy. Bad News was a Spinal Tap-ish band/documentary created by former Young Ones Rik Mayall (rik), Adrian Edmonson (vivian), and Nigel Planer (neil). They were the subjects of two episodes of the BBC comedy, The Comic Strip. This show was [...]
And you try to tell me with consternation That you have found me a brand new lock Then you try to warn me that there’s only one combination One new sling – the same old rock I told you I would post this as soon as I found a video, and I have. Ok, This [...]
He Held Your Hand And He Sang You A Song Ima kill the discourteous motherfucker. This is one of the great SUN Records classics, completely hit out of the park by Balladeer Bob Dylan, the rockabilly troubador. I’m serious. Click the picture of Bob to hear the original. I’ll wait. … not bad, right? A [...]
DearSteve LSD Has Done Much Good That’s How The Spinning Beachball Came About Silicon Valley is founded on a bedrock of psychedelic drugs. Albert Hoffman, who wrote the above letter at the ripe age of 101, spent years trying to bring the study of LSD back into the realm of “real” science. Ryan Grim scratches [...]
From The Cretaceous Era 75 to 80 Million Years Ago The scientists were looking for insects in the samples of Canadian amber, when they noticed all these filaments. They looked closer and discovered that they were looking at honest to god dinosaur feathers. These aren’t fossils. These are preserved feathers, entombed in amber. Tell me [...]
Take The Money, Honey Take My Whole Life Too There was a time when I really loved U2. It was when I was going through my divorce, in the early 90′s, and Achtung Baby came out. Bono had only just started preening around like the preening, rock star god (of which there were two polarities, [...]
The ZoCrowes Were tight The Army Of Guitars Was Achieved I’m sorry I never got to see Jimmy Page and The Black Crowes (who played together recently) when they toured in 2000. I wasn’t really enamored with their album. I don’t like Chris Robinson’s voice singing Zep (I love him singing his own stuff). He [...]
Hail Ants Mohamed Babu Shot Some Great Photos These images are all over teh interwebs, because they’re so awesome. Photographer Mohamed Babu, of Solent News, created this tableaux of chromatic brilliance, after his wife noticed that, after drinking milk, household ants would turn white. Babu then set up these colored drops of sugar water, and [...]
Articulated and Articulate 17th Century Robots Karakuri is the art of clockwork automation, dating back to Japan’s Edo Period (17th and 18th Centuries). Once the spring powered clockwork mechanism hit Japan, in the 1600s, the Japanese put the spring’s stored energy to use with art, flair, and grace. These automatons can perform incredibly intricate, and [...]
Unbelievably Powerful Sand Animation Ukranian artist (and polymath) Kseniya Simonova seems a little Bjorky, in a good way. By this I mean I think he creativity is off the chart tectonic, like a meteor of ball lightning. If you read her About Me, you’ll see she has a bunch of degrees in carious subjects. She’s [...]
Watch This At Work Your Job Exploits You Anyway This is an excellent 2007 documentary, produced by the BBC, about Pink Floyd. It was filmed a year before Richard Wright succumbed to cancer, and it’s brilliant. Pink Floyd is one of those bands whose omnipresence (even decades later) can make us forget how amazing they [...]
Led Zeppelin Would Be Proud You’ll Be Smiling By The End As you may know, I am fond of Led Zeppelin, and Jimmy Page in particular. I saw this mashup on Wired, actually on Underwire, and I had to post it my self. The amount of work editing this is huge, and my hat is [...]
