We Got Stronger Beer

It seems appropriate to post this song by Tim Hicks on Grey Cup day. Go Ti-Cats!



Whoa, we got stronger beer! (Yeah we do baby)

Cooking Shrimp The Japanese Way

Yes, it's in Japanese but you'll like it.



Via Holy Kaw!

Portland Police arrest 35 in Black Friday vegan strip club riot

The article reads like satire but Portland's Casa Diablo is indeed a vegan strip club. It serves vegan food, and does not permit dancers to wear fur, leather, feathers, or wool when performing.

Apparently all hell broke loose when the club held its first ever Black Friday sale Nov. 28, and patrons of the Northwest Portland establishment got into a brawl over 59 cent a minute lap dances, despite the club’s attempt to be prepared by having 24 dancers available that morning.

35 people were arrested and 3 others were treated for minor injuries.

“We don’t normally have much trouble here at Casa Diablo,” said club manager Renewable Rhonda. “I mean, the biggest incident we’ve had since we opened was a patron who had a little too much to drink, and demanded a refund on his lap dance when he realized Wendy Wheatgrass wasn’t wearing a fair-trade garter. But this, this is just crazy!”

More: That Oregon Life

The Wild Horses Of Sable Island

Scenes from Halifax filmmaker Matt Trecartin's documentary 'Chasing Wild Horses', the story of Romanian-born fashion photographer Roberto Dutesco and his passion for the wild horses of Sable Island:

Sable Island from Matt Trecartin on Vimeo.

Today I read that a Parks Canada report says the Sable Island horses may face extinction.

Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl

Earlier this year filmmaker, director and editor Danny Cooke visited Chernobyl, the site of the devastating 1986 nuclear disaster and captured some eerie footage. The area surrounding the reactor is called the Zone and it is one of the most contaminated places on Earth. The 20-mile no man's land was evacuated nearly 30 years ago.

Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.

1,400 workers are currently building a giant arch to cover the damaged reactor like a casserole. There's still so much radiation coming from the reactor that workers have to construct the arch nearly a thousand feet away, shielded by a massive concrete wall. When finished, the arch will be slid into place around the Sarcophagus, then sealed up.
Soundtrack 'Promise Land' by Hannah Miller

Link
Via

Snow Drawing On a Frozen Lake

A work by artist Sonja Hinrichsen entitled Snow Drawings at Catamount Lake, brought together 60 local volunteers in snowshoes to trample temporary artworks in the snow on the frozen Colorado Lake. I'm amazed that such intricate patterns could be created with clumsy snowshoes.

More:  Colossal

Story Behind Striking Portland "Hug" Photo

Photo by Portland-based photographer Johnny Nguyen

According to Sgt. Barnum, the interaction took place at the beginning of the rally. With emotions running high as speakers were addressing the crowd, he noticed a young man with tears in his eyes holding a "Free Hugs" sign among a group of people.

Sgt. Barnum motioned him over and the two started talking about the demonstration, school, art and life. As the conversation ended, Sgt. Barnum pointed to his sign and asked, "Do I get one of those?" The moment following his question was captured in the photo above, which shows Devonte's eyes welling up with tears once again as he embraces the officer.

More: Boing Boing

Lynda Barry's Illustrated Syllabus & Homework Assignments

Cartoonist turned professor, Lynda Barry, has turned an imaginative collection of course materials intended for her students into Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor, an old fashioned, tangible book.

More:  Open Culture

Guy Strips Down and Rebuilds Car Engine In Stop-Motion Animation

Chris Herridge took photos as he stripped down an engine he bought off ebay so that he could remember how to put it back together again. Then he decided to do an animation.
This is the result 11 months and 3000 pictures later:



Via Boing Boing

Bela Lugosi Discusses His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hospital in 1955

In 1955 Bela Lugosi the Hungarian-born star of Dracula had seen his career degenerate until he was reduced to playing a cruel parody of himself in some of the tackiest B horror films ever made. Along the way he picked up a drug habit. In late April of 1955 the 72-year-old actor, destitute and recently divorced from his fourth wife, checked himself into the psychopathic ward at Los Angeles General Hospital. Here is the interview when he left the hospital to start shooting The Ghoul Goes West.



More: Open Culture

Thanksgiving Dinner at NYC's Plaza Hotel, 1899.

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Macy's Parade Balloons Come To Life

Are you looking for something to do in NYC today? From 3pm - 10pm you can watch as Macy's  iconic parade balloons are filled with helium. See Kermit the Frog, Charlie Brown, Sonic the Hedgehog, Buzz Lightyear, and more.



More: Link

Portraits of Time: Ancient Trees

San Francisco photographer Beth Moon's "Portraits of Time" is a series of portraits of ancient trees from around the world that was fourteen years in the making.  She has chosen trees of immense size, great age, and notable history. Locations are researched by a number of methods: history books, botanical books, tree registers, newspaper articles, and information from friends and fellow travellers.

More: LensCulture

Lewis Carroll’s Typewriter

Twenty years ago when Charlie Lovett found a small handwritten note by Lewis Carroll in which he asked for help in operating his new typewriter he did not know that Carroll's actual machine still existed. He wrote an article for a small Lewis Carroll journal titled “Lewis Carroll’s Typewriter” in which he described the Hammond No. 1 typewriter that Lewis Carroll (whose real name was Charles Dodgson) had bought in 1888.

In 2012 it came up for auction at a small auction house in England and Lovett purchased it. He did more research and wrote an article for an exhibition catalogue and was able to illustrate the article with pictures of the actual machine.

Read more here.

Anchor Tracey Spicer Protests 'Extreme Grooming'

Image: James Brickwood/Daily Life

Australian television anchor, Tracey Spicer, did the math and realized she was spending between $500 a month and countless hours a year on basic grooming. She decided enough was enough and tossed the lipstick, the hair products and the layers of pancake.



More: CBC Radio

I Remember Mr. Potato Head Before He Became a Plastic Phoney

The Mr. Potato Head toy, first marketed in 1952, originally came with  facial features on sharp spikes that we kids stuck into a real potato or a carrot, or an apple. "Any fruit or vegetable makes a funny face man," reads the package to the original Mr. Potato Head.

The 1968 Mr. Potato Head On The Moon was one such toy, imploring kids to use a cucumber for a spaceship. It wasn't until the 1970s that child safety laws outlawed the old-fashioned spiky Potato Head pieces.

Mr. Head originally came with a pipe, but had to give up the habit in 1987 when he became a spokespotato for the Cancer Society.

Link

Yukiko Morita's Bread Lamps

Yukiko Morita's lamps are made from actual loaves of bread covered in a layer of resin.

Via: bookofjoe

Got a year old carrot? Turn it into a something tasty.

Ren Redzepi, chef at Copenhagen's Noma, creates a wonderful dish from a year-old carrot. Noma is widely considered to be the best restaurant in the world.



Via  Holy Kaw

Sophie Barbasch – Fault Line

“Fault Line is a project I am doing in the small coastal town of Brooklin, Maine. The protagonist is my younger cousin Adam, who lives there. I also photograph my brother, father, and other cousins. I chose the title because a fault line alludes to where the earth splits in an earthquake (a metaphor for a divided family with a complicated history) and also alludes to fault, or blame (I wonder, how does a family support each other, even when things aren’t perfect?) My goal is to show the weight we all carry and how we are both connected and isolated from each other.” -Sophie Barbasch

Link

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Hell hath no fury like a woman with a stolen identity.

In 2011, a woman named Erin Hart stole artist Jessamyn Lovell’s wallet, and eventually her identity, racking up credit card charges, parking tickets, and even a theft charge in Lovell’s name. Did Lovell get angry? Yes she did and then she got even. She created an art exhibition called “Dear Erin Hart” featuring documents, surveillance photos, videos, and interviews documenting Erin Hart’s crime spree.

Erin Hart stole Jessamyn Lovell’s identity, time, and peace of mind. Lovell, in relentlessly pursuing her thief, robs her of her anonymity.

More: Beautiful/Decay



Lovell's project reminds me of some of French artist Sophie Calle's work. Calle is also known for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives.

Chart Of Cousins

Many of my American friends will be spending time with relatives this Thanksgiving.  This chart helps you figure out exactly how you're related.

Figure out the common ancestor between two relatives. Then select the relationship of the first relative to the common ancestor in the top row. Move down to the row that corresponds to the relationship of the second person to the common ancestor. The result is the relationship of the second person to the first.

Mind boggling, at least to me!



Link

‘Casablanca’ Piano to Be Auctioned

“Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.'  ” Going up for auction at Bonham's today is one of the most famous pianos in the world, the painted upright in Rick’s Cafe Americain in the movie “Casablanca” when Ingrid Bergman uttered those immortal cinematic words.



Catherine Williamson, the director of entertainment memorabilia at Bonhams, explains why this piano is a significant piece of movie memorabilia.

"The piano is central to the plot because of the transit papers — this thing that everyone is searching for so desperately.”
“Fifteen minutes into the movie, he tucks them in there. They’re under there while Sam plays, they’re there for all of the activity that happens in the cafe. The piano is there. It represents the way out for them. That’s what made it so important.”

More: NYTimes.com

Dream Rooms In Dolls' Houses

 Small Stories: At Home in a Doll’s House is an exhibition at the V & A Museum of Childhood in London that shows histories of domestic life across the centuries using dolls’ houses.” To add a modern touch to the show,  19 designers have each created their “dream room” inside a 30cm wooden box.

Wilderness Dreams by Orly Orbach“Orly wanted to represent the idea of dreaming in this room, using cave drawings and wild animals. She’s quite into Jungian symbolism, the idea of an archetypal primeval wildness that we can access even in our civilised times through our dreams.”

Library (a Recent Plan) by Emma Mawston, Liberty Art Fabrics Interiors.
“Liberty looked back to the early 1900s and took a real library plan from the archive. The craftsmanship in this is amazing: the wallpaper, the vases, the little books. The rug on the floor was hand-embroidered by students at the Royal School of Needlework.”

Room with a View by Nancy Edwards“This is inspired by London’s skyline. These iconic buildings are used to create furniture: the bed is one of the pods in the London Eye, the tower of Big Ben has a swing underneath, the Thames is sewn into the carpet.”

Photograph: V&A Photo Studio

More: The Guardian

Alysha Umphress In Performance

Alysha Umphress, with Brett Rowe on piano, sings the number “I Can Cook, Too” from the Broadway revival of the 1944 musical “On The Town.” The show is at the Lyric Theater.



NYTimes.com

For sale: the final residence of Tsar Nicholas II’s last surviving sibling — a dilapidated semi in Toronto

Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna was the youngest child of Emperor Alexander III of Russia.
Her older brother was Tsar Nicholas II.

At age 19, on the occasion of her wedding in 1901, Tsar Nicholas granted his youngest sister a 200-room starter home — a $453-million St. Petersburg neo-Palladian with a 47-window front façade. It's a far cry from such opulence to the house at 716 Gerrard Street East where she died in the upstairs front bedroom Nov. 24, 1960.

Listed last week on MLS, the modest two-story Riverdale semidetached was the final residence of the Tsar Nicholas II’s last surviving sibling, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandranova. The highest ranking member of the Russian imperial family to emigrate to North America, Olga convalesced in the care of Russian friends who ran the beauty shop on the main floor.

She was bedridden for a year and ate nothing but ice cream, according to Nick Barisheff, who was 15 when the 78-year-old duchess succumbed to cancer in his family’s apartment.

The exterior of 716 Gerrard Street East, where Grand Duchess Olga of Russia lived in Toronto,
is pictured on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2014. (Matthew Sherwood for National Post)

More: National Post

Fairy Post Office

 In 2013 the sweetest post office was installed in a tree at California's Tilden Park. The original office consisted of a miniature mailbox in front of a pint-sized office complete with desk, lamp, a thimble-sized birdcage, and art on the wall. The creators of the post office put little letters in the mailbox and after a couple of months simply left the whole thing to exist in secret. When they returned months later they found that hikers who had stumbled upon post office had added decorations, like miniature wall maps and trinkets on the desk; new notes had been written and left in the mailbox. The post office even distributes its own newspaper ("The Small Times")

More: Atlas Obscura

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Memorializing Asia’s Most Traveled Roads

Above: detail, Famous Places of the Fifty-Three Stations: Yoshiwara, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858)
Japan, Edo period, 1855; Six of a set of 55 woodblock prints; ink and color on paper

 "The Traveler’s Eye: Scenes of Asia,"  an exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery contains more than 100 mementos spanning 500 years of travel across the Asian continent. Among the items in adjoining rooms are rocks from China, archeological sketches done in Iraq, postcards, a scroll and woodblock prints from Japan.

Detail, Famous Places of the Fifty-Three Stations: Kawasaki.

More: Smithsonian

Seals Think Acoustic Tags On Fish Are Dinner Bells

When scientists are studying fish or invertebrates they often mark them with acoustic tags that make ultrasonic pinging noises. Although the marked animal cannot hear the sound a new study finds that predators such as grey seals may hear those tags as a dinner bell.

Amanda L. Stansbury of the University of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland and colleagues set up a foraging experiment consisting of 20 boxes placed at regular locations along the bottom of the wall of a long pool:

Eighteen boxes were empty, one had fish in it, and the last had fish plus an acoustic fish tag. Each seal was then given 20 trials to find a fish. The results of the study were published November 19 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Over time, the seals became better at finding a box with the fish. And in the later trials, they found the fish in the box with the tag more easily than the one with the fish alone.

More: Science News

Eugenia Loli’s Dreamy Collages

Greek-born artist Eugenia Loli makes surreal collages inspired by old magazines.

Sphinx

Maker

Bloomed Joyride

Artist's Tumblr 

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Whale Shark Rescue

While swimming in isolated waters 300 miles south west of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, david valencia spotted this thirty five foot female whale shark with a line six inches thick wrapped around her and digging into her skin. The growth of anemones and gooseneck barnacles on the rope would indicate that it had been there for a long time.

Read more: Sport Diver

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Goldfish Tea Bags

CHARM VILLA makes tea bags that look like goldfish.

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America’s First Pet Burial Grounds - Est 1896

Hartsdale Pet Cemetery near White Plains, NY, also called The Peaceable Kingdom, was established in 1896 by a New York City veterinarian who offered an apple orchard at his summer retreat in nearby Westchester County to serve as a burial plot for a bereaved friend’s dog. Its five acres are home to 80,000 pets (rabbits, guinea pigs, birds, and a lion cub among the vast numbers of cats and dogs).

Via

Red: A Kubrick Supercut

Red: A Kubrick Supercut from Rishi Kaneria on Vimeo.

A supercut examining Stanley Kubrick's use of the color red. Red’s many meanings include: death, blood, danger, anger, energy, war, strength, power, determination…but also passion, desire, love, and sex. All prominent themes in Kubrick’s work.
Via The Curious Brain 

Nancy Calder's Still Lifes

I have just discovered the work of Toronto contemporary realist artist, Nancy Calder. I like the tureen best because I have one just like it.

Iron Dog
16” x 20” oil on linen dibond panel

Roller Skates
16” x 20”  oil on linen dibond panel.

Soup Tureen
16"x20" oil on linen

LED Lights And Long Exposure Turn Budapest Trams Into Time Machines

With all this snow it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas so here's a post to get you in the spirit.

In Budapest, Hungary trams are decorated with 30,000 bright blinking LED lights every holiday season. Long exposure creates an otherworldly effect.

Image: englishhungary.blogspot.com

Image: Kis Gabo Photography

Image: Zsolt Andrasi

More: DeMilked

Carnivora Gardinum

Amazing biolapse film of carnivorous plants doing their thing. Chris Field spent more than a year making it, with 107 days of straight shooting with 2 cameras.

Carnivora Gardinum from chris field on Vimeo.

Via Notcot

‘BobbyQue’: Cooking with Black Panther Bobby Seale

Bobby Seale, founding chairman and national organizer of the Black Panther Party, has a cookbook, cooking show and “BobbyQue” website, all devoted to the lost art of barbecue.

Is he a sellout? Here he explains the relationship between revolution and barbecue:



Read his Barbecue Bill Of Rights.

More: Dangerous Minds
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Extreme Commute

Are you tired of your trip to work and back? Shawn Parkinson doesn't feel sorry for you. He's one of a group of Kiwi butchers who make the trek from New Zealand to rural Iceland - for just two months' work each year. This is what his commute looks like:

Dannevirke to Auckland - six-hour drive. Auckland to Sydney - three-hour flight. Sydney to Dubai - 14 and a half hours in the air. Dubai to London - seven-hour flight. London to Reykjavik - almost three hours' flying time. Reykjavik to Blonduos, north-west Iceland - three-hour drive.

Two months later, he repeats all 22,300km (about 13,850 miles) on the return leg.



More: BBC News



Thanks Bruce!

Thanksgiving Recipes Across the United States

The NYTimes has scoured the nation for Thanksgiving recipes that evoke each of the 50 states (and D.C. and Puerto Rico). Even though Thanksgiving is a distant memory for this Canadian I've pinned a few for my future holiday meals.

ALASKA: Russian Salmon Pie

CALIFORNIA: Sourdough Stuffing With Kale, Dates and Turkey Sausage

NEW JERSEY: Crepes-Style Manicotti

TENNESSEE: Roasted Brussels Sprouts With Peanut Vinaigrette

Via Kottke