Category Archives: Culture

Broadly defined

Some Sammi

The wonderful Sammi Cheng, singing “Forever Beauty” from the film Love On A Diet (check out her fat suit!):

Dr. House is a (musical) genius!

(þDiana Hsieh)

That’s been obvious since the mid-’90s, at least

Quoth Furious D:
[T]he problem Mike Myers has is Mike Myers.
D is, as always, deeply insightful into the Hollywood mindset.

Rage

First, look into these eyes:

Just keep looking for a few moments.
Now read how her own mother treated her. (þ Herself)
If your reaction is other than murderous rage, or an intense desire to take that poor little girl in your arms and do anything to make things better, there might be something wrong with you.
Read to [...]

Free Books!

Wowio disappeared for a month or so, and I thought the company was going under. Instead, they were going global.
Wowio.com will now give free PDF books to anyone with an email address, anywhere in the world. And not just public-domain texts either. They get copyrighted works, and sometimes damn good ones1 — [...]

One day on Amazon

Amazon’s MP3 store has a special, a steep discount on one album every day. And whoever’s choosing them seems to have excellent taste. Two days ago they put up Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage album for $0.99. I noticed it in time to snag it, but too late to advertise it to my [...]

Why weren’t they laughed out of the room?

Certain black1 politicos in the vicinity of Dallas, Texas, are either colossally ignorant, or they are engaged in a devilishly clever scheme cause anyone who ever cries “Racism!” again in the future to be laughed out of the room (þMichelle Malkin):
[Dallas County] Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections “has [...]

American Music, part three

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
“American Patrol”, The Glenn Miller Orchestra, 1 August 1939(!)
Happy Independence Day, everybody!

American Music, part two

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
“S’Wonderful”, Artie Shaw, recorded 9 January 1945

American Music, Part One

“Tuxedo Junction”, by The Glenn Miller Orchestra:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Once lost, now found

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has never been whole since 1928. Even the recent restoration, which I saw in the theater, was missing chunks of the movie.
No more.
An original, full-length print has been discovered!
Please pardon me why I dance and leap and cavort in anticipation of viewing it.

Sounds like a must-see

Dirty Harry points us to a film (not a documentary) about life in North Korea, which is looking for a North American distributor:
Call it a Schindler’s List for North Korea. The difference is that the Steven Spielberg film debuted nearly 50 years after the Holocaust had ended. Crossing, which premieres today south of the DMZ [...]

Upbeat (with no cynicism)

To make up for the previous post, here’s Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Just Wild About Harry”:
powered by ODEO
If Odeo is being wonky, which it seems to be at this moment, you can download the Vorbis file.

When, And At What Cost

Six years ago, western civilization was challenged, confronted with the indisputable fact of a hate and an evil that wanted to destroy it without mercy, without compromise, without exception.
This should have galvanized us, united us, resolved us, and committed us to wiping that evil from the face of the earth, without remorse.
And for some of [...]

Curious books available on-line

I’ve got the RSS feeds for both Project Gutenberg and the Online Books Page subscribed in my Google Reader1, and cool, curious, or interesting stuff gets starred whenever I see it. Most of it will probably go onto my research reading lists rather than my for-pleasure reading lists, but here’s a sampling of what’s [...]