ceci n’est pas un blog

I just heard that KUT is going to have Radiolab on at 3pm every day this week to see what response to it is like in Austin. I am fanatically obsessed with this show. It’s insightful, intelligent and funny, and I’ve learned a lot from it: everything from how rats to laugh to how problematic theories on the center of universe can be.

Since we don’t get it on the radio here, I listen to the podcast on iTunes, but I’m really hoping that they’ll get enough positive response to make it a regular show. If you want to call in to let KUT know that you like it (since they’re gaging response by calls), their number is 512-471-2345.

I’ve been a fan of Han Hoogerbrugge’s art and animations for a few years. I’m ecstatic that he has put up his whimsical and dark and hilarious short snippet animations on his site. You have to hover on them or click them to make them work. Oh, the hours of joy one can find on the nets.

I personally don’t find it to be great fun to talk to machines when I’m trying to get help by calling customer service numbers. A genuine, bona fide person is usually able to direct me more efficiently to what I need than a tone-deaf, humorless computer who doesn’t understand the irritation in my voice when I have to repeat something several times. Fortunately, someone else at Gethuman.com must’ve been equally annoyed, and made an easy way to connect to real people through their frequently-updated list of “cheats” to be able to reach a live person via a multitude of companies’ customer service numbers. Nifty!

Here’s a list of all the podcasts I subscribe to:

• Radio Oh La La: The only music podcast I subscribe to, this exceptional one is dedicated to French pop music from the 50s and 60s. High camp, classics and fun.
• The Sound of Young America. Just the tongue in cheek description of it being a “Public Radio Show About Things That Are Awesome” and the fact that the host and producer Jesse Thorn calls himself “America’s radio sweetheart” delight me. The show features intelligent interviews with authors, film makers, comedians, artists and more. True to its jingle, this is “maximum fun!”
• Boing boing boing. A very seldom podcast from the makers of boingboing.
• The Onion Radio News. You can get the Onion in pod form!
• Yoga Today. This video podcast is the only reason I’ve kept up with my yoga regularly, and I highly recommend it for those who need direction in yoga and don’t have time or motivation to go out of the house to do it. They do a different hour session of yoga everyday, and it’s great to be able to pause to look at certain poses in detail. You can fast forward through the ads at the beginning.

With this steady diet, I have enough entertainment to last a lifetime!

Well, since I’m off on a major flickr kick today, I might as well let it keep rolling. I just saw that there is a site called flickrvision.com which shows all the recent flickr photos that also have geographical information. It places them on a map, and flips through them as they’re added all over the world. What an addictive way to get a visual snapshot of what’s going on all over, right now. It makes the world feel smaller and yet still very diverse.

I love the feature in flickr where you can map all your photos to different places on a map. Here’s my personal flickr map of San Francisco memories. It’s really handy to be able to situate different images to associate memories with locations when you look back at them later.

I love past depictions of what people thought the future would be like. This collection is especially magical, as it includes a water-unicycle, slidewalks, locomotives pulling houses, personal airplanes, weather control systems, amphibious railways, police X-rays for seeing through walls, and zeppelins.

I’ve gotten obsessed with Pop Surrealism over the past year, and just realized that most of the coolest artists have websites, so I figured I might as well do a compilation of some great ones for those wandering souls who are trying to find such a list on the internet. Here she be:

• Mark Ryden
• Marion Peck
• Gary Baseman
• Tim Biskup
• Ray Caesar
• Ana Bagayan
• Scott Musgrove

As this is not at all a comprehensive list, feel free to add your own favorites.

There are also quite a few really interesting and weird artists on the Beinart International Surreal Art Collective site, but it’s not strictly pop surrealism by any means.

I am fascinated by Guy Maddin’s films which look like they were made in the dawn of the silent film period, but which have modern and bizarrely surreal themes. My favorite is his short film called “The Heart of the World“.

Today I discovered a photographer whose style is reminiscent of Maddin’s: Stephen Berkman. Just gotta love those anachronistic mash ups!

There’s a really neat flash-based site called musicovery that allows you to discover all kinds of music and visually navigate through musicians based on how they’re linked through musical style, time period, or even mood. Although it doesn’t include movies like liveplasma, the fact that it automatically plays music from the selected musician as you navigate makes it a really cool browseable jukebox.

In case anyone wants to have an RSS feed of my blog, you can just put
http://shannou.com/blog/?feed=rss2 in as the URL. It didn’t look like there’s anywhere on this page that allows you to do that , so I’m just sayin’.

I’ve recently learned that the best way to increase traffic to your site is to feature pictures of zombies and/or pirates and then have boingboing.net link to it. I didn’t even think when I submitted my flickr photoset to them that they would post it since the title “Zombie Rights March Protested by Pirates” seemed too ludicrous to be featured on any site. I laughed wildly to myself as I typed up this absurd (but true) description of it:

Here’s a flickr set of pictures documenting the zombie rights march to Austin’s City Hall last Friday. The zombies’ signs in the march included badly spelled slogans such as “Mairage = 1 Zombie + 1 Zombie”, “More Binifits for Zombie Vets in Our Necronomoconomy”, “Brains…The Other White Meat”, “We’re here, we’re dead, get used to it!” and “Zombies Was People Too.” The zombies, shouting “What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Brains!” was unhindered by a group of pirates protesting the undead’s demands for their rights.

In the day or two that followed, I was very glad that I hadn’t posted the images on my own server since the photoset ended up getting over 20,000 visits. Ah, the excitement of being boingboinged. And the silliness that I can use that or “google” as a verb and have so many people know what I mean!

zefrank syndicated this lovely video which elaborates the artistic fountain possibilities inherent in the combination of 101 2 liter bottles of Diet Coke with 523 Mentos.

I’ve recently been researching different ways to portray large amounts of data visually, and found one that shows web tags in a graphical representation. It’s a fun way to compare the structures of different sites, and you can try your own site on Websites as Graphs.

Wowsers. I love coffee. I don’t love Folgers, but this bizarre commercial done by Saatchi & Saatchi sums the love up pretty well. And it’s invigorating!