Monday, April 07, 2014

The Paul Winter Consort's "Icarus"

By Jack Brummet, Jazz Ed.

This is such a gorgeous song.  How often does a song so beautifully capture the whole story of its [one word] title?  You see Icarus soar and keep soaring, and then the dark part as the wax melts and the feathers fall away and the song fades out, like the doppler rings from his splash into the sea, radiating and dispersing into nothingness.


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Sunday, April 06, 2014

Amazon.com's $5 album deals

By Jack Brummet, Music ed.


Whenever Amazon sends one of those "5$ albums on sale now" emails, I generally take the bait and go look. Of however many albums, there are usually two good to great ones and the rest are remainders, or sub-remainders. If Amazon was an actual bookstore, these would be in a rack on the street marked "free," kind of like the stained couch those people down the block set out on the street in the rain.

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Saturday, April 05, 2014

All this is that visitors in the last 24 hours by world location


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Killing time: Google auto-completes

Mona Goldwater, Social Mores Ed.

For no particular reason, while waiting for some things to process, I decided to run some random Google searches to see the autocomplete results.  Here are a few from this morning:












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Friday, April 04, 2014

Fab new paintings by former President George W. Bush (with a link to his older ones)

By Jack Brummet, painting ed.

We wrote about Ex-President George W. Bush's painting last year.  Since then, he has produced a whole bunch of new canvases -- portraits of world leaders he knew and met with during his eight year occupation of the White House














Our article on President Bush's earlier paintings:

The complete (so far) painting oeuvre of George W. Bush (24 paintings and counting)

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Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Mike Kelly's amazing composite airplane photograph

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Ed.


Wow! Mike Kelly of Pure Photo photographed every plane that took from LAX in an eight hour period. He then worked in Photoshop eight hours to amazingly combine them into one image. 

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Poem: Waiting

By Jack Brummet


There is
no tomorrow

until we
get through

the day
after yesterday
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Monday, March 31, 2014

Andy Warhol greets Pope John Paul II/a note on Andy's religion

By Mona Goldwater, Religions Ed.


No one really thought of Andy Warhol as being especially religious when he was alive.  He did, however, attend church regularly.

In an interview with Lee Radziwill, conducted by Warhol and Fred Hughes for the March 1975 Interview magazine, Andy talked about going to church regularly and taking communion "sometimes."


From the piece "Warhol at Home" in Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters by John Richardson (published by Pimlico in England in 2001), page 247:


"To believe the envious Truman Capote, Andy was a Sphinx without a secret. In fact, he did have a secret, one that the kept dark from all but his closest friends: he was exceedingly devout - so much so that he made daily visits to the church of Saint Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan... Although famously thrifty, he was also secretly charitable. Besides giving financial support, he often spent evenings working in a shelter for the homeless run by the Church of the Heavenly Rest. It was not soppy social consciousness or guilt that prompted Andy's good works; it was atavism as personified by his adored and adoring mother, the pious Julia."
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ATIT reheated: UFO and a green-faced entity seen at Nike Missile Base in Redmond, Washington

[From All This Is That, March 2005]

By Jack Brummet, Alien Lore Ed.




From a MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) Report. This UFO and alien sighting occurred a couple of miles away from my office.

DATE: June 24, 1988
TIME: Sometime between 12:30 and 2:00 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time
LOCATION: Redmond, Washington
DURATION: Estimates vary, around 7 minutes for sighting of UFO; about 45 minutes total duration including sighting of face, possibly longer

SOURCE OF SIGHTING: UFO Information Service (Goudie)

INVESTIGATORS:
Donald A. Johnson, Ph.D., MUFON
Don Olson, MUFON
Rita Andreeva, MUFON


Four 11-year-old girls who had attended a private Christian elementary school together were having a slumber party reunion at the home of one of the girls on Education Hill in Redmond, Washington. At a few minutes after either 12:30 AM or 1:30 AM they were looking out the window to see if they could find the girl's dog. They were downstairs in the TV room, while the parents and brother and sister of the host were asleep upstairs. They witnessed a craft-like UFO, described as either a domed-disc or two plates put together edge-to- edge, hovering in the night sky. It had white and red lights and possibly faint green lights around the rim of the object. Of the two girls interviewed, both thought right away that it was a UFO (i.e. "spacecraft"), and not an aircraft because it was similar to a picture they had once seen in a book.



The UFO was hovering at about 30 degrees above the horizon when first sighted. It was described as smaller than a house in size, possibly 25 feet in diameter. The UFO moved to the right horizontally about 10 degrees, reversed direction abruptly and moved back in a straight line to the left 10 degrees, moved back to the right 5 degrees to a center position, and then moved really fast straight down. It moved down behind some tall evergreen trees and the girls thought that it probably came down in a clearing in Nike Park, about 3-4 blocks from the girl's home where they were staying. The UFO was reported to be visible through the window of the TV room for a total of between 2 and 7 minutes.


Sometime later, within 15 minutes to a half an hour, two of the girls witnessed a frightening face. The accounts of how the face appeared to them varies. In one account the girls thought they saw something like a shadow or a figure at the top of the stairs leading up to the kitchen. The became scared and hid in their sleeping bags; they zipped them over their heads and lay next to each other. They conversed through the bags and agreed to look at the same time, so that it would not be too scary. As they pulled the bags down from over their heads they saw a dark, mossy green face only about arm's length away. Really frightened, one of the girls pulled the sleeping bag over her head, and when she looked out again in a few minutes, the being was gone. The other girl's account said they were lying on their backs trying to get to sleep and staring up at the ceiling when all of a sudden they both saw this green face. She watched it for about 45 seconds, "and then it just, went away". Asked if it just vanished like it was a slide from a projector or something, she said, no, it wasn't like that. It was just like a real face, but it was green in color and it was looking at them. The second girl appears to be unclear about how the face appeared because she also reports she covered her head with the sleeping bag at one point but can't remember when.

The face was described as greenish in hue, with red, glowing eyes. Interviewed separately, both of the girls said there was something like a dent in one of the cheeks. One girl said it looked
like the "face on Mars" photograph she saw in the newspaper about a week later, while the other girl said it had pointy ears and bushy eyebrows. When asked a direct question later about the pointed ears, the second girl said she didn't remember any ears. If the face had indeed been attached to a body, one girl figures that the being must have been about 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall.

About 10 to 15 minutes later the second girl, who lived there, saw a clump of rainbow colored lights slowly revolving in her kitchen and flashing light all over the ceiling and refrigerator. The first girl made a vague reference to lights in the kitchen but apparently did not see the rainbow-colored clump of lights hovering in the kitchen (the kitchen is partially visible from the TV room, up half a flight of stairs).

The girls became noisy discussing what they had seen woke the mother. The mother came down and ordered them to go to sleep. Apparently nothing further happened that night.

Of the other two girls, they are certain that one saw what they saw but would not consent to be interviewed by UFO investigators. They are unsure what the fourth girl saw. The second girl, the one at whose home the events occurred, reported that she had had a precognitive experience during that previous day, recalling during a croquet match that she had dreamed those exact events some weeks before. She also reports that since the UFO incident she is no longer subject to nose bleeds, which she reports have occurred to her chronically throughout her life and also occur with her father. She also said that a soccer injury to her knee no longer gave her any pain after the encounter, and she attributes the healing to the event.
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