Золотое правило Великого винилового гуру северо-запада
14 minutes ago
Sunday 22 May 2011
How Snake Oil Got a Bad Rap (Hint: It Wasn’t The Snakes’ Fault)
But get this: The original snake oil actually worked. Save this one for the next cocktail party; it will blow your friends’ minds.
In the 1860s, Chinese laborers immigrated to the United States to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. At night, they would rub their sore, tired muscles with ointment made from Chinese water snake (Enhydris chinensis), an ancient Chinese remedy they shared with their American co-workers.
A 2007 story in Scientific American explains that California neurophysiology researcher Richard Kunin made the connection between Chinese water snakes and omega-3 fatty acids in the 1980s.
“Kunin visited San Francisco’s Chinatown to buy such snake oil and analyze it. According to his 1989 analysis published in the Western Journal of Medicine, Chinese water-snake oil contains 20 percent eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), one of the two types of omega-3 fatty acids most readily used by our bodies. Salmon, one of the most popular food sources of omega-3s, contains a maximum of 18 percent EPA, lower than that of snake oil.”
However, it wasn’t until several years after Kunin’s research that American scientists discovered that omega-3s are vital for human metabolism. Not only do they sooth inflammation in muscles and joints, but also, they can help “cognitive function and reduce blood pressure, cholesterol, and even depression.”
So why does snake oil have such a bad rap?...
Continue reading
Lisa Hix @'Collectors Weekly'
Q&A: Mark E Smith
Mark E Smith was born in 1957 and grew up in Prestwich, Greater Manchester. He left school at 16, and worked in a meat factory and then for an import-export company in Manchester docks. In 1976, he formed the post-punk band, The Fall, who were championed by the late DJ John Peel. He has been the only constant member since the band formed. Tomorrow, The Fall will play the Friends Of Mine Festival in Cheshire; in September, they will release their 29th album, on Cherry Red Records. His autobiography, Renegade, was published in 2008.
When were you happiest?
Every day is great for me. I dislike rose-coloured glasses.
What is your greatest fear?
Being trapped in a lift with Chatty Man or at a UK music festival with no transport. Fear is something I try not to absorb.
What is your earliest memory?
Having a hot wash at the age of four, before my first day of school.
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
All nurses and television programmers at 4am who "update". But mainly myself, as Napoleon.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Having to clean my teeth and look after my health.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
A lot of people seem obliged to have a viewpoint.
What was your most embarrassing moment?
It is weekly.
Aside from a property, what's the most expensive thing you've bought?
Human souls are not cheap.
What makes you unhappy?
All UK comedians.
What is your most treasured possession?
A tree in my front garden.
Where would you like to live?
Peking during the Boxer rebellion, 1900.
What would your super power be?
No food necessary. True bats know false powers drag you down.
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
I could use a new brain and other organs.
If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
A decent bitter/lager.
Who would play you in the film of your life?
Orson Welles or Brian Cox.
What is your most unappealing habit?
Random spitting, stealing lighters – both are unconscious.
What is your favourite smell?
Rain.
What is your favourite word or phrase?
"See you later."
What is your favourite book?
North, by Céline, and My Autobiography: Kevin Keegan.
What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
A Jack Straw outfit, including voice and face.
What is the worst thing anyone's said to you?
Don't think you can leave me/this company/this train etc.
Cat or dog?
Not dog – mutual hatred.
Is it better to give or to receive?
The first.
What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Spiked Opal Fruits/Starbursts (in whisky) – cheap.
What do you owe your parents?
Pointing the way to the front door.
Rosanna Greenstreet @'The Guardian'
When were you happiest?
Every day is great for me. I dislike rose-coloured glasses.
What is your greatest fear?
Being trapped in a lift with Chatty Man or at a UK music festival with no transport. Fear is something I try not to absorb.
What is your earliest memory?
Having a hot wash at the age of four, before my first day of school.
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
All nurses and television programmers at 4am who "update". But mainly myself, as Napoleon.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Having to clean my teeth and look after my health.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
A lot of people seem obliged to have a viewpoint.
What was your most embarrassing moment?
It is weekly.
Aside from a property, what's the most expensive thing you've bought?
Human souls are not cheap.
What makes you unhappy?
All UK comedians.
What is your most treasured possession?
A tree in my front garden.
Where would you like to live?
Peking during the Boxer rebellion, 1900.
What would your super power be?
No food necessary. True bats know false powers drag you down.
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
I could use a new brain and other organs.
If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
A decent bitter/lager.
Who would play you in the film of your life?
Orson Welles or Brian Cox.
What is your most unappealing habit?
Random spitting, stealing lighters – both are unconscious.
What is your favourite smell?
Rain.
What is your favourite word or phrase?
"See you later."
What is your favourite book?
North, by Céline, and My Autobiography: Kevin Keegan.
What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
A Jack Straw outfit, including voice and face.
What is the worst thing anyone's said to you?
Don't think you can leave me/this company/this train etc.
Cat or dog?
Not dog – mutual hatred.
Is it better to give or to receive?
The first.
What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Spiked Opal Fruits/Starbursts (in whisky) – cheap.
What do you owe your parents?
Pointing the way to the front door.
Rosanna Greenstreet @'The Guardian'
Saturday 21 May 2011
Kraftwerk Icons by Dave Brasgalla
© The Iconfactory
This collection contains 13 icons with large resources for Windows & Mac OS X.
It begins!
BreakingNews Breaking News
Moderate 4.8-magnitude earthquake strikes near Solomon Islands, South Pacific http://on.doi.gov/mzlNvF
zunguzungu Aaron Bady
"The place was filthy. If you really believed the end was near, would you waste time vacuuming?" Visiting Family Radio: http://s.tt/12sJB
Revolutionary Cells:
On the Role of Texts, Tweets, and Status Updates in Nonviolent Revolutions
(PDF)
On the Role of Texts, Tweets, and Status Updates in Nonviolent Revolutions
(PDF)
History of Electronic / Electroacoustic Music (1937-2001)
This is from a 62 CD set called "The History of Electroacoustic Music" that was floating around as a torrent, reputedly curated by a Portugese student. It's sketchy. The torrent vanished and the collection has long been unavailable.
It's a clearly flawed selection: there's no women and almost no one working outside of the Western tradition (where are the Japanese? Chinese? etc.). However, as an effort, it's admirable and contains a ton of great stuff. Take it with a grain of salt, or perhaps use it as a provocation to curate a more intelligent, inclusive, and comprehensive selection.
@'UbuWeb'
Grinderman - A Short Film
A short film about Grinderman. First broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK on 19 May 2011. The film includes an interview with Nick Cave, behind the scenes footage from the album artwork photoshoot and videos by John Hillcoat, Ilinca Höpfner and Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard
German police seize Pirate Party servers, looking at Anon's toolkit
Authorities appear to be concerned about a possible attack on French energy giant EDF. The German Pirate Party said in a statement that it does not believe itself to be a target of the investigation and expressed willingness “within its legal obligations” to aid French police:
The [Pirate Party] Board does not have information that indicates the necessity to take all servers of the Pirate Party off-line. According to the information it has been provided with, only one single public service on a virtual server of the party was affected. The disconnection of all servers is a massive intrusion into the communications infrastructure of the sixth largest party in Germany. Considering the state elections taking place in Bremen in two days, this caused a severe political damage, which the Board condemns decisively.
In relation to the ongoing investigations, it will have to be verified whether the issued search warrant was actually appropriate, especially whether the principle of proportionality was followed. After all, this action has led to a large-scale breakdown of the technical infrastructure of the Pirate Party Germany. It will also have to be verified whether data have been affected that have no relation to the French investigation.
PiratenPad links in Anonymous chat rooms
The EtherPad Foundation, which coordinates development of the underlying technology, said today, "We entirely support PiratenPad in its struggle, we believe that EtherPad deployments and really-real time collaborative document editing should be a right for all people, great and small."
The group believes the main reason for the raid is “because PiratenPad was being used by the group Anonymous to organize an attack," but notes that even this particular EtherPad install was used for legitimate purposes such as "structured debates around the protests in Spain, so this is a major cause for concern from a libertarian perspective."
Anonymous' main communications tools have been hit hard in the last two weeks. The main Internet Relay Chat servers, run by a group called AnonOps, were taken over last week by a dissident member and have only recently been relocated to a different domain name, which continues to have "issues." Now comes the attack on PiratenPad, though an AnonOps leader says that "police.de wasn't my fault."
Rick Falkvinge, who heads the Swedish Pirate Party, came to the defense of his piratical brethren today, writing, "Doing this to a democratic party—Germany’s sixth largest, actually—two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage. This shows why we must introduce understanding of information policy into the justice system all across Europe. A computer is not just something you can carry away; doing so has consequences. It is not a wrench, and yet the law (and police) treat it like any tool, just like a wrench."
In response to the takeover of its servers, the German Pirate Party has been tweeting up some sturm und drang today, and its "#servergate" hashtag is the second highest "trending" tag in Germany.
Not surprisingly, the main German police website is now down, as is the website of federal investigators (the BKA). As one Anon put it in a tweet, "#Anonymous to german police: 'Let me introduce myself...' #servergate #PoliceMeetsCocks."
But the German Pirate Party called the attacks inappropriate. "We condemn the totally inappropriate actions by investigators,” said Sebastian Mink, chair of the Chairman Pirate Party, “but these actions are not a reason to attack other websites and we distance ourselves from such attacks.”
Nate Anderson @'Ars Technica'
*Gigg(le)s*
prodnose Danny Baker
BBC LATEST: Injunction footballer "to sue Twitter". Also seeks restraining order on anyone going within 100m of grapevine. More later.
BBC LATEST: Injunction footballer "to sue Twitter". Also seeks restraining order on anyone going within 100m of grapevine. More later.
Patti Smith interviewed by Thurston Moore (BOMB 54/Winter 1996)
Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe
Patti Smith was, and is, pure experience… Her reign in the 70s as a street-hot rock & roll messiah seemed to exist from a void. No past, no future—”the future is here,” she’d sing. I’d hear tales of romance, the girl with the blackest hair hanging out at recording sessions writing poetry. But I didn’t know her. I could only embrace the identity I perceived. I was impressionable and she came on like an alien. The first time I met her was in 1975 in a magazine. It was two poems about three wishes: rock & roll, sex, and New York City. Her photo was stark—no disco color flash. It was anti-glam, nocturnal staring eyes, black leather trousers. She was skinny and smart. She posed as if she were the coolest boy in the city. And she was. I could only imagine her world through her poems: telling, truthful, dirty, hopeful. I wanted to meet her and take her to a movie, but she was so unobtainable and fantastic I could only entrust my faith to the future. The future would allow me to have a date with Patti Smith or at least hang out with her. And the future seems to have come. It seems to be happening, it’s happened. It’s here.Patti grew up in south Jersey in the ‘60s. As a teenager she became involved in a succession of religious experiences: “Catholic lust,” an intense relationship with the Jehovah Witnesses, and a full-on romance with Tibetan Buddhism. She completely immersed herself in the genius of Bob Dylan and Arthur Rimbaud. She loved (and loves) rock & roll with an unbounded passion. It instilled beauty and vision to a complex life of dreams.
Patti moved to New York City late in the decade. I’ve met people who knew her at this time and I’ll stare at them as if to somehow transport myself through their memory to see her. She was skinny and exotic. She had Keith Richard’s haircut. She was sexy and manic. She worked at book stores and wrote and read poetry and did art. She co-wrote and acted in Cowboy Mouth with Sam Shepard. She was muse and lover to Robert Mapplethorpe. They were writers, artists, and rock & rollers—they were young and had any which way to go. Years moved by.
She and Lenny Kaye jammed poetry and electric guitar at St. Mark’s Church. Patti would touch her chest and pronounce, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine…” Word was out that an amazing woman with a wild, intellectual positivism was tearing it up downtown. Local news programs and the Village Voice would begin to monitor her moves. She wrote amazing, celebratory record reviews for Rolling Stone, ??Rock Scene and Creem. Rock & roll was the sounding tool for modern prayer. She went to hear Television at CBGB and joined forces with Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. They amplified the influence of Burroughs, Genet, Hendrix, Dylan, Stooges, Dolls and reggae.
Patti and Television spent 1975 at CBGB creating a forum for an excited and completely distinctive sensibility. “We created it, let’s take it over,” she’d shout and brought serious sounds to the people away from the arena-mind of the corporatized music/youth culture. Revolution was neccessary. The Ramones came in, Blondie came in, Talking Heads came in. Entrepreneurs hyped the Sex Pistols and a subculture was begun. Its current status as a valid mainstream format is just a commercial of its sublime expansion. By 1979 Patti split to Michigan with Fred “Sonic” Smith (legendary guitarist of Detroit’s high energy prophets the MC5) and got married. They had two kids and did a lot of fishing. She was out of the scene and out of sight. A second generation of artists and musicians had come to New York City and began to make noise in an explosion of punk rock inspired enterprise. The strongest and most original force in the music’s history had been a woman. And this fact alone exacted upon the “punk” culture a situation in which women were empowered and encouraged.
Patti reappeared in the late ‘80s with the affirming “People Have the Power.” The song’s video showed a distinguished, serious Patti at home in proclamation amongst images of spiritual leadership. She and Fred played at a celebration for Dylan and another for Jackson Pollock.
Fred passed away in 1995 as did Patti’s brother and close friend, Todd. Robert Mapplethorpe had also passed away.
Patti doesn’t drive. In 1977 she fell off the stage and her eyesight was damaged. Survival in Michigan is difficult and lonely without Fred. She wants to play. As soon as her 13-year-old ends the school year she plans on moving back to New York. She has no set design on a professional life but she loves performance. And teaching. I could only interview Patti in conversational mode. She speaks with humor and thoughtfulness, her words are at once searching and prosaic.
I flew to Boston to meet her and Lenny Kaye where we were to drive to Lowell, Massachusetts for a benefit for the Kerouac Foundation. She asked me to play guitar on three songs: one she had written, one by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, and one an improvisation to a poem by Kerouac. We did a show in Lowell and two in Boston, all three in these cool churches. We spent Saturday visiting the haunts of Kerouac’s Lowell. Patti took Polaroids of my hands for a Sunday exhibit at a friend’s gallery in Jamaica Plain. She’d frame the photos with broad white frames and write around them vignettes pertaining to the subject. I was friends with someone I had dreamed of being friends with for nearly 20 years.
This conversation was recorded late night in a hotel in Lowell, October 6, and the next day in the back seat of a car driving to Boston.
INTERVIEW
Via
(Thanx son#1!)
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