fog photos

  

Fog and spiderwebs from my 5min. walk a few mornings back.

Boston, PA

Digital camera for Christmas + finally figuring out flickr's online photo stuff = images, maybe. We'll start with the above, a (literal) screenshot from last Sunday night's Journal de France newscast. The story was about major US cities affected by the recent blizzard. Two for three ain't bad.

The uncritical enthusiasm of the European intellectual for tribal culture appears in the exclamation of the architect Le Corbusier on first seeing Manhattan: "It is hot-jazz in stone." It appears again in the artist Moholy-Nagy's account of his visit to a San Francisco night club in 1940. A Negro band was playing with zest and laughter. Suddenly a player intoned, "One million and three," and was answered: "One million and seven and a half." Then another sang, "Eleven," and another, "Twenty-one." Then amidst "happy laughter and shrill singing the numbers took over the place."

Moholy-Nagy notes how, to Europeans, America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of their own in phrases like "57 Varieties," "the 5 and 10," or "7 Up" and "behind the 8-ball." It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures.

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

NY Times: Is Alaska's Only Elephant Happy? Some say that Maggie should be moved from the Alaska Zoo to a warmer climate where she could get more outdoor exercise. Zoo officials have responded with plans to build her a treadmill.

LA Times: TAIPEI, Taiwan — The radio show called "Special Communications" was an unlikely hit, given that it consisted of announcers reading strings of numbers for 15 minutes.
Taiwan used the mind-numbing program in the 1980s to send coded messages to its spies in mainland China. But like many Taiwanese propaganda broadcasts, it could also be picked up locally. To the surprise of many at the government-run Radio Taiwan International, the show soon developed a cult following among Taiwanese. [full story]