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Monday Links from the Post-Prandial Sofa vol. CIV

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    Monday Links from the Post-Prandial Sofa vol. CIV

    Home again! If your Christmas dinner was anything like as good as the one my sister came up with, you won't feel like moving much, so settle down and browse this lot instead:
    • Exposing Houdini's Tricks of Magic (Nov, 1929) - "Only one man, the artisan who made his magic apparatus, knows the working secrets of Houdini's most mystifying stunts." There's a huge collection of other good stuff scanned from Modern Mechanics magazine on this site: "Yesterday's Tomorrow Today!"

    • Carved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee - Yet more remarkable sculptures made out of books: "Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are."

    • Comics. Often dirty. - "Please click on the button below to certify you're over 18. Of course, if you are under 18, you can't legally certify anything. So if you're a minor, please get a parent or guardian to click on the button which says you aren't."

    • Twenty three years - @loveandgarbage remembers the Lockerbie bombing: "The stench. A thick stench in the air. A thick stench still in the nostrils in the day after – every breath for hours reminding you. But you needed no reminding. You walked along the familiar streets. And the park? Not like the park you remember. It was full. Row upon row upon row of luggage. Look over your shoulder and see the hill, bright plastic sheets there covering things. Get to the door and you walk in. And in the kitchen your grandmother has shut curtains. She never shuts curtains. And you look out. And you look out."

    • IAMA Jewelry store clerk. I handle thousands of dollars of merchandise every day, and I'm ready to spill the beans on the industry to help redditors. Boyfriends and husbands, take note. Girlfriends and wives, learn and appreciate. - Redditors notable_bro and others share the secrets of the jewellery trade. Maybe a bit late for you, but you'll know what to watch out for next Christmas/birthday/anniversary

    • "An EXTRA TRAIN will leave Shoreditch" - Trains on Christmas Day before 1900 - "In the 1830s and early 1840s it seems that the railway companies did not make any special arrangements for Christmas Day and ran regular weekday services... The reason that trains continued to run as normal on Christmas Day in this period was, I presume, because it was only significantly observed by the upper and middle classes and for many people it simply a normal day." Apparently, the last Christmas Day passenger train service in the UK ran in 1981.

    • Advice on how to be a good witness in court (in England & Wales) - "Having fought about a thousand trials when I practiced as a barrister, I know what it takes to be a good witness. This is neither secret knowledge nor actual legal advice but it is inside knowledge which I’m sharing. People who frequently give evidence in court, whether they be expert witnesses, police officers or business people learn this knowledge for themselves but the vast majority of people who appear as witnesses do so for the first time. They lack a proper understanding of how they will be assessed as witnesses. Consequently, many of them do themselves much injustice. Their presentation of their evidence is prejudiced by popular culture. Films, TV shows, literature and the like almost never represents court proceedings properly." Scrapper Duncan offers you lengthy free tuition in the art; handy the next time you sue the builder who cocked-up your conservatory.

    • Alexander Graham Bell recordings played from 1880s - "Alexander Graham Bell foresaw many things, including that people could someday talk over a telephone. Yet the inventor certainly never could have anticipated that his audio-recording experiments in a Washington, D.C., lab could be recovered 130 years later and played for a gathering of scientists, curators and journalists." The Smithsonian and other institutions have done excellent work making three-dimensional scans of wax cylinders and the like that are too delicate to play, and analysing the results to recreate the stored sound.

    • Race To The Moon with Richard Furno, Part 1 - Part 2 - "Please join me in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Race to the Moon! Map co-author Richard Furno has allowed me to turn his keynote presentation into a post on my blog illustrating the trials and tribulations of creating this fabulous wall map for the National Geographic Society’s magazine." In 1969, National Geographic published an incredibly detailed map of the Moon, using the data available from the US and Soviet space programmes. This is the story of how it was done.

    • The Wormworld Saga: Chapter 2 - The Journey Begins - It's a year since Daniel Lieske published the first chapter of his beautiful online graphic novel (linked to in Monday Links vol. LIV) , and here's chapter 2 - yes, it takes him around twelve months to plan, rough out and draw each chapter. In the past year it has been translated by volunteers into multiple languages, and he has raised enough funding from donations and the sale of prints to give up his day job and focus on it full time. He expects the entire work to take ten years to complete


    Happy invoicing!
    Last edited by NickFitz; 26 December 2011, 18:36. Reason: Bloody typo :(

    #2
    awesome work fitzy!

    thanks very much for the most excellent links.

    i raise my post cold-meat-feast brandy glass to you sir!

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