Arbore, a flooring contractor in Madrid, Spain, created these awesome interlocking hardwood pieces in the form of M.C. Escher’s famous geometric Reptiles.
[via Technabob]
Want.
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fedward, tumbling
goes on, and the heat goes on
~ Saturday, May 18 ~
1,346 notes
~ Tuesday, May 14 ~
npr:
By the end of the century, ocean levels could rise by 2 or 3 feet. That’s enough to flood the colonists’ first settlement at Jamestown, Va. And it’s putting pressure on archaeologists to get as many artifacts out of the ground as quickly as possible — before it’s too late.
— With Rising Seas, America’s Birthplace Could Disappear
Photo: John Poole/NPR
This is upsetting. Jamestown is one if the most interesting national parks, not to mention an important one.
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~ Monday, May 13 ~
“ Really, no one actually wants to mispronounce a name. The onus is on me to correct a person the first time — I’ve become quite vigilant in this respect. I also love when people ask me how to pronounce it, say it back and ask, “Am I saying it right?” It’s as if they’re throwing me a bone here — yes, I decided to go by this difficult-to-pronounce name, but hey, we’re in this together, this business of being fully who we are and respecting others for doing the same.
—
“How Do You Spell It?” Life With A Name Nobody Knows How To Pronounce | xoJane
FWIW, I’ve tried to become much more consistent with this when encountering a name I haven’t heard before. I used to wonder if that made me look like some rube and caused the name-haver to roll their eyes, but I have come to the conclusion that the opposite is true: People with unusual-in-America names are perfectly aware that this is the case, and probably run into people effing it up all the time. Thus it is MORE respectful, not less, to stop and say, “Can you repeat that, please? I want to make sure I’m getting it right.”
(via tiffanyb)
Ages ago I was in a summer opera program with a young woman from Japan named Hiroko. She was well used to people mangling her name, and in fact the stage director proved hopelessly unable to pronounce it even remotely correctly (the fact he was greatly apologetic could not overcome a natural inability for languages). For the singers, however, we were used to singing in multiple languages we didn’t grow up with, and every single one of us – quite naturally – put effort into that very exchange. Ironically this was so much interaction it made the stereotypically shy Japanese woman Hiroko very uncomfortable. She’d never been around that many people who were trying so genuinely to get it right.
And oh, without digging out phonetic symbols, it’s roughly “he-DO-ko”. Or “Heroki” to our poor, linguistically challenged director.
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I recently asked this question on Twitter:
Assuming a starting point of Leith, if you walked 500 miles and 500 more, where would you actually end up?
I figured there was no way you could walk a reasonably direct thousand miles from Scotland and still be on land, so the obvious answer is that you’d turn back after the first 500 and return to Leith.
But that’s cheating. You might as well walk circles around Edinburgh, or at least find a single route roughly following the borders of Scotland.
The direct route from Leith to Dover, however, is a little shy of 500 miles, so in my presumed scenario (my game, my rules) the walker doesn’t want to go too far out of his way, but would also like to get off his feet periodically. Adding stops in Glasgow (our walker is Scottish, so he should have friends or family there), Manchester (music scene), and London (because nobody’s going to walk past London without going in), gets us to 510 miles before Dover.
From there it’s a ferry to Calais, where the 500 more commence. Possible destinations also exist in northern Germany (Kiel area), central Germany (Ulm), the French Alps (somewhere between Lyon and Grenoble), or Bordeaux.
And again, my game, my rules, so I’m going with Bordeaux. If I’ve walked a thousand miles to fall down at your door, that door had better be at a winery.
Also, don’t be fooled by the total distance, since it includes the 25.7 mile ferry trip. Leith to Bordeaux is almost exactly a thousand miles of walking.
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~ Friday, May 10 ~
~ Thursday, May 9 ~
OK, maybe I’m a little late to the game on this (it was posted in February) but who doesn’t love stride piano?
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~ Wednesday, May 8 ~
“ Even the most famous bootleggers in America rarely made millions during the early years. Al Capone was said during his tax-evasion trial to have made $1 million in 1924 and 1925 combined, a time when the bootlegging business was better established. Dean O’Banion, Capone’s main rival, was said to have made $1 million annually on bootlegged liquor, but only at his peak. And George Remus, a notorious Cincinnati-based bootlegger who was dubbed “King of the Bootleggers” in a 2008 biography by William A. Cook, only began making serious money after 1921 (his total net worth was estimated at $6 million by 1925), when he entered into a “gentleman’s agreement” with law enforcement officials that allowed him to avoid prosecution.
Tags:
gatsby
anything worth doing is worth overdoing
—
Was the Great Gatsby Broke? — Daily Intelligencer
My only problem with this article is that I felt the book implied Gatsby had even more sources of income than were listed, so any straightforward estimate of what he could have taken in from the businesses we know about is bound to miss the ones that Fitzgerald left out (or that Nick Carraway didn’t mention because he himself didn’t know).
That said, the analysis sticks, regardless. Even if Gatsby made twice as much through other lines of business, he was still spending an unsustainable amount of money on his lifestyle
Plus, this just seems like the sort of thing I’d figure out some night when I couldn’t sleep, so I’m glad the work has been done for me.
“ At some point my grandma made a very strange decision, that she wasn’t just going to tape these interviews with these people, she was just going to tape everything. So I have all these tapes of my grandmother. In one instance it’s of her in the back of a taxi cab, lost, in Los Angeles, screaming at the taxi driver. At one point the driver says: ‘You sound like my father!’ and my grandmother screams back: ‘Well, your father must be very disappointed in you!’
~ Tuesday, May 7 ~
“ All screenwriters think their babies are beautiful,” he said, taking a chug of Diet Dr Pepper followed by a gulp of Diet Coke and a drag on a Camel. “I’m here to tell it like it is: Some babies are ugly.
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