Day: March 25, 2008

Stagflation

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Waiter Rant on how the food industry is weathering the recession.

Forgive my flare of working class/misogynistic anger. Every server has good days and bad days. Old pros like me should be able to roll with the punches. But business at Café Machiavelli’s has been so bad lately that my patience is wearing thin. We’re down five hundred covers a week since I started. That’s bad. Waiters are getting cut on Saturday nights. Working a thirteen hour double last Thursday earned me a paltry sixty bucks. The staff members at the bottom of the tip totem pole, the bus people, are really hurting. One guy told me how he was having a hard time affording Pampers. Several bussers have already left, looking for greener pastures. The sad part is that there are no greener pastures. Things are bad all over. I don’t know if America’s economy is in a recession or not, but the restaurant industry sure as hell is.

Odd Musical Instruments Gallery

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Pictures and descriptions of odd musical instruments. Above is a picture of a man playing a double violin:

Part of an ongoing project that has lasted over 25 years, another one of Jon Rose’s “Relative Violins”, here we see a 10-string double violin, sharing the same fingerboard.

This is the development of a Total Artform based around the one instrument. Necessary to this concept has been innovation in the fields of new instrument design (over 20 deconstructed violin instruments including the legendary double piston and triple neck wheeling violin)

(via Monkeyfilter)

The Weather Underground

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A nine part documentary about The Weathermen (You can find the rest of the parts here):

In 1969, a small group of college students announced their intentions to overthrow the U.S. government in opposition to the Vietnam War.

“We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That’s really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don’t do anything about it, that’s violence.” -Naomi Jaffe

The Weather Underground Organization (Weathermen) hoped to cause chaos on a level able to “wake” the American public out of what the group saw as its complacency with the slaughter of between 3 and 5,000,000 Vietnamese people.

The group referred to itself as a revolutionary organization of women and men, whose purpose was to achieve the revolutionary overthrow of the Government of the United States. To that end, they carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots.

Attaching a Camera to an Elephant

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Cool pictures and awesome idea except I’m not sure why they couldn’t have found a smaller camera for the poor elephant. Cameras used for daguerreotypes were smaller…

We revealed the amazing story of how four tiger cubs were captured on special cameras in logs carried by elephants – giving the most intimate insight into their early lives ever recorded.

Now, we show for the first time other creatures of the jungle caught in this extraordinary – and pioneering – way.

Cheeky langur monkeys, a rare sloth bear, spotted deer and a leopard with her cub are just some of the other animals that film-maker John Downer came across in his fascinating experiment.

Top 15 Science Fiction Book Series

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From Listverse:

Nothing is better than finishing a brilliant science fiction novel knowing that it is only the first in a series. Some of the greatest minds in sci-fi have used the series format to create complex and thrilling universes for their story characters to exist in, while others have created dystopian (and utopian) future environments on earth. This list takes the best of the science fiction series genre and attempts to rank them – a difficult (and obviously subjective) task. For your reading pleasure, here are the 15 greatest science fiction book series.