Paul on upright bass and vocal doing the Elvis tune ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
A clip from ‘Chaos & Creation At Abbey Road’
Day: March 18, 2008
RIP Arthur C. Clarke
Wikipedia’s entry on Arthur C. Clarke.
How a German wartime flying ace discovered he shot down his hero
From The Mail:
A German fighter ace has just learned that one of his 28 wartime ‘kills’ was his favourite author.
Messerschmidt pilot Horst Rippert, 88, said he would have held his fire if he had known the man flying the Lightning fighter was renowned French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
The fliers clashed in the skies over southern France in July 1944.
(via Kottke)
Three Little Pigs (Disney 1933)
The Life Clock
From Ektopia:
Watch your life tick away with the Life Clock. It’s been slowed down 61320 times to represent 84 years in one single revolution.
Absinthe Posters
The height of the absinthe boom in the late 19th century, coincided with the rise of the large lithographic advertising poster as a
powerful commercial and artistic medium Рpioneered by the work of Jules Ch̩ret. Some of the greatest poster artists of the
period – Cappiello, Privat-Livemont, Lefevre, Tamagno – created famous images to advertise the absinthe grand marques.
Fortunately, the greatest of them all, Toulouse Lautrec, never produced an absinthe-specific poster, thus thoughtfully sparing
future generations of absinthiana collectors the necessity of a potentially financially ruinous purchase….
Daily Dose of Ingersoll
How do they answer all this? They say that God “permits” it.
What would you say to me if I stood by and saw a ruffian beat out
the brains of a child, when I had full and perfect power to prevent
it? You would say truthfully that I was as bad as the murderer. Is
it possible for this God to prevent it? Then, if he does not he is
a fiend; he is no god. But they say he “permits” it. What for? So
that we may have freedom of choice. What for? So that God may find,
I suppose, who are good and who are bad. Did he not know that when
he made us? Did he not know exactly just what he was making? Why
should he make those whom he knew would be criminals? If I should
make a machine that would walk your streets and take the lives of
people you would hang me. And if God made a man whom he knew would
commit murder, then God is guilty of that murder. If God made a man
knowing that he would beat his wife, that he would starve his
children, that he would strew on either side of his path of life
the wrecks of ruined homes, then I say the being who knowingly
called that wretch into existence is directly responsible. And yet
we are to find the providence of God in the history of nations.
What little I have read shows me that when man has been helped, man
has done it; when the chains of slavery have been broken, they have
been broken by man; when something bad has been done in the
government of mankind, it is easy to trace it to man, and to fix
the responsibility upon human beings. You need not look to the sky;
you need throw neither praise nor blame upon gods; you can find the
efficient causes nearer home — right here.Robert Green Ingersoll – “Orthodoxy”(1884)