Yesterday I learned from Majikthise that Jerry Andrus had died. Jerry was a magician, an artist, an inventor, and a skeptic, and I had the honor of meeting him last year in the course of my work on an upcoming book. He was, as a friend said of him this morning, "one of the good guys."

You could sit in front of a television set all evening and come out and say you've had fun, but ... if you sit in front of a television and say you've had fun and enjoyed it, you've produced nothing in return. If you had fun making a project or something, or working on things, you've had fun and when you get done you have something to show for it.

His website is here, and it features a passel of lovely videos of him giving talks, performing magic, and demonstrating some of his tremendous home-built optical illusions.

The obit from Jerry's hometown paper is here.

Tags: art, random coolness, work

How can it be that the phrase "The Well of Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" returns not a single Google hit?

Tags: random coolness, weirdness

This (item ten, specifically) reminded me of this:



Baby sleeping on me again, by the way.

Tags: pop culture, random coolness

This kind of crazy is my favorite kind of crazy.

Tags: random coolness

A few minutes ago, someone in Qatar surfed here by way of my random coolness tag.

It's at times like this that I really wish LJ supported search-string tracking.

Tags: random coolness

Check this out. A lovely, simple concept beautifully executed.

Puts me in mind of this, vaguely, too.

Update: Oops. That first link is a math/music thing. It's a little noisy, so don't click it if you don't like noise.

Tags: random coolness

Back when we were mucking around with drink names, lauredhel put in a plug for Il Pompelmo, a grapefruit soda from San Pellegrino --- cousin to the delectable Limonata, Aranciata, and Chinotto.

Well, I kept my eyes open and eventually noticed a lone bottle on the shelf at my local Italian butcher. Bought it. Drank it. Delicious. Then again a couple of weeks later. Lone bottle; bought; drank; delish. This week I went in and they had six bottles on the shelf. Bought two of 'em. (I hope someone else in this nabe likes Pompelmo, because otherwise the lovely Italians are riding for an unpleasant fall after September 1.)

But man oh man is it good. Sweet but not too sweet, with a nice bite to it and a really full grapefruit flavor. My dad's going to love it. Thanks, lauredhel!

Tags: random coolness

On the first night of the National Student Association's 1972 convention, NSA hosted a concert by Wayne Cochran and his CC Riders. In the middle of Cochran's set, a group of female delegates stormed the stage to protest his sexism. They tried to confront him, tried to get him to defend himself, but he left the auditorium and the concert was abandoned.

I'd never heard of Wayne Cochran before I read the coverage of the 1972 incident in an NSA newspaper. Turns out he was a white R&B singer from Georgia who cobbled together a pretty good career for himself in spite of never finding a breakthrough hit. (He did record two songs --- "Harlem Shuffle" and "Last Kiss" --- that other bands later sold a lot of records covering.)

For most of the sixties and seventies, Cochran toured. He played Vegas. He did talk shows and the occasional television guest shot. And then the drink and the drugs caught up with him for a while, and then he was a proponent of Egyptian mysticism for a while. Eventually he resurfaced as a preacher.

I need you to know all this about Wayne Cochran. But mostly, I need you to know about The Look.

I need you to know about The Look.

I'm saying that you need to know about The Look. I'm saying that I need for you to know about The Look.

I need you to know about about The Look.

Please. I need you to know about The Look. I need you to know about The Look.

I really, really, need you to know about The Look.

Tags: random coolness

Some of you may have seen this on Boing Boing: a while back, Sony made the most astounding ad for ... um, video monitors or something.

The effect they wanted was thousands of superballs bouncing along a city block. Vivid, shocking color, that sort of thing. So what they did was, they closed off a steep hillside street in San Francisco for two days, and threw a quarter of a million superballs down from the top. Over and over again. They dumped them out of a backhoe's loader, they shot them out of air cannons, they dumped them out of buckets.

And then they scooped them up with shovels and schlepped them up to the top of the hill and started all over.

Go watch the video. In high-res if you've got the pipe. (The making-of "featurette" isn't as interesting as it should be, but the extended version of the ad is pretty cool.) It literally makes me gasp every time I watch it.

Wow. Just wow.

Tags: random coolness

I finished the penultimate chapter of the dissertation a week and a half ago, and I'm rolling straight into the last chapter, so I haven't done much reading for pleasure recently. But I do have a little something to share in response to eeminy and chi_editrix's recent posts --- I took four books with me to the Virgin Islands in April, and read them all.

I'm not sure how Down and Out In Paris and London made it into my island-reading bag, but I'm glad it did. A fascinating book, maybe most for the ways in which Orwell's early-twentieth-century European capitals seem to mirror conditions in developing-world cities today. Serendipitously too, Christine was reading Nickeled and Dimed that week, which made for some discombobulating beachside conversations.

Not much specific to say about Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, though I was moved by it at the time. I see that I dog-eared six pages --- maybe I'll flip through it again when I don't have a kid climbing on me and post a followup.

Somehow I had never gotten around to reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I wanted to check it out before the Depp movie comes out this summer. Sadly, I was underwhelmed.

James Randi's The Mask of Nostradamus was the only work I took with my to the islands --- research for the book project I'm consulting on. A bit of a jumble organizationally, but full of great morsels.

Tags: random coolness