A smattering of links found whilst enjoying the holiday interstice:
A collection of images of snowflakes as seen through a scanning electron microscope (site is in French, but there isn’t much text, so just marvel at the images)
Donald Fagen, best known as half of Steely Dan, wrote this bittersweet remembrance of humorist/radio host Jean Shepherd that appeared at Slate. Most people today know Shepherd as the man behind the now-classic “A Christmas Story”, but his fans knew a much different persona, which diverged even further from the real Shepherd.
In 2007, one of the most significant films in the entire history of cinema, Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”, was restored to its full original form and enhanced to near-modern picture quality and is now available on Blu-Ray DVD in 1080p HD. The restoration includes the original orchestral soundtrack performed by the Deutches Filmorchestra. You can see just how amazing the restored film looks by watching this trailer at Apple.com and comparing it to the more typical video as seen on YouTube. (although even THAT looks about 100 times better than some video transfers I have seen)
Greg Ross at Futility Closet tells us a little about this “amputation assistant” device patented in the mid-1800s by a surgeon named George Griswold. It’s basically a device to hold the patient’s limb firmly in place to make it easier for the surgeon to remove with his saw, rather like some macabre jig invented by a bloody-minded Norm Abram wannabe. No word on whether this will be in use for poor old Zsa Zsa Gabor.
This post at The Society Pages makes an awfully earnest attempt to answer a question that many people, myself included, have been asking for a while: Why is Kim Kardashian famous? For all the discussion of subjugation to the patriarchal paradigm and such, I think the picture here probably is the simplest answer.
Speaking of which, prepare to have your outrage meter peg straight into the red as you watch this group of seven-year-olds move their moneymakers to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”:
