Wednesday night February 20th 2013

Love these beautiful prints by Geninne D. Zlatkis

Watercolor birds 

Garden

Moth Cat

Warbler

Bear & Bird

Friends


Pixel Bird

Hummer



Genine's art blog


Is this a cool looking fruit or what?

Pandanus tectorius is a species of Pandanus (screwpine) that is native to Malesia, eastern Australia, and the Pacific Islands. Common names include Thatch Screwpine, Hala (Hawaiian), Bacua (Spanish), and Vacquois (French).

Ripe fruits fill the air with a pleasant aroma, much like flowers. The fruit is healthy and can be eaten raw or cooked. It is a major source of food in Micronesia, especially in the atolls. The fibrous nature of the fruit also serves as a natural dental floss. The tree's leaves are often used as flavoring for sweet dishes such as kaya jam, and are also said to have medicinal properties, the oil to cure headaches and the flowers to cure constipation.The fibers on inner ends of dry keys are used as brushes for painting kapa/tapa. They also contain tasty seeds which are difficult to remove.These ends of hala fruit are often strung to make leis.


Photo by colleeninhawaii

More about the pandanus fruit.

Crows have such a marvelous sense of play!
Crows playing on a snowy car.

Ravens like snow rolling too

And this old chestnut, snowboarding crow

Wing surfer

Crows swinging

Playing king of the castle on an antenna


W.H. Auden's Night Mail. A white man's rap in the 1930's

Night Mail

I
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

II
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

III
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

IV
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten? 

"Night Mail is a 1936 documentary film about a London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the GPO Film Unit. A poem byEnglish poet W. H. Auden was written for it, used in the closing few minutes, as was music by Benjamin Britten."

Google's Glass lets users send messages, video-chat, record video and take photos

How It Feels [through Glass]. Google's new glasses.

Engineer describes Google Glass interface

Google seeking 'explorers' to buy and try $1,500 smart glasses

An Oscars infographic:

Japanese condom ice cream and other meanderings

So funny. Two girls wonder what the heck Japanese condom ice cream could possibly be.

A marvelous website, Cinephilia & Beyond archive. A treasure trove of videos, audio, pictures, behind the scenes info, all kinds of good stuff about movies, actors, directors.





Inspiring the energy and vigor of this young baker. Beautiful, intense craftsmanship.
Makes me extra thankful for the bagels, croissants and non-factory made bread I love so much.



Watch 60,000 Bottle Caps put on a wall in 2 minutes. Love the music, Music for a Found Harmonium



Unbroken seal on King Tut's tomb. However the tomb had already been entered by robbers.

Love these fun anatomical cutaway images of Kaiju monsters. A whole collection of them here as well.









Whoa, who knew World War 3 could have happened in 1983? Yikes.
Soviet officer who 'saved the world from WWIII' gets Dresden Peace Prize

 Stanislav Petrov

So interesting, churches in Ethiopia carved out of a single stone. The churches of Lalibela.

Over 1000 recordings of music from the San or Bushmen people in the Kalahari now available on the British Museum Sounds website.

10 Most Devastating Homemade Street Drugs

Whistled language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands)


An example of the whistled language in La Gomera.


Whistling Languages in Kuskoy, Turkey

Washington, D.C., circa 1910. "King of Cardonia" is the caption here, perhaps the name of a play. [Update: The correct spelling is "Cadonia"; the play ended its D.C. run in January 1910.] Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative.

How big is the moon comparison

Haunted by Fray Bentos

After researching information about the Liebig chromolithographs, origins of bouillon, Marmite, Oxo and Campbell's soups, I became curious about the company town of Fray Bentos, in Uruguay.
Apparently, it's pronounced Fry Bentos. Huh.

How the old factory looks now, as an industrial museum.

Old, rusted company cars, seen on the way into Fray Bentos.

More old company cars seen on the way into Fray Bentos

The old office in the Fray Bentos plant, as it was on the day it closed down.

 

From elbetobm's Flickr page LOST CONNECTIONS...OLD CONVERSATIONS...WHERE HAVE THEY ALL GONE?...FRIGORIFICO ANGLO....FRAY BENTOS...URUGUAY

Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay was a meatpacking plant located at 
Fray Bentos, Uruguay, on the Uruguay River bank.

In 1924, the Vestey group purchases the old installations of Liebig Extract of Meat Company and the production goes on under a new name.

During its peak period, El Anglo had 5,000 workers whose ranks included English, Belgians, Russians, Spanish and Italians. It finally closed in 1979 after Europe and the United States had cut back their purchases from Latin America. Small brick houses with thick walls running along the river's edge in Fray Bentos form the "Barrio Anglo," a city-within-a-city where meatpacking workers lived that featured a hospital, a school, a social club and a football squad.

   Once I started looking into the history of Fray Bentos, I was drawn into its story. I felt very much like the author of the blog page below. 

Fascinated by what once was.


Once the world's largest refrigerator.


Taken from this excellent blog page at Survival for tribal peoples

Short extract from Lost Cowboys: From Patagonia to the Alamo by Hank Wangford, 1996. Click on the book to purchase.

In this extract the author and his fellow traveller,  Joe Tambien arrive in Fray Bentos to be given a tour of the  meat processing plant, El Anglo, by Eduardo Irigoyen. We had arrived in Fray Bentos. The Intendencia, the Town Hall,  is on Fray Bentos' small town plaza.  In the centre is a filigree iron  bandstand like the one in Kensington Gardens. We go in and find  Eduardo Irigoyen who is to take us to the plant. Eduardo has jet-black hair and a nearly trimmed beard vaguely of the  French student type: He is wearing a white  short-sleeved shirt under a blue V-neck pullover. Behind his glasses his  dark eyes get very inter when he talks in a soft but precise voice about Fray Bentos  and the Anglo Plant. He loves the Anglo plant and all its gory history and I want to hear every word. We drive down past old tree-lined terraces of low workers houses, part of the  original Anglo workers' ghetto round the plant.  We turn a corner, come out of the trees and suddenly we are on the edge  of a wide river and underneath a gigantic building.  We walk out on to a rickety jetty and right there on the shore is a  towering concrete monolith of a building, a hangar, a massive,  brutish stone box sticking right out into the bright-blue  Uruguayan sky beside the wide, slow-flowing, yellow-ochre river.  Across the top of this huge block, in gigantic faded black letters  roaring across the Río Uruguay,  the beautiful  River of Birds, is `ANGLO'. This monstrous box is the cold-storage building for  the plant, the end of this particular line for carcases  waiting to be shipped directly from  the shores of this muddy yellow river across the  Atlantic Ocean to Europe. It needed to be this big. The Anglo plant was the biggest  meat-processing plant in the world. "It’s gargantuan fridge  used to hold enough meat to feed the whole of Britain and  free Europe during the Second World War. I wanted to know more.                                         ----------------------------------------- ---------------------------- And more...   What the heck is corned beef anyway? Corned beef refers to a particular style of brine-cured beef.  The "corn" in corned beef refers to the "corns" or grains of coarse salts used to cure it.  The Oxford English Dictionary dates the usage of corn, meaning "small hard particle, a grain,  as of sand or salt." Potassium nitrate(saltpeter) is often added to the brine  to help preserve the beef's pink color. The world's biggest paper and pulp mills: One of the biggest paper and pulp mills in the world is situated near fray Bentos  in Uruguay. This pulp and paper mill is from the Finnish paper company of Botnia  ( second largest producer of paper in the world ). The facility is producing 1 million  tonnes of bleached short-fibre eucalyptus pulp per year: In the U.S. and Canada, corned beef typically comes in two forms, a cut of beef  (usually brisket, but sometimes round or silverside) cured or pickled in a seasoned  brine, and canned (pre-cooked). In the United States, corned beef is often purchased ready to eat in delicatessens.  It is the key ingredient in the famous grilled Reuben sandwich, consisting of  corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, andThousand Island or Russian dressing on  rye bread. Corned beef hash is commonly served with eggs for breakfast. Smoking corned beef, typically with a generally similar spice mix, produces the  cold cut known as pastrami. ----------------------------------------- The extraordinary Anglo Mural and its meanings at the RiosCichero Mural blog,  which depicts elements of the life and times of the Anglo company at Fray Bentos.   After reading that I need to post this. How to best dry your hands using paper towels.  It's surprisingly useful. Fray Bentos then And now