Incoming Signals: A WeblogA:hover 07/19/08• After many months of dithering, technical incompetence, and procrastination, I'm finally kicking around a Wordpress version of Incoming Signals over here at this link. If you have me bookmarked, don't change your URL—at some point once I've got the new version looking and working the way I want to, I'll move it over to this page and, probably, archive the material on this page somewhere else. It's all a work in progress. But for the most part, new Incoming Signals entries will be made over there, not over here.• permalink06/04/08• It's been true for a long time that I don't update this page nearly often enough, but three months, that's a new record. More soon. In the meantime, here's a link I've been saving for whenever I decided to post again: A simulated aerial view of what Manhattan Island looked like in 1609. • permalink03/06/08• The Obakemono Project, a guide to Japanese folk monsters.• Knitted Daleks.• Nasal strips for horses.• The silver skull watch of Mary Queen of Scots.• An animated historical map of the construction of the New York City subway system.• Some stuff I wrote elsewhere:• For the A.V. Club: An interview with ex-Jayhawk Gary Louris.• The John Lee Hooker and Hank Williams entries in the Inventory feature (Don't Taunt) The Reaper: 26 tempting but inappropriate funeral songs.• A review of Mike Doughty's new disc, Golden Delicious, which is neither golden nor particularly delicious.• Posted at the A.V. Club blog: A wonderfully cheesy 1991 unauthorized biography of Patrick Swayze published by Personality Comics.• And for pcsexe.com, I wrote about 11 great movies about the prehistoric era, pegged to the new 10,000 BC (which is a Roland Emmerich movie, so don't go expecting anything great).• permalink02/22/08• Beautiful images of agatized dinosaur bone. (via Making Light)• The World War One-era draft cards of Al Capone, Groucho Marx, T.S. Eliot, and other famous people. (via Boing Boing)• An antique Masonic pocketwatch, c. 1935. (via Neatorama)• A detailed three-dimensional model of ancient Rome. (via Cynical-C) • A photographic comparison of the U.S.-Mexico border in the town of Nogales, 1898 and 2008. And some things I wrote elsewhere:For The A.V. Club: • A brief report on Tapes N' Tapes' secret unannounced show at the Turf Club in St. Paul last night. • A then-and-now photo gallery of the locations in Joshua Tree National Park used for the cover and inside album art for U2's The Joshua Tree in 1987 and 2007.• A review of ex-Jayhawk Gary Louris's new CD, Vagabonds. • The entries on renaissance fairs, Doctor Who and The Rocky Horror Picture Show for this group-written Inventory feature on 20 pop-cultural obsessions even geekier than Monty Python. That is most definitely NOT me in the pcsexe.com pcsexe.com:• An appreciation of the Coen brothers in anticipation of No Country For Old Men's showing at the Oscars on Sunday.• permalink01/28/08• Great, haunting photographs of a Namibian ghost town being taken over by sand dunes. (via Boing Boing)• Another photo set of the decaying Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, which reminds me of what the library in J.R.R. Tolkien's Khazad-Dum might have looked like. Here's a site with more explanation about the photos. (via Making Light)• A couple of image galleries found on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's website: The USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection, which collects paintings of fruit (here's a page with nothing but strawberries), and the Henry G. Gilbert Nursery and Seed Catalog Collection. And lots and lots of information about the fight for screwworm eradication, which I didn't bother to link to. But when I say lots and lots, I mean it-just one of those collections was "59 linear feet and occupies 91 archival boxes." That's more information on screwworm eradication than I need to know, though I'm sure the war was just and courageously fought. Also, there's the "Cackelator," which appears to be a briefcase-sized electronic tin chicken—I wish I could tell you more about it, but there's tantalizingly little information there. (originally via Information Junk)• Images of Arctic polar science stations during 1881-84, the first International Polar Year. (Why was the first International Polar Year three years long, anyway?)• permalink01/26/08• Hopefully soon, we'll see some much-needed structural changes and updates for Incoming Signals. Don't hold your breath, but I'm working on it. Every since I began blogging in 2001 or 2002, I've been writing the HTML by hand, which has limited my ability to add things like tags or other recent innovations. My plan is to begin running Incoming Signals via a publishing system like Wordpress. So far, I haven't gotten very far because I am not really very good at the technical side, and can't figure out how to install it. It's pretty frustrating; I feel like someone who just got a new car but can't figure out how to open the doors, let alone start the engine, and yet is looking at an instruction manual that skips past all that and starts talking about the intricacies of carburetors and the rest of the stuff under the hood that I can barely name, let alone fix. But I'm trying to stay optimistic about it. For now, I can still post via the old methods.• I also posted this at the A.V. Club Blog: A wonderfully exhaustive list of all the reasons why David Banner became angry on the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV show. My favorite: 108. Having several clay pots broken over his head in the middle of the now-burning room (why is the room always burning?), and then knocking an entire case of same clay pots onto same head, and then, while lying very still and struggling not to get angry, having his pants catch fire. • I saw Cloverfield last weekend, and loved it. A very vocal subset of the audience clearly hated it, though they were polite enough not to say so until the credits started running. I can see why they didn't like it. The shaky, handheld camerawork is a huge part of what made the film work for me, but all that motion definitely makes some people nauseous, and it also strikes some people (wrongly, I think) as amateurish. People also didn't like that there was nothing like a traditional resolution to the story. To me, that wasn't the point of the movie at all; what's most interesting about Cloverfield is that it's the first giant-monster movie to really try to capture what the experience must be like for an ordinary person caught in the middle of the city when a giant monster attacks. (Only this scene from Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah has really touched on this, and it's only about 45 seconds long.) So what if there wasn't a true "ending"? I didn't feel cheated, never mind what was or was not resolved. On another subject, any New York-based disaster film is obviously going to be full of associations with 9/11, and maybe Cloverfield was in bad taste to have made them—I don't really buy that, but then I didn't live in New York in 2001. But I also think we need horror films with 9/11 imagery in the same way that it was important for earlier films to touch on Vietnam or the Cold War. It's one of the ways we work these issues out as a culture, by making stories that allegorize subjects we have trouble dealing with otherwise. It's what made Texas Chain Saw Massacre important, and it's what makes Cloverfield important, or at least as important as a movie about a 400-foot-tall creature demolishing Manhattan can be. • Anyway, I also wrote an article for pcsexe.com about other great monster movies. Please check it out. • While we're at it, during my long interregnum when I wasn't posting here, I also wrote a Halloween article on 10 great Asian horror films. (And there's lots of my writing at The A.V. Club that I haven't posted here either, but I don't want to dump 20 links on you right now; go look, if you're interested.)• Hey, what about some random links? That's supposed to be the point of this blog, isn't it?• The X-Ray art of photographer Larry Berman. (via Information Junk)• Tracking the trains of Zurich in real time. • Artist Ben Wilson's Wireframe Lamborghini. (via Things)• A gallery of Polish movie posters. (via Boing Boing)• A gallery of Belarussian movie posters. (via Plep)• Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge. (via Making Light)• permalink01/02/08Just a quick post to declare that this blog is still alive. Happy new year.• permalink08/28/07Sorry about the lack of updates recently; I've been swamped. I'll return to a more regular posting schedule as soon as I can. In the meantime, enjoy this economic theory of AC/DC.• permalink08/02/07The big news in my city today was the total collapse of the Mississippi River bridge of I-35, the main highway running through Minneapolis, during the middle of rush hour with dozens of vehicles in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I'm fine and everyone I know is fine, but many aren't—nine deaths officially announced so far, and there are certainly people still unaccounted for. It's pretty shocking. That stretch of I-35 was one of the most heavily trafficked in town. I crossed that bridge almost every day, and it's very easy to imagine that it could have been me, my family or my friends who were unlucky enough to be on it when it collapsed. Judging from the extent of the damage I've seen in the news media and online, it seems amazing that the death toll was so low. I don't think it's known yet what caused the structural collapse. We'll be dealing with this for a long time to come; besides the deaths and injuries, the loss of the bridge literally tears a ragged hole in the heart of our city's transportation system. • permalink07/30/07• There's something very eerie about this gallery of taxidermied polar bears. (via Plep)• Armor for cats and mice. (via Cynical-C)• A map, compiled by NASA, showing how much of the surface area of the United States is covered in turf lawns.• Peanuts, as it might have been written by Charles Bukowski. Also: The Nietzsche Family Circus.• A useful website for finding sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk times around the world.• If my Simpsons trivia quiz linked to below was too easy for you, then this monster Simpsons quiz with more than 300 questions is your game.• permalink07/25/07• A history of artificial eyes. (via Plep)• Standard tooth numbering. (via Making Light)• ApeLad's Laugh Out Loud Cats, mixing the LOLCATs phenomenon with his own work on the 700 Hoboes project.• Scans from Jack Kirby's comics adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (via Gerry Canavan)• Stuff I've written recently elsewhere:• For pcsexe.com: A guide to the major characters on The Simpsons and a Simpsons trivia quiz, and a character guide for the movie of Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix.• For the A.V. Club: The Charles Mingus and Roky Erickson entries in this Inventory of 10 surprisingly good tribute albums, and reviews of Metric's Metric, Grow Up And Blow Away and Gogol Bordello's Super Taranta!.• permalink07/03/07• I wrote a trivia quiz for pcsexe.com on Transformers and movie robots in general.• permalink06/14/07• Over at the A.V. Club, I've got an interview with guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson.• permalink06/13/07• Record-setting large lakes and islands, including the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.• A gallery of Chinese public health posters.• One hell of a lawn ornament: A life-size replica of a Camarasaurus. A steal at $55,000. (via J-Walk)• An archeological timeline of human expansion.• A wall map of Aboriginal Australia. (via Moon River)• Artist Jonathan McCabe's cellular automata. (via Moon River)• Tove Jansson's illustrations for The Hobbit.• A family tree of North American railroads.• An interesting blog post with lots of photos on the most dangerous roads in the world. I drove though a particularly cliff-bedecked section of the Pacific Coast Highway near San Francisco recently and that was vertigo-inducing enough for me; I think I'd need tranquilizers to go on the Bolivian road mentioned here.• The weblog Throttling sticks rigorously to its mission statement of cataloging throttling scenes from old comics, and is therefore awesome. (via Superfrankenstein Beer & Meat)• In the stuff-I-wrote-elsewhere department: I'm a little late posting this here since the movie's out by now, but last week I wrote a trivia quiz about heist movies, pegged to Ocean's Thirteen.• And here's a quiz about the Silver Surfer, occasioned by the new (and probably pretty bad, since it's not screening for critics) Fantastic Four movie.• permalink05/25/07• 40 facts about sleep, including: "Experts say one of the most alluring sleep distractions is the 24-hour accessibility of the internet." Ain't that the truth. (via Cynical-C)• A tour through the Inferno. And speaking of the underworld: Maps of the major subway systems of the world. (both via Making Light)• See what happens when two galaxies smash into each other, as is apparently going to happen eventually when the Andromeda galaxy whacks into our own Milky Way, with Gravitas: Portraits of a Universe in Motion. (via Monkeyfilter)• Scenes from Dr. Strangelove recreated with household items. (via Cynical-C)• The U.S. Civil War in four minutes.• An interactive timeline of British history. (via Neatorama)• A photo series showing the assembly of the space shuttle and its engines and subsequent transport to the launch pad. (via Neatorama)Stuff I wrote elsewhere:• For pcsexe.com, a guide to the characters of the Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy and a roundup of a dozen other worthwhile pirate movies.• permalink05/18/07• Unusual technical images of equipment used in World War II. (via Neatorama)• I just started reading a collection of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories. Here's a set of audio excerpts from lectures Borges gave at Harvard. Also, William Carlos Williams reading his own poetry. (via Bookslut)• Probably not related to Jorge, but Phil Borges is a photographer worth looking at. (via Neatorama)• Transylmania!: Bite the villagers before they stake you. • Over at pcsexe.com, I wrote a guide to the characters of the Shrek trilogy. You'll thank me later when you're not all confused as to who the hell this "Pinocchio" guy is.• permalink05/01/07• Diagrams of Amtrak Superliners. (via Information Junk)• Michel Gagn
