georgeland: the blog

and yet somehow emotionally involved in it anyway. It seems very dysfunctional, and I fear for my sanity in the long term, let alone my tendons.

Originally, I’d meant to post more African & African-American content during the month of February, when by law and by custom we in English-speaking North America bother to pay attention to the accomplishments and struggles of the African Diaspora. The conspiracy-minded might point out that February is the shortest month of the year.

Anyway, I kinda screwed that up, which is embarassing, because I ran across a lot of great content that I just kept forgetting to put up. Situation remedied, starting now.

self-trained repairmen of Nigeria. I was reading something a while ago, about how cheap low-end electronics, or even much of a resale market, are a phenomenon that you just don’t see in most of Africa. People buy the best they can, so that it can last long enough to be run into the ground, rebuilt, and run into the ground again. Of course, what this means is that to capture the low-cost end of the market, a lot of people end up handicrafting their own devices, many of them to fit needs that there are no factory-made tools for. Welcome to the world of afrigadget.

Notable tinkerers of recent history include young Mr. William Kamkwamba, electrifying rural Malawi one handcrafted windmill at a time, and Dr. Cedrick Ngalande, creator of a fermentation-powered generator. Mmm, beer (but probably not).

Man, every oncet in a while I think of something brilliant and original to write in here. Then, of course, I forget it along the way, and I just end up posting a bunch of youtube links instead. This is another of those days.

James Earl Jones: This is ABC

Stevie Wonder, a vocoder, and some muppets: 1, 2, 3, Sesame (see also Superstition)

Cookie Monster as John Shaft

Johnny Cash: Nasty Dan with Oscar the Grouch, and Jackson with Miss Piggy, Dirty old Egg-sucking Dog with Rowlf, and a VERY CHANGED version of Don’t Take Your Guns to Town with Big Bird

I love trash, and Subway

Finally, a new generation of puppets live even further north: Be Joyful, featuring Nanalan

Thank you, and good night.

wheels on the bus rock out

charlie bit me, via

It is the year of the Rat today.

Plan accordingly.

Happy New Year

Happy Christmas, my ass:
Fairytale of New York

December was a crap month to end a fairly lovely year. I’m hoping that 2008 goes a bit better.

kidney cells to power “biobatteries” (more detail here, but not much more)

kidney transplant, and what Medicare will cover, and what it won’t

This has been a day full of too many kidneys, and I am ready for it to be over now, thank you.

drambuie research in Australia

Jon, your thoughts?

Putin to confer with Baba Mat, The Wise Old Woman Who Lives In The Land Of Many Tall Trees Beyond The Black Mountains

rehab. I finally understand why people actually care about amy winehouse; this song, at least, sounds to me like someone else misses there being no new Motown for the past 30-odd years.

I keep meaning to write something original for this site, but I keep getting distracted by shiny things.

Speaking of which: Super Information Hijinks: Reality Check is now online, having foolishly been let go out of print by a couple different publishers. So cute.

The cat says: only connect

best version of Satisfaction ever recorded

dog + orange things = funny

With an estimated 175 million copies distributed in 2006, the IKEA catalogue is thought to have surpassed the Bible as the most published print-work in the world.

In other Ikea-related news, they seem to be purging their catalogue of the more amusingly-named items. No more the Anja Rand, supporting your feet with Objectivism! No more the Jerker desk!

Finally, the child raised by affordable Swedish design

A quirk in Tennessee state law may result in the untimely execution of thousands of bottles of vintage whiskey

new Orangina ad campaign is all about furries. Stripper furries.

I cannot begin to express how weird this is.

The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF. Introduction to an issue of The Journal of Science Fiction Studies, which has been around longer than I’ve been alive.

Synopsis: American SF has long been a bastion of white nerds, devoted to a future in which everyone has the freedom to think and act just like white nerds. Which means that black inroads into SF more often happened sideways through music and comics, rather than through the front door. Sun Ra as well as Samuel Delany, Luke Cage: Powerman! as well as Octavia Butler.

Man, everything I post now is a video link. What am I doing, just watching TV all day? Anyway:

We are the cyclists; the intermediate stage between humans and pure energy. (via JORT)

How the Edwardians Spoke. Interesting BBC doc; German recordings of British POWs in WWI are virtually the only source of vernacular regional speech patterns from before the talkies. The Scottish accents don’t sound that different to me, but I was surprised at how distinct Oxfordshire was; apparently the Oxbridge crowd and the townies didn’t mix much.

Steve Martin plays his composition “The Crow”