A scene from a 1931 Paramount publicity film called The House That Shadows Built and the Four Marx Brothers appear to promote Monkey Business. It's actually a reworking of a scene from their Broadway revue "I"ll Say She Is!" where they all do their Maurice Chevalier impressions (again) while trying to impress a talent scout.
This clip is from the fantastic Marx Brothers documentary "The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell."
Shoji Hamada was born in Tokyo in 1894. At the age of nineteen he started to study ceramics at Tokyo Technical College, and two years later spent some time touring Japan's traditional pottery sites. In 1918 he met Bernard Leach, and within a year the two men were working together at Abiko.
In 1920 they both came to England and Hamada helped Leach build the climbing kiln for the St Ives Pottery. He gave two exhibitions at Paterson's Gallery in London in 1923, and then toured Europe and returned to Japan. He exhibited again at Paterson's in 1929 and 1931, and in 1932 went to the United States with Leach. During the next three decades he made many more trips to the USA.
He is regarded as one of the most influential masters of studio pottery, and has probably inspired more potters than any other figure. The simplicity of his designs gives them urgency and power. This man, who was once declared a 'national living treasure', is certainly the jewel in studio pottery's crown. He died in 1978.
Scientists have sounded the death knell for the plug and power lead.
In a breakthrough that sounds like something out of Star Trek, they have discovered a way of 'beaming' power across a room into a light bulb, mobile phone or laptop computer without wires or cables.
In the first successful trial of its kind, the team was able to illuminate a 60-watt light bulb 7ft away.The team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who call their invention 'WiTricity', believe it could change the way we use electricity and do away with the tangle of cables, plugs and chargers that clutter modern homes.
It could also allow the use of laptops and mobile phones without batteries.
The inspiration came when the lead researcher, Dr Marin Soljacic, was standing in his kitchen at night staring at his mobile phone.
"It was probably the sixth time that month that I was awakened by my cell phone beeping to let me know that I had forgotten to charge it. It occurred to me that it would be so great if the thing took care of its own charging," he said.
To turn this dream into reality, Dr Soljacic needed a way of transmitting power wirelessly. (more from Daily Mail )
dani and his beer in ein hod
המנצח בתחרות הוא מר דני שלייפסטון, שלדעתי הוא לא אחר מ"דוקטור הפבייקד", הממציא המשוגע מהסדרה ללימוד אנגלית "סקוטרמן" - (צפו בוידיאו ושיפטו בעצמכם). שלייפסטון עבד ולמד במבשלות באנגליה ובארצות הבית ובין השאר במפעל שמכין לתת שעורה, באנגליה. הזוג שלייפסטון פתח בר בשם "ארט בר" בכפר האומנים עין-הוד. בפאב אפשר לראות יצירות אומנות של אנליה, אישתו של שלייפסטון, ויצירות של אומנים נוספים. "for more"
( more on שום, פלפל ושמן זית)
Have you ever fixed a wobbly restaurant table by inserting a sugar packet under a leg? Neither have I.
But if you do that sort of thing, this is for you: High 'n Low Silicone Shim.
Toronto and Brooklyn-based design studio NYTO has recently developed High 'n Low, a silicone shim substitute for wobbly tables and chairs. Real-deal sugar packets aren't the most reliable and certainly aren't reusable after they bust open. This rubber replica can be used over and over, easily carried in the pocket or purse, readily accessible when your seat or surface is less than stable.( via j-walk )
Even the censored version was deemed inappropriate…
Finally some sense from the country where guns are OK and tits illegal: US mail accepts Josephine Baker’s bare breasts
Jean-Claude Baker, one of 1920s Paris pin-up queen Josephine Baker’s adopted children, has won his battle against the US Postal Services. For his New York restaurant Chez Josephine, JC decided to mail out 15,000 postcards, featuring Josephine topless in her feather costume from the Folies-Bergeres music hall in Paris.
The card was refused by a teller of the Postal Services, who said “This is not at all acceptable. This is pornographic advertising!” Jean-Claude then decided to print the card with a superimposed banner stamped with the word “censored” over the offending breasts, but again the post office refused to accept the cards. “The banner still allowed a bit of the breast to be seen,” was the official reason.
Now, talks between New York Civil Liberties Union and the US postal service have established that the tellers were wrong and the mail carrier eventually agreed to accept the cards. The cards will be resent in their full, uncensored, original splendor.
Josephine Baker took French citizenship in 1937, fought in the resistance during World War II and formally adopted 12 children of various races, who she described as her “Rainbow Tribe.” She died in 1975.( from frogsmoke )
Stephanie Gerbier goes to work dressed for combat: She wears body armor under her white apron, steel-reinforced shoes and a metal glove on her left arm. Her weapon of choice is a flat, razor-sharp knife.
She can truss up a garnet-red round of beef to look as exquisite as a gift-wrapped jewelry box, carve $17-a-pound veal scallops so thin that the pink slices are nearly translucent and extract precision cuts from a 660-pound side of beef.
For those skills, the 23-year-old Gerbier this year became one of the first two women to win France's annual competition for best apprentice butcher.
Gerbier is breaking cultural barriers in a trade that mirrors the transformations in the European workplace of the 21st century: The attraction of prestigious white-collar and high-tech professions has steered young people away from Old World artisanal crafts, many of which traditionally have been open only to men for centuries. As a result, women are more able to enter trades that were largely closed to them.
Facing a shortage of as many as 5,000 butchers, France's historically macho meat industry has begun welcoming women. This summer, the national Federation of Butcher Shops is targeting women in a major recruiting drive -- and promoting Gerbier as one of its new female success stories in a field that now has about 100 female certified butchers, according to federation spokeswoman Cecile Mousset.
"The only drawback to being a woman butcher is that you can't carry heavy pieces of meat like a 90-kilo [200-pound] leg on your own," said Gerbier, who just earned her two-year professional aptitude certificate. "I always need to ask for help, but that's a minor inconvenience."
The butcher shortage comes as the French butcher shop -- considered by many French consumers to be the heart of the national culinary obsession -- is struggling to survive in the face of growing competition from supermarkets and an expanding fast-food culture. In the past three decades, France has lost nearly half of its butcher shops: 21,000 are open today, down from more than 40,000.
"People think that being a butcher is gross," said Gerbier, who wears her fawn hair in a ponytail and whose delicate fingers belie her ability to manhandle hefty chunks of pork, beef and lamb. "But it's not the case. We work in a very clean environment. The meat we get is washed before we work on it; it's not all bloody. People have misconceptions because of movies, but it's far from reality."( more from washington post )
On June 5th, at 7:10 A.M., Israeli fighter jets launched an early-morning air assault on Egypt’s airfields, effectively destroying Nasser’s Air Force on the ground and, in just a few hours, deciding the course of the war. On the sixth and the seventh, Israel, exploiting its dominance of the skies, shattered Egypt’s ground forces. The six days of fighting between Israel and the combined forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria is the most straightforward aspect of the drama. In just a hundred and thirty-two hours, Israel captured the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the holy sites and the Old City, from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria––twenty-six thousand square miles of additional territory. At first, Radio Cairo assured listeners that the Egyptians were winning great battles against the Israelis. Nasser’s deputy and eventual successor, Anwar Sadat, who knew the truth, took a nighttime walk in his Cairo neighborhood, “dazed and brokenhearted,” as he wrote in his memoirs, and saw people dancing in the streets to celebrate their “victory.” Nasser’s dream of a pan-Arab nation, of eliminating Israel, was finished. “If I had known the Army wasn’t ready,” Nasser said, “I wouldn’t have gone to war. I’m a chess player.” (Nasser and Eshkol both died within the next few years.) Egypt lost more than fifteen thousand men in the war, Israel about eight hundred. Rabin wrote in his memoirs that the Israelis easily could have taken Cairo, Amman, and Damascus.
So profound was the Israeli national delirium in the days and weeks after the war that it was impossible for most Israelis to think straight about the long-term consequences of retaining conquered territory. After being told that the state was in mortal danger, Israel was now in possession of Biblical Israel—the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, all of Jerusalem, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, in Hebron, and many other such sites scattered throughout the West Bank. Once the Old City was secured, on the third day of the war, Dayan, the most theatrical of all Israeli commanders, flew by helicopter to Jerusalem and staged his arrival in the manner of General Allenby, the British general who took Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917. “We have returned to the most holy of our places,” Dayan declared. “We have returned, never to part from them again.” ( more from New Yorker )
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