Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCXLIV

[NickFitz]

September! As good a time as any to push back the deadline so you have more time for general reading

• Loyalty Nearly Killed My Beehive - "My queen was a dud, and her replacement had been murdered." John Knight on the struggles of the amateur beekeeper.
  
  
• How The 'Kung Fu Fighting' Melody Came To Represent Asia - "There's a tune that you've probably heard throughout your life. It's nine notes long, and it's almost always used to signal that something vaguely Asian is happening or is about to happen." This NPR show by Kat Chow explores the history of this musical phrase, but the real meat is at Martin Nilsson’s web site The Musical Cliché Figure Signifying The Far East: Whence, Wherefore, Whither? which traces its influences back to at least 1847
  
  
• The Star Wars George Lucas Doesn't Want You To See - "The original 1977 version of the saga is nearly impossible to find, so these fans made their own."
  
  
• 'We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative - "I’m going to tell you a story about llamas. It will be like every other story you’ve ever heard about llamas: how they are covered in fine scales; how they eat their young if not raised properly; and how, at the end of their lives, they hurl themselves – lemming-like- over cliffs to drown in the surging sea. They are, at heart, sea creatures, birthed from the sea, married to it like the fishing people who make their livelihood there." Kameron Hurley on the difference between what everybody knows, and the truth.
  
  
• By the Silent Line: Photographer Pierre Folk Spent Years Documenting a Vanishing 160-Year-Old Parisian Railway - E.g.
  
  
  
  
  
• The Unlikely Rise, Fall, And Rise Again Of “Viz” Comic - "How the hilariously puerile magazine sprang to life in a Newcastle bedroom, became a British institution, nearly went bankrupt, then found a new lease of life online." Good interview with Viz writer-editors Simon Thorp and Graham Dury.
  
  
• Vending Machines of the British Isles - "Sound Diaries is interested in exploring the sounds produced by various vending machines, and from January – April 2011, we collected submissions from contributors and made recordings ourselves featuring the sounds produced by Vending Machines of the British Isles… Vending Machines of the British Isles was also presented at the Boring 2011 conference and Ian Rawes contributed an interview about the sounds of vending machines. Both the Boring Conference presentation by Felicity Ford and Ian’s interview can be read in the Texts & Papers section of this website.”
  
  
• The Best Time I Went to the Orthodontist on LSD - Ah, the halcyon days of youth: ”At this point in our career as young degenerates, Debi and I had been taking acid for well over a year. We never kept track of how often we did it but we’d been tripping at the supermarket, tripping in my mom’s car, tripping at all-ages shows, and tripping while lying on the beach with our throats exposed in hopes that vampires would attack us, so this seemed manageable… We linked arms as we walked across the grass to cross the street. We were bold and we were brave, and Dr. Steinlauf’s office was less than a block away.”
  
  
• Why the $#&@! Did Your Airline Cancel Your Flight Today? They Had a Very Good Reason. - Amy Cohn explains the issues behind making you sit in an airport for hours: ”It may seem like the airlines are just out to make your life hell. But as a professor of industrial and operations engineering who has studied the industry for 20 years, I’ve learned that cancellations are rarely good for the airline industry except when they are also actually good for passengers.”
  
  
• Bees & Bombs - Collection of op-art animations, some eye-popping, some really rather mellow, like this:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[mudskipper]

That llama thing is weird.

And it goes on a bit.

"But none of those things fit our narrative. What we want to talk about are women in one capacity: their capacity as wife, mother, sister, daughter to a man. I see this in fiction all the time. I see it in books and TV. I hear it in the way people talk."

Reminds me of this from last week - She's got a Cambridge Law degree, a Harvard MBA and she ran the Financial Times. The most important thing the Telegraph can think to tell us about her is that she's a married mother of three.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_5744116.html

[vetran]

"But none of those things fit our narrative. What we want to talk about are women in one capacity: their capacity as wife, mother, sister, daughter to a man. I see this in fiction all the time. I see it in books and TV. I hear it in the way people talk."

Reminds me of this from last week - She's got a Cambridge Law degree, a Harvard MBA and she ran the Financial Times. The most important thing the Telegraph can think to tell us about her is that she's a married mother of three.



Newspaper's Sexist Headline Misses Executive's Long Resume

How much is her house worth?

have to agree, were she or he going to be in charge of children's services then the fact they had no children might be relevant. I suppose it could be relevant she might actually stop the presenters kiddy fiddling.