Fun with literal-minded electronica

Song title: (1) Jammed Shredder, (2) Androids Go Diving
Suggested partway through listening to the eleventh track on this album, which was a Magnatune freebie a month back.

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Autumn in upstate New York

Dissertation title: She Was Like a British Romantic – Parallels between the substance inspired writing of Jack Bruce and of Thomas de Quincey

Not Bruce and Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker there on the small stage entertaining the Columbus Day weekend crowd, but an amazing simulacrum. My apologies for the shakiness of the hand held shot, as my cheap digital camera does not have anything resembling image stabilization.

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Cruel bars of gourd

Domain name: punkinheadjack.com
It's quite dark out already but I'm not seeing any trick-or-treat action on our very quiet, rather safe suburban street. So I don't think Jack is in that much danger of violent liberation, out on the porch rail where he is now.

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I don’t know why he’s standing there

Album name: Cameleopard vs. Manatee
Spotted by the cafeteria in our office building
Which would win? Or would it even possible to imagine them fighting?
http://frabjoustimes.magahiz.com/pages/contact

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A surefire vaccine against boredom

via luxirare.com

Candy name: H1-oween Shots
How cool would it be to give out treats this year in syringes for Halloween? You would even need to carry out the elaborate and somewhat tricky ’spherification’ process described in this post, just have the kids line up one by one and direct the concoction straight into their greedy mouths from the nozzle of your needle-less syringe. Maybe better for a party than for trick-or-treaters at the door owing to logistics and trust factors, but we clearly have the technology.
Thanks to Holy Kaw for pointing me to this blog.

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The power behind the drone

Song name: Aboriginality Is the Art of Concealing Your Power Supply

Music for Friday. The resemblance to the experience of running a drum sander or a router is striking.

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Exploring the north

Canada, 1957, Scott 370, 34mm x 23mm

Canada’s great geographer, David Thompson, is honored on this issue. He appears in the foreground sighting through what appears to be an octant, with the background dominated by a curly-cornered map of the western section of the dominion. This is one of those striking  juxtapositions of features in contrasting scales which we have seen before.

The figure is not a detailed likeness of the man’s face, choosing to emphasize instead the details of his traditional garb. The map has its own emphasis not on the mountains or forests but rather on the watersheds of the major rivers and lakes of the western provinces, which ties into the search for a passage to the Pacific Northwest that was a major motivation for Thompson’s explorations. The way in which the various headwaters twine around but stay separate almost seems to express a note of frustration that this did not work out as hoped.

Four colors

Belize, 32mm x 48mm

I like this map stamp because of the way it illustrates the Four Color Map Theorem, which asserts that any map on a plane (or a sphere) can be split up into areas each colored one of just four colors with no two colors adjacent. Here the districts of the country of Belize (formerly known as British Honduras) and the adjacent countries of Mexico and Guatemala are colored yellow, dark brown, green, and reddish brown with no two of the same color touching. A few moments with paper and pencil should satisfy the curious viewer that it is not possible to render this map with only three distinct colors. Maps on more complex geometric objects such as the surface of a torus or a Möbius strip are not able to satisfy this condition with so few colors. Note that the Caribbean does not touch the district of Cayo shown here in dark brown, so by this construction both could have done in blue as well satisfying the constraints of the theorem.

Off the coast of Belize are islands which take on an unusual shape in this issue, the southernmost island looking like a check mark and the more northerly islands near the Mexican state of Quintana Roo in the Yucatan appearing to be more scattered than they are in reality. These are called the Cayes and sit amongst coral reefs much prized by scuba divers visiting the coast. One mainland province of Belize is disconnected from the rest, making up the southern end of a peninsula (shown in reddish brown here) with the town of San Pedro at its tip.

Outline of the Hawkeye state

United States, 1946, Scott 942, 38mm x 23mm, plate block

The map on this stamp from six decades ago shows the outline of the US state of Iowa to commemorate the centenary of statehood. The monochrome blue design is adorned with a state flag and with the border showing a flowering stalk of corn to each side. No topographical features, towns or cities, or much of anything else is depicted. In particular, the great rivers, the Mississippi to the east and the Missouri to the west, are in evidence solely by the shape of the state borders there.

The state is at the center of the region that was hit hard by the floods in early summer of this year with several billion dollars of property damage. The recovery is expected to be fairly slow for the most affected areas, perhaps even slower now that the national and global economic situation has been thrown into turmoil. Were it not for this disaster, the news event of the year for Iowa might have been the way that during the first week of the year, the Iowa caucuses marked the first emergence of Barack Obama as a viable candidate for President.

Bleeding over the edges

Lebanon, 1961, Scott C296, 20mm x 36mm

Here we have a somewhat anonymous-looking strip of land with boundaries to the east and west but extending to the bounding pane at the north and south. Topographically, a number of waterways are depicted along with a central ridge feature running to the northeast. And who is the gentleman shown in profile to the left?

It turns out that the land is the central coast of Lebanon, with the coastal cities (for the western border is the Mediterranean Ocean) of Sidon, Beirut, and Jbeil indicated in script. The western border is with Syria and is somewhat altered from its present shape owing to subsequent conflicts in the region. The central mountain range is Mount Lebanon itself, home of the famous cedar trees. There is no indication on the map to the south of where Lebanon ends and Israel begins, although the composition suggests an emphasis not so much on that border which loomed so large in later years but perhaps with domestic concerns in the capital. And the portrait situated right by that capital is that of President Fuad Chehab.

The year this stamp was issued was in the interval between the bloodletting of the 1940s and that of the mid-1970s, during a Presidential mandate marked by factions seeking to gain the upper hand in the nation. Perhaps some of that shows through too.