Fantastical Miniature Flying Machines Made From Cardboard

This is worth posting, Check it out HERE.

Lost & Found - World's Largest Collection of Rustic Automata

Hi, I'm back with the occasional post.

Wise Words from Robert Crumb and With This I Bid You Adieu.

"The America that I missed died in about 1935. That’s why I have all this old stuff, all these old 78 records from that era. It was the golden age of recorded music, before the music business poisoned the people’s music, the same way that ‘agribusiness’ poisoned the very soil of the earth. In the old days, music was produced by common people, the music they produced to entertain themselves. The record industry took it and resold it, repackaged and killed it, spewed it out in a bland, artificial, ersatz version of itself. This goes along with the rise of the mass media, the spread of radio. My mother, born in the 1920s, remembered walking in the street in the summertime in Philadelphia, and in every other house, people were playing some kind of live music. Her parents played music and sang together. In her generation, her brothers didn’t want to play an instrument anymore. It was the swing era and all they wanted to do was to listen to Benny Goodman on the radio. The takeover of radio happened much later. In places like Africa, you can still find great recorded music from the ’50s. I have many 78s from Africa at that time that sound like some great rural music from America in the ’20s. In the U.S at that time there were thousands and thousands of bands, dance halls, ballrooms in hotels, restaurants had dance floors, school auditoriums, clubs in small towns. A small town of 10,000 would have a least a hundred bands. In the mid 30’s radio spread very fast in America and the depression killed a lot of the venues where live music was performed. You could go to the movies for 10 cents. Then in the 50’s TV finished it all off. Mass media makes you stay home, passive. In the 20’s there was live music everywhere in the States. I talked to old musicians who played in dance bands. This old musician bandleader Jack Coackley in San Francisco told me that in 1928 when you went downtown in the evening on the trolley car to play at a ballroom, the streets were full of musicians going to work, carrying instruments in cases. Same thing happened in France with the death of musette, the popular dance music of the working classes. There hasn’t been a decent popular music in America for a long time. The current pop music in the Western world is just plain god-awful. America is long gone. The ’80s killed it for me. The Reagan era, AIDS. It was an awful decade.”

How Synthesizers Work

At one time in my life I was a studio synthesist, traveling from recording studio to recording studio, producing music and sound effects using my modular synthesizers. From time to time, people would ask me how they operated. I usually explained things like oscillators, filters, voltage controlled amplifiers and envelope generators while their eyes glazed over.

Here's a link to an excellent explanation by Meg Neal that I found on Gizmodo.

Enigma: A Steampunk Cafe Filled with Kinetic Sculptures

Travel Photo of the Week

Fukushima, Japan

Rever 3D Printer for Kids On Kickstarter

From 3ders.org...

"3D printing firm Qubea, which has been active since mid-2012, has developed a new 3D printer for kids. The Rever 3D printer, marketed as an 'affordable 3D printer for kids', is the subject of a Kickstarter campaign, through which Qubea hopes to raise $150,000."

The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by Robert Crumb

Robert Crumb Gets It Out of His System

A splendid interview from Observer.com....

“Oh, I hate men much more than women,” Mr. Crumb said, “They are just horrible. It’s men who do all the raping and pillaging, the mass killing. Fame also exposed me to a very seedy, sleazy side of humanity I wasn’t aware of before. I was just a naïve, 26-year-old schlub with a boss working for a greeting card company. I was just a worker drawing these cards. After I started doing these comics, suddenly a lot of very carefully coiffed men in leather trench coats and open shirts with gold chains wanted to talk to me and make deals.”

The rest is even better.

Fun Time! Terry Gilliam's Deleted Animations from Monty Python & The Holy Grail!