What comes around...

Herd Immunity by Carlos Fdez

Sooner or later in life, we will all take our own turn being in the position we once had someone else in. ― Ashly Lorenzana

  

Wipeout

Get ready for a frantic weekend with the Ventures.  

 

Beauty is youth at all ages

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These are graphics from Palmolive soap ads from the 1920s through the 1950s. Palmolive's ad agency used several templates for the ad layouts, with one of the most common being a strong graphical image at top with teaser text (the rather incoherent phrase that acts as the title of this post is one of the teasers). The image to the left shows the full ad that the above image is taken from.

The Palmolive ads are aimed at women, and they stress youth, beauty and romance. Occasionally the interests of the day surface -- during the war years the men appear in uniform, there is a spate of ads featuring the Dionne quintuplets, while early ads featured an Egyptian motif that was probably a result of the finding of Tut's tomb and the burst of interest in Egyptology at the time.

By contrast today's soap ads are much more fixated on natural ingredients, moisturizing, scents and skin care. I wonder what the future holds? 

 

These ad images, and those after the jump, were taken from the Duke University Archive's Palmolive Company collection. There are more examples at the link.

The french fry king of Rio de Janeiro

For Your Love

Get ready for a dedicated weekend with Additif s.

 

Juho Könkkölä's elaborate origami art

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Juho Könkkölä is a 23 year old Finnish origami artist. The samurai warrior pictured above took him 2 months of planning and a month to fold from a single piece of paper. Below are more pictures of his paper samurai as well as other examples of his work (you can see more at the portfolio page of his website). 

The post ends with a video of the steps he took in folding the origami samurai. Enjoy.

Cossack sword dancing

Cossack sword dancing started out as a pantomime of fights in battles. It has evolved into showing off as you dance around while twirling swords. Above is a collection of various people doing a sword dance. I wonder what an American helicopter mom would think of their tyke swinging swords around like the lad in the video.

Below is a video by Evgeny Kolot, a Cossack martial arts instructor demonstrating a sword dance in slow motion. It is nicely filmed and rather hypnotic. There are other good videos on his channel.

She's Got You

Get ready for a short end of the stick weekend with Sharon Little and Tim Sonnefeld.

 

Life goes on

A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on;
And the road didn’t become more beautiful or even more ugly.
That’s human action on the outside world.
We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we pass by and we forget;
And the sun is always punctual every day.

― Alberto Caeiro

 

Converting sound into an image via an eidophone

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In my earlier post Reconstructing sound from a silent video we saw a method of reconstructing audio by observing the minute variations of a surface's edge caused by sound vibrations. In this post we see images made by sound vibrations.

Megan Watts Hughes was a 19th Century Welsh singer and scientist. She developed a machine she called an Eidophone which allowed her to create graphic captures of her singing notes by disturbing particles on a membrane. Some of the pictures are very striking.

These are taken from the Public Domain Review's post Picturing a Voice. There are more examples at the link, as well as a discussion of her eidophone and other early attempts to visually capture sound.

All Along the Watchtower

Get ready for a subverted weekend with Lazer Lloyd.

  

Cambodian grilled fish, radish curry and honey chicken

These videos are of Polin, a young Cambodian woman, cooking various meals. No recipes are offered, just shots of her gathering some ingredients and preparing the food. This is a style you see in a certain genre of cooking videos -- no dialog and an emphasis on traditional living with pretty scenery mixed in.

A while back I posted Cooking snake soup, which was a video of two Cambodian sisters in the same style (I think one of them was Polin). In the comments to that post I mentioned some of these Vlogs had gotten in trouble for cooking endangered animals. Polin is connected to these dodgier Vlogs. From a Coconuts Bangkok article:

Our first-hand introduction to the world of primitive tech videos took place on an enormous resin plantation, about two-and-a-half hours outside Phnom Penh.

The set was in the back of an expansive, well-kept property just meters from the shore of the Mekong. There we found a house fashioned from wooden rods with a thatched roof. Inside, it was completely empty – a prop.

There was a small pond and a pen for the ducks, but both were empty as the ducks were being kept at the couple’s real home. Three fighting cocks sat in wooden cages —  though it was unclear if they were destined to be part of a production. 

Huong Raty, the producer of NLTV, was wearing pressed slacks and a Lacoste shirt when he came out to greet us. The 31-year-old had a gold ring, a nice watch, and carefully styled hair. His wife, Touch Polin, in contrast, arrived wearing traditional Cambodian clothes, her outfit for that day’s shoot.

The video they were shooting during our visit, Cooking Cassava with Coconut Milk in My Village would be uploaded the next day, not to NLTV but to another channel they produce, one called Polin Lifestyle (PL) channel. 

The production set-up was simple but professional. Shot on a tripod with an SLR, they worked with the efficiency of a crew that clearly produced these videos on a near-daily basis.

Polin slowly and deliberately cut and stripped a cassava root while being given instructions by her husband off-screen. When the camera stopped filming, she retired to the shade of the house while two men came to the table to quickly slice up what was left.

The full video, which shows Polin arriving on a riverbank in a boat, digging up the cassava roots, then later cooking them with coconut milk, follows the basic tenets of other primitive technology-type videos. There’s no talking, no background music, a lot of long shots, and plenty of repetitive action. There is a calming effect to watching it, much in contrast to the frenzied eating seen in the videos produced by PTKH and similar channels.

Not all of their videos are as innocuous, however. The top videos on their main channel, NLTV, mostly focus on Polin, sometimes accompanied by other women, cooking and eating large game (the videos that allegedly featured protected animals have been deleted from their channel).

Unmentioned in the above article, to me the videos at the Polin Lifestyle YouTube channel are closer to the Chinese Vlogger Li ZiQi (my post about her is Homemade wheat beer and crayfish)

Below are a couple more Polin's videos, with no endangered species in either. In the first she makes a white radish curry and a fish stew, in the second she goes to a beekeeper and gets some honey, which she uses to make a honey glazed grilled chicken.

Zhou Yi - the Sugar King

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Zhou Yi is a Chinese patissier who has earned the tile of 'Sugar King' due to his intricate and beautiful fondant cake icings. These examples of his work are from the Veri-art post Zhou Yi - "Incredibly Detailed And Beautiful Handmade Cake". There are more after the jump, and many more at the link.

Zhou Yi

Happy New Year

I like to think that these two young ladies are in a lifeboat that just escaped from the sinking wreck of the S.S. TwentyTwenty. Hopefully things will improve for them and us. Happy New Year all.

 

Ekranoplans

During the Cold War the soviets worked on a series of ground effects crafts, called ekranoplans, that were neither ship nor plane, but a hybrid between the two.  

Below, from La Boite Verte, are pictures of the Lu from both today and when it was active. It is a missile firing variant that was the last of the Soviet ekranoplans built.

 

Escaping from a sinking submarine

Merry Christmas

Nativity by He Qi

Let us keep Christmas beautiful without a thought of greed - Ann Garnett Schultz

   

  

I think I would rather get a lump of coal

A Christmas postcard with an illustration of Santa Claus attempting to put a frightened child into his sack of presents. An English legend popular during the Victorian era said that St. Nicholas recruited the Devil to help with his deliveries. Together, they determined which children had been naughty or nice.  - Missouri Historical Society (from Some of the Earliest Christmas Cards Were Morbid and Creepy)

  

Different Chistmas music

This time of the year I figure people are getting sick of hearing the same Christmas songs over and over, so I head over seas to find different Christmas music for a change of pace. This year, as is often the case with these alternate Christmas music posts, I headed to Japan to see what sort of insanity I could find.

The Japanese celebrate Christmas with all of the trappings -- Christmas trees, Santa, elfs, presents and what-not -- but it is a couples holiday to them, more akin to Valentines Day than anything. That's why in the song above (Christmas? What is that? Is it delicious?) they've changed the lyrics from 'jingle bells' to 'single hell' and the Crayon Pop song below is called Lonely Christmas.

Enjoy them as you go about your pre-Christmas routines and hopefully some of the more energetic ones don't induce seizures while you watch them. Oh, one more warning... you might get the phrase "a winter fairy is melting a snowman" stuck in your head for some odd reason. Just sayin' is all.

Reconstructing sound from a silent video

The technique uses the edges of objects in the video. The idea is they vibrate from the sound waves. The vibrations are too small to have the edges displaced in the pixel resolution of the video, but the edge pixels change in color tone as they vibrate. It is that variation that is tracked to recreate the sounds.

It is a fascinating technique that is actually quite creepy considering the slowly evolving surveillance state some desire. We don't need Big Brother surreptitiously listening as well as watching.