 |
| Click any image to enlarge |
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 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.
 |
| Click any image to enlarge |
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.
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.
 |
| Click any image to enlarge |
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 |
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.
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.
|
| Nativity by He Qi |
Let us keep Christmas beautiful without a thought of greed - Ann Garnett Schultz
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)
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.
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.
A while back we visited Norilsk, Siberia, the northernmost city of 100,000 people or more. It was a rather grim looking town that existed because of the mining of nearby nickel deposits. Today we'll see the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, a small settlement of less than 3,000 souls on the island of Svalbard. It is the northernmost town on Earth.
Like Norilsk, mining is its reason for existing, although it is coal, not nickel, that is mined. As you can see, it is also much better tended and maintained, and far more cheery looking, than its Russian counterpart.
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
Valery Barykin is a contemporary Russian artist who blends the Soviet era propaganda poster style with Western pinup art from the same period. He says it was from his time in the Soviet Army when he was exposed to both Soviet propaganda posters and Western pin-ups. He blends the two, sometimes as a montage sometimes redrawn, to create his works. In fact, I recognize the one immediately below of the woman in a low cut blouse serving hotdogs as a piece of American art that he repainted.
The information and images are from a post at Все интересное в искусстве и не только (Everything is interesting in art and not only). It has more samples of his work.
 |
| Valery Barykin |
The video starts with an Azerbaijani couple planting onions and garlic in their garden. They then move to the side of a river where they cook a meal of grilled fish over an open fire, accompanied by bread and a salad. The scenery is spectacular and there is sparse captioning naming the ingredients.
 |
| Click any image to enlarge |
Mary Michael Shelley is an artist based out of Ithica New York. As she describes herself on her website:
I'm a folk artist, a painter and a wood carver. My artwork has been described as primitive, traditional, untrained, Americana, whimsical, naïve, eccentric, outsider, visionary or carved craft. I like describing myself as "self-taught", as in self-made, in the great American tradition.
I am best known for my carved folkart paintings of waitresses, diners, animals, cows, farms, sailboats, central New York regional themes, and special order commissions. I work out of my Ithaca, NY studio, in the heart of the Finger Lakes region. I use art to explore and make sense of life events, dreams and emotions, sometimes calling my artwork a "picture diary" or "picture story" ... As an artist I serve up art, just as a waitress serves up food. My goal is to produce a quality piece of art that will survive and please long past my lifetime.
These images, and those after the jump, are from the portfolio on her website. Her pieces are reasonably priced and can be bought online. She also does commissioned works.
Above is amateur 8mm color film footage taken during the Pearl Harbor attack by Technical Sergeant Harold S. Oberg and his wife Eda. You can read a detailed account of their filming at the Warfare History Network's article Recording the Pearl Harbor Attack.
Work was always necessary to survive. Then I decided the goal should be to survive without working. But now I have much more work than I had before. Hunting for freedom, I've found the real prison. but at least it's a prison I've chosen for myself. - Maurizio Cattelan
 |
| Click any image to enlarge |
These are some old pulp magazine covers from the days when men were men and damsels were all too frequently in distress. These covers, and those after the jump, are from Magazine Art's Adventure Pulp archive. There are many more at the archive.
Teqball is a sport that is a cross between soccer and ping pong. Blending in the need to bounce the ball off the curved Teqball table adds a lot of action so, although it has the strange soccer-like aversion to opposable thumbs, at least it isn't a wheezing bore like soccer is.
It was developed in Hungary in 22012 and has been gaining in popularity. A summary of its rules are:
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. ― Marcel Proust
Above is a video with clips of both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton boxing. The differences in their approach to the humor of the situation is obvious. Chaplin is a trickster, frequently outsmarting his opponent whereas Keaton is a complete stumblebum.
I've never been a big Chaplin fan, thinking many of his jokes are too cute for their own good. I much prefer Keaton's physical humor -- his getting tangled up in the ropes trying to enter the ring is good example of his work.
 |
| Click any image to enlarge |
Noriaki Kimura, a government engineer in the Aomori Prefecture in Japan, produces trading cards featuring local fisherman. He takes the pictures and makes the cards which are distributed. From a Sankei News article:
In an attempt to improve the value and popularity of fish caught in the prefecture and promote local sake that matched fish, we created a poster modeled on fishermen in the agency's venture business in FISCAL 2017. In addition, to make it easier to carry, we made business card-sized trading cards, and in December last year, we began distributing them at direct sales fairs in the prefecture, tuna demolition shows, and events in Tokyo. Then, it is said that it got a great popularity from female customers such as "I want it by all means" and "It is cool"
I wonder if they'll ever match the value of a 1909-11 T206 White Border Honus Wagner baseball card? Information and images from Spoon & Tamago's Japanese Fisherman Trading Cards are Getting Kids Excited About the Fishery Industry.
 |
| Click any image to enlarge |
Buddhas, bodhisattvas, Dharma protectors, masters and monks. These images, and those after the jump are from Picryl's Thangkas & Mandalas. There are more at the link.
Get ready for a pyrotechnic weekend with Windsor Davies and Don Estelle.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. - Abraham Lincoln
 |
| Click any image to enlarge |
This artwork is the European explorers' impressions of the indigenous population of the Americas. These images, and those after the jump, are from the John Carter Brown digitized collection. There are many more at the link, including a large number of black and white etchings.
Get ready for some Schrodinger's vote totals this weekend with Common Rotation.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
Regardless, with the votes in the game changes. Political actions no longer need to be calibrated against votes won or lost, instead there is a different calculus. Keep that in mind as things unfold.
Last night there were Trick-or-Treaters out and about where I live. It was good to see. Of course that means today there will be sugar-addled tykes, smashed pumpkins and spooky decorations to take down.
Historically, the now very secular holiday of Halloween evolved from All Hallows Eve, the day before the actual holiday it marks -- All Saints Day. While overshadowed by its Eve, All Saints Day is still celebrated, with liturgies, visits to graves to place candles and flowers and other local traditions.
Happy All Saints Day to you all.
