I have many crosses to bear. Patchy eyebrows. Poor numerical skills. Inability to pronounce ‘chagrin’*.

And most of all, my lips, which are always on the verge of chapping. Naturally, I have developed many very strong opinions about which lip balms are best. But I often forget to put them on – especially when I’m writing intensely. (In fact, if I’m really into something, I forget to eat or pee or even breathe.) So I tend to scatter them around the house and in every coat pocket and bag and next to the sink and next to my keyboard and in that crevice in the sofa where the fucking Apple remote always hides. The idea is that I’ll stumble across them throughout the day, think ‘ooh, yeah, lip balm’, and voila, lovely lips. This is incredibly annoying for people who need to go through my pockets, for say, dry-cleaning purposes (Fox: “WHY are there focking LIPBALMS and PENS and TAMPONS in EVERY POCKET YOU OWN, WOMAN?” He is Irish and famously loud and says ‘fock’ with an ‘o’, but enough about him, let’s talk about meeeeeee).

Here are my top three scatterbalms:

Dermophil Indien

Fox and I lived in Zurich for just over one year, though it felt like muuuuuuuch longer. I spent most of the year vomiting (I was pregnant with Errol), writing (my third book, my first spec screenplay), missing London (so much I ached), and determinedly planning to move to beautiful New York (so intensely I got lockjaw). It takes a special kind of numbskull to resent a place for not being another place. I am that numbskull. Zurich and I never made friends.

But I did make friends with the beauty products. (Obviously.) Most Swiss beauty products are overrated and overpriced (I’m looking at you, La Prairie), but Karin Herzog is great, I liked this cleanser, and if you happen to find yourself in Switzerland, stock up on the giant cotton pads at Coop for make-up removal and the Weleda oil for stretch marks and most of all, Dermophil Indien lip balm. Dermophil Indien is French (you can tell, because when you say the name, you automatically pout) and was originally developed to treat First World War soldiers with frost bite. (This story MAY not be true but let’s pretend it is.) Dermophil Indien is my perfect lip balm: not too hard, not too soft, not too shiny, not too sticky, doesn’t smell, doesn’t taste, doesn’t tingle, just moisturizes the shit out of your lips. You can slick it on at night and it’s still there in the morning. It’s. Awesome. Its small, fits into the tiniest clutch or wallet, and comes in a three-pack, so you can start your scattering right away.

DHC Lip Cream.

I’m not a huge fan of the oil cleanser by DHC, though people swear by it, I far prefer Nude or the classic Shu Uemura – but this lip cream is EXCELLENT. It’s rather elegant to take out in public, too. Slightly shinier than the Dermophil, if that’s your bag.

 

Lanisoh Nipple Cream.

So here’s the thing about nipple cream: it doesn’t like the cold, so you can’t take it outside. If it spends more than 20 minutes in anything below blood temperature, it gets very very thick and nasty and cement-like, and never quite recovers. But in the middle of winter, when your lips are about to fall off and walk out the door from dryness, and you keep accidentally peeling skin off your lips with your teeth while you’re thinking about something else and then whoops realize you’ve made yourself actually BLEED, fucks sake Gemma, then Lanisoh is the only answer. Keep this in your bathroom, near the heater, and slap a big glob on your mouth every night after you brush your teeth. It’ll still be on when you wake up. Sometimes I put it on my eyes, around my nose if I have a cold – anywhere that gets dry. It’s the best. If you happen to be breastfeeding an infant with a faulty latch and find that your nipples are a war zone, it’s good for that too. So is this stuff. But we’re not talking about breastfeeding, we’re talking about lips.

Okay. Back to writing. Oy.

*Did I put this in a book once? I CAN NEVER REMEMBER. Especially my first two books, which are full of silly asides and chatter straight from my brain. Anyway, it’s true.

 

 

 

This video from the MTA shows some of the vintage technologies that are still in use to control many of the NYC's subway lines and how they are upgrading (ve. ry. slow. ly.) to safer and more reliable computerized systems. Some of control systems are more than 80 years old.

Whoa, after watching that, I'm shocked that the trains ever get anywhere at all. (via the kid should see this)

Tags: NYC   subway   video

(leaving M.Drive and Lost Highway comparisons out for nerd purity sake)

Missing Girl = Missing Girls

Biker James Hurley = viagra biker Officer Paul, “the Kid”

Catherine “The Mill” = Vaughn’s “Construction” land theme

One Eyed Jack Escorts = escort hooker theme

Road House with Julie Cruise = Dive bar singer with guitar

What happened to Agent Cooper’s love in Pittsburgh? What happened to Detective Velcoro’s wife? Both tragedies made the protagonists dedicated to work and willingly single.

Agent Cooper’s recorder Diane = Velcoro’s recorder to his kid

Dr Jacoby = Rick Springfield

Colin “Velcoro” goes to “Another house where Casper brought girls”; music is left playing for days = The cabin where Leo took Laura and Ronnet; music was left playing for days.

The blue diamonds of TD and the Blue Diamond Motel of Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks on the TD escort party invite

Dive bar waitress with cut eye and cheek is two parts Norma and one part Nadine (sans eye patch)

Jacques Renault = club owner with “fuck you” grill

So, my guess is that McAdams will pretend to be an escort/her sister to get into the exclusive private escort party

She’ll have to hide from the Mayor JUST like Audrey Horne had to hide from her Father at One Eyed Jacks

Meaning, they will find McAdams, drug her and Colin and the kid will have to save her, Maybe in disguise…

Oh, and Bob is supernatural spirit and Casper is named after one. (Dork joke for dorks)

There are only a dozen images so far, but this Tumblr comparing art from before the 16th century and contemporary images of hip hop is fantastic. My favorites:

Tags: art   music

Franklin, the first black member of Charles Schulz's Peanuts gang, made his debut in July 1968. His presence came about through the efforts of Los Angeles schoolteacher Harriet Glickman, who wrote Schulz several letters in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination arguing that the inclusion of black characters in the most popular comic strip in America would be a positive thing. Here is her initial letter to Schulz:

After some back and forth between Schulz and Glickman, Franklin made his first appearance in the strip.

Franklin's introduction was part of a five-day sequence featuring Sally tossing away Charlie Brown's beach ball and Franklin rescuing it. In some ways, this seems an aggressive bit of integration -- many American public beaches, while no longer legally segregated, were still de facto segregated at the time. In other ways, the strips suggest what might be seen today as an excess of caution; of the twenty panels of the series, Franklin is in ten panels and Sally is in eight, but never is Franklin in the same panel as the white girl. Franklin would not reappear for another two and a half months, when he came for a visit to Charlie Brown's neighborhood. He was somewhat lighter skinned here, which seems to be less a matter of trying to make him acceptable to the readers and more a matter of cutting back on shading lines which were overpowering his facial features. Franklin's job in this series was to react to the oddness of the neighborhood kids, and that was a precursor to what would be his primary role in the strip as a whole. Perhaps due to excessive caution, Franklin was never granted any of the sort of usual quirks that define a Peanuts character, the very sort of mistake that Glickman was warning about when she called for one of the black kids to be "a Lucy."

His inclusion made news nationally and upset many people, particularly in the South. Schulz had a conversation with the president of the comic's distribution company:

I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin -- he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, "Well, Larry, let's put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How's that?"

(via @essl)

Tags: Charles Schulz   comics   Harriet Glickman   Peanuts   racism

rgfellows:

kanyewestboro:

calanoida:

Susanna and the Elders, Restored (Left)

Susanna and the Elders, Restored with X-ray (Right)

Kathleen Gilje, 1998

wow

Oooh my gosh this is rad. This is so rad.

For those who don’t know about this painting, the artist was the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

Gentileschi was a female painter in a time when it was very largely unheard of for a woman to be an artist. She managed to get the opportunity for training and eventual employment because her father, Orazio, was already a well established master painter who was very adamant that she get artistic training. He apparently saw a high degree of skill in some artwork she did as a hobby in childhood. He was very supportive of her and encouraged her to resist the “traditional attitude and psychological submission to brainwashing and the jealousy of her obvious talents.”  

Gentileschi became extremely well known in her time for painting female figures from the Bible and their suffering. For example, the one seen above depicts the story from the Book of Daniel. Susanna is bathing in her garden when two elders began to spy on her in the nude. As she finishes they stop her and tell her that they will tell everyone that they saw her have an affair with a young man (she’s married so this is an offense punishable by death) unless she has sex with them. She refuses, they tell their tale, and she is going to be put to death when the protagonist of the book (Daniel) stops them.

So that painting above? That was her first major painting. She was SEVENTEEN-YEARS-OLD. For context, here is a painting of the same story by Alessandro Allori made just four years earlier in 1606: 

Wowwwww. That does not look like a woman being threatened with a choice between death or rape. So imagine 17 year old Artemisia trying to approach painting the scene of a woman being assaulted. And she paints what is seen in the x-ray above. A woman in horrifying, grotesque anguish with what appears to be a knife poised in her clenched hand. Damn that shit is real. Who wants to guess that she was advised by, perhaps her father or others, to tone it down. Women can’t look that grotesque. Sexual assault can’t be depicted as that horrifying. And women definitely can’t be seen as having the potential to fight back. Certainly not in artwork. Women need to be soft. They need to wilt from their captors but still look pretty and be a damsel in distress. So she changed it. 

What’s interesting to note is that she eventually painted and stuck with some of her own, less traditional depictions of women. However, that is more interesting with some context.  

(Warning for reference to rape, torture, and images of paintings which show violence and blood.)

So, Gentileschi’s story continues in the very next year, 1611, when her father hires Agostino Tassi, an artist, to privately tutor her. It was in this time when Tassi raped her. He then proceeded to promise that he would marry her. He pointed out that if it got out that she had lost her virginity to a man she wasn’t going to marry then it would ruin her. Using this, he emotionally manipulated her into continuing a sexual relationship with him. However, he then proceeded to marry someone else. Horrified at this turn of events she went to her father. Orazio was having none of this shit and took Tassi to court. At that time, rape wasn’t technically an offense to warrant a trial, but the fact that he had taken her virginity (and therefore technically “damaged Orazio’s property”. ugh.) meant that the trial went along. It lasted for 7 months. During this time, to prove the truth of her words, Artemisia was given invasive gynecological examinations and was even questioned while being subjected to torture via thumb screws. It was also discovered during the trial that Tassi was planning to kill his current wife, have an affair with her sister, and steal a number of Orazio’s paintings. Tassi was found guilty and was given a prison sentence of…. ONE. YEAR……. Which he never even served because the verdict was annulled.

During this time and a bit after (1611-1612), Artemisia painted her most famous work of Judith Slaying Holofernes. This bible story involved Holofernes, an Assyrian general, leading troops to invade and destroy Bethulia, the home of Judith. Judith decides to deal with this issue by coming to him, flirting with him to get his guard down, and then plying him with food and lots of wine. When he passed out, Judith and her handmaiden took his sword and cut his head off. Issue averted. The subject was a very popular one for art at the time. Here is a version of the scene painted in 1598-99 by Carivaggio, whom was a great stylistic influence on Artemisia:

This depiction is a pretty good example of how this scene was typically depicted. Artists usually went out of their way to show Judith committing the act (or having committed it) while trying to detach her from the actual violence of it. In this way, they could avoid her losing the morality of her character and also avoid showing a woman committing such aggression. So here we see a young, rather delicate looking Judith in a pure white dress. She is daintily holding down this massive man and looks rather disgusted and upset at having to do this. Now, here is Artemisia’s:

Damn. Thats a whole different scene. Here Holofernes looks less like he’s simply surprised by the goings ons and more like a man choking on his own blood and struggling fruitlessly against his captors. The blood here is less of a bright red than in Carrivaggio’s but is somehow more sickening. It feels more real, and gushes in a much less stylized way than Carrivaggio’s. Not to mention, Judith here is far from removed from the violence. She is putting her physical weight into this act. Her hands (much stronger looking than most depictions of women’s hands in early artwork) are working hard. Her face, as well, is completely different. She doesn’t look upset, necessarily, but more determined. 

It’s also worth note that the handmaiden is now involved in the action. It’s worth note because, during her rape trial, Artemisia stated that she had cried for help during the initial rape. Specifically she had called for Tassi’s female tenant in the building, Tuzia. Tuzia not only ignored her cries for help, but she also denied the whole happening. Tuzia had been a friend of Artemisia’s and in fact was one of her only female friends. Artemisia felt extremely betrayed, but rather than turning her against her own gender, this event instilled in her the deep importance of female relationships and solidarity among women. This can be seen in some of her artwork, and I believe in the one above, as well, with the inclusion of the handmaiden in the act.

So, I just added a million words worth of information dump on a post when no one asked me, but there we go. I could talk for ages about Artemisia as a person and her depictions of women (even beyond what I wrote above. Don’t get me started on her depictions of female nudes in comparison to how male artists painted nude women at the time.) 

To sum up: Artemisia Gentileschi is rad as hell. This x-ray is also rad as hell and makes her even radder.

I love art history.

“Maybe if you start snoring, he’ll leave us alone. Hit it, big fella.”

(Arbroath.)

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: BFFs, BIG HUGE PUPPEHs, Hoomin Interaction, Impending Doom, kitteh, Most tags ever, Photobomb, Whackadoodle Eyes, When Kittehs POUNCE!

hugonebula:

“Master glassblower and stained glass artist Loren Stump in California has wowed the internet with an extraordinary display of virtuosity. He created a “loaf” of glass, called murrine, out of carefully layered glass rods that, when sliced, reveal a painstakingly detailed work of art in cross-section.

"The most impressive thing about his work is that the resulting image can only be seen in its entirety after the murrini is cut…"

(via Artist Creates Glass Loaves That Can Be Sliced Into Beautiful Portraits Like Bread | Bored Panda)

This owl seems #chill

When he was around 32 years old, Leonardo da Vinci applied to the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, for a job. The duke was in need of military expertise and Leonardo's 10-point CV emphasized his military engineering skills:

3. Also, if one cannot, when besieging a terrain, proceed by bombardment either because of the height of the glacis or the strength of its situation and location, I have methods for destroying every fortress or other stranglehold unless it has been founded upon a rock or so forth.

4. I have also types of cannon, most convenient and easily portable, with which to hurl small stones almost like a hail-storm; and the smoke from the cannon will instil a great fear in the enemy on account of the grave damage and confusion.

And I love what is almost an aside at the end of the list:

Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze and clay. Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible as well as any other, whosoever he may be.

Oh yeah, P.S., by the way, not that it matters, I am also the greatest living artist in the world, no big deal. Yr pal, Leo. (via farnam street and the letters of note book)

Tags: art   Leonardo da Vinci   Ludovico Sforza   working

James Somers says that we're probably using the wrong dictionary and that most modern dictionaries are "where all the words live and the writing's no good".

The New Oxford American dictionary, by the way, is not like singularly bad. Google's dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: they're all like this. They're all a chore to read. There's no play, no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space.

As a counterpoint, Somers offers John McPhee's secret weapon, Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, the bulk of which was the work of one man and was last revised in 1913.

Take a simple word, like "flash." In all the dictionaries I've ever known, I would have never looked up that word. I'd've had no reason to -- I already knew what it meant. But go look up "flash" in Webster's (the edition I'm using is the 1913). The first thing you'll notice is that the example sentences don't sound like they came out of a DMV training manual ("the lights started flashing") -- they come from Milton and Shakespeare and Tennyson ("A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act").

You'll find a sense of the word that is somehow more evocative than any you've seen. "2. To convey as by a flash... as, to flash a message along the wires; to flash conviction on the mind." In the juxtaposition of those two examples -- a message transmitted by wires; a feeling that comes suddenly to mind -- is a beautiful analogy, worth dwelling on, and savoring. Listen to that phrase: "to flash conviction on the mind." This is in a dictionary, for God's sake.

And, toward the bottom of the entry, as McPhee promised, is a usage note, explaining the fine differences in meaning between words in the penumbra of "flash":

"... Flashing differs from exploding or disploding in not being accompanied with a loud report. To glisten, or glister, is to shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew."

Did you see that last clause? "To shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew." I'm not sure why you won't find writing like that in dictionaries these days, but you won't. Here is the modern equivalent of that sentence in the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster: "glisten applies to the soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface ."

Who decided that the American public couldn't handle "a soft and fitful luster"? I can't help but think something has been lost. "A soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface" doesn't just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, "the fitful luster," of, for example, an eye full of tears -- which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than "a wet sidewalk."

It's as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet's ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.

Don't miss the end of the piece, where Somers shows how to replace the tin-eared dictionaries on your Mac, iPhone, and Kindle with the Webster's 1913. (via @satishev)

Update: In the same vein, Kevin Kelly recommends using The Synonym Finder as a thesaurus.

Just look up a word, any word, and it proceeds to overwhelm you with alternative choices (a total of 1.5 million synonyms are presented in 1,361 pages), including short phrases and only mildly related words. Rather than being a problem of imprecision, the Finder's broad inclusiveness prods your imagination and prompts your recall.

Tags: books   James Somers   John McPhee   language

Bea: I bet Oprah is sad.
Me: Yeah.
Bea: But she's just dead; she's out there somewhere and will probably be part of the earth.
Me: Yeah.
Bea: And now you have a chance at taking her spot and being Oprah's friend.

Meet Oscar, The Bionic Cat!

This is so cool! Oscar is the first cat in the world with TWO bionic legs! He is now getting a new, and improved, foot using a procedure this “bionic vet” created! For more info about Super Vet Noel Fitzpatrick check out his TV show on Channel 4 in the UK or online. 

The post Meet Oscar, The Bionic Cat! appeared first on HelloGiggles.

Our babysitter showed me this video this morning, and we were both laughing out loud. "MTA: We're going to ruin your summer." Sounds about right. Totally worth watching if you live in New York!

P.S. A subway experiment and subway reading.

(Photo by Ourit Ben-Haim)

Jim Koch is the co-founder and chairman of The Boston Beer Company, brewer of the Sam Adams beers. Part of his job is to drink professionally and he does so without getting completely sloshed. What's his secret? Eating a packet of dry yeast before tying one on.

You see, what [expert brewer] Owades knew was that active dry yeast has an enzyme in it called alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH). Roughly put, ADH is able to break alcohol molecules down into their constituent parts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Which is the same thing that happens when your body metabolizes alcohol in its liver. Owades realized if you also have that enzyme in your stomach when the alcohol first hits it, the ADH will begin breaking it down before it gets into your bloodstream and, thus, your brain.

"And it will mitigate - not eliminate - but mitigate the effects of alcohol!" Koch told me.

Could have used this tip last night. Does this mean no hangovers as well?

Update: I got two kinds of feedback about this post:

1) What's the fun in drinking alcohol if you're not getting drunk? (Good point.)

2) Yeast doesn't really work. What does seem to work is Pepcid AC and Zantac. From Shenglong on Hacker News:

Again, I'm not a chemist or a doctor, but from my preliminary internet research and anecdotal testing (though I have quite a few different data points), Famotadine (OTC) [Pepcid], and higher levels of APO-Ranitidine (can be prescription) [Zantac] seems to slow the rate of ethanol -> acetaldehyde, balancing out the drunkness effect more, and giving you more time to process the acetaldehyde -> acetic acid. I typically go from maxing out at 2 drinks / 3 hour period, to about 11 drinks / 3 hour period on Ranitidine, given favorable conditions. I've had lower levels of success with Famotadine.

And it goes without saying, I don't recommend trying any of this at home. At the local bar on the other hand Nope, not there either. (thx, @natebirdman)

Tags: alcohol   food   how to   Jim Koch

This One Woman Cover Of Nirvana’s ‘Heart Shaped Box’ Is Courtney Love Approved

This has been a great week in Courtney Love news! The first lady of Grunge has given this her stamp of approval to this unique version of “Heart Shaped Box”. I cannot imagine the amount of subpar covers of her husbands music she has had to endure. For her to love it enough to call it genius means you are exceptional.

This is genius @iamkawehi @Esquiremag http://t.co/pEPOSu1PZC — Courtney Love Cobain (@Courtney) March 19, 2014

The post This One Woman Cover Of Nirvana’s ‘Heart Shaped Box’ Is Courtney Love Approved appeared first on HelloGiggles.

Frida Kahlo's very deliberate choice in clothing may have been her greatest self-portrait. Far from the latest European styles, she wore traditional Mexican skirts and dresses, or tehuana, intended to colorfully conceal the disfigurement she suffered, stemming from a bout with polio in 1913, at the age of six, that left one of her legs significantly thinner and shorter than the other. At the age of 18, she also was also involved in a serious bus accident causing a broken spine, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, and a crushed right foot. Further, a handrail that pierced her abdomen prevented her from having children.

Despite the maladies, Kahlo kept a brave face, communicating her dogged perseverance through her diversion of choice, festive and heavily embroidered skirts and loose blouses. In 2012, her complete wardrobe, as well as belongings, went on display in Mexico City, after being locked away for nearly 50 years, unseen and untouched. It's said that whiffs of perfume and cigarette smoke could be detected.

In a new book of photos (Edition RM), Ishiuchi Miyako has effectively created the first documentation of these artifacts, individually shot and suitably solitary in their beauty. Photographed in the courtyard of Kahlo's home in Mexico City and current museum, Casa Azul, the Japanese artist used only natural light and an analog camera to capture the outward brilliance and hidden medical devices of Kahlo's daily life. We see an orthopedic (or, orthopedic for its time) leather bodice, a pair of shoes with platforms of differing heights, and an array of her signature floor-length skirts masking the source of so much pain and seclusion. The resulting self-reflection led to some of the most personal and striking self-portraits ever painted. 

santullianal:

Alexander McQueen SS 1999

"They were solid wood, solid ash, so there’s no give in the ankle. So any kind of a runway walk that I had practiced went out the window. And then suddenly they laced me into this leather bodice, and there were some spinning discs in the floor of the runway, which I had, while practicing in these wooden legs, you know … wasveryconscious of how to avoid them. But now that my neck was secured in this almost neck-brace position, I couldn’t look down. I couldn’t even see where the spinning discs were. And I just remember thinking, “Okay, you’ve done the Olympics. You’ve done harder things than this. You can do this. You can survive it… And you know, the fact is, nobody knew that they were prosthetic legs. They were the star of the show—these wooden boots peeking out from under this raffia dress—but in fact, they were actually legs made for me.” - Aimee Mullins

“When I used Aimee [Mullins] for [this collection], I made a point of not putting her in … sprinting legs [prostheses for running]… . We did try them on but I thought no, that’s not the point of this exercise. The point is that she was to mould in with the rest of the girls.” - McQueen, i-D July, 2000

As with anything good, denim doesn’t last forever, but local East London artisan Luke Deverell is on hand to breathe new life into your favourite garments. 

As most denim connoisseurs will vouch, the greatest part about breaking in your raw denim is the way jeans develop an individual imprint like a blank canvas. As with all the beautiful fades, whiskers and honeycombs you create, the rips, tears and unsightly crotch blowout are also an inevitable occurrence for the rugged fabric – no matter the quality or brand.

While many people tackle the problem with clean machine repairs for concealed blemishes, many purists prefer to embrace the damage as another notable notch on their denim items. One man who is pushing this traditionalist approach is Luke Deverell of Darn and Dusted – a bespoke mending company based in East London.

A one-man-band Luke offers a completely bespoke service, mending everything from huge tears on your favorite jeans, moth holes on shirts, to more delicate repairs on some of your most cherished vintage pieces you want preserved the authentic way. Luke is also one of the hard working staff at the Edwin Shoreditch store and offers his service for the brand, repairing customers busted Edwin garments.

Fascinated with vintage workwear and the naive yet lovingly approach wearers would patch and repair their uniforms, Luke applies the same authentic approach to his work, using simply his own two hands and needle and thread to ensure his much-loved garments live to see another day. His vast vintage collection has helped him develop a deep understanding of fabrics and hone his skills in mending the traditional way. Following the haphazard style of these relics, Luke embraces the crude darn effects using graphic stab stitches and a simple 1×1 running stitches to restore any impairments.

Aside from the bespoke repair service, Luke has been busy curating a collection of vintage workwear garments that he will sell through his dedicated website (still under construction so watch this space). Here Luke has experimented with the more eclectic repairs and patchworks you’d expect to see from Japanese artisans like Narita Tabby, both of whom have an appreciation for each works. Luke is also offering custom scarves and bandanas created from natural indigo dyed fabrics with traditional Indian batik patterns as well as imported Japanese sashiko pocket squares. Also are a must-see are his boro-inspired tote bags that he produces in collaboration with Shackleton Bags.

To see more of Luke’s work follow Darn and Dusted on Instagram.

A poster on Reddit asks: What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don't seem like they would have? A few of my favorite answers (from this thread and a previous one):

When pilgrims were landing on Plymouth Rock, you could already visit what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico to stay at a hotel, eat at a restaurant and buy Native American silver.

Prisoners began to arrive to Auschwitz a few days after McDonald's was founded.

The first wagon train of the Oregon Trail heads out the same year the fax machine is invented.

Nintendo was founded in 1888. Jack the Ripper was on the loose in 1888.

1912 saw the maiden voyage of the Titanic as well as the birth of vitamins, x-ray crystallography, and MDMA.

1971: The year in which America drove a lunar buggy on the moon and Switzerland gave women the vote.

NASA's Gemini program was winding down at the same time as plate tectonics, as we know it today, was becoming refined and accepted by the scientific community.

Spain was still a fascist dictatorship when Microsoft was founded.

There were no classes in calculus in Harvard's curriculum for the first few years because calculus hadn't been discovered yet.

Two empires [Roman & Ottoman] spanned the entire gap from Jesus to Babe Ruth.

When the pyramids were being built, there were still woolly mammoths.

The last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out.

Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.

Related: true facts that sound made up, timeline twins, and the Great Span.

Tags: history

nickkroll:

I do indeed appreciate this. As I’m sure the Australian German-club-goers did as well.

This is fucking great and crazy...when the snow hit NYC yesterday, Casey Neistat grabbed his snowboard and went snowboarding behind a Jeep in the East Village.

Tags: Casey   Neistat   NYC   snowboarding   sports   weather

Mario Wienerroither takes music videos, strips out all the sound, and then foleys back in sound effects based on what people are doing in the video. You'll get the gist after about 6 seconds of this Jamiroquai video:

Great stuff. He's also done Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, Prodigy's Firestarter, and Queen's I Want to Break Free. (via @faketv)

Tags: Mario Wienerroither   music   remix   video

Sheryl Canter extensively researched the best way to season a cast iron pan and here is what she recommends you do. (Because science.)

I've read dozens of Web pages on how to season cast iron, and there is no consensus in the advice. Some say vegetable oils leave a sticky surface and to only use lard. Some say animal fat gives a surface that is too soft and to only use vegetable oils. Some say corn oil is the only fat to use, or Crisco, or olive oil. Some recommend bacon drippings since lard is no longer readily available. Some say you must use a saturated fat -- that is, a fat that is solid at room temperature, whether it's animal or vegetable (palm oil, coconut oil, Crisco, lard). Some say never use butter. Some say butter is fine. Some swear by Pam (spray-on canola oil with additives). Some say the additives in Pam leave a residue at high temperatures and pure canola oil is best. Some say it doesn't matter what oil you use.

They are all wrong. It does matter what oil you use, and the oil that gives the best results is not in this list. So what is it? Here are some hints: What oil do artists mix with pigment for a high quality oil paint that dries hard and glassy on the canvas? What oil is commonly used by woodturners to give their sculptures a protective, soft-sheen finish? It's the same oil. Now what is the food-grade equivalent of this oil?

The oil used by artists and woodturners is linseed oil. The food-grade equivalent is called flaxseed oil. This oil is ideal for seasoning cast iron for the same reason it's an ideal base for oil paint and wood finishes. It's a "drying oil", which means it can transform into a hard, tough film. This doesn't happen through "drying" in the sense of losing moisture through evaporation. The term is actually a misnomer. The transformation is through a chemical process called "polymerization".

Those before and after photos are hard to argue with. (via @akuban)

Update: Canter wrote a bit more about seasoning and added an extra step to the process. (via @_Atticus)

Tags: science   Sheryl Canter

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:

"Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know. 

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”

- from Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live

Opening tomorrow. @greatsbrand first retail experience. #bethefirst (at Williamsburg)

One of the best ways to guarantee perfectly cooked beans — ones that emerge creamy and tender instead of crunchy or mushy — is cooking them ever so gently over low, steady heat. Hmm ... low and steady heat, you say? Sounds to me like a job for the slow cooker.

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