American Flag Linky

It’s the 4th of July in the USA! To honour the occasion, make an effort to seek out and enjoy an American cultural product or consumer item.

150th anniversary of Gettysburg. Check out these photos of veterans gathering at the 50th anniversary. (via AndyMac)

So, so perfect: all the American flags on the moon are now white.

Twelve Tones. A half hour video about music, patterns, shapes, and stuff. I haven’t watched it yet but Hugh Dingwall says it’s amazing and I clicked around in it a bit to figure out what it was and every bit that I watched was really interesting and made me want to see more. So. Try it.

How I taught myself to code in eight weeks (via mundens)

Why this vintage Masters of the Universe figure still smells bad three decades on (via DavidR)

Jason Everman, the guy who was thrown out of Nirvana just before they were hugely famous and then Soundgarden just before *they* were hugely famous, has an interesting story to tell about those events and what came next for him.

Artist refashions Barbie to real teen-girl proportions. It looks really weird, and also awesome. (Yes I’m linking to an article on Stuff.co.nz, which amazingly enough covered this ahead of all my other much trendier sources. First in NZ for your Barbie-related news needs!)

Like many, I snorted at and shared the image of a CNN panel discussion with the on-screen graphic, “N-Word vs. cracker: which is worse?” When you can’t even say one of the words, you have your answer. But now this clip from that discussion is also being shared, and it’s well worth watching. Levar Burton (best known internationally for Star Trek TNG) discusses how he was raised, and raises his kids, to follow a set routine when stopped by police to avoid being brutalised.

Revising your writing again? Blame the modernists.

Jamie Oliver read his first book recently. I posed a question on Facebook: if one of your friends wanted to read a book for the first time, what book (on your shelf) would you offer? Loads and loads of people made cool suggestions.

Jack Kirby comic artstravaganze: loads of his amazing double-page spreads. It’s kind of obvious why he was the King, looking at all these jammed together like this. (via Dylan)

The impossible “literacy” test once required of black voters in Louisiana. (via Nick Tipping)

Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe. Ingenious!

Pac-Man as survival horror game (via Sonal)

My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter

Laurie Penny: I was a manic pixie dream girl
Asher Wolf: I was never a manic pixie dream girl
Read ’em both. (Second one via Gem Wilder.)

C-3PO rapping. How did I never know about this?

And finally, the Unipiper has upped his game… OF THRONES. This makes no sense.

8 thoughts on “American Flag Linky”

  1. Wow sounds wierd but some of that stuff about Everman reminded me of me.

    And the flags being all white, that figures. Sadly (and it won’t have lasted nearly as long) that means the colour polaroid of his family that one of the astronauts left on the surface is now the same way.
    http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/a16.data_trvl.html

    The other artifacts, trails and footprints though will be there essentially forever as far as human timescales are concerned unless something external disturbs them.

  2. Looking back fifty years, the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Civil War were super interesting, falling as they did at the time of the civil rights movement (which makes me realise: the answer to the N-word or cracker debate isn’t cracker after all! Huh!) The Southern states ended up trying to use it (mostly) as an anti-civil rights platform to try and reinforce their segregationist policies (the South will come again. No it won’t. Yes it will. No it won’t. WE can’t hear you, na na na na na na!) And nationally, the entire thing was a bit of a wasted opportunity. But, it did give rise to modern Civil War re-enactors.* There’s a great book on the subject by Robert Cook called Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (Baton Rouge, LA: University of Louisiana Press, 2007)

    *Interesting footnote: the first military re-enactors in the UK were actually American Civil War buffs, not – as many think – Sealed Knot type English civil war enthusiasts. The ACW re-enactors beat the Sealed Knot to the punch by about three months. Hah! Going to that conference last year did actually make me learn something!

  3. “Stuff.co.nz … amazingly enough covered this ahead of all my other much trendier sources.” Uh, Barbie is a vacuous celebrity. I’m only surprised they didn’t run her above the Egyptian coup.

    (I mean, I assume they *did* run her above the GCSB hearings.)

  4. It’s the 4th of July in the USA! To honour the occasion, make an effort to seek out and enjoy an American cultural product or consumer item.

    This made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

    Love the “I was a MPDG” article.

  5. Ivan: it’s an artist subverting a kid-culture symbol of capitalist patriarchy! That’s manna from heaven for half the blogs I follow! (And they mostly did run it eventually, too.) 🙂

    china: *hugs you once for every laugh*

  6. One single woman has a firefighter, lifeguard, a cop, a NASCAR driver, a ballerina, hairdresser, a teacher, a nurse, a doctor, a surgeon, a dentist, a vet, a paratrooper, a jet pilot, a Marine, an Ambassador for World Peace, the President of the United States of America, a UNICEF diplomat, a TV chef, an architect, a paleontologist, an astronaut, and a computer engineer among other things.

    And yet because she is thin, pretty and blonde, she gets written off as “a vacuous celebrity.”

    Oh Barbie, you are victim of the patriarchy. Time to add a new vocation: feminist.

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