Sunday Excursions: Short and Sweet

Lots going on in meatspace today, so this Sunday's Excursion is going to be brief.













photo D.L Stupski
via Ursi's Blog
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I Met the Walrus

From Mental Floss:

In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan managed to snag a brief interview with John Lennon in his hotel room in Toronto. Using his reel-to-reel tape recorder, Levitan asked Lennon a series of questions about peace, popularity, and messages in music. The answers give us a portrait of Lennon at the end of his involvement with The Beatles.

In 2007, Levitan collaborated with director Josh Raskin, illustrator James Braithwaite, and animator Alex Kurina to produce I Met the Walrus, a short animated film featuring a condensed version of the Lennon-Levitan interview set to sprawling stream-of-consciousness animation. The resulting film has won an AFI Award and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Wise and sensible words from John Lennon. I think today's peace activists would be well served to pay attention.
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Our buddy across the Pond, The Presurfer dropped a goodly number of gems on us this past week. Here's a couple of them:

First this:

The Museum of Unworkable Devices is a celebration of fascinating devices that don't work. It houses examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining optimistic in the face of repeated failures.

and then:









The Amen Break and the Golden Ratio

The 'Amen break' was a drum solo performed by Gregory Sylvester Coleman. The drum solo is frequently used as a sampled drum loop in hip hop, jungle and drum and bass music. It is 5.20 seconds long and consists of 4 bars of the drum-solo sampled from the song 'Amen, Brother' as performed by the 1960s funk and soul outfit The Winstons.

Mathematician Michael Schneider became intrigued when he saw an image of the audio waves because he immediately recognized the Golden Ratio in the structure of its timing. And he was surprised to find an even deeper relationship to the structure of the human body.

Below is a good introduction to the history and use of the Amen Break. The video is a bit long for our purposes, but the first few minutes should give you a good idea. Listen to it all for an excellent and comprehensive profile.



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Out