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Wednesday, April 14th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 4:36a | Mick Jagger Takes Shots at Conspiracy Theorists & Anti-Vaxxers in a New Song, “Eazy Sleazy” (with Dave Grohl on Drums, Bass & Guitar)
Follow along with the lyrics below, or in the video above. W’e took it on the chin Looking at the graphs with a magnifying glass Looking out from these prison walls That’s a pretty mask We escaped from the prison walls Shooting the vaccine bill gates is in my bloodstream We’ll escape from these prison walls Mick Jagger Takes Shots at Conspiracy Theorists & Anti-Vaxxers in a New Song, “Eazy Sleazy” (with Dave Grohl on Drums, Bass & Guitar) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 8:00a | Free Software Lets You Create Traditional Japanese Wood Joints & Furniture: Download Tsugite
The Japanese art of tsugite, or wood joinery, goes back more than a millennium. As still practiced today, it involves no nails, screws, or adhesives at all, yet it can be used to put up whole buildings — as well as to disassemble them with relative ease. The key is its canon of elaborately carved joints engineered to slide together without accidentally coming apart, the designs of which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture in animated GIF form. Though it would be natural to assume that 21st-century technology has no purchase on this domain of dedicated traditional craftsmen, it does greatly assist the efforts of the rest of us to understand just how tsugite works. Now, thanks to researchers at the University of Tokyo, a new piece of software makes it possible for us to do our own Japanese joinery as well. Called, simply, Tsugite, it’s described in the video introduction above as “an interactive computational system to design wooden joinery that can be fabricated using a three-axis CNC milling machine.” (CNC stands for “computer numerical control,” the term for a standard automated-machining process.) In real time, Tsugite’s interface gives graphical feedback on the joint being designed, evaluating its overall “slidabilty” and highlighting problem areas, such as elements “perpendicular to the grain orientation” and thus more likely to break under pressure. This is the sort of thing that a Japanese carpenter, having undergone years if not decades of training and apprenticeship, will know by instinct. And though the work of a three-axis CNC machine can’t yet match the aesthetic elegance of joinery hand-carved by a such a master, Tsugite could well, in the hands of users from different cultures as well as domains of art and craft, lead to the creation of new and unconventional kinds of joints as yet unimagined. You can download the software on Github, and you’ll also find supplementary documentation here. Even if you don’t have a milling system handy, working through virtual trial and error constitutes an education in traditional Japanese wood joinery by itself. The current version of Tsugite only accommodates single joints, but its potential for future expansion is clear: with practice, who among us wouldn’t want to try our hand at, say, building a shrine?
via Spoon & Tamago Related Content: See How Traditional Japanese Carpenters Can Build a Whole Building Using No Nails or Screws Watch Japanese Woodworking Masters Create Elegant & Elaborate Geometric Patterns with Wood Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Free Software Lets You Create Traditional Japanese Wood Joints & Furniture: Download Tsugite is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 11:00a | The Strangest Books in the World: Discover The Madman’s Library, a Captivating Compendium of Peculiar Books & Manuscripts
If you are a frequent reader of Open Culture, or the many blogs we tend to read — especially those concerned with the rare, unusual, and obscure — it’s likely you’ve encountered some of the books in The Madman’s Library, Edward Brooke-Hitching’s fantastic new volume of literary oddities. If not, you’re probably familiar with a few of the categories he identifies under his subtitle, “The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History.” These include “Books Made of Flesh and Blood,” such as a Qur’an written in 50 pints of Saddam Hussein’s blood. If such artifacts don’t qualify as “literary curiosities,” it’s hard to know what does. Brooke-Hitching grants the designation “curiosity” is subjective, and culturally determined, “but after nearly a decade of searching through catalogues of libraries, auction houses and antiquarian book dealers around the world,” he writes in his introduction,” works of undeniable peculiarity leapt out.” Or as he tells Smithsonian in an interview, “the more books you see, the more your radar is sensitive to something that pings with its strangeness.” He pulls out the first book in his bag as an example: a self-published collection of poetry by Charlie Sheen.
Perhaps few other people have laid eyes on such an enormous collection of oddball bibliographic treasures. These are not only books made of strange — and even deadly — materials; they are also books whose contents or histories are just plain weird.
Of the latter, Brooke-Hitching cites Jonathan Swift’s series of pamphlets written under a pseudonym, “a successful campaign to convince all of London of the premature death of a charlatan prophet he despised.” In a chapter titled ‘Works of the Supernatural,’ Brooke-Hitching gives us the example of W.B. Yeats’ wife George, who transcribed “4000 pages of spiritual dictation in the first three years of their marriage.” Her automatic writing was published in a compilation called A Vision in 1925, but “through seven editions it was only Yeats’ name” on the title page.
There are ‘Books that aren’t Books,’ such as a skull inscribed with a prayer and a collection of autobiographical fragments embroidered on the linen jacket of an incarcerated seamstress; there are ‘Cryptic Books” like the Voynich Manuscript and poetry written in code. Part literary detective story, part bibliographic odyssey through time, part literary curiosity all its own (though more of the coffee-table variety), The Madman’s Library is a feast for bibliophiles and oddballs of all kinds. Pick up a copy here and see several more of exceptionally curious books over at Smithsonian.
Related Content: A Medieval Book That Opens Six Different Ways, Revealing Six Different Books in One Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Strangest Books in the World: Discover The Madman’s Library, a Captivating Compendium of Peculiar Books? & Manuscripts is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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