Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

A few awesome things:

Images from the American section of a world history for Japanese children published in 1861, including pictures of George Washington punching a tiger and Franklin aiming a canon with his bare hands. For context, this is less than a decade after Perry. NB: careful with the attribution. (via and all over)

The complete organ works of J.S. Bach, as recorded by Dr. James Kibbie on several baroque organs, free for downloading. Large numbers of royalty-free recordings of classical music from MusOpen. (via)

Database of European megaliths. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from The Earthly Paradise, Bellerophon in Lycia, William Morris.

Short links.

Trebuchets hurl things.

Bakemono scare people.

Fred Rogers was really good at his job. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from The Queen of Attolia, Megan Whalen Turner.

Links, links, links -- always with the links. Have to keep myself entertained somehow. It's that or post origami:

Why we can't just throw all our trash into volcanos. (via)

Why didn't I know The Toast did summaries of Byron poems? Behold the accuracy of "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year." Bonus link: Portaits of Byron rated by how Byronic they are.

Get to Know Your Japanese Bathroom Ghosts. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "Lamia," part II, l.39, John Keats.

How ladybugs fold their wings, including a recreation using origami of part of the collapse. (via)

Drone shots of cherry blossom petals fallen into water. (via)

How a professional climate change denier turned into a climate change advocate, with a specialty of convincing other deniers. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "An Hour of My Youth," Aleardo Aleardi, tr. William Dean Howells.

What it looks like to land on Mars. If you were Curiosity, that is -- someone compiled the photos from its final descent into a short video. (via)

USGS is using Twitter to find earthquakes in places without detectors. (via)

Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" covered on shakuhachi and koto (ETA: video gone). Smooooooth. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "MacArthur Park," Jimmy Webb.

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.

For the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, The New Yorker has put John Hershey's "Hiroshima" online for free -- it was originally published as the entirety of the 31 Aug 1946 edition, displacing even the "Talk of the Town" section. (via)

(I've other links to share but none that could possibly work with that, and that's enough post as is.)

---L.

Subject quote from "A Perfect Day, Elise," PJ Harvey.

More fun with the Cascadia subduction zone: "The Really Big One." "A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives." (via)

For more pre-disaster worries, here's a long piece on confronting the New Madrid seismic zone: Part 1, Part 2. (via?)

Photo of Anandibai Joshi of India, Keiko Okami of Japan, and Sabat Islambouli of Syria while students at Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1885, before going on to become the first licensed female doctors in Western medicine in their respective countries. Make sure to click See More. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "Never Look Away," Vienna Teng.

"SF Clichés: A Sonnet Cycle" by John M. Ford.

Extreme commute: From New Zealand to Rural Iceland. (FWIW, Scots and Scandinavian butchers also do this.) (via)

It takes a little less than 5 and a quarter hours to travel the Nozomi Shinkansen from Tokyo to Hakata/Fukuoka. You're welcome. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798," William Wordsworth.

Breaking Cat News. (via several)

Not quite a timelapse, though it does use a ton of slo-mo: January in Japan, a seven-minute travelogue. (via)

Online random worldmap generator, or if you prefer, there's a download that gives you even more options. It's fun to center a map on a coastline and zoom down to the kilometer scale. Might even be useful for an RPG or a fantasy novel. (via danged if I remember)

---L.

Subject quote from "Always," The Mercy Bell (with a teenage Butterfly Boucher rocking out on bass).

Bits of random Japanese music:

Babymetal is what you get when a idol group goes death metal: loligoths headbanging in coordinated choreography. As synthetic as any J-pop idol group, but the agency that packaged them did find a drummer and guitarist who know their stuff, and the lead singer has a voice that can stand up their shredding. Their concert videos are, as is par for the idol course, better than the regular music videos. I think this is the first metal of any sort that's actually earwormed me. Start with "Ijime, Dame, Zetai" ("bullying, no more, ever") and "Gimme Choco(late)". (via)

tricot is a math rock quartet, which is kinda like the intersection of alt.rock and experimental jazz -- filled constantly changing oddball time signatures. I like it myself, and these guys are tight in performance. Best entry song is probably "Ochansensu-su" -- if you like that and the next song on the linked playlist, "POOL," randomize the rest. NB: I find this stuff good for de-earworming Babymetal. (via, which also has "if you like them" recs)

Charisma.com is an electro-rap duo -- yes, the "dot com" is part of the band name. Start with "HATE" (alternate version with lyrics, less violence, and doofy studio prancing). If you like that, randomwalk the sidebar. (via).

Subject quote from "Tennis Court," Lorde.