Paper roll punching

I’ve been genuinely surprised by how many people are still using paper rolls to control their organs, and how many organs are still being produced for this technology. The means used to bridge the gap between electronic composition and paper device control are interesting–they remind me of what I think happened in (Italian?) textiles in…

Big top Barbarellas

Dolce vita pin-ups and spaghetti circus over at Raffaele De Ritis’ Novelties and Wonders.

Castlewood busker organ

Rather taken with Castlewood = 20 note (which notes?) (MIDI file on site). 375mm (15″) wide x 300mm (12″) high x 290mm (11.5″) deep – ie wee bit bigger than my Dell opened up. Photos of kit & construction. 2008/6/16 complete kit price 1420AUS = 860EUR, possibly plus 3.2% European tariff. US 810€inc PP Profile…

Tijuana Brass covers

Over at WFMU, probably the best music station in the world. Not much from this neck of the bosque, although they’ve got Los desechables, who I didn’t know, and the vile Eléctrica Dharma, who I do know and whose only merit is in having given rise to our freestyle pakrock outfit, Eléctrica Shoarma.

This is pleasent to walk there the night

The excellent Lenox Napier points us to http://www.ibiza-tourism.net/. This is one of a legion of sites dedicated to spamourism–posting ostensibly useful, functionally redundant tourism information with the sole genuine purpose of harvesting Google adclicks. The domain registree, who is apparently based in France, is too thick or too lazy to use machine translation, so we…

Competition videos from the Portuguese Racing Sardine Club

The British Sardine Racing association (popups) is “dedicated to breeding a better Sardine, revolutionising training methods, and the breeding of both pedigree fish, and Hybrids, such as the Sardine/Shark crossbreed.” The Living Age (1919): “… eagerly bending over a long, narrow tank on the floor. They were racing sardines, taking them out of a tin…

“Before the devil knows you’re dead” trailer, before and after dubbing

In English: Dubbed into Spanish: If the standard of dubbing wasn’t so amateurish then maybe we could accept the fact that very little stuff is original version with subtitles, resulting in half the freaking Chinese talking better English than the Spanish. (I’m talking about the standard of voice acting, not the way Spanish post-production has…

Yves Saint Laurent disinterred?

Surely the first two stories are in reverse chronological order. More news from beyond the grave: Frank Drake plans to talk to alien civilisations in 100 years; is El Draque still after Nova Albion?

Hans Grüsel’s Kränkenkabinet

The redundant (heavy-metal) umlaut and the missing t in Kränkenkabinet seem like reasonable grounds for wondering whether “Hansel Urnst Grüsel” has ever been further east than New Jersey, never mind Neubrandenburg, and the stage show is similarly fantastic. Check out the video of Tea for two at the end of this post (the MP3 audio…

More on the hack attack: Adolfo Daine/adol77dai51, Manchurian candidate?

More on the hacker who briefly brought baldie enterprises to a shuddering halt the other day. The problem is now fixed and I haven’t got time to investigate properly, but I no longer have any reason to believe that the attack was purely permissions-based, exploiting the tendency of most of us to 777 /wp-content/ directories.…