Animation: Parallelostory

Last year we pointed you to “another animation (Leo’s Song)” from Portland-based web site Impactist here’s a great new one called Parrallelostory.

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Video: On days like these

A new short film shot in Piccadilly Circus London.

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Time: 1234567890

Tonight we finally reached “1234567890″ as Unix time. If you run a Unix or Linux machine try the following command…

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Quote of the day: The last Poem

This quote is from James Clavell’s well known novel Shogun:

The blue sky above the earth
White clouds rise towards heaven
Life is only a butterfly’s dream
Death the way to eternal life

Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell, 1924 – 1994, Shogun

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Bartitsu: The Gentleman’s Art of Self Defense

A short documentary on Bartitsu, a self defense system created by E.W. Barton-Wright in 1899 by combining Asian and European defense techniques including jujitsu, boxing, french (kick)-boxing, stick fighting and improvised fighting for example by using your overcoat to defend yourself. It was so popular in the UK at the beginning of the 20. century that Arthur Conan Doyle had his best know character, Sherlock Holmes, practicing Bartitsu in one of his books.

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Quote of the day: Funeral Blues

One of W.H. Auden best known poems “Funeral Blues” in its second (shorter) and changed version. We are still searching for the original version with five stanzas which Auden wrote together with Christopher Isherwood in 1936.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Wystan Hugh Auden, 1907 – 1973, Funeral Blues

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