Tree.fm allows you to listen to random forests around the world. This is so chill. Give it a try.
People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, and unwind wherever you are. Take a breath and soak in the forest sounds as they breathe with life and beauty!
The United Nations has gotten some well deserved bad press lately for egregious behavior by some UN agencies, but there remain many UN organizations doing good work. Best Tourism Villages from UN Tourism is an agency that promotes villages around the world with populations below 15,000 where tourism preserves cultures and traditions, celebrates diversity, provides opportunities and safeguards biodiversity. See the full list of villages from 2023 and previous years at unwto.org.
For decades there was one thing that all New Yorkers could rally around: the dollar slice of pizza. It has been a given that one could depend on a tasty and inexpensive slice of New York-style pizza in all five boroughs of the city. The price has varied slightly over the years, but the quality never changed. The wonderful little documentary below looks at our enduring love affair with the slice.
I can trace my love of poetry back to my 7th grade English teacher. For reasons lost to the fog of time, one day Natalie Fine handed me a book of poems by Langston Hughes and simply said, “I think you will get these.” I did, and I still do.
Recently, I found the wonderful website Read A Little Poetry which is a labor of love by the Manila based writer and poet T. De Los Reyes. The selection of poems are always intriguing, as is the marginalia that accompanies them. The newsletter is ad-hoc – so it’s like having random treats delivered to your inbox – but the website has a meticulous archive sorted by poets and themes, alongside a tab for generating random poems.
A Dream Deferred
Langston HughesWhat happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?
Bluebird
Charles Bukowski
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s still singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?
While searching for early Paris photographs for a project, I ran across the marvelous video below. The short film pairs the images by the pioneering street photographer Eugène Atget with the music of Wim Mertens.
NB: If the video fails to open in your browser please click here.
Have you ever experienced that sinking feeling when your luggage failed to appear on the airport carousel ? Or have you ever reached your destination and realized that you left your headphones or other valuables in the airline seat pocket ? I recently ran across this informative and entertaining video from the folks at National Geographic explaining what happens to all of that lost stuff.
I recently read Nick Harkaway’s exciting novel Titanium Noir. The blurb above is a better recommendation for the book than any review that I could ever post. If you haven’t read Harkaway, it’s not a bad place to start. After reading the book I was reminded of a marvelous infographic about Noir films that I ran across a few years ago. Designer Melanie Patrick and writer Adam Frost have, at the behest of the British Film Institute, come up with a handy infographic (click here to view it in a larger format) that explains and visualizes the particulars of the “shadowy world of one of classic Hollywood’s most beloved subgenres.”
Every knitter and Orwell fan that you know will want this free download: a knitting pattern for a sweater depicting the cover of the iconic Penguin Classics version of George Orwell’s 1984. “The pattern includes extra alphabet charts so that you can customise the title and author to your favourite book.”
“When young and full of fellow feeling, Professor Joseph Skizzen had been tormented by the thought that the human race (which he naïvely believed was made up of great composers, a few harmlessly lecherous painters, maybe a mathematician or a scientist, a salon of writers, all aiming at higher things however they otherwise carried on) … that such an ennobled species might not prosper, indeed, might not survive in any serious way—symphonies sinking like torpedoed ships, murals spray-canned out of sight, statues toppled, books burned, plays updated by posturing directors; but now, older, wiser—more jaundiced, it’s true—he worried that it might (now that he saw that the human world was packed with politicians who could not even spell “scruple”; now that he saw that it was crammed with commercial types who adored only American money; now that he saw how it had been overrun by religious stupefiers, mountebanks, charlatans, obfuscators, and other dedicated misleaders, as well as corrupt professionals of all kinds—ten o’clock scholars, malpracticing doctors, bribed judges, sleepy deans, callous munitions makers and their pompous generals, pedophilic priests, but probably not pet lovers, not arborists, not gardeners—but Puritans, squeezers, and other assholes, ladies bountiful, ladies easy, shoppers diligent, lobbyists greedy, Eagle Scouts, racist cops, loan sharks, backbiters, gun runners, spies, Judases, philistines, vulgarians, dumbbells, dolts, boobs, louts, jerks, jocks, creeps, yokels, cretins, simps, pipsqueaks—not a mensch among them—nebbechs, scolds, schlemiels, schnorrers, schnooks, schmucks, schlumps, dummkopfs, potato heads, klutzes, not to omit pushers, bigots, born-again Bible bangers, users, conmen, ass kissers, Casanovas, pimps, thieves and their sort, rapists and their kind, murderers and their ilk—the pugnacious, the miserly, the envious, the litigatious, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the lubricious, the jealous, the profligate, the gossipacious, the indifferent, the bored), well, now that he saw it had been so infested, he worried that the race might … might what? … the whole lot might sail on through floods of their own blood like a proud ship and parade out of the new Noah’s ark in the required pairs—for breeding, one of each sex—sportscasters, programmers, promoters, polluters, stockbrokers, bankers, body builders, busty models, show hosts, stamp and coin collectors, crooners, glamour girls, addicts, gamblers, shirkers, solicitors, opportunists, insatiable developers, arrogant agents, fudging accountants, yellow journalists, ambulance chasers and shysters of every sleazy pursuit, CEOs at the head of a whole column of white-collar crooks, psychiatrists, osteopaths, snake oilers, hucksters, fawners, fans of funerals, fortune-tellers and other prognosticators, road warriors, chieftains, Klansmen, Shriners, men and women of any cloth and any holy order—at every step moister of cunt and stiffer of cock than any cock or cunt before them, even back when the world was new, now saved and saved with spunk enough to couple and restock the pop … the pop … the goddamn population.”
From William H. Gass’s novel Middle C.
Travel Between The Pages 