Al Capone – who owned a string of dairy farms – forced New York pizzerias to use his rubbery mob cheese, so different from the real mozzarella produced here in New York City since the first immigrants from Naples arrived in Brooklyn around 1900.
The only places permitted to use good mozzarella made locally were the old-fashioned pizza parlors like Lombardi’s, Patsy’s, and John’s, who could continue doing so only if they promised to never serve slices.
Month: April 2011
London postal railroad
A group of intrepid London explorers found an entrance to the long-abandoned postal rail system, which once whisked mail across the city through a network of underground tunnels. They walked km of track, stopped in several stations, and lavishly documented the journey with photos and text. What an adventure!
hidden london tunnels
Internet Intelligence
A non-human intelligence operating within and at the scale of the global communications network is possible.
Regexp generator
click to create regexp
Another Jay On Earth
Magical Hard-Drive
A 128-MB flash-drive inside a 500GB enclosure. Working in a “looped” mode – when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning.
The Jasmine Revolution
several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. This has been motivated, of course, by events in MENA, and the timing has been significant because it has coincided with 2 important political conferences in Beijing, but it appears to have no real-world substance whatsoever, to have begun as a hoax at best, and to exist only in cyberspace, and cyberspace outside China at that. But the interesting bit is the real world effect it is having inside China, and the momentum it is generating.
trolling the chinese security apparatus
Planet Earth
5 years ago, the BBC started broadcasting one of the most extraordinary documentaries ever to grace television: Planet Earth. The culmination of 5 years of field work, it employed the most cutting-edge of techniques in order to capture life in all its forms, from sweeping spaceborne vistas to shockingly intimate close-ups — including many sights rarely glimpsed by human eyes. Visually spectacular, it showcased footage shot in 204 locations in 62 countries, thoroughly documenting every biome from the snowy peaks of the Himalayas to the lifegiving waters of the Okavango Delta, a rich narrative tapestry backed by a stirring orchestral score from the BBC Concert Orchestra.
planet earth is the best nature documentary of all time.
Fake Artisanal
is there a boardroom somewhere where a marketing and product design group is trying to figure out how to make your next Happy Meal toy, laptop, or Ikea table look like it was handmade by a MAKE reader, recycled from scrap, and sold on Etsy? Will we soon have Potemkin crafters whose fake, procedurally generated pictures, mottoes, and logos grace each item arriving from an anonymous overseas factory? Will the 21st-century equivalent of an offshore call-center worker who insists he is “Bob from Des Moines” be the Guangzhou assembly-line worker who carefully “hand-wraps” a phone sleeve and inserts a homespun anti-corporate manifesto (produced by Markov chains fed on angry blog posts from online maker forums) into the envelope? I wouldn’t be surprised. Our species’ capacity to commodify everything — even the anti-commodification movement — has yet to meet its match.
creating fake artisanal goods on the assembly line
Sleep No More
The British theater company Punchdrunk plans to bring “Sleep No More,” its site-specific Hitchcock-Shakespeare mash-up, to the former McKittrick Hotel building on West 27th Street in Chelsea this spring.In the interactive piece, audience members wear masks and wander around a series of rooms watching wordless dance and musical tableaus based on “Macbeth” (with a Bernard Herrmann score). When the show was produced in collaboration in 2009 with the American Repertory Theater in an old school in Brookline, Mass., rooms throughout the building were turned into scenes from “Macbeth”: actors moved giant trees around the gymnasium; Lady Macbeth went mad inside a classroom; Banquo’s ghost appeared on a stage; dancers ran through the hallways.
super awesome.
2013-12-30:
“Queen of the Night,” very loosely based on Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” combines and amplifies the elements of his previous productions and throws in a few more for good measure. There’s a bit of opera, a lot of rock ’n’ roll, plenty of circus and magic, and hefty servings of food and drink, interwoven with a series of sacred and profane rituals that the audience experiences, as it were, on the move.
i bought tickets before sharing this, obv
Gregor J. Rothfuss 