After 26 years of teaching children (literally my entire life), Reading Rainbow is being cancelled. It’s not for a lack of interest, but a lack of funding for the show. NPR says the show also was victim of a “shift in the philosophy of educational television programming,” that started under Bush.
I don’t know how many of you grew up in the 80’s, but Reading Rainbow will be sorely missed by those of us who did have the show to thank for our early interest in reading.
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InventorSpot has posted their yearly list of top pet costumes for Halloween. As always, the selection fails to disappoint, like the little Football Star Costume shown. The whole list is great.
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Wired has a list of some of the strangest mission patches that NASA has produced. The patch above was for the creation of the Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules of the International Space Station. NASA selected a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle to represent the project because three of the four modules share names with those characters. The modules were built by the Italian Space Agency, so they are named after the Italian Renaissance artists, rather than the turtles.
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A month ago, I linked to a news story about plans for a full-sized LEGO house in the UK. James May, the TV host responsible, has construction of the three-million brick project well underway. And yes, it has a functioning bathroom. You can view twenty photos of the construction process at the link.
Link via Geekologie
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Linsey Pollak, Brendan Hook, and Ric Halstead comprise The Cycologists, an Australian band that bases its preformances on a bicycle theme. They’ve fitted their instruments into their bicycles, as the video above demonstrates when the musicians use their seats as clarinets. Other instruments include tuned bicycle bells, flutes that work as handlebars, and panpipes powered by tire pumps. The Cycologists’ stage shows are quite complex and you can see videos of them at the link.
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Brooklyn-based artist Ranjit Bhatnagar works with sound installations and homemade instruments. He created this music box guided by a Möbius strip. It’d be perfect for playing “The Song That Never Ends“! Bhatnagar made the music box as part of a project to create a musical instrument every day for a month.
Artist’s Website via Popular Science
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Photographer Brian Ulrich has spent the last few year examining “the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live.” His latest project captures the beauty and sadness of empty stores and failed businesses.
Most recently a new project began in 2008 entitled Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls. In the recent economic downturn some of the very stores I photographed at the beginning of the project are now emptied and laid barren in the hulking empty architecture of the big box, mall or store.
Link -via Metafilter
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James Hayes-Bohanan, Ph.D. is a professor of geography AND a scholar with the Vanderbilt University Institute for Coffee Studies. His website Geography of Coffee is full of information about coffee around the world, including the places coffee is produced, shipped, and sold. You’ll also find out about fair trade and the politics of the coffee business. Of course, there are also coffee reviews and instructions for making the perfect cup. Link -via the Presurfer
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This is a slice of cartoonist Jim Unwin’s diagram of mythical creatures. Unwin, based out of South London, is also noted around the Internet for his “virtual collection” of chairs from The Incredibles and as the designer of the video game Little Big Planet. Full sized image at the link.
Link via Popped Culture
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Looks like America is not the only country that needs to be weary of fast food. While not many outside the US can see the appeal of
a Big Mac, people in Morocco just love the McArabia.
This new sneaky tactic of adapting global fast food chains to the local palette is happening all over the
world from squid topped Dominoes pizza in Taiwan to KFC’s vegetarian Chana Snacker, a chickpea burger topped with Thousand Island sauce, in India.
Watch out global obesity! I see a plot for a Super Size Me sequel.
Walk into a McDonald’s in Morocco and you’ll find a sandwich you can’t get anywhere else in the world: a cumin-spiced flatbread creation called the McArabia Tagine.
“Honestly it tastes Moroccan,” said Noor El Ghoumari, 34, a man who had just paid 53 dirhams, or about $6.60, for a meal with one of the ground beef sandwiches in Rabat on a recent afternoon. “This is a local McDonald’s and obviously they have to adapt.”
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