AsterBar

http://www.westfordcomp.com/

Very interesting, slightly mysterious website. Among other photography galleries, it offers a unique collection of photographs made from film found in old cameras.

The collector must have grown up in the 1950s (as I did). His comments on the photos suggest that he finds a certain ghostly, part melancholic, part ironic quality in these lost, amateurish, abandoned images.

A website very well worth visiting – and revisiting. It also has a kind of bizarre minimalism to it, that I find fascinating to contemplate. I think the blogger must be a very zen kind of guy.

Make a contribution; this is a project well worth fostering.

I’ve been receiving email newsletters from this blog since sometime last year when I bought some of the farm’s sublime Lamb Bacon. (I think I found it in The New York Times Dining & Wine section.)

Eugene Wyatt writes really well, takes great photos and posts wonderful poems. You should visit his website,  http://catskill-merino.com/, savor it, and buy some products from him either from the website or at the Union Square Farmers’ Market in NYC (if you are fortunate enough to inhabit the Big Apple).

Fantastic piece from Michael Kinsley in The Atlantic about one of the many things that are wrong with our newspapers: overblown and overlong writing. He analyzes and quantifies the maddening fluff, extraneous verbiage, coy attempts at false balance, and general wrong-headedness that pervade current print journalism practice. It’s a lot of fun to read, too.

Cut This Story!

Why is it such a revolutionary notion in our society that a business thrives mightily by giving its customers what they want and only what they want? If there’s one thing capitalists detest, it’s free markets (damned liars). “If people want to block ads, the producers of ads must be doing something wrong”! What a refreshing concept.

From the NY Times.

Link By Link, by Noam Cohen

Here’s a page full of “Unusual articles” culled from Wikipedia.

Improved services for underserved communities, thanks to GIS Systems and the Cedar Grove Institute. Sunshine and scrutiny versus municipal discrimination.

The Revolution will be Mapped

I like the cow’s head on the flag.

Herefordshire Flag

An editorial by Tyler Cowan, professor of Economics at George Mason University, discussing the GOOD news about the world economy in the last decade. It’s been very bad for us in the US, but very good for a lot of other folks. Food for thought, and I can accept the trade-off, at least in the short term.

Fruitful Decade for many in the World

Very interesting piece about the history of journalism in the twentieth century, and a fatal wrong turn the ‘professionals’ made, which has landed us all in the soup. Moral of the story: if you want to stay honest, take the owner’s responsibility for the enterprise you work in. Otherwise, the oligarchs will get you in the long run.

The Biggest Mistake of Professional Journalism

Four sessions for free, here’s the link