Year: 2008

Click the photo to see the birth announcement on Boing Boing.

Congratulations are in order — Cory just announced on Boing Boing that Alice gave birth to a healthy baby girl! Weighing in at 9 pounds, 6 ounces and bearing these names, in order:

• Poesy – As in “poetry”
• Emmeline – After Emmeline Pankhurst
• Fibonacci – After the mathematician who popularized the Hindu-Arabic number system and who has a mathematical sequence named after him
• Nautilus – after the fictional submarine created by Jules Verne
• Taylor – Alice’s last name
• Doctorow – Cory’s last name

A hearty mazel tov to Cory and Alice, and once again, welcome to the world, Poesy!

From the Tom the Dancing Bug comic, here’s a team-up featuring two superheroes: God-Man and Human-Man…

Click the comic to see it on its original page.

If you’re dreading the commute home in the aftermath of the bad weather all over the country, here’s a little something to keep it all in perspective: Guangzhou train station, during their bad winter weather:

Click the photo to see a much larger version.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Composer Hector Berlioz and AC/DC vocalist Brian Johnson.

My calendar’s full, but if you’re thinking about making those first baby-steps into — ahem — culture, may I recommend Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, which the Toronto Symphony Orchestra will perform tonight and tomorrow at Roy Thomson Hall, with super-maestro Charles Dutoit conducting. I think it’s pretty accessible: after all, it’s all about trying to impress a chick with your music, lust, obsession, orgies, drugs, devil-worship and a big-ass bell — dude, it’s AC/DC, if they’d formed a band 150 years earlier!*

(* It could also be a loose summary of my social life — or a very accurate summary of Robert Downey, Jr.’s — from ages 27 to 37.)

Links

• The Wikipedia entry for Symphonie Fantastique
• A video of the NHK Symphony Orchestra (Tokyo) performing the 5th Movement of Symphonie Fantastique, a.k.a. “Things get freaky“
• The Hector Berlioz Website

Wow, has a year already passed?

There’s more here and here.

Click the photo to see it on its original Flickr page.

[Via Boing Boing] Here’s a page from the 1906 schoolbook New Complete Geography showing a number of various “races” and what they look like.

Note the inclusion of “Philippino” — probably included because the Philippines was an American protectorate at the time (one of the by-products of which was my great-grandfather, one James O’Hara, born near Dayton, Ohio). I thought I’d run the image of my kababayan (countryman) from the book side-by-side with my own smiling mug, just for kicks:

Should I swap my goatee for that splendiferous handlebar moustache from the illustration?