via petapixel.com
Ha Ha. Lots of LOLs.Sunday, June 05, 2011
Wave At The Bus
An Antipodean Eye: abrolhos ~ keep your eyes open
If you are having trouble working out the picture, it's a screen grab off google earth. The white area is a southerly swell breaking on shallow coral reef. The pale blue area slightly off centre is a sand hole in the reef in about 5m of water.
The sand hole first started to form 381 years ago today, when on her maiden voyage the VOC ship, the Batavia, ran aground on a moonlit night with little swell. The watchman mistook the surf for the moon's shimmer and the ship rammed into the reef under full sail. Half a mile either way and they would have sailed clean through the Houtman Abrolhos without ever realising. As it was, the pride of the Dutch fleet was doomed to break up on Morning Reef over the next week or so. The already mutinous crew and terrified passengers were either, ferried on the ship's longboat to nearly islands, which were sandy cays at best, or drowned trying to swim there. Some non swimmers stayed on the broken ship drinking the liquor and parading the deck drunkenly in the captain's finery, before belatedly drifting ashore some days later, with the rats, on the spars and rigging of the 600t ship.
Let's Twist again 50 Years of the Twist| Music | The Guardian
via guardian.co.uk
It's 1961, and a new era is dawning. On the dancefloor, the Twist – which had enjoyed a brief vogue among America's teens the previous summer – is enjoying a second coming that will sweep the world and change the way people move. No more waltz, quickstep or foxtrot. No more rumba or beguine, cha-cha or tango. No more jitterbug or jive. The Twist is a dance for different times. The absence of body contact is significant. Rather than going through a set of predetermined steps, you are free to use dancing as a means of self-expression, of doing your own thing, though that phrase will not come into use until the 60s have become fully swinging. It is a narcissistic dance, but it also gives you the chance to watch your partner's moves, and read their intentions. And since you are not physically attached to your partner, there is nothing to stop you drifting away to dance with someone else who has caught your eye (of course, you can also have that humiliation visited upon you, and find yourself dancing alone). Finally, there is no leader: here is the first dance in which the genders are created equal.
Fifty years ago, this felt like a revolution. One evening in the late summer of 1961, I was invited to a teenage party at which a very pretty girl and I were the only ones who knew how to do the Twist. The others gathered round, watching eagerly and then trying for themselves this move that seemed to demolish not just the dance styles but the moral and social structures of the past. Their expressions were those of Mad Men's junior account executives and secretaries. For a while, the Twist was ours and ours alone. But not for long.
No one knows how the Twist began. The word was used in connection with dancing in a number of songs during the first half of the 20th century, but the song itself seems to have been written, in its first form, in 1957 by Brother Joseph Wallace of the Sensational Nightingales, a prominent gospel group. Its profoundly secular nature prevented him performing it himself, but when the Nightingales found themselves sharing a Florida hotel with the popular (and very secular) Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Wallace offered them his song. Ballard modified the melody and chords to fit the conventional 12-bar blues structure, and the following year, at the Cincinnati studio of King Records, the group committed the result to tape.
King Records' boss was Syd Nathan, an archetypal cigar-chomping philistine who liked the Twist so little that it first saw the light of day, in January 1959, as the B-side of a ballad called Teardrops On Your Letter, which edged its way into the Top 100. As occasionally happened, however, disc jockeys decided they preferred the Twist and played it at teenage functions. It won particular favour in Baltimore, where the audience at a TV show for local teens made up a dance to go with it.
This was quickly spotted by Philadelphia-based disc jockey Dick Clark, who already had a national following for his own TV show, American Bandstand, which was broadcast in an early evening slot on weekdays. Barely into his 30s, the clean-cut Clark was building an empire, and his cultural impact and commercial power were already enormous. As the author of a book called Your Happiest Years, which included chapters entitled "Good Manners are Good Sense" and "Teenagers and Parents Can Be Friends", he had initial reservations about the propriety of the Twist's pelvic movements. But his sharp business instincts had led him to cultivate mutually profitable relationships inside the music business, and he was quick to suggest to his old friend Bernie Lowe, co-owner of Philadelphia's Cameo and Parkway labels, that it would be a good idea to record a cover version of this new song, to feature on his show.
Lowe selected one of his contracted artists, a cheerful, good-looking, puppy-fattish 19-year-old called Ernest Evans whose professional name, Chubby Checker, paid homage to Fats Domino, but whose previous recordings had provoked little response. The job of making the record was given to Dave Appell, a former dance-band guitarist who had become Cameo-Parkway's house arranger. Appell changed the underlying rhythm from the jazzy shuffle of Ballard's original to an even eight-to-the-bar feel derived from Latin music – a pattern that became identified as the Twist beat – and inserted a gritty tenor saxophone solo.
Chubby Checker and the Twist were duly given their first national exposure in August 1960 to the broader audience offered by Clark's Saturday night show, broadcast from New York. The singer gave the audience his famous advice on how to master the dance – "Just pretend you're wiping your bottom with a towel as you get out of the shower, while putting out a cigarette with both feet" – and a month later the record was No 1 in the national charts. By the end of the year, however, it had been forgotten. The Twist already seemed to have gone the way of its predecessors, in double-quick time.
As things turned out, it was only sleeping, and 1961 was destined to be the year of the Twist. At the start of the year Checker had a second No 1 with another dance-craze song, Pony Time, but his next record was a flop. He needed another hit, and in May he was back in Cameo-Parkway's studio to record a song called Let's Twist Again, composed by Dave Appell with Kal Mann, Bernie Lowe's business partner and a former comedy writer. According to Mann, it took all of five minutes to assemble a song clearly designed to do little more than squeeze out the last drop of juice from the original idea. More tuneful than the original, it reached the US Top 10. Elsewhere, meanwhile, events were conspiring to revive what had begun to look like a time-expired fad.
On West 45th Street in midtown Manhattan, a small nightclub called the Peppermint Lounge was setting aside its past as a sleazy leather bar. Owned by the Genovese crime family, and operated by one of its underbosses, Matty "The Horse" Ianniello, as part of a string of strip clubs and gay bars, it had acquired as resident band a young New Jersey group called Joey Dee and the Starliters. They were joined on stage by three teenage girls from Spanish Harlem who had turned up at the club one night in high bouffant hairdos, lavish mascara and matching frocks, with Kleenex stuffed in their bras, and were given a job as the world's first go-go dancers. Later they would become known as the Ronettes, but for now they merely gyrated while the Starliters' high-energy versions of current hits pulled in crowds of young dancers.
Since the club was licensed to hold no more than 178 people, those crowds could never be huge. What counted was not the size but the nature of the audience, for in the late summer of 1961 the Peppermint Lounge enlisted the services of Earl Blackwell, publisher of the Celebrity Register, to arrange visits by a couple of New York columnists: Igor Cassini, who contributed gossip items to the daily Journal-American under the byline "Cholly Knickerbocker", and Eugenia Sheppard, a fashion writer for the Herald Tribune. Both gave prominent mentions to the club, and to the sudden blossoming of the Twist fad, and the warmth of their approval encouraged a flock of celebrities to follow in their footsteps. Before long columnists were recording the presence of Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, Greta Garbo, Tennessee Williams, Elsa Maxwell, Noël Coward, Norman Mailer and the offspring of various European royal families. Doormen were being bribed to secure admission for celebrities emerging from Rolls-Royces. As the Cotton Club was to the 20s and Studio 54 would be to the 70s, so the Peppermint Lounge was to its brief era.
Suddenly the Twist was reborn, with a vigour that grew exponentially. Within weeks, Joey Dee and the Starliters were not only topping the charts with Peppermint Twist but entertaining Manhattan's social elite at a charity ball in the Plaza hotel and a party at the Museum of Modern Art. Jackie Kennedy, the epitome of the new carefree spirit of the post-Eisenhower era, did the Twist in a Capri nightspot. Anthropologists and psychologists were asked for their opinions, and the dance made the cover of Time magazine. Checker's The Twist topped the chart for a second time. Arthur Murray, the dance teacher, added it to his curriculum, setting an example followed with some reluctance by Fred Astaire's nationwide chain of academies. Suddenly almost every new record seemed to have Twist in the title, from future classics such as Sam Cooke's Twistin' The Night Away, Gary US Bonds' Twist, Twist Senora and the Isley Brothers' Twist And Shout, to countless examples of exploitative dross. And, inevitably, Hollywood started taking an interest.
Twist Around The Clock was launched on 30 December 1961, with the craze at its height. A barely disguised low-budget rewrite of Rock Around The Clock, it was advertised with the slogan "It's twist-errific!" and featured Checker, Dion DiMucci and the Marcels with such songs as Twist Along, Twistin' USA and The Twist Is Here To Stay. The following day a competing film, Hey, Let's Twist, hit the cinemas, centring on the Peppermint Lounge, with Joey Dee featured as an ambitious young singer and Joe Pesci, a sometime guitarist with the Starliters, making his uncredited screen debut as a dancer in the club scenes (the Ronettes were to have been given roles as the Starliters' girlfriends, until the film's producers clocked their skin pigment). In Britain, where Let's Twist Again reached No 2 in the charts, the film industry followed suit, recruiting Checker to sing something called The Lose Your Inhibitions Twist in Dick Lester's It's Trad, Dad!, which also featured Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and Chris Barber.
Checker rerecorded Let's Twist Again in German, for an audience also dancing to Der Liszt Twist. In France there was Twist à Saint-Tropez, by Dick Rivers et Les Chats Sauvages, while Johnny Hallyday invited his followers to Viens Danser Le Twist. But by the time the Beatles brought their first album to a climax with their raucous, Hamburg-honed version of Twist And Shout at the beginning of 1963, the whole business had become the inevitable victim of overexposure. To its early adopters, it was history.
The Peppermint Lounge would lose first its celebrity clientele and then its liquor licence, but it could be credited with popularising the idea of the discotheque: a phenomenon that, with or without go-go girls, would be a great deal harder to eradicate than the dance that made its name. What the Twist had done, however, was create a powerful hunger among modernist youth for new dance crazes based on the template of dancing on the spot, with no contact. And so along came the Locomotion, the Fly, the Madison, the Hitch Hike, the Watusi, the Hully Gully, the Frug, the Stroll, the Monkey, the Dog, the Mashed Potato and countless others, including that nameless creation, beloved of mods, in which all movement was reduced to the merest twitch of one knee and a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders: it was, as New Orleans R&B singer Chris Kenner would proclaim in 1962, the Land Of 1,000 Dances indeed.
And when I watch that Mad Men scene now, there's something in it I recognise from the teenage party of half a century ago: the faces, with their look of joy and discovery. It was only a dance, for heaven's sake, but it opened up a world.
Ray Condo Band : "Come Back To Me"
via youtube.com
Another one of those musicians who died young. Brilliant energetic rockabilly tunes. He earned the last name "Condo" from "couch-surfing" around town so much that he was sometimes called a "one-man condo".Saturday, June 04, 2011
Koala Patrol
As I was waiting for a bus this evening, this little guy sauntered past and sat in the middle of the road in Reynella. I eventually managed to chase him off the road and into a small tree where he would be safe in the short term.
Derby Day
This year’s race is of particular interest because The Queen has a horse running, Carlton house trained by Sir Michael Stoute at Newmarket. This is her tenth runner in the race, her first being Aureole in 1953 which finished second but this year looks to be her best chance so far of having a winner. Carlton House
Friday, June 03, 2011
Photo Hunt: Dirty
There are always dirty implements and tools that need to be cleaned during our cooking classes. Luckily we share the pain.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Live beef exports ban a threat to delicate trade dispute | Crikey
Disturbing evidence of the appalling conditions at some Indonesian abattoirs and the decision to ban Australian live exports to those facilities threatens to exacerbate an already delicate trade dispute between the two countries.
Over the past year meat exporters including Australia have raised objections to an Indonesian government decision to drastically reduce the quantity of imported livestock and packaged meat in an attempt to boost the local industry.
A recent report in Indonesian news magazine Globe Asia delved into the issue.
Last year Australian live cattle imports into Indonesia shrunk by more than 30%, and the quotas for this year have been limited to 500,000 head. The cuts form part of the Ministry of Agriculture’s plan for the archipelago to achieve beef self-sufficiency by 2014.
The import cuts go beyond live cattle exports — this year Indonesia reduced boxed beef imports by 58%, setting the cap at 50,000 tonnes. (In April, the figure was increased to 72,000.)
But the cut to imports have failed to stimulate the Indonesia cattle industry, which was ill prepared to fill the considerable gap. It has pushed up beef prices across Indonesia and prompted fears of food shortages.
As the Globe Asia article explains:
“What is clear is that the Indonesian government cannot handle increasing demand for beef while simultaneously curbing imports: Domestic production is simply not capable of filling the gap.
“A case in point occurred in September 2010 when beef prices in Jakarta skyrocketed ahead of the Idul Fitri holiday due to undersupply, which local traders blamed squarely on the agriculture ministry’s efforts to curb imports. The situation only got worse.
“Given higher prices and lack of supply, Indonesian cattle owners decided to make a quick buck by slaughtering breeding female cows to meet demand, dealing a major blow to government efforts to increase the country’s domestic herd size as part of its self-sufficiency blueprint.
“The Ministry of Agriculture rushed to pass a regulation banning livestock owners from slaughtering breeding females, but the damage had already been done. One meat importer estimates that ‘80 per cent to 90 per cent of what’s been killed at the moment in Indonesia is productive breeding females’.”
Just how the animal welfare issue — and the Australian government’s decision to suspend exports to 11 abattoirs — connects to the trade dispute is open to interpretation.
Australia shipped $684.5 million worth of live cattle last year, with Indonesia accounting for a little under 60% of the trade, so the stakes are significant.
On one reading, the ban will serve as a shot across the bows at the Indonesians to make clear they do not hold all the power in determining export patterns. While the Australian government appears caught unawares by the issue, it seized the moment to make a point to the Indonesians.
But on another reading the Indonesians will be unfussed by Australia’s move, which only reinforces the logic behind its move towards self-sufficiency. The ban may even prompt the affected abattoirs to turn to Indonesian cattle, which will be subject to the country’s more relaxed approach to animal rights.
Either way, it is unlikely the Indonesians will be rushing to improve the conditions of its abattoirs.
That was certainly the message from Indonesia yesterday. According to news agency AAP, Indonesia’s deputy Agriculture Minister Bayu Krisnamurthi said the ball was in Canberra’s court.
“We are one of their biggest markets,” he said. “So it’s also their interest to make sure Indonesian market still will be open.”
An open market, indeed.
via crikey.com.au
So there you have it, the Indonesian point of view. Interesting.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Big Muff | The John Martyn Pages
via johnmartyn.info
Fantastic John Martyn resource. Go on, you know you want to. If you haven't listened, why not?
Red wine and chocolate are good for the mind, scientists claim | Mail Online
via dailymail.co.uk
It is the perfect excuse to round off a meal with an after-dinner mint and one last glass of Merlot.
Research suggests that red wine and chocolate are good for the mind.
It is thought that polyphenols - plant chemicals abundant in dark chocolate and wines - widen blood vessels, speeding the supply of blood to the brain.
This provides it with a rush of oxygen and sugars, making complex calculations easier and quicker.
Those who like to indulge will be particularly pleased to know that it is thought that polyphenols are more effective in combination than alone.
In other words, having some chocolate with your red wine could be better for you than just having a drink alone.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1384196/Red-wine-chocolate-goo...
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Fifa crisis deepens as Sepp Blatter goes before ethics committee | Football | The Guardian
via guardian.co.uk
Money rules eh Sepp? These guys make the ICC and IOC look like paragons of virtue. FIFA needs to be blown up and reinvented.
As the most senior figures in world football descended on London for tonight's Champions League final, the main topic of conversation was not the clash between Manchester United and Barcelona but the shattered credibility of Fifa.
Blatter was due to attend but it is unclear whether he will make the trip from Zurich in light of the latest allegations. He said: "I cannot comment on the proceedings that have been opened against me. The facts will speak for themselves."
"I think the process is fast descending into a farce," the sports minister Hugh Robertson said. "It's impossible to have a sensible election when both of the candidates have been accused of corruption. The sensible thing would be to suspend the election until these allegations have been properly investigated."
The claims against Blatter mean that 10 of Fifa's 24-man executive committee have now either been found guilty or accused of corruption in the last 12 months.
Fifa's ethics committee was obliged to investigate Blatter under its own code after Bin Hammam claimed the president knew all about alleged payments handed to Caribbean Football Union (CFU) officials at a conference on 10-11 May.
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