Happy Christmas

Via Plan 59

Quote

"He who opens a school, closes a prison." - Victor Hugo

Fear Of Heights

A job I couldn't do.

Video

Photo (For Winter)

Bicycle: Unchanged

What I like about bicycles is that they never change. They are the same beautifully simple machines they have always been. 1912 photo below via Shorpy.

What Obama Has Done In Two Years

Actually, a lot.

Motor City

Via a post at David Byrne's blog about Detroit.

Maps Of Europe

America's view:


And other perspectives via Strange Maps.

Short Film, Coachella

It's Election Time!

Clown News

Tiririca!

Photo

Poll

A poll you can trust.

Chart

Video (High Seas)

Rough seas.

Harlem Night Clubs 1932

Details at Big Think.

Photo c.1910

From an incredible series at The Big Picture of color photos taken in Russia a hundred years ago.

Good Tree Gone

Story here.

Poem

This poem, it seems to me, honors anyone ever lost at sea.

New Religion
by Bill Holm

This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven's not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.

"New Religion" by Bill Holm, from The Chain Letter of the Soul: New & Selected Poems. © Milkweed Editions, 2009.