Saturday's Sumptuous Mixture (late, as usual)

We saw some of High Bridge, Kentucky in the previous miscellany. here’s one more old one and a much more modern video of a train on the high bridge which gave the place its name.

Upstairs, Downstairs: 1907
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

Circa 1907
“Cliff stairway, High Bridge, Kentucky”
Oops, forgot my car keys!!
8x10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained leans on tropes of the bad black man that have long been part of the African-American memory of slavery and its aftermath... more

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The Most Beautiful Opera Houses in the World
via Flavorwire by Alison Nastasi
Rising from the Oslofjord inlet like an iceberg is the Oslo Opera House. Co.Design recently wrote about a faceted wall installation inside the modern performance space created by Danish-Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson. Glowing walls line the foyer, adding a striking effect.
We felt inspired by the design and went searching for some of the most beautiful opera houses in the world. These grandiose venues conjure the drama, history, and craft associated with the art form.
Take a trip around the world in our gallery, where we've selected 15 of the most stunning spaces for opera aficionados and architecture/design lovers.


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Is increased biofuel demand in the US causing more poor in Central America to starve?
via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin

Richard Perry/The New York Times
A worthy and overlooked story in the NYT by Elizabeth Rosenthal about a new economic riptide hitting Central America, a result of America’s changing corn policy. The US is now using 40% of its own corn crop to produce biofuel, and tortilla prices have doubled in Guatemala, which now imports about half of its corn.
“Recent laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increasing use of biofuel in cars have had far-flung ripple effects, economists say, as land once devoted to growing food for humans is now sometimes more profitably used for churning out vehicle fuel.”
Read the rest, and check out Richard Perry’s photo slideshow.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Do animals make music? Consider the hermit thrush: nondescript, flitting about the underbrush, where it feeds on insects and berries. But, oh, its song... more

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Early Pirate Bay server now in a museum
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

The Computer Museum in Linköping, Sweden has a “50 Years of File-Sharing&ready exhibition on that includes a machine characterised as the first Pirate Bay server, though there’s some nuance to that description:

A Pirate Bay insider informed TorrentFreak that the contents of the computer case in question were initially hosted in the blue box pictured here. In the same photo are also the three other servers that were operational at the time, a laptop, tower case and the red server box.
So, in just a few years, the hardware moved from an old blue box to a prominent place at the Computer Museum.

“First” Pirate Bay Server on Permanent Display in Computer Museum

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1940 : The original and only Miss Drake’s Home Cookery
via Retronaut by Swinburne University of Technology

“Swinburne University of Technology is an Australian public university based in Melbourne, Victoria. The institution was founded by the Honourable George Swinburne in 1908. It achieved university status in June 1992.”
Wikipedia
This was, of course, long after the aforesaid Miss Drake has been delivering her cookery courses which were, apparently, extremely popular.
The Swinburne Library Blog tells us that the updated book is now available in a digital format.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
When he was 26, Frank Ramsay oversaw Wittgenstein’s Ph.D. thesis. The young prodigy led a short but brilliant life... more

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How the Blues Brothers got made
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Video embedding withheld by request!
Vanity Fair’s history of the making of The Blues Brothers is amazing, a story as madcap and improbable as the movie itself (though there’s a lot more coke in the story of the movie). This is one of my favourite films of all time – at one point I could quote the whole movie by heart (which created a lot of dissonance when I saw the DVD release and they’d added scenes – it was like discovering extra rooms in a house I knew so well I could get around with my eyes closed).
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My Favorite Rembrandt
via Picture This: Library of Congress Prints & Photos by Jeff Bridgers
The following is a guest post by Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints.
Picking a favourite Rembrandt might sound about as reasonable as choosing a favourite star or a single book to take to a desert island. But I do have a favourite – Rembrandt’s 1648 etching St. Jerome beside a Pollard Willow.

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