Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items (plus a lot about kitties) from around the Bay and beyond
Make all the catty jokes you want about Uwe Mitzscherlich, the German man who married his asthmatic cat Cecilia to honor their decade of companionship. Seriously, though, if you’ve ever bonded with a pet, the whole thing is just heartbreaking. In happier animal news, the Bay Area’s baby peregrine falcons got tagged today.
*****
Totally un-cool headline of the day: “San Francisco may cut funding to transgender job center”
*****
Totally cool headline of the day: “Looking For Burritos in All the Wrong Places”
*****
“A group of Second Life users is suing Second Life’s creator over a virtual land dispute. They say their contractual property ownership rights have been changed and that this alteration of the terms of service constitutes fraud and violates California consumer protection laws.”
*****
1984-meets-Avatar: Berkeley computing professor’s vision of Earth sprinkled with “countless tiny sensors” becoming a reality thanks to tech juggernaut.
*****
This week is Scopitone week on the Daily Blurgh. “What’s a Scopitone?” you ask. The Scopitone was a type of jukebox popular in the ’60s that synced 16mm short films (also known as “Scopitones”) to magnetic soundtracks, effectively creating music videos long before MTV was around. To learn more, check out Robin Edgerton’s excellent history of the device, as well as the bountiful blog Scopitones.com. To start us off, here is handsome rogue Serge Gainsbourg singing “Le Poinçonneur Des Lilas” in one of the earliest Scopitones made in France (the clip is from 1958 and was shot in the Porte des Lilas Métro station):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7LVx-HeW10