“Words,” presented by Radiolab and NPR, is a slightly more difficult video to describe! It’s a collage of visual representations of the various meanings of commonly used words (with the occasional homonym thrown in). The video moves almost seamlessly from definition to definition and word to word; ‘play,’ for instance, is illustrated by children playing, an umpire yelling “play ball!”, and a man playing a trumpet, and that final image serves as a transition into the word ‘blow,’ which then includes blown-out birthday candles, a blown fuse, and a boxer taking a blow to the head. It’s poignant and thought-provoking, a reminder that those worn-out words are linked to our rich and varied world. It makes them new.

Of course, the fridge is a relatively new home for words. If you prefer something a little more tried and true, you can always visit Letterheady an “an online homage to offline correspondence” (and a sister site to Letters of Note, which was highlighted in an earlier post). Letterheady in an impressive (and still growing) collection of interesting and/or historically important letterhead. It’s like an online museum! Their most popular letterhead? Nikola Tesla’s. They also feature the personal and professional stationery of the likes of Marie Curie, Bruce Lee, Harry Houdini, Johnny Cash, Jean Harlow, and Adolf Hitler (three versions). Definitely worth a look!

Along the same lines, check out this collection of book plates at Dark Roasted Blend. Some of the book plates date back to 1480! You can also check out book plates belonging to (among others) Charles de Gaulle, George Washington, Sigmund Freud, Greta Garbo, and Charlie Chaplin. Fun stuff!

If you’d prefer something a little more qualitative, check out Bio Mapping. Artist Christian Nold equips people with devices that measure when they are stressed and when they are relaxed, and sends them out to wander cities including Paris, San Francisco, and London. This data is compiled to create Emotion Maps, which not only show which areas of the city tend be stressful or calm, but are also “packed full of personal observations and highlight the issues that people feel strongly about.” They’re also quite beautiful; the design of each map is quite different. They are all available online and zoomable, or each map can be purchased as a print. I should add that Bio Mapping is not just about making quirky, pretty maps; Nold has also created a free, downloadable book, Emotional Cartography,

a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.

Worth checking out!

If you’d prefer to learn about such luminaries in their own words, the blog Letters of Note is a treasure trove. Editor Shaun Usher posts a new letter that he deems interesting and/or important each weekday, including a transcription and, where necessary, a translation. This month alone brings letters from Jack Kerouac, Steve Martin, John Lennon, Richard Feynman, John Candy, Gene Roddenberry, Walt Disney, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, President Eisenhower, and Adolph Hitler. My favorite of this month’s letters, though, is from someone not at all famous: a prison official writing back to the mother of jailed civil rights activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (pictured right, seated, with her head turned). He chides her thusly:

I notice that you state that as a mother of a minor that you want to be notified in case of any emergency. What I cannot understand is why as a mother you permitted a minor white girl to gang up with a bunch of negro bucks and white hoodlums to ramble over this country with the express purpose of violating the laws of certain states and attempting to incite acts of violence.

That particular letter was initially posted on Hunter Gray’s website (he is also in the photo, seated, left).

If I ever do find it, I will send it straight to the blog Paleofuture: A look into the future that never was. Paleofuture, which has been going strong since 2007, has assembled a fabulous collection of past visions of the future that stretch from the 1870’s to the 1990’s. The decades with the most representation, of course, are my beloved 1950’s and 1960’s; I was delighted to stumble across the 1959 Parade article, “Will Robots Make People Obsolete?” But it’s also fascinating to go back to, say, the 1890’s. If you do, check out “Jean-Marc Côté’s Visions of the Year 2000,” fantastical illustrations with a slightly creepy edge. Paleofuture appears to be starting a print magazine as well.

On the flip side of the coin are bits of the past that stay in the past. National Public Radio has produced a lovely multimedia essay for their site called “The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations” that is well worth a look! While the lamplighter wins ‘most romantic photograph,’ my favorite is the very first entry: Lector, someone who read newspapers and political tracts aloud to cigar-makers while they worked. Sign me up, I say!

But there are a few shining lights, sites that organize their podcasts well and give enough information for browsers like me to find just the right podcast, even if we didn’t know exactly what we were looking for ahead of time.

One of these is the University of Oxford. Yes, stodgy old Oxford. Lectures are organized by Division (the Humanities Division is right at the top), then by Faculty (that’s “department” on this side of the pond), and enough information is given about each series of lectures to allow the listener to decide which one best suits her or his mood. There’s a series on Tolkien at Oxford, for instance, and a philosophy lecture series on Ethics of the New Biosciences. Plus, it’s Oxford, the mystique of which has yet to fade for most of us.

Our sister organization in Maine, the Maine Humanities Council, releases about one or two new podcasts every month on their Humanities on Demand blog. The lectures span the humanities disciplines, and each podcast is accompanied by a nice description of the lecture and the scholar who gave it. Thanks, Maine!

Finally, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History offers over seventy podcasts available for free! Their podcasts feature “eminent historians discussing major topics in American history,” and new podcasts are uploaded weekly.  Podcasts are organized by historical period, and you can also select from a list of their most popular podcasts (right now, “Myths of the American Revolution” is most popular). Each lecture has its own discussion board, too, so you can respond to the ideas in the lecture and to other listeners’ comments. Anyone dumping podcasts online pell-mell should be directed here for a lesson in how to do it right!

Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States. We invite you to capture the stories and images of the country today. Go out, look around, talk to people, and contribute to this re-mapping of the United States.

We’ve already got a head start. In May, the Mapping Main Street team packed into a 1996 Suburu station wagon and started a 12,000 mile journey across the country to visit Main Streets. In the process, we took photos, shot videos, and interviewed people. On Main Street in a small town in West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, we met a retired man who is fixing up a boarded-up house that was once a hotel for jazz musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King during segregation. In New Hope, PA, we sat down for beers with a cop on Main Street who talked about strangest fetishes he had come across in his line of work.  We’ve talked with farm laborers and business owners, people out on their porches and people on park benches. We’ve even stood in empty fields…all on Main Streets across the country.

We commissioned bands to write songs for the project. High Places, the Hive Dwellers, Jason Cady and Ian Svenonius collected field recordings on Main Streets and wrote a songs inspired by those recordings. We’ve also started fabricating a Mapping Main Street scuplture that will serve as a mobile art installation and recording unit, enabling people to share stories via cell phones.

They’re always looking for people to contribute to the project, so if you’re interested in them, they’re interested in you!

Moving beyond the borders of the country, check out this quirky little video that demonstrates how people in different parts of the world count cash differently. A cultural nuance that has never crossed my mind!

Photo credit: fdfr66.com

Finally, there’s Atlas Obscura, which bills itself as “a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica.” Here’s how they describe themselves:

The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloging all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you’re looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you’ll find them.

Recently added attractions include Indonesian jungle tours that center around the world’s largest flower, which smells like rotting flesh; a festival in France in which villagers paint themselves black and white and drunkenly recreate a local, pre-Christian folk tale; and a zoo in New Jersey, the occupants of which are rescued exotic and farm animals. Off the beaten path, indeed!

This work explores ideas of class, race, ownership, value, cultural identification and faith. I collaborate with members of The Church Under the Bridge in Waco, Texas, a non-denominational, multi-cultural Christian church that has been meeting under Interstate 35 for sixteen years. Many of the people have had significant disruptions in their lives, experienced periods of homelessness or incarceration, addiction to drugs and alcohol, mental illness or profound poverty and hopelessness. Many are working toward a new measure of stability and accomplishment through the programs and opportunities offered through the church. Other members have more stable lives and are drawn to service at the Church Under the Bridge. I ask each person what he or she keeps and why it is valued.

The portraits are spare, taken under the bridge on Sunday mornings against a backdrop of gray concrete. Each subject holds or displays the one thing he or she will not discard, and each photograph is accompanied by an explanation in the subject’s own words. Mullally’s lens is both kind and thoughtful; the words and images combine to provide a compelling look at these individuals and their community.

Striking a very different note, the British blog Angry People in Local Newspapers is a collection of photographs of people with grievances published in, well, local newspapers. Most of the newspapers are in the UK, with a few from Australia and New Zealand sprinkled in. All of the posts include links to the original articles, providing those of us in the US with an often amusing glimpse into the daily life of other cultures: how trash collection or public transportation or local government works, or doesn’t, in English villages. Much of the anger that the photos attempt to communicate is justified; some of it is most certainly not.

Finally, Matt Logue’s award-winning book empty L.A. features photographs of Los Angeles with no people or cars. Bedrooms, beaches, parking lots, and many, many streets and highways — all uninhabited. It’s eerie, like stepping into an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s also a jarring reminder that what makes a city a city is the humans in it.

An offshoot of the Reading the Past blog, Reusable Cover Art is a collection of book covers that incorporate the same image into their cover art. Some of the juxtapositions are funny; an image that inspired Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale is used for both an edition of the Canterbury Tales and a smutty historical romance (of which, now that I think about it, Chaucer would probably heartily approve). Others are a little more thought-provoking, as when the same image of a veiled woman is used for novels called Kleopatra and Scheherazade. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the images are of females looking feminine,  which makes Reusable Cover Art not just a curiosity, but a handy opportunity to reflect on how these images are used as a kind of shorthand, particularly when it comes to gender and race.

I dare anyone to resist the charms of Abebooks‘ Weird Book Room, a collection of, well, really weird books. Some, like We are the people our parents warned us against,  just have outrageous titles, but some are genuinely perplexing, like The Manga Guide to Calculus or this week’s Weird Book of the Week, Liberace: Your Personal Fashion Consultant:

Never underestimate a man in hot pants. Liberace, the globally-renowned pianist, swings his closet door open in order to coach you on the fine art of extraordinary dressing for ordinary occasions! Need something to wear to your sister’s wedding? Packing for your next Mediterranean cruise? Shopping for a new car? Rest assured, Liberace has the perfect gold lamé number or full-length cape to suit all of your needs.

Not only can you enjoy dazzling photographs of Liberace in the most outrageous of outfits, but you can also punch these photos out to play with twelve paper dolls in hilarious poses!

Ah, the cultures and subcultures that produced these artifacts! And if you happen to know of a weird book that hasn’t made it into the Weird Book Room yet, you can submit it for consideration, as people across the English-speaking world have done.

Finally, three cheers for the blog Curious Pages: recommended inappropriate books for kids, which features offbeat, out of print, abstract, and sometimes not-for-children children’s books. I was thrilled to see a new edition of The Wizard of Oz illustrated by collage artist Graham Rawle, whom I love (anyone who can create a novel exclusively out of clippings from 1960’s women’s magazines is okay by me). Curious Pages doesn’t neglect the classics; there is a post on Der Struwwelpeter (or Shock-Headed Peter), Heinrich Hoffmann’s 1845 collection of German children’s stories chock full of not-so-subtle messages about the dangers of playing with matches, sucking thumbs, going out in bad weather, etc. A nice reminder that children’s stories and fairy tales have rarely been as safe as we’ve tried to make them over the last several decades.

Select columns are available on the New York Times site, which also makes columns available as podcasts. The Ethicist writes a blog, too, called Moral of the Story, which addresses moral questions raised by current news stories.

If you want to know how you measure up, ethically speaking, you might want to visit YourMorals.org, home to a number of quick ethical tests. After you finish each test, the system generates a little graph of how you stack up against everyone else who’s taken it. Here’s how the founders describe their site’s origins and goals:

This website is a collaboration among five social psychologists who study morality and politics. Our goal was to create a site that would be useful and interesting to users, particularly ethics classes and seminars, and that would also allow us to test a variety of theories about moral psychology. One of our main goals is to foster understanding across the political spectrum. Almost everyone cares about morality, and we want to understand — and to help others understand — the many different ways that people care.

Happy clicking, everyone!