This comprehensive archive of maps and statistics covers every major "agglomeration" in the world. Agglomerations include "a central city and neighboring communities linked to it by continuous built-up areas or many commuters." Browse the interactive maps to learn more about your favorite megalopolis -- Sao Paulo, Lagos, Karachi, Lima -- the gang's all here. Several maps let you see the actual population density and trace the migration patterns of populations from the country to the city. If census data is your thing, then City Population truly swings.
David Isay, creator of Sound Portraits Productions, just won a McArthur Foundation grant for his work as an independent non-fiction radio storyteller and producer. Listen to some of the available audio programs to get a feel for the depth and breadth of his documentary craft. We tuned in to a restored 1945 interview with the uncanny New York tabloid photographer Weegee and a lengthy audio biography of the Jewish giant Eddie Carmel. Finally, we listened to excerpts from Ghetto Life 101, an extraordinary audio diary of life and survival on Chicago's South Side produced by LeAlan Jones, 13, and his pal Lloyd Newman, 14.
Lionel Fanthorpe Appreciation Page
Who is Lionel Fanthorpe, you ask? Only one of the twentieth century's great undiscovered literary giants. During the heyday of pulp science fiction novels in the fifties and sixties, Mr. Fanthorpe maintained an unbelievable output of one 158-page book every 12 days. He achieved this by dictating all of his material; essentially thinking aloud. The results speak for themselves: "When he awoke it was pitch dark, dark as the pit, dark as the tomb, dark as the grave. A thick, black velvet darkness that seemed almost tangible in its intensity. The kind of darkness that got into the pores of your nose...."
Chicago Tribune: Jelly Roll Morton
"Jelly Roll Morton helped invent jazz in America. In return, he was cheated and discarded by the industry he ignited." So begins this commemorative tribute to the Storyville piano player who took ragtime out of New Orleans and onto the road. Morton brought Dixieland to Chicago, founded the Red Hot Peppers, and composed and recorded prolifically in the first decades of the twentieth century, but died broke and nearly forgotten in 1941. Audio clips, an interactive timeline, abundant photographs, and interviews with contemporary jazzmen attest to the genius and soul of Jelly Roll.
UCR California Museum of Photography presents "Automobile Images and American Identities," a photo show produced in cooperation with The Automobile Club of Southern California. We clicked through the gallery of black-and-white and color images, lingering over Margaret Bourke-White's sensuous 1931 Pierce Arrow, Ansel Adams' 1966 aerial view of a freeway cloverleaf, and Berenice Abbot's 1938 Manhattan parking lot. Rural, urban, suburban, set in driveways and on highways, these images evoke the romance of the road and invite visitors to describe the ride of their lives in text and pictures.
Subtitled "Whatever you can think of," Halfbakery is a communal repository of ideas, inventions, and speculations, none fully cooked. Participants post notions for discussion. To join in the ongoing conversation you'll need to log on and create an account, but you can browse anonymously through the alphabetical idea space, seamlessly archived by the head baker. Mull over a "Babbage Drum Machine," a body language interpreter, and the perennially popular nose cam.
The Fantastic in Art and Fiction
Featuring over 300 ghoulish illustrations, this fascinating image bank explores the roles of angels, demons, monsters, witches, and other gruesome ephemera in classical art and literature. According to the site, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century western literature, "The Fantastic involves dread, fear and anxiety in the face of phenomena that escape rational explanation, or that reveal the notion of reality to be no more than a construct." Drawing from classics like Goethe's "Faust," Aesop's "Fables," and Borges' "Book of Imaginary Beings," this dark and gloomy archive of imaginary creatures makes for great goth screen saver material. Anne Rice fans will flip their wigs.
In the early seventies, the Mattel Corporation unveiled a unique new home organ: "Instead of producing electronically simulated organs, drums, etc, it spun clear LP-sized discs, optically encoded with looped recordings of real instruments and instrumental accompaniments." The Optigan was quickly dismissed as the Edsel of musical instruments, but in recent years this curious organ has made a comeback, appearing on albums by Fiona Apple, Elvis Costello, and Aimee Mann. It has also inspired an immensely entertaining web site.