Robert Newman - The History Of The World Backwards Episode 1

April 4th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)

Robert Newman - The History Of The World Backwards Season 1 Episode 1/6

Robert Newman combines comedy and history in fantastically entertaining monologues such as his ‘History of Oil’ theater production.

In this new 6 part series, Newman looks at history as if time flowed backwards. The opening scene, for example, comments on the ethnic cleansing by Cherokee and Apache in the 1800s that lead to the eradication of all white people from the North American continent by the mid 15th Century.

The most startling result of this process is that many things can be seen as progress when played backwards. Our destruction of the Earth’s environment becomes our understanding of how to fix it.
29 min 1 sec Oct 30, 2007

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The BBS Documentary - Part 1 - Baud

March 29th, 2008 · 3 comments or link to (permalink)

The BBS Documentary - Part 1 - Baud

Part 1 of what looks like a great documentary series about the Balkanized version of online existence before the Internet took hold. As one of the interviewees points out, people seem to think the Internet came out of nowhere rather than being evolutionary. In the same way, people think that the web created the explosive growth in the Internet, but actually things picked up a year or so before, opening up the evolutionary niche for something like the web to thrive. For that reason, understanding the history of Bulletin Board Systems, through a documentary like this, is the only way to understand the history of the Internet in its proper context.

As an aside, the Altair 8800, pictured, was the computer I used (or rather avoided using) at high school.

jason scott 38 min 19 sec Jan 13, 2007 www.bbsdocumentary.com

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Les Horribles Cernettes - You Only Love Your Collider

March 28th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)

An amateur pop promo made by people working at CERN in the 90s. The people in this video were the subject of the first ever photo on the web.

According to band member, Silvano de Gennaro:

“Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls” to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the “World Wide Web”. I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch”.”

Cray-zee

LHC - Collider

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Battle of the Somme

January 19th, 2008 · 5 comments or link to (permalink)

If America had been continuously fighting the Iraq War from before the Mayflower landed, the US death toll would be less than the fatalities in this single battle.

If there was a specific date for the beginning of American hegemony and the death of Imperialist Europe, it would be the first day of the Somme. The Somme was the most brutal of WWI battles with over a million casualties, part of a pointless conflict fought between one country whose ruler had known the others’ as his ‘grandma’.

The Commander in Chief of the British Army at the time, was Douglas Haig, an antiquated buffoon who refused to prepare for modern methods of warfare, calling the machine gun a ‘vastly overrated weapon’. Countless tens of thousands of people died as a result, yet Haig is the name embossed at the center of every poppy worn in Britain in commemoration of both world wars, every year, to this date. This is what one might politely call - a fucking disgrace.
1 hr 19 min 7 sec Jan 2, 2008
www.caltonradio.com

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Death in Rome

December 22nd, 2007 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

A film about the murder of former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978. This was a seminal moment in Italy’s history, comparable to the assassination of JFK. Its also been the subject of so much fiction that its good to watch a documentary on the subject.
45 min 0 sec Dec 15, 2007

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