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GammaBlog Video - NYC - East Village - Lower East Side - Politics - Architecture - Street Art - Photos - NYC Guide 
From eight stories above, Riverside park looked a fairyland.
On the ground it was a two inches of instant slush, puddles that insist on baptizing your feet before you can cross the street, plus the joy of horizontal precipitation.
I didn’t take any photos to illustrate the slush.
Update: Now with more Santas, part 2 of the video is embedded below.
Both videos are mildly NSFW, mostly for language.
I regard Santacon and other roving gatherings as street art, people expressing themselves in public. I was torn between capturing the event on video and dancing down the street. This year I pretty much sacrificed the dancing for the capturing. Maybe next year I’ll attach my camera to a Santa helmet and just go for it. Though if I wasn’t having fun shoving my striped pole in the air like a crane, I would have put the camera away, had a drink or two, and joined the dance.
Bill Cunningham in the New York Times stumbled upon the event and has an audio slideshow. He was greatly amused.
Part 1 finds the Santas in midtown completely covering the steps of the General Post Office on Eighth Avenue,
and then traipsing over to Grand Central Terminal.
Full Screen (Link to YouTube, click play in high quality and then hit the full screen button on the player)
Santacon NYC 2008 Part 1 from GammaBlog on Vimeo.
Part 2 takes the Santas from Rockefeller Center, to the South Street Seaport, and the Staten Island Ferry.
Full Screen (Link to YouTube, click play in high quality and then hit the full screen button on the player)
Santacon NYC – 2008 – Pt. 2 from GammaBlog on Vimeo.
The pedal-powered stripper pole at the South Street Seaport. I mostly shot video during this year’s massive NYC Santacon. I have eight and a half gigs of it to edit into something worth showing.
Warning if you go to Santacon dressed as a panda, you will likely get whacked in the head with a candy cane by feisty girls!
The device was discovered more than a century ago by sponge divers from the Aegean island of Symi.
In 1900, after a gale blew them off course, they took shelter by a barren islet called Antikythera.
When the storm abated, they went diving. Instead of sponges, the divers found a large heap of
bronze and marble statues. They had happened upon an ancient shipwreck.
In all the excitement, nobody noticed a corroded lump of rock dumped in a crate in the courtyard of
the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. That changed a few months later when it cracked open,
revealing traces of gearwheels, precisely marked circular scales and inscriptions in ancient Greek.
Some scholars thought it was a hoax, others that it had come from a modern ship that sank on
the ancient wreck site by chance. The only clues to its purpose were a reference to the signs
of the zodiac – used for astronomy as well as astrology – and the word “Pachon”, which was a
month name used by the ancient Greeks. As the years passed, the mechanism sank into obscurity.
With no answers, historians of technology tended to mention it as an afterthought, if at all.
In recent decades, however, a series of researchers have dedicated large parts of their lives to
studying the mechanism. From their combined efforts, including X-raying its internal workings, we
at last have a fairly complete picture of what the Antikythera mechanism did. It turns out that it
was a hand-wound clockwork device used to calculate the motions of the sun, moon and planets
as seen from Earth, as well as to predict solar and lunar eclipses.
Archimedes and the 2000-year-old computer
Not that you can tell from the photo, but tonight’s full moon is closer to the earth and larger than any full moon has been since 1993.
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/12/081212-full-moon…
Via BoingBoing
Still no walls on the Hotel Ludlow.
This is quite an unusual Jim Power mosaic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him take such care in rendering the human form.
I was going nuts after upgrading to WP 2.7, I was unable to login to my admin area. That’s the part of the blog where you write your posts etc. Everytime I tried to get in, it just bounced back at me, asking me to login again. It turns out that I had to delete the cookies from my browser. Fortunately I was able to find this answer on the wordpress.org forum.
Talking back to the ads in the Broadway Lafayette subway station. “Public spaces for the public good.”
Bowery Boogie EV Grieve The Lo-Down Cityroom NYT Culture Feed from WNYC NY 1 Majority Report RSS of Gary Null’s Blog Buzzflash C-Monster Art Blog
