The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'eccentric'

2007/11/9

A new rail company with a whiff of eccentricity is soon to start services in the UK. Grand Central Rail, founded by third-generation railwayman and former British Rail manager Ian Yeowart, who had been planning to run his own railway services since John Major privatised the railways. They will initially be running services from London to Sunderland, in refurbished InterCity 125s with Monopoly and Cluedo boards printed on the tables and Marilyn Monroe posters (part of their branding) at the ends of carriages. That is, assuming that they get their trains back from the refurbishers:

"The problem with the railway industry, particularly on the engineering side, is that it's agricultural," says Mr Yeowart - referring to the workshops where the trains are being refurbished. "It's like going back 50 years."
Despite the years of under-investment followed by a cack-handed privatisation process; despite the utilitarian, pile-'em-high ethos of many operators and the cattle-truck morning commutes; despite Paddington and Hatfield and Potters Bar, the romance of the railways remains hardwired into the national soul.

(via Londonist) eccentric railway uk 0

2003/9/13

The Top 10 Outsider Videos; with Quicktime (bOING bOING):

Peace and Love the movie pitch
A brain-damaged hippie has decided to devote all his time and money into pitching a surreal cartoon/live-action musical/ Hollywood blockbuster about the powers of peace and love. He has a convoluted plot that involves love babies and sperm and magical lovemaking and the KKK and Vietnam and death and birth and its all done in this heavily marketable style that is so fucking insane you will never want to go near acid ever again.
HIGHLIGHT: He goes off on a tangent about a new chain of organic vegetarian restaurants called Peace and Love that will stem from the success of the movie and will compete with McDonalds.

bizarre eccentric fringe outsider art video 0

2002/12/13

The bizarre story of Solresol, a musical language, designed by a 19th-century French inventor, in which sequences of notes represent words.

The following June, the Paris newspaper La Quotidienne asked Sudre for a private demonstration. The paper's editor picked up his pen and scratched out a single word onto a slip of paper: "Victoire!" Sudre played a few notes on his violin. His students, in another room, dutifully translated this into perfect French. To the staff's bewilderment, Sudre then asked them to give him words in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, or Chinese... because he had already completed these dictionaries.

After its inventor passed away in 1862 or so, and Solresol soon vanished into obscurity, unable to compete against more user-friendly languages such as Volapuk and Esperanto. However, a revival is under way, led by various cryptographers, musicologists and miscellaneous enthusiasts across the world, with a website (unreachable at time of writing), proposed automated translation programs, and seven Solresol characters are apparently in the Unicode spec (though I couldn't find them). (via Found)

conlangs eccentric history language music solresol 2

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