Posts Tagged ‘Coney Island’
“A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal”*…
A recursive recipe is one where ingredients in the recipe can be replaced by another recipe. The more ingredients you replace, the more that the recipe is made truly from scratch…
Dive into some of your favorites (like chocolate chip cookies, above; larger images on the site)– fractal fun at “Recursive Recipes“!
* Frank Conroy
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As we noodle on “natural,” we might send tasty birthday greetings to Nathan Handwerker; he was born on this date in 1892. In 1916, with $300 borrowed from friends, he and his wife Ida started a hot dog stand on Coney Island– and launched what evolved into Nathan’s Famous restaurants and the related Nathan’s retail product line.
An emigrant from Eastern Europe, Handwerker found a job slicing bread rolls for Feltman’s German Gardens, a Coney Island restaurant that sold franks (hot dogs) for 10 cents each. Encouraged by a singing waiter there and his piano player– Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante– Handwerker struck out on his own, selling his hot dogs (spiced with Ida’s secret recipe) for a nickel. At the outset of his new venture, he reputedly hired young men to wear white coats with stethoscopes around their necks to stand near his carts and eat his hot dogs, giving the impression of purity and cleanliness.
Handwerker named his previously unnamed hot dog stand Nathan’s Hot Dogs in 1921 after Sophie Tucker, then a singer at the nearby Carey Walsh’s Cafe, made a hit of the song “Nathan, Nathan, Why You Waitin?”
“Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce”*…
After spending much time on Instagram, a pattern quickly revealed itself: covers of Kinfolk magazines, wood, American flags, lattes, etc.
These similarities popped uo without even trying to look for them specifically, and so, a project was born. Not out of spite, but out of a fascination with the redundancy of almost identical subject matter.
Four images, one Instagram account per set. A whole lotta the same shit.
Welcome to the Kinspiracy…
“Kinfolk Magazine: making white people feel artistic since 2011″– more at The Kinspiracy.
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As we contemplate composition, we might send amusing birthday greetings to George C. Tilyou; he was born on this date in 1862. Tilyou was the man most responsible for turning Coney Island into a entertainment destination. Having open the first theater there, he began to experiment with rides, most successfully with a copy of the Ferris Wheel that he saw on his honeymoon at the Columbian Exhibition. (Tilyou tried to buy that one, but as it was already promised to the upcoming St Louis World’s Fair, he built a replica.)
He parlayed those rides into an attraction: Steeplechase Park, known round the world for its trademark “funny face” logo.
Any resemblance to Batman’s nemesis, The Joker, is not coincidental: illustrator Bill Finger, who co-created the character attests to being influenced by the Steeplechase Park mascot.
The Park’s unique appeal lay in its power to involve visitors…
Many rides were calculated to play with gravity and so encourage couples to grab a hold of each other. In addition to the famous Steeplechase, which took its customers down a wavy track on mechanical horseback, the attractions included the Human Roulette Wheel, the Human Pool Table, the Whichway and the Barrel of Love, which spun humans in directions they’d never been spun in before. Equally involving was the Blowhole Theater–a stage built into an exit that forced customers to become actors, as they endured blasts of air and electric shocks to the delight of other recent victims.
Steeplechase burned down in 1907, but Tilyou didn’t miss a stride. After charging admission to the burning ruins, he rebuilt the park, this time introducing the roofed Pavilion of Fun. After Tilyou died in 1914, various managers took their turn running Steeplechase, although ownership remained in the family. The park finally closed in 1964, ending what amounted to a 69-year run of comic relief from the modern world.
Pencil it in…
“I’m known as the pencil guy,” laughed Dalton Ghetti, 49. “I don’t mind that at all.”
The Bridgeport artist creates impossibly detailed miniature sculptures on the tip of a pencil.
He shuns a magnifying glass and uses simple tools like razor blades and needles to create delicate little figures – from a tiny, jagged handsaw to a minibust of Elvis in shades…
Readers can find the full, photo-laced story in The NY Daily News (and more in The [U.K.] Daily Mail); and readers in the Northeast can see the Brazilian-born carver’s work at the New Britain Museum of American Art, as part of its “Meticulous Masterpieces” exhibit, through this Sunday.
(Many thanks to reader PL.)
As we ponder altogether new meanings for “sharpen my pencil,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1940, at the New York World’s Fair, that the world’ first Parachute Wedding was conducted. Arno Rudolphi and Ann Hayward, were married on the Parachute Jump, a 26-story high ride created for the World’s Fair (though now working on Coney Island). The entire wedding party– minister, bride, groom, best man, maid of honor & four musicians– was suspended aloft until the newlyweds completed their vows.
It’s all Greeking to me…
Web page layout, employing Lorem Ipsum
Studies show that people asked to assess a page design will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. So designers and editors use “Greeking”– non-English text that has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using “Content here, content here,” making it look like readable English.
But while the name is surely an allusions to the old saying “it’s all Greek to me,” the actual text usually employed is in fact Latin; more specifically, it’s “Lorem ipsum”:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum malesuada aliquet tortor vitae mollis. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nulla justo neque, luctus a laoreet quis, auctor et libero. Aenean elementum consequat nisi id ullamcorper. Quisque quis bibendum sem. Nulla id dui tellus, a semper sapien. Mauris est eros, dapibus ut luctus ac, ultricies sed enim. Praesent molestie cursus neque at faucibus. Vestibulum non nisl ac mauris ultricies porttitor eu eget leo. Aliquam porttitor scelerisque arcu eu tempus. Pellentesque faucibus consectetur magna, non consequat erat molestie at. Praesent nisl mi, congue ac semper at, iaculis non felis. Curabitur laoreet mattis augue, id hendrerit lacus hendrerit quis.
While to those of us with rusty Latin it might appear random, it is in fact closely derived from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC, a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, is excerpted from a line in section 1.10.32.
While no one is quite sure who first chose it nor why, it’s been in regular use since the 16th Century.
One can generate one’s own passage (of essentially any length) here.
As we fire up Pagemaker, we might recall that it was on this date in 1884 America’s first roller coaster– or “switchback railroad,” as then it was known– began operating at Coney Island. (The “hot dog” had been invented, also at Coney Island, in 1867, and was thus available to trouble the stomachs of the very first coaster riders.)
source: Ultimate Roller Coaster
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