Mid May Miscellany - Kiwiboomers

Mid May Miscellany

More than just an iPad
Food critics
Mori the Hori
Phones out of date?
Weapons of mass…

More than just a communications device… have a giggle at this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcIwXVKQjsQ

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Judging restaurants by what comes out of the kitchen: 50 years ago it was a novelty, initiated by Craig Claiborne, the first foodie..

…his first “Directory to Dining,” 50 years ago this month, marks the day when (America) pulled up a chair and began to chow down. Within a few years, nearly every major newspaper had to have a Craig Claiborne of its own. Reading the critics, eating what they had recommended, and then bragging or complaining about it would become a national pastime.

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Recorded live in concert in 1962, these two tracks by the enormously popular Howard Morrison Quartet show just how little things have changed in New Zealand, and how much they have.

http://www.elsewhere.co.nz/fromthevaults/4917/howard-morrison-quartet-rioting-in-wellington-mori-the-hori-1962/

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Today we worry about the social effects of the Internet. A century ago, it was the telephone that threatened to reinvent society.

In 2009, the United States crossed a digital Rubicon: For the first time, the amount of data sent with mobile devices exceeded the sum of transmitted voice data. The shift was heralded in tech circles with prophetic fury: “The phone call is dead,” pronounced a blogger at the Web site TechCrunch. Writing in Wired, journalist Clive Thompson observed, “This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social network messaging.” And the online news network True/Slant declared a paradox: “We’re well on our way to becoming an incredibly disconnected connected society.”

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Back to the fourth form where… a rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class because it was a weapon of maths disruption.