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The Indianapolis Star reports (A few fans brave cold to welcome Colts),

The end of the Indianapolis Colts' season came down to 11 people.

Not the 11 players on the field during the Super Bowl, but the 11 who showed up at Indianapolis International Airport on a cold, snowbound Monday afternoon, when the team returned after its 31-17 defeat Sunday by the New Orleans Saints in Super Bowl XLIV in South Florida.

"Win or lose, they're still our team," said Karen Calhoun, Brownsburg, who carried a "Where's the parade?" sign...

Even this rabid Patriots fan can feel a little bad for them.

The Star's Colts pages are a saga of misery, woe, and hubris.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Io05fTLSg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCqgtb3Nby4

They seemed to get better after they warmed up, like the Saints.

San Francisco in 1906.

My brother sent a link to this historical footage, writing, "Things like this fascinate me." Me too. It's Market Street in San Francisco as filmed from the front of a streetcar a few days before the 1906 earthquake. (The four-points button under the "You" in YouTube at the bottom of the video will display it full-screen.)

Traffic is willy-nilly -- horse-drawn wagons and open automobiles, bicycles and pedestrians all cross paths at random angles, scurrying over cobblestones and tracks, often just ahead of an oncoming streetcar. A newspaper seller works the strip between the parallel sets of tracks in the center of the wide street. Knots of people wait for streetcars at trackside in the cars' part of the road, forcing oncoming autos to hang a left onto the tracks.

Text on the video's Flixxy page notes that,

This film, originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly when it was shot. From New York trade papers announcing the film showing to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows indicating time of year & actual weather and conditions on historical record, even when the cars were registered (he even knows who owned them and when the plates were issued!).. It was filmed only four days before the quake and shipped by train to NY for processing.

Film historian William M. Drew writes (California's first narrative film),

"A Trip Down Market Street," shot in April of 1906 with the camera mounted on a trolley car, used one continuous take in a full reel of film to provide a vivid depiction of San Francisco's bustling thoroughfare. Historian David Kiehn, who identified the film as a Miles Brothers production, also discovered through his research that Harry Miles put his technical ingenuity to good effect by equipping the camera with a thousand foot magazine capable of shooting the entire journey down the long street without need of reloading...

...on April 18, 1906, just four days after the brothers had shot their Market Street film, the studio, along with all its plans and even photographs of the building, went up in flames during the cataclysm that devastated the entire city. Despite their own terrible loss, the Miles Brothers were on the spot, racing across San Francisco and the Bay Area to chronicle the dramatic events with their movie cameras for a film that played around the nation, bringing widespread recognition to the brothers for their heroic endeavors and their skill as documentarians.

The music behind the silent footage is "La Femme D'Argent" from the Moon Safari album by Air which that Amazon page describes as "a superlatively happy collection of experimental disco-mood sound nestled between ambient soundscape and breathy pop."

Comments (1)
Tom wrote, For relevant assistance in getting an ACCURATE date for the so-called 1906 (San Francisco) traffic video, please refer to the web site below for a...

Read the rest, write another...

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40 wild birds play a Gibson Les Paul guitar. Here's the installation, which the BBC thinks is "very Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who started the conceptual art ball rolling nearly a hundred years ago. "

YouTube - Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Barbican Centre, London

For his installation in The Curve, Boursier-Mougenot creates a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a captivating, live soundscape.

The birds do not seem startled by the sounds they make on the strings.

A Soundblog review after an indoor exhibit of the birds in 2008 dwelled on the constricted setting, perhaps driving Mr. Boursier-Mougenot outdoors this time, from Feb. 27- May 23 at The Curve, Barbican, London.

The artist is also exhibiting in New York this month: harmonichaos at the Paula Cooper Gallery

consists of vacuum cleaners outfitted with harmonicas, lights and sound-frequency analyzers. As the vacuums turn on and off, the harmonicas fill the darkened space with sound. The installation will make use of architectural space to explore the viewer's relationship to sound and sculptural objects.

This runs Feb. 19 - March 17, overlapping the birds.

Breaded and deep-fried pork tenderloin sandwich is a Hoosier specialty.

For Patriots fans, it's a lackluster Super Bowl. The best we can do is root for the Saints.

But while oyster po' boys aren't our idea of easy munchies, we'd never eat that monstrosity above, beloved though it may be in restaurants throughout Indiana. If you must, there are Breaded Pork Tenderloin Sandwich Tutorials illustrating a recipe made from these ingredients.

1 pork tenderloin (about 20-24 oz.)

4 sandwich buns or kaiser rolls

1 gallon canola oil if deep fat frying

1 quart buttermilk for the marinade

2 whole eggs for the marinade (optional)

1/4 cup of white flour for the marinade

Pinch of salt and black or white pepper for the marinade

1 tablespoon dry mustard for the marinade

1 or 2 cloves of freshly chopped garlic for the marinade

Pinch of Emeril's Original Essence seasoning or Cayenne for punch for the marinade

1 package of Japanese bread crumbs for the breading (or Saltine crackers)

1/4 cup yellow corn meal for the breading (optional)

Sliced tomato, sliced onion, lettuce, mustard, mayo, and pickle condiments to suit

We're thinking crab cakes and BLTs at our house Sunday.

Key statistic: U.S. Internet speeds are really slow.

The State of the Internet. from Focus Research. Data is presented with colorful, easy-to-digest graphics.

Here we take a look at exactly who is using the Internet the most, how they are using it and how much the amount of usage is increasing. At a glance, we can see that there are the same number of men and women who use the Internet. However, their age, educational background and level of income may influence how much time they spend online.

Eagle Cam by WVEC.com documents bald eagles nesting at the Norfolk, Va. Botanical Garden.

First egg laid Sunday, Jan. 31

It's quite amazing, TV-quality. When I first came on it, the lens was zoomed up close; it has since pulled back to show the nest, quite high up in a tree.

Today, only mom was in the nest while I watched. "Bald Eagles typically lay a clutch of two eggs although nests of one or even three eggs occur as well. In fact this pair has a history of three egg clutches. The eggs are typically laid over a period of 3-6 days," writes a state wildlife biologist in a blog about Eagle Cam.

The color camera switches to black and white at night with an infrared illuminator. A chat runs along the right side of the live video, and informed people are often there quelling rumors and answering questions in a relaxed, low-key way.

The photo is a screen capture I made from the stream late this afternoon, cropped but not enlarged.

It's gotten 20 million pageviews and more than 15,000 comments since it was posted in 2005 to a Russian Flash drawing site.

How to "draw a woman from the inside out" starts with a skeleton:

You see -- and can pause to examine -- every line the artist, identified only as gg, drew or erased to clothe that framework with flesh, skin and, finally, clothing:

The top image is linked to the Flash page, the bottom one to the image in context, with comments, via Google translate.

Hat tip to my daughter for passing this one on. (She gave me the hat, too.)

Daniel Lieske, The Journey Begins, 2006. (enlarge).

"The image was created in 2006 for the 19th CG Challenge 'The Journey Begins' on CGSociety.org and it eventually won the second prize in this competition," Lieske write on a page entirely devoted to the making of this work.

The eminently browsable site of Daniel Lieske also includes a retrospective gallery that's interesting especially for the evolution of a comic-book style into more finely detailed and rendered work.

...is a Digital Artist located in the small town of Warendorf, Germany. Born and raised at the Teutoburger Forest, he holds lots of childhood memories of adventures in the woods. His passion for trees and nature themes is visible through his artwork and still keeps to inspire him. Daniel started to work in game development in 1999 and today works as a Concept Artist for a big german game studio.

Bio from his commercial portfolio at Digital Decoy

The self-portrait above is from his blog.

President Obama's Speech at the House Republican retreat in Baltimore.: Bigger video.

If you'd rather read it, there's a transcript at WaPo. And a story: Obama talks to House Republicans in rare, televised debate in Baltimore.

Our government talks amongst itself as we watch.