Monthly Archives: April 2011

IMAGE: William and Kate’s official royal wedding cake. The British fruit cake may not taste quite as delicious as Prince William’s favourite chocolate biscuit cake, but its alcohol-soaked sultanas and rock-solid royal icing give it an impressive shelf-life and the sturdiness to survive extensive handling — two qualities much more necessary to the core functions […]

25-year-old gang member Anthony Garcia spent years adding detail to the drawing of a Pico Rivera liquor store on his chest, including a loop of Christmas fairy lights strung along the ceiling and the bowed street lamp and sign across the way. But this is no body art homage to a favoured alcohol purveyor.

At her blog, Garden History Girl, Paige Johnson (by day, a nanotechnology researcher at the University of Tulsa), describes the inception of the Atomic Gardening Society:

In March 1959, an unusual group of scientists, government officials, and lesser worthies assembled for a dinner party in the dining hall of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London. Unbeknownst to them, one of the courses was a strange strain of American peanuts: ‘NC 4x,’ ‘North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed’ peanuts, produced from seeds that had been exposed to 18,500 roentgen units of x-rays in order to induce mutations.

IMAGE: Matthew Moore’s farm being eaten by sprawl. All images via Matthew Moore. Over at GOOD, I published a story by Thomas Gorman, a Berkeley News21 Fellow, about farmer and artist Matthew Moore’s Lifecycles project. Moore is a sculptor and fourth-generation family farmer whose property is destined to be swallowed by sprawl from the city […]

These colour lithographs were originally made in 1850 at the request of Walter S. Sherwill, an army officer who served as a British “boundary commissioner” in Bengal. According to Ptak Science Books, these particular reproductions were taken from an article exploring the economic and infrastructural marvels of the Indian opium trade in an 1882 supplement […]