Tuesday, December 13, 2005

It Takes All Kinds

This world is adorned in diverse ways, decorated with rare ornaments.

Street Mattress is a site devoted to photographs of discarded mattresses...11,627 and counting.

Le Tyrosémiophile is a gorgeous site that celebrates the glories of antique French cheese labels.

Old plate 78s is a Russian site that compiles "Music and the songs, which you can listen having unloaded with these pages to, are written down from old plates with the subsequent restoration of a sound." Stated in less exuberant prose, this site features mp3s of songs from Russian 78s, and galleries of their labels.

The Online Archive of American Folk Medicine comprises 3,200 published works, accessible through a search window. I typed in "rabies," and got references to "omelette of pulverized oyster shells" and "cauterization of wound with heated iron bar made from horseshoe found having full number of nails."

Acoustic Environments in Change documents changes in the sonic environment of six European villages.

The field recordist Robert Garfias has posted decades' worth of music "from Burma, Romania, The Philippines, Turkey, Korea, Zimbabwe and Mozambique and in addition smaller collections of recordings from Spain, Mexico, Central America, India, Indonesia, Laos and Thailand and probably others as they occur to me."

The Online Museum of Shopping Lists commemorates discarded shopping lists from the UK.

1 comment:

Eli said...

I should send this post to my old college advisor - the one who taught a course on the history of technical manuals.