SOUNDTRACK: AUSTIN CITY LIMITS FESTIVAL 2010 (on Palladia TV 2011).
Recently Palladia broadcast some highlights from the Austin City Limits Festival in 2010. The bands they showed were Phish, The Flaming Lips, Vampire Weekend, Muse, LCD Soundsystem, Sonic Youth, Spoon and Slightly Stoopid.
There were so many good bands at this festival (why is Richard Thompson in such small print?) that I won’t really complain about the inclusion of Slightly Stoopid and LCD Soundsystem on this best of (but they could have included Band of Horses, Yeasayer, Broken Bells, Gogol Bordello (the list goes on!). (I’d never heard of Slightly Stoopid and although I like LCD Soundsystem, live they were less than stellar). Although I am glad they didn’t include the Eagles, thank you very much.
I’m trying to get actual set lists of these airings (they mentioned the song titles during the show but I didn’t write them down).
This was a 2-hour broadcast and it was really good. If they re-air the episode, it’s worth watching. The quality of the broadcast is excellent (even if the HD format does take up way too much space on a TiVo).
[READ: November 6, 2011] “Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist”
A while back I read a few old articles that I got from JSTOR, the online archiving resource. This month, I received some links to three new old articles that are available on JSTOR. So, since it’s the holiday weekend, I thought it would be fun to mention them now.
And to start of the holidays, I present you with this–a loving history of the beer can (for archaeologists).
This is a fairly fascinating look at the development of the beer can from 1935 to the present. The selling point of the article is that archeologists could use beer cans to date the timeframe of an excavation. I agree with this; however, since they only date back to 1935, I’m not entirely convinced of its long-term usefulness.
The problem with the article is that page two shows a chronological timeline. This in itself is not a problem (although it is odd that it goes from present to 1935 instead of chronologically forward); the problem is that the article itself more or less sates exactly the same thing as the timeline. For although this article is 20 pages long, there are tons of photos and very little in the way of text beyond what was in that (very thorough) time line.
Nevertheless, you can see the morphing of beer cans from ones that you had to pop open with a can opener to ones that finally had self opening cans. See the switch from tin to aluminum, and even learn why the tops of cans are a little narrower than the sides (called a neck-in chime, it evidently saves a lot of money).
So yes, in some ways this seems like a silly article, but you can see some historical use for this information. Again, dating what amounts to refuse by five years or so may not be terribly useful, even if Maxwell posits that this could be used by “archaeologists inferring the age of historic deposits, or the date of intrusion on pre-historic sites.”
But for the casual archaeologist (meaning anyone who has a son age 4 and up), or the collector of beer cans, (meaning anyone in college), this article is a fun look at the short history of canning. And of beer. I wish the photos were clearer, although it may have just been my printer.
Sadly to read this article you will need JSTOR access, but the link to the front page is here.
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