January 31, 2013
Flowers, Love and Money
"Experience the Floriculture: Flowers, Love and Money exhibition through your nose, as Odette Toilette hosts a guided sniffing into the history and aesthetics of floral perfumes."
I just like the sound of Odette Toilette. The perfect drag name?
Putting people off coming to Britain
The Updated Gentleman's Guide to Chivalry
"According to the gents at Esquire of old, the rules of conduct for men, when women are concerned, boil down to just 10 things. I divided them into three categories: irrelevant, optional and mandatory."
January 30, 2013
The Princess And The Queen
George R.R. Martin has co-edited a new anthology called Dangerous Women
Life is not a song
Sansa Stark, you have always been more than you seemed.
January 29, 2013
Vice Guide to Travel - Takanakuy
"In the Peruvian Andes, folks know how to celebrate the season right. What they do is, they put on a colorful ski-mask, dress up like Mad Max mountain bikers, tie a dead eagle to their heads, and get drunk and dance for about a week straight. Then, come Christmas morning, they all gather together in the middle of town and beat the baby bejesus out of each other."
Autoplay video at the link.
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind
"This relic is in fact the ancient fossil that inspired the extra-terrestrial antagonists in Ridley Scott's classic sci-fi horror, Alien."
Xenomorph design with Chinese characteristics: "Perhaps because China is often accused of stealing intellectual property, a cottage industry has sprouted up, with folks in China saying Western inventions are Chinese knock offs. Then, there's the bit about people making crap up on the internet."
Oxford ragwort
"Exactly how it arrived in Oxford is unknown, Mabey explains, but it was as likely as not brought back deliberately as part of an 18th-century scientific expedition."
January 28, 2013
BBC Four - The Saint and the Hanged Man (2011)
On the journey to Rome to clear his name, Cantilupe unexectedly dropped dead. It was the best career move he had ever made.
James Freeman Clarke - “How to Make the Most of Life” from Every-day Religion (1886)
"In the great storms which have lately swept over the north Atlantic, a steamer from our shores discovered another, dismasted and rudderless, drifting before the gale, its decks swept by terrible seas. The sailors volunteered to man a boat, and go to save those on the wreck. The labor was appalling, the dangers frightful; but they succeeded, and saved the lives of their fellow-men. Which has made the noblest use of life, the self-indulgent epicurean, who amuses himself with a little art, a little literature, a little criticism and a little vapid social pleasure, or these rugged, brave hearts, who bade defiance to storm and sea, and brought salvation to those in despair? To forget yourself is the secret of life; to forget yourself in some worthy purpose outside of yourself."
I'd play the Overlook
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the best kind of board games are literary board games.
Redrum interiors: iOS wallpaper patterns inspired by the various carpet patterns in The Shining, created by artist Sal Giliberto.
January 27, 2013
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
"The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis became most famous at the moment of its demise. The thirty-three high-rise towers built in the 1950s were supposed to solve the impending population crisis in inner city St. Louis. It was supposed to save the urban poor from the indignities of the downtown slums that lacked natural light, water and fresh air. And for a short while, it worked. It was a housing marvel."
99% Invisible podcast documentary at the link.
Glass mascots by Rene Lalique
"For most Rolls-Royce or Mercedes owners, removing the iconic ornaments or badges of their luxury vehicles would completely ruin the effect. But back in the 1920s and '30s, it was not the famous badges of these revered cars which the powerful and rich of France wanted to display."
Ice Age Art: The Arrival of the Modern Mind
An exhibition of Ice Age "art" and art historical projection/mind-reading is underway at the British Museum and I am most likely to miss it. The collection looks interesting. The curatorial waffle, not so much.
January 26, 2013
BBC -The Medieval Mind: How To Build A Cathedral
Architecture and a theology of light.
The Anglo-Saxon Invasion
Matthias Schulz points to evidence suggesting Britain is more German than it thinks. I never laboured under the misapprehension it was anything else; teaching archaeology gives you the long view.
And that sound you hear is just a little bit of history repeating.
The Celts were no match for these roughnecks. The Romans had taught them how to play the lyre and drink copious amounts of wine, but the populace in the regions controlled by the Pax Romana was barred from carrying weapons. As a result, the local peoples, no longer accustomed to the sword, lost one battle after the next and were forced to the edges of the island.
Why was the British Empire so efficient?
"For there is no doubt about it, it was. A mere thousand bureaucrats in the Colonial Office managed an empire so large that the sun never set on it, an empire that included a subcontinent. How was this possible?
"One reason, I think, is that the colonies weren’t informatically connected. No phones, no text messages, no Skype, no e-mail, no conference calls, no webinars, no meetings. Therefore, no micromanagement."
Prince Harry - candid interview from Afghanistan
This is what a king looks like.
January 25, 2013
Digital fabrication
Iris van Herpen, MIT Media Lab scholar Neri Oxman and Stratasys created 3D printed clothes for Paris Fashion Week.
She means the patterns are replaced by code; the software was in the pattern cutters.
Also handy: "Filabot promises to help turn your plastic crap into 3-D printed fanciness, alleviating one of the biggest sustainability problems for 3-D printing."
The Bottle
Interactive Kinetic Mapping - Technology Preview
The Bottle from White Kanga on Vimeo.
January 24, 2013
Euro Truck Simulator 2 - United Kingdom
A 10% discount pushed this to No. 1 on Steam last week (NSFW - swears, London driving; autoplay* at the link).
*sic
Wet streets cause rain
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
- Michael Crichton
Via Ace.
Arafel
"It occurred to me today that the greatest thing we have to fear in space is not alien civilizations, but the AIs that killed them."
Got a 3D printer?
Build yourself a loyal robot companion.
Related thought: Or go ahead and print yourself a house.
January 23, 2013
The Tomorrow People - The Blue and the Green (1974)
"John and Stephen find themselves with two mysteries to investigate-the possibility that Stephen's new teacher Elizabeth M'Boah is a Tomorrow Person and some worryingly accurate paintings of alien planets."
Paris, 1808
Monsieurs Granpree and Le Pique fight for the hand of Mademoiselle Tirevit in the skies above Paris.
Those were men.
Balloon related: Paris, 1903 in Autochrome Lumière (hat tip to Mr. Ardolino).
Angry but quite unharmed
"Unsinkable Sam (also known as Oscar) was the nickname of a German ship's cat who saw service in both the Kriegsmarine and Royal Navy during the Second World War, serving on board three vessels and surviving the sinking of all three."
Science advances one funeral at a time
"The consequence of Hippasus’ insight should have been a period of discussion and contemplation during which Pythagoras ought to have come to terms with this new source of numbers."
January 22, 2013
Mount Dixon Rockfall, 21 Jan 2013
"Debris from a huge rockfall off Mt Dixon 21 Jan, 2013 - Aoraki Mount Cook National Park, NZ. Stopped a few hundred metres from Plateau Hut."
A proper ring disposal guide
Middle Earth public service announcements (hat tip to Mr. Campbell).
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want
And deserve to get it good and hard.
Penn's Obama Rant
"Penn Jillette and Michael Goudeau talk about President Barack Obama's appearance on Jimmy Fallon and his previous drug use."
January 21, 2013
BBC Perfume (2011)
Episode One - Someething Old, Something New.
Connected thought: "A Mayfair businessman has revived the fortunes of London's oldest perfume house after discovering it was founded by his great-great grandfather. Simon Brooke had no idea of his link with Grossmith perfumers, which made scent for Queen Victoria, when he began researching his family tree six years ago."
And this: "But yesterday was a big Axe day, I can tell you," Veronique Ferval, IFF's creative center manager, tells me. "You could walk around and could smell . . ."
. . . a high-school locker room? But she's cut off by Ann Gottlieb, the woman who oversees all Axe scents. IFF is currently trying to win the contract for Axe's 2014 scent (it releases at least one a year), competing against other fragrance houses. No detail should be spilled. "It paid off," Gottlieb tells Ferval. "Your submissions were really good."
Ownership of the Ring: Specialized Equipment?
James Daily considers Bilbo's contract with the company of Thorin Oakenshield.
The Alice
A player character class for any kind of D&D.
Signs of the Fierce Gentleman
"How would you know a Fierce Gentleman walking down the street, and how would you tell him apart from just another Joe Schmoe (excuse me — a Man who has not yet come to the realization that the current global situation was calling him urgently to become a Fierce Gentleman)?"
January 20, 2013
Justice for Richard III
Having earned an ill deserved "C" for my essay on this topic for an undergraduate course in Middle Ages English History, I can speak to the long standing, pernicious effects of Tudor propaganda.
It is time for Richard III to come home to York (via Quotulatiousness).
Petition at the link.
Monday, January 21
Make the most depressing day of the year Welsh Rarebit day!
The Beeb: Perfect Welsh rarebit.
Stealth Wear
New York-based artist Adam Harvey has designed anti-surveillance clothing.
In the spirit of fooling cameras – and messing with surveillance – Harvey has now come out in a set of hoodies and scarves that block thermal radiation from the infrared scanners drones use. Wearing the fabric would make that part of the body look black to a drone, so the image would appear like disembodied legs. He also designed a pouch for cell phones that shields them from trackers by blocking the radio signals the phone emits. For those airport X-ray machines, he has a shirt with a printed design that blocks the radiation from one’s heart.
Reull Vallis
"The European Space Agency announced Thursday that it has taken high-definition pictures of an ancient river nearly 1,000 miles long on Mars."
January 19, 2013
Maîtres du Temps - Chapter One
"Maîtres du Temps is a pantheon where teams of independent master watchmakers at the very pinnacle of haute horlogerie collaborate to develop innovative, interesting, and very exclusive timepieces. Founded by Mr. Steven Holtzman and based in Switzerland, Maîtres du Temps crafts limited-series mechanical masterpieces, each the synthesis of the experience, art, and techniques of the Masters who create it."
List Price: $400,000.
Why 2013 will be the year you quit your job
"... don’t stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want – freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind."
Related observations: Young people are screwed... here's how to survive.
Die Hard: A perfect movie
"No one has ever started a movie with the intention of writing a Die Hard. Good Die Hard scripts are like McClane himself; they're the right script in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Imidacloprid
"The world's most widely used insecticide has for the first time been officially labelled an 'unacceptable' danger to bees feeding on flowering crops."
Ólafur Arnalds - KEX Hostel, Reykjavik (Live on KEXP)
"Icelandic artist Ólafur Arnalds performs live on KEXP from KEX Hostel in Reykjavik during Iceland Airwaves '12. Recorded on November 1, 2012."
January 18, 2013
Philippe Starck - Design and destiny
The is the most French man on Earth.
The Hippies were wrong
Six harsh truths that will make you a better person.
If you protest that you're not a shallow capitalist materialist and that you disagree that money is everything, I can only say: Who said anything about money? You're missing the larger point.
Interesting times
In 2012, China produced twice as many apps for iPhones and iPads as the entire US app store.
January 17, 2013
A brutal teacher, but you learn fast
Six embattled Brutalist icons.
Related thought: Sevon iconic skylines that almost looked ridiculous (via Five Feet of Fury).
Motorcycles of the Russian Empire
So what bikes did they ride long ago in Russia?
January 16, 2013
Alain de Botton - Atheism 2.0
"What aspects of religion should atheists (respectfully) adopt? Alain de Botton suggests a 'religion for atheists' -- call it Atheism 2.0 -- that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection, ritual and transcendence."
The Viking at Stamford Bridge
"25 September 1066. The Saxons really had the Vikings by the balls now."
Cooking steak with freefall
"From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?"
Townes Van Zandt - Our Mother The Mountain
Our Mother the Mountain
January 15, 2013
Slavoj Zizek - Brotherhood & Unity
Zizek on the ethical miracle of racist jokes (and the truth in cliches) (nsfw if you are employed in Canada's public sector). The full discussion in Kosova starts at this link.
Start with the small fork above the plate
"Fijian tribesmen used this macabre set of forks to eat the bodies of rival warriors. But despite their grisly background, these seven instruments have been sold for £30,000 at auction."
IllumiRoom
Microsoft is building a holodeck gaming system for your living room.
January 14, 2013
Arthur of the Britons (1972)
"Arthur of the Britons is a British television show about the historical King Arthur. Produced by the HTV regional franchise, it consisted of two series, released between 1972 and 1973."
Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights
An interview with H.P. Lovecraft, conducted by postcard (via Boing Boing).
Artezian and artesian
Sacrificial: "Residents of a town under siege by the Roman army about 2,000 years ago buried two hoards of treasure in the town's citadel — treasure recently excavated by archaeologists."
Accidental: "A new study of objects lost down the drains in the bathhouses from the Roman Empire reveals that people got up to all sorts of things in these gathering places. They bathed, of course, but they also adorned themselves with trinkets, snacked on finger foods and even did needlework."
Manhattanhenge
"Manhattanhenge – sometimes referred to as the Manhattan Solstice – is a circumstance which occurs twice a year, during which the setting sun aligns with the east–west streets of the main street grid in the borough of Manhattan in New York City."
January 13, 2013
Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis - No Laughing Matter (2007)
Christopher Hitchens, who only discovered he was Jewish in 1989, talked about the place of Judaism in history: about Voltaire, suspicion, Israel, and the Jewish diaspora.
Martin Amis then discussed the Jewish concept of manhood, before going on to contemplate the effect of 9/11 on the Jewish community.
Hitchens then touched on some moments that betray a prejudice against Jews that still lingers even after the Holocaust, including the claims made in America in 1989 that Jewish doctors were deliberately injecting black babies with Aids. He suggest that prejudice against Jews is different from other kinds, because it takes a pseudo-intellectual, as opposed to superficial and ignorant form.
Amis then seeked to define the actual concept of anti-semitism, before Hitchens considered the perception of Jews as masters of finance.
The Plank
"At last week’s Men’s Fashion Week, the American designer Tom Ford showed a collection of glossy rich evening wear with fox furs and patent slippers, while Northern Irish designer JW Anderson – winner of the British Fashion Council’s Emerging Talent Award – wowed the crowds with camel-coloured, skirt-length ruffled shorts.
"But nothing was as impressive as the striking plywood plank creations debuted on Londoner Craig Green’s catwalk. As an ardent supporter of eccentric fashion, I didn’t want to wait until the autumn/winter 2013-14 collection is released before styling The Plank myself. So I had one made."
Images at the link.
Aaron Swartz - How we stopped SOPA
"Ignore the hipster douchebag affectations and pay attention to what he's saying. He lays out a process by which irresistible force can be resisted even when the media is NOT on your side. It's not theoretical, it worked."
R.I.P.: Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz.
January 12, 2013
Savile Row (2008)
"If Savile Row goes so too does 200 years of sartorial history."
Antler Chair
"Inspired by mythological human-animal hybrids, this utterly unique chair is completely handmade and designed to be anthropomorphic down to the last detail, with carved hoof legs, a textured paint finish that mimics fur, and specially selected and patterned leather."
Medusae Collection
"Add a little underwater illumination to your space with these stunning jellyfish pendants."
January 11, 2013
BBC4 Beautiful Minds - Richard Dawkins (2012)
"Professor Richard Dawkins reveals how he came to write his explosive first book The Selfish Gene
The gripping hand: I wanted to know how he met Lalla Ward.
Tatemae
"A lot of sci-fi adventures feature the idea of a 'cultured' society which has become so formalized and ossified in ritual that it's dishonest, corrupt, and barbaric in its purported civility, and it takes the Barbaric Outsider's rude truth to puncture the Sham Civility (which is Actual Primativism). That it happens in books doesn't make it false, though: It's a real thing. Sometimes -- often -- it takes either an outsider or at least a stubborn contrarian to point out we've moved past 'polite manners' and into the realm of barbaric habit."
Backgrounder: Twenty-emotions for which tere are no words in the English language.
Leonardo Interactivo
"The Leonardo interactive is a tool that provides the digital version of the Codices Madrid of Leonardo da Vinci, and multiple functionalities that bring us closer to the world of Tuscan genius."
How to restring drawstring pants
The wire hanger method worked for me; saving two pairs of pajama bottoms in the process. Thanks, internet!
January 10, 2013
George R.R. Martin Master Class
"Bestselling author of the A Song of Ice and Fire cycle, George R.R. Martin, joins students and faculty to discuss his celebrated novels' adaptation to the small screen as HBO's Game of Thrones. This Higher Learning event was held on March 13, 2012 at TIFF Bell Lightbox."
The game is about what the game has rules about
"There are still people who believe this even though poker doesn't have rules for bluffing."
Optimizing the Alcubierre Drive
"A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive."
XNAV
"Spacecraft could one day navigate through the cosmos using a particular type of dead star as a kind of GPS."
January 09, 2013
Craig Green at MAN, Fall/Winter 2013 Men’s
"Green is among London’s new crop of design talent, having graduated from Central Saint Martins’ Master’s Program only a year ago, and his lineup today proved a remarkable step in the evolution of his DIY, blue-collar aesthetic. Utilizing hyper-crinkled fabrics, cut-and-rolled-at-the-ankle trousers and oversized layerings, Green essentially crafts his own silhouettes, anchored somewhere in an intangible alleyway between high fashion and utilitarian (he cites workwear and labor uniforms as an inspiration)."
Looking to London: "Since launching his line with Fashion East last season, 26-year-old Central Saint Martins MA graduate Craig Green has struck an impressive balance between conceptual and wearable design."
How to dress like Downton Abbey
Savile Row tailors showcase outfits of the 1920s at London Menswear Fashion Week.
God damn, this subreddit is classy
"Strength and honour my friend. Those 8 drams took 15 years to make, imagine how sweet your life will be in 15 years. In the making of that scotch parts of it were burned, chopped, boiled and pressured and with each stage gave it character and its appeal. Just like the scotch, life is better with character. Win or lose, never ever stop fighting."
The London underground at 150
"To celebrate the London Underground's 150th birthday, Stephen Moss takes a journey along the Central line – the longest, busiest, reddest tube line of them all."
150 fascinating Tube facts: "There is only one Tube station which does not have any letters of the word 'mackerel' in it: St John's Wood."
January 08, 2013
The Serpent in the Sword
"The Serpent in the Sword is a paper by Lee A Jones studying early medieval pattern-welded swords. This video shows how to create a pattern-welded sword that actually has a serpent at its core. The processes while using modern tools are similar to the ones employed by anglo-saxon or viking-age smiths."
Relitto del Pozzino
"Medicinal tablets retrieved from a 2000-year-old shipwreck suggest that classical Mediterranean civilizations had sophisticated drugs."
Etruscan Studies: Shipwreck at Baratti (pdf).
David Bowie - Where Are We Now?
Bored out of our skulls from the first bar.
January 07, 2013
The Twilight Zone - The Obsolete Man (1961)
"The Obsolete Man is an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone. It deals with themes of Orwellian totalitarianism, euthanasia, utilitarianism, collectivism and religion."
Liberty, the god that failed
"Pierre Manent has put it best: In America, as in every Western polity, we are expected to be 'atheists under the one God, the God in whom we believe.' This is the intolerable paradox that the partisans of Liberty have foisted upon us—and with spectacular success. They have hypnotized an entire civilization, which need only awaken from its trance in order to realize the ridiculousness of its situation."
London Night (1934)
John Morrison and Harold Burdekin photographed London "as it was before smog, before the Blitz changed the face of the city forever, and before the brutalist concrete monoliths of post-war rebuilding."
Library Time Machine: "There was another London, before clean air, before the Blitz, before post-war reconstruction. It was a night time London."
British Intelligence (1940)
"British Intelligence is a 1940 spy film set in World War I. It was directed by Terry O. Morse and starred Boris Karloff and Margaret Lindsay. Released in the USA in January 1940, the Warner Bros. B picture was based on a 1918 play Three Faces East written by Anthony Paul Kelly that was produced on the stage by George M. Cohan."
January 06, 2013
Dazaifu Tenmangu Starbucks
"If you’ve been in one Starbucks, you’ve been in them all…. or so I used to think, before I saw this one designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates."
Flogsta scream
"Every evening at 10pm, students living in the Flogsta neighborhood of Uppsala, Sweden stick their heads out the window and scream. No one knows how it started, but most accounts say it began in the 1970s and has been going on every night since."
January 05, 2013
National Geographic Photo Contest 2012
"For our 24th annual photo contest, National Geographic Traveler magazine received more than 12,000 entries from 6,615 talented photographers in 152 countries around the globe."
January 04, 2013
Atmospheric Vortex Engine
"An atmospheric vortex engine (AVE) uses a controlled vortex to capture mechanical energy produced when heat is carried upward by convection in the atmosphere."
Artist's impression
Fredrik Säker has been allowed to use a self-portrait in place of his Swedish passport photo.
Richard Dawkins & Ricky Gervais on religion
"I must have been designed because I fit this hole perfectly."
January 03, 2013
The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit (1985)
"The Hobbit (Russian: Сказочное путешествие мистера Бильбо Беггинса Хоббита, Skazochnoye puteshestviye mistera Bilbo Begginsa Khobbita, 'The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit') was a 1985 Soviet film adaption of J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 book The Hobbit by Vladimir Latyshev."
Worth the price of admission for Russian Smaug's hand gestures!
The Hobbits (1993)
"Hobitit (literally The Hobbits) is a Finnish live action fantasy television miniseries originally broadcast in 1993 on Yle TV1. Produced by Olof Qvickström, it is based on the events of the books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien."
Why there is no Jewish Narnia
"To answer the question of why Jews do not write fantasy, we should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal."
Movies on the Radio
David Garland interviews Howard Shore.
In which we discover Shore has heard the word "warg" spoken with a New Zealand accent but not seen it (recently, at least) in print. Which presents a problem with his claim he reads Tolkien for pleasure. Then again, he has a reader's pronunciation of Smaug so I'd guess he had read the books at some point.
January 02, 2013
Tom Ryaboi - City Rising (2012)
"Daring photographer Tom Ryaboi snaps the Toronto skyline from the top of skyscrapers as a pioneer of the heart-stopping photography movement rooftopping."
Every man should carry a pocket knife
You need something to clench in your teeth when swinging from a rope.
50 Best Dressed Men in Britain 2013
"The 19th-century American firebrand preacher Henry Ward Beecher once said, 'Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance.' And that is exactly what we celebrate in the annual GQ best-dressed list, in association with Mercedes-Benz, where we name the British men we think really make it big in the sartorial stakes."
Project Seal
New Zealand author and film-maker Ray Waru has uncovered a series of tests conducted by the United States and New Zealand during World War II toward creating a tsunami bomb in case the atomic bomb failed to convince the Japanese.
The top secret operation, code-named "Project Seal", tested the doomsday device as a possible rival to the nuclear bomb. About 3,700 bombs were exploded during the tests, first in New Caledonia and later at Whangaparaoa Peninsula, near Auckland.
January 01, 2013
Seb Toots Montreal snowboarding run
Seb Toots Montreal snowboarding run from Seb Toots on Vimeo.
Black Angel (1977)
The Black Angel negative has been found.
Nicol Williamson performs J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1974)
Never released in North America, the earliest audiobook adaptation of The Hobbit.