Friday Quick Hits and Varia

We have hints of spring in the Red River Valley with a high today in the upper twenties, but don’t worry, we won’t get soft. Snow piles abound and the weather folks have assured us that things will still get worse before they get better.

Whatever the weather, the Friday before Spring Break (for me at least) is a good time for some quick hits and varia. 

• The Cyrus Cylinder from the British Museum is on display at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery.
• Have you looked checked out ASOR’s March Fellowship Madness yet? If not, go here and then give a few dollars to help support stories like this. It’s a good thing.
• Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. (Oxford 2012) is very long. This review is shorter.
• A plague of locusts in the Middle East!
• Few things are more infuriating than being told that sharing a PDF of a scholarly article with a colleague violates copyright. 
• The speed of censorship in China.
• Three cricket notes: What’s happening here? Welcome back Sanga (this is all I wanted to see from the Boxing Day Test)! And this is funny.
• So I need to buy a new Window’s PC and have some grant money to do it. I’m thinking of a Dell XPS15. It needs to be powerful, have a graphic card, and be of “better” quality. Any opinions?
• On the same grant, I’m going to get a Panasonic GX-1 with a couple of lenses rather than upgrading my venerable Nikon D80 DSLR.
• Here I am yesterday talking about the North Dakota Man Camp Project on the student run Studio One television show.
• Punk fashion at the Met - Punk: Chaos to Couture. And for something less punk, check out Sebastian Heath’s 3D image of the Met’s Caracalla head. 
• This is a little article on an N.C. Wyeth painting, Odyssey, that found its way into the from the GlaxoSmithKline corporate offices to the Philadelphia Art Museum. It is interesting that the Philadelphia Art Museum does not have any Wyeth paintings, but the nearby Brandywine River Museum has a massive collection. Wonder why they gave it to the Philadelphia Art Museum?
• A quick course on how to pick a man camp and a new report on the rising population of the Williston Basin.
• A new documentary on Greek American Radicals.
• Any Ihnatko is not my favorite tech blogger, but I did think his three part series on why he switched from an iPhone to a Samsung Galaxy IIIS is pretty good. The only issue for me is this admission: “After that, I’d only pull out my iPhone for one reason: to take a photo. The iPhone continues to kick the butts of all challengers as a camera.”
• Check out the three part post over at the Electric Archaeologist on Digital Humanities Job Advertisements (part 1, part 2, part 3). Then check out his notes on how to become a Digital Humanist.
• This is an interesting way to measure your social attitudes. 
• North Dakota is the 19th most well-being state (pdf).
• New Franz Ferdinand songs, a new Kurt Vile song, and a cool performance by Kishi Bashi.
• If you’re in North Dakota and want to hear some cool cats talk about the Dakota War in the Dakota Territory, check out this schedule of public talks.
• Some North Dakota abandonment porn.
• Check out the archaeology of conserving and restoring old computers.
• What I’m reading: Walker Evans, Walker Evans: Florida. J. Paul Getty Museum 2000 via Kostis Kourelis (But I have a couple of other books on my nightstand including D.B. Monk’s An aesthetic occupation : the immediacy of architecture and the Palestine conflict. Duke 2002 (via Jordan Pickett)
• What I’m listening to: Ten Years After, Cricklewood Green; Ten Years After, Ssssh; Ten Years After, Stonedhenge. R.I.P Alvin Lee.

 Two photos of one of my favorite (albeit utterly indistinct) buildings in Grand Forks: