Category: Into It

August 3, 2013 0 Comments Into It

1908 Olympics

What happened when the Olympics gave out medals for drawing, music, and literature?

A lot has changed for the Olympics over the last century, mostly due to a shift away from amateur competitors to professional athletes. But entire disciplines have been tossed aside, too. The Olympics from 1912 to 1952 weren’t just about sports, but art. …

June 10, 2013 0 Comments Into It

From The Empire Project

Tristan da Cunha: the Remotest Island in the World

From the nearest port in South Africa, it takes six days on a fishing boat to reach the small island of Tristan da Cunha. Fifteen hundred miles out into the South Atlantic, simple white homes with bright colored roofs sit in rows …

May 22, 2013 0 Comments Into It

The Resurgence of Records

It seems like every new technology tries its best to kill off the vinyl record. Digital music is the furthest we’ve come from running needles through intricate grooves, but record orders keep coming in. Metal stamp plates continue using thousands of pounds …

April 23, 2013 0 Comments Into It

Escalators, the Pedestrian Joyride

From Joyride to Daily Life The idea of the escalator has been around a lot longer than a working model. Nathan Ames first patented “Revolving Stairs” in 1859, though he didn’t specify materials or have a practical use in mind. Even 30 years later …

April 1, 2013 3 Comments Into It

The Worst of Super Nintendo

The Worst of SNES The 16-bit gaming boom took over the early nineties. It gave us classics like Super Mario World, but it also emboldened marketers to dream up spin-offs. In these crossovers, the best parts about pop stars, TV shows, and …

March 13, 2013 0 Comments Into It

The Strange Life of Discontinued Breakfast Cereal

The cereal aisle is run by kids. It’s their purchasing power that brings TV shows, movies, and even stranger products together with the barons of breakfast.  Mr. T cereal debuted in 1984 and was essentially T-shaped captain crunch. But it got a little …

February 27, 2013 0 Comments Into It

The Island of California

California’s San Andreas fault is slowly shifting LA away from the mainland. But we don’t have to look to the future to imagine a disjointed coastline. Instead we can look to the past, to the maps of the 17th and 18th centuries …

February 13, 2013 0 Comments Into It

Henry Ford’s Brazilian Ghost Town

Fordlândia // Henry Ford’s Brazilian Ghost Town from agbales on Vimeo. If there’s a pilgrimage for the industrialized world, it probably ends in the Amazon Rainforest, at the center of a abandoned town called Fordlândia. By 1928, Henry Ford had just completed …

February 8, 2013 0 Comments Into It

The Odyssey, Only This Time With Rubber Duckies

Listen at KMUW.org Back in the seventies, Sesame Street’s Ernie sang to us about his favorite bath time buddy. But the rubber ducky has seen adventures far beyond the tub. In 1992, three cargo containers leaving Hong Kong spilled into the Pacific …

January 23, 2013 0 Comments Into It

Song of the Lesser Water Boatman

Listen at KMUW.org The lesser water boatman is an insect usually found feeding on ponds and lakes across Europe. Only a few millimeters long, they look a bit like a sunflower seed with big black eyes and paddling arms. They’re not known …

January 5, 2013 0 Comments Into It

A Brief History of Jumping from Space

[Listen to the audio at KMUW] A year before cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, American Joe Kittenger took a lift below a two-hundred foot helium balloon. The ride took an hour and a half in a tiny open-air basket took him …

June 19, 2012 0 Comments Into It

Stock Sounds: The Scream

The scream might be the glue that holds together horror films, but its reach goes well beyond the genre. And since the early sound libraries, certain screams have risen to the top, being used over and over again. Perhaps the most famous …

June 5, 2012 0 Comments Into It

If It’s Not Funny, Laugh Anyway

Laughter has a long history in drama: as far back as Shakespeare, plants in the audience initiated reactions with their own belly laughs and jeers. But laughter has a strange role in television. Unlike most sound effects, it doesn’t correlate to something …

May 25, 2012 0 Comments Into It

Stock Sounds: Part 1

Click here to hear part 1 of 4: Stock Sounds Long before the luxury of recordings, stage performers created their own sounds to accompany productions. Copper sheets were struck to produce a crack of lightning. Blocks of wood, hand drums, whistles and …

May 12, 2012 0 Comments Into It

Talking Toasters (The Evolution of the Pop-Tart)

The Strange Evolution of the Pop-Tart Listen to the full segment over at [KMUW] Kellogg’s rushed Pop-Tarts onto the market in 1964, shortly after their competitor announcement a similar toaster snack release called Country Squares. Since then, the evolution of the Pop-Tart …

April 24, 2012 0 Comments Into It

Crushed Bugs & Ground Stone: The World of Pigments

Click here to listen to the segment over at [KMUW] Given the infinite access we’re afforded to color, it’s hard to imagine the importance its been given throughout history and the passion that has gone into its hunt. In the pursuit of …

April 10, 2012 0 Comments Into It

Bull-Baiting

Listen to the segment over [KMUW] Bull Baiting The violent pastime known as bull baiting entertained the wealthy and poor alike throughout the Middle Ages, and well into the 19th century. The spectacle took place in public rings, where a single bull …

March 27, 2012 0 Comments Into It

Video Arcades

Since the first simple video arcade games were developed in the late sixties, the video arcade has fought a war of innovation and marketing with home gaming. What’s called The Golden Age of arcades was sparked by the 1978 release …

February 28, 2012 0 Comments Into It

Colorful Noise

From record players and tape decks to digital images, noise is a constant in our lives. I got reeled in by the concept of “colorful noise” from the analogy between light and sound. The pairing of spectrums is a fairly loose one, …

February 14, 2012 0 Comments Into It

The Lonely Crawlers

Perhaps this year’s most overlooked couple, the pair of crawler-transporters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida have been delivering shuttles to their launch pad since the Apollo missions. With the end of the Constellation Program, no new jobs are set …