bookofjoe

"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" — George David Weiss is dead

The great songwriter in 1961 ".... added the lyrics, 'In the jungle, the mighty jungle' to a popular, infectious melody to create the No. 1 Billboard hit "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" for the Tokens," wrote T. Rees Shapiro in today's Washington Post obituary.

Weiss died this past Monday at the age of 89.

Excerpts from the Post obituary follow.

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The origin of his greatest success, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," was mired in controversy. The tune was originally composed in 1939 by Solomon Linda, who lived in a shanty in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg.

But in 1952, Linda sold the copyrights to a recording of his song -- which he called "Mbube," Zulu for lion — to a studio for 10 shillings, less than $1.

The song eventually captured the attention of Pete Seeger, who wrote out a rough transcription of the song's main lyrics, "uyimbube, uyimbube," as "wimoweh, wimoweh," and performed it with the Weavers.

Today, more than 150 variations of Linda's original song exist, and it has been featured in more than a dozen movies, including Disney's "The Lion King" (1994).

The song generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue, but when Linda died in 1962 at age 53, he was so poor his widow could not afford a headstone for his grave.

In 2004, Linda's family filed a suit against Abilene Music Inc., the publishing company that owned copyrights to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Two years later, Abilene agreed to pay the family the song's royalties retroactively from 1987 onward.

"This song has never died," Mr. Weiss once said of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." "I never thought of it as a song but rather a series of gimmicks thrown together. It just shows you — you can't second-guess the public."

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Margalit Fox's obituary in yesterday's New York Times had a slightly different take on the origin of the blockbuster hit: "'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' (1961), based on a South African Zulu song first recorded in the 1930s, was given a reworked melody and new lyrics ('In the jungle, the might jungle/The lion sleep tonight') by Mr. Weiss, Mr. Peretti and Mr. Creatore."

"Their adaptation, which kept the refrain — 'Wimoweh, wimoweh' — popularized in a 1950s version by the Weavers, became a million-selling hit for the Tokens."

Turn any faucet into a drinking fountain

Charlie Sorrel of Wired's Gadget Lab happened on this interesting device, and reviewed it as follows.

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The Tapi slides onto any faucet and transforms it into a switchable tap and fountain, all at the squeeze of a rubber nipple. The silicone blob fits over the tap’s tip and lets water through as normal. Give it a squeeze and the flow is cut, which redirects the water out of a hole in the top giving an instant drinking-fountain. In the kitchen it’s good for a quick sip without dirtying a glass. In the bathroom it works well for rinsing the toothpaste suds from your frothing maw.

My mother used to have a primitive version of these tap-accessories on her faucet back when I was a kid, although in that case the fountain-function was caused by cheap rubber slipping off the metal tubes and spraying water all over the kitchen. They also made all water taste of rubber, although you could pretend you were milking a particularly productive cow if you imagined it hard enough.

The Tapi Tap Squeeze Drink Fountain claims to be flavor free. It comes in a double-rainbow of colors, and will offer endless fun as you pinch it and spray suffocating jets of water up the the noses of unsuspecting house guests.

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$4.95.

[via Oh Gizmo, Coolest Gadgets, CrunchGear and Laughing Squid]

Lou Reed loves the Moog Guitar

Ditto Kaki King, Joey Santiago, Julian Lage and Brett Comeaux, among many others.

Introduced in 2008, the $3,500 instrument deploys magnetic fields to keep the strings vibrating indefinitely — or even stop them cold.

From the website:

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The Moog Guitar provides an incredibly intimate playing experience that connects musicians directly to the source of the sound: the strings of the guitar. It does this by controlling the way the strings vibrate. In a very coherent way, it gives energy to, and takes energy away from the strings. The resulting timbres do not rely on effects or post-processing. They are created directly from the strings.

Touching the strings, being able to directly manipulate the very source of sound is fundamental to the nature of the guitar and to the spirit of playing it. The Moog Guitar’s controls just set the background mode — the control system characteristics. The strings are always your main user interface.

Below,

the new model E1.

Salt 'n pepper yacht

Earthenware, made in England, designed by Takae.

4" x 4" x 2".

$58.45.

[via Puppies and Flowers]

Icons of the Web

Stand down, joe, it's not about you.

Sheesh.

From the website:

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A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.

We retrieved each site's icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization above.

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its "www." counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons — those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach — are scaled to 16x16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).

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[via a friend who prefers to remain in deep black]

Nolex Watch by Natalia Brilli

The Belgian designer's take on the Rolex, covered in leather, handmade in France.

$350.

MotoMorphic JaFM

Nicolas Stecher's September 2010 Wired magazine story follows.

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Some motorcycles are created for speed. Some are born to tame twisty roads. Not MotoMorphic's JaFM. It was designed to have the widest front tire possible. The idea sprang into designer Jim Davis' head in 2001, when he first beheld what was then the fattest rear tire on the market: Avon's Venom 250. He fantasized aboout what such a monstrosity would look like on the front of a motorcycle. It had never been done  before.

On the initial prototype, the front rubber's contact patch was so large — nearly four times more surface area than a typical tire's — that cornering was problematic. MotoMorphic's team countered with a variable steering angle and a burly damper to soak up vibrations. To offset the increased forces from more than 100 pounds of extra weight — half from the beefed-up frame and half from wheels and tires themselves — the engineers installed stiffer fork springs.

The adjustments helped, but the bike's design left no room for a traditional gas tank. The team had anticipated this, so they sealed up the welds to let the frame tubes themselves serve as a gas tank. This had the added benefit of lowering the cycle's center of gravity and improving its handling. "We never expected to make it ride like a sport bike," Davis says. But the end product might actually perform better for a lot of riders. Score one for engineering from the pavement up.

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The bike weighs 550 pounds with seven gallons of gas.

Base price is $100,000, with a wide range of available custom upgrades in terms of finishes, materials, and components.

Frequently asked questions here.

Can they build one for you?

Apply within.

What are they?

Answer here this time tomorrow.

Hint: smaller than a bread box.