Author Archives: Content Catnip

The lost art and history documentaries of YouTube

Forget Netflix, YouTube has some incredible vintage documentaries about art and history. Made during the days of  analogue, these docos may seem pixellated and blurry by today’s standards. Yet if you persevere, you’ll be rewarded with terrific storytelling, great production values and enigmatic and fascinating subject matter. Here for you are some great documentaries about materialContinue reading “The lost art and history documentaries of YouTube”

Every Picture Tells A Story: Young Stanley Kubrik’s mysterious showgirl

As a young and upcoming photographer, Stanley Kubrik landed a job for Look Magazine in 1949. This meant he got paid to trail in the wake of stunningly beautiful showgirl Rosemary Williams through the rainy Gothic streets of NYC and to capture her in her intimate surroundings of home along walking the film noir streetsContinue reading “Every Picture Tells A Story: Young Stanley Kubrik’s mysterious showgirl”

The Vintage Restart Page

Are you lonely and nostalgic for all of the crappy, interminably slow and dull-as-dishwater computers that you have possessed in the past. If you answered yes then enter into the timewarp that is the Vintage Restart Page. This features all of the crappy clip art graphics and quaintly exaggerated shadowing on buttons that you haveContinue reading “The Vintage Restart Page”

A tribute to the phenomenal Scottish writer William McIllvanney

William McIlvanney or Willie to his nearest and dearest was single-handedly responsible for the genre of Tartan Noir, the bleak and rainy Glaswegian streets, grisly crime screnes steeped in whisky and venomous characters that were the stomping ground of characters like Inspector Laidlaw (changed to Taggart for the famous TV show). All other Scottish crimeContinue reading “A tribute to the phenomenal Scottish writer William McIllvanney”

Decode ancient manuscripts in this online course about Medieval Spanish Burgos

A new Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) aims to involve people are volunteer historians who are needed to decrypt and decode 1,500 pages of medieval manuscripts from the Cathedral of Burgos (Spain). Even better, there is a Massive Open Online Course that accompanies the process. Read more about it here.  To Won’s Father: An AncientContinue reading “Decode ancient manuscripts in this online course about Medieval Spanish Burgos”

Every Picture Tells A Story: Lion Tamer for a touring circus at Ascot, 1936

A fearless lion tamer goads and encourages her intimidating charges during the Bertram Mills Touring Circus at Ascot.  Shot by Edward G Malindine in 1936. Courtesy of the National Media Museum on Flickr