Jeff Altman found some old 16mm footage shot by his grandfather while vacationing at Disneyland in 1956. The restored quality is impressive.

Shot by my grandfather on his Bell & Howell Filmo using 16mm Kodachrome film stock. This footage was taken a year after the California theme park opened.

It was quite a surprise going through this and seeing my grandmother meeting Walt Disney himself! I’ve been doing my best to find out what they were shooting at the front of the park. So far I’ve been unsuccessful.

Transferred to HD (1080PsF 23.98) myself off a Spirit and Color Corrected using a da Vinci 2k Plus. Slowed to 18fps to match the original film speed.

If you don’t watch out, you could really get lost in a site like TV Tropes. Or at least I could. To be sure, the site appeals to a particular type of person. Someone who likes patterns and categories.

The easiest way to understand what it’s trying to do is to look up a show that you know, like The Wire or So You Think You Can Dance.

A wiki-style site is perfect for TV Tropes. Traditional ideas, like Chekov’s Gun, are outrageously annotated and linked. On some shows there’s a bingo game waiting to happen.

• The 115 images of Earth that were sent on the Voyager space probe golden record. It’s like a family photo album that says “look what we’ve done!” More info.
• Some scenes from the Official Beatles Coloring Book. (1964)
• Tone Audio offers the best review that I’ve read on the Beatles Remasters. Being sticklers, they have a lot to say about Mono vs. Stereo.

The New Yorker featured an article on tinnitus in their February issue. Groopman gives a decent overview and then focuses on soldiers coming back from war, where explosions and constant gunfire are a real problem.

• Pete Drake and Peter Frampton aside, have you ever wondered if an instrument can be played fast enough to mimic human speech? Well, it turns out it can. Using, MIDI controllers to play piano keys VERY quickly, Austrian composer Peter Ablinger translates a child’s voice to a piano. Check out the video with the full article.
• Some old-timers talk about Chicago, a piece from Granta magazine.
• Letters of Note is a blog of historical correspondences. Presented with scans of the original letters and typed transcriptions, the site is well curated and already has a variety of content. Some are terribly sad, like the mother who lost five sons in WWII without knowing it until she got a response from FDR. Others are hilarious, like this letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asking him to investigate the obscene lyrics to “Louie Louie.”

CNet reports that Comscore and Omniture, two industry standards when it comes to web tracking, will be working together to form a new service. This is the second big news of the month from Omniture, which is also being acquired by Adobe.

The announcement is tentative good news, since there has long been a discrepancy between internal analytics numbers like Omniture and the survey-based approach of Comscore (to the point where you can’t compare Comscore to anything but Comscore). More accurate reporting can only be good in the long run for advertising on the internet.