Jason and the Argonauts

Jason and the Argonauts is an American made fantasy film produced by Charles H. Schneer and distributed by Columbia pictures in 1963. Jason (played by Todd Armstrong) is a Greek soldier who banned together a crew to sail to the end of the earth seeking the Golden Fleece.

            In 1963 Jason and the Argonauts was highly acclaimed, and was considered ground breaking because of the stop motion animation by director Harryhausen. The film did not win any awards, but Harryhausen did receive a lifetime achievement award in the 1992 Academy Awards where Tom Hanks commented on Jason and the Argonauts saying, “Some people say its Casablanca or Citizen Kane, I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made.”

            This film is before its time with the stop motion animation and the massive amount of other special effects that they incorporated in this movie. This would be the equivalent to an Avengers movie or Jurassic Park of modern day as far as special effects; it was simply over the top. The movie was very entertaining. As I watched, I set myself in the time that this came out from the perspective of never seeing special effects that are as interactive with the human characters before. I would have been blown away in 1963, and that made it more enjoyable for me to watch now. The story line was slow and basic, the acting was fare, and Hercules was a chump. The amount of shield/ weapon throwing in the movie was hilarious. The only thing that would keep this film from being a success in today’s market is the simplicity of the acting and the shallowness of the character depth. They did not build on either of these, but that wasn’t why this movie was made. It was made for Hydra fighting, skeleton screaming, Hercules abandoning, shield throwing action and, in that category, Schneer and Harryhausen nailed it.

How MP3 Changed Music

MP3: Wikimedia Common/Public Domain



            Many people have listened to MP3 files or owned an MP3 player, but I am willing to bet that most people do not know what MP3 is. In a world where everything is instant and accessible most people would find it inconvenient, and downright unacceptable, to have your favorite song take three to five minutes to stream each time you want to listen to it. But thanks to a German company named Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft and its inventors Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Bradenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernest Eberlein, that is no longer the case.

Karlheinz Brandenburg:
Christleches Medienmagazin pro

            In the early 1990’s many people still used cassette tapes and were being introduced to the CD player for all their instant music needs. But behind the scenes there was a new technology being developed that would forever change music. While we were now able to record crystal clear high quality digital sound onto CD’s, the files of music were still very large in consideration to how long songs were. What Karlheinz Brandenburg (often called the Father of the MP3) was working on was developing in the MP3, which would cut that footprint down by 12 times. MP3, aka Motion Pictures Expert Group Audio Layer 3 (we will stick with MP3), is technology that takes the original digital audio file and compresses it making it smaller with hardly any sound quality loss.     At first, MP3 was a near failure because the technology was before its time. It wasn’t until 1996 that it was copy-written in the US. By that time the internet was in full dial up swing. As MP3 files became more popular, so did file sharing. Now with music files taking a third of the time to download and taking 12 times less storage space, it made music very easy to access. Before Limewire and Napster, people would either copy and burn CD’s that their friends bought or record a song that was playing on the radio with a cassette (if you could get the timing right). But now, people were able to store millions of songs on their computers and share them with anyone who was connected to the internet. This caused earthquakes for the music industry. Artists were losing enormous amounts of money along with record labels and music producers. But in all reality, this is how MP3 really stayed relevant, and in turn, thrived.

            A year later in 1997 the first MP3 player was invented by MPMan. This was huge because you no longer had to carry around a bulky cd player that you could only carry in your pocket if you owned a pair of Jinko jeans. You could have access to hundreds of songs on a device that was just the size of your hand. Many companies made MP3 players from that time forward and the music industry scrambled to shut down the file share sites like Napster, Frostwire, and Limewire. But the granddaddy of them all made an appearance in 2001 when Apple introduced the Ipod and Itunes. By that time a lot of the illegal filesharing sites where on the downfall. Apple had revolutionized the music world.

MP3 revolutionized the way we access music in just 10 years thanks to some German inventors that never gave up, millions of American music pirates, and Apple. That is such a short time if you think about how long it took to get recorded music accessible to the masses. Thanks to this technology, along with advances in the internet and the data grid in America, we can now stream music on services like Spotify and Pandora from anywhere, often with no delay. What a time to be alive!

Fine Woodworking Magazine

Fine Woodworking Magazine has been around since 1975. The magazine printed issues every season offering articles on various focuses of woodworking. Every issue contains projects, different crafting techniques, articles on wood theory, and works from different master woodworkers. Fine Woodworking’s primary audience was the more skilled woodworker, but they kept the magazine interesting enough to appeal to all in the woodworking community. As the magazine grew to be more popular, they started to print more frequently graduating to a monthly magazine, they also have articles that appeal to Diy hobbyist and beginning woodworkers. Now, Fine Woodworking has multiple platforms to view, read, and listen to their product.

If you are green planet conscious and do not want to subscribe to the magazine, they literally have all options of viewing for their product. They are on social media, offer website subscriptions, YouTube videos, podcasts, and if you are not interested in any of those they also have a TV show on PBS called Rough Cut (maybe the ultimate This Old House rival). Their podcast is Shop Talk Live, where a couple of hosts talk about random things in the woodworking world. I have recently listened to an episode about glue ups (I know, sounds exhilarating). They are very active on Instagram where they feature how-to projects, new articles in upcoming issues, and other work of woodworkers on Instagram. Fine Woodworking also utilizes YouTube in the same manner as Instagram, where they will feature some popular woodworkers and have them go through a build to show the viewers different techniques and tips and tricks of the trade. As an alternative to their magazine, they also offer a full subscription to their website. You can view some things as a guest, but to have full access you can choose to subscribe for a fee to get things like digital magazine issues, work projects, build plans, and access to their article data base to over 40 years’ worth of articles and plans.

Overall, I would say that the primary subscribers to Fine Woodworking’s Magazine is the older generation of woodworker. However, I believe they do an exceptional job of making their product available to the younger generation in the form of digital media. I am sure that the magazine will stick around even with the digital media takeover. Some demand for the magazine will die off with an older generation, but woodworkers like tangible things they can touch with their hands and they always will. Woodworking is a very small community, and a magazine used to be the only real current event information someone could get outside of joining a woodworker’s guild.  Now with the ability to share your hard work over social media and share knowledge over YouTube, it makes being a beginning woodworker a lot easier than I would imagine it would have been 40 years ago. 

About Me

Hello everyone, my name is Cody Bland. I am currently a business management major at Paris Junior College. I have a full-time job and I am also a full-time husband and father to an eight month old baby boy. I serve as a musician and usher at Transformation Church, and have been serving for going on three years now. I am a proud veteran of United States Navy, and served 4 years where I had the liberty to work overseas in Sicily and Greece. 
I have recently fell in love with the new hobby of woodworking. Woodworking and DIY never really was an interest until I married my wife and got to work with my father-in-law (Randy) building my first work bench. Randy and I also built a headboard for our current bed. While I have learned a lot from him in the few projects we have tackled, I learn more by my (oh so frustrating) mistakes. Woodworking is currently a hobby that takes up my free time. Right now, I just build things for around the house or for family and friends. My craft is a work in progress, and it is a process that I embrace. It takes time to be a good woodworker, and I plan on enjoying all the time I get to learn. The content of this blog will follow my journey as I try different things from YouTube woodworkers and my own projects, reviewing my likes and dislikes about the process, the project, and the outcomes. It will give me a good platform to showcase my success and failures, while showing the learning curve of a beginner woodworker.