Things I’ve been listening to
Music by The Flaming Lips, Jaga Jazzist, Glass Ghost, Kes Band, Deerhunter, Zoos of Berlin, Fleet Foxes, The Instruments and Radiohead, among others.
According to Google Analytics, someone visited my website immediately after typing the search phrase “where to buy flatulence underwear melbourne australia”.
There’s nowhere I can go from there.
For a moment I thought this looked like the most miserable Christmas morning ever, but then I counted not one, not two but three dolls she’s managed to wrangle from Santa. Oh, and a model airplane if you don’t mind.
I hope your Christmas was just as bountiful, but less monochrome.
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Zoos of Berlin, Wye Oak, The Flaming Lips, The Octopus Project & Black Moth Super Rainbow, Beirut, Glass Ghost, Odawas, Jaga Jazzist and Midlake, among others.
Horn by Peter M. Ball
Great concept, mixing grimy police procedural, online sleaze and the world of faerie. Much straighter than I expected, having read a bit of Ball’s short fiction this year, though that’s no doubt due to the noir trappings.
Looking forward to seeing where Ball takes the sequel, which is being published by Twelfth Planet Press in 2010.
It’s like an alternate universe Catweazle.
(Frighteningly, it’s probably not that far removed from our actual universe Catweazle.)
(adski_kaferti, via Black and WTF)
Nicely customised comments form at the Panic Inc. corporate blog. Different enough from the usual WordPress comments form you see everywhere on the web, but with all the normal elements in place. Cute and idiosyncratic while maintaining usability.
Can’t help feeling my life would be richer and fuller if I wasn’t so dismayed by the sight of dirty dishes.
Or if we had a dishwasher.
It amazes me that the designers of the nineteenth century, armed with little more than their typographic inventiveness, and without the aid of automated data manipulation devices, were able to corral ever-increasing masses of information into something comprehensible. (Think of railway timetables, for instance, or even newspapers.)
This 1858 document, entitled Tableau de L’Histoire Universelle, attempts the modest task of drawing a family tree of the entire human race.
I can’t speak as to the accuracy of the genealogy, but as an infographic it’s freakin’ awesome.
(Also, I’d be thrilled if anyone could point me to a font that matches the handwritten type in the poster, particularly the italics.)
(peacay)
Things I’ve been reading
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction December 2009 (‘Farewell Atlantis’ by Terry Bisson and ‘Iris’ by Nancy Springer)
No causal connection has wealthy beginning
In the middle of 1944, a series of apparently innocuous answers in the crossword puzzle of the Daily Telegraph rang alarm bells at MI5. In the space of a few weeks, the words ‘Utah’, ‘Omaha’, ‘Neptune’, ‘mulberry’ and ‘overlord’ all featured as solutions to the crossword. What was significant was that these were all codewords relating to the soon-to-occur (and supposedly secret) Allied invasion of Normandy.
Coincidence? Espionage? Treason? The answer, like the solution to a good cryptic clue, is as appealing as it is obvious.
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Bear In Heaven, Deerhunter, Danielson, Midlake, Ron Sexsmith, Rufus Wainwright, Sufjan Stevens, Blitzen Trapper and Jerusalem Mules, among others.
Dutch edition of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (or, Honey, I Blew Up The Invisible Man).
Sporty car in our neighbourhood with numberplate ‘D6GURU’. I admire any motorist so proud of their D&D attribute rolling ability.
Off to hear songs about Jesus, miserly inn proprietors and genius savants who travel in threes.
Six day old bacon: safe or unsafe? For convenience I am going with safe.
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Jaga Jazzist, Kes Band, Farben, Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, The Instruments, Grizzly Bear, Frightened Rabbit and Ekkehard Ehlers & Paul Wirkus, among others.
I’m not sure The Wiggles have much to offer from an educational perspective if they still haven’t figured out how to wake up Jeff.
Artist Carl Warner on his fruit and vegetable recreation of iconic London landmarks: “It’s important to me that people look at this and go ‘London’, instantly.”
I love that that’s important to anyone. I love that anyone would want to spend three weeks striving to become the Christopher Wren of the fruit and veg world. I love that in the video accompanying the original article there’s at least one half-empty bottle of lager lying around the studio.
(newslite.tv, via Dark Roasted Blend )
From a US patent for a flatulence deodorising pad that sits in your underwear (in, the patent helpfully informs us, “the anal area”).
The background notes make for compelling reading (the charcoal cloth of which the pad is made was originally developed to defend soldiers against chemical warfare), but I particularly like the idea that somewhere there’s an illustrator whose specialty is the infographics of the fart.
(Google Patents, via Amy and Aaron Edgar)