To put the problem in the simplest terms, the nutri­tional interests of the Centipede’s members continue to be sidelined in the interest of sustaining the maniacal Dr. Josef Heiter’s erection.

Why ‘Lindsay’ is leaving the human centipede.

Why aren’t I letting myself have the same freedom as a writer that I grant myself as a reader? Why don’t I let myself write what I love, regardless of whatever the apparent genre of it might be?

I’m fascinated by authors who can plant themselves in all kinds of terrain. Russell Hoban is one example. Michael Chabon is another. Here he is talking about the exper­ience of — and reasoning behind — his involvement in the movie adapt­ation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom adven­tures. (Coincidentally I’m posting this while watching a video from Neil Gaimain’s Wheeler Centre appearance in which he talks about his concern at being pigeonholed.)

Those emotional hygienists are back with a new episode — their first in over a year. I think the more relaxed schedule suits them.

The editorial team at Hardie Grant Egmont’s ‘Ampersand’ project have started compiling some handy links and resources concerning ye olde craft of storytellinge. As you will no doubt discover, they take this sort of thing seriously (and would probably never use a phrase like ‘ye olde craft of storytelling’).

Hemingway is a new café down the road from us (okay, quite a way down the road) that lets you exchange fruit and veggies from your garden for coffee and comest­ibles. Finally I have a use for those much-too-big turnips! (Okay, a second use.) (Via @cristyclark)

Great idea from Melbourne poet Anna Ryan-Punch: write a poem on the back of a playing card, leave it somewhere, and tweet the location (and suit) of the card. A poem a week for 52 weeks (because 52 playing cards, you dig?)

The first poem is being released tomorrow. Follow @poemsinthewild for updates.

Bugle spoiler alert: the latest episode has both producer Chris and producer Tom in it! It’s pretty much The Three Doctors of Bugle episodes! (Except with wall-to-wall plum-jokes.)

F___ you Chris!

Payback doesn’t come harder-boiled.

Matthew Holness (of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace fame) looks to be creating a timely new character: The Reprisalizer, a “hard-boiled hero for the Seventies”. The period detail on the site is amazing; reminds me of the trashy crime novels my grand­father used to read. Can’t wait for the film. (Via Hauling Like A Brooligan.)

Be it Hitchcock movies, infomer­cials, the super­ficial and sensa­tion­al­istic local news, or Thomas Pynchon novels, (The Simpsons) is a crash course in popular culture, nearly compuls­ively cataloging and critiquing other media forms.

The Atlantic reports on the 500th Simpsons episode (with a brief glimpse into the typical writing process — “about a year” from “conception to air”!). As ambivalent as I feel toward it now (though I’ve enjoyed some recent episodes) — and as disap­pointing as it is to see the producers feeding into the Julian Assange celebrity-machine by casting him in the 500th episode — it’s hard to overstate the impact of this series, and the civil­ising power of satire to which it is testament.

At one point during the tour, Branca, an impec­cably polite gentleman with enviable hair, opened the door to a dim, cavernous room and beckoned me in.

Here were acres of burlap sacks piled atop pallets and containing the 40 or so barks, roots, fungi, herbs, and spices that go into Fernet Branca. These include myrrh, gentian root, cinchona bark, orris root, zedoary, and saffron. To walk through the room is to recon­noiter a peculiar olfactory geography, crossing from the republic of one aroma into another, with the border­lands between the two sometimes under détente, but often not.

I ordered a Fernet Branca at Bar Ampere here in Melbourne in the other night. I ordered it because I liked the idea of drinking something that sounds like a Swiss mathem­atician. But it turns out that among the things I don’t partic­u­larly like are drinks that taste like iodine. In fact, drinking Fernet is a bit like tongue-kissing a First World War infirmary.

Having said that, I’m willing to give it another chance. This 2008 Atlantic article serves as a decent Fernet primer.

An example of the kind of thing where I think Twitter has the edge over Google+ or Facebook: it gives rise to demented brilliance like #FutureSeinfeld. Some great work from @spikelynch, @facelikethunder, @timsterne and @monkeytypist among many others.

I’ve seen a lot of people link to Nicholas Carr’s call for publishers to bundle free, electronic versions of books with purchases of the physical artifact (in the way that music labels often bundle audio files with vinyl purchases), but it chimes so much with my own feelings that I felt I needed to link to it here too.

“Yes! That stock photo of squirrels having sex on top of a photo­copier is just what we need for the cover of the next Rogering Rodents Quarterly!”

Erik Malinowski takes a fascin­ating look at the making of ‘Homer at the Bat’ from season three of The Simpsons. This was the first Simpsons episode to make heavy use of multiple guest stars — and as Malinowski explains, the writing staff were forced to give one hundred and ten percent to pull the episode off. (“That’s impossible…” etc)

Which other guest stars have demanded changes over the show’s twenty-plus year history, I wonder?

Can’t help but feel that Japanese cinema has been missing a trick here. (Via @cityoftongues, via io9)

Humankind moves one step closer to artificial food. (Image via the arrangement of nerves in a leaf)

Interesting article describing how Words with Friends creators Zynga reshaped the [Scrabble] board, added four tiles, and changed the values and distri­bution of the letters in the process of devel­oping their block­buster smart­phone game.

‘One of the goals we had in designing our letter distri­bution was to give players letters that would allow them to form words much more easily than in other word games,’ [designer and engineer Kevin] Holme said via e-mail. ‘In [Words with Friends], we put four Hs into the bag and set their value to 3 — a big difference from Scrabble, which uses two Hs worth 4 points.’

In other words, he amplified the number of… ‘explosive moments.’

Further to the link I posted last week about the psychic division between the writer as author and the writer as human being, here’s author Chris Womersley writing for the Untitled Books website about the delicate splitting of the self that comes with producing a work of fiction:

The fellow who does the dishes, forgets people’s names, ferociously bites his nails and eats porridge for breakfast — the everyday me, in other words — and the one who performs the slightly dreamy act of writing are, subtly, different. The everyday me doesn’t actually narrate my works of fiction. Instead it is the writerly version of myself — the one with access to the (hopefully) best possible word, who can spend months revis­iting sentences to ensure they are just right, who can see the structure of the story being told, who under­stands his characters; the one who rearranges.

“The Hitler Youth LP”. (For context, see this tweet from @spikelynch.)

‘Good God, man, what do you mean?!’ cried Sergeant Major General. ‘Do you mean some unima­ginable alien being came through a hole in the fabric of space-time and sucked this man’s living heart from his body as part of some kind of plot to take over our planet?’

Inspired the acquis­ition of a number of books all named The Eye of the Tiger, Pinknantucket Press is making its own splendid contri­bution to the canon of works endowed with this most excellent desig­nation.

Keep a look-out for the forth­coming Eye of the Tiger Omnibus.