A conversation I had today

CO-WORKER: So are you in school?

ME: I just graduated.

CO-WORKER: Where did you go?

ME: Bard.

CO-WORKER: Ah. Yeah, I noticed the big words.

ME: I didn't know they were hanging out so prominently!

Fun with words

The Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus is an interesting experiment in organizing and associating words. Have you ever brainstormed by drawing webs connecting different terms and ideas? It's a little like that. Unfortunately, the free version is only an evaluation, and you can only play around a little before you'll be prompted to buy. But what're you gonna do.




The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form, or OEDILF, is a project to define every word in the dictionary with its own limerick. They're up through the bn's. Wish them luck.

Be you human or canine or camel
Your ameloblasts make enamel;
Thus the teeth in your mouth
Right and left, north and south,
Have some apatite—if you're a mammal.
(S. A. McBurnie)

Color Code, "a full-color portrait of the English language," is a really neat experiment. Words are given a color based on the results of a Yahoo! image search for that particular word; the colors of associated images are averaged together to determine that the word "class," for example, is a soft pastel blue. The words are grouped together in giant maps based on related meanings, in clusters like "furniture," "disease," "happening," or "flower" (shown below); they can also be arranged in one big spectrum according to color. As a synaesthete who does habitually associate color with words, I find this project especially intriguing.
Via Mindful Things.




Color in Motion, "an animated and interactive experience of color communication and color symbolism," is a cute flash animation exploring various associations for different colors. Each color is featured as a stick-figure character in a movie showcasing different aspects of that color. There are also "meet the colors" features which list different words and associations that apply to the them, and finally, at the end, there are some toys you can play with to make your own movies.




The Quack-Project goes around the world collecting recordings of children performing animal noises in many different languages, and shares the results. You can listen to audio files of children quacking, mooing, oinking, crowing, neighing, barking, and ribbitting in Cantonese, Bengali, Italian, Hindi, Somali, and many more. No written animal sounds, unfortunately -- those can be quite interesting, too.

The Eggcorn Database is an amusing and sometimes surprising listing of misheard and commonly-mistaken idioms and turns-of-phrase -- "dog-eat-dog" becomes "doggy-dog," "boisterous" becomes "voiceterous," "cease and desist" becomes "cease and decease," and, providing the project its title, "acorn" becomes "eggcorn." It's interesting what people come up with when they only hear these expressions in speech and never see them written down.

Speak Up has a carefully-considered critique of the alphabet.

B b
This is a very nice pair; whoever did this was really thinking about the relationship between the two. I like the way the capital B can have some variation in the proportions from top to bottom. Obviously designed by a man, the ball and stick of the lowercase b is simple and, appropriately, half of the cap B. Talk about male and female! The buxom, pregnant cap together with the excitable lowercase.

SEW is a short film about a girl diagnosed with OCD who can't stop playing a particular, very demanding word game in her head. Artistic, informative, and touching, the film was made by a student about one of his close friends, who is also a filmmaker. Both of them have made a lot of other films which are well worth checking out (just click on their names on the intro page to see their other work).




The Phrontistry is a great site with obscure word lists and vocabulary resources. Visit the International House of Logorrhea or the Compendium of Lost Words; learn about lipograms, writing omitting a letter of the alphabet; read essays and rants on language; or browse an extensive list of glossaries, from Divination and Fortune Telling to Feeding and Eating, Three-Letter Rare Words, Manias and Obsessions, and Words of Wisdom.

Fun with Words is "a celebration of the English language" with lots of neat features for the logophile: lists of collective nouns for animals, commonly confused words, word oddities, palindromes, pangrams, conflicting proverbs, unusual word forms...oh, so much good stuff.

The sidebar has been updated with a lot of new dictionaries and language sites, too. Happy browsing!

Wisdom of ages

Who were you in your last life? Try the Past Life Analysis to reveal your soul's true history.

My diagnosis:

I don't know how you feel about it, but you were male in your last earthly incarnation.
You were born somewhere in the territory of modern North Japan around the year 775.
Your profession was that of a sailor or shoemaker. Your brief psychological profile in your past life:
Such people are always involved with all new. You have always loved changes, especially in art, music, cooking. The lesson that your last past life brought to your present incarnation:
Your lesson is to learn discretion and moderation and then to teach others to do the same. Your life will be happier if you help those who lack reasoning. Do you remember now?

The English Proverb of the Day from Mythfolklore.net; or, since I can't post javascript, you can just look at the entire calendar of proverbs.

Try Sage, the oracle at Nick Bantock's official site.

The exact origins of the Sage will probably never be confirmed. However, given the location of the find, it is more than possible that the author or authors were members of the Knatii, a nomadic group of mystics that inhabited the area during that period.

Given the difficulties of translation, and the often obscure and ambiguous tone of the answers, the scroll's contents weren't released until 1977, when they appeared as an academic paper. This paper entitled The Ala-Dagh Sage, was given to a distinguished audience of linguists at the Salzburg Theosophical Symposium.

In 1999 a new (and more poetic) translation of the Sage was commissioned, and the following electronic version is one of the outcomes of that enterprise. When consulting the Sage it is important to remember that its wisdom is only fully revealed when the questioner accepts the sense within nonsense.

Wisdom from the Cool Quotes Collection.

Learn about yourself with the Ultimate Personality Test from thesurrealist.co.uk.

Or try your luck with the Bad Cookie Generator.

Stray link

Oops. I just realized that I forgot the link which was one of my major reasons for making the fairy tale post: McSweeny's new list of Klingon Fairy Tales.

The post has been updated.

Frothing

Some interesting rants I've heard lately:

"If You're Thinking of Starting a Women's Mag..." Elizabeth Spiers at Mediabistro has some choice advice for you.

So here's my central issue: if gender-neutral aliens from another planet were to land on earth and could only learn about women from the covers of women's mags, they would probably make the following assumptions:

1. Women tend to be disproportionately enthusiastic about banal things, thus the astronomical number of exclamation marks.

2. Women care mostly and overwhelmingly about clothes and makeup application.

3. In order to cognitively process how the aforementioned clothes and makeup are to be worn, women need a specific number of options—say, 803. Or 540. (On the upside, this would perhaps refute the stereotype that women are not quantitatively oriented.)

It's certainly not news that fashion magazines are idiotic and backwards, but this article tackles the issue with humor and style.

Citizen of the Month has a rather curmudgeonly but spot-on rant about What's the Matter with Kids Today.

I think our culture took a nosedive during the "We are the World" era. All those stupid songs like "The children are our future." Whose future? Theirs… not mine. Let’s clean up the environment so I don’t have to breathe the fumes, not for some nebulous future of the "children." Do I always have to bend over backwards for "the children?" The "children" have ruined TV. Most TV sucks because — god forbid — some child might see something like Janet Jackson’s boob. Maybe I want to see Janet Jackson’s boob. Now, I’m never going to get a chance again because it might ruin the innocence of some bratty American child.

He contends that our children are too coddled and fussed over, that they've become the center of existence to the detriment of us grownups. As an avowed non-breeder, I tend to agree with him. Not that I think children should be seen and not heard -- too many parents are concerned only that their children don't bother them, and completely neglect their needs as people. But surely some balance can be found. Neil's rant struck a chord.

UPDATE: A new McSweeny's feature, Your Children Are Destroying the Neighborhood, underscores the point nicely.

There's been a bit of flap over Dove's new "Campaign for Real Beauty, an ad campaign featuring real, curvy women instead of professional models. Have you seen it? Because I've never come across it, but people are talking. Apparently, the models are big chunkers and plastering their flab across giant billboards offends everyone's rights to have nothing but airbrushed perfection flung at them, according to some articles on the subject. Quips one: Really, the only time I want to see a thigh that big is in a bucket with bread crumbs on it (rim shot here). Another trumpets its disgust right from the headline: "We DON'T Want To See 'Real Women' In Ads!" Pound provides some reasoned and much-needed opposition, defending the much-maligned real women (who are just that, real women -- quite average, not fat or anything -- just not anorexic and over six feet tall!) in "Smell the Dove": Thank you, Sun-Times and Channel 2 fellas, for exposing those Dove billboards for the anti-erection propaganda that they are. She also got an article in the Sun Times to make her rebuttal.

I've just come across an interesting old 2 Blowhards post, "The Arts Litany": prompted by a visit to artsy, hippie Ithaca, Michael Blowhard waxes grumpy about how certain types of people seem to accept an entire list of beliefs and attitudes in order to conform to a particular lifestyle or subculture. He devises the Arts Litany, a collection of those common beliefs shared unthinkingly by "arts people." For example: Solar power; Free Tibet; Sex roles are evil, and the only solution to the hell they create is for everyone to become androgynous. He admits that these ideas aren't all bad, and I myself am likely to subscribe to a number of them, but he does raise a valid point. Do you believe everything you believe because you've decided that it's right, or just because it's part of the package?

Victoria Beckham has reportedly never read a book. Not even the ones her husband wrote, or her own autobiography. Nothing. She prefers music and, heh, fashion magazines. In the article, she also talks about how she's looking forward to having children, so that she can help them paint their nails and fix their hair and dress them up in nice clothes. She wants a Barbie, she means. Now, I find this disgusting. Why do we choose these people to lavish all our attention and adoration upon? Why is she the chosen role model for our girls, the target of our envy and love? Why do such empty people get so much recognition?

An article in The Guardian, "The Tyranny of Reading", on the other hand, protests the outrage that follows the revelation that someone doesn't like to read.

And why not? Since when did a regular quota of suitably serious reading matter become obligatory? And who decides what's worthy anyway? If Victoria Beckham swallowed a regular dose of sugary chick lit or violent slasher chillers, for example (well, they're books too), would it somehow make her reading habits more acceptable than the fact that she happens to "love fashion magazines"?

You know, I think it would. There's just something about the willingness to engage with the outside world, even as minimally as might be possible reading a mass-market potboiler. She could at least pick up a little vocabulary she wouldn't encounter in Cosmo. She could at least know what it feels like to hold a book in your hands and turn the pages -- at least glimpse the reading world as it is experienced by its adepts. Instead, "books" are just some vast, foreign, boring thing, something for snobby people, and she's too cool for them.

Yes, I will be a Reading Tyrant if I have to. It matters.

Well, I think that's more than enough ranting for today. Tires you out, doesn't it?

Looking grimm

Wow. The new Brothers Grimm movie coming out Friday looks really, really bad. I hadn't gotten around to watching the trailer until now, and now I'm pretty depressed. The visuals, which I had figured for a sure thing, aren't even that seductive. Everything looks cartoonish and overblown, like a Halloween haunted house -- huge overdose of atmosphere, when less is usually more. And the goofy, kiddie humor looks walk-outingly awful. I'm not even going to talk about the outrageous myths being perpetrated about the brothers themselves. It's Terry Gilliam and everything, but it looks so damn Disney.

Why?

Gilliam, forget this crap and go make Good Omens, dammit.

Fairy tales to get lost in

The Daily Pick recently featured a great post, SuperBlog: Fairy Tales, with loads of great fairy-tale links, many of which I will reproduce here because they're great. I'll throw in a few of my own.

There are loads of sites online where you can read the entire texts of fairy tales or fairy tale collections for free. These are all that I've found so far.

First, folklore or world tales:

Tales of Wonder is an archive with a sampling of folk and fairy tales from around the world, including Central Asia, Central Europe, Scandinavia, Japan, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

The InfoPoland site at SUNY Buffalo has a collection of twelve Polish fairy tales.

Blackmask Online has an etext of Japanese Fairy Tales.

The Armenian Embassy has a collection of sixteen Armenian fairy tales.

Italiansrus.com has a page of Italian fairy tales.

Next, collections by specific authors:

An online collection of more than 656 of Aesop's Fables at Aesopfables.com. Translations are either Rev. George Fyler Townsend (1814-1900), Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), or Jean de la Fontaine's French rendered into English by "several good internet souls."

National Geographic has a nice, only mildly cheesy presentation of Grimms' Fairy Tales: from Folklore to Forever, twelve tales based on a 1914 translation.

Grimm's Fairy Tales [sic] and Tales Collected by the Brothers Grimm are two scholarly collections of tales, both based on the 1884 translation by Margaret Hunt. The maintainer of the 209 Grimm's Fairy Tales recommends the other collection, which is more accurate. Tales Collected by the Brothers Grimm includes 200 tales and ten legends, which are all available individually or as a single zip file.

All of the preceeding links are via The Daily Pick. Now for some of my own.

Mythfolklore.net has a large collection of tales from Andrew Lang's fairy books.

There are a lot of other great things at Mythfolklore.net. There are a number of great rotating content scripts which will produce a number of cool random of of-the-day features: there are English, Latin, and Greek proverbs, the Roman calendar, Lang fairy tales (the tale of the day is now featured at the bottom of this page), Arabian Nights tales, Aesop's fables, myths, and more. There's also a random Myth Image generator, which I would love to put on my blog, but it's too big, or simply put in this post, but I can't post javascript. It's a shame, because the images are really lovely. So you'll just have to go see.

With the Proppian Fairy Tale Generator, you can select the mythic functions you want, and from them generate a semi-coherent tale based on Vladimir Propp's model. I would have included this in Make-Your-Own, if I'd remembered.
Via The Daily Pick.

"Wakey, wakey: Sleeping Beauty hasn't always been a docile object, says Lyn Gardner. She's had to face a cannibal queen, a rapist king - and even a Nazi prince." An oldish but still interesting article in The Guardian from December discusses the history of Sleeping Beauty and the changes she's undergone through time.

SurLaLune is simply the best resource out there for everything fairy-tale related. There are articles, illustrations, book recommendations, annotated tales, full texts of books, a discussion board, and lots and lots of links. Just about all you could need.

The Endicott Studio is another great all-around resource for fairy tales, folklore, and myth. Home to the Journal of Mythic Arts, they have a reading room of excellent articles and fiction, a poetry coffeehouse, an art gallery, multimedia arts, a discussion board, and more.

I am tempted to post a few more links dealing with myth right now, but it does say "fairy tales" in the header, so I think I'll save all that for another time.

UPDATE: I forgot one of the links I really wanted to post. McSweeny's offers up a great list of Klingon Fairy Tales, including such classics as "Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears" and "There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe With a Big Spike on It."

Magical artwork

Just the enchanting and enchanted work of a few amazing artists I would like to share with you.

Cheval noir. Aya Kato, an artist working in Japan, does lush, unbelievably intricate, often dark paintings of figures from folklore, fairy tale, and children's literature, both Japanese and Western. Her work is meticulous, and the incredibly detailed world she creates is both sensuous and disturbing.




The Chimerical Constructions of Aria Nadii. From the website: Aria Nadii is a transcendental artist and alchemist whose materials include embroidered fabrics woven through with metals, musical scores and the shredded pages of old books, fragments combined with oils and inks to create a landscape of transformation. There are a lot of Hindu motifs, mythological figures, medieval beasts, and other similar borrowings. I especially like the Astrological and Alchemical galleries.




Connie Toebe Gallery. Connie Toebe constructs fascinating little scenes in boxes, using collage, paper cut-outs, fabric, and sculpture objects to create magical dioramas, often drawing on fairy-tale themes. They are very beautiful, and the stories they tell are subtle and fascinating. I found myself reminded at several points of the Shrines and Navigational Boxes in the Gazio Room of Nick Bantock's Museum at Purgatory.




Speaking of Nick Bantock, there are a couple great galleries of his outstanding work online. His official site has a couple of nice new galleries, if you can deal with the fact that it's as much a catalog as a gallery and all the work is for sale with large, disheartening price tags. Griffinandsabine.com, an unofficial site run in collaboration with the artist, also has a few galleries displaying a selection of hand-picked artwork.

Possession

Everywhere I turn, people seem to be having trouble letting go of their things.

I used to be what they call a "pack rat." My mother called me "Stuff Girl" (no kidding) and she likened my bedroom to a museum, a collection of objects meticuously displayed, covering every horizontal surface and most of the verticals. Then one year, near the end of high school, something just snapped and I threw it all out. Gave away whatever I could. I gleefully stuffed things into giant garbage bags and kicked them to the curb, to charity, to my friends, whoever would accept them. I hardened my heart against the pitiable faces of even my favorite stuffed animals, and did away with the trappings of my childhood. I am a minimalist, you see, and I have a very particular aesthetic. I like my things functional and attractive, and anything superfluous, tacky, kitschy, or nostalgic must go.

I repeated this performance as needed, obeying the mantra, if you don't need it or want it or like it, don't keep it. The goal was to keep mobile -- I should only keep what I would be willing to personally carry from residence to residence. Anything that will spend its life in the back of the closet may as well move out for good. Unwanted gifts were disposed of with only moderate guilt. Even most of my school artwork was mercilessly dispatched (I told myself that I wouldn't regret it, but I may have been wrong). I may occasionally miss an item or two that I've gotten rid of, but overall, I feel mercifully free. Each and every thing that I own is an essential and integral piece of my daily life, something I appreciate and treasure. Everywhere I cast my eye it falls upon beauty, simplicity, and harmony. There are no more skeletons in my closet, just clothes and luggage and spare blankets and posters waiting to be framed. Useful things. Out of sight, but needed.

That's my advice to anyone struggling with too much stuff: renounce, renounce, renounce.

Just be sure that you won't regret it.

Musical revelations

Here, listen to this song. It's one of my current favorites, and I just adore it.

Jem - They.mp3

Now listen to this song.

10 Well tempered clavier book 2, No. 12 in F minor, BWV 881- Prelude.wma
(Right-click and "save target as" -- my browser at least can't handle the Windows Media Player format. I don't have an mp3, sorry.)

I was about to sit down to read for a bit and I had put on one of my classical playlists, "book lovers," which is just a combination of the albums Brahms for Book Lovers and Bach for Book Lovers. I was stopped in my tracks when the first random song started playing and I heard that familiar melody picked out on the gently dancing piano.

I had had no idea that Jem's song had been based on Bach, and discovering this was, as the title suggests, quite a revelation. I found this blog article about it: "Jem Gets Bach in the Saddle" by Greg Stepanich.

Wikipedia also has an interesting List of popular songs based on classical music. Oh, if only all of those links were audio links. It would be great fun to explore and listen to them all.

The final bit of musical revelation for today is a link to a song that I'd been searching for for some time. The song is Freeform Five's remix of Brian Wilson's "Our Prayer" from the album Smile. I first heard it on The Blue Room on BBC's Radio One several months ago, and loved it. I looked it up in the tracklisting, but there didn't seem to be any way to get it. There was a while when I stopped listening to The Blue Room, but I recently started again, and I found myself missing this song. So I looked for it again, and after long searching, finally came up with this link where I could at least listen to if not download it.

The song seems to be kind of a random phenomenon, a hip, electronica remix of an acapella hymn from a rock album. (I tracked down and listened to the original, and I didn't care for it at all.) Stylus magazine's The Stypod has an interesting post about it (no permalink -- scroll down to the third entry):

There's no telling exactly how or why this remix came into being. Having little to do stylistically with the grownup album rock majesty of Smile, it seems unlikely that the Freeform Five's take on the album's opening acapella track would have been commissioned by Nonesuch. Although, perhaps the label felt compelled to reach out to the younger, more modish facet of the artist's audience. But even then, why settle for a little-known act like Freeform Five? I figure the most likely explanation would be that the remixers in question had their fun with "Our Prayer" before any contact with the label was even established. [...] Fashioned as a tame electro/IDM hybrid, it wanders alongside the track's original version with crafty beats and further harmonizing via buzzy synths. It's quite far removed from the instrumental stylings and compositions of Brian "Sweet Hair" Wilson, but it'll do the trick as long as you're expecting it as such.

Anyway, here, at last, is the link to the song. Click on the "listen" link. The playlist has two songs on it -- skip the first one, which is something weird, and go right to this one.

Brian Wilson - Our Prayer (Freeform Reform)

Enjoy.


reading: Nick Bantock, The Venetian's Wife
saw: Adaptation; Jerry Maguire; Firefly

music: "cool music" mix, curr. Sting, "A Thousand Years"
beverage: Republic of Tea British Breakfast tea

Be vewwy vewwy quiet

A customer today purchased a Sally Hansen "Nearly Nude" French Nail Kit. This particular item was rendered in the register's occasionally peculiar shorthand as "SH NEARLY NUDE FRENCH," as if some French people in a state of undress nearby might be offended or startled off by any sudden loud noise.

I suddenly pictured a sort of Elmer Fudd in pursuit of exposed Gallic flesh, crouched down behind that famed chinked wall in France which is celebrated in naughty schoolyard rhyme, shushing his fellows as he surreptitiously observed his quarry...

Stats

100% of survey participants said
that they would be willing to take a short survey.

Make-Your-Own:

Face. The Ultimate Flash Face allows you to construct a face using a wide variety of types. The results vaguely resemble the work of police sketch artists.




Bayeux Tapestry. The Historic Tale Reconstruction Kit can be used to create panels, strips, or even greeting cards with text and tapestry images. For inspiration, look here at this great example.

Comic strip. This great generator features loads of stylishly drawn, very inspiring characters and objects you can combine to design some very eye-catching strips.
Via Drawn!




City. You can build a modern city, medieval town, or North Pole village from the ground up with the cute pixel-art City Creator.




Shakespearean insult. The Shakespearean Insult Kit is one of those simple text column a-column b-type generators. Thou frothy, elf-skinned flax-wench!

Irish curse. An tInneal Mallachtaí -- The Curse Engine is similar, allowing you to select from three columns of insults, and then rendering the results into Gaelic. Go gcreime scata Fomhórach ólta do chuid fo-éadaigh (May a pack of drunken Fomorians gnaw at your underwear)!

Doll. ELouai has a collection of Doll Makers, from Candybar to Boy to Ragnarok, along with a Doll House Maker and more. Cute time-waster. (Below are two Ragnarok dolls.)




Fat doll. There's the Fat Doll Maker, which I've posted before but which is so appropriate to today's category that I have to repost it. I'll include a picture this time.




Flower. Zefrank has created a nice Flower Maker where you can design and upload your own flowers; then, you can generate a random
Community Garden using the flowers created by other users, or grow a custom garden with the Garden Maker, and send it to a friend.
Via Reflections in d minor.




Anagrams. Brendan's On-Line Anagram Generator will helpfully break down and provide anagrams for any word or phrase you offer it. (BLUE TEA can be reworded as A TUB EEL, and BLUEWYVERN as WE BLUR ENVY. Did you know that?)

Mondrian painting. With the Mondrian Machine, you just click on a portion of the canvas, and it automatically divides and colors for you. Instant art.




Picasso painting. Mr. Picassohead is a creator that lets you combine ears, eyes, noses, mouths and such to create your very own stylized Picasso face.
Both this and the previous one via Michelle's Mental Clutter.




Now go. Go out and make something. Then come back and show me what you've done!

It really is Gorges

Well, I just got back from yet another visit -- and yes, I did go west again -- this time to see LadySusan in Ithaca, where she's settling in and about to begin life as a grad student at Cornell. It was good to see her again after the summer, as well as my cat Sidney, whom she's just adopted. The visit was great, except for the bit where I left my wallet at home and was turned away from a couple bars and refused alcohol for the duration of my stay. This also scrapped our plans to visit a local winery, which we had been very much looking forward to.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was that in one of the many little bookshops that line the Ithaca Commons, we came across the Brick Testament book, which was a neat find. (Interestingly, the book is rather cleaned-up -- many of the most risqué panels from the website are omitted.) Reading the introduction, I realized that I had mischaracterized the project in my earlier post. The creator, "The Rev." Brendon Powell Smith, is not actually a reverend at all -- he's an atheist -- and the purpose of the site is much more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek than I believed. It's not religious at all, which goes a ways toward explaining the tone of the narration. So there you go. Should have been paying more attention. The site is now even more highly recommended.


reading: Gregory Maguire, Lost
saw: Firefly; The Black Adder

music: "cooltunes" mix, curr. "The Egypt Journey Part II" from the Shade - Wrath of Angels soundtrack
beverage: Twinings English Breakfast tea

Evolutionary strides

Wow, I'm a Flippery Fish already. From Insignificant Microbe I skipped right over Multicellular Microorganism, Wiggly Worm, Crunchy Crustacean, Lowly Insect, and Slimy Mollusc, and went straight to the first respectable-sounding, non-icky creature on the list. I didn't think I'd make it that high...I figured crustacean or insect at best.

I've gone overboard with the listings and rankings and stats, I know. I don't delude myself. Rather than giving me a sheen of respectability, it only lends an air of desperation. Look at me, link me, love me! But ego-stroking apart, I figure all the fluff might attract a whiff of traffic. And I feel like the world needs to know about the cool things I link to. So I'll keep at it. Dry land and legs, here I come.

Mixed messages

I went to the post office recently to purchase stamps and they gave me a book of stamps printed with a candy-heart design that reads "I [HEART] YOU." These are wholly inappropriate. I don't write to anyone I love. We have internet and telephone for that. I only send mail to pay bills, and I don't heart my creditors. "I O YOU" would be much more to the point.

Unexpected visitors

Does anyone know what might cause a whole slew of blogs that clearly have no links to me and nothing to do with me -- apparently real, personal blogs as well as spam, inactive, and blank ones -- to show up in my referrers list? And it's not even a referrers list that's published on the page, just my site meter stats. Some even with multiple page views. No spam comments or anything.

I thought I had a vague idea of what goes on out there, but this one doesn't make much sense to me.

UPDATE: Well, I think I've partially solved it. I should have known -- my My Blog Log stats helpfully indicate that the "next blog" button is the most frequently clicked link today. Apparently something's just whipping through the blogs one after another. That would be why they're all Blogger addresses... Still, I'm not sure what it gets anyone.

Photoblogs to be seen

Sidebar Spotlight

Ever since my "Notable photos" post I've been meaning to post some links highlighting the great photoblogs I have in my sidebar. I guess I'll just take them in order.

Gravity Zero: News from the dream is a mix of quiet observations, understated, unexpected photos, handwritten scribbles and texts, and just the right amount of silence. There are also some interesting semi-regular features, like a 30-year old found diary being posted in increments.

The FoUnD LeTtErS PrOjEcT: Letters that are found and recorded during the day seems to have already been dead when I found it, alas. I may have to remove it, or perhaps create a special section for inactive blogs. It's a nice collection of those isolated letters taken from street signs and spray-painted on walls and formed by the fortuitous intersection of stray detritus.

Kit.blog is the blog of Romanian photographer Cristian "Kit" Paul, and from the first time I saw it I was impressed by his bold use of color and the clarity of his compositions. Just a good photographer with a good eye.

Bruhns Photos is the work of a Swedish photographer who occupies himself mainly with the endless vistas presented by the sea and sky. What little text there is is in Swedish, but it hardly matters -- there's little apart from the titles of the works, and the beautiful photos speak quite well for themselves.

PHOTO BLOG is simply a group blog where loads of photographers post their best, most beautiful, and most interesting shots. The quality is quite high, and something good always comes out of the grab bag.

Year of Wonders should have gone up on my list much sooner -- the only reason it didn't is because I came across it before I even started collecting photoblogs, and I just filed it with my photography sites and forgot about it. That was a mistake. Tumulus, the photographer, does rich nature photographs of the areas around his home, specializing particularly in close-ups of flowers, but also experimenting quite successfully with the odd fungus, insect, sky, or man-made object. A very nice view into a small and beautiful world.

Curiously Incongruous: photo-poetic images of London is a great visual log of the photographer's rambles through London. He peers into its back alleys and forgotten corners, and brings back evocative, secret portraits of his home city.

Machinafotografica is a new photoblog that promises to be a steady source of lovely images for some time to come. Urban details and moments captured in the London-based photographer's travels.

Eyematter covers the gamut from sweeping, magical landscapes to closely observed, intimate details. There's a little of everything. Seascapes, flowers, architecture, people, tilted cameras, street scenes, color, black and white, all gorgeously executed.

Artsy Science is a refreshing blend of, well, art and science. High-powered microscope photography yields bold, fascinating, alien images of even the most everyday objects.

Daily dose of imagery features large, bold landscapes and cityscapes, broad and brightly colored.

Catchy Colors Photoblog: Elite blog showcasing the best of colors from Flickr is a sampling of the boldest, most colorful photographs culled daily from Flickr. The two bloggers have an impeccable editorial eye, and assemble a dazzling collection of the best and brightest.

FlickrSoup for the Soul: A big bowl of important things in life - love, connection and gratitude. A secret recipe ONLY brewed on Flickr is another Flickr collection by one of the Catchy Colors bloggers. It's a soulful mix of uplifting sentiment and touching Flickr images, with a nice dash of artsy flair. It manages romantic without maudlin, which is always tough to pull off.

The Lost City: Artifacts of things that were, and never will be again is a collection by the other Catchy Colors blogger. These Flickr photos are of old architecture and forgotten technology, harkening back to another century. It's not my usual period of interest, but the images were so appealing and evocative that I couldn't resist. Vintage, art deco, retro, classic, and just plain old -- it makes for a pleasant trip through time.

Stuff and things

Slow and Steady

Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy. They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady plodder. It'd really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or on the spur of the moment. They expect you to examine everything carefully from every angle and then usually decide against it.

How Do People See You?

the Wit (52% dark, 30% spontaneous, 22% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 40% on dark You scored higher than 7% on spontaneous You scored higher than 20% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

Start ya off with a couple nice quiz results. Now that I've got y'all warmed up...

TIME has just created a worthwhile list of the fifty coolest websites. I was quite pleased to discover that I already knew about most of the interesting ones.

A man in Spain is building his own cathedral. It's pretty impressive-looking. Sadly, he's having trouble finding people to support him, and the unapproved building will likely be torn down after his death.




In other singlehanded-monument-construction news, a retired carpenter who believes he knows the secret to Stonehenge is raising his own Stonehenge in his backyard using only rudimentary tools and the power of his own body to move stone blocks weighing tons. (I read a news story about this somewhere, which had a video of the guy in action showing how it worked, but now I can only find his own website, which is much less interesting. Damn. Sorry.)




Giant "Bra Fence" Sparks Controversy: Official Says Fence Offends Asian Cultures, South Africans. For years, women returning from a pub in the nearby town of Wanaka have stopped at the fence and removed their bras...




The New York Times article Bad to the Last Drop explains why tap water is better than bottled.

There is apparently an update of the EPIC 2014 media-documentary-from-the-future video (I originally linked to it here): EPIC 2015.

I've just stumbled across somebody's blog called Bluetealeaf. I know it's impossible to be truly original in this world, but I'm always a little unsettled when I come across other people with identities I feel are unique and original to me. No sign of what inspired his name; I promise to tell the story of mine someday soon if anyone's interested.

The Brick Testament: the Bible in Legos! It's a Christian site, naturally, and while I am generally repulsed by things evangelicals do to make religion hip and appealing to kids (like Revolve, that New Testament packaged as a teen fashion magazine, and Refuel, its masculine counterpart, for example; or that game King's Call, which I'm still sore over), I like this particular project a lot. It's not cleaned-up at all, either -- a helpful little code warns about episodes containing nudity, sex, violence, and cursing, of which there are many. I never expected to see so many naked little Lego people knowing each other Biblically, so to speak. The segments are very short, and sometimes quite surreal and strangely humorous -- a lot of which comes from the source material, I suppose. The many panels which read simply "And then he died," with a little croaked-over figure, are wonderful. Ever read the Bible? There's some weird stuff in there. There's essentially no effort made to interpret or reconcile the bizarreness of some of the stories -- they're just there, built brick-by-brick as faithfully as possible. The Brick Testament is really a very impressive artistic endeavor, and a lovely rendering in Lego of a great work of literature.




UPDATE: I was not entirely right about what The Brick Testament is all about.

Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions is a pretty cool site for science-fiction fans comparing images of spacecraft, bases, and other objects from numerous examples of the genre to show relative size. It also makes a nice visual compendium of sci-fi vessels. Very comprehensive.
Via Bibi's box.




reading: Charles de Lint, The Newford Stories; A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (re-reading -- I love that book); Kenneth Morris, The Dragon Path; J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Lois Gould, Subject to Change
saw: Firefly; Beverly Hills Cop 2

music: The Blue Room on BBC Radio 1
beverage: Twinings Darjeeling tea

Art and music in motion

La Pâte à Son is a very cool toy where you assemble different kinds of pipes on a board in order to make music as little beans are shot through them. You can engineer your own music machine -- it's lots of fun. Trust me.
Via Little Fluffy Industries.




Reminds me of Animusic, impressive digitally animated films of elaborate music machines operated by the motion of thousands of little ping-pong balls.




Then there's Drum Machine, long one of my favorite animations. Watch the little guys play the drums with their heads, and enjoy the beats.
Originally via Beautiful Stuff.




Sensory Impact blogs about Cinepainting, a neat film of falling, splashing paint -- a sort of living painting. Link to a preview video.




This amazing artist creates shifting, moving sand pictures live on an overhead projector. The effect is stunning.




This animation shows a drawing of a woman being created moment by moment, from the skeleton up.
Via Le Web...et le reste.




"Time for Space Wiggle" is a nifty technique for creating stereo images with the illusion of 3-d space by rapidly flashing back and forth between two frames. A creepy and cool effect. (Others have noted, so I will too, that a few of these images are NSFW.)

Where you go when you die

You can become a diamond. For the right price, the good folks at LifeGem will compress your cremated remains into as many as a hundred sparkling colored diamonds and fashion them into all kinds of rings, pendants, and other jewelry to satisfy your loved ones' wearable memorial needs. Hey, a body is mostly carbon after all, right?




Or you could become a tree. The Bio-Urn is an organic burial urn containing a seed, fertilizer, and your ashes. As you decompose, the seed grows, transforming your earthly remains into a new living tree. The Bio-Urn seeks to turn cemeteries into forests, and to plug you directly back into the circle of life. All very The Lion King.
Link via Martine.




Sticks and stones from out my bones...

More Super Smile Time Vacation Pictures!!!!

Part II: Destinations


One of the many games we saw. This was roughly where we sat for almost all of them.


The Hooters in Florence, KY where we got our free wings. We find it amazing that people take families to Hooters. They have high chairs.


Don't they look delicious?


Gratuitous Grand Canyon pictures.


Mine look the same as anybody else's.


Except that they have our backs in them.


The vacation resort friend's house where we stayed.


With a hot tub.


What a great trip.

I have a couple more good photos, but I'm mostly avoiding posting ones with people in them, so these are really all that I have to show. They're kinda boring, now that I think about it. But what kind of vacation slideshow would it be if I showed interesting pictures?