NaNoWriMo
Yes, the NBA season started last night, and we have Halloween tonight (we’re going as Mahna Mahna Muppets), but the BIG DAY is tomorrow: start of National Novel Writing Month.
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Entries for October 2007
Douglas Wolk
OK, short intro: Douglas Wolk is smart, funny, and if you have any interest in comics whatsoever you should absolutely check out his Reading Comics. Great stuff. This is a long interview, but every time I tried to cut it, I thought, “Nope, not that—too smart.” So here you go. Comments turned on, normal rules apply—enjoy.
JT: The opening of one of Robert Warshow’s essays, on Krazy Kat, is worth quoting at length, if only because it could be a sort of manifesto of sorts for blogging, writ-large:
“On the underside of our society, there are those who have no real stake at all in respectable culture. These are the open enemies of culture…. these are the readers of pulp magazines and comic books, potential book-burners, unhappy patrons of astrologers and communicants of lunatic sects, the hopelessly alienated and outclassed…. But their distance from the center gives them in the mass a degree of independence that the rest of us can achieve only individually and by discipline… when this lumpen culture displays itself in mass art forms, it can occasionally take on a purity and freshness that would almost surely be smothered higher up on the cultural scale.”
We’ll get to comics, but I wonder if this doesn’t perfectly capture some of the anarchism, snark, and general weirdness of a lot that comes across the blogosphere? Insofar as blogging remains a kind of private, gift-exchange of woe and rant and fanatical interest, isn’t this what makes blogs so much fun? So vital?
DW: There’s still a pernicious kind of defensive class-consciousness to what Warshow’s writing here, a sense of “purity and freshness” from noble savages (“potential book-burners”? same to you, buddy!), a sense that everybody knows what the cultural scale is and that it’s self-evidently immutable. That’s not really the case any more, and it hasn’t been the case for a long time. And the phrase “respectable culture” suggests that what’s at stake here maybe isn’t even culture as much as respect—the respect owed to the individual, disciplined “rest of us” by “them in the mass.” That, as they say, is a mug’s game.
To put it another way: “distance from the center” presumes not only that everybody agrees on what that center is, but that one is either near to it or far from it, and that being far from it can confer some kind of ironic virtue. This is the same kind of mindset that valorizes “outsider art” for the straw dangling from the corner of its mouth rather than for itself. What’s fun and vital about the blogosphere is not that it doesn’t speak with the questionably unified (“smothered”?) voice of mass culture, but that individual bloggers only need to speak for themselves and about their own personal interests, and don’t need to triangulate themselves against any distinct or nebulous center; it doesn’t matter who’s paying attention and who isn’t, even when lots of people are paying attention! Each blogger is a gravitational center, great or small, but there’s no sun they’re all orbiting around.
JT: In Reading Comics, you write “The blessing and the curse of comics as a medium is that there is such a thing as ‘comics culture.’” It’s unfair to ask, but can you give a shorter summary of this than you give in this chapter of your book (“What’s Good About Bad Comics and What’s Bad About Good Comics”)? How are these cultures changing—or spreading—as mainstream literary writers like Chabon and Lethem enter the fray & magazines and journals like The Virginia Quarterly Review and The New York Times Magazine have begun featuring comics regularly (or that we now have a Best American Comics)? Is the imprimatur of “official culture” the mark of death for comics culture?
DW: “Comics culture” has always been a little bit tough for me to grapple with, partly because I’m looking at it from the inside. It’s a culture that’s immersed in comics and their history and economics and formal conventions, to the point where it can be difficult to read comics casually: you almost have to adopt (or work around) a certain cultural mode to pick up something with words and pictures and read it for pleasure, and that’s annoying. On the other hand, the culture of comics-readers does privilege deep knowledge, and in its eccentric way it’s deeply committed to being hospitable to newcomers; we care about this stuff a lot, and we like the feeling of being a community.
As for the second half of your question, why would an influx of public attention, talent and money possibly mark the death of comics? If people start buying books by Jaime Hernandez and Megan Kelso because they’ve seen their work in the Times Magazine, I’m all for that—believe me, there’s nobody who’s attached to the idea of the best cartoonists remaining some kind of subcultural secret. It’s interesting to see the the way the new streams of creators are affecting comics, though—I’m particularly fond of cartoonists with backgrounds in design or contemporary visual art who’ve come to comics because they’ve gotten interested in narrative. In the last few years, there’s also been a bit of a trend of celebrity writers in the comics mainstream, some of whom have adapted easily to the different sort of writing that works in combination with drawings, and some of whom are still writing as if the images in comics are just ancillary illustrations of the important (verbal) part. But that doesn’t mean that something important has been lost, just that there’s fresh blood and sometimes a learning curve—there are more English-language comics in print now than there have ever been before, and more good stuff available than ever before.
JT: A quick Google search for “comics blogs” returns about 58 million results. Are there notable blogs out there that manifest these two sides of comics culture? Is there a killer spandex fanboy site? A Pitchfork for comics?
DW: Oh, absolutely. I’d like to say that if there’s a Pitchfork for comics, it’s The Savage Critic(s), to which I occasionally contribute—my two favorite comics critics, Joe “Jog” McCulloch and Abhay Khosla, both write for it. The best spandex sites these days, as far as I’m concerned, are Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog, Bully Says: Comics Oughta Be Fun!, The Absorbascon and Myriad Issues, with extra credit to Funnybook Babylon for “Downcounting,” their weekly savaging of DC’s “Countdown” series. And then there are great generalist blogs—the Comics Reporter is one of the first things I read every morning, and I really like the newish Picture Poetry, too.
JT: Even though I included 20 pages of graphic novel in my own book, I don’t really have a big collection: Joe Sacco’s books, Spiegelman’s Maus books, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, a couple of Eisner’s, Alan Moore, Marjane Satrapi’s memoirs, Clowes, Pekar, and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics—basically: no superhero comics whatsoever. Am I just totally dropping the ball on the superhero and other serial comics?
DW: There are a bunch of worthwhile serial comics at the moment, and some of them are superhero comics—although superhero comics are very much grounded in a shared set of conventions, there are an awful lot of them, and even a lot of the best ones require a willingness to figure out how they fit into the “continuity” context of thousands of others. If you don’t like the idea of gigantic metaphors in brightly colored outfits, don’t force yourself. That said, on the superhero front right now I’m loving Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s “All-Star Superman” (which is deliberately un-linked to continuity) and Greg Pak, John Romita, Jr., and Klaus Janson’s “World War Hulk” (which is very heavily enmeshed with continuity), and I think a lot of Brian Michael Bendis’s “New Avengers”/”Mighty Avengers”/”Illuminati” work is really interesting—it fails as often as it works, but he’s pushing himself really hard.
The best non-superhero serial comics right now? Eric Shanower’s “Age of Bronze,” “Y: The Last Man,” “DMZ,” and I suppose “Love and Rockets” counts! Skipping serials on principle means you’re missing out in pretty much the same way that you’re missing out if you only watch movies and don’t bother with “The Wire” or “Lost” or “Arrested Development”…
JT: Given the fanatical culture of comics, it seems natural that there are a ton of comics blogs (and that a lot of comics artists would have blogs), but the comic and the graphic novel don’t really work as an online medium, do they? I tried keeping up with the New York Times Magazine’s comics section when I dropped my print subscription, but they serialize them on the Web as PDFs—and even then, they don’t read very well on my 15” MacBook Pro. Is this a fundamental nature of the beast? Or are there people out there making it work? Is there a Henry Darger out there in the blogosphere? The next Harvey Pekar (as if the current one weren’t handful enough)?
DW: Scott McCloud’s whole thing about the limitless potential of online comics hasn’t quite been borne out yet, but it’s still a very new medium. I agree that the Times’s PDFs are a dreadful idea, but there are a lot of Web-comics that have enormous readerships; it seems, in general, like daily humor strips are the format that work best so far. I love Achewood and Diesel Sweeties, in particular; as far as non-humor strips go, Dicebox is pretty wonderful. The real problem is that there’s presently no way for a cartoonist to make any money at all, let alone make a living, doing online comics (that whole “micropayment” thing seems to have fizzled); the few people whose sole employment seems to be doing them are actually making their money selling related merchandise. I this an insurmountable problem? Probably not—but nobody’s sure how to fix it yet. At least people doing print comics have a tangible object that can be exchanged for money.
As for the Darger/Pekar question, I’m not sure what you mean—when you say Henry Darger, I think of a crazed sexually obsessed hyperproductive fantasist working in total isolation (hence not somebody who’d be in the blogosphere, by definition); when you say Harvey Pekar, I think of a compulsive self-documenter (hence… everybody in the blogosphere).
The Blow-Up
There’s a great piece in the new MIT Technology Review [free reg. req’d], “The Blow-Up,” on the role of quants in this summer’s credit meltdown:
For Richard Bookstaber, a quant who has managed hedge funds and risk for companies like Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley, the August downturn proved that concerns he’d long harbored were well founded…. Today, he is very worried about the tools and the methods of the quants. In particular, he frets about complexity and what he calls “tight coupling,” an engineer’s term for systems in which small errors can compound quickly, as they do in nuclear plants. The quants’ tools, he feels, have became so complicated that they have escaped their creators. “We have gotten to the point where even professionals may not understand the instruments,” he says.
Brijit
A nice write-up in The Washington Post yesterday about Brijit, a start-up that hopes to make finding good magazine articles an easier task by creating a site that posts abstracts and ratings:
Brijit, Brosowsky said, aims to be “everyone’s best-read friend.”
Now on Brijit are summations of articles in current issues of GQ, Wired, Mother Jones, ESPN the Magazine, the Economist, Smithsonian and more than 50 other magazines. Even if you never read the entire article, just scanning Brijit could make you the smartest person at your next cocktail party.
Call me ‘mildly interested.’ It’s not a bad idea. And I agree with David Foster Wallace’s great opening essay in this year’s Best American Essays, & also with Jason’s reaction to it: namely, that we need editors a lot more than we think & now more than ever.
But, between the actual magazines and the individual styles, tastes, and voices of the blogs and group blogs that I already read to find what I’ve missed, where’s room for Brijit? Maybe Brijit will reach critical mass and become a single-stop clearing-house for bloggers with more specialized tastes? One thing they’ll have to do for certain is expand their currently-limited scope: if you look at their source list, a large number of the journals and magazines from which this year’s crop of Best American Essays came are missing—including many that do post their content online & without a paywall.
Iconic Moments of the 20th Century
Euro art collective Henry VIII’s Wives recreate iconic 20th century photographs using Glaswegian pensioners as models, all posed outside their housing complex in Glasgow. A real glaswegian kiss to the complacent gaze with which the original photos are too-easily met.
(thx, joseph)
Jessica Hagy
If you haven’t seen them yet (and chances are you have), Jessica Hagy’s index cards are little marvels of wit and wisdom. They’ve also netted her world-wide acclaim and a book deal with Penguin. Her book, Indexed, comes out next year. While she’s not the first blogger with a book deal, I love her cards so much I asked her to chat with me about how she started blogging—as well as how her blog got her a book deal and more. But first, here’s one of my all-time favorite Jessica Hagy index cards:
JT: So, you’re sitting around at work one day saying, “Yeah, I am like Roz Chast—but only her if maybe she worked as a McKinsey consultant, and, yes, I am going to start a blog posting my index cards, dammit!” Or did it start out a little differently?
JH: I read somewhere that ‘every writer needs a blog’ but I didn’t want to do one of those “Here’s what I had for breakfast. Here’s what I did at school” blogs. I’d had a few really lame advertising jobs, and was going back to school, and I felt like I had to do something—anything—that was remotely creative so my head wouldn’t explode. I never thought anyone would find the thing, actually. It was just my little, goofy project.
JT: Your cards are a run-away hit on the blogosphere, including their regular feature in the Freakonomics blog: did it take a while to build up? What other opportunities have grown out of your blog? Are you a full-time 3x5-er now?
JH: About a week after I posted the first batch last August, somebody linked the blog to Metafilter. Whoever you are, thank you! That’s how my agent (it’s still strange to me that I have an honest-to-god agent) found me, and from there, it just sort of took off.
I’m working on the full-timing. The Indexed book comes out on Feb 28th (one day before leap day). Indexed was a Webby honoree and is on a bunch of “best blogs’ lists. Right now, the cards are on Freakonomics and run in Plenty Magazine. They ran in GOOD magazine, on the BBC Magazine Online, and JibJab commissioned a bunch of them. Current TV is going to film me drawing about a dozen of them and turn that into TV interstitials.
I’ve had a few offers to sell the whole thing, but none seemed to be great fits. Syndication is the next thing we’re going after.
I’m super, super, super lucky.
JT: It’s blog-2-book madness these days—how did your book come about?
JH: My incredibly cool editor at Pengiun emailed me about turning the blog into a book in February. I forwarded his email to my agent. They talked to each other. I talked to them. And off we went. I love the Internet.
JT: I can’t wait for your book—but in the meantime, I hope whoever you get as a publicist uses this video of your work. How did that come about?
JH: That was an email from Clemens Kogler, an Austrian filmmaker, just saying he liked the stuff and could he use it in a film. That sounded fun to me, and the result was Le Grand Content. It was featured on the front page of YouTube on Superbowl Sunday, and having worked in advertising for years and never gotten a decent TV spot produced, that felt like a creative victory of sorts, to have that show up there when it did.
JT: Finally, care to leave us with a card about blogs?
JH:
OK, comments are turned on: be interesting or nice or both.
The State We’re In
OK, Joel Turnipseed here. I’ll be doing some of the usual curatorial work that Jason does so well, but I also want to take this week to have a look at how blogs are changing how we create, disseminate, and critique our culture these days. In a world in which an Eau Claire Area Teen can post something to Digg and bring as much attention to it as an article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic (both of whom are heavy into blogging themselves these days), this seems like a good thing to do. For better or worse, blogs seem to be the new dispensation. But what, really, are they good for—or: what are they really good for—and what don’t they do very well? Helping me out this week will be:
Jessica Hagy, blogger and author of forthcoming Indexed
Douglas Wolk, music and comics critic and author of Reading Comics
Ted Genoways, poet and editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review
Yochai Benkler, law professor and author of The Wealth of Networks
Steven Berlin Johnson, outside.in & author, most-recently, of The Ghost Map
Jane Ciabattari, journalist, critic, and NBCC board member
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing blogger and author of, most-recently, Overclocked
I’ll be posting short interviews with these fine folks throughout the week.
Transit Maps of the World
Subway map geeks rejoice:
Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit-including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication. Transit Maps is the graphic designer’s new bible, the transport enthusiast’s dream collection, and a coffee-table essential for everyone who’s ever traveled in a city.
Found out about this from Boing Boing, where Cory has a quick review.
This week on kottke.org: Joel Turnipseed
In the interest of growing the site beyond its current boundaries (i.e. me having to be seated in front of a computer 24/7/365), I’m trying something new on kottke.org. Starting tomorrow and continuing through next Tuesday, Joel Turnipseed will be editing the site. Joel is a writer living in Minneapolis, has previously run a software company, and is the author of Baghdad Express, a memoir of his experience as a US Marine in the first Gulf War. His writing has appeared in Granta, GQ, and The New York Times. For the week, Joel will be posting links, interviews, and entries loosely organized around a theme; he’ll introduce himself and explain exactly what’s going tomorrow. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.
(And yeah, this is the result of my help wanted post from earlier in the month.)
A list of thirty illnesses, sorted according
A list of thirty illnesses, sorted according to whether or not you can eat the victims. Oh McSweeney’s lists, we’ve been parted too long.
A good but not great profile of
A good but not great profile of Steve Nash in Play, the NY Times’ occasional sports magazine.
My first and second years in the N.B.A., I used to get really nervous in a tight game. But now I wait for that moment when things are really close — that’s what I really love. Having the ball in my hands and the responsibility makes me feel calm and open. Not to have that, not to get to that point in a game, would feel really…really confining.
I also liked how he involved not-so-good players on his college team:
If he had a guy on the right wing in transition who he knew couldn’t shoot the ball, he’d throw a pass that was just good enough to include the guy in the fast break, but just bad enough that the guy wasn’t in a position to get off a shot and would have to pass the ball back.
As a supplement to Alex Ross’ musical
As a supplement to Alex Ross’ musical recommendations, a reader recommends NPR’s list of 50 essential classical music CDs and Jazz 100, a list of the best jazz on CD. (thx, john)
Hilarious interview with a pair of flair
Hilarious interview with a pair of flair bartenders. So what is flair bartending?
A lot of people don’t know what it is. They think we’re just bottle flippers. There’s a bar here called Front Page, and they have a channel with extreme sports-snowboarding and a couple of other sports. And I think flair actually falls into the same category. You can get hurt really badly. Like I was practicing at home and a bottle fell down on this bone [points to ankle] and I went straight to the floor. I stopped practicing for at least 30 minutes. But flair is a passion. Once you get in it, it’s very addictive.
I poked around on YouTube and found some flair bartending videos…looks like (fairly unimpressive) bottle flipping to me. (thx, catherine)
Project Orcon was a WWII-era effort to
Project Orcon was a WWII-era effort to find a non-jammable guidance system for missiles; pigeons were one of the things they tried. Loaded into a missile, the pigeons were to tap on the image of the target to correct the missile’s trajectory.
Trainee pigeons were started out in the primary trainer pecking at slowly moving targets. They were rewarded with corn for each hit and quickly learned that good pecking meant more food. Eventually pigeons were able to track a target jumping back and forth at five inches per second for 80 seconds, without a break. Peck frequency turned out to be four per second, and more than 80 percent of the pecks were within a quarter inch of the target. The training conditions simulated missile-flight speeds of about 400 miles per hour.
More information at Wikipedia, including some interesting see alsos: bat bomb and anti-tank dog. (thx, dan)
Pretty amusing interview with a 9-year-old about
Pretty amusing interview with a 9-year-old about music, file sharing, and DRM.
Q: When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?
A: Why would they put [music] on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?
(thx, mark)
The Warhol Economy
Two quick reviews of Elizabeth Currid’s book, The Warhol Economy, which argues that New York’s “vibrant creative social scene” is what makes the city go. First, James Surowiecki in the New Yorker:
Of course, everyone knows that art and culture help make New York a great place to live. But Currid goes much further, showing that the culture industry creates tremendous economic value in its own right. It is the city’s fourth-largest employer, and generates billions of dollars a year in revenue. More important, New York has no real global rival for dominance in the culture industry. Using an economic-analysis tool called a “location quotient,” Currid calculates that New York matters far more to fashion, art, and culture than to finance. To exaggerate a bit, if New York suddenly disappeared, stock markets could keep functioning, but we would not be able to dress ourselves or find art to put on the wall. Currid suggests that, in the fight among cities for business, being the center of fashion and art constitutes New York’s true “competitive advantage.”
And from The Economist:
New York’s cultural economy has reached a critical juncture, argues Ms Currid, threatened by, of all things, prosperity. The bleak economic conditions of the 1970s allowed artists to flock into dirt-cheap apartments and ushered in the East Village scene of the early 1980s. The boom of the past decade, by contrast, has priced budding Basquiats out of Manhattan, pushing them across the water to Brooklyn and New Jersey. Studio flats meant for artists-in-residence get snapped up by bankers. The closure last year of CBGB, a bar that became a punk and art-rock laboratory in the 1970s (and whose founder, Hilly Kristal, died last month) came to symbolise this squeeze.
Ms Currid sees this expulsion of talent as a serious problem. The solution, she argues, lies in a series of well-aimed public-policy measures: tax incentives, zoning that helps nightlife districts, more subsidised housing and studio space for up-and-coming artists, and more.
The first chapter of the book is available on the Princeton University Press site.
A tshirt featuring a subway map representation
A tshirt featuring a subway map representation of the human gastrointestinal system. (thx, sami)
Update: Oh, and I plumb forgot the Threadless Metropolitan Cardiac Authority tshirt. (thx, sam)
A list of seven topics to avoid
A list of seven topics to avoid talking about so as to not seem boring, including “the route you took to get here”.
What do these subjects have in common? The listener has nothing to add. He or she must just hear you describe your experience.
I’m particularly sensitive to the “recent changes in your child’s nap schedule” one these days. I remember how bored I was as a non-parent with the tendency for baby-talk to completely dominate conversations.
Nintendo-themed rap music video: Buy Mii a
Nintendo-themed rap music video: Buy Mii a Wii. My favorite part is when he rhymes Nintendo with Shigeru Miyamoto. (thx, undulattice)
GOOD Magazine lists seven instances in which
GOOD Magazine lists seven instances in which the old-fashioned way still works best, including the use of maggots for cleaning wounds, beekeeping, and letterpress printing.
The basic idea of beekeeping is still the same as it was in the 1800s. The Langstroth hive is named after the scientist who first discovered what we called bee space-three eighths of an inch. That’s their travel space, they won’t junk it up with honey or anything. Beekeepers take advantage of that, and that’s how the hives work.
FFFFOUND!, art curating for the masses
Alexander Bohn wrote a glowing review of FFFFOUND! at Speak Up the other day. My FFFFOUND! fandom is documented elsewhere, so I’ll comment instead on an observation Bohn made in his initial paragraph:
Graphic design might not work in the white cube, but it flourishes on a white background. A new mutated strain of design blog has evolved: The Randomly Curated Other People’s Images White Background Site, or RCOPIWS. Sites like Manystuff, Monoscope, Your Daily Awesome, and VVORK (among countless others) offer designers and design aficionados a constant flood of typographic morsels, interesting photos, arresting new art, and the like. One such site sets itself apart, notably, from the other RCOPIWSes: the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound.com — allegedly, but unconfirmed, initiated by online fiend Yugo Nakamura.
Among the many things that the internet has democratized is curating, a task once more or less exclusive to editors (magazine, book, and newspaper), art gallery owners, media executives (music, TV, and film), and museum curators. They choose the art you see on a museum’s wall, the shows you see on TV, the movies that get made, and the stories you read in the newspaper. The ease and low cost of publishing on the web coupled with the abundance of sample-ready media has made the curating process available to many more people. Smashing Telly is David Galbraith’s rolling film festival (or TV channel). By simply listening to the music that you like, Last.fm allows anyone to put together their own radio station to share with others. kottke.org is essentially a table of contents for a magazine I wish existed. Shorpy has freed old photography from the nearly impenetrable Library of Congress web site and presented it in a compelling blog-like fashion.
In the case of FFFFOUND! and other RCOPIWSs, I would argue that these sites showcase a new form of art curating. The pace is faster, you don’t need a physical gallery or museum, and you don’t need to worry about crossing arbitrary boundaries of style or media. Nor do you need to concern yourself with questions like “is this person an artist or an outsider artist?” If a particular piece is good or compelling or noteworthy, in it goes. The last week’s output at Monoscope would make a pretty good show in a Chelsea art gallery, no? It’ll be interesting to see how this grassroots art curating will affect the art/design/photography world at large. Jen Bekman, who has roots in the internet industry, is already exploring this new frontier with her nimble gallery and the Hey, Hot Shot! competition. Others are sure to follow.
A visual history of giant spheres.
A visual history of giant spheres.
1850: Baron Haussmann and engineer Eugene Belgrand design the modern Paris sewer system.The sewers are regularly cleaned using large wooden spheres just smaller than the system’s tubular tunnels. The buildup of water pressure behind the balls forces them through the tunnel network until they emerge somewhere downstream pushing a mass of filthy sludge.
(via i like)
A list of fast food menu items
A list of fast food menu items that are really high in trans fats. The list is a bit misleading as no attempt is made to normalize portions (the top two items are multi-portion side orders) but still handy, especially for the list of places that had no items on the list (Subway, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, In-N-Out, etc.). (via serious eats)
Update: Many Eyes user Michael created two charts to accompany the list above: a bar chart and a treemap. (thx, michael)
If you’re overwhelmed by the thought of
If you’re overwhelmed by the thought of switching to an organic diet, here’s five easy organic foods you can introduce into your household with minimal fuss and maximum impact.
Potatoes are a staple of the American diet — one survey found they account for 30 percent of our overall vegetable consumption. A simple switch to organic potatoes has the potential to have a big impact because commercially-farmed potatoes are some of the most pesticide-contaminated vegetables.
Mormon teens interviewed
Sarah Hepola has a pair of interviews up on her site with two Mormon teens (first interview, second interview).
Joseph Smith was evil incarnate — a little insane, but more evil. Sort of like Charles Manson, only slightly better looking.
I hereby declare the interviewees the two most articulate teenagers on the internet. (via the morning news)
Ben Tesch is about to launch a
Ben Tesch is about to launch a collaborative weather site called cumul.us. It’ll aggregate weather information and harness the wisdom of crowds to see if they can make better weather predictions than the experts.
Will this all work? Who knows, but it only took me two months to make, and I wanted to find out.
Unlike so many other types of information, the web has had little impact on how weather reporting is done (the Weather Channel stuff is still rudimentary), so it’ll be interesting to see if this works.
Ursine is a new series of photos
Ursine is a new series of photos by Jill Greenberg, who previously did monkey portraiture and crying children, the latter of which provoked some controversy in the blogosphere.
I was going to shoot grizzly bears because they’re safer than bloggers.
A complete series of photos are available on Greenberg’s web site, sadly buried in an inscrutable Flash interface.
Comet Holmes brightened a millionfold late this
Comet Holmes brightened a millionfold late this week and has become visible to the naked eye, even in bright cities. The second chart on this page shows how quickly the comet shot up in brightness.
If anyone steals a base during the
If anyone steals a base during the World Series, Taco Bell is going to give everyone in the US a free taco. They did something similar last year and the terms and conditions of the offer were pretty amusing.
For my future reference, How-to: Proper GMail
For my future reference, How-to: Proper GMail IMAP for iPhone and Apple Mail.
Jackson, Mississippi’s Frank Melton is the worst
Jackson, Mississippi’s Frank Melton is the worst mayor in America. He carries concealed weapons without authority or permit, shuts down businesses without cause or warrant, and, my favorite:
He once bulldozed an elderly woman’s house, promising to build her a better one. He then forgot to build it.
Short video piece about fonts and typography,
Short video piece about fonts and typography, featuring Steven Heller, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones. (via quipsologies)
Pixar is releasing a DVD with a
Pixar is releasing a DVD with a bunch of their short films on it. (via jimr.ay)
Wes Anderson is racist.
Wes Anderson is racist.
Dr. James Watson is racist.
Tyler Perry critics are racist.
The fashion industry is racist.
Halle Berry is racist.
The Department of Homeland Security is racist.
Indie rock is racist.
Global warming is racist.
Martin Amis is racist.
Iggy Pop is racist.
Pixar is racist.
Michael Bay is racist.
William Safire, who now does the On
William Safire, who now does the On Language column for the NY Times, wrote a speech for President Nixon in 1969 in the event that something happened during the Apollo 11 mission to strand the astronauts on the moon.
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
(via cyn-c)
10 questions that are illegal to ask during
10 questions that are illegal to ask during a job interview, including Where were you born? and Do you have children?
A story by J. Robert Lennon using
A story by J. Robert Lennon using only words from The Cat In The Hat.
I have to say one thing here: it is not fun to be with me. I like books and things. Tame: that is I. I get no kicks, fly no kites, play no games. Hops and pot are not my things. If you are here, I want you to go away. So what should this dish, this fox want out of me? I sat and picked at the fish and looked at those hands, so white.
Anagrams for “Ann Coulter” include “Rectal Noun”, “
Anagrams for “Ann Coulter” include “Rectal Noun”, “Loaner Cunt”, “Real Con Nut”, and “Unclean Rot”.
The director of the Rotterdam Natural History
The director of the Rotterdam Natural History Museum is looking for someone to donate pubic lice, which lice are difficult to find these days, possibly because of a decrease in pubic hair due to waxing.
When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with extinction. Pubic lice can’t live without pubic hair.
A pair of Lego skyscrapers (made from 250,000
A pair of Lego skyscrapers (made from 250,000 pieces and inhabited by 1000 Lego people) are on display at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC through November 24. Dennis Crowley’s got some pictures and a short movie. Details include a wee Banksy piece on the side of the building and tiny iPod ads. Here’s a timelapse video of the construction. (thx, dens)
There are indications that Google is changing
There are indications that Google is changing their PageRank algorithm, possibly to penalize sites running paid links or too many cross-promotional links across blog networks. Affected sites include Engadget, Forbes, and Washington Post. Even Boing Boing, which I think had been at 9, is down to 7. You can check a site’s PR here.
Depending on the site, 30-40% of a site’s total traffic can come from search engines, much of that from Google. It will be interesting to see how much of an impact the PR drop will have on their traffic and revenue. (thx, my moon my mann)
Update: Just got the following from the editor of a site that got its PR bumped down. He says:
Two weeks ago I lost 80% of my search traffic due to, I believe, using ads from Text-Link-Ads, which does not permit the “nofollow” attribute on link ads. That meant an overall drop of more than 44% of my total traffic. It also meant a 65%-95% drop in Google AdSense earnings per day and a loss of PageRank from 7 to 6.
He has removed the text links from his site and is negotiating with Google for reinstatement but estimates a loss in revenue of $10,000 for the year due to this change. And this is for a relatively small site…the Engadget folks must be freaking out.
Stopping underground coal fires would significantly reduce
Stopping underground coal fires would significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere.
Underground coal fires in China alone produce as much carbon dioxide annually as all the cars and light trucks in the United States.
A coal fire near Centralia, PA has been burning continuously since 1962 and prompted the permanent evacuation of the townspeople.
Cool anatomical drawing of a balloon animal.
Cool anatomical drawing of a balloon animal. See also: drawings of skeletal systems of cartoon characters by Michael Paulus, which are available as prints. (via ffffound!)
Errol Morris finale on the Roger Fenton photographs
Errol Morris has posted the third and final installment of his quest to find out which of two Roger Fenton photographs taken during the Crimean War came first. It is as excellent (and lengthy) as the first and second parts. Morris asks “How can the real world be recovered from the simulacrum?” and arrives at a compelling answer (which I won’t give away here) via sun-maps, shadow experts, The Wisconsin Death-Trip Effect, and ultimately, the Dust-Plunging-Straight-Down Test.
It is insane, but I would like to make the claim that the meaning of photography is contained in these two images. By thinking about the Fenton photographs we are essentially thinking about some of the most vexing issues in photography — about posing, about the intentions of the photographer, about the nature of photographic evidence — about the relationship between photographs and reality.
Morris’ posts make me a bit sad though. Yes, because the series is concluded but also for two other reasons:
1. Morris’ investigation sticks out like a sore thumb, especially compared to most popular media (newspapers, magazines, blogs, TV news). Why isn’t Morris’ level of skepticism and doggedness the norm rather than the delightful exception? Choosing the easy answer or the first answer that seems right enough is certainly compelling, especially under limited time constraints. Once acquired, that easy answer often becomes tied up with the ego of the person holding the belief…i.e. “this answer is correct because I think it’s right because I’m smart and not easily duped and it proves the point I’m trying to make and therefore this answer is correct”. Morris encountered dozens of easy and plausibly correct answers and rejected them all based on a lack of evidence, which allowed him to finally arrive at a correct answer supported by compelling physical evidence.
2. At the same time, lessons in photography and philosophy aside, what did we really learn? In the course of this investigation, Morris spent dozens of hours, wrote thousands of words, flew to Ukraine, enlisted the help of several experts, and probably spent thousands of dollars. Based on seemingly insignificant details, he was able to determine that one photograph was taken slightly before another photograph. If so much energy was put into the discovery of that one small fact, how are we actually supposed to learn anything truthful about larger and more significant events like the Iraq War or global warming. Presumably there’s more evidence to go on, but that’s not always helpful. Does this completely bum anyone else the fuck out?
Tip for reading long online articles with
Tip for reading long online articles with footnotes: open the article in two browser windows, one for reading and the other for the footnotes.
Apple = the new evil empire?
Apple’s market capitalization now exceeds that of Intel and IBM. The faithful are in a celebratory mood. But I predict that we’ll soon see an uptick in stories and blog posts asking some variation of the following question: “Now that Apple is 1) a huge company, 2) no longer a scrappy underdog, and 3) basically dominates an industry like, dare I say it, Microsoft, will those free-thinking Mac fanatics who desperately wanted the company to survive its lean years now turn on them because giant multinational corporations who use DRM and are in bed with the music and cellphone industries are evil?” This will likely be abbreviated: “Is Apple the new Microsoft?”
Answers will range from yes, no, maybe, it depends, you’re asking the wrong question, I love Apple so SHUT UP, and, from Anil, Microsoft was never that bad and Apple has always been rotten and thank God those fanatics finally woke up about it and I was right all along. And….go!
Kris Holm, extreme unicyclist. (via that’s how it happened)
Kris Holm, extreme unicyclist. (via that’s how it happened)
Order your Dumbledore pride tshirts, now available
Order your Dumbledore pride tshirts, now available in rainbow “I always knew” and “Wizards Are Gay” varieties.
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