January 2010
18 posts
World's 'most expensive' ham →
Nope, not an overpaid actor but an actual piece of dead pig for £1800 that, once the acorn-fed pigs die, takes three years to cure and is described as “amazing value”. I’ll take two.
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Next stop Barking? →
But beggar dogs have evolved the most specialized behavior. Relying on scraps of food from commuters, the beggar dogs can not only recognize which humans are most likely to give them something to eat, but have evolved to ride the subway. Using scents, and the ability to recognize the train conductor’s names for different stops, they incorporate many stations into their territories.
Realism in UI Design →
Graphical user interfaces are typically full of symbols. Most graphical elements you see on your screen are meant to stand for ideas or concepts. The little house on your desktop isn’t a little house, it’s «home». The eye isn’t an actual eye, it means «look at the selected element». The cog isn’t a cog, it means «click me to see available commands».
Details and realism can distract from these...
So, in your mind, what makes a good monster? →
I don’t understand any of the references, but the pictures are pretty, and the insight into monster-creating is a little bit interesting.
The Quietus Reductive & Subjective Albums Of The... →
The Quietus doesn’t review as much as Pitchfork or Drownedinsound, and as such it’s a bit easier to identify with the tastes of the writers, and that means that when they say things are worth listening to, I normally take their advice and do so. This is the 2nd half of their top-albums list for 2009 and (along with the first half) has plenty of new bands for me to listen to....
WatchA new MIA video? People seem to think so, and it’s pretty cool regardless.
Walking Through Walls →
Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment?
BLDG BLOG takes a meandering, but all...
Lastgraph for 2009 →
Lastgraph lets you create posters showing your listening trends for a period of time. I’ve generated one for me based on the whole of 2009, and it’s pretty bumpy. Spot the week where my hard-drive died and I was computer-less!
Antagonistic Books →
A book that sets itself on fire when you open it (instructions on how to make your own), and one that is impossible to shut once opened.
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Beautiful in the living room... →
… glorious in the street? Some pretty sad pictures of what happens to Christmas trees come the beginning of January.
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kottke.org's best links of 2009 →
There’s plenty of stuff here that’s worth a 2nd look, even if you think you’ve seen it all before. I haven’t made it all the way through yet, but the post on Beep Baseball is particularly interesting. Also, Pete Campbell dancing.
Crime is a way to use the city →
Someday I’d like to write a cheap book about the architectural side of burglary—bank heists, home invasions, jewelry thefts, wall-scaling girl gangs of the Global South, trans-metropolitan tunnels dug vault-to-vault through crypts by men with names like Terry Leather, smoke & mirrors, props and decoys, CCTV control rooms, lock-pickers’ guides, hourly updated routes of gold trucks...
December 2009
1 post
Best of 2009
I haven’t been too kind to this little old blog in the 2nd half of this year but it has been music that’s pulled me back, so seems fitting to end the year with a best-of as I’m something of a fan of lists.
Now, for someone who buys a lot of music this might be surprising but this year saw my first iTunes purchases. The dropping of DRM inspired me to grab an album that I’d...
August 2009
3 posts
Music Again
As I’ve done a couple of times before, I thought it was about time for another round-up of some of the cool new music I’ve found. (New to me, anyway.)
(All links to Spotify. Soon everyone will be able to get it!)
First up, there are a couple of albums from artists who are more famous in other guises:
Julian Plenti is… Skyscraper is an album by Interpol singer and guitarist Paul...
Creativity for Left-Brained People
As a systems-thinking, ridiculously rational INTP, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told to, “Stop overthinking!” After all, rational thinking isn’t naturally associated with creativity. I admittedly find it difficult to act on creative whim, preferring designs that are the logical outputs of a rational thought-process. To me, a “beautiful” design is one that is logically coherent and...
As Opposed To?
I’m left wondering what the word ‘creative’ means to people who can overcome difficulty by just being creative. It seems to be like an ingredient that’s available down the shops. If it’s necessary, you’ll get some and use it. Need to produce something? ‘Oh, just think creatively.’ I want to say, how do you think creatively? What is thinking creatively? But I don’t want to let on that I’m ignorant...
July 2009
1 post
Getting up to Speed →
Regarding this article on the planned California high-speed train project, Nina writes:
Good writing is the kind of writing that gets you interested in something you honestly never cared about before, and conveys to you why the topic is so magical, meaningful or important. It also speaks frankly about limitations and problems, insecurities and doubts.
And I agree, it’s wonderfully written.
June 2009
5 posts
Talk of the Town
Following on from a serious, but interesting, article on what’s happening in Iran were two pieces in the New Yorker this week that were interesting, a little quirky, and made me smile.
The first is a look at what kinds of music soldiers listen to. Unsurprisingly, Metal seems to feature prominently - the research was spurred-on by claims that a ridiculously high proportion of fan-mail sent...
NYBooks in the Guardian
Yesterday’s Review section of the Guardian, that I just got round to reading, had three articles from the New York Review of Books that made for interesting reading:
Malise Ruthven writes on a Divided Iran, picking out the ways, both now and in the past, in how men and women are considered and treated.
Michael Dirda writes about Patricia Highsmith, the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley...
Infinite Summer →
An effort to get people reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer (starts Sunday, carries on into September, doing around 75 pages per week).
I’m a little bit tempted to join in, but it would mean buying another book when I have quite a large pile (literally, I don’t have a bookcase in my new flat yet) sitting unread. The idea of reading-along like this intrigues...
Confessions of a Non–Serial Killer
So, for the record: I am not the Zodiac killer, had absolutely nothing to do with those (or any other) murders. As far as I know, I wasn’t even in California when any of them happened. Similarly, I had nothing to do with the death of Joan Webster, a Boston college student whose murder Penn has also tried to pin on me. A note to Zodiac hobbyists and Penn aficionados: Please don’t bother parsing the...
May 2009
5 posts
“For a while everyone was using the word. Ponzi, Ponzi, Ponzi, it bounced around...”
– Claire Cameron, for The Rumpus, asks the question “What will become of the word Ponzi?”.
Windosill →
I enjoyed playing this downloadable game (there are Mac and Windows versions) where you have to help a little toy train progress through a number of rooms. Rock Paper Shotgun take a look, though their thoughts will make easier (“spoil”) one of the early puzzles.
Viva Print →
The Morning News asks its readers and writers to tell them what printed publications they still read. If they’d asked me, I’d have told them that I generally buy the Guardian on saturdays and the Observer on sundays; I have subscriptions to the New Yorker and Believer; I buy the Economist approximately every other week; and Private Eye now and again.
April 2009
4 posts
Balance your senses →
Phosphine gas is a byproduct of the meth-cooking process and is highly lethal to inhale. Lethal smells are so not feng shui. A good idea is to counterbalance a lethal odor with a delicious one, like that of a Mango Splash Glade PlugIn. Plants are a key feng-shui component for their unique ability to absorb energy-stifling toxins from the air. Unfortunately, your average fern probably won’t...
A Bit of Music
As I don’t seem to have found anything interesting to link to recently, I thought that I’d instead write a little about some of the new albums I’ve been listening to recently. It seems that this time of year is a favourite for 2nd and 3rd albums, while only a handful of debuts have made it into my ears. (Links are all to Spotify, sorry to anyone who can’t access it.)
...
March 2009
19 posts
A Woman A Man Walked By (again)
Just after putting up the link to the video I got an email from Amazon kindly letting me know that they’d dispatched a copy of the album to me and, sure enough, on Saturday morning it slipped through my letter box.
To say I was looking forward to listening to it is something of an understatement. When Polly announced a few years ago that she was going to stop touring, I took it to mean that...
WatchThis is the video to Black Hearted Love, the first single to be released from the new album being given to us by PJ Harvey and John Parish in the next few days. I love the beginning of the video, travelling through the trees towards the bouncy-castle, and the slow-motion works quite nicely. As is to be expected the song is lovely, quite different from White Chalk’s piano-dominated sounds,...
NIN/JA →
Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction (and Street Sweeper…Ninja Street Sweepers works, not sure why they got left out of the cool tour name) have put an EP online to download in exchange for an email address.
Treme →
The show, which takes its name from a culturally rich black neighbourhood of the city, will focus on New Orleans’s musical community in a smaller and more intimate story than that told throughout The Wire. Set months after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, the show will explore how the city’s musicians try to rebuild their lives.
The Guardian’s TV & Radio blog has...
Swissmiss at PKNY →
The talk Tina Roth Eisenberg gave at last night’s Pecha Kucha was videoed and it does a pretty good job of explaining what her blog is all about and how it came to be.
Pecha Kucha is a simple idea but intrigues me immensely. In Japanese it means “the sound of conversation” and involves a group of people listening to around a dozen others who each present 20 slides each for 20...
beghilos →
Hip hop slang applications include the sequence 3722145 which spells “SHIZZLE”.
From Wikipedia’s entry on Calculator Spelling, also known as “beghilos”, the alphabet of letters producable from the upside-down numbers.
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How £1,000 headphones are made →
CNet takes a tour of the Sennheiser factory, where they’re hand-making the new HD800 headphones that will sell for £1000.
The Untold Story →
Across town, the Diamond District was deserted. Notarbartolo drove his rented gray Peugeot 307 past the city’s soot-covered central train station and turned onto Pelikaanstraat, a road that skirted the district. He pulled to the curb, and the Monster, the Genius, the King of Keys, and Speedy stepped out carrying large duffel bags. The King of Keys picked the lock on a run-down office...
Two new Bolaño novels →
Two new novels by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño have reportedly been found in Spain among papers he left behind after his death. The previously unseen manuscripts were entitled Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer, reported La Vanguardia. The newspaper said the documents also included what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño’s epic five-part novel 2666.
More news...
PJ Harvey & John Parish interview →
The Quietus has an interview, taken from The Stool Pigeon, with PJ Harvey and John Parish in which they tell the story of how they met and why they continue to work together. I’m looking forward to their new joint album, A Woman A Man Walked By (out March 30th), so so much.
(The full article is up here, but it’s horrible to read. I can’t understand why they’d do that?)
