It's on my To Do list.
Escape
Okay, so I was browsing through the works of that great Frisian artist MC Escher (as one does on a Wednesday afternoon when you're on deadline), and one thing lead to another and I stumbled upon this delightful (yes, I just said "delightful") trompe-l'oeil painting by Pere Borrell del Caso.
It's the small things in life than bring me the greatest pleasure.
Nollywood
Every day when I walk through the station to my platform, I pass (or passed, before they started reconstructing the old building) some Nigerian traders selling DVDs of Nigerian films. Time magazine has a strange, strange slideshow up of Nigerian cinema's finest figures.
If the photos are anything to go by, Nigerian movies aren't like your average Hollywood/Bollywood fare...
Pick A Number
This post could serve one of three purposes:
1) An excuse to post the beautiful (though context-less) advertising-themed picture I found in the Shorpy archives. (Yes, it's advertising-themed. Look again.)
2) To subtly point out the advertisements I've got running on the site.
3) To link to this fascinating Slate piece subtitled: Will clicking on all the ads help your favorite Web site?
You decide.
Daddy
I learned pretty early in my spell as a writer at Sports Illustrated that the best way to make people you don't like look stupid, is not to misquote them or to quote them out of context; it's to report exactly what they say. (Clive Rice did a far better job of making Clive Rice look like a bitter racist than I ever could.) I've always though that the American liberal media should take the same approach with Sarah Palin.
Just let the woman talk. She'll hang herself.
But Vanity Fair aren't taking any chances. After August's shamelessly one-eyed character assassination, they've now hauled out the big guns. This month they've got a first-person dirt-disher in the form of Levi Johnston: the half-wit hockey player who knocked up Palin's teenage daughter.
The story is hee-larious, like a combination of Married With Children, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Juno.
It's pretty much impossible for me to pick out my favourite bits... but here's my Top Three:
If this little snot-nose got your daughter pregnant, you'd probably want to bury him in the snowy tundra of backwoods Alaska. If his intention with the story was to diss the mother of his pregnant ex-girlfriend, then he succeeded. But not without making himself look like a total loser at the same time.
I Gotta Feeling
I needed some cheering up this morning (see the previous post), and – of all people – it took Oprah Winfrey and the Black Eyed Peas to put a smile on my dial. To kick off Oprah's 24th season, the BEPs did a live performance of their terrible/catchy new song a flash mob of synchronised dancers shook their collective asses on Chicago's Michigan Avenue.
Talk Talk
"He called the US President 'our son Obama', suggested swine flu might have been made by the military in a lab so companies could make money on the vaccine and called the Iraq war the mother of all evils." So starts the Sydney Morning Herald's report on Muammar Gaddafi's rant at the United Nations... and it just gets better/crazier from there.
Foreign Policy also has a fun (well, fun if it weren't so disturbing) slideshow up on the incident, along with another slideshow of The Top 10 Craziest Things Ever Said At The UN General Assembly.
You can't make this stuff up.
Weather
The gods are angry. Australia's just been hit by a massive dust storm, and the south-eastern United States have been spanked by a series of terrible floods.
The Big Picture is there with the photos... both of the dust and of the water.
MyFaceTuber
I weep sometimes for single people in this (allegedly) connected age. I still have Facebook "friends" who probably wouldn't speak to me in real life. How're people supposed to... y'know... meet people these days?
Code
I'm desperately (and geekily) trying to figure out whether the half-angel/half-demon statue they used in the marketing campaign for Angels & Demons is a fake or a forgotten masterpiece. I'm leaning towards fake, but you never know...
In the mean time, though, I'm waiting for the new Dan Brown book to go through its mandatory Early Hype phase before it lands up in one of my local cheap-and-dusty second-hand bookshops. I'm in two minds about The Lost Symbol: on one hand, I've enjoyed all his other books; on the other, I know that Dan Brown doesn't let things like historical accuracy or common sense or good writing get in the way of a good (coughairportnovelcough) story.
While I wait for my used-book bonanza, though, I'm going to keep on creating my own Dan Brown novels using Slate.com's hilarious Interactive Dan Brown Sequel Generator. You enter a city (say, Paris) and a society that ignorant tin-foil-hatters like to pick on (Scientologists, Mafia, Major League Baseball...), and – hey, presto! – the gizmo creates a summary of a Dan Brown novel.
Formulaic? You bet.
Walrus
You know you're in for a good read when the story starts like this: "In 1969, when he was 14 years old, Jerry Levitan sauntered past a row of reporters lined outside John Lennon's Toronto hotel room, knocked on the door, and convinced his favorite Beatle to give him a short interview."
The interview was taped, the tape got turned into an online clip, and the clip – yes, that's it there, down below this paragraph – won an Emmy. The New York Observer has the full, amazing story.
The interview was taped, the tape got turned into an online clip, and the clip – yes, that's it there, down below this paragraph – won an Emmy. The New York Observer has the full, amazing story.
Short
Esquire (US) have a Twitter-fied take on film reviews: they sent their film critic to the Toronto International Film Festival, and asked him to write one-sentence reviews on the festival's biggest movies.
"Joseph Heller would have smiled at this hilarious but ultimately feeble anti-war lark (and mostly true story) with more Clooney, only this time he's the Jedi while Ewan McGregor is the small-time journalist in awe of his absurdity."
Says it all, really.
Title
I've finished reading Umberto Eco's classic The Name Of The Rose, and there was something in the author's notes at the end of the book that got me to thinking...
While talking about the title of the novel, Eco says that "a title should muddle the reader's thoughts; not regiment them". So a title that gives the entire plot away (like, say, Dick And Jane Get A New Puppy) isn't doing its job as well as one that confuses the daylights out of you.
Like, say, Chinatown.
Or Reservoir Dogs.
Yellow Brick Road
Slate have a nice little story up about L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard Of Oz. I read the book ages ago (seriously, like when I was nine), but I've watched the movie a couple of times since then, and it's one of my all-time favourites.
Who knew that, all this time, it was actually just one big feminist tract?
Men Swear
I'm going to the MH Menswear event tonight. And I don't care what the Fashion Police say: I'm wearing comfortable shoes.
Go Fish
My thoughts about the freaky animals that roam the bowels of our oceans are a matter of public record. But it turns out there's plenty of animal weirdness up here on Terra Firma as well.
Cracked have an article up on 13 Real Animals Lifted Directly Out Of Your Nightmares. But aside from a bestiary of pants-wettingly scary animals, the list features a little fish called the Deep Sea Hatchet Fish, which has – and I don't think I'm overstating things here – the dream-haunting face of the soul of the damned.
Emmy!
Neil Patrick Harris – whom you may remember from Doogie Howzer, the Tonys and some guy's blog – hosted the Emmys... and was absolutely brilliant, as always. Here's his opening number.
Somebody, give this man the Oscars gig!
Somebody, give this man the Oscars gig!
Debate
Just when you think the intelligence of the Lincoln-Douglas debates has forever left American shores, xkcd shows up to prove you... Wrong? Right? Psht. Who really knows any more?
Haters
New York magazine has a fascinating/frightening cover story on the tide/tsunami of hatred that's being directed at President Obama. It's very, very scary. Turns out the "silent" majority - which we discovered wasn't a majority - isn't quite so silent either.
I can't start my week like this. I'm heading off to a happier place.
Caught
A few years ago I heard a great story about the last-ever episode of The Road Runner. Goes like this: right at the end of the episode, Wile E. Coyote finally catches the Road Runner, and he taps Road Runner on the shoulder and says: "Tag. You're it."
Ever since, I've been trying to hunt down that episode. To no avail. And Cecil Adams at The Straight Dope (which is the only site on the Internet you can really trust) says it never happened anyway.
Then this morning I found... this:
Ever since, I've been trying to hunt down that episode. To no avail. And Cecil Adams at The Straight Dope (which is the only site on the Internet you can really trust) says it never happened anyway.
Then this morning I found... this:
Kids
The Cool Hunter has some pics up of the Jean Paul Gaultier children's apparel range. I was going to make some snarky comment about it, but then I realised that my two toddlers already dress better than I do.
But, having said that, no son of mine would ever wear an Inspector Clouseau trenchcoat and matching beret... no matter how chic it looks.
Brands
Branding consultants Interbrand have issued their annual report on the World's Top 100 Brands. And if you've invested in a company that sells sugary, fizzy, ice-cold cough mixture that always gives me gas when I drink it, then there's good news for you.
Time magazine's report on the report reports that "more than 30 brands that started out the decade on Interbrand's list are now nowhere to be found. They include AT&T, Boeing, Heineken and (we're sorry to say) TIME."
Ouch.
Business Week have the entire scorecard up, as part of their excellent coverage of the story (better than TIME's, which probably explains a thing or two). I'm surprised to see how low BP, Kodak and Amazon.com are... and how high AIG, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are.
Hammer Time
I've been trawling through the New York magazine archives, admiring their slideshows of the best and worst of fashion magazines.
Their selection from March 2009 was particularly amusing. The "Best" stuff is really good, and the "Worst" stuff is especially awful.
Seriously. What were they thinking?
Diego
Soccernet have a great story up, where they look at Diego Maradona's troubled tenure as Argentina coach. I can't help thinking that the best coaches – Mourinho, Ferguson, Van Gaal, Hiddink, Benitez, Wenger – weren't great players... and despite a few notable exceptions (Cruijff, Beckenbauer), the greatest players don't necessarily make great coaches.
It's a lesson few sports teams seem able to learn.
Codex
I'm busy reading (or audiobooking) The Name of The Rose by Umberto Eco, and it's just as good as I had hoped it would be. (Much better than the movie, which I also enjoyed.) It's all about 13th-century monks and books and weird stuff... and that's had me thinking about the creepy Codex Gigas.
The Codex Gigas is an enormous 13th-century manuscript (like, a metre tall), with beautiful script...
... and fine illumination ...
... and it carries on like that through page after page of Old Testament, New Testament, Josephus's Antiquities, Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, a necrologium...
... until, out of nowhere, on page 290, it has a massive cartoon picture of a snarling green devil man.
Spooky.
Spookier still, its script is entirely uniform, and it appears to be the work of a single hand – even though it would have taken 30 years to write.
The legend goes that the monk had broken his vows, and was sentenced to be walled up alive. In order to gain indulgence/forgiveness, he vowed to write, in one single night, a book containing all human knowledge.
Around midnight he realised he could not complete the work alone, so he make a Faustian pact with the Devil, asking the Prince of Darkness to complete the book in exchange for his soul.
[Please insert your own creaking door and ghostly howls here. And also please imagine me telling the story with a flashlight shining up from under my chin.]
Cover Up
The nominees are up for The Maggies – a smartly-named award for the best British magazine covers. Looking through the list, there are some great ones and some arb ones... and I couldn't help wondering whether any of them would have passed the mandatory Media24 requirement of slapping your entire Contents page onto the cover (because, y'know, the more coverlines the better).
I'm weird like that: I prefer the approach of The New Yorker or the old George Lois-era Esquire, where your cover is like a stand-alone work of art.
Of course, these covers are pretty and all... but I don't know if they'd make me want to buy the magazine. Which I suppose is where the unwritten coverlines rule comes in.
Copy/Paste
Guardian blogger Roy Greenslade has a post up (which, in an irony that will soon become apparent, he lifted from elsewhere) on 10 Ugly Truths About Modern Journalism. As good as it is, I'm not going to reproduce the list here (my Copy/Paste tool isn't as sharp as Roy's), but I can comment on three of the entries:
6. Some journalists use Wikipedia
That should say "all" journalists. Trust me.
8. Many journalists have side projects
That should say: "Most journalists cannot afford to not have side projects." A mid-level salary in publishing is like an entry-level salary in commerce.
2. Many stories are not copy edited
This is especially true for online news. But you want to hear the scariest part? The editors at some online news outlets (coughNews24cough) actually take great pride in the fact that their stories are not spell-checked, grammar-checked, or – get this – fact-checked before they're published. Hence all the unapologetic "President Is Shot / Wait, No He's Not / OK Maybe He Is / No, We Were Thinking About Some Other Guy / OK Nobody Got Shot / How Do You Spell President Again?" stories.
Wabbit
It pays homage (and I want you to read that in a faux French "ommage" way) to the operas of Richard Wagner, it pays tribute to Der Ring des Nibelungen, it was the first cartoon short to be deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and it's been rated as the greatest cartoon of all time. It is What's Opera, Doc?, and it is completely insane.
Consider this your cultural learning for the day.
Consider this your cultural learning for the day.
Senior Management
A while back, the Washington Post ran a wonderfully-told story on Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly newspaper which – whether you live in DC or not – has some damn fine articles on offer.
I did, however, have to chuckle when Slate's David Plotz – one of City Paper's alumni – recalled in a recent Gabfest podcast that City Paper used to have "many senior editors, who were senior to no-one and who edited nothing".
I'm going to use that line over and over.
Bundesliga
It's down to business in the Champions League, and Soccernet have an excellent preview up. I fear it could end in tears for my teams: Liverpool, Barcelona and Ajax (who didn't even qualify, so it's tears already).
But something I can't help noticing is the healthy representation of German clubs.
The Bundesliga is – hands down – the most entertaining top league in Europe... and not just because Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger says so. The German championship is often, scarily often, decided on the last day of the season.
Take a look at this run-down of final-day Bundesliga finishes since I started watching soccer in 1990:
1991/92
1. VfB Stuttgart 21-10-7 +30 52pts
2. Borussia Dortmund 20-12-6 +19 52pts
3. Eintracht Frankfurt 18-14-6 +35 50pts
VfB Stuttgart won the title on goal difference after beating Bayer Leverkusen 2-1 with a goal scored (by a defender, Guido Buchwald) with just two minutes of the season left to play, after going a goal down and having one of their key players sent off. They had to win the game: second-placed Dortmund were beating Duisburg 1-0, and could have edged Stuttgart on goal difference... if they'd won 12-0. But that was never going to happen. Frankfurt could have spoiled both teams' parties, but they lost 1-2 (to a last-minute goal, of course) at Hansa Rostock. Had Frankfurt won, they'd have won the title on goal difference. To give you a proper idea of how mental this season finale was, consider this: at the start of the last game of the season, the top three were: Frankfurt-Dortmund-Stuttgart. With three minutes of the season to go, the top three were: Dortmund-Frankfurt-Stuttgart. It ended (as you'll see above) Stuttgart-Dortmund-Frankfurt.
1992/93
1. Werder Bremen 19-10-5 +33 48pts
2. Bayern München 18-11-5 +29 47pts
Werder Bremen won the title by one point after beating Stuttgart 3-0, but only because of what happened to title rivals Bayern Munich. Bayern had to beat mid-tablers Schalke, but were 2-1 down with 16 minutes of the game (and the season) to play... but they then scored twice to go 3-2 up (giving them a +30 goal difference, which was the same as Bremen's, but Bayern would have won the title by having scored more goals)... but then they had a player sent off and conceded a goal, meaning they could only draw 3-3... which wasn't enough to win the championship.
1993/94
1. Bayern München 17-10-7 +31 44pts
2. 1. FC Kaiserslautern 18-7-9 +28 43pts
Bayern won the title by one point after beating Schalke 2-0 on the last day of the season – but Kaiserslautern finished just one point behind them after scoring two goals in injury time to record a frantic (but futile) 3-1 win over Hamburg.
1994/95
1. Borussia Dortmund 20-9-5 +34 49pts
2. Werder Bremen 20-8-6 +31 48pts
Dortmund won the title by one point on the last day of the season after a routine 2-0 win over Hamburg. But – of course – that's only half the story. If Dortmund had only won 1-0, and if Bremen had managed a draw against Bayern, both Dortmund and Bremen would have finished on 49 log points and +33 goal difference. As it turned out, though, Bremen somehow contrived to lose 1-3.
1999/2000
1.FC Bayern München 22-7-5 +45 73pts
2. Bayer 04 Leverkusen 21-10-3 +38 73pts
Bayern took the title on goal difference after beating Werder Bremen 3-1 on a dramatic final day of the season. Leverkusen would have won the title if they'd only drawn against vowel-free nobodies SpVgg Unterhaching... but they lost their minds, and the game 0-2.
2000/01
1. FC Bayern München 19-6-9 +25 63pts
2. FC Schalke 04 18-8-8 +30 62pts
Schalke knew that they had to beat Unterhaching (those guys again) on the last day of the season, and then hope that Bayern would somehow stuff up their final game at Hamburg. This being Germany, Schalke were of course 0-1 down after four minutes. They managed to turn a 0-2 scoreline into a more respectable (bust still not good enough) 2-2, but then Unterhaching scored again to make it 2-3 with just 20 minutes of the game (and the season) remaining. Schalke finally pulled up their socks and scored three goals in the last 17 minutes to record a handsome 5-3 win... and the celebrations started when Bayern conceded a last-minute goal at Hamburg. Schalke win, Bayern lose, Schalke win the title. Right? Nein. Bayern scored a crazy goal in the fourth minute of injury time to scrape the draw, the point and the championship.
2001/02
1. BV 09 Borussia Dortmund 21-7-6 +29 70pts
2. Bayer 04 Leverkusen 21-6-7 +39 69pts
3. FC Bayern München 20-8-6 +40 68pts
Going into the last day, Bayern knew they had to beat Hansa Rostock, and then hope that both Leverkusen (at home to Hertha Berlin) and Dortmund (at home to Werder Bremen) lost their games. This being Germany, anything's possible, so you couldn't blame Bayern for playing their lederhosen off and going into a 3-0 lead against Hansa. But when news filtered through from the other two title hopefuls, Bayern gave up and sulked off with just a 3-2 win and no shiny trophy. That's because Leverkusen beat Hertha 2-1 to set up a dramatic championship triumph... which didn't happen, because – despite going 0-1 down at Werder – Dortmund recovered to win 2-1 (the winner coming, of course, with just 16 minutes of the season left to play) to take the title by one beautiful punkt.
2008/09
1. VfL Wolfsburg 21-6-7 +39 69pts
2. FC Bayern München 20-7-7 +29 67pts
Last season's final Bundesliga table shows an eight-point spread over the top five teams – which, with each team playing 34 games and with three points being awarded for every win, means a competition that's about as tight as the shorts soccer players used to wear in the 1980s. Thoroughly deserving Wolfsburg eventually won the title by a massive two points, but they did so by scoring 10 goals in their last two matches... and by beating Werder Bremen 5-1 on the final day, rendering meaningless Bayern's 2-1 win at third-placed Stuttgart.
So you can keep your English Premiership. The Bundesliga is where it's at.
Wiley
New York magazine have a superb gallery of portraits by Kehinde Wiley. Wiley's work is amazing: he remasters the Old Masters by replacing the old white dudes of the originals with young African-Americans and hip-hop artists.
Albrecht Dürer has never been so street.
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