Red Balloons Go By

This is my 99th post of the month, which is reason enough, I reckon, for a trainspottery look at cricketers who've managed 99 runs in a Test match or One-Day International.

Sachin Tendulkar somehow contrived to go out on 99 in an ODIs three times in the space of five months in 2007 (including, as I recall, being run out going for triple figures against South Africa in what would become a major Slumdog Millionaire plot point).



But one of my favourite cricket trivia stats is that Shane Warne's highest Test batting score was 99 (he was caught on the boundary trying to heave his way to a century). That's tragic, but nowhere near as tragic as Martin Crowe's top score of 299. Crowe (who's Oscar winner Russell Crowe's cousin) was caught behind going for his triple-ton – and commented afterwards that, "It's a bit like climbing Everest and pulling a hamstring in the last stride."

I suppose, though, that the only thing worse that going out for 99 is ending a match on 99 not out. That's happened less often in Tests and ODIs, but (as always) there are some stories attached – usually of batsmen who reach 99* by scoring the winning run, or of batsmen who run out of batting partners.

In 1932 Don Bradman was stranded on a massive 299* when Pud Thurlow (back in the 30s cricketers chose their names from Pynchon and Dickens novels) got himself run out, thereby ending the innings... much to Bradman's bemusement.

Loopholes

If I had a penny for every time I saw someone treating a Law like it's a Guideline, there probably wouldn't be a recession.

Monster Mash

It's a couple of days early, but what the heck. Happy Halloween, ghouls and boys.

Trabant

In a parallel universe, I've been laughing so much I just crashed my Trabant into a tractor factory. On Der Spiegel's site (mit Englische translation), they're running a story on Communist-era East German humour... as eavesdropped on by West German spies during the cold war.

How about this for Best East German Joke You'll Read Today?

"What would happen if the desert became communist? Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage."

Hilarious. And how about this for Best Sentence You'll Read Online Today:

The joke report was by far the most popular service the spies provided. "It was our biggest hit," recalls former BND spy Dieter Gandersheim, whose real name is of course quite different.

Grunge

There's a new book out on Grunge: the music, the culture, the hair, the checked shirts, the pimply youths, the early 90s, the bands, the Seattle sound, the songs, the catchers in the rye, the phonies, the works.

The focus (or out-of-focus) will, surely, be on Nirvana. I kind of preferred Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains. But that's just me.



The pictures are by Michael Lavine, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth wrote the words. Reckon I might pick me up a copy. In the mean time, though, I'm going to take this news as an excuse to play Pearl Jam's post-grunge Wishlist over and over and over.

Rights/Duties

I got this link from (strangely enough) a Republican friend from Colorado. It's a speech by PJ O'Rourke at the opening of the Cato Institute's headquarters in 1993. As a fan of great speeches (I've plundered the bank at American Rhetoric), I'm loving this one.

There are so many quotable nuggets here, I don't know where to start. But I reckon I'll go with this:

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

Golf clap.

Considered

Steadily creeping into my personal list of Top 7 Podcasts* is NPR's All Songs Considered – a half-hour radio show where they showcase music that I would otherwise probably never hear. It's a great show, and its spin-offs are pretty amazing.

Take their live concerts, for example: they have, for free download, a list of live shows that include (right now) Radiohead, Yo La Tengo, Moby and Sonic Youth. All very hipstery, and all very good. (Except the Radiohead show sounds like my neighbour's dog barking next to a dishwasher... which I suppose is how all Radiohead music sounds.)



The only trouble with All Songs Considered is that all songs are - alas - not considered. As Slate's Jody Rosen writes in a very funny piece, NPR adhere to a DORF matrix (you'll have to read the story to see what that means) which excludes anything by contemporary black musicians.

Which is a bad thing. Obviously.

Except...

I couldn't help thinking of NPR's limitations when I read (and listened to a podcast talking about) Sasha Frere-Jones's excellent New Yorker essay on the demise of hip-hop. I guess when you turn your genre into a collection of throwaway ringtones, you can't really expect people to take you seriously any more.

Or, in NPR's case, to consider your songs.




* (Which are – in no particular order – Slate's Gabfest and Culturefest, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and Common Sense, NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, EconTalk and The New Yorker Out Loud)

Taxi

I'm sending my bandwidth through the roof listening/watching music videos on taxijam. (Way it works is, they get South African bands to do acoustic sets while traveling in a minibus taxi.) There's some good stuff here, and the little irritations (like the poppie leaning into the taxi to ask Prime Circle – in the thicket Sarf Efriken accent you've ever heard: "Wot bend aw yoo gahs?") are more charming than irritating.

The Jack Parow clip is foul... but very, very funny.

A-Team

As you must have heard by now, they're doing a movie remake of The A-Team... and the marketing photos are already hitting the Net. I'm going to have that theme tune stuck in my head for the rest of the day...

Bucket List

Add "Read This New York Times Story" to your To-Do List for today. It's a couple of years old, but it remains a neat little piece - and it's an excellent/ironic way of putting a story like this together.

Who said newspaper articles are formulaic?

Last Day

Abstruse Goose delivers the perfect Monday morning comic.

Barry White

It's very silly. But it remains (what can I say?) one of my all-time favourite songs.

"Now when she came over, she brought the discus
On and on, she promised to kick this
EWF stole my breath
When he finished, there was nothing left."

It doesn't get any better than that.

Lines

Here's an interesting map from some totally random site. It's a representation of worldwide airliner routes. Not much happening in far eastern Russia, then...

Lights

Happy Diwali from The Big Picture... and from me.

Müller Möller Miller

Soccernet are running another instant classic by German soccer writer Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger (soon to be Uli Hesse, as the story reveals), where he looks at the origins of German soccer players' names. You'll never look at Franz Beckenbauer the same way again...

Pollock

There's a fun little piece up at The Smithsonian, where they ask (and kind of answer) whether Jackson Pollock hid his name in his painting, Mural. It all sounds very Da Vinci Code (and personally, I reckon he could've written the solution to Kryptos in there, and nobody'd have noticed)... but they could be onto something.

Stairs

Okay, so it's pretty random. But I still ended up spending a good couple of minutes admiring the collection of Great Spiral Stairs at Atlas Obscura. I had a spiral staircase in my first apartment. It wasn't nearly as impressive as the ones listed here...

Two Cultures

In my online wanderings I stubbed my toe on a 1984 (the year, not the book) (maybe) essay by Thomas Pynchon called Is It OK To Be A Luddite?. It's a belated response/timely reassessment of CP Snowe's lecture, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which was (quoting PYnchon now) "notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming polarized into "literary" and "scientific" factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other."

Snowe's theory was eventually hit over the fence by Stephen Jay Gould, but Pynchon's essay is still well worth a read.

In typical style, he name-checks literary characters like Frankenstein and Brainy Smurf and funny-named real people like Ned Lud and Arnold Toynbee, talks (a lot) about the sciences, and then (even more) about the arts, and goes on long, rambling tangents where those two cultures don't just meet - they run away together for a dirty weekend in Mexico.

Nowhere

Discovered this map at New Scientist: it's a map charting the world's most remote places, based on how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50 000 or more people by land or water. It reminds me of the stats on the world's poles of inaccessibility.

Either way, it puts a new spin on "The Middle of Nowhere".

(Which, it turns out, is somewhere in Tibet.)

Parenting

Says it all, really.

Reading

Rediscovered this little gem in an old copy of Esquire we had floating around the office: author Dave Eggers' take on the future of reading. It's worth - you guessed it - a read.

Drive Time

Wired's Autopia have a cool gallery up of 10 Cars Way Too Far Ahead Of Their Time. The cars are absolutely mind-blowing (you have got to be kidding me about that third headlight on the '48 Tucker!), and most of them would still seem avant-garde today. Or next year.

Diet

This does count as proper dieting, right?

Right?!?

Awards

There's a great story up at The New Republic, where the writer bemoans/laments/pokes fun at undeserving award winners. I love this paragraph:

"Nearly every field of human endeavor has a regular prize. And nearly every prize seems to regularly go to a clearly undeserving winner. Woody Allen’s character complained in Annie Hall, “They’re always giving out awards. Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler.” If an award like that really did exist, though, they’d probably end up giving it to Mussolini."

Too bad they don't hand out prizes for great paragraphs...

Ad

It's not often (by which I mean "It never happens") that I pay even the slightest regard to online advertisements. But I just visited The Nation's site, and was hit by this absolutely brilliant subscription ad.



See? Online advertising can work.

(If it's funny.)

Wild Things

Spike Jonze has just made (and released, to mixed reviews) a movie version of the children's book Where The Wild Things Are. Early word has it that the film isn't really, y'know, for kiddies. Clearly amused by all of this, New York magazine has a list up of 12 Controversy-Causing Kids' Movies - or, as they put it: "...child-targeted movies that were bad, too visionary, or, in a few cases, too racist for their own good."

The list includes The Black Cauldron, which I remember quite enjoying as a child. Trouble was, I was a bit of a bookworm (first proper book I read was the book of The Secret Of NIMH, which I was five), so I insisted on reading the books of The Black Cauldron too. Very, very different to the movie, is all I'm gonna say 'bout that.

Not Free

Couple of weeks ago, Newsweek published a list of What You Need to Know Now (or, I suppose, a couple of weeks ago). It's all, of course, totally counter-intuitive (they call them "unexpected truths"). The list is quite interesting: We Are All Hindus Now, Elections Aren't the Answer, It's Too Late to Stop Global Warming and so on.



I quite liked Paid Is the New Free (written by Daniel Gross, whose Slate stuff I always enjoy). It explodes the myth (if, indeed, myths can be "exploded") of everything online being gratis mahala.

It's a nice dose of realism: working in publishing, I've lost count of the times I've seen print staff being asked to do online work "for free", seen online advertising space given away "as added value" (i.e. for free), and seen the internet treated as a copyright-free, payment-free Wild West. We're constantly being told that "Online Is The Future", but that "Content Is King"... and none of the bean-counters have yet figured out that you can't have one with the other. Newsweek seem to have figured it out. But I guess they had to.

Maybe

President and Mrs Obama have, according to the BBC, decorated their private rooms and the Oval Office with a range of modern and abstract art. They've made some interesting choices. They've got some contemporary art, along with modern art - including Ed Ruscha' s ode to indecision: I Think I'll...

When asked for comment, Ruscha told the LA Times: "I hope my painting has a reverse effect on White House decisions."

Power To The People

Here's a handy little map from the Land Art Generator Initiative - charting the total global area required to power the world using solar power, and with zero carbon emissions.

Seems OK to me.



Of course, InformationIsBeautiful has to take it a step further and redraw the map using offshore wind power and... erm... Matrix-esque human battery power. I guess we're better off with windmills than with Neo. I wonder, though, which would be better: huge windmills in the oceans, or massive solar panels in the middle of nowhere.

My Adidas

The name adidas is, as you well know, an acronym for All Day I Dream About Sneakers. Or that's what they're trying to convince us with their new marketing campaign. The images from the campaign are pretty amazing - and I reckon I could really use the Luftsack pair when I'm strap-hanging in a crowded train.

Wall

Here's an interesting map from TE Architects, via Information Is Beautiful: they call it the Schengen Wall - and it's a theoretical "wall" that divides the world's Haves from its Have Nots. Look at those numbers: 73% of the cash, 14% of the people – it's the Pareto Principle at its best.

Now I have a Schengen-friendly passport... but you know where I live? There, at the far end of the grey part of the map.

Bag Check

I'm flying across the country again on Friday (for business, but for pleasure-ish business). Unlike xkcd, I'll keep my opinions on airport security to myself.

Volunteer

Either he has his archives archived by category, or Johnny Hart is having another last laugh: both today's BC and The Wizard of Id share a similar, it's-been-on-my-mind-lately, theme.

I Phone

Looks like Wiley wants to hang up too.

Circle

Expect to read about this in the next Dan Brown shine-a-flashlight-under-your-chin tin foil hat novel (actually, no: don't expect to read about this, because that might require some actual research on the part of the author). Some of the greatest wonders of the ancient world - Easter Island, Nazca, Ollantaytambo, Paratoari, Tassili n'Ajjer and Giza - are all aligned on a single, great, invisible circle.

According to the mind-blowing site where I found this, "additional ancient sites that are located within one tenth of one degree of this great circle include Petra; Persepolis; Khajuraho; Pyay, Sukhothai and Anatom Island."


But there's more.

"Near Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu and Cusco are within one quarter of a degree. The Oracle at Siwa in the western Egyptian desert is within one quarter of a degree. In the Indus Valley, Mohenjo-daro and Ganweriwala are within one quarter of a degree. The ancient Sumerian city of Ur and Angkor temples in Cambodia and Thailand are within one degree of the great circle. The Angkor temple at Preah Vihear is within one quarter of a degree."

And the list goes on, making both my mind and my link button explode in giddy amazement.



"This circle crosses over the source and the mouth of the Amazon, the dividing line between upper and lower Egypt, the mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus River and the Bay of Bengal near the mouth of the Ganges. The circle also crosses over a number of areas of the world that are largely unexplored, including the Sahara Desert, the Brazilian Rainforest, the highlands of New Guinea, and underwater areas of the North Atlantic Ocean, the South Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea."

Spooky.

Morale

Boy, am I glad it's Friday.

Toys

MotorCrave are calling Suzusho's Supasse V sports coupe a "kit car". Boy, do I wish it lived in my toy box...

Twitterville

The numbers aren't exact (or at least the representation of the numbers isn't), but it's pretty interesting nonetheless. I love these "If X was a village" stats... and InformationIsBeautiful are great at creating attractive infographics.

It's interesting, though, how many "dead" people there are in the village. I get the sense that this is true for most social networks.

Rules

There's a great piece up at mental_floss on 8 Obscure Rules From the World of Sports, which contains this pearler:

"Everyone knows that if a player bats out of turn, he’s out. A weird situation popped up in a 2005 Kansas City Royals game, though. David DeJesus batted first in the first inning and hit a single. At that point, the umps realized that DeJesus was actually second in the Royals’ lineup and called him out. That meant the second man in the batting order had to come up to bat…David DeJesus. He flew out in his second at-bat. Fans of the Royals will tell you this pretty much encapsulates David DeJesus’ skill set: he’s so bad that he can make two outs in a single inning."

The rest is just as good.

Earth

Don't know why, but I'm feeling very GreenPeacey today. First the panda, now the polar bear: here's Design Crave's collection of 30 Amazing Environment Ads for Earth Day. Superb stuff.

Plane

How cool is this? Much like you get concept cars, you also get concept aeroplanes... and designer Reindy Allendra's KLM WB-1010 is the most eye-popping paper plane you'll ever see. Inspired by blue whales and blimps, the plane will have supersonic engines and a helium-injected body, and will carry 1500 people at a max speed of 620 miles an hour.

Of course, it'll never fly.

But it's nice to dream.

Cover Version

I think my link button is going to explode. Slate magazine have a photo gallery up of New York magazine covers which reference old Esquire magazine covers (from the famous George Lois era). Interestingly, Esquire referenced Esquire last year during their anniversary celebrations - and they weren't the only ones!

Milk

It's an oldie... but a goodie.

Panda

Back in April, Foreign Policy ran a photo essay on 10 Environmental Challenges We've Got to Solve. Scary stuff... but it's a handy reminder of what we need to do before we reach a point where we, y'know, can't do it any more.

Doom

Since the whole restructuring thing kicked in, we've had a couple of these roaming the corridors at work.

Number One Fan

Wired's Gadget Lab has a feature up on a brilliant new invention: a fan... without blades! So no more risk of getting your fingers chopped off, but no more chance of getting the whole talking-into-the-fan-and-getting-a-Darth-Vader-voice thing. It'll take some getting used to, I'm afraid.

And it looks unnervingly like a portable mini Stargate.

Vrooooom!

There's a cool (and occasionally funny) piece up at Motorcrave on the 10 Fastest Motorcycles In History. Once you get past the fact that none of them actually look like motorcycles, it's an interesting read.

Motherboard

This is about as much help as you'll get from the average office IT assistant.

(Which is why I appreciate the good ones when they come along...)

/

Very funny story on the BBC: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the Internet, has formally apologised for all the slashes in http://.

He admits that they were unnecessary, and he's sorry for all the trouble they've caused you.

Berlin

It's been 20 years now since the Berlin Wall came down – and Berliners marked the anniversary with a massive street theatre performance called "The Berlin Reunion". The Big Picture was there.

Nobel

In all the hoo-ha about this year's Nobel Peace Prize, I've been thinking about my now-standard annoyance at the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'm astounded that someone like JM Coetzee could win it, yet writers who've actually made a real contribution to human culture haven't.

I'm talking about people like Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Chinua Achebe, Bertolt Brecht, Philip Roth.

I'm not alone. Great Book Guide have a wonderful list up of "alternate" Nobel Literature laureates, listing the real winners alongside the should've-been winners. (They include Bob Dylan. Brilliant!)

Maybe we'll have a similar Alternate Peace Prize list up sometime.

Vote For Me

Mental Floss has a cool little collection of Famous Political Campaign slogans (We Polked You in ’44, We Shall Pierce You in ’52!). There's some snappy stuff - and there's more at Wikipedia. My all-time faves are "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" (just because it sounds good), and - of course - "Yes We Can".

Best ever, though, is the immortal classic: I Like Ike.

Crying

I'm busy reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying Of Lot 49. I should have it finished up by the end of the week - it's only 100-odd pages long. Trouble is, those 100-odd pages are very odd indeed, and the text is so dense and so peppered with allusion, that it's taking longer than most books would.

I like Pynchon. Anybody who has his own Wiki, with notes and explanations for every page, has to be worth reading.

I also like Pynchon's vibe: he's a total recluse, refusing to do telly interviews and making absolutely no public appearances. There is (according to the legend that I'm happy to perpetuate) only one known photograph of him - and it's so old and so arb, it could be of anybody, really. Makes a fascinating change from all those pop culture publicity hounds. And, strangely, it makes his already-intangible (some might say incoherent) prose seem all the more distant.



You've got to have some mystery in your culture.