New York magazine has a slideshow up of work by Harry Benson, one of the great 20th celebrity photographers. His work really is magnificent, and it's worth checking out.
One of his best – and most famous – photos is actually a contact sheet (more on those here) of shots he took of the Beatles getting stuck in to a pillow fight after hearing that "I Want to Hold Your Hand" had gone to number one.
Great pics (as expected) up at The Big Picture of the Eid al-Adha celebrations. It always amuses me how people will call it "Eid", when "Eid" means "Festival"... and there are about a dozens Eids on the Muslim calendar.
Another industry takes a Dubai-esque turn for the worse: according to this great feature at The Daily Beast, the market value of paparazzi pics has plummeted 31%.
Foreign Policy have a great feature up on their Top 100 Global Thinkers... and it really is a Global list. It's a long read (one of those cases where the Internet simply cannot compete with a magazine for readability), but it's worthwhile - if only to see Hillary Clinton having to share sixth place with Bill.
Everybody's going to run some or other end-of-year list (the whole thing will go meta when somebody runs a list of Top 10 End-of-Year Lists)... but The Root has an especially amusing one. Top 10 Fails of 2009 - with everybody's favourite "Don't Make Him Look Too Gay" musician sitting happily in ninth place.
Jim Carrey just won the Best Comedic Performance Award for Yes Man at the 2009 MTV Movie Awards... and it got me remembering his unforgettable victory for The Truman Show back in 1999.
American Conservative has an interesting piece by Pat Buchanan: a review of a book about President James Knox Polk's inspired leadership/disgraceful behaviour (depending on your viewpoint, and depending on which of the comments you agree with) in the Mexican-American War. With the war in Afghanistan nowhere near ending, now's the perfect time to revisit this part of American history.
Great little slice of history here: it is (courtesy of Strangemaps) the map which US President Franklin D Roosevelt used as evidence – evidence, I say! – of an insidious Nazi plot to conquer and divide (in that order) South America.
There's a fascinating collection of scans at BibliOdyssey of a 15th Century book which charts a pilgrim's voyage from Kontanz (on the shores of Lake Constance on the Swiss/German border) to Jerusalem. Scale? Pfft. Topographic accuracy? Pshaw. Who needs 'em when you've got images like this?
The latest word in the whole free / online / content / Google / Murdoch debate comes from a very smart voice at The Daily Beast. As if to support his argument by undermining it, I'll copy/paste his argument here:
"Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what's happening on the free Internet is more akin to the "crowdsourcing" of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them—only the search engines that parse their articles. Why must everything we create or do be presumed free for everyone to use, in any context, and open to comments from anyone in the world? Searching me, and what I create, should be a privilege enjoyed by those to whom I offer it—not a right bestowed onto every person, company, and government on the planet.
Openness of this sort is not freedom. It’s the forced relinquishing of everything we do to the hive, and to Google. We end up with fewer new ideas, less original content, and more links, copies and regurgitations of yesterday's ideas. The people and companies who index ideas end up getting the money, while the people who actually have ideas and waste their time creating content end up broke."
See how easy that was? And I didn't have to pay a cent for it!
Sheesh. Talk about putting a damper on the day. Time magazine have a completely joyless slideshow up lowlighting the 10 Worst Things About The Worst Decade Ever. That would be this decade, then. Not the 1940s (World War II? Hiroshima? Not as bad?), not the 1910s (World War I? Spanish flu? No?)> No, the Noughties. Seems a bit harsh. Until you flip through the slideshow. Now I'm wondering how we've all survived it.
There's a big part of me that prefers eating in to dining out – and most of that has to do with the surly waitrons we have to endure as diners. (I'm like: "Just bring me my food and leave me alone!") That's why I enjoyed reading Bruce Buschel's piece in the New York Times, where he offers his rules for waitrons... or 100 Things Restauraunt Staffers Should Never Do.
There's a fascinating (but – I must warn you – long) story at The Chronicle of Higher Education about the nature of boyhood. It's very interesting, and it tries to answer the questions about developmental gaps between young boys and young girls.
I loved this insight in this quote: "People look at the adult world and say, 'Men are still in charge.' So they look down at boys and say, 'They are small men, so they must be on the way to success'. It's still a man's world. People make the mistake of thinking it's a boy's world."
From the depths of the dusty archives, here's the funkiest song you'll hear today. Or this week. Or ever. It's by Betty Davis, who was married to Miles Davis... so you know you're gonna get some deep, deep funk going on.
Talk about the power of recycling. Here, on ItWasThisOrTwitter, we present a heart-warming/heart-breaking picture of a homeless hermit crab, which we got from GOOD, who got it from TreeHugger, who got it from Recyclart, who got it from MakeMyMood, who got it from some other site who got it from some photographer who's homeless now himself because his work is being passed around the Internet for free.
Incredibly, it took a study, by scientists, to determine that computer games about war sometimes condone – and reward – war crimes. And incredibly, this came as a shock to the scientists. I'm still trying to figure out the hidden combination of keys that'll let you dive when you're tackled or do a sneaky, intentional handball to set up a goal in the EA FIFA soccer series.
You know how they once found a map of Africa in Nelson Mandela's hand print? And you know how sometimes when you stir your hot chocolate just so, the foam makes the shape of Madagascar? It's called accidental geography, and there's a very silly – though endlessly fascinating – gallery up at StrangeMaps, featuring unbelievable examples of exactly that.
After all the hoo-hah about the France-Ireland World Cup qualifying play-off match, it's refreshing to see someone taking an educated, reasoned approach. But while the world waits (in vain) for that to happen, this will have to do.
Oops. When gay magazine Out put gay American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert on their (mostly gay) cover, they were instructed by Lambert's publicist not to make the little lamb look "too gay". The magazine's editor – in a move that even a straight like me can love – dutifully put Lambert on the cover and ran the yes-I'm-gay-but-not-too-gay interview... but then also launched a blistering attack on Lambert in the editor's letter.
My favourite part: "Much easier to stick you in Details, where your homosexuality can be neutralized by having you awkwardly grabbing a woman’s breast and saying, “Women are pretty.” So are kittens, Adam, but it doesn’t mean you have to make out with them."
We're going to see a few stories like this as we charge towards 2010... but they're going to be fun to read anyway. The music gurus at NPR have compiled a list of The Decade's 50 Most Important Recordings – and it has, as you'd expect, some absolutely brilliant tracks. The list includes got some famous tracks and, brilliantly, some I've never heard of.
So you'll have A Milli by Lil Wayne...
... sitting next to Since U Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson (a song that, you have to admit, kinda grows on you)...
... in between Amy Winehouse...
... and Sigur Ros...
... via Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Journeys...
... and the amazing La Pasión Segun San Marcos by Osvaldo Golijov, which is absolutely incredible. A 21st century classical piece written by an Argentine Jew about the Passion of Jesus Christ, which starts out sounding like a Brazilian tribal song before moving into Afro-Cuban beats and something that Bach would've written if he'd been this good.
Here it is. My gift to you. (Until they take it down.)
There's a great popular history book by Erich Durschmied called The Hinge Factor, where he looks at the tiny pivots on which the course of history has turned. And sometimes, really, that's all it takes: one little tipping point, one crazy fluke, one strange incident - and the world changes forever. So it was with the Berlin Wall. Slate have an amazing piece up which tells the story of the shrug - the shrug! - that brought down the Wall... and ultimately, it's fair to say, brought down Communism.
Here's an extract:
Gunter Schabowski, the portly spokesman for the ruling Politburo, installed just weeks earlier, stopped by the offices of the Communist Party boss, Egon Krenz, en route to his daily press briefing. "Anything to announce?" he asked casually. Krenz shuffled through the papers on his desk, then passed Schabowski a two-page memo. "Take this," he said with a grin. "It will do us a power of good." Schabowski scanned the memo while being driven from party headquarters. It was a short press release having to do with passports. From now on, every East German would have the right to have one—and to travel freely.
For a nation locked so long behind the Iron Curtain, this was tremendous news. At the press conference, there was a sudden hush as Schabowski read from the memo, then a hubbub of shouting reporters. From the back of the room, as the cameras rolled, broadcasting live to the nation, the fatal question rang out: "When does it take effect?"
Schabowski paused, looked up. "What?" he said, confused. The chorus of questions rang out again, seeking clarification. Schabowski scratched his head, mumbled to aides on either side, perched his glasses on the end of his nose, and scanned his notes, then once again he looked up … and shrugged. "Ab Sofort," he read aloud from what he saw written on the press release. Immediately. Without delay.
A bunch of guys at the office are getting into the whole Movember spirit... with interesting results. (I'm struggling to hold serious business conversations without giggling like an idiot at all the fuzzy moustaches.) So in their honour, and in honour of Movember, and in honour of body hair all over the world, I present to you The Daily Beast's honourable Ode To Shaggy Men.
The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute has an interesting (and mercifully brief) piece up on the complexity of the modern economy - and why the Keynesian model simply doesn't work any more. Sounds like we're going to have to think up our own solutions to our own problems, instead of looking for quick fixed in history books. (Or maybe just look to Hayek for advice instead...)
My old favourite xkcd recently ran a "map" (and I use the term loosely) charting the character interactions in a couple of great movies, including The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, 12 Angry Men (amusingly), and Primer (even more amusingly). They're loving it over at StrangeMaps, and really, who can blame them?
For a more accurate, though far less amusing, plot of how Primer's brain-busting timeline worked, take a look at the diagram at Wikipedia... and then bust your brain some more at the page on Feynman diagrams.
(I'm a big, fat, nerd for Professor Feynman and his work. Anybody who can work on the Manhatten Project, diss string theorists, and still find time to frequent a hostess bar has to be alright.)
here's one of my all-time favourite poems, by one of my all-time favourite poets: e.e.cummings. it's very naughty (it's pretty much an ode to adultery), but it's very smartly done. i love the way the brackets grope around the paragraphs like the lovers' hot, sweaty hands. (and, of course, the lower case.)
may i feel said he (i'll squeal said she just once said he) it's fun said she
(may i touch said he how much said she a lot said he) why not said she
(let's go said he not too far said she what's too far said he where you are said she)
may i stay said he which way said she like this said he if you kiss said she
may i move said he is it love said she) if you're willing said he (but you're killing said she
but it's life said he but your wife said she now said he) ow said she
(tiptop said he don't stop said she oh no said he) go slow said she
(cccome?said he ummm said she) you're divine!said he (you are Mine said she)
"When you start getting friended by your grandmother, I think that's when it starts to lose its cool." And with that, AdWeek reveals one of the reasons why Facebook is losing popularity among 18- to 24-year-olds. Makes you wonder where they're going – and whether under-18s are going to join the (small, but steady) migration.
There's a great gallery up at BestDesignOptions of 40 inspiring ideas for business cards - based on real people's real business cards. Makes my little cardboard company-issue seem a bit bland by comparison. Reckon I'm going to have to jazz mine up a bit.
The ideas, as you'll see from this small sample, range from the sublime
I'm declaring today to be the start of my summer. (Because last week's unseasonably rubbish weather seems to have blown off and away into the northern hemisphere, where it belongs.)
I watched Inglourious Basterds a couple weeks back, and spent great parts of the movie laughing at the over-the-top... accents. (You thought I was going to say "over-the-top violence" there, dintcha?) A recent New Yorker magazine had a brilliant article about Tim Monich, the dialogue coach who taught Brad Pitt his hee-larious Aldo Raine accent. Great article (sadly not available online in full). Great movie.
So You Think You Can Dance is my (current) favourite show on television. Here's why. Check out this gorgeous routine, about a woman's struggle with breast cancer, choreographed by Tyce Diorio:
Today was the last round of World Cup qualifying games in Africa, and I only watched Nigeria's progress with half an eye, seeing as they needed pretty much the impossible to happen: they had to beat Kenya in Kenya, while their group rivals Tunisia had to (more or less) just avoid losing in Mozambique.
Here's how it all unfolded, going minute-by-minute, UK time:
13:00 First half kicks off in both games (Mozambique 0 Tunisia 0 and Kenya 0 Nigeria 0) 13:15 Kenya 1 Nigeria 0 - Tunisia qualify 13:45 Half-time - Tunisia qualify
14:00 Second half kicks off in both games (Mozambique 0 Tunisia 0 and Kenya 1 Nigeria 0) 14:17 Kenya 1 Nigeria 1 - Tunisia qualify 14:20 Kenya 1 Nigeria 2 - Nigeria qualify 14:34 Kenya 2 Nigeria 2 - Tunisia qualify 14:38 Mozambique 1 Tunisia 0 - Nigeria qualify 14:38 Kenya 2 Nigeria 3 - Nigeria qualify 14:45 Both games end.
Interesting interview up at GOOD, with a Lama who leads 12- or 36-month spiritual retreats. You've got to love this quote: "We asked them not to send us any letters from anyone. We asked them not to send us any news. We didn’t know about 9/11. It happened during our retreat and we found out a couple years later. They didn’t tell us. I think we were the only ones on the planet who didn’t know about it."
Makes my three-day break down the coast seem... I dunno... not quite as relaxing.
As impressive at the weekend's Lyon-Marseille 10-goal thriller was, it still fell far, far short of the all-time greatest game of soccer in the history of mankind... ever. That honour, of course, goes to a now-forgotten Serie A clash from 1991 between Inter Milan and Sampdoria.
Yup, sports fans, it's true: You can keep your 1970 World Cup Final and your 2005 Champions League Final (both of which remain personal favourites). For pure drama, incident and classic action, none can compare to this one. So here, for your scroll-past-it-to-read-the-Tom-Jones-story-two-posts-down-instead pleasure, is the full story of that amazing game...
Sampdoria, a quiet club with a dodgy badge from the pirate-swarming rivers of Genoa (that's them in the faux-vintage photo), weren't expected to do very much in the 1990/91 Italian domestic soccer season. The league that year contained such luminaries as AC Milan (with their Gullit-Van Basten-Rijkaard trio of Dutch superstars), Inter Milan (with their own German troika of Klinsmann-Brehme-Matthaus), and Napoli (for whom Maradona was on a post-World Cup vengeance mission).
And while the other teams' superstars (Skuhravy, Brolin, Alemao, Voller, the list goes on) were all on a roll after the 1990 FIFA World Cup, Sampdoria's only decent player was Gianluca Vialli, who'd flopped horrendously at Italia 90.
So of course - for this is, you see, a football fairytale - Sampdoria played out of their skins, leading the charge over the course of an utterly epic season.
Late in May, as the championship reached its climax, Sampdoria travelled to Inter Milan. Inter needed a win; Sampdoria needed Inter not to win. Here, after the highlights of the reverse fixture earlier in the season (see, I told you it was an obscure game - it's hidden deep in the bowels of YouTube) is what happened:
The game had it all: crazy misses, blinding saves, a disallowed goal, two red cards, a missed penalty, goal-line clearances, two great goals, crowd violence and (this bit's not in the clip) Sampdoria's goalkeeper getting clunked on the head by a wayward firecracker.
As Rob Smyth recalls in his excellent piece at The Guardian, "this was the definitive smash-and-grab victory. Inter had 24 shots to Samp's six. They had 13 corners to Samp's one. The Inter keeper Zenga didn't make a single save; Pagliuca made 14, including, unthinkably, a penalty from Matthäus. He had the game of his life."
Listening to the commentary, it sounds like Martin Tyler is in tears at one point. As I recall, everybody who saw the game was.
This blog (and its few brilliant pieces of original writing) notwithstanding, I'm constantly amazed by the idea that online content should be provided for free. The editor of Wired magazine reckons content should be totally gratis mahala, and most publishers I've worked for have treated orignal online writing as a nice added bonus. (Certainly not anything you as a professional writer are going to be paid anything extra for.) I don't understand that - and I find that generally, you get what you pay for. (Like my Dad probably said: If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.)
So three cheers and a hip-hip-hooray to the otherwise completely evil and nefarious Rupert Murdoch. The Daily Beast has the story:
"Railing against “content kleptomaniacs” like Google, Microsoft, and Ask.com—which effectively syndicate News Corp. content without paying—Murdoch even suggested he might put up walls that prevent the stories in his papers from appearing in Google searches at all. Click here to find out more!
That’s right: Instead of rigging the system to achieve higher rankings in search returns, Murdoch is contemplating pulling his content from Google searches altogether—a simple tweak that Google says is available to every Web site."
NPR's All Songs Considered has a brilliant spin-off, which they call The Tiny Desk Concerts. Works like this: they get an artist in to perform a small, (extremely) intimate concert at the (you guessed it) desk of DJ Bob Boilen. They've had some top acts on the show, but my favourite is Tom Jones. Small desk, BIG voice!
You've got to love the computer with Microsoft Outlook flickering on the screen in the foreground.
I wish I could get something like this going at my desk...
David McCandless over at InformationIsBeautiful just launched a book, and all the marketing around it has caused him to pause and ask: what makes good information design? He's come up with an interesting Venn diagram, which - though still a work in progress - should be mandatory viewing for every media designer.
In late 2008 Karl Rove wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal about his annual competition with President George W Bush. Every year the supreme leader and his grand vizier (or president and senior advisor, depending which way way you want to look at it) would see who could read the most books. In 2006, Rove claims, Rove read 110 books and the president read 95. That's like, almost two full books per week - including Albert Camus's "The Stranger", which (having read it myself, I can promise you) is not light reading.
So where did the president get the time? And - as they're discussing on GOOD - how many books are you averaging a year?
Time magazine has an interesting gallery up of photos by Jim Naughten, who has a new book out on Re-enactors... specifically, re-enactors of First and Second World War battles.
The images are quite haunting (the portraits especially)... It's as if the people stepped through the Stargate and landed on Europe's battlefields 65 years too late.
Here's my favourite opening scene from any movie, bar none. (OK, maybe bar a James Bond opening stunt. But you get the picture.) It's from the action flick Desperado, the big(ger) budget sequel to Robert Rodriguez's zero-budget El Mariachi. Setting, backstory, mood, tone, whatever: this scene sets it all up brilliantly. And Steve Buscemi totally owns the scene as the guy who sets up Antonio Banderas's lead character for the audience.
It goes from that, straight into the foot-stomping musical title sequence...
... and then into the feature film. The rest of the movie is, sadly, absolute rubbish. But it was always going to be downhill from that great opening scene.
Foreign Policy have an excellent slideshow up of photographs of some of the world's worst slums, taken by Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen. Bendiksen worked in the mean streets of Nairobi, Caracas, Mumbai, and Jakarta - and his pictures are absolutely incredible.
