This And Twitter

Slim

My three-month get-in-shape programme isn't going as well as I'd hoped.

(Although I did do a 5km run a couple of days ago.)

(But it was more of a run-jog-walk-jog-walk-jog-sprint.)

There's a Watteau exhibition at the Met, and Slate have a handy little slideshow up as an introduction/primer to the artist. Watteau's work has always struck me as a tad too - what's the word? - artsy-fartsy. But there's a menace lurking beneath it, which I like a lot... and he was pretty much spot-on when it came to painting movement and painting musicians.

In a parallel universe, he toured with the Stones.

Up Close

I've been spending the morning picking weeds out of my lawn, with my nose, like, a foot away from the ground. It felt a bit like this macrophotography gallery at BestDesignOptions.

0

Scientific American have a fun story up on the history of Zero. It's not as in-depth as the Wikipedia article, but it's pretty good... and it's not on Wikipedia, which has to count for something.

You have to wonder how mathematicians could have gone for so long without it.

Heroes

SlateV has a series (via The Big Money) called Cubez, where they visit various companies and see what it's like to work there. Their most recent visit was to Marvel Comics.

Looks pretty much like where I work.

But we've got more supervillains.

Barry

"Lisa Jack, then a student of photography at Occidental College, sought a striking subject for a portrait project and was tipped off about a charismatic freshman named Barry Obama who would make an ideal subject." So begins (or began) the story of a quiet little photoshoot that would eventually end up as an exhibit at M+B.

The story behind the shoot is really charming. "Barry”, according to the M+B site, showed up to the shoot with a bomber jacket, flared jeans, a pack of cigarettes and a Panama hat he thought would look “cool”.

I guess it helps if the guy you photographed 28 years ago ends up being the leader of the Free World.

And yes, the Panama hat is kinda cool.

...

There's a lot of this going around.

Lottie

There's a new Winnie-The-Pooh book coming out! According to the BBC: "The Bear of Very Little Brain will make his comeback in Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, the first authorised sequel to Milne's original 1920s stories."

And also according to the Beeb, there's a new character in the Hundred Acre Wood... with the arrival of Lottie the Otter no doubt bringing tears of joy to the Disney marketing people's eyes.

Stand by for the new range of plush toys and Happy Meal cash-ins.

Wings

Motorcrave's running a list of the 10 Top Cars from this year's Frankfurt Motor Show... and I'm overjoyed to see that Flügeltüren are still alive and well. Bless your retro hearts, Mercedes-Benz.

Procrastinate (Later)

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.

Ohm

Physics humour. You gotta love it.

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:

It could be the part where Palin demands that Levi gets a haircut, but he refuses: "The first thing Sarah said to me at the hotel was “You gotta cut your hair.” I told her I didn’t want to—I had a mullet at the time—but she finally got me to do it."

Or maybe this part: " It was the happiest day of my life, but it was also terrible because my family couldn’t be there. I didn’t think Sarah wanted my mom around all the cameras because she had been arrested for selling prescription medication a week and a half earlier."

Or this bit: "It takes a lot to make Sarah Palin cry, but I’ve seen her cry a few times—once was when Bristol and I told her that we were pregnant."

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.

Pedigree

We've started looking for a puppy. It's unbelievable how expensive they are. Indexed (via the banjo scene in Deliverance) explains why.

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.

Again

"Restructuring" is such a nice way of saying it...

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.

Snip Snip

Just got my hair cut for tonight's big shindig.

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.

O'zapft Is!

The Big Picture wishes you a happy Oktoberfest. As do I.

Movies

Yeah, yeah... I know that's two awards show opening numbers in a row. But when one of them is NPH and the other is "Movies Kick Ass" from the 2002 MTV Movie Awards, then who's complainin'?

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!

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:

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.