And that makes it three Non Sequitur days in a row.
Terror
Speaking of Cracked (it's in the next/previous post), they have a giggle-uncontrollably-in-front-of-your-computer story up right now, called The 5 Most Embarrassing Failures in the History of Terrorism. It's one of those where you read the first three, then think that the last two aren't going to be as funny, then proceed to read those last two and laugh your head off.
Green
Cracked.com have a very, very feature up, where they've devised a flowchart plotting the creation of a Green Day album. Now I like Green Day. I like their songs, and their effortless shifts from emo to screamo to punk. But I'll never listen to them with the same ears after seeing that Cracked flowchart.
Of course, it would be wrong of me to upload it here instead of offering a link to the Cracked site. But, in keeping with the whole white-guy-who-wears-mascara-and-calls-it-guyliner vibe, I'm going to do that anyway.
Egg
There's a new book out called The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History... which, once Amazon gets over its annoyance at all its stuff getting stolen by the South African Post Office, I intend to purchase.
While I wait for that that happy day to arrive, though, I'm keeping myself occupied with Wired's look at some of the photographs that made it into the book... and – oh, rarest of the rarest of the rare! – one of the photographs that didn't. When a photographer's assistant pretends he's about to flick his finger against a super-rare Elephant Bird's egg, you know that the guys putting the project together are having way too much fun.
While I wait for that that happy day to arrive, though, I'm keeping myself occupied with Wired's look at some of the photographs that made it into the book... and – oh, rarest of the rarest of the rare! – one of the photographs that didn't. When a photographer's assistant pretends he's about to flick his finger against a super-rare Elephant Bird's egg, you know that the guys putting the project together are having way too much fun.
Fall Guy
To mark the new Fall (Autumn – Autumn, I say!) fashion season, New York magazine has a wonderful slideshow ode to the humble T-shirt. It's got me itching for our southern hemisphere Spring...
Bad Boys Ink
(Okay, so that header was a reference to a mid-90s boy band, much loved by me for their catchy tunes and by my little sister for their... erm... catchy tunes? I can't recall. I'll have to ask her sometime.)
Anyway, Inked magazine have a fun fashion editorial this month, where they match tattoos to fine tailoring. I hate tatts, but I really like the look.
Anyway, Inked magazine have a fun fashion editorial this month, where they match tattoos to fine tailoring. I hate tatts, but I really like the look.
Fly
Every year in Moscow a group of nutcases get together for Flying Day – a competition where they roll home-made go-karts off a ramp over the Moscow River, and see how far they fly. Time magazine, the serious journal of record that it is, has the photographs.
Five zombies. Four bullets. Two zombies.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote an entire story in just six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." He called it his best work (and it's hard to disagree). To celebrate artistic brevity, Wired magazine ran a collection of six-word stories in late 2006, featuring minor classics like
Kirby had never eaten toes before.
– Kevin Smith
Nevertheless, he tried a third time.
– James P. Blaylock
There were only six words left.
– Gregory Maguire
... and my favourite
Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
– Alan Moore
There's an ever-expanding collection up at SixWordStories.net.
Go there. Waste time. Enjoy yourself.
Kirby had never eaten toes before.
– Kevin Smith
Nevertheless, he tried a third time.
– James P. Blaylock
There were only six words left.
– Gregory Maguire
... and my favourite
Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
– Alan Moore
There's an ever-expanding collection up at SixWordStories.net.
Go there. Waste time. Enjoy yourself.
Dropping The Ball
Portsmouth (and, though it still brings back some dodgy memories, ex-Liverpool) goalkeeper David James (Liverpool fans called him 'Calamity James') has a great blog up at The Guardian (OK, no more brackets from here on) about the financial troubles at Portsmouth. He raises an interesting point: how can a club that's sold £80-million worth of players in the past year be in such dire financial distress?
Signs of the times, I guess...
Average Joe
You've got to hand it to Stephen Sommers. His movies are rubbish, but he knows it... and he has nothing but contempt – contempt, I say! – for movie critics who don't get that. There's a brilliant list of quotes from the GI Joe director up at Movieline. Best of the bunch: "I make the kind of movies critics love to hate. They love dark and depressing movies."
I haven't watched GI Joe yet, but I can only assume that Sommers didn't draw on the old cartoons – or on Cracked's list of Cobra Commander Terror Plots That Might Actually Work – for plotline inspiration.
Rain
Holy crap. And I thought the downpour we had last Tuesday was bad. According to The Big Picture's amazing gallery, Typhoon Morakot dumped 2.5 metres – yes, metres – of rain on Taiwan during its blast through southeast Asia.
Old News
There's a column up at The Guardian by yet another newspaper writer who's desperately trying to fend off obsolescence. I like where he says: "The bogus idea that "news is free information" has captivated a generation of media managers. It is like saying fruit is free food or wind is free energy."
And if I had tuppence for every time I've heard some publishing suit puke out the war cry "Content Is King!" without ever investing in content and without pointing out the difference between Content, Good Content and Crappy Content, there would be no economic downturn and I would be a very rich man.
Wright
Last night my pub quiz team (three cheers for the Beer-Battered Fish!) finished in a disastrous fourth place. We got full marks in History, Film, Arts & Literature and General Knowledge, but we totally tanked the special Guest category: Buildings. As part of my strict (but poorly thought-through) training programme, I've been studying up on buildings for next time.
The Smithsonian magazine had an excellent piece two months ago on the genius architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Slate have followed that up with a slideshow of their own, looking at the beautiful Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Here's hoping they ask about that in the next pub quiz...
Hoops
Amazing what you'll find when you go a-wandering... I stumbled upon a page on the Vandelay Design site listing their 25 favourite photographer portfolio websites. There, halfway down the page, I discovered Hoops Photography, by a guy called Tom Hoops.
His portraits are amazing, and his site is well worth a quick visit.
Tackle
When I played soccer in high school, I had a reputation for my tough tackling (which, I fear, only partially made up for my lack of pace and dodgy left foot). So when I saw this incredible goal by Karlsruhe defender Sebastian Langkamp, my eyes welled up with tears of pride... and a sense of "Hey, I could do that!"
OS
Microsoft have just announced the new logo for their retail stores (it's that blocky eyesore up there), and it got me to thinking about a slideshow story I read about the origins of software logos. I still like the good old Apple logo... but I'm astounded at how bad some software logos are.
Mac OS X? What were they thinking? And Linux? Surely the open source community can do better than that!
Oh, wait. They did.
News
In all the muddled debate about why so many newspapers are being forced to close, it's nice to hear a voice of reason. I'm not sure Probably Bad News (which was recommended to me by my little sister the newshound) is that voice of reason, but it'll do for now.
Dear John
Here's the most moving, most sincere tribute/obit you'll read all year (and it's been a year for obits, hasn't it?). Film-maker John Hughes sounds like the nicest man ever to work in Hollywood.
Bull
I can't believe I missed this: last month The Big Picture ran a (gruesome, in places) gallery of pics from the Festival of San Fermin. Y'know... the one with the running of the bulls?
My favourite pic is the one of the bullfighter. Everything from his sideburns to his name (Juan Jose Padilla) tells you that this man don't take no bull.
Olé.
Uzzle
This month's Smithsonian magazine has a wonderful, whimsical (that's my new favourite pretentious word) piece on this famous photograph from Woodstock. They've tracked down the photographer – the delightfully-named Burk Uzzle (stand aside Wackford Squeers!) – and reunited him with the couple in the picture.
It's a great little story... and it's a great little excuse to have a look through Uzzle's portfolio, which contains some wonderfully whimsical (there's that word again!) portraits of weird Americana.
National Pride
Ever since the Faroe Islands (population: three men and a puffin) beat Austria in their first-ever competitive international soccer match in September 1990 (I remember it like it was yesterday – they had to play in Sweden because there wasn't enough room in the Faroe Islands for a proper soccer field), I've had a strange fascination with small nations and their underdog national soccer teams.
When the USSR splintered into a million little pieces and Yugoslavia disintegrated into a million calls for peace, my soccer logs exploded into life. Suddenly you had unheard-of nations like Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Macedonia, Croatia, my beloved Slovenia, Turkmenistan (I'll write a post about that crazy country one day) and so on and so on. And – because I yam what I yam – I set out to learn every one of those countries' location on the official world map.
Ten years later, Soccernet ran a classic piece about a friendly international between Tibet and Greenland – two countries which, for various reasons, aren't independent on any official world map. I return to that story once every year or so, if only for the you-wouldn't-read-it-anywhere-else line: "Behind the goal, you could buy a hot dog or the Tibetan-English Dictionary of Buddhist Terminology. Revised and Enlarged edition, naturally."
Greenland returned in 2006 for the absolutely mental FIFI Wild Cup: a rebel World Cup organised by German soccer punks FC St Pauli, featuring Greenland, Tibet, Gibraltar, Zanzibar and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus – none of which are recognised by FIFA or any official world maps.
Now I read on the BBC that Easter Island just played their first game, against Colo Colo from Chile.
I'm loving it. And as long as FC Barcelona are the de facto Catalan national side, Athletic Bilbao are – even more so – the de facto Basque national side (there's a post in there too somewhere!), and SC Heerenveen are the de facto national side of my beloved Friesland (with the national flag – pompeblêden and all – as their shirt), I'll be a happy man.
Fade Away
I wanted to write about this amazing dream I had... but, as in this xkcd classic, it's all a blur now.
The Deep
Another great list up on Wired: 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs. I'd forgotten how weird the Narwhal is.
Come to think of it, there are some seriously weird animals lurking under the sea. You've got your dugong (which, from a distance, looks like a large-breasted mermaid), your giant isopod (which looks like the worst kind of bedbug), your Japanese spider crab (which, thanks to a little thing called "deep sea gigantism", is the scariest thing you'll never meet), and your largetooth sawfish (which has a saw at the end of its nose). Let's not even talk about your red-lipped batfish.
Someone once said that the only reason God gave Man dominion over the flocks of the air and the beasts of the earth is because Man would run away screaming like a little girl if he ever encountered the fishes of the sea.
(And if they didn't say it, they probably should have...)
Plots
And there I thought I'd figured it out... Wired have a brilliant Top 10 list – 10 Best Head-Scratching Stories, Explained – which explains, in two lines, the crazy plots of some crazy books/movies/etc. 2001: A Space Odyssey I can accept, and Mulholland Drive I figured out myself. But I'm unconvinced about Blade Runner.
There's also a link in the Comments section, which is worth checking out: Uncomfortable Plot Summaries.
The End
Slate have a week-long, multi-part feature running, called How Is America Going To End?. It's half-depressing, half-amusing... and it's hard to tell how seriously they're actually taking themselves with this project (I'm going with Not Seriously At All). My favourite part is the interactive, Choose Your Own Apocalypse tool, where you can choose from any one of 144 potential causes of America's demise.
I'll take Decadence. (At least it's a fun way to go out...)
The story includes a linke to a list of reasons cited for the fall of Rome. Here I think I'll take one of the B's: backwardness in science, bankruptcy, barbarization, bastardization, blockage of land by large landholders, blood poisoning, bolshevization, bread and circuses, bureaucracy, byzantinism...
Bears In The Wood
I'm two-thirds of the way through reading (reading?) the audiobook of Bill Bryson's A Walk In The Woods, where he writes about his epic hike on the epic Appalachian Trail. It's getting me all itchy-footed and wanderlusty... despite the scary (but funny) bits in Chapter Two about the savage bears of the trail.
Ursus horribilis. The Latin name of the Grizzly Bear pretty much sums it up.
That bit also got me to thinking, though, about the superb Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man, which I watched just a couple of weekends ago. Thinking about them grizzlies, my get-up-and-go just got up and went.
＊
Slate have a great story up on why the big swimming costume hoo-hah is so bad for the sport... and why the sport is in such a bad place in any case. It's like every new world record that anybody sets in the swimming pool should automatically get a big old Barry Bonds-style asterisk next to it.
Mad Men
I'm a huge fan of George Lois, so I suppose I should be a huge fan of Mad Men too, but I got lost in the first season and – as I did with Lost – always kind of regretted it.
I want to have watched the show, without actually watching it. (If you see what I mean...)
I've partly had my wish granted: New York magazine has a slideshow up of everything that's happened in the first two seasons so far.
It's all part of the big Season Three hype, which includes – of all things – this fun Talk Of The Town piece in The New Yorker.
Wackford Squeers
It's not often that a book review is more fun to read than the book, but this might be one of those rare occasions. New York magazine's Sam Anderson has written a scathing – but beautifully written – review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice.
Sample sentence: "Every time he turns around he runs into a key player with a silly name (Japonica Fenway, Trillium Fortnight, Fritz Drybeam, Sauncho Smilax), who proceeds to do a cartoonish turn, dump some helpful exposition, and pass the quirk baton to the next silly name, who repeats the cycle."
Me? I don't so much mind the silly names. When Charles Dickens did silly names, it worked... and the world would be an emptier place without the likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Martin Chuzzlewit and Uriah Heep.
Sample sentence: "Every time he turns around he runs into a key player with a silly name (Japonica Fenway, Trillium Fortnight, Fritz Drybeam, Sauncho Smilax), who proceeds to do a cartoonish turn, dump some helpful exposition, and pass the quirk baton to the next silly name, who repeats the cycle."
Me? I don't so much mind the silly names. When Charles Dickens did silly names, it worked... and the world would be an emptier place without the likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Martin Chuzzlewit and Uriah Heep.
Splash
They've got a gallery up at Best Design Options of 35 Stock Pictures of Water Splashes Sure To Inspire and Cool You Down... which does exactly what it says it will. But I prefer the gallery Dive Right In, at my old favourite The Big Picture.
One of the nice things about living in the southern hemisphere is our summer starts just as the northerners' summer ends. And one of the nice things about living in Africa is that our summer never ends.
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