Lately, I’ve been on a kick where I’ve been reading (almost exclusively) novels about journalism. There are lots, apparently because many journalists not-so-secretly dream of being novelists.
As soon as I saw this one — “Dwarf Rapes Nun, Flees in UFO” — I knew it would make its way to the top of my list.
Best of all, copies are going for a cool $0.01 on Amazon.
Okay, so I know the FIFA World Cup is on, even though I haven’t watched any of it yet. The thing is, it looks so long. I find the format pretty interesting from a theoretical perspective — where I live, everything’s a round-robin or a double-knockout — and I know it means that early games can be life-or-death for the teams, but my problem is that I don’t really have a team.
I’d love to pick a team and follow it through the tournament, but it’s too possible for any team to get knocked out in the first round. I can’t make an emotional investment with such a high risk of loss. Instead, I suspect I’ll wait for a compelling narrative to emerge (secretly, I’m hoping for a North Korea Cinderella run) before I jump on a bandwagon.
So, in four years’ time, I urge the powers at FIFA to consider an alternative format for the tournament. I propose three-sided soccer.
Firstly, it will level the playing field — all the teams will have to contend with new strategies and unusual situations.
Secondly, it will shorten the tournament — there will have to be a third fewer games. Plus, with one winner and two losers, the cream will rise to the top sooner.
And thirdly, it will introduce a whole new audience to the concept of three-sided soccer.
Look, it’s weird: it’s played on a hexagonal pitch, and the aim of the game is not to score the most goals, but to concede the fewest.
Even more bizarrely, the concept of the game arose out of some kind of Marxist critique of the bipolar, antagonistic nature of class struggle. I’ll let Wikipedia explain it:
It was devised by the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn to explain his notion of triolectics …. The game purports to deconstruct the confrontational and bi-polar nature of conventional football as an analogy of class struggle in which the referee stands as a signifier of the state and media apparatus, posturing as a neutral arbitrator in the political process of ongoing class struggle.
For further reading, there’s a full (?) set of rules here, which calls three-sided soccer “a game of skill, persuasion and psychogeography.” (There’s also a bit in there about the homoerotic nature of regular soccer, and how three-sided soccer disrupts that.)
And, I particularly enjoyed an account of an attempt to actually play the game, organized (if that’s the correct word) by a group of anarchists who used a mental map of the moon to find their playing field:
Mainly, it seems, the skill to trick people from another team into thinking you are going to form an alliance with them …. Embarrassingly, it is one of our representatives who has been so obviously and completely duped. Worse still, it’s me. It has taken a very short time to realise that with three sides playing one is going to be picked on. It is us.
Both the other two groups press towards our goal, indulging in an orgy of free-scoring libertarian collectivism.
Yes, I think this would be a great addition to the next World Cup. Perhaps as a qualifier?
Perspective, as you probably know but might not be able to define, is the way that objects appear to the eye based on their size, shape and distance from the observer.
Most commonly, you’ll know that things appear smaller as they get further away. If you draw, you’ll know about the “vanishing point” — the imaginary point at which all parallel lines appear to converge.
Now imagine that the vanishing point isn’t way out by the horizon, but that your perspective is flipped — so that the vanishing point is somewhere behind you.
Things would, in this reverse perspective, appear larger the further away they were, and they would appear to shrink as they approached.
In Byzantine art, this idea was used to give the illusion of God’s perspective — that the omnipotent diety is looking out from everywhere, rather than scanning from a single point.
Now, here’s a video — possibly the first reverse-perspective video. It’s cool:
(via Boing Boing)
Apparently, salt is zombie powder. Watch what happens when you sprinkle salt on freshly-skinned frogs legs:
Now, I could make a couple of educated guesses as to why or how this happens*, but it’s still freaky. As one YouTube commenter wrote: “Please do a video on human legs.”
____
* If I recall correctly, sodium can cause a cascading neural reaction. That’s basically how nerves work.
I have vague memories of seeing a news video, once, of a one-armed man typing on a keyboard. At various times in my life, I’ve emulated that behaviour — usually while trying to instant message someone and simultaneously eat a burrito.
Now, it is suggested that a half-size keyboard could solve my problems — just the left-half, mind you. Apparently, you can learn (quickly) to type with half a keyboard. You press the spacebar to switch between halves.
Yes, yes, it sounds confusing.
Give it a try at this demo, here.
Personally, I’m not convinced. Granted, I only tried it for a bit, but it felt clumsy and difficult. Perhaps I could re-train my brain, or perhaps I am too old for new tricks. Or perhaps it’s because I don’t properly touch-type to begin with. But other users seem to take to it right away.
I’d be curious to hear other responses.
If you like this kind of thing (and I do) you’ll love the story of a 1950s psychologist who took three people — each of them convinced that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ — and made them live together.
Then, he subtly messed with them. All in the name of “science.”
Oh, it couldn’t possibly be ethical. And he didn’t learn anything — except, perhaps, that Jesusii will come to fisticuffs, the Golden Rule notwithstanding.
You can buy a whole book, “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti“, or you can read about it at Slate:
Leon seems to waver, eventually asking to be addressed as “Dr Righteous Idealed Dung” instead of his previous moniker of “Dr Domino dominorum et Rex rexarum, Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doctor, reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” [The psychologist] interprets this more as an attempt to avoid conflict than a reflection of any genuine identity change.
The Christs explain one another’s claims to divinity in predictably idiosyncratic ways: Clyde, an elderly gentleman, declares that his companions are, in fact, dead, and that it is the “machines” inside them that produce their false claims, while the other two explain the contradiction by noting that their companions are “crazy” or “duped” or that they don’t really mean what they say.
This is odd — thousands of feral bunnies are roaming around the University of Victoria campus.
According to the Montreal Gazette, there is a brewing war between the bunny lovers and the bunny haters about what to do with the animals:
Leaders of the protect-the-bunnies movement claim the university is secretly killing rabbits at night and that there are “poison boxes” on the grounds. Bunny supporters claim that officials have only paid lip-service to trap and sterilize programs as they always regarded a massive slaughter as the final solution.
“The University of Victoria has been for years conducting a misinformation campaign in order to justify their killing of abandoned domestic rabbits on campus,” said animal rights activist Roslyn Cassells.
“Betrayal is the order of the day at the University of Victoria, where a large-scale nighttime shooting of over 1,000 abandoned pet rabbits is imminent,” Cassells said in a recent e-mail to the media.
But the university’s facilities management director Tom Smith denies the activists’ claims.
“I think it’s an effort to draw attention to it through sensationalism,” he said. “I don’t think this would be happening if it was snakes.”
There is no secret cull, no poison boxes, no nighttime sharpshooters and no plan for a mass extermination, Smith said.
And there will always be a place for rabbits on campus, he added.
But the university does want to have rabbit-free zones in sch areas as the playing fields — where students have tripped in rabbit holes — and the grass outside residences, which is now black with rabbit feces.
“It’s where students used to lie and study outside. They can’t do that anymore because of the feces,” Smith said.
Oh my. The paper says the university has spent about $100,000 over the past three years cleaning up various bunny-related damage.
It’s actually much, much more interesting to watch than it sounds like:
In some of the clips, the bulbous, pulsating sacs of water look a lot like what I imagine water would look like in zero-gravity situations, floating around, held together only by surface tension.
Also, seeing the reactions before the impact is kind of cool.
It is difficult for me to believe that these have never before been invented, but there you go — there’s something new under the sun.
Anyway, if you’ve ever dreamed of walking with reverse knees like a horse or goat, you can strap a pair of Weta Legs on, and go to ‘er. For about a thousand bucks.
Gothamist has a great story, um, digging into the rumour that there exist hidden tunnels underneath New York City that exist solely for the purpose of herding cattle. Yes, you heard me right:
According to Edible Geography, historian Betty Fussel discovered that cattle traffic was so heavy in the 1870s that a tunnel was built to increase the flow to slaughterhouses along 12th Avenue and 34th Street. The underground passages were eventually made redundant when refrigerated train cars were introduced, but they’re rumored to still be there!
There’s one reference to the tunnel from 1997, when author Brian Wiprud wrote about “watching a crew install a drainage basin on Greenwich Street when they came upon a wall of wood about ten feet down. A laborer went into the hole with a torch and came out saying it was an oak-vaulted tunnel ten feet wide by eight feet high that trailed off an undetermined distance in either direction. It was then that an old man from the neighborhood stepped up to the trench and said, ‘Why, I see you found the cattle tunnel.’”
An “oak-vaulted tunnel ten feet wide by eight feet high” which may run for several blocks would certainly, I think, become a major tourist attraction. Cities like Moose Jaw (the Tunnels of Moose Jaw and their tenuous connection to Al Capone) and Seattle (tired of the flooding, the city raised the streets a full storey, turning first-floor display windows into basements) have already capitalized on underground attractions.
New York City, by the way, ha had recent success turning an abandoned elevated rail track into a park (the High Line), so one wag on the Gothamist site suggested turning these tunnels into the “Low Line” — which is doubly funny when you think of cows lowing.
Urban exploration of this sort has long fascinated me. I remember living in Toronto and never quite finding the time to go looking for one of its famed, forgotten subway stations. I regret now that I never did.
I can’t really explain it. Here’s a video:
It’s actually a game mod, and you can read all about it at GameInformer. Go to that link if the video doesn’t work, too.
UPDATE: Okay, the video doesn’t embed very well. go to the link. It’s …. oddly nostalgic.
WARNING: If you’re in any way skittish about nudity or sexual content, just skip this whole post.
So, you’re not sure what perfume you should use. Perhaps you have heard of natural pheromones? Like, really natural? Try this on for size:
Or, check out the pornography at it’s official website, SmellMeAnd.com.
But whatever you do, absolutely do not miss the interview at Vice magazine.
(via Adfreak and Copyranter. Thanks, Ryan!)
Give this video all three minutes that it deserves.
It’s by Cyriak, who calls it one of his “creative brain-spillages” and claims, “I am … from 100 years into the future, where I have been exhumed and sent backwards in time via cyberspace in order to welcome you to the unabridged contents of my brain-damaged imagination.”
(Via the Daily What)
So, knowing that the Canadian women curlers were playing a tough gold-medal match against Sweden — and that they were up against it in extra ends — but without any TV in my house, I checked a couple of websites to find out what the final result was.
Sadly for my patriotism, Canada lost 7-6 to Sweden.
Annoyingly, though, I clicked through three separate news sites that all had a variation on the same headline: “Settle for silver.” I guess they had to come up with something quickly — and at least they didn’t use “Silver lining” — but it still made a mockery of the idea of the Internet as a cacophony of different voices.
So I did a quick Google News search: “Settle for silver” and “Silver lining” each brought back a huuuuuge number of news articles — but crazily, they “… and 5,350 more” bit at the end was the exact same number. Does Google News max out at a certain amount of news?
So I checked “Good as gold.” Yup, precisely 5,350 more articles.
Weird. I refreshed it a couple of times, and the number changed, but each time I refreshed the page, the number changed slightly — but each search refreshed to the same number.
My favourite was when there was exactly 5,678 articles left. I felt like I was on the Sesame Street version of Google News.
So, the upshot? Either Google News arbitrarily stops searching after about 5,000 articles have been found, assuming (probably correctly) that you don’t need that much news, or frighteningly every single sports cliché is used exactly the same number of times.
I hesitate to Google “Gave it 110%”
Gordon Lightfoot, a singer and Canadian icon. Not dead. Although, for an hour or so earlier this month, everyone thought he was.
Starting with one single tweet — “RIP Gordon Lightfoot” — the false news was picked up, retweeted, and amplified until it hit the mainstream media (all of which took a mere 10 minutes, frighteningly).
Lightfoot himself, apparently on his way to a dentist appointment when he heard the news of his own demise on the radio, was actually alive and well, and everything was quickly cleared up.
Now, though, the author of that first tweet — let’s call her Tweeter Zero — has written an essay in the Globe and Mail about how the whole thing got started, and how it brought the wrath of the internet down on her:
By the time I went back online, Gordon Lightfoot was officially undead (phew!) and the witch hunt was on (uh-oh!). Media guru and sleuth Ian Capstick was hot on my trail, and even had my picture and the dreaded tweet in question on his blog. Commenters were gleefully posting personal information about me: my full name, where I lived, whom I worked for. So I did what anybody in my situation would do. I opened a bottle of wine, and began to drink.
(Full disclosure: I was briefly acquainted with the aforementioned Mr. Capstick during my days at Canadian University Press.)
Lest you think the poor Tweeter Zero is fully to blame, she broadcast the message only to her meagre 100 Twitter followers, and she blames the origination of the whole episode on a telephone prank call (“But nobody seems to be interested in him. He used the telephone. And dude, that’s just so 20th century.”)
A lesson, perhaps, in the power and speed of the information superhighway.
Now, we came not to bury Gordon Lightfoot, but to praise him: