At an Irish music festival that also featured acts like Massive Attack, The Frames, and Modest Mouse, this performance by a couple of kids (brother and sister) in the open mic tent is the clip that’s going viral.
Also, open mic tent? Awesome idea! Old couch under the tent? Awesome idea.
Anyone out there from the Winnipeg Folk Festival reading this?
Last year, when I discovered that there was a “holiday” known as National Punctuation Day, I was ecstatic.
This year, I am more sedate. But I am still happy. Please, take the opportunity to think about punctuation and to celebrate its proper use. Like other aspects of good grammar, punctuation helps clarify communication. Have you ever had people misinterpret what you are saying or writing? Punctuation helps mitigate that. It’s essential.
Last year, the folks who run NationalPunctuationDay.com asked you to celebrate with meatloaf. This year, it’s a less-delicious, but more-creative exercise: poetry. Specifically, they are asking for your best punctuation-related haikus.
They’ve even got a bunch to start you off:
Serial comma.
What is your philosophy?
To use or not to?Raised by two parens
I’ve been bracketed since youth.
I’m an inside job.Dot dot ellipses
The yada yada of print.
So on and so forth.Punctuate or die.
What is a writer to do?
Good writers will know.
You, too, can enter: Send your best 5-7-5 (syllables, that is) poetry to [email protected] to enter. Haikus received by Sept. 30 are eligible for prizes.
And again this year, I will take the opportunity to highlight these blogs:
No, go out and celebrate the day with some sort of punctuation goodness.
The infamous BP publicity photo above, shows its response to the oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year. It seemed nearly instantaneously after it was release that people noticed it had been digitally altered.
The image on the left is the one they released, replacing the image on the right, which has some blank screens and is presumably less competent for it.
Sometimes, in this age of Photoshop and photorealistic renderings, it seems as if retouching pictures is a purely modern problem. But it’s as old as photography itself.
Here is an excellent site showing a fairly comprehensive history of photo tampering, all the way back to the 1800s.
It’s illuminating.
Personally, although a photograph may “look” real, I think it will be important to develop some critical senses when examining them. Like words, photos can show the truth, or they can show a lie.
It’s not just digital alteration, either, or techniques as simple as cropping. Simply choosing which photo to take, and which not to take, can have a powerful impact on the message that is sent.
It will be interesting, I think, over the next few decades, to see how it develops. I think the near future will see 3-D photography — which will initially be seen as “true-er” because it will be harder to fake. But eventually I think we’ll see photography judged on the same standards we judge paintings and drawings. That is, depending on not just the image represented, but the surrounding context, and how much we trust the image-maker, and on a host of other things.
Three billion of them in every square kilometre, with ladybugs flying a mile high, spiders even higher, and termites taking the crown for high-flyers.
It’s creepy, not quite crawly, technically, but cool.
(Bug Girl, via Boing Boing)
There’s something so now about this story, and how it combines elements of individual desperation, lack of oversight at large corporations, and the collapse of the economy. Lawyer Daniel K. Perlman used to sublet a room from a business that had a suite on the 40th floor of the Empire State Building.
When that business left, though, Perlman stayed. Other tenants got eviction notices from the building. He, somehow, didn’t.
With no one to pay rent to, and vacant offices all around him he kept working. The maintenance people knew him. When his access card stopped working one day, he got another (though it was for a different floor) through a friend.
This lasted for seven months.
Read the whole story at the New York Times (also the source for the picture). I love his attitude, summed up in this quote: “If I’m guilty of anything, I’m guilty of procrastinating.”
Apparently, this clip is from 1949 and the first three minutes focus on Brandon. It’s great to see what the city looked like 60-some years ago, but I can’t help feel a little sad about all the amazing buildings that are no longer standing.
So much has changed, but underneath it all, there is a real consistency. How does the saying go? “The more things change…”
I spent $5 on it, but I don’t think I’ll keep it. At least shipping was free!
Buy your own at Horrible Logos, or for $10, you can get a high-resolution version sent to you (rather than just waiting to have it posted to the site).
In my experience, the response was quick, the customer service non-existent, and the product exactly as advertised. Thanks Horrible Logos!
(I also, in my “special instructions to seller” told him that I expected my $5 to be spent on a horrible beer. I hope he hates it!)
I want to see more of these:
I write this not as a vampire, but as a concerned advocate for health. You should be raising strong, fit children. Do you have any idea what fat does to the taste of blood? I may as well be drinking sap from a log. And where is the thrill of the hunt when the prey topples over so readily?
That’s just a snippet — but I want more! Oh, so do you? Well, head to Something Awful!
The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense can help you figure out exactly which type of ridiculous nonsense that idiot is spewing.
Click on the image for the full-size, or go to Crispian Jago’s blog, where he has this version, a “sanitized version for schools” (oh, how that makes me shudder) as well as translations into multiple languages and several pieces of merchandise (posters and T-shirts and the like).
(thanks Derek)
One of the most unexpected housewarming gifts I’ve ever received was a set of sticky chalkboard-like vinyl tiles that you could put on your wall, or your fridge, or wherever, and write messages on.
I’ve never seen them for sale, though, and I wouldn’t know where to get more. And yet, now I don’t have to — you can make your own. Better than sticky vinyl tile, though, would be these small blocks. And, really, since it’s a DIY project, you can make them whatever size or shape your heart desires (even a heart).
The instructions are so dead-simple they’re practically not instructions at all. The good people at Good Measure have posted it as a Weekend Project, but I suspect it wouldn’t take more than an afternoon. They suggest using 1/4-inch MDF and really, really, really ensuring you have it well-sanded, but aside from that, the only time-consuming part would be waiting for the paint to dry. Four coats of it.
Read up on the project at Good Measure.
According to a mathematical analysis, which calculates how quickly we are discovering new planets, and quickly the are getting closer to being like Earth, one Samuel Arbesman predicts that the likeliest time to discover a habitable planet is early May 2011.
And, we have a 75 per cent chance of such a discovery by the end of 2013.
Of course, still no news on how we might actually get there.
This Hungarian prototype of a new kind of drive system for a bicycle shows off an asymmetric curve that uses a wire instead of a chain to connect the pedals to the rear wheel.
Do I fully understand the design? No. But it sounds as if it has a few really cool advantages:
I am intrigued!
My retro heart beats faster at the look of these playing cards, um, decked out in graphics ripped straight from Atari classics like Breakout, Asteroids and Centipede.
And, they’re only $6.50 at NSCX. Which, I guess, is kind of pricey for a deck of cards. But what price nostalgia?
Yes, I am aware that I am a bit of a typographile. But I can’t help slightly drooling over this letterpressed poster of full-on awesome. They call it a typography anatomy lesson, and it truly is — breaking out every piece of every letter with its proper name.
Here’s a look at the full poster:
They were — were! — on sale for $75 apiece, signed and wax-sealed, but they are sadly, sold out. I hope they do a new run, although I would definitely settle for a print rather than a signed original.
I love the detail, as cited on Ligature, Loop & Stem, where you could have bought one:
Typographers refer to elements of a letterform using a variety of terms that align naturally to architecture or the human body—eye, ear, foot, arm, lobe, leg—and we’ve captured many of them in this modernist-style limited edition print.
Each individually numbered 12″ × 16″ print is reproduced in Toronto by Neil Wismayer at Lunar Caustic Press on 130lb Strathmore Natural White wool finish stock in black and PMS187 red inks. Prints are hand stamped with an official red LL&S wax seal.
There are a number of close-ups (poster porn?) at Flickr, where one of the creators, Grant Hutchinson, has a small photostream.
