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I'm finally feeling brave enough to link to my newest blog, simply called Another. Initially, it was meant to be a diary, a dumping grounds for posts that felt too personal and self-indulgent to inflict on this Cup's readership. But the new blog changed genres and became something more specific when I realized that the only posts I'm hesitant to put here are the ones dealing with depression; and so, Another became a "literary" mental health blog, focusing on the relationship between writing and depression, but also linking to abstracts of clinical studies, essays about therapy, and reviews of recent and relevent books.
Some posts that may (or may not) appeal to this Cup's readers include
Over the past two days, I've deleted more than 100 blog comments by spammers. But, rather than think on the time wasted by my DIY resistance to MT-Blacklist, I prefer to finally acknowledge that spammers are some of my most loyal and bright comment-ers. More importantly, no other group of writers is so devoted to the art of the aphorism -- trying to revive it and reintroduce it to popular culture. Here, the aphorisms posted by spammers in only the past twenty-four hours:
Advertising
-Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission.
Dreams
-Both dreams and people crash down.
Ethics
-Ethics is not necessarily the handmaiden of theology.
Foresight
-People who do not think far enough ahead inevitably have worries near at hand.
Freedom
-You are free and that is why you are lost.
-He who gives up freedom for security deserves neither.
Friends
-The shifts of Fortune test the reliability of friends.
Genius
-Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.
Gifts & Giving
-One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
-There is no benefit in the gifts of a bad man.
Gratitude
-Gratitude is born in hearts that take time to count up past mercies.
-Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
Humility
-The professor makes the syllabus, not you.
Ideas
-Ideas on Earth are badges of friendship or enmity.
Inertia
-Inertia is not limited to matter.
Knowledge
-The important thing isn't doing, but knowing how you do it.
-You cannot learn without already knowing.
Life
-Often the test of courage is not to die, but to live.
Love
-With love comes strange currencies.
-'Love -- a grave mental disease.' Plato
Mind
-'Of course' is cyanide of the mind.
Morality
-Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right.
Newness
-Newness is relative.
Other
-That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
Pain
-Anyone can learn from pain.
Passion
-To be a human without passion is to be dead.
People
-Don't worry that other people don't know you; worry that you don't know other people.
-There are no weird people - some just require more understanding.
-People are just smart enough to not be happily ignorant.
-People are exponentially funnier when they're in rant mode.
Prosperity
-When prosperity comes, do not use all of it.
Religion
-Believing in God does not require believing in religion.
Speech
-Only when we have nothing to say do we say anything at all.
Tolerance
-Please remember that the labels are your own.
Travel
-A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.
Virtue
-Virtue never stands alone. It is bound to have neighbors.
Wisdom
-Some nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
World
-The world is a beautiful book for those who can read it.
It's hard to know when a link's too old to post, and the longer you think about it, the older it gets. So, I've devised a quick formula for calculating lit links' freshness:
(P ÷ 10) ÷ (DL + C),
where P is the number of pages you've read of the author (or genre) profiled, quoted, or excerpted in the linked-to page; D is the number of days since the link first appeared on a weblog that you read; L is the cumulative number of lines in posts about the link; and C is the number of comments left on those posts. If the resulting number is equal to or greater than 1, the link is fresh enough to post. If the resulting number is < 1, posting the link will broadcast that your blog is the web equivalent of a) a 20-something who recaps episodes of Friends to his family over his cellphone, b) a LES-er who just took up smoking, or c) a mother in a high school carpool who sings along to hip-hop and wears chunky-soled sandals with capris.
An example: I noticed earlier this week that TMFTML had linked to an essay by James Hynes, the author of Publish or Perish. I've read (and liked) P or P, so P is 335. D is 3, L is 7, and C is 4. Plugging the numbers into the formula, I get 1.34. And I'm good to go!
links catch-upmedia
-'Apprentice' manages mythic, cheesy finale / Bill Gets the Job on 'The Apprentice' / Apprentice After Party
-Twins are copies and so are their films
-"The runner-up in the competition admitted during her interview that her proudest achievement was founding a program pairing 'stray animals with stray children'": Amy's Robot watches Miss USA.
-"The Hung craze has arrived on the heels of a cinematic season seemingly devoted to emasculating Asian males."
-band name origins
-celebrities-eating.com (via New Yorkish)
-Jennifer Garner's yearbook photo
-The Cinetrix, for the benefit of those without Wall Street Journal subscriptions, quotes from a WSJ article on "Machinima," "an emerging genre of low-budget videogame-generated films." More on Machinima here, here, and here.
blogs + web things
-Sharpeworld's back
-A9 combines Google results with Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" service.
-And now Google does the same?
-Also: a 3D search engine
-RSS feeds for your favorite ebay searches
-unconscious mutterings, a free association meme
more
-Chinese ice sculptures
-pigments through the ages
-Frankfurt Artist Marie Krebs has designed a uterus room for expectant parents to crawl into. (via quasimeta)
-TieGate! and The Bush Press Conference Response Generator
-Cicada: The other, other white meat
-What songs should you avoid when driving?
the art-of-factwriting
-Spike Magazine interviews J G Ballard.
-On the Nature of Literary Friendship, A Web Del Sol series (last two via Rake's Progress)
-Alice Hoffman writes on fairy tales for the Washington Post
-The Boston Globe looks at the American Library Association's "Celebrity READ" poster series and suggests alternate book selections for the celebs. (last two via bookslut)
-Maud quotes from a great exchange between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson.
-Slate's Jack Shafer, on the Pulitzers, asks "Who cares?" and Ed answers, "Who cares about Jack Shafer?"
-Meanwhile, Terry describes and comments on the runners-up for the Pulitzer drama prize. On Omnium Gatherum: "In an inept attempt at subtlety, each guest is made to say one or two things inconsistent with his or her caricature—though somebody ought to tell the authors that making the fey Brit a raving Israel-hater was more accurate than they might have guessed."
-remains of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's plane have been found (via TMFTML)
art
-a surprisingly serious conversation on art criticism at TMFTML
-art by J.S. Rossbach (via Mock Turtle Soup)
-art by Jean-Jacques Gaude (via Penny Dreadful)
-art by rabotando (?) (via neurastenia)
-photography by Petr Salek (via cipango)
web and tech
-play the Kinja music digest
-share your Netflix queue
-your phone can alert you when friends are nearby
other
-Gymnast's Skills Save Him in Fourth-Floor Fall
-The Kingdom of Loathing
-Totally Ick.
lit links latermusic, tv, film
-Largehearted boy, truly largehearted, has rounded up a great collection of mp3 downloads that includes a hard-to-find Morrissey and Siouxsie Sioux duet.
-Dahlia Lithwick writes on "Average Joe, Adam Returns": "There is, for one thing, an odd National Geographic vibe to the new show, mostly in the resemblance between the cooped-up female contestants and their cousins, the orangutans; both devote relentless hours to fighting and grooming each other."
-Celebs pick their all-time favorite films for The Guardian.
-ABC's adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (a childhood favorite) premieres May 15. (via GirlHacker)
-The Black Table looks back at Kurt Cobain. (My response reading it: something like this.)
tech and computer stuff
-Playfair decodes purchased iTune songs into regular AAC Audio Files. (via boing boing)
-Vivienne Westwood Moto phone (via ashleyb)
-Mac OS X icons (via angiemckaig)
more
-"He says he now has a happy marriage, although, like many ex-gays, his opposite-sex attraction has so far been confined to his wife." (quote and link via Emma)
-Queen Stone and Prince TMFTML
-Suicide Girls to become a magazine
-Sarah reminds me that my family members aren't very good Jews. Twenty or so years ago, my grandmother wrote her own Haggadah, which is sweet and all, but it accidentally calls pork "kosher." Also, no one ever told me that on Passover even your medications should be kosher. I guess that's a subtlety best addressed, though, after removing the porkchops from the table.
Enter Tiffany Alana Stone, a literary disciple of the legendary Jack Kerouac, a professional Hollywood script reader, and unofficial queen of the ever-growing world of the Internet web logs, or blogs as they have come to be known……Enter Tiffany Stone, a graduate with a bachelor of arts in writing and literature from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., a school founded by the poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg…
…Enter the real Tiffany Stone.
I have to tell you, this article kind of makes me feel like I'm at a gang bang. (link via TMFTML)
UPDATE: I should have read the comments at TMFTML first.
UPDATE 2: And I shouldn't have started reading Tiffany's blog. Because nothing hurts like a bad writer describing your family's restaurant. Don't read it. I'll pass along the highlight: a link to someone else's post on the property's previous life as mob hangout. (This little bit of history continues to induce ghost sightings among waitstaff and family.)
A couple days ago, I skimmed an article (available here) on spammers' festive spirit; they love celebrating holidays, adjusting email subject lines to each holiday's theme and mood. But I'm not convinced spam couldn't still be better, especially comment spam, which I've become something of an expert in over the past year.
Each month, the art of comment spamming improves, but never enough to convince me that the spam's not spam. Shouldn't that be the point? I mean, why embrace honesty and self-disclosure, when you're hawking spyware and penis enlargement pumps?
This past month's improvements have been commendable, revealing a new awareness of theme and relevancy. I'm, at least, now getting spam about books and movies. But, still, they're not fooling anyone:
It makes me think of something prozac out of High Fidelity, which paxil is a movie I liked, although soma a part of that is certainly olimpositaca because it was a movie about, cialis partially for, and potentially levitra by, music people. I want tramadol to read the book it was adapted ambienI don't know why they ruined an otherwise almost-coherent sentence with "olimpositaca" (Is that some kind of territorial marker, like dog piss or graffiti? Like, Yo, the olimpositaca spamgang's been here?) But the real problem, like I've said, is the total transparency of spam's attempts at trickery. They need to be more Crying Game, not having their goods hang out while thinking a cheap wig's going to trick you. Comment spam should be so good that it's indistiguishable from other comments, so good that any non sequiter or grammatical mistake will immediately prompt suspicion among the other comment-ers.
And so, that brings me to the real point of this post. This month, have spam comments finally gotten that good?
While I was sleeping, spam killed my hotmail account. If you sent me an email and it bounced, try again now.
(By the way, the TV's on in the background, and I just heard an ad for The Girl Next Door. It was one of those interview dazed non-critics leaving the theatre ads, which is always a bad sign. But worse yet, the quote the ad chose to end on was, "The previews don't really do it justice." I guess all standards are relative, but relative to a movie's past publicity?)
tongue snapping dry roof soundsIf I post again today, it will probably be sometime in the evening. And while most of the links I've got queued up for posting require some context or commentary, there are a few I can just throw out quickly:
-We hate Choire.
-Metafilter post goes blah blah blah Chuck Palahniuk.
-I feel okay putting off an investigation into what this link's about until tomorrow.
-Something on libraries.
-RP stumbles across a large mp3 archive of lit-related recordings.
Reserved for later: some TT linkage, commentary on all the lit bloggers filling their heads with big ideas, some excerpts from a wonderful book I'm reading, and what converting to my newly founded religion would entail of you. No. Yes. I'm a little serious. Some nice man emailed Cup with a request to start a cult for him to join, and I don't think it was spam. Oh, also, I've an article on spamming strategies that I'd like to respond to. But for now, a time-bridge of ellipses…
I've noticed that comments have been trailing off lately, despite an unprecedented abundance of offensive posts. To bring us up to date: I announced that Disney creatures have issued a fatwa on young children, had fun with the idea of both fat people and teens falling to their deaths, played my part in ignoring the reality of Africa's AIDS crisis, conflated blonde hair with a love for Nazis, laughed at people trying to find help in the privacy of their jail cells, placed the (probably very nice) CEO of Montblanc North America on silk sheets, and spun him round an ultra lux ass fulcrum, and, finally, said that I think happy third-worlders are, well, "gross."
People who read my blog regularly know that I'm usually more sensitive and caring. But I haven't had a good night sleep in weeks and the result is a tipsy, continual, public handling of a funny boner that, like my penis, is imaginary and only funny in that oh-gross way. If you don't depress this recent mania with a load of frightening, antagonistic, or senseless comments, I can't return as quickly to writing
-depressing riffs on my inability to finish books
-numbered lists of the numerous misreadings of canonical philosophy implied by reality TV
-and earnest apologies tomorrow for thinking any posts here merited re-reading, though at the time it was obvious I was only pretending to not find myself funny at 3:30 am so you could tell me that I do, using as your evidence the fact that self-reflexive commentary is always-already self-satisfied and juvenile, though more typically male in its psychology, because men are more likely to think you won't notice their self-deprecation isn't the sound of verterbrae snapping as they attempt self-fellatio -- much like the delusion that endless defensive joking implies self-awareness rather than a stunted self-esteem overcompensated for by unnaturally long sentences.
Thanks, everyone, for your submissions to Cup of Chicha’s “keywords that brought you here” contest. Over the past year, we’ve received thousands of creative, intriguing, and unabashedly candid entries, but sadly, not all of them could make the cut. To allow for as many winners as possible, though, we’ve created several new categories, including Don’t Come Back*, You Tell Yourself That, and Just Not Going to Happen. Thanks again for your hits, and feel free (*except for you) to enter the 2005 contest, starting (…hold on…) now.
CUP OF CHICHA'S “KEYWORDS THAT BROUGHT YOU HERE” CATEGORIES AND WINNERS
Best Typo
first place:
pubic humiliations (1, Google)
Just Not Going to Happen
first place:
contest for johnny depp (1, Google)
runners up:
sofia coppola address (3, Google)
nell freudenberger nude (12, Google)
lemony snicket nude (1, Google)
chuck palahniuk literary canon (4, Yahoo)
We’ll Look Into That
first place:
cheatsheet writing a novel (1, Google)
runners up:
gifts for narcissists (1, Google)
anthropomorphic implants (1, Google)
celebrities with shared psychotic disorder (2, Google)
do men like pubic hair (2, Google)
where do mfas work (1, Google)
Most Delightfully Gay
first place:
what male fairy are you quiz (2, Google)
Search Requests Most Likely to Gain Our Sympathy
first place:
jonathan safran foer loathsome (3, Google)
runners up:
she needed a cigarette (3, Google)
ptsd christina britney (1, Google)
i don t care about ben marcus (1, Google)
Best Example of Honesty
first place:
penis size doesn t matter aphorisms (1, Google)
Best Reminders to Take Our Medication
first place:
internet suicide novel (1, Google)
runners up:
do you ever fully recover from a nervous breakdown (1, Google)
what good is intelligence if you can t discover a useful melancholy (1, Google)
examples of hobbies and manic depressives (1, Yahoo)
pulling all nighter cigarettes (1, Google)
sometimes i want to cry (3, Google)
suicide via helium (1, Google)
shower psychology breakdown (1, Google)
life is horrible (9, Google)
my heart hurts (23, Google)
all things bleak and sordid (2, Google)
Suggestions for the Name of Our First Novel
first place:
encyclopedia of girls kissing (1, Yahoo)
runners up:
slobs in airports (3, Google)
horrible poopy ghost (2, Google)
Sounds Most Unpleasant
first place:
amputee dorm disease (1, Google)
runner up:
sex and the city syndrome (2, Google)
Proof that Cup of Chicha is the Web’s No.1 Authority on Evil Animals
first place (tie):
dolphins and satan or evil (1, Google)
fear that somewhere somehow a duck is watching you (6, Google)
runners up:
feral chihauhaus (5, Google)
sammy the killer squirrel (1, Google)
electrocuting squirrels (3, Google)
lifelike squirrel attack (1, Google)
Best Turn of Phrase (That We Think Was Ours)
first place:
unibrow crosshatch (12, Google)
Yeah, You Tell Yourself That
first place:
bipolars are genius and creative (1, Google)
Subcultures, Fetishes, and Procedures We Were Previously Unaware of
first place:
egoless porn (1, Google)
runners up:
toe shortening (4, Google)
smoking peanut shells and its effects (2, Google)
sneezing fetish stories (1, Google)
medical fetish injections (2, Google)
Best Examples of Knowing What You Want and Going For It
first place (tie):
chastity devices home built (3, Google)
streisand look a like porn film (2, Other)
runners up:
kelly osbourne feet pics (8, Google)
pictures of self cunnilingus (4, Google)
tennessee albino midgets (1, Google)
hermaphrodite hair braid pics (1, Google)
bea arthur smoking (3, Google)
in jungle animal fuck the pregnant women (2, Google)
scooby doo story erotic (1, Google)
anthropomorphic porn (2, Google)
tina fey barefoot (2, Google)
sexy meat dumpling (3, Google)
nudist new years eve party los angeles (2, Google)
fantasy photos of mermaids sexy (1, Google)
stiletto amputee (2, Google)
picture of identical twin boys fucking each other (5, Google)
If your search request is listed here Don’t Come Back
first place:
how to send my teen to german nudist camp (1, Google)
runners up:
freeze dry taxidermy dog (4, Google)
toddlers raped pics (2, Google)
sodomized my sister (2, Google)
platter woman head fantasy (1, Google)
pictures of carson daly s chest (2, Google)
bear rape trainer 27 inch penis (1, Google)
breakable girls porn (1, Other)
sexy cannibalism (3, Google)
very little girl fucking (1, Google)
If your search request is listed here We See Right Through You. (Don’t Come Back.)
first place:
poetry gang raped by boyfriends (1, Google)
runners up:
teenage nude art models beauty appreciation (1, Google)
family fun nudist pictures (1, Google)
educational photos of red pubic hair (1, Google)
horny old child (1, Google)
And to the Googler who got here with the search phrase "fake erotic guillotine execution," you didn't win any awards, but we do happen to have a hotel recommendation for you.
cutting the internet into links; snortinglit-related
-John Updike's won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his story collection, The Early Stories. "What signal is being sent here about the state of American fiction?" asks the Lit Saloon. "…Its contents were all previously published -- the newest story almost three decades ago (and some half a century ago)." Meanwhile, Rake's Progress quotes from Nicholson Baker's U&I: "…and I was stunned to recognize that in Updike we were dealing with a man so naturally verbal that he could write his fucking memoirs on a ladder!"
-The NY Times reports on Anne Fadiman's departure from The American Scholar. "[John Churchill, the publisher of the journal] declined to specify what changes the society envisioned for the journal, saying only that Ms. Fadiman's successor would be asked to reduce a budget deficit of about $250,000 by 50 percent."
-The NY Times finally gets around to Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli. (Btw, I didn't know Andrew has a twin brother, an unpublished novelist. Given their identical DNA, do you think Andrew's success gives the brother hope, or suicidal ideations?)
-Ralf Zeigermann (aka, the Cartoonist) has updated his page of Finnegans Wake illustrations.
media
-Pocket movies, clips designed for your Pocket PC or Smartphone.
-Another lame Virginia Heffernan piece, this time about Kerry's appearance on MTV's "Choose or Lose." (I've always hated the vacant young person finally confronts politics and feels something trope, which V-Heff uses to frame this piece. Its last sentence, piggybacking on its first: "Somewhere, the girl in the red sweatshirt is nodding with great intensity, furrowing her young brow for the first time." Oh, give me a fucking break.)
-I don't think she looks good.
more, other
-test your site's readability
-eblots: cut rate internet therapy
-vintage toy collection
-another instance of creepy food anthropomorphism
-It's an easy transition from being "quirky children" to being "quirkyalones." "George has an unusual obsession — the vacuum cleaner. 'We have photos of him hugging it at 6 months of age,' the authors write."
i took my first adderall 30 minutes ago and, so far, nothin' doin'books and lit
-In the "Bards of Bromley," William Wordsworth, George Eliot, August Strindberg, Goethe, and A. A Milne are forced to suffer the indignities of a writing workshop. Listen here. (via …something slant)
-The NY Times profiles Anne Carson
-The Guardian reviews Mirror, Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection.
-The Literary Saloon reports on Alicia Keys' literary ambitions. : (
media
-handicapping the remaining apprentices
-related: NY Times piece on casting the second season of "The Apprentice"
other
-Wilo's Laws. "1.3 If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there's a misunderstanding."
-artist paints an iceberg red
-PowerPoint to the people
quick hitslit
-"Some of the UK's best-known writers are to give budding authors the chance to write endings for their short stories." (via Maud)
-The Literary Saloon reports that Alain Robbe-Grillet has been elected to the Académie française.
-The Reading Experience hates on the NYRB.
media
-The NY Times' Heffernan spews nonsense on "America's Next Top Model."
-at New Yorkish: Honest Movie Posters
-Law and Artier
-I didn't realize Chaise, a digital arts magazine, was run by Brown seniors I've had classes with. Congrats, guys.
more
-Lindsayism's new design is awesome.
-iPods in 20 different colors.
-what people have done to their babies' ultrasound pictures (via idle type)
hyper leekslit
-Golden Rule Jones rounds up links to sites and articles about writers' homes.
-Gillian Slovo rereads Anna Karenina. Slovo's new novel, The Ice Road, is coming out soon and, based on this piece, I'll make sure not to read it. (link via bookslut)
-The London News Review has launched a book blog. (via TMFTML)
-The NY Times looks at Ma Yan's Diary: The Daily Life of a Chinese Schoolgirl, "which has sold 45,000 copies in France and has already appeared in eight languages in addition to French."
-IMPAC shortlist
-Pulp.net (via Sarah's Confessions)
film, music, tv
-Mischa Barton's iTunes playlist, with commentary by Uncle Grambo
-Yohanna is America's Next Top Model, aka Tyra's indentured servant. Meanwhile, Elyse, my favorite contestant from last year's season, has written an article for Bust magazine, available here.
-Britney, My Tanned Lady. (via the blueprint)
(-You're right. They do.)
other
-Standard Deviance relays -- and suggests -- new uses for pregnant women.
-Scientists calculate how high heels can go. You tall women don't know how fucking important this research is. (via kottke's remaindered links)
-Which Completely Random Person are You? (via Confessions)
One of the largely unacknowledged difficulties of keeping a weblog is properly timing your posts: on the one hand, you can only post when you have time, and, on the other hand, a links and commentary weblog must be timely. And by timely, I mean both new and under-blogged; you have to catch a link before it's gone mainstream, and that can happen in the span of several hours.
Throw in depression, outside commitments like oversleeping, and blogging starts to require the reflexes of an athlete. Act fast, or lose the inning. You can collect all the interesting links in the world at 5 am, too tired to paste them in MT, but too guilty over all your various forms of unproductivity to stop reading and fall asleep. But when you wake up at 2 PM and all those people doing under-cover blogging at their workplace snagged your bookmarked links in the AM, you realize: the laziness and procastination-tendencies that originally made blogging so appealing don't make you a good blogger. You can't procastinate procastination. Or you can, but it feels mighty shitty knowing you're too lazy or tired to even do your procastination properly. On that note, I'm going to finally start writing my promised review of the now-untimely Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…
Poor Viagra. She didn't understand why, despite all her compliments on people's posts, she always found her comments deleted when she checked back for responses.
sleeping doesn't helpI'll add to this list as the day progresses.
lit
-David Cronenberg is set to direct an adaptation of Martin Amis' London Fields. (via Gothamist)
-The Howling Fantods bring more news on David Foster Wallaca's upcoming story collection, Oblivion. (via Rake's Progress) (Also, looks like DFW's The Broom of the System is getting reissued on Oblivion's release date.)
-The Reading Experience rounds up new or little-known lit-centric weblogs. Among them: Inside the Missouri Review, Spurious, and Long Pauses.
-"An analysis published in Berlin says that [Nabokov's] Lolita … was originally the creation of a leading Nazi journalist." (via moorish girl)
music
-Magnetic Fields: new album and tour dates
-Nick Drake rarities and remixes to be released, May 24 (via the fold drop)
-"Beginning May 24, Morrissey is confirmed to appear for an entire week on CBS' 'The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn.'" (via the blueprint)
other
-SBaGen is freeware (for Windows, Mac and Linux) that affects brain waves. "Four bands" are available: "Delta - deep sleep, Theta - dreaming and intuitive stuff, Alpha - awake, focussed inside, Beta - awake, focussed outside."
-Mind Balance: a video game that turns brain waves into movements. "If the Mawg slips to the right, the participant can help shift the creature’s balance back to the left by staring at the orb flickering on the left-hand side of the screen. The subsequent change in brainwave electrical activity is detected by the system as a VEP, and transformed into a one-dimensional analog control axis that can be used to get the Mawg back on track." (via btang phlog)
-I want my second language to be Vampire.
-PSA: might as well not drink Dasani.
I've been wondering why, given the constant increase of spam coments on my site, I don't give in and install MT Blacklist. But then I realized spam comment-hunting has become, for me, an online duckhunt. I paste in an IP address, click to add it to my list of banned IPs, and it's like Pow, a bird shot dead.
dwarf and midget linkslittle lit
-Jessica Lee Jernigan reviews Hotel World and interviews its author, Ali Smith. Meanwhile, the NY Times reviews Smith's latest, The Whole Story and Other Stories in today's "Books in Brief."
-The Seven Basic Plots, by John Leary
-lit on your iPod (last 2 via Maud )
-Dennis Lim's Codex scores good reviews in the NY Times and Village Voice
-In the Guardian (which now requires registration, Godfuckit), "writer Sarah Champion gives an exclusive account of how it feels to be mistaken for the notorious 'Belle de Jour'"
-Sara Nelson writes for the Observer on The Sleeping Father's dark horse success.
-The New York Review of Books looks at Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.
art projects
-the untitled project: text scrubbed from photos
-World of Awe, reviewed in the NY Times
-Michael Kenna 's photography
-Jeff Bohlander's retro collages
more
-firsthand accounts of Ph.D.'s on landing jobs and working in academe
-Stereogum posts 2 tracks from Modest Mouse's latest album
-taxonomy, with illustrative links, of online loser-types
-Resonant Frequencies and the Human Brain
-dwarf and midget cats
-celebrity yearbooks
I left New York at 6 am, having only slept an hour -- the night before that, three. And as the plane crossed half the country, sinking and rising in slow cycles, I fell into dreams, and was lifted from them by new altitude. In my dreams, I woke up to the plane setting down in Iowa, but I couldn't move, so limp from fatigue. And then I'd rise from the dream as the plane ascended, and descend into dreams of waking as it fell.
When we finally landed, stairs were wheeled up to the plane. I walked down them (--like a president greeting a crowd, except I swayed with nine days' worth of clothes and books in carry-ons--) and I thought I'd trip. And I struggled hard to keep my balance against the morning light (-- the anticipation of a crowd, I thought, not much different than my count-down, taken step by step, to level ground).
I could see, from the plane's window and then again, outside the airport, that Iowa had finally won its spring. But it wasn't a pleasant spring. The cornfields were dry and, since the land was flat, they looked like sand, and desert. I took an airport shuttle home, hoping, for my body's sake, that the monotony of fields was a fair compromise between the the nill of sleep and my short-term need to stay awake.
And now I'm home. And, as sad as this sounds, home partly means my own computer -- my email, weblog, cable modem -- which domesticate my apartment like pets do, waiting to be attended to when I come in from trips.
I've been feeling guilty about not writing more, or better, posts while in NY. It's not that I'm worried about my readers (-you-), but that I hate thoughts and ideas going to waste -- not being properly stored (in my weblog, my internet refrigerator). There's lots of things I did in NY that I want to post about -- and god no, not as journals. I might nap now, but I want to put up my thoughts on the Whitney Biennial, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and some books I'm reading. And I've bookmarked dozens of sites that I should sort through, discarding the links that other sites have used, and hoping some remain for blogging. So, this post means to say I'm back, and my weblog will, again, have links and commentary, and I hope you'll relapse into the habit of reading it.
(Ok: now to my bed, for napping.)
Until I'm feeling better, please refer to my blogroll for good blog reading. I'll be posting occasionally, but the TV commentary will manage to be both heavy-handed and irrelevent, the literary links five-days-stale, and the journals unusually self-pitying. But the redesign, previously a hypothetical, will be ready soon (thanks to Bill), and its premier will mark my transition from sickness to health: my old page, swarming with germs, will be burned, and a clean new (style)sheet will be set down in its place.
Everquest Daily Grind: partners of EQ addicts tell their stories. Here, frightening, sad excerpts from five of them:
-What really has me concerned is that she has an in-game boyfriend now. he is a nice guy and i have grouped with him a couple of times, but now i can not get the comp if he is on and can only play after he has left. she assures me that it's only in the game and that i am still her #1, but she spends every chance she can get with him.
-I'm so angry with him now. I don't even want to talk to him. I have never been like that. I am starting to think that I'm wasting my breath. I am tired of going to bed alone each and every night. When I lay in bed at night I start to cry thinking about how things used to be before "the game".
-I called my attorney and talked to them. I told them what she was doing and I was sure she was leaving the state to be with her internet "husband". (She married her boyfriend in the game) All they did was shake their head and say,"She's done nothing other then get a attorney of her own to help her own case. This will bite her in the ass big time."
-I was visiting an old friend and I went into premature labor. I couldn't get through to my husband b/c he was online via dialup. I had to call a neighbor to go over there and tell him to get off the computer. I called back a little later and talked to him and told him what was going on. This was a dangerous situation b/c I was only like 4 months pregnant and having contractions with my second child. Well when I tried to call back a few hours later to give him and update on what was going on the phone line was busy again. He had gotten back on the computer. He was more concerned about his game than he was me and his unborn child. That tore me up inside and I will never forget it.
-I have seen a therapist, because I can no longer function at work. I have talked to the woman's husband, who is also devastated. I have talked to other members in the game who know my husband, one of them had the audacity to tell me to let them be and wish them happiness. THEY ARE BOTH STILL MARRIED!!!! I will never rest until I know where my husband is, and he gives me an explanation of why he has done this. His child loves and adores him so much, he has lost it all. I have learned also that his character was causing trouble, he was using his "power" and ego to make everyone miserable. He lost everything in real life, so he had to turn to the game to regain that power.
Link via BoingBoing.
weekend linkslit
-The Guardian looks at Chuck Palahniuk's new short story, "Guts," "a cautionary masturbation tale writ large." (And, similarly, my contribution to literature may be this link: the random masturbation synonym generator. Read it when you're not hitting the tube of toothpaste, doodling the beefsteak, or cleaning out the bayonet.)
-serialized novels, delivered to your phone
-Book Babes Watch. Binoculars, bikinis, hysterical blindness.
-NYT review of Paul E. Dinter's Other Side of the Altar: One Man's Life in the Catholic Priesthood and Anthony Swofford's Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. In part, I'm linking to this because Tony read at Iowa recently.
-And guess who else is coming to U. of Iowa, on March 29: Salman Rushdie.
-How, how, how can Lucina Rosenfeld write novels when she can't write [columns]?
film, tv
-Daily Refill has a mini OC episode for those who don't like waiting.
-The Apprentice blog asks, Which apprentice are you?
-Ed links to an excerpt from a crazy Tim Robbins-penned play.
-A SATC reunion: between the show's clothes and its fans
After seeing this and this, I don't think I need to take my SSRIs today.
And I'm not sure I'll have time to post again until tomorrow. So, here's some quick, quick links:
-Sarah rounds up the nominations for the British Book Awards.
-Birnbaum interviews Flaherty (The Midnight Disease). Seems even neurologists have no sense of humor when it comes to author photos.
-how to gauge buzz in NYC (via Gawker)
-When you're eating pork from a serial killer's farm, you might not be eating pork.
Have you ever sent an email with the wrong information in it?Bigstring: Erasable-Recallable EmailHave you ever sent an email to the wrong person?
Have you ever sent an email without the attachment?
Have you ever sent an email that you wish you could just erase?
Have you ever sent an email that you wanted to self-destruct in a day, week month or more?
web drivel-"Hi, Jeanie. Tell me, how did you get into 'dead mouse' art?"
-strawberry poptart blow torches (via caterina)
-random Law and Order plot generator (via web zen)
-human washing machines (via b-tang)
-World Ice Art Championships
-Kelly Ripa Ripped (via web zen)
BugMeNot.com lets you bypass news sites' registration. (Site found by way of SixDifferentWays' remaindered links.)
quick linksblogs on psychology and, sometimes, art
-Follow Me Here… links to an article on the possibility of suicide -- for the sane and healthy -- ever being rational.
-Brainworld, infrequently updated, looks at "brain studies" in relation to art and literature. Similarly, Cinebrain is about "brain science and cinema."
-The Nautis Project tracks scholarship on Rupert Sheldrake, C.G. Jung, Henri Bergson, and Joseph Campbell.
other
-Iron Chef America (via GirlHacker)
-The Official Rules of Calvinball (via Mefi)
-iSkip.com: "Skippers of the world unite!" Here's where he's rolling. (via J-Walk)
and media
-Cinetrix has seen Prozac Nation. "And while it's no Showgirls or Mommie Dearest, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more infuriating and unlikeable non-serial-killer female protagonist."
-Omarosa has a webpage.
-Kidman's set to play the White Witch in the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
sunday links, to be updated throughout the daylit
-Maud Newton reviews The Island of Bicycle Dancers in today's Washington Post.
-at I Love Books, Novels about novelists. Related: a TLS review of Muriel Spark's The Finishing School.
-The Guardian posts a short story from Julian Barne's newest collection, The Lemon Table.
-From the Village Voice's review Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father: "It's resplendent with aching absurdities, word salads, inspired semicolon deployment, golden-eared teenage monologues. It's the best thing I hope to read all year—and if it isn't, this will be a very good year indeed."
other
-"New Nietzschean Diet Lets You Eat Whatever You Fear Most"
-Mefi post on shoes and practices that are cruel to feet.
-More disturbing feet, thanks to Pony's new ad campaign. (via ad rants)
-Gaultier: “I think I like marionettes better than models!”
other, part II
-Guess My Name. (via Idle Type)
-Alice in Wonderland syndrome (via quiddity)
But today, TMTML quotes from an article on Morrissey --
[H]is brand of loneliness and longing and hopelessness (all the stuff he sings about) is that of a person who finds it natural to have relationships with the unreachable - that's to say, with images and works rather than people. Nostalgia is the be-all-and-end- all of pop, and Morrissey is the king of all that, so when he became a star himself (and began featuring his own mug on his record sleeves) he had succeeded in creating an audience literally after his own image, a tribe inured to the modes and manners of heightened fandom."-- and then names his next post, on 'holy anorexia,’ Some Girls are Bigger than Others. So, yes, a crush, definitely.
Found at MeFi: strange and unusual sea creatures. In a Pixar rendition of the blogosphere, which would you be? Some suggestions:
TMFTML and Maud Newton.
Any 2 lit bloggers.
Whitney Pastorek complains about blogs in the Village Voice. From the intro:
It takes a lot to make me rethink my place in this city, and even more to make me question my very existence. But lately, irrational social fears are keeping me up at night. Something is going horribly wrong, and I have finally traced the problem to its source: blogs.Or, more specifically, the Blogosphere—a land where the smart get smarter, the connected connect to one another, and the losers go home. The Godfather here is Nick Denton, owner of Gawker Media, a top-tier blog conglomerate named for its flagship, gawker.com. Launched by Denton in January 2003, with Elizabeth Spiers as editor, Gawker made its name by skewering New York media culture—what are the funny signs up in the bathroom at Condé Nast? Who was spotted going into the Condé Nast building wearing something awful?— but Spiers lost her indie cred when she moved on to the New York magazine-owned The Kicker and started blogging about how she goes to parties and hangs out with the very people she used to skewer. Other sites under the Gawker umbrella are Wonkette (Gawker for D.C.), gizmodo.com (Gawker for techno-geeks), and Fleshbot.com (Gawker for porn).
A step down from Denton's cabal are blogs like TMFTML (The Minor Fall, the Major Lift), independently run by some guy sitting in a room. Sort of the P. Diddy to Gawker's Sting, they remixed the hit song and made it . . . different. Plus he maintains total anonymity—which really pisses bloggers off. On his level are sites like Cup of Chicha, Old Hag, or the Elegant Variation. Here, you're less likely to find breaking news about media culture, but you will learn a lot about the drinking patterns of articulate twentysomethings. They're all friends, the bloggers on this level, and they're in a constant state of link-swapping, making it possible to actually click through the Web in a giant circle all day, like Tigger bouncing through the Hundred Acre Wood.
ice cream, pajamas, cigarettesbooks
-an online petition to replace Poynter's Book Babes. Commentary here.
-On the subject of friends and foes:Jennifer Howard to temporarily become a lit blogger.
-The short-listed writers for storySouth's Million Writers Award talk about their nominated stories over at Moorish Girl.
-the NY Times reviews Kureishi's latest. "But Kureishi with his good idea is sadly like his narrator with the hot new body: he doesn't know what to do with it."
-the new rage online: summarize a novel in 25 words
-Optic Nerve is back. More info on Tomine at Bookslut.
-a nice Calvino site, courtesy of wood s lot
-On The Shelf: "Peabody Institute Library news, book reviews, and other items of interest."
entertainment
-on movie taglines (via pullquote)
-Academy Awards cookies
-Aeon Flux the movie? Starring Theron?
other
-ice sculpting
-watch a woman age. Given my cig addiction, I don't need time-lapsing.
-how to fake your own death (last two via idle type)
-how to create a ghost. (via number one hit song)
Quoted from The Reading Experience:
Literary criticism is in a sorry state these days. Discussion of books and writing has been superseded by gossip about writers (Elias Canetti/Iris Murdoch) and even about critics (Naomi Wolf/Harold Bloom), the most talked-about critic has become so because he indulges in hysterical and ad hominem attacks on writers who don't write books like his own (Dale Peck), not a single book nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of "criticism" is actually a work of literary criticism. Literary webloggers have so far focused their attention on what passes for literary "news" (a useful enough service nevertheless), book reviews of fiction are gradually being abandoned, academic critics concern themselves with literature at all only to the extent of instructing their students to despise it.
And I'll admit something horrible: I had to look the word up.
kind of like bloggingcousin lit
-The Literary Saloon, not at all surprised by Milan Kundera's popularity, links to a relatively recent profile (or, strangely, an interview of an interviewer) of Kundera, in which Kundera states, "I don't like [North] American literature."
-Something Slant recommends the latest issue of U. of Iowa's 91st Meridian. While you're in the neighborhood, also take a look at this page, which links to several university-affiliated lit. journals, from the Iowa Review Web to eXchanges.
-I just discovered, but haven't yet explored, BookBrowse.com and LibraryLookup.
vaguely related to music, tv, film, etc.
-I didn't bother either uploading or downloading The Grey Album, but I will, today, link to some free MP3s (left column)
-Low Culture interviews movie goers exiting screenings of The Passion of the Christ in Jerusalem and Brooklyn.
-prank calls with film clips
kind of like art
-bar code drug paintings
-many links to sand sculptures
-hand-carved guitars (via the Presurfer)
-music nesting dolls
fonts and logos
-famous fonts
-the HOT or NOT of logo design
-logos across the globe (last two via danelope)
Amazon's wishlists are now sortable by priority, from "must have" to "don't buy this for me." But I've already moved on to WishCentral, which lets me list, categorize, and prioritize items from any store website. (The less money I have, the more organized my wishing.)
linkagebooks and writing
-Notes from Underground is officially the most over-used title in journalism. The article, found via bookslut, is about the ULA, The Paris Review, and Yiyun Li, an Iowa classmate and winner of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize.
-rules for better writing (via boingboing)
-Novelist Sarah Dunant's top 10 books on the Renaissance.
-The Constant Critic: tri-weekly poetry reviews
-an experiment in speed reading
-Nobody wants you to turn your blog into a book except for me.
-Gawker looks at Nick and Jessica's book proposal
media
-A blog devoted to reviewing Entertainment Weekly.
-Best Picture Nominees Turned TV Series: 2007-08 (via Amy's Robot)
-The Guardian examines the high school movie genre.
-SATC behind-the-scenes tensions might derail the planned movie. "'By the end, no one would talk to Kim. Not even in the makeup room,' our on-set insider said."
sex
-Beautiful Agony: faces during orgasm. I'm building up the courage to watch no. 15. (via idle type)
-Experiment: To have sexual relations with "the world's finest love doll."
-Fleshbot wishes you a happy Mardi Gras.
other
-Manual of Traffic Signs. (via G3RM)
-"Amaze is the hand-held maze that changes as you play. Once you set up one of sixteen different maze challenges the fun begins!" I want this. (via Tom McMahon)
-The Onion one-ups my typo-riddled attempt at parody.
inspiration for hypothetical redesign
-Simple clean CSS rollover menus with lists
-Well Designed Weblogs, Volume 2
-CSS Design: Custom Underlines
-CSS bugs and solutions
Network Images. From left to right, high school dating, high school friendship, and the internet.
Link via Spitting Image.
blog laxativebooks and writing
-The Shanghai Translation Publishing House has sold more than 1 million copies of Milan Kundera's books, making Kundera the best selling foreign author of literary works in the city. "Since the publishing house released the first title, 'Jacques and His Master,' last April, the book has created a 'Kundera craze' in domestic book markets, the publisher said yesterday." Have I mentioned before -- no, probably not because it's creepy -- that both my mother and I find Kundera really hot? Link, btw, via Ed, who may not even want credit after that last sentence.
-Robert McCrum writes on 'the curse of the synopsis' in yesterday's Guardian. Maud: "McCrum correctly points out that few novels resemble the one the author envisioned at the outset." TLS: "As we often mention, we do not comprehend how publishers go about their business -- and are surprised that they have any success whatsoever if this is the way they do it." Sarah: "There are a lot of hands that must talk to each other and communicate smoothly, so the author has to at least indulge that--at least a little bit… Also, submitting a proposal is a quicker way--at least in theory--of ascertaining whether a book will actually sell." Ed: "But one thing [Sarah] overlooks is that the new synopsis trend may very well reflect a profit-driven industry looking to cut corners wherever possible. "
-Beatrice has launched 5 Questions With, "brisk conversations with book people."
-Moorish Girl has taken off her glasses, and, amazingly, is the most beautiful girl at Prom (even though other girls might be wearing dresses by the same designer).
-This is a fun post. Maud rounds up first sentences of recently read novels.
-Found at This is comfort: Surrealist Writers and textz, a "free archive of radical writing."
picture books
-Matthew Vescovo, the artist behind Instructoart, has a new book coming out: Instructoart Lesson 1: Informative Yet Aesthetically Pleasing. According to Beautiful Stuff, " His instructions for every day life include things like how to do the hokey pokey, how to make armpit fart sounds, how to air kiss someone, and how to do the elevator fake-out."
-The NY Times profiles Will Eisner, whose latest graphic novel, "The Plot," "tells the story behind the creation of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' the infamous Russian forgery that purported to reveal a Jewish plan to rule the world."
-The Cartoon Guide to Genetics
tv and film
-David Denby on The Passion: "one of the cruellest movies in the history of the cinema."
-Even though my boyfriend's been singing its off-key jingle on a 24-hour loop, I still heart that Quiznos ad.
-No wonder Matthew Perry's been looking thinner/better. (Scroll down, third item.)
other
-How many ladies can say they've had a song dedicated to them?
-the cult construction kit. I swear I've posted that link before.
-At Harper's: When Killing Just Won't Do
-smelly vision for email? (via the fold drop)
I'm considering adding a new feature to this site: bi-monthly interviews with Iowa Writers' Workshop writers (current classmates, past graduates). Unless I find a poet friend interested in conducting interviews, I'll probably focus on fiction writers, starting with classmates that have already met success. Bad idea/good idea? Recommendations? Suggestions?
hot blog-on-blog action-Emma introduces the NYer's new staff writer, Caitlin Flanagan.
-The Atlantic asks, "Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore?"
-Lee attacks the racism of gossip blogs. Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox responds (scroll down).
-TEV's Mark lets his Believer subscription lapse.
-Jeff MacIntyre passes along a recommendation for a magazine that sounds "better-than-Believer cool."
-The Girls Project: a new initiative featuring award-winning films, videos, and a comprehensive website celebrating young women's lives around the world. (via pullquote)
-Shows that mention witchcraft no longer eligible for closed-captioning
-covers from rare witchcraft books (via the Cartoonist)
-subliminal advertising links
-strange clip art (via Tom McMahon)
-Prentiss Riddle compares handbooks on breaking monotony in talking-heads comics.
-Tijuana Bibles. "A typical bible consisted of eight stapled comic-strip frames portraying characters and celebrities (eg. John Dillinger, Popeye, Disney characters) in wildly sodomistic situations." (via spitting image)
-Compiled by Vitamin Q, a baker's dozen of beauty standards.
-A new craze has drinks being snorted through a tube using an Alcohol Without Liquid (AWOL) vaporiser. "But alcohol experts described the device as 'diabolical' and warned that inhaling alcohol could cause serious brain damage."
-According to a new study, antibiotic use in women is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. (via medpundit)
links, super-sizedliterary
-sex advice from poets (via bookslut)
-Students Pull All-Nighter for Shakespeare
-Kafka quotations at The Modern World
-A beginner's guide to reading Proust (via Golden Rule Jones)
-More books are getting trailers. Here, one for Douglas Coupland's latest. (via notes from somewhere bizarre)
-"Word Menu, a $35 program from Write Bros. Inc., offers a lexicon of 76,000 words and phrases that are arranged by subject and can be made to appear in alphabetized lists or within colorful concentric circles." Download a trial version here. (I recommend, instead, a used visual dictionary and the onelook reverse dictionary. Also worth checking out, though slightly less useful: plumb design's visual thesaurus.) (first link via Maud)
-"I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever coloring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications…"
film, tv, music
-The Joni Mitchell Library (via J-Walk)
-Fight Club: Calvin and Hobbes for adults? (via B.A.)
-Found at Splinters: The Ister is a new film by inspired by Heidegger's series of lectures on Holderlin's poem Der Ister. (Strangely enough, a classmate of mine at Brown was working on a film about the same damn thing.)
-an "American Idol" for politics
visuals
-Anatomical Collages and Papier-Mâché Anatomical Models (via the eyes have it)
-Colored dye in toilet bowls: Toilygraph photography. (via J-Walk)
-portraits of famous blondes (Bardot, Buffy, Britney), made from bubblegum (via Boing Boing)
-Aya Takano's The world after 800,000,000 years (via Anarchismo)
-Classic Good Girl & Romance Covers (via notes from somewhere bizarre)
other, more
-What superhero are you? (via J-Walk)
-iPod car stereo system
-"Technology with roots in antiterrorism efforts will soon make the singles scene safer and friendlier, not to mention more efficient, if a software system called the Love Detector lives up to its billing." (via Spitting Image)
sunday night links-via funferal: "According to an article in the Irish Times (registration required) the Joyce estate has informed the Irish government that it intends to sue for copyright infringement if there are any public readings of Joyce's works during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday this June."
-Scarlett Thomas on book blurbs (via Confessions)
-Steriogram Walkie Talkie Man music video by Michel Gondry (via abstract dynamics)
-amnesia in Hollywood movies
-the advertising slogan hall of fame (via Angie McKaig)
happy v-dayliterature
-The Independent asks writers to recall early romantic encounters.
-Library Girl Romances
-Stephany (over at Maud's) points out that the Washington Post's review of Helen Fisher's Why We Love has a bewildering first paragraph.
-The Straits Times profiles Alain Robbe-Grillet. (via TEV)
family values
-Sex in the First Person
-To all the ladies out there: a family proposal. Well worth the read.
-Ignoring nasty comments is secret to long-lasting love.
-brown acid for the toddler soul.
If blogs are bad, blog readers are worse. And worse than blog readers are blog commenters (I'd write commentators, but that's really not correct), clinging to a periphery's periphary, a fringe's fringe.
Reading others' blogs, and having had this blog for almost two years now, I've noticed that, while the most salient category when discussing bloggers is field of interest, commenters are best categorized according to personality. But, as much as commenters define a blogger's sense of his or her audience, not much writing has been done about them; here, my attempt to rectify the situation by pinning down the recurring archetypes.
1. Borderline
Some blogs, more than others, attract this archetpye, quickly becoming homepages on every McLean's patient-accessible computer. These blogs serve as the blogosphere's Hellmouths, portals through which trolls enter the blogosphere and run freely until slayed. Until then, these commenters will mistake your posts for happy, well-loved bunnies that, for the commenters' peace of mind, must be stuffed quickly into killing-pots.
This type of commenter is especally attracted to posts with bitchy humor, and will go out of their way to interpet the humor as whatever personal quality they've always felt assaulted by. Unfortunately, their descriptions of the offensive quality enact, very accurately, the quality they find offensive. An example comment from Andrea's weblog: "OH and lastly I'm so sick of you 'I'm so educated and better than everyone else' type egos all over the web … You probably get orgasms from insulting those better than you." If you're accusing people of thinking they're better than you, don't also imply that insulting "those better than you" is orgasmic. Or, put a different way: most sadists are also masochists, and they love to fuck themselves.
2. Soulmate
The Soulmate usually, though not always, belongs to the opposite sex. And either your blog seems "friendly" to him/her, like a polite cheerleader talking to a zitty boy, or your quality of mind, given the Soulmate's assertion that he/she has the *same* *exact* thoughts, is much worse than even your pessimism had previously allowed you to assume. It should be noted: most Soulmates are also Non-native Thinkers, though most Non-native Thinkers are not Soulmates. The Soulmate, however, should never to be confused with a Companion.
3. Context-Blind
The context-blind commenter assumes you've authored every article you've blockquoted. While this would make you admirably prolific, it opens you up to their bewilderingly hysterical accusations. Unlike the Borderline commenter, in which delusional conclusions are willed in order to justify attacks, the context-blind poster has a slightly less sophisticted psychology. Media-unsavvy, they can't distinguish between originals and their quotations, and write fan letters addressed to characters. Of all the commenter types, the Context-blind is most likely to comment on a year-old entry and expect an immediate response, in which you ammend your "article" on abortion/God/Britney/sex with dolphins.
4. Teenager
Usually quarantined at Livejournal, the Teenager will sometimes smell food from a great distance. Infestation occurs quickly.
5. Non-Native Thinker
This commenter posts with the confidence of a professor in Comparitive Literature, and though you may have been in a tenured, senile professor's class before, the Non-native Thinker makes less sense more often. Charitably, you try to blur your eyes, hoping the grammar comes into focus like a hidden image in a stereogram. No.
6. Companion
The Companion is often a blogger from a well-liked or blogrolled site, and is the best reason to include space for comments on your blog. The Companion is usually a commentator, and, in that sense, doesn't belong here. But, if I didn't include a good archetype, readers might think I'm discouraging comments, when the sad truth is that I refresh my MT menu fourteen times an hour, hoping the comment count goes up one. When it doesn't, I feel cyberspace is dark and lonely.
Aka, forgetting to pay the elecriticty bill. Posts will resume shortly.
quickening-In the TLS: 'The odds against Hamlet'
-win an original H.P. Lovecraft book
-"Ireland's best-known modern writer has put literary Dublin in a tizz by confessing that he can't be bothered with James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses."
-Incredibly Strange Albums
-celebrity mugshot playing cards
-Pretend you're in grad school again. Create nerds on your computer.
-cryptographer: find secret messages hidden in any text.
-At The Morning News, Sexual Firsts and The Bohemian Index
empty caloriesfilm, tv, music
-video: The Beatles on 'The Ed Sullivan Show'
-SATC, the movie?
-Jennifer Aninston to star in a film about a woman who discovers that her family was the real-life inspiration for The Graduate.
-What to Rent: "The World Leader In Movie Rental Suggestion Technology"
more
-Bookslut's Jessa Crispin reviews recent comics in the Washington Post
-Joseph Epstein on George Steiner (via About Last Night)
-Quotes From Either President of the United States George W. Bush or Senator/Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars Movies.
-Which Mags Wear Which Rags?: Dress codes from Allure to V
-the physics of haute couture
other
-color flames, and how to make them (via GirlHacker)
-Students watch Web to do their laundry
-gigantic sperm
My blog's in need of a light redesign and I'm willing to pay someone for help. If you're interested, leave a comment or email me at nathalie_chicha at hotmail dot com.
Until the end of this month, you can also find me at Coudal Partners, one of the sleekest blogs on the net. When link-ferreting for this Cup, I usually go to Coudal first; their finds are consistently artsy, smart, and ahead of the curve. In other words, I have no idea why they want me mucking that up, but I'm very flattered and excited to start.
junky weekend links-Hamlet as text-adventure (via beautiful stuff)
-quiz: art or crap? Sometimes hard to tell.
-on that note: bar code art (via eclectica)
-Next threat to fans of good music: 'ring back tones' (via Adrants)
-Attacked by food!/Playing with your food
-If you're going to go on a diet, it might as well be an orgasmic diet.
-bad-ass kittens (via fiendish)
-contract riders for celebrities
-hacking Friendster (via muxway)
-online Lite-Brite
this is not a linklit-related
-David Foster Wallace parody competition finalists
-Book Errata: typos in novels (via bookslut)
-Ray Bradbury's literary parlor game (text copied from the WSJ)
-the Telegraph reviews the new issue of Granta, Granta 84: Over There: How America Sees the World (via the lit saloon)
-Salon's seasonal "what to read" feature. Haven't read it yet.
-more Chuck Palahniuk movies in development
-Paris Hilton's book proposal, Tongue-in-Chic
-"The Absurdist Heroine," Wilde's influence on Pynchon
hit and misc.
-how to get into a NY fashion show
-sheets for bedwetters, hetrosexual couples, and/or crime scenes
-more Loretta Lux portraits of children
-"'Mindsight' could explain sixth sense." Obvs. No, wait. WTH's mindsight?
-Jay-Z and Beyonce to wed?
In a recent email, a very nice reader called me a "star of the blogosphere." The only way this would be true, of course, is if we pushed the "star" metaphor to its literal, astronomical conclusion: billions of stars in the sky, most of them barely visible.
I'm proud of the amout of time I've put into my blog over the past two years; every month since this blog's inception, my stats have climbed upwards. In Nov. 2002, Cup netted 3,037 unique visitors; by Nov. 2003, the decimal point had moved to the right, and I was racking up 33,620 UVs. Last month's stats: 47,603 UVs / 127,586 PViews. To me, this is awesome, and I feel so lucky to have that many readers. But a quick stroll through Technorati's Top 100 quickly disabuses me of any hopes for stardom.
Here's my Technorati profile: 156 inbound blogs, 195 inbound links. Here's some stats from Technorati's top 100:
| Andrew Sullivan | 2814 blogs | 3673 links | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Doc Searls | 1993 blogs | 2567 links | |
| kottke | 1924 blogs | 2329 links | |
| Lileks | 1389 blogs | 1625 links | Gawker | 1084 blogs | 1373 links |
| Belle de Jour | 910 blogs | 983 links |
If these are the big leagues, I'm still playing for the Pee Wees. But I'm having fun, and people tell me my butt looks OK in the uniforms.
sugarlitty bitty links
-Salon rehashes the NYTBR brouhaha with new interviews and a semiotically unflattering picture of Keller. (By the way, today it's a SWAG day at Salon. That ad's like a litmus test for my depression: I know I need to up my dosage when the SWAG ad makes me want to kill myself.)
-Previews of "Michael Chabon Presents…The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #1"
-Cyberdrama: Introduction (via wood s lot)
-What's in a pseudonym? (via Maud)
-at_large responds to the study reported at the Lit Saloon
-and for those who haven't been there yet: BBC audio interviews with writers
the best interview on the worldwideinternetweb
-The Eurotrash Interview
more media
-Hollywood Animal, abridged until it's readable
-David Denby reviews The Dreamers
-SATC may continue in the form of pay-per-view specials (warning: loud ad)
-Baudrillard, help me.
links w/ educational benefits
-list of demons and types of demons
-list of deities
friendly links with no benefits
-SpellKaster software: "Controlled Radionic Energy Makes It All Possible!" (warning: there's, of course, music)
-dentists are now refusing to fix vampires' teeth (via whatevs)
-Notice where the 1st and 5th ads in this site's sidebar take you. Finally, honest marketing.
Ed, in latent Freudian fashion, donated this itty bitty member pic to my blogger album. However, using Photoshop technology, I enlarged© his contribution and got this: a blond à la Philip Seymour Hoffman, sucking at a Teachout-proportioned bong. Why, Ed?
In some sense*, most bloggers are anonymous. Because, despite our society's unwillingness to give hardcore physiognomy another go, we feel like we don't really know someone until we know what he looks like. Radio appearances, as Pump Up the Volume proved, disclose nothing -- which is why, last night, I google searched for an online pic of Teachout.
In all fairness, though, I'm going to give as many bloggers as I can a chance to hate me equally. Without further ado, here's what your favorite bloggers (with pics readily or un-readily available online) look like:
*the sense in which we smear TMFTML's mystique on our pale (caveat, Old Hag) and skinny bods.
Somedays, in the blogosphere, I feel like a short brunette among supermodels.
*…I can choose to feel for them, because popularity requires standards.
old school style
poll-tics
-don't forget to list ear enhancement surgery.
-New Yorkish breaks down celebrities' '04 candidate endorsements.
-Presidential Candidates? They Look Like Brat Packers to Us.
and more
-Book-a-Minute Classics (via)
-play intrsuments online (via)
-USA Today begins publishing TiVo data (via)
-CBGB's photo album (via)
-online scrabble
MR. WANG QIN
HANG SENG BANK LTD.
DES VOEUX RD. BRANCH,
CENTRAL HONG KONG,
HONK KONG.
Good day,
Let me start by introducing myself. I am Mr. Wang Qin credit officer of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd. I have a concealed business suggestion for you.
Before the U.S and Iraqi war our client General. Ibrahim Moussa who was with the Iraqi forces and also business man made a numbered fixed deposit for 18 calendar months, with a value of Twenty millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars only in my branch.
Upon maturity several notice was sent to him, even during the war early this year. Again after the war another notification was sent and still no response came from him. We later find out that the General and his family had been killed during the war in bomb blast that hit their home.
After further investigation it was also discovered that Gen. Ibrahim Moussa did not declare any next of kin in his official papers including the paper work of his bank deposit. And he also confided in me the last time he was at my office that no one except me knew of his deposit in my bank. So, Twenty millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars is still lying in my bank and no one will ever come forward to claim it. What bothers me most is that according to the to the laws of my country at the expiration 3 years the funds will revert to the ownership of the Hong Kong Government if nobody applies to claim the funds.
Against this backdrop, my suggestion to you is that I will like you as a foreigner to stand as the next of kin to Gen. Ibrahim Moussa so that you will be able to receive his funds.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE:
I want you to know that I have had everything planned out so that we shall come out successful. I have contacted an attorney that will prepare the necessary document that will back you up as the next of kin to Gen. Ibrahim Moussa, all that is required from you at this stage is for you to provide me with your Full Names and Address so that the attorney can commence his job. After you have been made the next of kin, the attorney will also fill in for claims on your behalf and secure the necessary approval and letter of probate in your favor for the move of the funds to an account that will be provided by you.
There is no risk involved at all in the matter as we are going adopt a legalized method and the attorney will prepare all the necessary documents. Please endeavor to observe utmost discretion in all matters concerning this issue.
Once the funds have been transferred to your nominated bank account we shall share in the ratio of 70% for me, 25% for you and 5% for any expenses incurred during the course of this operation.
Should you be interested please send me your private phone and fax numbers for easy communication and I will provide you with more details of this operation.
p.s
REPLY ME AT; wan_q@fsmail.net
Your earliest response to this letter will be appreciated.
Kind Regards
Mr. Wang Qin
qin
t-cup, updated-Ed reviews the NYTBR shortlist
-Oscar nominees announced. (The Black Table comments.)
-The Devil Wears Pearls: Slate looks at marriage in movies
-a political novel-in-progress by Eggers, up at Salon
-David Markson news & quotes
-webloggers: milking the Golden Globes
-another speckled paint/solipsistic gazette incarnation
-10 most underpaid jobs in the U.S.
link a little link for meunrelated
-map of NYC's mouse and rat populations, via the Disney census
-It's the attack of The Stepford Photos.
-learn how to speak with an American accent and wreck a nice beach
-contribute to presidential candidates on Amazon; also, Shop to Drop Bush
obliterated
-The Guardian profiles the New York Review of Book's Robert Silvers.
-a review of The Corrections screenplay
-Slate's summary judgment covers American Dynasty, The Man in My Basement, Voyage to the End of the Room, and The Lady and the Unicorn.
-sound clips of Pynchon on "The Simpsons"
-a belated visual for this article
mediated
-Sundance winners announced
-embot's favorite unknown video artists
-Fellini's sketches
-Gaugin's Olympia
and
-The Rotten Fruit! You know I love that shit.
Instead of shaving my legs today, I think I'll mosey on over here and leave some comments. (Link via Old Hag.)
This site's in the middle of the redesign. To your left are featured posts, which I'll try to change (or rotate) weekly. I'll also be trashing and replacing categories (viewable when you scroll over the cups).
Thanks for giving me the patience I demand.
Recommendations
-Blogging Sundance keeps track of Sundance's films and deals, and reviews festival favorites.
-St*rnosedmole is a poetry blog, inspired by Silliman's Blog, also "focused on contemporary poetry and poetics."
-Harlequin Knights focuses on smart films. And in its most recent entry, it uses each of these phrases: "ethics of violence," "moral calculus of violence," and "ideology of violence as pure spectacle."
-This blog snatched the url www.bookblog.net. But it's not so much a blog as an online book club.
-Two more film blogs, one in the running for NY Mag's best blog: GreenCine Daily and greg.org.
-For a while , The Procastinations of Kelly Ann Collins was only about my favorite habit.
-Pullquote: it calls its favorite blogs "amuses-bouche," so I'm taken.
Questions
-I'm already a fan of ArtsJournal blogs About Last Night and Modern Art Notes. But should I also be checking out In Media Res ("Bob Goldfarb on Media") or Sticks & Stones ("James S. Russell on architecture")?
-Also: can anyone pass along some info on identity theory's blogs, including Peg Alford's -- unlisted on this page?
I'm back in Iowa, my cable modem's been fixed, and I intend to be a good, productive blogger from now on. Some upcoming posts, or possible topics for them: the misapplication of lit crit; death via facelift + the culture of beauty; my three-month belated review of The Time Traveller's Wife (or should I just drop it already?); clips from nonfiction books I've been reading. And, again, I intend to attempt attempting a small redesign.
itty bitty links-Marginalia and Other [Library] Crimes
-opera's death scenes
-The Hidden Song Archive, a database of hidden and unlisted tracks.
-The Decline of Fashion has a selective memory
-Woody Allen misunderstands his $2 million book deal
-suggest a reading list for largehearted boy's new project, "52 Books in 52 Weeks"
-The 2004 Edge Annual Question: What's Your Law?
-reviews of Cold Mountain, My Architect, The Time Traveler's Wife.
-a discussion of my (manic-) depression, and the wish that I could fuck up my life with alcohol or drugs instead of mental illness.
-the two obvious groups books belong to.
-a list of people i hate. almost everyone. list is/was inspired by the personals on gawker.
-an apology for the recent state of my weblog, and some thoughts on the idea of "decline." (Depending on whether I'm feeling manic or depressed, this could be combined with the second possibility listed.)
-migraines. migraines.
-a response to this Guardian article that I haven't read yet.
-delusional artists with websites. (This could be combined with the third item on this list.)
-some sad articles about people being tricked into shock therapy. heh.
-some notes on quitting smoking. nicotine patch. lucid dreaming. sucking butts.
-or just random links. nobody with self-respect reads journal blogs.
or suggest a posting. It gets tiring only having myself to blame for the inanity of my blog.
update: This wasn't supposed to be a serious post and I feel guilty for my writing's inability to convey that. I thought, to what degree the post was negative or self-indulgent, it was also artificially, or self-consciously, cranky, exaggerating complaints and confessions until they lost their natural shape. I didn't anticipate my readers' responses, which have been either concerned or censorious. In the second category, this response (from this post's comments):
maybe you are just as boring as those sad second rate girls in their shabby sororities. Maybe you are not special, or particularly talented. How talented do you have to be to link other peoples stories and reviews.Hello, nice young man! I've a question: since I've been avoiding writing fiction for about three months now, and consequently am not doing any bad writing, why am I not much happier?maybe the depression stems from not being a very good writer and or person, yet desperately wanting to be "artistic" because you saw a movie or read an article about it in your youth.
There are real problems and real lives out there, quit boring us with your petty melodrama.
The concerned letters were less fun, but they somehow meant more to me, because I do often doubt the value of my weblog, and your encouragement helps me continue forward. But I don't want to bait concern with a post that reads more seriously than I intended. Here's short translations of the more autobiographical items in my list:
-a discussion of my (manic-) depression, and the wish that I could fuck up my life with alcohol or drugs instead of mental illness.
-I have no obvious excuse for the way I waste my time. There's no external signifier for my problems.
-a list of people i hate. almost everyone. list is/was inspired by the personals on gawker.
-The personal ads on Gawker have obnoxious text. Also, it's fun to use the word "hate."
-nobody with self-respect reads journal blogs.
-"Journal blogs" have a bad teeny-bopper reputation, and "blogs" are often already hard enough to justify.
It gets tiring only having myself to blame for the inanity of my blog.
Sometimes I have no idea what's interesting enough to post. Is this post's revision interesting enough?
daily im/de/com-pressionculture Qs
-James Poniewozik asks, Has the Mainstream Run Dry? "In the most mass of mass media, it is no longer possible to please most of the people most of the time. … In all of entertainment we are moving from the era of mass culture to the era of individual culture."
-"What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here," writes Paul Graham. "But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era."
-Will theory really have to die for people to stop asking, "Is Theory over?" From a NY Times profile of critic Terry Eagleton: "Today graduate students and professors are bogged down in relativism, writing about sex and the body instead of the big issues. 'On the wilder shores of academia,' [Eagleton] writes, 'an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing.'"
-Brown Prof. Arnold Weinstein's latest book, A Scream Goes Through The House, asks, What can literature teach us about life, and vice-versa?
-Slate's "burning academic question of the day": Should professors be allowed to date students? (The answer that immediately occurs to me: only if they're hot, because otherwise it's gross.)
other articles
-What type of personal ads work best in the back pages of a literary review?
-A psychiatrist tries out the pills she prescribes her patients. "I was determined to stick it out despite my deteriorating physical and mental health; I was following the advice I had given hundreds of patients."
-Tyler Green, whose blog modern art notes is moving to ArtsJournal this week, writes about the relationship between art and time for artnet magazine.
-Oliver Sacks writes about time in The New York Review of Books.
film and TV
-Washington Post columnist Tom Shales comments on the final episodes of "Sex and the City." No spoilers except this mention of what spoilers might pertain to: "Next week's episode, 'The Ick Factor,' finds the show back at its best, full of snap and fizz and one certifiable shock, a crisis befalling one of the characters that should not be divulged in advance. …The character who gets the bolt from the blue [in next week's episode] is the one viewers might think is the least prepared to deal with it."
-Danger Blog! has an extensive post on screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, complete with links to his unmade TV pilots.
-TV commercials by famous directors
literature
-The Puffies 2003: the only award for bad book blurbs
-AS Byatt writes about the lure of fairy tales.
-Sara Nelson's One-Woman Book-of-the-Week Club
-"‘A Picture's Worth’ is a personal project that aims to highlight the inspiration that can arise from a photograph and to capture it in the form of words which in turn can reveal the true beauty of a photograph. Ultimately, the project seeks to inspire and enhance captivating story writing and beautiful photography." Jesus Christ, that's bad writing. But I thought I'd pass it along.
more
-Morpheus is a simple wonderful interface that allows you to create and change human faces.
-Grossology exhibits
Thanks for today's links goes to, among others, DBC, Fimoculous, mefi, TMN, Maud Newton, and coudal partners.
Last month, I chopped my blogroll into categories, hoping that an organized listing would make my reading recommendations more persuasive. But, when it comes to blogs, a more precise organization can also be a sloppier one; the categories too often overlap. Some "lit blogs" have more general linkage than "link blogs." Some "link blogs" cover the territory of "art blogs." And "journal blogs" are often about personal responses to books and TV shows, not any different from "media blogs."
So, I assume my blogroll will always be in flux, and will always be partially wrong. Here's a list of the blogs that have recently been recategorized or relabeled, and please leave comments if you have corrections or recommendations:
from "lit/culture/media":
Boynton: moved from "lit/culture/media" to "links"
Eclogues: on hiatus (
)
Eurotrash: moved from "lit/culture/media" to "journals"
Manhattan Transfer: a current favorite (
) (and almost moved to "journals")
Parking Lot: moved from "lit/culture/media" to "other"
Return of the Reluctant: a current favorite
from "art":
Dublog: a current favorite
Sugar'n Spicy: no longer on hiatus
from "links":
D.B.C.: newly added, written by a friend (previously the author of subplot)
G3RM: a current favorite
J-Walk: a current favorite
Sharpeworld: last month, I forgot to affix a still-valid "on hiatus" label
Simian Design: moved from "links" to "other"
The Excitement Machine: no longer on hiatus
from "other":
Giornale Nuovo: moved from "other" to "lit/culture/media," labeled as a "culture blog" (but could also have been categorized as an "art blog")
Mock Turtle Soup: moved from "other" to "links"
Semi Compos Mentis: renamed "Fishbucket" and moved from "other" to "art"
VitaminQ: a current favorite
happy new year2003 time capsules
-The Critics Critiqued: Their nastiest insults, most insightful reviews, and oddest fixations this year.
-Fimoculous names his favorite blogs of 2003 and adds more to his already-large round-up of 2003's "year in review" lists.
-The Washington Post lists what's IN and OUT (recommended by Amy's Robot)
-Yahoo has collected "the most popular Ask Yahoo! questions of 2003." The times are changing: "Are soy candles really better than wax candles?"
-the Guardian looks back on 2003's literary happenings
more, literature
-The Paris Review chooses its new editor
-The Chronicle announces the winners of its First Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative MLA Paper Titles (aka the Provokies).
-Return of the Reluctant can help you decide which lit. award you should be shooting for; "if you have a sweeping epic, then the Pulitzer's your best bet."
-France lifts its ban on book commercials
-"Can books, without much explanation, without being read even, say something?"
-David Foster Wallace on irony
more, film and music
-Elliot Smith may have been murdered
-"Morrissey is Debbie Harry at +8% pitch & tempo."
-Bollywood FAQs
-Paltrow's Sylvia "is not the fun, humorous woman she knew."
more, media
-a wonderful collection of Guardian articles on difficult art forms
-the LA Weekly profiles Benedikt Taschen of Tachen Books
-10 Ads Americans Won't See. This is the only time in recent memory I'm glad to be American. From a description of ad no.3: "He chops up the bloody grey matter with a credit card and snorts the bloody pulp."
-If you're looking to read new or different magazines this year and want some suggestions, consult kottke's reader comments.
other
-The Un-Ethicist, by Miguel Cohen, brother of the Ethicist
-for those who love infographics: a collection
-how to tell if a Japanese restaurant is really Japanese: "Firstly, don't trust any Japanese restaurants that use the typeface called Wonton."
-On naming prescription drugs: "The harder the tonality of the name, the more efficacious the product in the mind of the physician and the end user."
-The Random URL game: "Click and a random word is culled from our 3 million word online dictionary, a .com is added and then...?" Blogs have already been playing this game for some time -- with dates, animals, letters, and colors. Here's an even lazier way to play the game. Or -- mutate the game.
insomnia furnacelit
-Sarah links to a well-researched article on book titles. But, really: Recollections of a Bleeding Heart is not a good title, unless the book's about an anthropomorphic heart that made a run for it during surgery.
-The NY Times reviews two books of personal essays and writes what you'd expect about the genre: "We are watching the life of the mind from close up, and what happens there is thrilling. Things are as densely plotted as in a novel; an idea can strike with the sensory force of poetry."
-Robert Birnbaum (Identity Theory), Jessa Crispin (BookSlut), Alex Good (goodreports.net), Maud Newton (MaudNewton.com), and Michael Orthofer (The Complete Review) panel-talk* their way through literary topics. *new verb. I haven't slept.
-How to Write a First Novel, by Steven Carter (via bookslut)
-pervy-ness, cluck cluck, bad you.
un-lit
-Manhattan Transfer's Definitive Guide to Gifts
-the best of the O.C. in 2003
Updates will be infrequent until the 27th. Until then, enjoy the sidebar's links; they're as good as the sidebar's font is ugly.
-Eurotrash on wanker ex-boyfriends
-the top 10 albums of 2003, by The Morning News. (Their no.6 is my no.1, I think.)
-Hilton sisters' yearbook pictures. Seems they went to school a couple blocks from my house.
-The Fold Drop covers the L.A. Times covering The Shins. (Btw, the model referred to in the story is Elyse Sewell.)
even cowgirls get the bluesI was a pack a day Marlboro Reds girl, probably one of the few. Now I'm wearing a NicoDerm patch.
When your dog or cat gets fixed, she comes home with a plastic cone around her neck; it makes her pain more pitiable, and when she tries to back out of it or shake it off, you sympathize. But you don't help her; the cone's for her benefit.
If you saw my sad face, you'd want to tear off the patch and buy me a carton of Reds. But you don't, and neither do I. So we listen to me whimper.
lit
-Poets respond to the question, What's American about American Poetry? (via mefi)
-The Master and Margarita, online. (again, via mefi)
-authors' favorite words and phrases (via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind)
-In the New Yorker: a new story by Lorrie Moore.
art
-Teplin's drawings (via things)
-architectural abstractions by Madeline Isom (via Dublog)
-Antonia William's fruits and vegetables (via iconomy)
-women by Toshizoh Inamura (via indigoblog)
-a new weblog by/for designers
other
-Cornell University Library's Witchcraft Collection. Also, Wickedness.net. (via things)
-Santa Claus gives kids false hope
-virtual drum kit (via things)
-Google can now track packages. It can also cheer you up, and teach you the meaning of life.
brainsicklylit-related
-The TLS didn't put its "best of 2003" rendition online. The Literary Saloon, though, gives us a sampling (scroll down).
-test your knowledge of the literary happenings of 2003 (via bookslut)
-"Spoken Word: Writers." "Who would have guessed [Joyce could] play a washerwoman so convincingly?"
-OneLook Reverse Dictionary: describe a concept and get back a list of related words and phrases. (via boynton)
images
-pictographic sentences (via stung eye)
-body paint. More here. (via iconomy)
-The Turner Prize: 20 Years
quizzes
-What kind of drunk are you? (via Steve's No Direction)
-Which historical lunatic are you? (via mercurial)
-You Know Yer Indie. Let's Sub-Categorize (via Shatnerian)
other
-Create a snowman. (Here's mine.)
-the odds of death due to injury (via incoming signals)
-Guide to Philosophy on the Internet
-Online Support for Depressives (via Spitting Image)
-get tracklistings for any mood
-the least essential albums of 2003
My blogroll, as of this morning, contained 174 uncategorized blogs: too much, too much. Right now, I'm in the process of sorting them into categories. So, if your blog's vanished from my sidebar, don't worry; it's about to find a happier home in a more intimate grouping. Update: It'll be a couple days before it looks right.
notes from the weakenedI'm sick. Sorry if this post is incoherent.
media
-Fimoculous rounds up 2003's "best of" lists.
-"Just beneath the surface of Spielberg's plastic fantastic films is a barely contained sadism that's frequently aimed at kids."
-I didn't link to any Paris video until now: Paris' appearance on SNL. Also:Paris Barbie. And: a heart-breaking love triangle on The Simple Life.
-This makes me very sad for Ozzy.
art
-Loretta Lux's children
-Recently at Conscientious: links to photography by Michael Ackerman, Reid Yalom, and Peter Haakon Thompson
-Transvestite potter wins Turner
lit
-JM Coetzee's Nobel lecture
-Robert Birnbaum interviews Martin Amis
-In Slate's Diary, Dominique Nabokov writes about Edmund White
other
-The History of Eating Utensils
-ashtray persecution
-One final gift for the dead: Stylists do hair, makeup to restore look of life, health to clients
Gawker on Paltrow's pregnancy:
Ah, but for the photographs of her parturient parts! I hear she has hired a team of 7 men, very short. They are just tall enough to block any photographs of her abundant abdomen, but not so tall as to obscure her vision as she wafts about Manhattan. It's a very subtle effect, sure to go unnoticed.
The Fold Drop on Paltrow's pregnancy:
What kind of heinous karmic debt do you have to owe for your whole life to be a Gwyneth Paltrow movie with a Coldplay soundtrack? Just wondering.
Manhattan Transfer on surviving the Christmas party season:
Scenario 2: You are trapped in conversation with somebody boring. (The David Eggers Syndrome).
Retreat to the bar. He'll follow you but the point isn't to lose him. It's to drink him away. Grab something strong enough to be irresponsible and make it a double. Drink for as long as he talks. Eventually you'll develop the super-power of time travel and won't remember a thing he said.
If this fails, try asking him lots of questions. Like who would win in a fight--cocaine or crystal meth? Or, who's the scarier alien--ET, Spock or Paris Hilton?
In Japan, they actually have loos where each cubicle has a flushing noise piped in the entire time you're in there, so no-one can hear you pee, let alone poo. Quite marvellous.
I learned early on, that even in an office with few women, it's very hard to get quiet poo time. You have to develop a kind of guerilla war strategy. You have to be clever and think ahead. I mean, only a suicide poo mission would launch between the hours of 12pm and 2pm.
daily snowflakes, no two alike until they meltmedia
-Amazon customer recommendations for purchases in addition to Michael Jackson's Number Ones (via gawker and TMN)
-Tom Cruise "is really, really That Guy." (Did anyone else, btw, think this cover was very he-doth-protest-too-much?)
-Long before Paris, there was Marilyn.
-The next Bachelorette is Meredith. (via whatevs)
-Current and upcoming film adaptations of books. (via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind)
books and lit
-Blogroll favorite Mimi Smartypants has turned her online diary into a book.
-Jean Rhys' autobiography was called Smile Please?
-On that note: Narcotics for Authors, my new charity.
-Upcoming: a memoir about Salinger.
other
-trivia for the day: Autopsy means "see for yourself."
-Critter Glitter
PSA
If you have Movable Type 2.64, spammers can do much more than leave comments.
i give you linkslit
-Observer critics and guests, including Monica Ali, pick their favorite reads of 2003.
-Maud Newton discusses the semicolon. Recommended. (Update: "Semicolons, part 2" here.)
-How rich is Mr. Darcy, anyway? (via About Last Night)
-The Wonder Years: When people loved the New York Times Book Review.
-Mefi users discuss authors' websites.
ideas
-Translated Lives: Autobiography Between Languages and Cultures (via wood s lot)
-David Cronenberg guest stars on "Alias" and talks about postmodernism and reality. Amy's Robot has the MP3.
-"The best opinions are contrarian, not conformist, although that is in itself a matter of opinion." Stephen Bayley discusses the art of forming opinions. (via the morning news)
-What is Neuromarketing?
food and drink
-conventional and unconventional foie gras preparation
-I want want want The Foie Gras T-Shirt.
-NYC sushi finder (via muxway)
-Crazy Asian Drinks! (via quasimeta)
D.I.Y. art
-drip paint like Jackson Pollock (via boynton)
-create a Mr. Picassohead. (via boynton)
other
-Morrissey has a new album in the works (via The Fold Drop)
-Confessions of a Naked Model, by "J"
-Fimoculous's recommendations for Friendster
-Classic Stars and Superstars of Hollywood in Opera Gloves (via Fiendish)
-family trees of Disney characters (via muxway)
I'm visiting family in L.A. this week. I might post, I might not. I'll try.
daily dustAll I have to say for myself is gbl!o0w8I%&wq5v. Tired.
lit links
-Two accounts of the National Book Awards ceremony.
- Lit Idol: "Aspiring novelists will compete for the chance to win a lucrative publishing contract in a Pop-Idol style literary talent search." (via TMFTML)
-Bookslut links to a profile of Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife. (Niffenegger's reading at Iowa City's Prairie Lights tomorrow. I'm leaving Iowa for L.A. in about ten hours, but Prairie Lights readings are broadcast live and archived online.)
-Origins of Modernity, an online book exhibit (via Coudal)
-gothic books online (via quiddity)
media
-The Family Guy might be returning to FOX.
-And Berkeley Breathed's Opus returns to the funny pages. (Last year, I lived next to the house where Bloom County was first drawn. That makes me special.) Maud links to a Salon interview with Berkeley.
-The Many Faces of Gary Oldman (via quiddity)
-a Seinfeld weblog (via pop culture junk mail)
other
-The Familiar Stranger Project (via SixDifferentWays)
-Shrunken Head Gallery (via J-Walk)
-Design your own police car (via itchy robot)
My MFA exam is due in 18 hours.
daily whateverlit-related
-Gordon Burn finds recent US fiction stale and wearisome
-PW takes a look at some unlikely candidates for the NY Times Book Review editorship.
-The Independent reviews the new biography, Saint Morrissey (via The Fold Drop)
and other
-Prentiss Riddle's "online geographic visualization goodies" include a marketing breakdown by zip code, city size comparisons, and environmental maps.
-"Thais are adept at performing no less than 13 situational-specific smiles in their everyday lives." (via TMN)
-I was wondering about that picture, too.
-Despair, Inc.'s Demotivators (via Mikarrhea)
-Low Culture finds new use for Friendster: stalking mag. writers. (Most of the writers in MTV's magazine, it notes, "use the same picture for Spankin’ New and Friendster. And suddenly that fluff piece you just skimmed takes on an entirely new dimension.")
-What kind of retro gal are you? (I'm a classy pin-up with very little feet.)
I found the url for the WP's online discussion of Howard's article, "moderated" by Howard, at a comment on TMFTML, and I think it's obvious Howard made up the participants' questions. Among the questions Howard answers:
Arlington, Va.: What is a blog? How does one start it and is there ever an end? Thank you.Chantilly, Va.: Please pardon me for my ignorance. What is a blog/blogger? Is a blogger a self proclaimed critic on the Internet? Please enlighten.
Thanks!Harrisburg, Pa.: Isn't there really a wide range of blog writers? While we see much of the tiring frustrations of youth, perhaps it is better they blow off their steam on the Internet rather than on graffiti walls.
Springfield, Va.: Does one need to own a Web site before submitting a "blog?"
How does one begin a "blog" assuming that he already knows what he wants to say?
I have a lot of questions concerning the "blog."
Doc Searls has responded to my comments on his previous post, "Celebrating Conditional Celebrity." If you've read my comments on his post, read his reponse; he answers my questions re: the relevance of his semantic distinctions, his disagreements with Clay's theory of power in the blogosphere, and the rationale behind posting my pic.
Elsewhere, many blogs have responded to Jennifer Howard's "attack" on literary blogs in yesterday's Washington Post. Given that I'm a lit-and-culture blog, and rarely talk about the technology and implications of blogging itself, it's been interesting for me to read so many posts about old media, new media, and the optimism that fuels political blogging.
Some of the meatier posts I've come across:
-Throwing Things: "There's a ton of blogs out there, and the only way people are going to know where the good ones are is through like-minded blogs linking to each other."
-SubIntSoc: "And where the networks and the papers fell down, the blogs rose up in triumph."
-Terry Teachout: "[Blogs] have brought about a wholesale revival of 'amateur' journalism, in the very best sense of the word."
Welcome To My World…: "The blogosphere is like a library in which books offering competing interpretations of things sit quietly beside each other until you open them up and the dialogue begins."
-Mader Blog:"I wonder, though, whether the critics are confusing hyperbole for simple argumentation with which they don't agree."
-Catallarchy: "There is absolutely nothing democratic about blogs. Rather, the blogosphere is the ultimate free-market anarchy."
My blogroll's been hacked.
Laura, of Laura's Blog, the only blog my new blogroll claims I read, is getting gigs of hate mail; apparently, there's some sort of blogroll epidemic underway, and every hacked blogroll lists her name 170 times. Poor Laura says she has nothing to do with it, but irrate bloggers refuse to listen.
Update: Blogrolling.com has already received 3,000 complaints and is working on the situation. Meanwhile, Laura's new popularity dismantles Clay's theory of power laws.
Doc Searls responds to Jennifer Howard's Washington Post article. But why is my picture wedged between the title "Celebrating Conditional Celebrity" and the line, "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people"?
The title is besides the point of Howard's article and Doc Searls' response; Doc argues (in my opinion, correctly) that it's unfair to infer much about the current state of blogging from a small sampling, but the phrase "Conditional Celebrity" seems to imply that what's ridiculous about this sampling is the obscurity of its chosen blogs. The beginning of Doc's post turns the blogs mentioned in Howard's article, mine especially, into "outsider" blogs ("fifteen people"), a distinction that, despite not being explicit, confirms Howard's observations more than any of the blogs she mentions do.
Like I said, though, that's not the main point of Doc's post. Going through his arguments:
-He writes, "I have the same problem with Jennifer's preoccupation wity celebrity as I did with Clay's preoccupation with power. Weblogs are about neither, at least not fundamentally." (My comment: I don't understand the sense in which Doc is refuting Clay; Clay doesn't seem to be discussing what weblogs are "about." Rather, he's showing why it's likely that blogs will never be linked to equally.)
-Doc argues with Howard's terms: "medium," "newsworthy," etc. (I feel strange defending Howard, but what's the relevance of whether or not blogs are a medium? Also: when arguing that blogs are popular [meaning, linked to] based on the worthiness, not the "newsworthiness," of their posts, he's shifting the context of Howard's comment. Howard is probably saying that, to a blogger and the blogger's usual readers, personal anecdotes can be as worthy of a post as a new book release. Doc, however, is discussing what makes a blog popular or link-worthy. Given his negative response to Clay's emphasis on incoming links, I'm not sure how to reconcile his focus on blogs' link-worthiness. On the other hand, I admire his argument that it's insight, rather than sass, that really gets a blog noticed. It's not a fair critique of Howard's use of "newsworthiness," but it is a fair critique of why a blog's "cronyism" isn't that important to a blog's popularity or "insider status.")
-He sums it up here: "If we want our blogs valued, if we want Google juice, we only have to try to say something worthwhile — meaning worth a link. It's not a lot more complicated than that."
While I regularly read newspapers and online news sites, I find most of this blog's content from reading other blogs. And that's the case for most of the bloggers I read daily, who are usually kind enough to link back to the blogs from which they're pilfering.
For "link blogs," blogs that point out interesting links with little commentary, attribution comes in the form of a simple "via [blog]" or "found at [blog]." Good examples of "link blogs" include Fiendish Is The Word (eclectic linkage), Geisha Asobi (a roster of oddities), things magazine (links about obscure art and culture), and, my favorite "links blog," The Solipsistic Gazette (tracks visual culture).
Then, there's another kind of blog, notable for its clever commentary. The "commentary blogs" I like focus on literary and pop culture. Like most blogs that aren't online diaries, these blogs also link to each other, but since they link to commentary, they usually refer to specific posts. And, since they're commentary blogs, not link blogs, they usually comment on the posts they're referring readers to. Almost no blogger is bitchy enough to (regularly) link to posts they dislike, so the commentary is usually complimentary ("[Blogger's name] made a good point about…").
This leads to an explicitly personal relationship between "commentary bloggers," in which they tease each other ("pint-sized polemicist Maud Newton") and treat each more as characters or friends than as simple link-sources. (Maud writes of Old Hag: "We'd have guessed she was a Sauvignon Blanc girl, and if she'd just come for a visit we'd share a bottle and try to figure out a way to steal her smarts.")
In an article in Sunday's The Washington Post, Jennifer Howard writes,
Bloggers know what they like and what they don't like, and they aren't afraid to tell you why. And they get to use bad words that will never see print inside a family newspaper. But to get to the good stuff, you have to wade through more and more self-congratulation and mutual admiration. Call it blogrolling.She continues,
From the Old Hag, who gives us blogrolling in a nutshell with this Nov. 7 post: "We'd also like to take a moment to draw your attention to some new blogs of note. If you look at our links list, you'll see Chica (whom we TOTALLY discovered, and now she's all Gawkered and Terry'd and does Choire EVER LINK TO ME?). . . . "
Note the offhand references and the verbing of names -- the Old Hag assumes that not only do you read blogs, you're on a first-name basis with the hip dudes and dudettes who run them. What, you've never heard of Chica, Terry and Choire? Let me introduce you, in order, to the up-and-coming blogger behind Cup of Chicha (www.nchicha.com/cupofchicha/); Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout, who moonlights as a blogger with his site About Last Night (www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/); and ur-New York media blog Gawker.com and its editor, Choire Sicha, who maintains his own blog at www.choiresicha.com. I only know this because I've been reading these sites long enough to get a feel for the usual suspects. Otherwise I'd have no clue either. And I'm not sure why I should want to.
I have two reponses to Jennifer Howard's argument that blogs, once bastions of outsider democracy, are now "turning into the same insider's game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique."
1. I tried to explain, in the beginning of this post, that "comments blogs" invariably lead to an appreciative online friendship between bloggers. I think this is a built-in feature of the blog-genre.
2. As Terry Teachout mentions on his blog, About Last Night, new blogs, based on the worth of their posts, get linked to all the time. The Elegant Variation has been online barely two months, but it's become a regular among the "commentary blogs." If Jennifer Howard weren't trying to make blogs' "cronyism" a trend with deep enough implications to merit an article (and I have to say, I'm happy she tried; I like seeing my blog's name in print), she'd probably realize that what she dislikes about these blogs is not their "insider's game" (as Elegant Variation proves, there is no "insider's game"). Instead, she dislikes the blogs' playful, self-referential, tone. It's unfair to conflate the two, but without this conflation, would an attack on the style of a handful of blogs merit an article? Probably not, but her conflation, in my opinion, makes her article, at best, irrelevent.
daily blinkart and architecture
-Illustrated Architecture Dictionary (via artnotes)
-commentary on DH Lawrence's paintings (via bookslut)
-photography by Lewis Carroll (via cipango)
-ghastly children's books
-Timothy Cummings' Spot Portraits (via cipango)
tv and film
-The winners of "American Idol" and every "American Idol" spin-off (ie, "Austrailian Idol") will soon compete for the title of "World Idol"
-Bizarre Love Triangle, an animated film. Also on the site: a music video by Thomas Fersen. (via coudal)
other
-Russian terms for friendship (via languagehat)
-bad names for babies, with speculation on the fatalism of names (via bifurcated rivets)
-cigarette ads (again, found at bifurcated rivets)
-Let Them Sing It For You (via J-Walk)
-Psychology Today's self-tests (via nutz'so)
-Merlin's List of Five Things (via Travelers Diagram)
*Link of the day*: brand name taxonomy charts (via magnetbox)
daily unproductivity-Thom Sachs' "Materials, Metaphors, Narratives". Works include a Hello Kitty Nativity Scene, a Prada Toilet, and a Chanel Guillotine.
-suggested Bush/Cheney '04 bumper stickers
-childhood classic Master Mind is now online. It's buggy in Safari; I recommend reloading between games.
-Japanese Snacks. com
-periodic table of bloggers
-From The Onion: Mom Finds Out About Blog
daily while-I-was-awaylit
-an overview of literary weblogs
-Last year, writer Dave Koch kept a Salon diary about his experience at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. (Koch recently guestblogged at Maud Newton, where I found the link.)
-This seems to be an Anne Sexton blog. More poems by Sexton here. (via wood s lot)
-Pride and Promiscuity: the lost sex scenes of Jane Austen
-even trashier links under "other," below
art + design
-Judging books by their covers, November 2003
-weblog Most art is boring links to strange art projects, like POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy.
-paintings by Joy Garnett (via spitting image)
-drawings by April Gornik (via cipango)
-calm collages (via YipYop)
-top 15 trends in logo design (via everyone)
web
-The Buttafly Guide to Interpreting Friendster Photos
-a round-up of social networking websites
-Ashley proposes "grid blogging"
love and sex
-The Atlantic reviews a book about called-off weddings, and another book about lavish ones.
-"What I learned about marriage while working as a Manhattan prostitute." (warning: Salon ads)
-Belle de Jour: diary of a London call girl
-Nick Denton's Fleshbot
-fetishistic shrink wrap
other
-My Miserable Life: A compendium of Suffering (via fiendish)
-the No Smoking bra
-freakish dress-up doll (via geisha)
-manipulate eyes (via J-Walk)
-listen to any song backwards (via fiendish)
-Which Biological Molecule Are You? (via the presurfer)
-Which author's fiction are you? (via ghost of a flea)
-Amy's Robot summarizes The Bachelor Fantasy Dates in the style of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Stein (towards bottom of post)
-In the format of "Am I Hot or Not": "Am I a Poet or Not" (via fiendish)
I'd like to thank the bloggers that have recently recommended this site to their unsuspecting readers. Special thanks to, among others, About Last Night, Gawker, injection*, Old Hag, Portage, Traveler's Diagram, and whatevs (dot org). I know I'm forgetting others, but know that every mention of my site still makes me want to do a little karate-victory-dance around my living room.
*Site run by my friend and ex-boyfriend, Geoff. Was recently redesigned -- then marred by cat photos. Usually when I see a cat photo on a blog, I delete that blog from my blogroll. But Geoff and his blog are the reasons I started blogging in the first place.
daily quick linkslit
-Raising a glass to the literary drunk (via TMFTML)
-the literary Simpsons (via fimoculous)
-famous rejections (via danelope)
sex
-The Trojan Games: sexual athleticism, NSFW. (via mefi)
-car sex positions
-sex blogs (via daze reader)
-a new reality show: "Can You be a Porn Star?"
more
-the layout of French kitchens, with some interactivity (via The Morning News)
-80s lyrics quiz. Despite watching nothing but MTV during the end of the 80s, I scored about 70.
-a picture of Bush
-Shiori Matsumoto painting gallery (via reenhead)
daily shm-artart and media
-oddly interactive photo portfolio (via 990000)
-From Jason Salavon, the artist that brought you Every Playboy Centerfold: clips from The Top 25 Grossing Films of All Time
-The Smile Project: "The installation takes the form of a family of five, human scale, animatronic sculptures embodied with the ability to 'emote' with facial expressions, body language and sound."
-eye placement in 500 years of portraits (via cipango)
random
-time tales: a collection of found photographs. (via six different ways)
-Lego album covers (via boing boing)
-What is a merkin? (More here, if you scroll halfway down.)
-I think a vampire killing kit would make me feel safer. No, really. It would. (link via quiddity)
-gallery of devil dolls (via the presurfer)
-Illustrations of the Elementary Forms of Disease (1838) and Renaissance and Baroque Anatomical Illustration (via eclogues)
-Grim picture painted for 2020 (BBC article via quasimeta)
-Night pictures of Seto (via things)
-Look, it's Choire Sicha, of choiresicha.com and Gawker. He's really cute. (photo found at Old Hag)
and I apologize for these posts
-NY Times interview with Britney
-Brit's rhinoplasty
-Spears and John Cusack? Amy's Robot writes, "Uma decides to go back to fuckface and you're going to give up that easy? Go over to her house with your boom box right now and make this right."
daily I'll-do-better-next-time-and-why-don't-you-believe-me?art
-Modern Art Notes is already directing snark at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. I really like this blog.
-the Polaroid Triptych Project (via fiendish)
-paintings by Wang Yiwu (via cipango)
media
-Low Culture reduces Tina Fey interviews to their structural elements.
-Quick: name someone you've always wanted to see naked! You said Bea Arthur, too? (via art notes)
-The Guardian interviews Sarah Polley. "While child stars like Drew Barrymore plunged into drug addiction and alcohol abuse, Polley went for political activism. She moved out of her home when she was 14, set up on her own - she had the income to do it - and dropped out of school. Her father was accepting of her independence, so he said in 1997, feeling 'she was at her best when she was out of kilter with society in some way'."
-Other actors have political aspirations, too. (I'm sorry that you already know what this is linking to.)
web and other
-Kaleidoscope gives you free-association tasks for your blog, like "Write as much as you can about something, in thirty seconds. You may not edit the post, but may surround it with explanation, afterwards." What the world needs now: more bloggers free-associating. (via boynton)
-What's your life's MPAA rating? Thanks only to my boyfriend, my life gets rated R. (again, via boynton)
-Every Playboy Centerfold (via idle type)
and more
-Gawker interviews Dale Peck, book reviewer. Old Hag (scroll half-way down) reviews the NY Times interview with Peck. Bookslut responds to Dale Peck's interview in Gawker.
and more, that I haven't looked through yet, but will, soon
Narrative Magazine / In Writing: The Narrative Voice on Kafka / Zadie Smith on Kafka and novelists / Terry Eagleton on novelists, poets, and realism
daily smoke-bunniesmedia
-Salon (caution: ads) takes a look at upcoming TV offerings about the young and unimaginably rich.
-Amy's Robot voices the opinions of most of my friends re:Elizabeth Smart.
images
-classic pin-ups
-a fungi montage and a fungus for every month. Think about it: wouldn't your girlfriend prefer a a rare and interesting fungus to a banal, played-out birthstone? (links via solipsistic)
web
-a blog of unusual lists (via things)
-My ex-boyfriend's good friend, Andrea Seigel, has a new, sleek website promoting her upcoming book, Like The Red Panda. The links on the About the Author page are droll, and the typepad weblog looks promising.
technology
-something for writers/bloggers who smoke
-"But what if everyone had one? That's the fear of traffic control officials, who believe chaos would take over the roads."
other
-online fortune-telling cootie catcher. Also, learn how to make a non-virtual cootie catcher. (second link from Prentiss Riddle)
tangentially related
-"Our Snapple Pie juice drink allows you to have pie all day long... and the best part is you don't have to turn on the oven. All you have to do is pop the cap!"
-the history of poisining (via quiddity)
-new toothpaste flavors (via pop culture junk mail)
daily shallow-gravefilm
-Maybe all the people who would want to know this already do, but The Cremaster Cycle has an official website, with flowcharts and pictures of sculptures and characters from each of the films.
lit-related
-books on Amazon.com are now searchable
-a look at the uncut transcript of Oscar Wilde's trial
-"Justin Timberlake is touting a kiss-and-tell book about life with Britney Spears." (via bookslut)
-Smackerels
other
-Smiths gossip
-revenge of the nerds, aka TV producers
-porn karaoke
-babies are evil
-plastic surgery catwalk (via gawker)
-list of archaic occupations (via mefi)
daily insomnia-and-dark-bedroomslit
-Haruki Murakami's Birthday Girl, from Harper's July issue (via injection)
-Jane Smiley watches The Secret Lives of Dentists, the film adaptation of a novella she wrote about her second divorce. (warning: Salon ads)
-the 101 best websites for authors
-10 mistakes that writers make
music
-The NY Times reviews the Shins' career and second album
-More information on Elliot Smith's suicide.
images
-Tankens bilder - Images of Thought (via solipsistic)
-Deborah Mesa-Polly's use of the fantastic in photography (via solipsistic)
-Asian Wooden Marionettes
-Molly Kiely's things to look at (via fiendish)
-Galleries of coloured alchemical emblems (via fiendish)
-Superheroines (via geisha)
other
-A list of street names for drugs, compiled by our government
-Bjork's latest look (via whatevs (dot org))
-101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself (see street drugs; Bjork's ensemble) (via quasimeta)
-Jeff Harris provides the pictures; you provide the journals (via stung eye)
-for my Brooklyn readers: Satan's Laundromat
-Spirographs!
1. From a Publishers Lunch email: "Authors Guild dues are $90 for the first year and follow a sliding scale after that based on your writing income (most members continue to pay $90 per year)." Oooh. Sad.
2. I signed up withmyspace.com to see how it compares to Friendster. Seems like it has more features, but is also more cheesy. Profiles require taglines; I hate taglines.
3. I'd sort of like to write an interview or article on "Vera Little" (pseudonym). From one of her many sites: "I am a multimedia designer, animator, and a doll-maker. I am a finger and leg amputee. I have an affinity for oddities and a tendency to accumulate things. I live with Max in an old factory in Boston." Some "Vera Little" places to go to: News, Leg Journal (very interesting), Animation, Links, Live Journal.
daily rumble-play the game of concentration with Smiths album covers (via incoming signals)
-The Gematriculator determines how good or evil a web site or a text passage is. (via attu)
-Yet another reason for me to be self-employed.
-the future of billboard technology (via quasimeta)
-hear Sylvia Plath's voice
more after breakfast.
It's now after breakfast:
-read and write anonymous confessions (via life in the present)
-Writer Aimee Bender has "a file called 'Fonts,' where [she makes] up different stories about fonts in the different fonts." (via bookslut)
-Gawker invents magazines that invent new genres
-Andy Warhol time capsules (via Stung Eye)
daily perchance-to-dream-The World's Heaviest People. Very interesting biographies linked together by the (genetic) tragedy of obesity. (via geisha asobi)
-Site Disclaimer: "Although we are happy to marry you, we cannot gaurantee that you will be happy. MarryYourPet is in no way responsible for anything nasty occurring." (via idle type)
-The Belkin iPod Voice Recorder lets you record onto your iPod. iTunes Link Maker lets you link to music at the iTunes Music Store.
-The Guardian looks at the history, and influence, of book covers. Also: a contest to design the cover of a to-be-republished classic.
-A gallery of classic pinball advertisements. (via Sugar'n Spicy)
-A long time ago, I read about this winner of a Britney look-alike contest. And to this day, it justifies my theory that Britney's probably not so hot sans makeup. (via six different ways)
-languages across Europe. More here. (via quasimeta)
-Swap identities for a day or more. (via the presurfer)
-Egyptian name translator.
Sam and I spent an unreasonably long time on the phone this morning trying to figure out why I could access all of my old bookmarked NY Times articles and he couldn't. I'll reduce our random theories and tests to this one observation: the url of an old article goes to the article in IE (Mac) and goes to a purchase-this-article page in Safari.
Try it out:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/09/nyregion/09SAGE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/arts/design/04REXE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/28/magazine/_28DESIGN.html
However, IE (Mac) will bounce you to a longer url which, when pasted into Safari's address bar, calls up the full article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/09/nyregion/09SAGE.html?ex=1066622400&en=ab7742b5a2199493&ei=5070
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/arts/design/04REXE.html?ex=1066622400&en=177276383896ac11&ei=5070
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/28/magazine/_28DESIGN.html?ex=1066622400&en=7cadbce997be877c&ei=5070
Someone should put together a list of these longer urls for every NY Times edition -- bypass archive fees. Would that be illegal? If it's done in a blog, no, it's not (and, as the link will tell you, blogged NY Times articles don't even need the extra-long url).
but yesterday this site had about 2,000 unique visitors, 1,000 more than this month's daily average. Where from? Don't know.
Is Speckled Paint/The Solipsistic Gazette/Penny Dreadful back at solipsistic.org?
daily crazy-sick-a short history of skirts (via fiendish)
-Lolita and "dolling"
-get your C.Y.B.O.R.G. name
-the ten geekiest hobbies
-The Crazy Idea Competition is over. Download the results, which include suicide propoganda and a mirror that reflects people other than yourself.
-best of CNN infographics (via the morning news)
-a writing meme
-Thomas Pynchon will be a guest-voice on an upcoming Simpsons (via fimoculous)
-bookslut, as always, has had good links recently. My favorites: the first illustrations of The Ulysses Project and writers' most embarrassing moments (bookslut: "Has the Guardian turned into YM?"). Also, a good recap of the creepy New Testament fashion magazine, Revolve.
daily so-sick-that-I-know-you'll-forgive-me-for-not-attributing-my-linksreference
-the open video project
-statistical resources on the web
-lots of timelines
books and writing
-Esquire's 70th Anniversary Special: The Greatest Stories Ever Told
-strange writing contests. Ex.: song title thesaurusizing
-Judging books by their covers, October 2003
-Movable and Mechanical Books
-Warren Ellis posts some fiction
music and video
-You may already know that Palm Pictures is coming out with three DVDs collecting the work of video directors Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze, and Michael Gondry. But did you know that the official website also has clips from the DVDs? Ok, maybe you did. I didn't.
-Oh shit, Belle and Sebastian got dissed.
more
-a typology of art school students
-"What is good intelligence," said Ryonosuke Akutagawa, “if you can’t discover a useful melancholy?” (Click on 10.06.03.)
-Internet Museum of Safety Razors
Seems that Speckled Paint/Solipsistic is back.
The blog-equivalent of high thread count linen.
That can be pulled out from under you at any moment. I've learned to love it without attachment.
I don't find Margaret Cho's stand-up funny. I don't find her blog funny either. But it is dark and honest and well-written.
daily some-quick-links-create your own tabloid (via the Cartoonist)
-Album Cover Challenge (via travelers diagram)
-Pareidolic Imagery Collection (via things)
-The New Technology of Spiritual Contact (via the presurfer)
-mapping organ trading around the world (via spitting image)
-vampire book library (via quiddity)
-104 Head Illustrations (via quasimeta)
-The most expensive ZIP codes to live in (via J-Walk)
George W. Bush's campaign blog has one of the worst logos I've ever seen. What free font did they use to spell "Blog"? Why does Bush look like he's enjoying a moment on the toilet? I do, however, like that Bush is forced to share the ugly "B."
There's a lot more on the site that seems like a joke but isn't. There's a Compassion Photo Album (bottom right), which, as you could guess, is a visual list of Bush's interactions with black Americans. The blog also has news items like "Afghan children are laughing and learning just two years after beginning of war" and ""The Proof is There for Those with Eyes." You can also buy bags and bibs for the kids.
daily things to look at later, but there never is a later-$50,000 worth of butterflies
-MTV Exquisite Corpse
-styles of knife throwing
-celebrity gossip from bitter waitresses
-Happy images 'make depressed sad'
-Emily Nussbaum on TV theme songs
-"Where do Nobel laureate authors turn for advice on their hair?"
-"Is it possible to live the Christian life — a life of integrity — and sell used cars?"
daily ok-"The quietness of a manhole cover cannot compare with the wild vapours of nylon I sense in your larynx." The Surrealist Compliment Generator (via betacorpo)
-new aphorisms by Friedrich Nietzche
-Matte paintings for film by Jean-Marie Vives. "Roll over the pictures to remove the matte." (via coudal partners)
-Sylvia Plath was a painter? (via caterina)
-Yesterday, JM Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in literature
-new marketing strategies for novels
-Sandman: Endless Nights, by Nail Gaiman, is the first comic book to ever debut on the NY Times Bestseller List. (via bookslut)
-famous funerals (via Attu sees all)
-"PervScan.com is a compendium of the latest headlines in sordid behavior."
-Dictionary of Obscure Sexual Terms (via six different ways)
-mothers against genetically engineered food ask, got milk?
-maybe not the best ad for this article (via fimoculous via radosh)
Posts will resume. . . very soon.
daily and-now-the-boyfriend's-back-in-ny-Adventures with an Ice Pick: a short history of lobotomy. Horrifying, awful. (via incoming signals)
-Medical History of American Presidents (via mefi)
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film about memory removal, sounds really wonderful. More here.
-"By their reckoning, a vast number of people who might once have been considered vegetative actually have hidden reserves of mental activity." (NY Times article)
-online Edward Said archive
-oh, those funny foreign cultures: safety charts from India (via J-Walk)
-dinner party/logic game. (If only the matches could be based on personality instead of color.)
- The Book of Sand, a puzzle based on a Borges story (via maud newton)
-The Onion A.V. Club interviews Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian
daily boy-hugging-me-as-i-type-The Man Eating Plant Page
-crazy pinball machines
-architecture by schizophrenics (via B.A.)
-Gothic Interior Design
-fairy tale illustrations (via exclamation mark)
-Translation: What Difference Does It Make? Compare different translations of The Illiad, The Divine Comedy, and other classics. (via Languagehat)
-Cliché Challenge: tracks the rise and fall of popular cliches based on Google references (via Bifurcated Rivets)
-Separated at Birth: Henry Clay and Mayor Bloomberg
-The 50 Most Common Used CDs, compiled by Pitchfork
-notes for Suede fans
daily tomorrow-Space-Age Garages (via GirlHacker)
-Space Art in Children's Books, 1950's to 1970's. Have I posted this before? (via boingboing)
-"As a part of our public outreach programs, Language Removal Services has here created the first 'language-free' political debate. It is our hope that this will allow you to better understand the true positions of the candidates. Below, we present language removals of the leading candidates to replace Davis."
-Tokyo Cow: The Magazine for Thought Criminals in the Eastern Capital. Plep says, "Fantastic."
-"Not only is the country's leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year." (Warning: Salon article.)
more
-"My friend Gay Bilson, one of Australia's greatest cooks, says that the first time she cut open a mangosteen and tasted a segment, she 'burst into tears at the sheer perfection of it, almost pushed to mawkish poetry.'"
-Zombie pin-ups (via geisha asobi)
-art for housewives' homemade snowglobes
-World Beard and Moustache Championships (via J-Walk)
daily still-sick-and-sloppyart and literature
-Ask Joan of Art your American art-related questions. (via spitting image)
-The Alphabet's Bastard Children. Experiments with the alphabet. (via ober dicta)
-A Neil Gaiman profile and summary of the new Sandman project
-A Quick and Easy Guide to Banned Books Week For Librarians
other
-Emmy results. John Stewart takes the award for best variety series over Letterman, Leno, and Conan.
-Love.com, a US News review of online dating services. A short excerpt: "Warren founded eHarmony.com, a Web site built around a 480-item questionnaire covering all sorts of personality traits and "basic subconscious wants." … The matching process is rigorous enough that 14,000 benighted souls who have used his site have never scored a single match."
-Presidents and the Paranormal, from Quiddity, who has lots of occult-y links this week.
-Are you an Anomalously Sensitive Person? Unfortunately, the answer will cost you $15. But the quiz (PDF) reassures me that not being able to balance my checkbook may simply mean that I'm psychic. (And psychics, obviously, have other ways of finding out their bank balance.)
daily sick-in-bed-surrounded-by-kleenex-Fake or Foto, CG or real?
-art projects by John Haddock. Check out 98/107, People Falling -- Imagined and Real, ISPs (Internet Sex Photos) (SFW).
-Ronald Reagan and Reading Proust: The Morning News reviews the NYer Festival
-What words do you find sexy? 2 Blowhards' readers answer.
-custom printed toilet paper (via muxway)
-X-Entertainment's Halloween Countdown. I've started looking for a costume; I'll post some thoughts about that later.
I've been spending too much time on Friendster, too little time writing my novel, and recently decided to try to correct the imbalance: by using Friendster to write a story. My protagonist is Glen, a NY surgeon; his story takes place via profiles and testimonials, which change over time, as other fictional characters meet and interact with him. But for now, Glen's just trying to find a place in the Friendster community, making friends, and broadening his story's audience. I thought it might be hard to make friends, given that Glen's fictional, but most people have been happy to accept Glen's Friendster invitations.
Here's Glen's profile (if you're connected to Glen's network, you can also get to it here):
And here's the photos that accompany Glen's profile:
Glen is constantly bookmarking interesting people he comes accross browsing Friendster, and he makes sure his bookmarks are "visible" to those being bookmarked, so they know Glen's interested in them. When he finds a boy or girl attractive, he also doesn't hesitate to tell them so.
Occasionally, Glen comes across someone with a picture he likes, like this,
and then, again, he sends a letter:
Sometimes he also gets letters, as more people accept his Friendster invitations and his network grows.
Glen may be creepy, but his new friends welcome him with open arms:
Glen continues to look for Friendsters that might share his interests, and stumbles across Jeff.
Jeff, like Glen, is (according to his profile) interested in anarchy and body modification. Glen tries to bond.
He sends Jeff letters, with his profile included, so Jeff can read about him:
Glen keeps on getting more friends, and letters from old friends:
I like to think Glen's profile and choice of pictures suggests creepiness without stating anything too explicit. However, the farther you move away from Glen's profile in the Friendster network, the more Glen materializes as explicitly fucked up. For ex., his testimonial for Fabian (or, as Glen sometimes misspells it, Fabien):
If you want to be Glen's friendster, do a user search for Glen Graft; he'll be happy to accept your invitation.
robber flyFiendish is the Word donates these good links to the blogosphere:
-the art and friendship of Van Gogh and Gaugin
-Flowers in Ultraviolet
-Goreyography
From Exclamation Mark:
-Ad*Access, thousands of vintage ads
-Jasper Maskelyne: a British magician who helped defeat Rommel's army in North Africa using sleight of hand. (Unfortunately, the article link's not currently working, so I'm just linking to Mark's post on Maskelyne.)
Amy's Robot
-is optimistic about Jane Campion's upcoming film, In The Cut
-informs us that Practical Magic might become a TV drama. Better than Charmed? I'll just be happy to see more witches. Lalala, witches.
other
-Steve Almond's reading recommendations
-carbonated milk? (via GirlHacker)
-Complete Guide to Self-Improvement and Mental Development on the Web. I'm also tempted to register with MindMedia Life Enhancement Network and download "Mindviewer" (love that name).
-Painting the Weather, an online exhibit (via ionarts)
-"There Is A Strange Noise In My Engine!" Oh, no, gah, poor thing. (via Geisha asobi)
-an ad mascot gallery, which scrubbles links to in relation to his purchase of Meet Mr. Product: The Art of the Advertising Character.
-A Severed Head Art Gallery of classical paintings. The "A," as opposed to "The," seems overly modest. (via The Cartoonist)
random corrections of other bloggers
1. It's SoFia, not SoPHia. Check the official movie site.
2. My last name is ChicHa, like the drink that this blog's named after. Chica means girl or something, not a butt-fucking-awesome Latin American drink. (I've never written "butt-fucking-awesome" before. I guess I'm trying to sound like someone else when I'm being bitchy.)
all play and no sleepfresh cup o' links
-How four magazines you've probably never read help determine what books you buy.
-professional trend spotters (via notes from somewhere bizarre)
-Word Pirates, aiming to "to raise our awareness of the way in which important words are being taken over for selfish reasons"
-one way to summarize NY fashion week
-designing your own SIAR (Sexually Interactive Autonomous Robots)
-sculpted airbrushed tans
-Reflexology charts, hands and feet
-The Dr. Ikkaku Ochi Collection, diseased bodies (via B.A.)
-Even smoking a pack a day, I'll live to 83
-Surgery without Anesthesia, thanks to Power Breathing (via mefi)
-Old Men Crying (via J-Walk)
stale cup o' links
-The Dead Pool: bet on what celebs will die this year
-self-portrait gallery (I may write more about this later.)
-gallery of human eyes, blog-style
-The Worst Jobs in Science
waking up too earlyvisual
-museum of skulls (via things)
-perfume ads since 1980 (via quiddity)
-Restrooms as Functional Art (via mefi)
lit'ure
-It's a literary contest, a survival challenge, a poetry slam, and a workshop; it's litkicks.com's QUEST. (via mefi)
-a new episode of Madelyn Murray O'Hair in Hell
other
-mono no aware, 'the sadness of things'
-beauty's place in lit theory
-Sofia Coppola's favorite films)
-"What do the new reality dating shows have in common with 19th-century literature?"
-Hollywood divorce settlements (scroll down to sidebar)
manic tuesday: link dump-Clayton Bailey's great robot sculptures, sonic pop guns, and more (via the Cartoonist)
-Disney characters' names in other languages (via languagehat)
-also, Dali's Disney movie
-more on writer Nell Freudenberger
-Logo Smackdown
-in case you haven't already seen it: Historic Tale Construction Kit
-Study: Sleeping Position Reveals Personality Traits
-What romance movie best represents your love life? (via Mercurial)
You must like to spank or be spanked, because your
romance is remeniscent of Secretary. A truly
modern love story, it shows that you don't need
to be conventional to be normal. You're
probably the type that owns a whole lot more
leather than what's upholstering your car or
sofa. Yeah, you know what I mean.
What Romance Movie Best Represents Your Love Life?
brought to you by Quizilla
Photo hunt, the bar game where you spot two photos' differences, finally has a sleek online counterpart. (So far my best score is 8760. If you play, tell me what you score.)
*Update: My new best score is 12,710. Also, a mefi user suggests "some somewhat fun but easy ways to cheat. First you can create a series of macros in photoshop (esp if you have two screens like me) that does a difference filter on one of the frames. The second way is to do the stereo optics thing where you cross your eyes and the differences will appear to flicker in the third image." (I can't blend the images by crossing my eyes, but maybe you can. My contacts might be acting as brakes, stopping the eyes from rolling too far in.)
everyday is like mondaylit and art
-Steve Almond is Bookslut's current Guest Ho.
-Weirdo Leonardo, the stranger artworks and writings of Leonardo da Vinci. Pretty awesome.
-Molière, Corneille, Rumsfeld
film, tv, music, etc.
-Family Guy, the movie (via mefi)
-Super NES endings (via geisha asobi)
- Johnny Cash singing the theme to Three's Company (via fimoculous)
other good stuff
-torture and coercion
-"Driving in the first four days after being dumped is highly unsafe."
-Imitate a Face Contest and the Oklahoma Microscopy Society's Ugly Bug Contest Homepage (via J-Walk)
-Encyclopedia Of The Self (via the presurfer)
everyday is like sundaylovely
-When Doubt Becomes Your Best Friend or When the Anticipation Is All You Have, a Flash meditation on Fall (via 990000)
-more of that sex x-ray photography I posted about a while back (via muxway)
-in case you haven't seen it: The Flash Based Juggling Simulator
not lovely
-Gallery of Hippie Horrors (via gravity lens)
-World Wide Ugly Couch Contest (via Weird Links)
-a cat I especially don't want sleeping on my face. Even Madcat and Lucifer look nicer.
other
-Diane Arbus Reconsidered
-the movie age gauge. Compare your age to celebrities', and learn how old you were when crucial movies came out. (via J-Walk)
-list of fictional cat characters
-meet market. "be good looking or you will be rejected." icky profiles.
also
Fiendish Is The Word! Fiendish Is The Word! Fiendish Is The Word! Fiendish Is The Word! Fiendish Is The Word! Fiendish Is The Word! Fiendish Is The Word is back.
i'm feeling slow and sad, and my soda has the aftertaste of windexI'm not saying I'll be true, but I'll try
-sex consent forms
-a blog of bad bridal fashions, from Art for housewives' post on recycled wedding gowns
-ties by famous artists
Now everything's changed, come on let's go
-Nostalgia Central, a trip through three decades of pop culture
-The Bad Fads Museum (via things)
someday you'll know I was the one
-1/1000 scale reproductions of Tokyo and NYC (via betacorpo)
-City Creator (via Coudal)
Introduce your computer to some school spirit.
I began reading a blog in my referrals log, and laughed at how similar its stories were to one of my college friend's life. The writing style was also identical, and then I realized so was the author's name.
tired, sick, busy, but here's some links-The Fantastic in Art and Fiction. Yes yes yes! Thanks goes to Spitting Image for the find.
-American Social Hygiene Posters, 1910-1970
-Industrial Art Gallery (via B.A.)
-Famous Cannabis Users (via the presurfer)
-It's the NY Review of Books' big Fall Books Issue.
-A Scrabble practice blog
-tense forms, "sort-of a record label, sort-of a publisher, and sort-of a puny art factory."
-Great links at Dublog, can't list them all.
-Real-Time Cloud Rendering and Animation, but unfortunately only for PCs
-the cash value of your soul, and an opportunity to sell
I've finally, happily discovered mighty girl, a blog by Margaret Berry. Here's her favorite posts and, also, her archived articles at The Morning News.
Here's a typical blog excerpt, from a post about a trip to Italy:
The rental car, oddly, was infested with spiders. I realize this sounds like a detail from a drug-induced haze, but I have the bites to prove it. What's more, my attempts to procure drugs in Keller, Virginia were surprisingly fruitless.
We're in Milan now for the Adaptive Path Workshop. According to my guidebook, Italian men should have leapt at me as I got off the plane and refused to stop grabbing at my ass until I batted at them with rolled newspapers. I dutifully learned the suggested phrases to ward off unwanted advances: more>
insomnia deluxelit and media
-White Noise, the movie? (via fimoculous)
-the Save Our Short Story Campaign
-some interesting background on Bertolucci's new film and its writer's novelization of the film based on his novel
-Age Progression and Image Modification of famous people (via Geisha Asobi)
-PhotoTherapy (via spitting image)
-novels about photographers (via spitting image)
more dolphin links
-How to have sex with a dolphin
-"Evidence Reveals Dolphins in a New Light, as Senseless Killers"
more biology
-some interesting evolution facts and theories, including an example to remember the "next time a myopic creationist tries to tell you how perfectly God made the human eye."
sam's b-day party's tonightmorbid
-safety coffins: All I desire for my own burial is not to be buried alive." (via exclamation mark)
-optical illusions. I particularly like skull or lovers?.
-Real Doll Surgery
writing, etc.
-boynton has a good post on writing longhand.
-Mastication is Normal judges more books by their covers.
fashion, design and art
-Tokyo Shoe Blog
-gluebooks
-An International Catalogue of Superheroes
Expect the new and improved (redesigned) Cup to appear in the next two or three weeks. It'll be a four column extravaganza, with more links, more images, and more handwritten coding that reveals I've no idea what I'm doing.
I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it, I'm about to lose control and I think I like it.
In the meantime, I've got a question. What are, in your opinion, the best designed blogs out there? I already know how I want my blog to look, but I need to get a jolt of design-energy to finish my redesign.
daily nocturnelit
-free PDF ebooks, mainly classics
-the books-on-books genre
-Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self
culture
-Dodge: A Quarterly Journal of Design Ideas
-When you hear Bach in a film, be wary
-the world of competitive eating
-culinary school, article and diary
images
-The Internet Museum of Saftey Razors
-Biodic: animal biology
-Cats Painted in the Progression of Psychosis of a Schizophrenic Artist
-Strange Brew writes, "This is sort of exactly how I feel about birds."
For the past 24 hours, the MSN network, including Slate and Hotmail, has been down. Anyone know why, or when it'll be back up?
daily tiredart
-the strange art photography of Alan Tex, via the blog ArtNudes
-The Joy of Sadness: Dürer's Melencolia I
-For better art links than mine, check out Sugar'n Spicy.
tech
-A Spell to free oneself from Excessive Computer Enchantment
-create moving 3D models of walkers
random
-Krazy Kids' Food Gallery (via B.A.)
-How Everyday Things Are Made includes production diagrams, summaries, and videos for products such as candy, cars, airplanes, and bottles. It also links to a wide selection of online factory tours.
-"Find the Man's Head within 3 seconds and you're a genius!"
i'll be in NY this week, but i'll have my cell and be checking email
random
-Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. To your left: Exhibit 1 - From a Dell computer box. I believe the caption should read 'If you drop this box on a dog, don't trip over its tail'. (via geisha asobi)
-Adidas Hangs Humans From Billboard
-The Unh! Project: A collection of gutteral moans from comics (via things)
film
-info on the next Wes Anderson film
-a gallery of celebs without makeup, or celebs playing characters with leprosy, or celebs just looking lousy
literature
-the art of the literary rejection letter. Also, an old favorite: rejectioncollection.com.
-The Authoritative Guide to Saying Authors' Names Right. No, not really.
daily headache-and-insomnia-The Museum of the Mind (via idle type)
-Looking Within: The Brain as Art, an article on the exhibit (via quiddity)
-Arby's oven mitt, voiced by Tom Arnold, is the definition of pathetic.
-mefi post on bad fortune cookies
-visit the catwalks of the major fashion houses
-Kate Moss retrospective
-"What I loved most about computer class was the Oregon Trail." Education in the early 90s.
-books database for OSX
-themed fonts (via geisha asobi)
random: maggot pomegranate…"[Penelope] Cruz continues to be a strikingly beautiful woman who can't move on the screen; there is something in her hunched, rolling gait that inevitably suggests Popeye the Sailor."…watergun museum…fetopia now has feto soap!…if you haven't already seen it: Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics.
The Hot or Not Photo Editing Guide. I particularly like the guillotine trick on page five and the scratch out and boombox techniques on page six.
last day of summer break-For those who don't have FTP servers (ie, blogspot members), here's a quick way to get doodles online and in your blog. (via semi compos mentis)
-Some time ago, I linked to Normal Bob Smith's Unholy Army of Catholic School Girls and Final Justice Jesus Dress Up, but Normal also has many more doll dressup pages.
-Insert Silence, for some artsy downtime. (via TWO-ZERO)
-Antidepressants 'grow brain cells.'
-"After two years of tests on a method of detection known as 'odourology', [French Police] have concluded that smell can be as effective as fingerprints or DNA to link a criminal with a crime." Maybe odourology works best in countries where people aren't proponents of the daily shower. (last two links via quasimeta)
-The Museum of Advertising Icons (via a new favorite, the cartoonist)
-Some people overestimate their pop culture contribution.
daily beep-boop-bop-bop-With Pretendster, "[you can] finally receive the testimonials you desperately crave and so obviously deserve." (via fimoculous)
-top ad slogans of all time. Might be a good resource for punny headline writers. (via mefi)
-illustrations of Little Red Riding Hood through time. (via exclamation mark)
-The Century Project "is a series of nude photographs accompanied by highly personal and moving statements by women whose lives span 100 years." (via sugar 'n spicy)
-crazy fads from the 20's through the 90's (via the presurfer)
-Sophia Coppola directs Kate Moss in the new White Stripes video. (via fimoculous)
-in case you haven't already seen it: Peter Kuper's flash + illustration adaptation of The Metamorphosis
If you're a Mac user and looking for free software, injection has a useful post.
daily art-and-shit-wonderful collection of staged photography (via amberglow)
-Society for Art of Imagination and Museum Morpheus (via Dublog)
-David Byrne's Power Point presentations (via Coudal Partners)
-an old Michael Gondry-directed Cibo Matto video, and a NY Times interview with Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Gondry. (via fimoculous)
-The String Tribute to the Smiths (via G3RM)
-good quotes (via betacorpo)
-finally! I've been looking for this: video of David Blaine pulling out his heart. Thanks goes to Bifurcated Rivets.
-"Viewers are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer's words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships." (via betacarpo)
-Semiotics: A Primer for Designers (via Fimoculous)
-"You're in grad school you say? You've been boning up on post-positivist realism? Test your hipness: see how many faces you know." (via consumptive)
-Derrida now endorses "modernist Enlightenment principles"? (via Fimoculous)
-some discussion of The Believer (via bookslut)
-"I'm a Midwestern writer, and I'm proud of it." I think he confuses "nadir" with "zenith." (via bookslut)
-Oblivio's Choice Cuts, a vertical montage of online prose
-The Virtual Letter Project (via Idle Type)
-Giornale Nuovo writes, "I was thinking the other day that wouldn’t it be good if there were an on-line art-history resource with a thematic or motivic index, such that one could find all of the famous paintings depicting the myth of Danaë, say, or those including scenes from Boccaccio’s Decameron . I was pleased to find that there is indeed such an index."
-5vs1: an illustration weblog (via iconomy)
-an online gallery of Ukiyo-e (translates to "pictures of the floating world") woodblock prints. (via artnotes)
-a strip show for the gents (via Geisha asobi)
-Random Personal Picture Finder (via B.A.'s Weblog)
-The art of photo retouching. Mousing over this image releases a banshee. (links via caterina)
-Baby Translator (via Geisha asobi)
-This site examines the accented speech of speakers from many different language backgrounds reading the same sample paragraph. Currently, we have obtained 264 speech samples." (via muxway)
-celebrities who died onstage (via Idle Type)
-Last Words…: transcripts and MP3s from the cockpits of doomed airplanes (via B.A.)
-Google News Alerts, convenient news tracking.
daily speak-of-the-devil-Newswriting groaners (via ascii rock, where I also found yesterday's pictures of smoke)
-Woody Allen's newest movie stars the totally unappealing Jason Biggs. Also, Coudal Partners links to what might be the Woody Allen font.
-19th cent. German stories (via eye of the goof)
-The Raving Atheist, "An Atheistic Examination of the Culture of Belief: How Religious Devotion Trivializes American Law and Politics." It's a blog.
-Also, some homestate news: "It was the first time more people left for other states than moved to California from other states, and the trend is continuing, experts say."
-RSS feeds for many comics
-As always, lots of good stuff at thingsmagazine.net.
-The History of the Devil, and the Idea of Evil from the Earliest Times to the Present Day.
-New Yorkers easily dismiss The Jersey Devil.
-the devil as a bringer of good luck; how to devil stick; more on the jersey devil; Tasmanian Devils; Church of Satan message board; Sympathy or The Devil, Renaissance Magic and the Ambivalence of Idols; Medieval Sourcebook: Tales of the Devil; Devil's Food Cake
I updated my "best of" section: Cup of Chicha highlights from the past three months.
Also, once I'm back in Iowa, I'm going to slowly redesign this site. I'm thinking: three columns, one for quick links and my blogroll, one for commentary and analysis, and another for pictures and personal info (a short "about," along with what I'm reading, listening to, etc.). Waddya think?
daily always-am-metaphilm: "we don't review movies, we interpret them"
-the knolwedge for thirst: a beverage blog
-"discover the world of smoking girls" (via geisha asobi)
-addictive online trivial pursuit
-handwriting analysis trouble traits
daily yeah-huh-huh-whatever-"…new evidence supports ancient assertions that intoxicating gases were a source of [the Delphic Oracle's] inspiration." (via die puny humans)
-are you a supertaster in virtual reality?
-"Technology is a toy. Technology is a friend." (via cheesedip)
-Ami Vitale's portfolio. Conscientious recommends her photos of Kashmir.
-"Style Bytes are a run-on list of street observations…"
-To lay claim to what will be, for a while, an important cultural referent, I sort of want to see Gigli.
-Ascii movies
-strange interactive art that I'm mainly linking to because the artist's name is Nathalie (via indigoblog)
daily expectations-stereo images (via everlasting blort)
-Banraku and Karakuri puppetry (via the highly recommended dublog)
-finalists from scene 360's "everyday life" contest
-Baryshnikov Will Play Heartthrob in 'Sex and the City'
-Fifteen ways to leave your lover
-Japanese psychiatric art (via geisha asobi)
-First gay public high school set for NY (via reenhead)
-MTA Unveils Virtual Subway (via the morning news)
-how to describe things to blind people
-"RedPaper is the world's first collaborative newspaper, powered by people just like you. Buy breaking stories and insight posted by real people all around the world for just the change in your pocket. " (via magnetbox)
-A good weblog I hadn't noticed before
-The Routine Autopsy: The Procedure Related in Narrative Form: A Guide for Screenwriters and Novelists (via the eyes have it)
When I don't attribute a source to a link, it's because I either found it myself on one of my manic-induced 4 am explorations of the web, or I saw the link on so many sites that it's truly become public domain. Otherwise, though, I try to attribute everything I link. Bloggers are usually only rewarded for their work by other bloggers. And, for a blog that gets as few daily visitors as mine (600-800, compared to, for example, Fimoculous's 2,000), linking to others' blogs is a good way to get into referrals logs and be checked out.
When I do stumble across a blog that obviously copped lots of my self-found links, and copied my arrangements of pictures or text, I think: what the hell? It's so easy to attribute sources, and, if we've the same taste in links, I'd otherwise put you on my blogroll and probably be a fan.
Mefi has some great links today, including:
-Surgical simulators. Some of the links are graphically interesting, and some are just graphic.
-The American Gallery of Psychiatric Art
-The International Time Capsule Society
daily no-no-i-don't-want-to-go-the ugliest cars (via the presurfer)
-the ugliest book covers
-Amazon plans to make books searchable
-This is where being a super-taster comes in handy: poisoning story no.1, poisoning story no.2.
-lots of dissection videos
-lifestyle drugs (via B.A.)
-Myths & Legends (via idle type)
-light strips
-Friendster shirts, how to write a Friendster profile, Friendster ebay auctions, a Friendster applet, and a Friendster blog.
daily link-dump-"In each issue of h2so4, a thinker of our Western tradition tackles your workaday concerns."
-Bathroom habits survey
-another Morrissey link
-Top 11 Draculas
-a world of pasties
-a documented life
-daily mash-ups
daily more-Not book reviews. Book cover reviews. (via iconomy)
-the pitfalls of having a literary pseudonym.
-new, cheap self-publishing
-"The Age of Grief," a wonderful novella by Jane Smiley, has been made into a movie. "Anatomy of a Scene" is the documentary of the making of the movie.
-AllMovie.com lets you search films by theme, tone, style, and more.
-Upload a scanned image of a font and What the Font? will tell you which font it is. (via burnt toast)
-Collage and Assemblage by James Michael Starr (via iconomy)
-the Astor Cube prank (via presurfer)
-strange candies.
I'm slowly affixing short descriptions to each of my sidebar's blogs; the descriptions should be visible when you hover the mouse over the blog link.
Of course, the descriptions aren't as informative as some blogs' self-assigned ones. For example, Dirty Peaches: "Less popular than pubic lice but more popular than Proust in translation."
daily sex education
-Women have more grey matter, men have more white matter, and other sex differences.
-"I really don't think you're going to see amazing games for women for another 10 years."
-for me: Joystick with built-in Pac-Man + other games
-Parisian Haute Coutoure
-Beauty pageants. I don't relate.
-Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 2003 Results. Entrants submitted bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.
-Authors' summer reading lists
-Send in titles, get Sam to draw a picture.
-the photography of Josephine Sacabo
-Polaroid SX-70 manipulations
daily sneezing-and-smoking-Sometimes my boyfriend writes Slate's Today's Papers. But usually it's written by Eric Umansky. MediaBistro interviews him on "his job, his jokes, and life on the night shift." The interviewer, coincidentally, is my friend David Hirschman, of the weblog subplot.
-Why can't furniture claim the one-of-a-kind authenticity of art? Artist-made lamps, stools, tables, chairs, cabinets, benches and outdoor furniture.
-paradoxes and strange proofs (via the great iconomy)
-Gryphons: more fierce than dragons, more noble than unicorns. (via Incoming Signals)
-walking tours of the 7 deadly sins in NYC
-Tom Cruise was illiterate until age 22 (via Gawker)
-I can't tell if this blog's subhead is a joke or not.
-Have I mentioned recently that I like Quasimeta?
daily okay-chief editor of the OED picks his favourite words with unusual origins (via Caterina)
-"The Phantom Museum is a handsomely produced, illustrated book by six authors who were asked to write a short story or an essay in response to having seen an exhibition of some of Henry Wellcome’s vast collection of medical curiosities."
-Iconomy links to Houber Tcherkelov's portfolio: art made from bacteria, virii, smashed mice, excrement, skin, blood, and embryos.
-"Critics seemed confused about 'K Street,' but then so did Albrecht. Executive producer Henry Bean said he welcomed the confusion. 'We like the fact that you can't always tell what is real and what is staged.'"
-the periodic table of deserts (via everlasting blort)
-Britney's photos in W
-the life of courtesans
-French goth (via new things)
Lately, the comments on this site have been intelligent and deserving of replies. So, instead of sleeping in that calm nook of 8-9 am, I've tried to respond to most of the reader discussions. I should have gotten around to it sooner, but, really, I'm masochistically lazy.
daily maybe-some-more-later?-stained glass windows by Chagall (via reenhead)
-Love Within Us, a digital book from Scene 360
-flesh or food? (via Geisha asobi)
-8 superpowers for future humans
daily life-and-death-211 Euphemisms for Death and Dying
-pictures of animals mating (via geisha asobi). (My suggestions for clicking: 1 2 3 4 5)
-Women Can Ovulate More Than Once a Month
-Angelina Jolie on sex and self-mutilation
-mefi post on x-rays and art (also see my April 26 post on x-ray art)
daily sweaty-sweaty-links-virtual book tours (via kottke)
-get music and movies for your mood (via Words of Waldman)
-sonic collages
-Ten Verses, "dedicated to promoting intellectually-engaged criticism of visual art and architecture."
-the pasta-log project (via the great team, via things magazine)
-from Pop Culture Junk Mail: Children's TV archive, cool lunchboxes, and the library of celebrity dolls .
-discouraging the trade in human skin (via spitting image)
-a pillow for the lonely (via muxway)
daily did-you-have-a-good-4th?-French-bashing. I'm French, according to my passport. But really, I'm an American who laughs at French jokes.
-And, a website of joking French: the Deleuze + Guattari Rhiz-o-Mat.
-If you're British and can beat this "sensory challenge," you can get a free MRI scan of your brain.
-Colorwhore: a directory of nice colors
-artst-designed chess sets
-Loreo 3D camera
-Blogathon 2003: blog for charity
-"Civilisations uses web technology to reveal the sweep of historical forces and the rise and fall of great empires and ideas over 5000 years in a way that no book could ever do."
-If you start living in alternate realities, remember this.
-Let MASH produce an alternate reality (I'm a novelist in Paris, living with my boyfriend).
-injust-spring's list of skewed love songs would be good in itself. But it also links to free MP3s.
daily my-life-flashes-before-my-eyes-every-moment-of-the-day-Fimoculous links to Baudrillard's thoughts on The Matrix. (Harder than reading the French is reading the Babelfish translation into English.)
-"How easy is it to group people into 'races' based on appearance? What about using individual traits? Does everybody classify the same way? Try your hand at 'sorting' individuals and see if it matches how people think of themselves. " (via the presurfer)
-Joyce's naughty letters to Nora (via reality carnival)
-real robots on the web (via B.A.'s weblog)
-famous diamonds (via girl hacker)
-photographs of slime mold (via reenhead)
-Doris Mitsch's Darkness Series (via amberglow)
-Gothic Lolita. I think I found my new Fall wardrobe. (via Geisha Asobi)
Among Fiendish Is The Word's many good links this week: bloodletting images, feral children, and well-known authors' signatures. Not yet available: the signatures of bloodletting ferals.
daily working-finally-yes-the 2003 USA Memory Championship
-the craziest thought competition
-what inflatable love dolls really look like
-coudal partners' summer reading list
-'After "The Bell Jar," Life Went On'
For those of us who can't get him on the phone, or have a nocturnal schedule that makes calling back impolite, Josh Gang now has a weblog, Dirty Peaches is/are delicious. Mr. Gang enjoys the writing of David Sedaris, Flannery O'Connor, and dead French theorists. I enjoy the writing of Flannery O'Connor and Mr. Gang.
daily slam-a slide show on the history of the lap dance
-and the slide show mentions Cake, "a group of feminist party promoters [that] advocate the lap-dance-as-party-game among their earnest Ivy League crowd."
-Man Keeps Wife Locked in House
-NPR covers a language removal service. Reminds me of Ben Marcus's Notable American Women
-MP3s of every song that's played on Gilmore Girls
daily feckless-Sputnik: whole life catalog, organized by verb (via new things)
-sand sculptures by Scott Radke (via indigoblog)
-art by Masaru Shichinohe (via solipsistic)
-more giant microbes
-The Bell Witch (via plep)
-sexiest movie scenes ever? (via six different ways)
-Steve Almond has a tour diary
-I always recommend Dublog.
daily why-am-i-not-working-Last words of fictional characters (via incoming signals)
-"WhoWhatWhen is a database of people and events from 1000 A.D. to the present. Create graphic timelines of periods in history and of the lives of individuals."
-Woody Allen: French Kissing in the USA
-"Microsoft said Friday that it is halting development of future Macintosh versions of its Internet Explorer browser, citing competition from Apple Computer's Safari browser." (via ascii rock)
-a summary of Slate's summary judgment: on Dumb and Dumberer, "'So excruciatingly awful, the word "dumb" could sue for slander.'"; on Hail to the Thief, "'Did I get the wrong CD in the mail?' wonders Newsweek's Devin Gordon, who thought Radiohead was returning to its more accessible roots."
daily awake:asleep::36:3-Top Ten Pictures of Thom Yorke Looking Pretentious. Fuck, I think he looks cute. And the last pic in the countdown (no.1): really, really cute. What's wrong with me that I love pretension?
-Much lonelier than wanting love from a cat is wanting love from a cat robot. (via geisha)
-TV is our mirror, literally.
-The Ten Lowest Moments in Advertising. Read no. 2.
-USA Today comes up with a good headline: 'Everything is so 5 minutes ago'
-Amazon World, a blog, tracks "some of the more interesting [Amazon] user reviews." A review of The Bell Jar: "Basically, this chick. . .is a player-hater."
daily my-feet-will-be-the-end-of-me-Hindu Hells: select your vice and see what happens (via B.A.'s weblog)
-online museum of ouija boards (via idle type)
-A mondegreen is the mishearing (usually accidental) of a phrase, such that it acquires a new meaning. (via kottke)
-Japan's chilling Internet suicide pacts
-quantum suicide, a thought-experiment (via S*T*A*R*E)
-From The Solipsistic Gazette: Chinese Opera and Julie Heffernan paintings. In an ideal world, 1. I'd actually write a novel, and 2. Heffernan would design its cover.
daily smooth-but-bumpy-sailing-Think your downstair neighbors are bad? Surely they could be worse (scroll down to reason no. 3).
-"B-Listers are amusing and forgettable, the perfect stars for our short attention spans."
-John Updike and other authors rate Hillary's memoir
-"Attention advertisers: it is now possible to place promotional and advertising messages directly onto eggs!" (via adrants)
-Damien Hirst quits drink and drugs
-40 Mistakes Men Make While Having Sex With Women contains some of the worst advice ever. But parts of it are just funny. Mistake no. 29: ATTEMPTING ANAL SEX AND PRETENDING IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. (link via coyote)
-vintage neck braces (via quiddity)
some recent links from the new-to-me Reality Carnival:
-Past Life Regression Software. For only $14.95, I'm sorely tempted.
-an article starts, "There is a good chance that an odd cluster of hereditary neurological diseases among the Ashkenazi Jews is a side-effect of strong selection for increased intelligence. "
-Occult-y interpretations of brain wave frequencies
-the blog's author calls me beautiful. oh man, that's really nice, thanks, merci.
-a simple guide to the A-list bloggers. Given that I read none of their blogs, I can't decide whether I should read the guide for edification, or be as uninterested in the guide as I am in the blogs. (link via burnt toast)
-fungus of the month. This month, Pisolithus tinctorius, the "dog turd" fungus. (via idle type)
-a new New Yorker story, by David Sedaris
-Ask the DJ is a sophisticated mix engine which analyses the music's rhythm to perform DJ-like transitions between tracks.
-more after lunch, really.
daily it's-been-days-a collection of New Scientist articles on human nature
-"my life as a phone psychic"
-multiple choice fiction
-how to get good 'n drunk in Iowa City (just go outside)
and, from here on out, pet-obsessions:
-weatherpix, severe weather photography
-a NYC links page that I'd bookmark instead of link, but I'm not on my own computer.
-random human sexuality diagrams, charts, and illustrations
-picture gallery of members of the Handlebar [Mustache] Club
-surreal food photographs
Updates:
The problem, dear readers, is that, in four weeks, I've moved three times and been sick twice. The cup's more than half empty. See:
.
daily mo mo mo-fashion designer pronunciations (via gawker)
-sex on drugs (via 6differentways)
-the eighties tarot (via 6differentways)
-be telekinetic (via the presurfer)
-moh latehr
-the NYer's Zizek profile is finally online
-what if we performed a live autopsy on a giant humanoid robot?
-two of the most linked-to article on the web: big bro. extraordinaire and um, chimps might be human
-Shakespeare and brain imaging
-"Liquidising goldfish 'not a crime'"
-so much more when I get around to it.
daily still-in-need-of-a-sublet-"…Other people's cigarette smoke will not kill you."
-Laura Domela's art (via coudal partners)
-2 NY Times articles on blogging: Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It and A New York State of Blog (about gawker.com)
-Globe Alive lists live people as search results.
-Online Dictionary of Playground Slang (via geegaw)
-if Simpsons characters mated… (via geisha asobi)
-quantitative analysis of facial attractiveness (via muxway)
-Personality changes throughout life (and, via quasimeta, yet another personality test)
daily i'm-drinking-good-spirits-etiquette books for women (via amberglow)
-Kings of Africa (via dublog)
-"The purpose of this page is to put all controversy aside and just provide information to help you get the most enjoyment out of your dog." (via everlasting blort)
-I still haven't seen the new Radiohead video.
-art by Yoshiki Hori (via geisha asobi log)
-make music with your hands, a PC, and a webcam (via girl hacker)
-"Why not put a fish tank in a the top of a full tower case?" (via 6 different ways)
-the 9 types of girlfriends (via the presurfer)
daily obscure-little-girls-Simulations of Prosthetic Vision
-the first draft of Infinite Jest
-more stop motion studies
-reality hacking (via Coudal Partners)
-the perception depository, looking at primitives
-The Monster Walks: Gargoyles and Grotesques in NYC
-Britney as Barbarella in Japanese tea tv commercial (via fimoculous)
-Someone with Windows: download this, report back
I've been twice informed that my links are now indistinguishable from my text. I'm sorry, I'll work on it.
daily storm-brewin'-the world's first sea floor resort complex (via six different ways)
-Time slows for people sho stop smoking
-worst banner ad ever, via B.A.'s Weblog
-The Codex Seraphinianus "is a highly idiosyncratic magnum opus by an Italian architect indulging his sense of fancy to the hilt."
-In time for my trip home: the NY Times reviews L.A. dining.
-Echocloud, a music recommendation engine
-surgical instruments from antiquity (via fiendish is the word)
-calories burned during various sex acts (via fiendish is the word)
daily i'm-still-hoping-learning to love you more, art assignments (via amberglow)
-How do people walk with these? And are they real? (via daze reader)
- freeze dry taxidermy services for cats, dogs and all family pets. (via geisha asobi)
-blog deceptions that geegaw remembers (scroll down to may 6)
-Which Ivy League university is right for you? I had to change my answers three times to get Brown instead of Harvard.
-BlogMatcher is a program that helps people find weblogs that match their interests and find like-minded blogs.
more later. gosh yeah.
Over the past couple weeks, I've often realized that I'm in love with Speckled Paint. I've never felt this way before about a blog: daily, I check to see if I'm still on its blogroll, I fantasize attending a blogger-only party and meeting its author (or: I would only ever go to such a party to meet him), and, today, I bought 200 Blog-shares of Speckled Paint stock. And, I've been wondering, why didn't I realize sooner Speckled Paint was my true, one and only, blog love?
But I just learned Speckled Paint is dead.
daily sublet-my-life-before and after life: a baby portrait, a current portrait
-Do family members reincarnate together?
-online paint by numbers
-um, think before clicking here: congenital anomalies
-beautiful images of retinas, lenses, and fibers
-the quickest way to know a blogger: read his first post and his 9/11 post (via kottke)
-"Sir Elton John is to take a musical version of Interview With the Vampire to Broadway." (via ghost of a flea)
-Faulkner's days in Hollywood
-Maybe lightning doesn't strike twice, but how about three times? Talk underway for Grease 3.
-A word repeated over and over will lose its meaning. So will a body part. (via geisha asobi)
-Dante's Inferno Test is up and running again.
-Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene (I haven't checked it out yet, so I can't promise that it's good.)
-book deals can suck
-images of mites (via speckled paint)
-"Are you a history buff, or just want to know more about artificial limbs 100 years ago?" (What did you expect after the "or"?)
-more, more, more and more later.
daily hoo-ha-ow-Suicide Prevention Products for Psychiatric and Correctional Facilities (via sharpeworld)
-The Living Almanac of Disasters
-"Philosophers (22) average IQ 173; Scientists (39) 164; Fiction writers (53) 163; Statesmen (43) 159; Musicians (11) 153; Artists (13) 150; Soldiers (27) 133." (via incoming signals)
-a timeline of food (via incoming signals)
-It's hard to find old tv ads on the net-- until you find Retromedia. (via scrubbles)
-"Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall and British rocker Elvis Costello plan to marry…"
"Welcome to this tiny face composer, or should I say de-composer?"
daily my-kidneys-are-kicking-"Marijuana, pornography and illegal labour have created a hidden market in the United States which now accounts for as much as 10% of the American economy, according to a study." (via spitting image)
-antique rat and mouse traps (via sublimate)
-Broken 1000 Faces (via speckled paint and geisha asobi)
-"All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun." (via geisha asobi)
-From the BBC: Einstein and Newton 'had autism'
-The Daily Show's Bush v. Bush debate (via cheesedip)
-"Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens." (via Dublog)
daily i'm-pro-biotics-Artistic and Psychological Experiments with Synesthia
-Incoming Signals responds to my question (I'm friggin' flattered) and returns with some links.
-today's best out of context sentence: "Taylor says he suffers 'mental anguish, humiliation, embarrassment, pain and suffering and loss of appetite' since eating the salad."
-I'm the last to link to it: butterfly alphabet
-the art of explanation (via Dublog)
-erotic fertility festivals (via Daze Reader)
-Geoff, weren't you at one time interested in this type of medical curiosity?
-online yoga (via Idle Type)
-Catherine Zeta-Jones smokes, even while pregnant
daily my-stomach-hurts-You cruel, cruel pescetarians. Fish do feel pain.
-before and after makeup; where can I find that makeup? (via geisha asobi log)
-Giornale Nuovo on collages
-Joyce and jogging
-phancy.com's got Bjork mp3s
-Joss Whedon's ten favorite Buffy episodes
-Freak Watchers Textbook
-Combat stress. Combat stress.
-Museum of The History of Psychological Instrumentation (via speckled paint)
-foods that affect your bowels
Why is AsciiRock forbidden? Has Incoming Signals stopped broadcasting? Will Supermodels Are Lonelier Than You Think come back? What does "as daily as possible" mean to Lightcycle? Will Portage ever get off the road?
daily i'm-nocturnal-again-Bob's Quick Guide To The Apostrophe, You Idiots
-Trickle: Automated Posting of Deferred MovableType Entries
-designer trading cards
-"The Trade Regulation Organization is issuing a '55 most wanted' playing-card deck similar to the one that the Pentagon issued two weeks ago in Iraq."
-American Crusade 2001+ trading cards
-apocalyptic dreaming
-world's first home DNA storage kit
-website DNA
You'll notice, if you scroll down and look left, that I've organized and extended my homage to other blogs. I'm still playing with the CSS, but use and abuse the list; all the listed blogs are great.
-What kind of thinker are you? (via burnt toast)
-vintage posters from the golden age of magic (via everlasting blort)
-Atheist: the game (via feindish is the word)
-get free Maxim (via fimoculous)
-BlogPulse - Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs (via muxway)
-paper dolls, aka Unholy Army of Catholic School Girls
-The Jean-Luc Godard Drinking Game (via scrubbles)
-Radiohead album art (via quasimeta)
-Researchers propose a mathematical model of marriage
-body part zen
-nerdy size comparisons of buildings and starships (via geisha asobi log)
-Animal Rights Leader Wants To Be Barbecued (also via geisha asobi log)
-strange fruits (via muxway)
-good gifts-- except for the bubble gun, which I have and is total crap (via idle type)
-the best gift of all: the 'orgasm machine' (via tokyo ouja)
-Create your own safety signs (via coudal partners)
-Most movies that feature skin disease use it to represent evil.
-Beck has a journal.
-Internet Sacred Text Archive
-home built chastity devices (via muxway)
-TELEPORT is a multidimensional transport system powered by a network of consciousness exploration units, or trips. (via incuBLOGula)
-. . .growing evidence that cannabis may protect the brain against the damaging effects of ageing. (via burnt toast)
-An Introvert's Lexicon (via fiendish is the word)
-Shoe Size-->Penis Size Conversion Chart (via Tokyo Ouja)
-Nietzsche Aphorism Generator (via spitting image)
-Start your own invisiblog
coyote's bark has been amassing some good links:
-skinstrip.net: share your naked pics
-sex in the U. library
-few want to wash dead people for a living
-call any phone booth in the world (via idle type)
-this has been on the web for a while, but I haven't been on the web: philosophy radio, "an archive of (or links to) recordings of radio programmes on philosophical themes."
-play rock paper scissors online (via b3ta)
-world wide blog
-"Forty German authors are hoping to set a record on World Book Day on Wednesday by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours."
-a new clickable collage every minute (via amberglow)
-free reference books
sites related to http://www.nchicha.com/cupofchicha (thanks, sixdifferentways)
I'll be posting very little this week. But then, next week, I'll be back full force, promise.
-DeLillo on terrorism
-the wonderful world of pop-up and animated books
-London tube map archive
-girls with guitars
-"According to industry reports, the execrable Ben Affleck and the ubiquitous and execrable Jennifer Lopez intend to do a remake of Casablanca."
-virus images
-To Inhale The Black Mosquito, a story in six images (via quasimeta)
-artnotes: an art and art history weblog
-Wes Anderson's next film, godspeed
-The Matrix must pay its respects to Berkeley's Campinile.
-Pot or not?
-milkmen: fathers who breastfeed (via everlasting blort)
more later, if you really want it.
-gallery of automata (and download E.T.A. Hoffman's "Automata" here)
-octofungi: "An intelligent sculpture which interacts with people and its environment and utilizes unusual materials and technologies. " (via geisha asobi blog)
-virtual fetal pig dissection (via everlasting blort)
-Ontogenesis: a weblog about biotech art
-Miss Manners looks at illness's military metaphors. (Doesn't anybody read Sontag?)
-100 Things You Didn't Know About Bukowski
-literal phone sex
-blowing fireballs
-neo-futurist presidential portraits
-Do writers' looks matter?
-indiewire reviews a Fellini documentary and interviews its director, Damian Pettigrew
-Recollections based on the album The Queen is Dead
-famous name changes
-stare down your computer
-The Webby Awards: 2003 Nominees
-Salon praises The Daily Show
-Gallery of World Paper Money (via AsciiRock)
-typo popularity tracking
-the 'Uncommon Gorey Gallery' (via incoming signals)
-naked skydiving (via geisha asobi blog)
-Pride and Prejudice, the wedding night
-Dublog has lots of great links this week. I can't list them all.
-comparative mammalian brain collections
-"The Robot Zoo is a traveling exhibit that reveals the biomechanics of giant robot animals to illustrate how real animals work." (via lightcycle.org)
-interesting mapping application
-Hemingway's letters to Marlene Dietrich
-setting up a home soda fountain (via muxway)
-on a side note: Indy Personals. Yo, what the fuck.
Also: the Hilton sisters have a blog. Sort of.
-Things Andrew Had No Intention of Telling Hannah (via kottke)
-Re-Code: create barcodes that make store purchases cheaper (via mefi)
-Getting the Picture: the Art of the Illustrated Letter
-man attacks string sculpture with scissors
"It's a simple game: you select a mood from the pull-down list, click on 'take me away' and it'll whisk you away to an appropriate site. Each time you reload the page or click the 'Mood swing' link, the moods are shuffled into a different order." (via idle type)
Gawker has some good items that I'd like to share.
-single female seeks commitment-phobic mate
-NYC food for the tabacco-deprived; nicotine patches for NYers
Other links worth your attention:
-real-life porn clerk stories (via the morning news)
-Salon reviews "Cowboy Bebop: The Movie"
-fact: two out of every ten babies drink blood.
-Is it a Tornado Shelter, or is it a bed? Actually, it's both! (via the presurfer)
-sharpeworld freaks out about chemtrails
-Joelogon's Foolproof Guide to Making Any Woman Your Platonic Friend (via the presurfer)
-and not on that note, Girls kissing! (via SixDifferentWays)
-photography of Geisha and Maiko girls (via speckled paint)
-"By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people's attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. " (via the right side of my brain)
-carnivorous plant photography (via Dublog)
-gallery of demons (via bifurcated rivets)
-Yahoo! News' most emailed photos
-attempts at explaining common English expressions (via the presurfer)
-Rumsfeld's poetry:
The Situation
Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.
—Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing
-super squid (via asciirock)
-Joker cards (via several sites)
-"Tabacco Shortage Makes Marines Irritable"
-Undress sixteen strangers while listening to them comment on their bodies. (via mefi)
-article on the comic strip Get Fuzzy (via scrubbles)
-White House to terminate drugs + terror ads
-Aphorisms Galore! (via mefi)
-Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time (via one-trick cyber pony)
-Dave Egger's new mag, The Believer
-The Royal Shakespeare Company is turning The Tempest into a video game (via the morning news)
-According to Geoff's site, injection, EGON is "like Pitchfork, only for serious comics."
Other blog writers ask for wish list presents, or paypal donations. All I ask is that you don't make fun of me, and that, if you read me often, you "buy" some shares of my blog. Now I can't even ask that you don't make fun of me.
Out of humility and laziness, I haven't added entries to the Best Of category since October. But tonight, procastination makes sifting through my monthly archives seem 1) productive, 2) necessary.
-despot or sexpot?
-1984, online
-Virginia Woolf's "Dark Cupboard" of suicide
-Cher disses Michael
-teenage angst fest: it's a contest to find the most humiliating piece of teenage writing out there
-ny city culture, up in smoke
-apathetic online journal generator: "I just don't have much to say recently. I've just been letting everything wash over me these days. Today was a complete loss, not that it matters. That's how it is. I feel like a fog, but it's not important. I've just been sitting around not getting anything done, but shrug."
-every insult there is, is here.
-how to stimulate death
-am i annoying or not . com
-the stella awards, for "the most frivolous [and] successful lawsuits" that [could only] happen in the US.
-most coveted book covers
-That last link was found at kottke, which has a lot of other good links this week, including one to a free literary map of NYC
-a graphical interpretation of J.L. Borges "Book of Imaginary Beings"
-and, somewhat related: strange science's goof gallery, "a collection of mistakes about living and extinct organisms."
-As I hope you can tell, I'm not blogging the war. Hundreds of sites are already doing that, and doing it better than I could. But I have to mention this one little headline: Would the real George Bush please stand down.
-a page of portraits
-Etch-a-Sketch online. While drawing with a mouse is harder than drawing with a pen, online etch-a-sketching is much easier than using the original.
-all the rules for every game
Atomic Tonic has a pretty good links collection. And, to save you time, and waste my night on nothing, I've selected some of the best links for you:
-Apology Note Generator. It can at least help with the first draft.
-drokk.com. Includes gallery of creepy cards and family indigestion.
-The Easter Egg Archive and the Easter Egg Page. Don't know what an easter egg is? Go away.
-fax foods. "In business for over twelve years, Fax Foods is the premier manufacturer of Food Display Solutions. What are Food Display Solutions? Perfect reproductions of foods mostly created with FDA approved plastics and resins."
-404 Research Lab. Links to the internet's best 404 Not Found Pages.
-MUM, or the MUseum of Menstruation. MUM sez, "Discover the rich history of menstruation and women's health on this Web site." If history implies some kind of change, I'm not sure menstruation can have a history; but the NY Times says the site's "odd, funny and well researched."
-Pacman! Sure, you have to use the arrow keys, but it's Pacman!
-Unclaimed Baggage Center. Buy people's unclaimed baggage.
-Where's George? See where your money's been.
-naughty food items
-sliced sections of a human head
-evolve creatures in your browser
-table of condiments that periodically go bad
-other people's stories
Sorry, none of these links are properly attributed. Most of them have been wasting away in my favorites folder and I can't remember where they came from.
-the "only video of a skull and bones ritual" (via spitting image)
-created languages (via incoming signals)
-monster cards: "Movie Monsters, TV Monsters, Classic Monsters" (via speckled paint)
-Chinese characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary (via muxway)
-fimoculous has Matthew Barney links (scroll to last item)
-From MeFi: "Decoding Visual Language Elements in News Content is an MFA thesis examining how layout, cropping, image selection et al. influence the way the content is perceived." Try out the interactive demo.
-Enter your God in The Great God Contest, or bet on the winner using the handicapper's tip sheet. (via idle type)
-how to write sex fiction (not erotica) (via bookslut)
-"Genius Creates Robot Orangutan With Mind of Baby" (via fark)
-retrocrush's list of the coolest toys ever
-old cig tv ads (via muxway)
-candy-colored drugs and pills (via the redesigned six different ways)
-Pride and Prejudice is now a hypertext
-Scientology---based on the teachings of Aleister Crowley? (via fimoculous)
-For Menard: Fischerspooner update
-latino Morrissey fans (found on asciirock's ref-log)
-abandoned subway stations (via ascii)
-manhattan skyscraper timeformations (via muxway)
-instruction manuals (via coudal partners)
-"New York's revival of '80s pop produces the worst album of the year."
-Merriam-Webster's newest additions
-The NY Times reviews Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others
-kissing school (via the presurfer)
-The Comics Characters Database
-torture test
The 2003 Bloggies winners have been announced. And Geoff, get this. "Best Tagline" award goes to Electric Bungalow: "Still cool, like the other side of the pillow."
-tree houses for adults
-Zagat Survey outtakes
-famous name changes (via six different ways)
-iconography portfolio (via coudal partners)
-popcrazy: for your deepest animal lusts, WB shows.
-Products available before the drugs they contained became illegal (via whatsthewhat)
-Alternate Reality Gaming
-Ganguro pics (via boingboing)
-all the patron saints
-an IMDB for books?
-Nudibranches, "probably the most beautiful creatures in the ocean!" (from dublog)
-toilets really are beautiful
-Italo Calvino's American Diary
-Neil Pollack hates Jonathan Safran Foer
-NYC in legos (via the presurfer)
-50 years of TV dinners (via reenhead)
-self-portraiture in five lines
-pictoplasma, character designs
-a better translation service (via wood s lot)
-Christina, the new face of Versace
-My cat, Bobo, is a very lucky black cat.
-Gawker currently has a gentrification map of Manhattan, based on the distribution of Starbucks.
-my sense of humor is devolving
-visual tours of abandoned insame asylums (via the ultimate insult)
-highly recommended: digital diorama/ cardboard animation (via magnetbox)
-names of the full moons (off MeFi), and China's three-phase exploration plan
-Slate on France's Red Bible
-The Private Dick: matrimonial spying (found at the morning news)
-an American fan translates the prologue of the new Murakami book, Kafka On The Shore (via injection)
-What does music look like?
-goth girls gone wild. Yes, it's porn.
-Britney gossip
Muxway has several good, good links this week: illustrated timeline of human evolution, rolling ball sculptures, bum wines, history of comedy/tragedy masks, and breakfast cereal character guide.
-pretty girls make graves: Cemetery Girlz (spotted at six different ways)
-"the style and class of vintage telegrams, with the speed and convenience of email." (via kottke)
-your beating heart (change its pace with your mouse) (found at the presurfer)
-the geek hierarchy
-our world leaders:
-dialect survey maps
-the eskeletons project
-leaflet drops
-On the web, the big headline of the moment is "Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war"
-"Raymond Radiguet died at age 20, having completed two novels and some poetry, encouraged by his mentor Jean Cocteau."
-anxieties of the famous (for SL)
-Clark Kent's glasses (last two links via incoming signals)
-Sam writes today's papers
-archnet's images (via muxway)
-"top tips for besting your enemies"
-What does it take to get called The Breakfast From Hell?
-more to come, I think.
-"People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."
-Lisboa photographs (off mefi)
-images of the Southwest
-audioblogger
-the perfect pick-up line
-If you're going to plagiarize fiction, at least change the names.
-New York songlines
-Solve this for me.
-morning simulator
-make Oulipo a word burst.
-the most reclusive writer of the 20th century
-inventing new games
-ephemera now
-Oprah is starting a new book club, this time for the classics.
-play 20 questions
-a communist theme park, complete with "surly border guards, rigorous customs inspections, authentic East German mark notes, and restaurants with regulation bland East German food."
-travelers diagram has some good, downloadable songs
-Super Mario Brothers Lit Crit (via cheesedip)
-computer program can predict what songs will be hits
-barmonkey
-and snowflakes
-Perversion Tracker: the very worst of Mac software
-Bacardi DJ Sudio (via coudal partners)
-stoic news weblog
-another weblog to check out: Dublog
-SignMaker Lite: Make your own freeway signs (found at Idle Type)
-lego porn (via kill my time)
-crazy French music video (get to the end)
-oh la la, I'm blog of the day.
-vespa calendar girls (via coudal partners)
-sunset from space (from bifurcated rivets)
-erotic origami (via 6differentways)
-not making it in the music business
-tiny chocolate handbags
-even tinier TVs (also see my past entry: a doll's house)
-cigarette pack art (may have already posted this; can't remember)
-"the slick, generic in-flight-style info-graphics
1. make it hard to believe this is real
2. make the whole thing scarier" (via incuBLOGula)
. . . to land here:
barefeet and capri pants
sexy sauces or bedrooms
hilton sisters eats food
vaginal lips guillotine
airport travelers named everything from wet people to being eaten alive by insects
martin luther devil get into my anus
picture of a harpy fantasy erotica
the unpleasentness of life
nathalie chicha october 31
britney derrida
lucky strike cigarettes and semiotics
jonathan safran foer sucks
-What is neen?
-What are newsquakes?
-What is skin cola?
-fake diploma templates
-children's books of the early soviet era
-new fiction by Steve Almond
-extreme body modification videos
-As City Tobacco Ban Looms, Tavern Owners Get Sly
-Many Colleges Bend Rules To Admit Rich Applicants
-Polanksi Victim Reveals Herself
-Quiz: What number are you? (I am 1i.)
-a new kind of self-portraiture (found at B3TA)
-rock stars' "equipment"
-mister tweak-a-thon
-add an anti-depressant to your charm bracelet (via the eyes have it)
-fitness in America
-artist asks you to steal his art (via quasimeta)
-"'Dark Matter' --The Physical Basis for Mysticism" (spotted at parking lot)
-odd and darling (via wastrel division)
-fortune-teller fish
-party jokes for every occasion
-how to seduce a goth princess
-found slide foundation
-why nerds are unpopular
-wireless charging (via injection)
-altered books (off MeFi)
-Eggers vs. the Establishment
-an excerpt from Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
-Winona's ad for Marc Jacob
-blog of the day
-speeches before execution (from reenhead.com)
-Mutations in creativity gene 'led to rise of man'
-"This is the face for social robotics." (via injection)
-photos from MissGothicMass 2003
-today in literature . com
-beautiful microscopy slides
(-this is what a productive weekend looks like.)
-Wired looks at Brown U.'s Cave, talks to Robert Coover
-foxy felons (via fimoculous)
-Are you paranoid? Do you use Google?
-play with time
-postmodern filmmaking
-cool lighter collection
Happy Happy
Some links for the bitter and single. No, that's not me, hah hah, hrmmm. Yes it is.
-send an anti-valentine
-v-day at the zoo
-attend the black hearts party
-Jeff Eugenides, author of Virgin Suicides, on v-day
-Bookslut's v-day guide to smutty books
-hearts and other bloody things
-romantic love is a hoax
-Martha Nussbaum on love
-The End of The Novel of Love
-a really, really good book: Eva Illouz's Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
-T-Mobile Sidekick now FREE at Amazon (link goes to Gizmodo, not Amazon)
-how the flash mind reader works
-"With 16 million living men carrying his Y-chromosome, Genghis Khan had about 800,000 times the reproductive success of the average man of his age. What was his secret?"
-Charles Bukowski photo essay
-How To Be A 19th Century American Man (via the presurfer)
-short abstract: Smokers Face Highest Odds For Depression
-Stop Smoking QuitMeter (also via presurfer)
-the mickey mouse gas mask (found on boingboing)
-Identity Theory interviews Geoff Dyer, author of Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It
-"Hell hole: 39 years of solitary confinement"
-the 14 minute orgasm pill
-50 best album covers, selon Rolling Stone
-what philosophers are really like
-that sucks
-Slate offers an unsatisfying analysis of Buddhism
-Meanwhile, Brits convert to the Jedi faith
-the flash mind reader
-"Who Could You Take in a Fight?" The Onion asks, celebrities answer.
-android tells you if you're pretty (via injection)
-upsetting kitty pics
-Joe Millionaire speculation
-micro fictions, printed inside matchbook covers (via wood s lot)
Often, I don't blog interesting links, but blog what links people are linking to. Today, instead, I'll delve into my massive, minutely organized "favorites" and pull out some un-timely links. This hour: articles.
Dangerous Muse: Caroline Blackwood
Admittedly, contemporaries often saw Caroline Blackwood as some sort of sorceress. Her father, the fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a changeling, according to his mother, who believed that fairies had stolen her real child at birth. Lord Dufferin grew up to marry Maureen Guinness, one of the three Golden Guinness Girls, each heir to a brewing fortune. ''The sisters are all witches,'' wrote John Huston, who stayed with one of them in Ireland on his way to shoot ''The African Queen,'' ''lovely ones to be sure, but witches nonetheless.'' They had pale gold hair, pale blue eyes and transparent skin. Huston believed they could change men into swine, and back again, without anybody realizing.
The consequences of having X.P. can be both startling and lethal. Exposure to even a few minutes of sunlight can cause agonizing blisters. Deadly skin cancers develop with frightening ease: X.P. sufferers are 1,000 times as likely to develop skin cancers as other people. Forced to shun the sun, these ''children of the moon'' live topsy-turvy lives utterly quarantined from what others take for granted: daylight.
This observation might suggest that the attainment of felicity requires one to be not merely alone but elevated, in which case the happiest of hermits were the stylites, so named because they perched on pillars in the wilderness (Greek: stylos, a pillar). The most celebrated of the stylites was Simeon, a fifth-century saint who lived for 36 years in a hut on top of a pillar 60 feet high, emerging from time to time to harangue the crowds and entertain them by performing up to a thousand consecutive genuflections, very likely still a record.
In Kurzweil's inventive hands, Alexander's neurosis takes odd forms, among them a fascination with hidden compartments in furniture and an obsession with puns and etymologies. But the strangest is that he records everything that happens to him in a small book attached by a rope to his waist. This ''girdle book'' is an alphabetized record of sounds, smells and events he has experienced; ''E,'' for instance (for Enclosure), is where his feelings go. ''Librarians often don't do feelings all that well,'' he notes.
-fifteen theses on the cute (found at wood s lot)
-The Guardian profiles Richard Ford
-x-entertainment blogs our childhood toys
-sunday game: smite the unbelievers (via wastrel division)
-toy cars, real cars (found at muxway)
-Caterina reviews The Confusions of Young Törless
-fish don't feel pain. Pescetarians, rejoice.
-eww, totally gross
-Match the couples: it's like "memory" meets Love Connection. (via the presurfer)
-somebody's small thought re:religion
-a little upsetting. Forniphilia: the art of human furniture.
-disco squirrels, take me to an altered state
-the visual and tactile aspects of the written word
-RIP Leslie Fiedler. "The OED credits [Fiedler] with being the first person to apply the term 'postmodernist' to literature."
-1970's playground equipment. Check out the Space Cruiser, Sociable Serpent, Bell Buoys, Slide Time, and the Space Rocket.
-"Casting notice sent out for an upcoming NBC/Bravo reality series called The Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in which a team of trendy gay men will try and restyle real-life, hapless straight men." (scroll down for article)
-Buddyspace: "Enhanced Presence Management"
-Psychadelic Republican Trading Cards
-Armwrestle the greatest minds of the 20th century.
-"Verbatim is the only magazine of language and linguistics for the layperson." (found at the morning news)
-the top 50 models (via kottke)
-museum of weird consumer culture (from the presurfer)
-the history of eating utensils (via muxway)
-the largest gossip collection ever
-"sleep is the new sex"
-scopitone of the week
-Haruki Murakami story
-what poetry form are you? (warning: link opens pop up ads)
-Ladies of the Bedchamber: the role of the royal mistress
-geekchic.com (i'll explore it later)
-daze reader has some interesting sex links this week
-"Revolutionary molecules turn bland food bodacious"
-what celebrity parts surgeons are sculpting
-Can you tell ABBA and gothic poetry apart?
-phrenology links
