With the help of a neat little application called PictoBrowser, I’ve tarted up the page with my Flickr photos. PictoBrowser should work even if you prefer reading the site with one of the old themes, but to get the full effect of my redecorating, you need to be using the ‘scallop‘ theme.
Year: 2007
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‘Just before it was dark Sullivan harpooned a large porpoise. The instrument was hurled with such force that it passed through the entire body. In a few minutes a fine animal … was lying on the deck … a dozen knives were skinning him for supper.’
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‘A voyage to explore the marine life beneath a vast sheet of Antarctic sea ice has enjoyed great success, uncovering new species and terrain ranging from barren to teaming with fast-growing life.’
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‘Besides the 22 U.S. Garbage Pail Kids series below (1 unpublished), you will find the “GPK World” category which contains various international sets released in other countries and […] the Poster series, interviews, articles, wrapper and box charts’
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‘Just how strong is the gravity from the Moon compared to someone right next to you?’ – I found the answer surprising. via Sandwalk.
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“It was the ultimate Happy Meal, because you got a real toy, no different from the Hot Wheels cars you’d buy at Toys ‘R’ Us… I was a little young to truly grasp the notion of being privileged in 1983, but when I got that car, I knew God had chosen me.”
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‘Soviet authorities thus “announced a competition to design a garden suburb outside Moscow, where workers could be sent to recuperate from the strains of factory labor.” […] one detail… was a sort of colosseum of slumber. A dream academy.’
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last.fm, again
I’ve joined last.fm, again, under a different name. The intention, again, is to post a ‘recently listened music’ widget somewhere on the site, but I’m still thinking about how best to rearrange various things. In the meantime, I was slightly startled by this. The ten most listened to artists for this week are:
- Red Hot Chili Peppers
- The Beatles
- Radiohead
- Coldplay
- Muse
- The Killers
- Nirvana
- Metallica
- Bloc Party
- Death Cab For Cutie
I’m not going to type out any more, but the trend continues.
I’m not generally comfortable using the term ‘white’ as a term of mild derision, because I’m not given to self-loathing (about my race, at least), and I’m well aware that, on so many levels beyond mere skin tone, I tick all the boxes. This isn’t a misguided bid for some kind of urban cred, but: that is just the whitest list I’ve ever seen in my life.
Really, of course, ‘white’ has nothing to do with it; I just don’t get guitar rock. It always seems like the basic principle is that ‘if we make enough messy noise, people won’t notice that we’ve got rubbish voices and no rhythm’.
Having exposed my own musical prejudices, it’s only fair to point out that you can see what I’ve been listening to recently on my last.fm profile page. Feel free to mock accordingly.
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The Tribes of Britain by David Miles
This is the blurb:
“Who are the English, the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh? – a ragbag of migrants, reflecting thousands of years of continuity and change. Now scientific techniques can explore this complex genetic jigsaw: ancient Britons and Saxons, Celts and Romans, Vikings and Normans, and the more recent migrations which have created these multicultural islands.
Drawing on the most recent discoveries, this book both challenges traditional views of history and provides new insight into who we are today.”
The book lacks pretty much everything that blurb might lead me to hope for: extensive analysis of the genetic make-up of the British, a surprising new perspective on British history, new insight into how it makes modern Britain what it is.
It’s a readable and up-to-date history of Britain focussing on population movements and demographics, with lots of quotable and surprising snippets. Who knew, for example, that the ‘fitz’ in names like ‘Fitzroy’ was from the French ‘fils de’? Or that among the black population of the UK, Africans now outnumber people from the West Indies? But if you have a broad understanding of the history of these islands, it’s not going to force you to re-evaluate it. And while I enjoyed many bits of it, this kind of large-scale history doesn’t lend itself to a clear narrative thread, and it was definitely putdownable.
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“As we approched the fence, we noticed bees flying around the hives. A few more steps along and we began to find bees on the snow surface — what must have been several hundred of them.” – interesting beeiana at Burning Silo
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The essay is more about torture than about Terry Gilliam.
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“‘Academy’ allows us to explore the temporal, formal, and aesthetic progression of the first seventy-five years of the Academy awards by taking each film and compressing, sound and picture, into a single minute.” weirdly compelling. via Metafilter
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‘During brief lulls in CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith, we try imagining the complex of rooms from where the Super-Versailles might be monitored and controlled in real-time.’
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“Welcome! You are about to view the website of Depth Of field (DOF) Photography, a collective made up of six, young Nigerian photographers all living and working in Lagos. Nigeria. Please feel at HOME!” via modal minority
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‘Welcome to the electronic Middle English Dictionary… Its 15,000 pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips’ via languagehat
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gifts received by the East German government. via things magazine
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‘Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D… Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words… Edits to include facts against the theory of evolution are almost immediately censored…’ (and check out the talk page)
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An Oscar-nominated short from 1950.