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“You thought you’ve seen it all? Then you have to join PingMag for a special field trip today! We checked out the newest patterns, motifs and textures: plunge in the very special and colourful world of quilts!!!” PIngMag – never knowingly underpunct
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‘The Poem as Comic Strip: Graphic novelists let loose in our archive.’ via bookslut
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“I gave it a test run by scanning a bunch of photos of a little amphibious vehicle that my dad and a couple of other fellows designed and built at a factory that they set up in the 1960s. It was called a Penguin.” Great post.
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‘However, it has in recent years become clear that we have grossly underestimated the cognitive abilities of birds.’ With some great videos of tool-using crows.
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‘The phenomenon is consistent enough that I can rely on it to help me remember things like phone numbers and proper names. I call it my letter-color synaesthesia.’
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I contend it is the best overnight homework any teacher has ever received in any course at any level at any place in any subject at any time, ever, ever, ever.
Year: 2007
It takes a lot to make me have sympathy for Bernard Matthews, whose company represents everything that’s worst in industrial food production, both the way they rear the turkeys and the revolting processed foods that they make from them. But I did get a twinge of sympathy when bird flu started killing all their turkeys.
I’ve got over that now.
The breeding ground for new strains of flu seems to be mass poultry production facilities around the world where huge numbers of birds are reared together in close contact with people. Ironically though, this outbreak isn’t going to do the free-range chicken industry any good. A chicken free to roam is a chicken free to expose itself to, and spread, infection. Perhaps if all the world’s chickens were reared in low-density, free-range conditions, the problem wouldn’t have started, but it’s too late for that now. And as far as I can gather from what they’re saying on the news, if H5N1 gets established here, free range will be thing of the past.
Links
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Great, great music. And an interesting man.
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‘spoof of the whole reality TV genre, filmed in a real Ikea store, without the company’s knowledge’
Links
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James Fenton on Auden
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“The card reads: [CELL PHONE Carved wood, Tanzania. Holstberg Collection, Illinois] Yep, all the information one could want. I suppose the artist must be named “Tanzania” — how cheeky! How modern!” w&w critiques an exhibition called ‘Africa.dot.com’
FSotW: My Happy Soviet Childhood
Flickr set of the week is My Happy Soviet Childhood by Freedom Toast.
EDIT: Oh crap, there’s always something, isn’t there. Why can’t any two browsers render the same bit of code in the same way? I don’t want borders under my linked images, you stupid machine.
EDIT LATER: Well, I’ve come up with a solution that works on every browser I’ve tested except Opera. I think I’m willing to accept that 1.1% of my visitors are just going to have to put up with it. Hell, my new version even looks slightly better on the older versions of IE which fail to display dotted borders properly.
Links
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Almost makes me want to join Second Life so I can build that villa round a central courtyard I always wanted. Via Digital Urban.
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via Coudal.
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Some videos introducing the current exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery: ‘Canaletto in England: A Venetian Artist Abroad 1746 – 1755’
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“The site contains lots of interesting information about Scots, the language spoken throughout Scotland from Shetland to Galloway and Aberdeen to Glasgow.” via languagehat
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My co-worker had to be on the radio yesterday to talk about offensive taboo words. Which would have been fine, only… the host made everyone go through the entire hour talking about these words and their use without ever mentioning a single one of them.


