This page and this page, about the art of Burkina Faso, have so many fabulous pictures that it’s hard to pick just one. My mask(s) of the week are these three Bwa plank masks:
But also make sure you look at this Dafing leaf mask, this Bobo antelope mask and these Mossi ‘red masks’. And just browse around a bit.
I ended up watching most of the Tory leadership candidate TV debate. The tag of David Cameron as ‘heir to Blair’ is almost spookily accurate. Not only does he have the same dewy eyes and the same tendency to talk in vacuous abstractions, he has the same slightly stiff body language. David Davis seemed more natural, talked far more in facts and policies and less in generalities, and seemed like a competent, intelligent bloke.
But Cameron also shares with Blair the slightly mysterious magnetism which attracts the camera, draws the attention of the audience, and almost makes you lose track of what he’s actually saying in favour of the way he’s saying it. It is the voice, or the body language, or the face? I’d be interested to know whether it works in person or if it’s just a telegenic thing. Either way, he has a bit of the star quality which the Tories have been badly lacking for some time. He’s not quite in the Clinton/Mandela/Beckham league of charisma, but he could be what the Conservatives need.
None of which says anything about his competence to run the country, of course.
I’ve just been learning about the internationalisation features in OS X. Which are cool. Since I can’t actually read and write Chinese or Tamil or Cherokee, I don’t have much use for them, but it’s nice that they’re integrated into the system. I guess I might occasionally use it for typing out bits of Anglo-Saxon – the Mac OS was never very good at handling þ and ð and ȝ, but now it’s been made fairly easy. Look, π in Gujarati: ૩.૧૪૧૫૯૨૬૫૩૫૮૯૭૯ (etc)
The only annoyance is that I don’t seem to be able to use them in Gimp and Inkscape, which aren’t Mac native of course, so that means my neato idea for a T-shirt design which includes some katakana is just a bit tougher to do. I expect I can find a work-around.
A new logo for Will:
Just playing around.
This is a fabulous story, in the Guardian. Make sure you listen to the samples. The sound of singing mice doesn’t seem to freak out the cat, unlike slowed-down blackbird song. Via Metafilter.
[I couldn’t get that blackbird link to work today – I don’t know whether it’s just a problem with my connection or a problem with the website]
Yup, it’s that time of the month again.
Firstly, what might be my all-time favourite, even better than ‘tugged eggcorn’:
squiggly lines in digital cameras are they ghosts?
Some of the others, in no particular order:
rachel whiteread is crap
decadent west blog
i will magnify the lord bible quotation mary
browning gather ye rosebuds
katatsuburi soro nobore fuji no yama
japanese halloween masks
masks that are in films
heraclitean still point
[edited down a bit to avoid providing extra Google-bait]
