from the comments
And then along comes someone with a shiny new camera and takes a picture of the flies landing on the dead horse and uploads it to their flickr account and everyone leaves comments telling them how gorgeous and interesting it is.
The Next Viral Sensation
Via here.
Dear Clusterflock (and particularly the Dallas ones)
Did any of you attend Madame Krassovska’s Ballet Jeunesse?
George Eliot
“Truly,” said Mr Lyon, smiling, “the uncertainty of things is a text rather too wide and obvious for fruitful application; and to discourse of it is, as one may say, to bottle up the air and make a present of it to those who are already standing out of doors.”
–Felix Holt, the Radical (p. 380, H.M. Caldwell edition)
Do you drink
your chilled/iced beverages through a straw?
quote out of context
You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ‘Ehh, get me out of here.’
from the spam
Don’t be a flaccid-tool carer
PetaPixel Interview | Phil Bebbington
My biggest challenge perhaps has been making my photography match the way I think – for years the two seemed out of kilter. I felt I was taking photos but not seeing – the day I started seeing, it started to make sense.
July 9 interview with Our Phil at the photography blog PetaPixel.
Gmail Spam
Your pork pistol won’t fail.
(Via my friend Steve.)
Low-grade shadows
“British-born and -based artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster skilfully skirt the boundaries between beauty and the shadowier aspects of humanity, playing with our perceptions as well as our notions of taste. Many of their most notable pieces are made from piles of rubbish, with light projected against them to create a shadow image entirely different to that seen when looking directly at the deliberately disguised pile.”
Scooter
taking a break for a chat
Here comes The 2 Train
So I’d like to introduce you to The 2 Train: my new band! The 2 Train is me, Lucy Foley (voice), and Ross Bonadonna (guitar). We play a mixture of jazz, pop and bossa nova. This past March, Ross and I recorded a bunch of songs by the fireplace here in Clare, and this is how it turned out.
We’re also busy making my first album in a frenzy of passion and nerditude. We’re about three quarters way through the record now, it’s a pure labour of love. It also sounds completely different to this project: the songs are all my own, and Ross and I are bringing them to life in Wombat Recording, Brooklyn. Clusterflock will be the first to know, as soon as it’s done. In the meanwhile, I hope you enjoy The 2 Train.
Key/Keyring
via Twitter
Typekit UI preview
Typekit is “a service enabling designers to build sites with web-native typography.” (thanks, Dale!)
Talk to the hand–
or not, as you prefer.
babble frog
La Tribune, a French business newspaper, is dispensing with journalists to translate its copy and relying solely on automated translation.
“Ryanair loan to make travel of the passengers upright,” read a typically bizarre headline on La Tribune’s site this week above a story in equally mangled English on the low-cost airline’s plans to make people fly standing up.
“The Chinese car in ambush,” “Internet Explorer: mistrust!” and “Assets of the continental right in management of the crisis” were some other mysterious headlines the same day on the site, which is still in an experimental phase.
What’s your analysis?
File under “suckage: jobs”
The charming Vanessa Davis has a comic about jobs, good and bad, over at Tablet, where I used to work (in a manner of speaking): Vocation, All I Ever wanted!
(Cross-posted on my blog.)
THE UNMENTIONABLE TOPIC
(via marginal revolution)
the cases of the missing walletses
Exhibit A.
Bill Fulton doesn’t remember losing his wallet, but its return helped him remember the past. The leather stayed smooth and the cowboy design unblemished. The zipper moved with ease. And when he looked inside, the contents brought back memories from 1946, when he apparently dropped the wallet behind the balcony bleachers in the Baker Middle School gym.
Exhibit B.
Money doesn’t grow on trees, but a tree-care supervisor in New York City’s Central Park found an old wallet inside a dead one. The park worker says he found the wallet last week under five feet of compost. Police tracked down Bendik the next day.
Putting the car in sidecar
Galaxies Colliding
at almost two million miles per hour.
Götterdämmerung
From a longish review of the stylistically controversial Porsche Panamera:
The road did eventually dry long enough for us to try the Turbo’s “Launch Control” program – standard on all vehicles with the “Sport Chrono” package. Simply select “Sport Plus” mode, hold the brake with your left foot, and send your right foot to the floor. The engine screams for a second or two and then the dashboard illuminates with the “Launch Control” alert. Release the brake quickly and the Panamera Turbo digs all four sticky Michelins into the pavement as it rips to 60 mph in a hallucinatory four seconds. The automaker claims the car will hit 160 km/h (100 mph) in 9.0 seconds flat. Yes, it runs faster than Porsche’s own GT3! We can’t recall another production sedan that can do that.
quote out of context
What we really have here is pigeons being taught to apply K-12 art teachers’ standards, which are probably based largely on skill with the media, whether the subject matter is recognizable, and degree of realism.
Winnetou and his German blood brother, Old Shatterhand
Why do thousands of Germans spend their weekends dressed as Native Americans?
Blackbird’s fame springs from a remarkable cultural phenomenon: some 40,000 German “hobbyists” who spend their weekends trying to live exactly as Indians of the North American plains did over two centuries ago. They recreate tepee encampments, dress in animal skins and furs, and forgo modern tools, using handmade bone knives to cut and prepare food. They address each other by adopted Indian-sounding names such as White Wolf. Many feel an intense spiritual link to Native myths and spirituality, and talk about “feeling” Native on the inside.
(via marginal revolution)
