National Punctuation Day
It’s National Punctuation Day today.
To celebrate I’ll be curling up with a hot cup of tea and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. I’ll also be making bad jokes like, “Is that a colon in your pants, or…”.
how to fit more people on planes
Soda Caps
via Quipsologies
there’s gold in them thar hills (or however a Brit would say it)
Amateur treasure hunter Terry Herbert found a trove of plundered Anglo-Saxon war loot in a friend’s field in England.
“Imagine you’re at home and somebody keeps putting money through your letterbox, that was what it was like,” Herbert said. “I was going to bed and in my sleep I was seeing gold items.”
writing, editing, and beauty
I have to be careful what I say around here (there are a number of writers and editors about), but this seems like a false binary:
In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn’t all bad. It’s good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don’t really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped. Its main function is to communicate clearly. It isn’t intended to last.
Pfft. As if fluid, conversational writing cannot be elegant or beautifully shaped. Don’t get me wrong. I think I follow what Mr. Kamiya is saying: Merlin Mann is not trying to be James Joyce (nor could he be, frankly). Still, much like Strunk’s adage “vigorous writing is concise,” it seems universal until you chew on it.
Does this sound right to you? Am I way off base?
Oh, and don’t hear what I’m not saying. I don’t pretend to be a commic genius,,,,,,,,,,
James May’s Lego House Dismantled
Top Gear’s James May built a house out of Lego for his other show Toy Stories.
Workmen started breaking down the structure which consisted of 3.3 million Lego bricks after no-one showed any interest in taking on the building.
Plans for Legoland to move it to their theme park fell through because transport costs were too high and despite a final Facebook appeal for someone to take it, no-one came forward.
it’s that time of year again
spam name
Cyril Dominguez.
Stupid rain, stupid river,
cactus blossoms.
(This is treated with ‘sepia’.)
The weather is so vile and depressing here this morning that I don’t know if I can even make myself draw. I may work on a manuscript.
Burj Dubai – The World’s Tallest Tower
Fantastic photo by Dave Alexander via Constihill
too early to tell
A census worker has been found hanged in Kentucky with the word ‘fed’ marked on his chest.
Pensativa
Larger sizes available at Flickr if you like.
dear clusterflock
How often do you think about your own death?
quote out of context
Now heaping praise on the “black, African, Kenyan” President of the United States.
Lose/Lose
More information and download can be found here. (thanks, Autumn)
Chessboxing
quote out of context
Evidence is mounting, however, for things on which the moon has no impact.
from the spam
An important building block is the duality stop of existence, atomic number 49 stop the physical and the virtual earthly concern stop, for the secure authentication of products. And even personal communication and one-on-one electronic mail stop is now on a regular basis stop
Google Chrome Frame
Google Chrome Frame (via) is another recent Google project that is worth paying attention: it’s a plugin that turns Internet Explorer into Google Chrome (I gloss, but you get the point). Jim Ray sums up what this means for developers:
So, what’s a developer to do with all of this? Of course, we can’t scrap IE entirely just yet and your own development plans should be dictated by your site’s unique audience. However, I’d suggest that Chrome Frame potentially makes designing for progressive enhancement even more realistic. Imagine being able to design with all of the modern tools like HTML 5, CSS 3, SVG, and performant javascript and telling all of your users, even the ones using IE 6, that this can all be theirs if they’ll just install a quick plug-in. No need to migrate to a new browser, learn a new UI and port over all of your bookmarks if you’re so curmudgeonly that you haven’t abandoned IE by now — those features can come to you!
If you are a non-Geek who uses IE, then I promise you will have to install this for some web application in the future.
Left-handed underwear for men
After years of going goofy handed, I don’t know if I could switch:
Hom, the company behind the pants, claim the underwear will “save left handed men up to three, often vital, seconds when visiting the loo”, potentially helping a raft of left-handed men, from American presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to Uri Geller and Paul McCartney.
Performance | MC SpandX
Y’know?
College is, according to Zooey Deschanel’s character in All The Real Girls, a place where:
- you write a lot of bad girl poetry
- you listen to a drum circle.
Experimentation With Degrees Of Blur.
The McFarthest Spot
Visualization of every McDonald’s location in the contiguous US (via):
Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!
ASCIIpOrtal is out!
Joe Larson’s ASCIIpOrtal has been officially been released! There goes my evening.
Previously: Portal in Ascii
(via Indie Games)
