I’ve noticed for a while that I seem to get some of my best ideas in the shower in the morning. Looks like I’m not alone, according to this article from the New York Times: …Where does inspiration strike? Obviously, in isolated instances, anywhere at any time. But the one place that seems to ignite the creative process in an amazing …
Paper or Plastic?
Yikes. A Salon.com article, “Plastic Bags Are Killing Us”: All the plastic that has been made is still around in smaller and smaller pieces. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade. That means every plastic bag you’ve ever used in your entire life … still exists in some form, even fragmented bits, and will exist long after you’re dead. Troubling. Read the whole thing …
“Museum” of Misused Quotation Marks
Ok, ok…technically, they call it a “gallery,” but that title serves to illustrate a point. And for the “quotationally challenged” of you out there (and you know who you are…or may not, actually…) that point may be worth making. If you’d just like to take a look, hop over to The Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks, and have at it. If …
Erudition.
Behold: “100 Words That All High School Graduates — And Their Parents — Should Know,” as chosen by the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries. If nothing else, it makes for a great band name generator. I hereby lay claim to “kinetic kowtow,” “fatuous xenophobe,” and “vacuous nanotechnology” — though I shall probably shorten the last to “vacuous nanotech,” once …
Summertime III: The Reconnoitering
Film Studies prof. David Bordwell discusses the concept of the film sequel with a group of cronies on his blog: Facing a summer packed with sequels, a journalist gets fed up.… Sequels prove that Hollywood lacks imagination and is interested only in profits. Sequel films are boring and repetitious. They rarely match the original in quality. And when good directors …
Are You Going To Eat That?
Ran across this photo set today: Underground menu at L’Enclume. If you’ve never seen molecular gastronomy up-close and personal before, here’s your chance—intimate photos of a 24-course meal that’s a blend of science, art, and food. That picture to the left there, for instance, is of a dish labeled “Whim 03”: The white block was an impossibly light, and yet completely …
Running the Numbers
Wow. Photographer Chris Jordan has some sample images from his new exhibition online. He writes: This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My …
Golden Oldies
It seems many of you are planning to see (or have already gone to see) the movie 300, so I thought I’d slap together some supplementary information, if you’d like to check out some of the history behind the movie. There’s nothing better than reading ancient history from ancient historians (I always say), so here are the results of my labors: …
The Year in Review
In the tradition of, well, everything ever, I was going to pull together a bunch of “2006 wrap-up links” to post. You know—countdowns, countups, reviews, top lists, etc. Turns out that Fimoculous has saved me the time, as usual. They’ve got links to everything you’d expect: movies, music, people, television, books… If you’d like to riffle back through 2006 before …
Ooo, It Makes Me Wonder.
Ladies and Gentlemen: In the year 2000 or so, Swiss film maker-traveler-adventurer Bernard Weber decided it was about time the world had a new set of Wonders, since all of the “ancient” Wonders had long ago fallen over, or been looted, pillaged, and/or burned into obscurity. (Well, except those pyramids. But, man! They’re sturdy.) With that in mind, he started …