Angel Eyes

Ella Fitzgerald
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Oscar Wilde on the 19th century ‘myspace band’ phenomenon

“…Trevor was a painter. Indeed, few people escape that nowadays…”

La tortue de Saint-Germain est morte

A week ago today, in a Calcutta zoo, a tortoise called Addwaita died. He was one of four Aldabra tortoises brought to India by British sailors in the 18th century, and presented as a gift for Lord Robert Clive of the East India Company, who was instrumental in establishing British colonial rule in India, before he returned to England in 1767. Long after the other three tortoises died, Addwaita continued to thrive, living in Clive’s garden before being moved to the zoo in 1875. According to zoo records, on his death he was though to be approximately 250 years old…

A History of the World in Six Glasses

By Tom Standage

“…Beer was first made in the Fertile Crescent and by 3000 BC was so important to Mesopotamia and Egypt that it was being used to pay wages. In ancient Greece, wine became the main export of a vast seaborne trade, helping to spread Greek culture abroad. After the fall of Rome, spirits such as brandy and rum, made using a process devised by Arab alchemists, fueled the Age of Exploration, fortifying seamen on long voyages and oiling the pernicious slave trade. Coffee also originated in the Arab world and went on to inspire scientific, financial and political revolutions in Europe during the Age of Reason, when coffeehouses became centres of intellectual exchange. And hundreds of years after the Chinese began drinking tea, it became especially popular in Britain, with far-reaching effects on British foreign policy. Finally, though carbonated drinks were invented in 18th-century Europe they became a 20th-century phenomenon, and Coca-Cola in particular is the leading symbol of globalization….”

His book argues that each drink is a form of disruptive technology, a catalyst for advancing culture which demonstrates the intricate interplay of different civilizations.

Microsoft designs the iPod package

Very funny clip, but it’s the clever use of music that really makes me crack up…

Robert Vaughn in Superman II, quoting Gore Vidal, on ambition

“It is not enough that I succeed – everybody else must fail…”

Pre-pixelated clothes for Reality TV shows

We’ve all seen it. Someone wears a garment with a trademarked logo or artwork on it, and the producers have to pixelate it beyond recognition in post-production…

“…Of course no Reality TV star wants their shirt, which displays their well-chosen article of self-expression, senselessly pixelated so nobody can see it. But no Reality TV producer wants to deal with the headache of removing said article of self-expression to avoid trademark violations. The pixelation process seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for something that could have been avoided with a little pre-planning…” So, here’s the solution…

It’s a funny idea, but the beauty part for me is that, as someone in the comments box points out, if the garment were actually to be worn on a reality TV show, the pre-pixelated design would in turn become a logo itself, and would thus have to be pixelated all over again by the producers…

What’s remarkable about this picture?

CIA job interview

The CIA had an opening for an assassin.After all of the background checks, interviews, and testing were done there were three finalists, two men and a woman.

For the final test, the CIA agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun.”We must know that you will follow your instructions, no matter what the circumstances. Inside this room, you will find your wife sitting in a chair, Kill Her!!!”

The man said, “You can’t be serious. I could never shoot my wife.”

The agent said, “Then you’re not the right man for this job.”

The second man was given the same instructions. He took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about five minutes. Then the man came out with tears in his eyes. “I tried, but I can’t kill my wife.”

The agent said, “You don’t have what it takes, Take your wife and go home.”

Finally, it was the woman’s turn. She was given the same instructions, to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one shot after another. Then they heard screaming, crashing and banging on the walls. After a few minutes, all was quiet.

The door opened slowly and there stood the woman. She wiped the sweat from her brow and said, “The fucking gun was loaded with blanks! I had to beat him to death with the chair.”

Miles ahead, indeed…

Miles Davis & Gil Evans 1959
Video sent by Itsme

I do like a beautiful head of hair on a girl…

…but I think I’m starting to prefer the head of a beautiful girl on a hair…

The image above, believe it or not, was painted on a single human hair by Chinese micro-painter Jin Yin Hua. His latest work, a giant panda, again on a single human hair, is currently on show at a gallery in China, where visitors can view it through a microscope…he uses a single rabbit hair as a paintbrush…

Beyond Good and Evil

(ambigram by Punya Mishra)

You can take a house to water…

…but you can’t make it sink…the Blur Building…”a building that is made of fog. It hovers above a lake. It’s the size of a football field. It complies with all required building standards, and is both an abstract exploration of the idea of transparency and the built environment, and a building you can enter, walk through, touch and breath in. The Blur Building is an element of the National Exhibition in Switzerland, and was designed by the innovative and highly respected architectural team Diller Scofidio…”

“…the centerpiece pavilion of the the sixth swiss national
exhibition is a suspended platform shrouded in a perpetual
cloud of man-made fog,..”

Vanborghini

Have to drive a van for work, but yearn for a fine Italian sportscar? – Here’s the vehicle for you…

Venus/Mars creative writing exercise

Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story.

The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.

At first, Laurie couldn’t decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question…

…Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neurosis of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. “A.S. Harris to Geostation 17,” he said into his transgalactic communicator. “Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far….” But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship’s cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit…

…He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. “Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel,” Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youthwhen the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. “Why must one lose one’s innocence to become a woman?” she pondered wistfully…

…Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu’udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu’udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. “We can’t allow this!! I’m going to veto that treaty!! Let’s blow’em out of the sky!!!”

This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.

Yeah? Well, you’re a self-centered, tedious, neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium.

Asshole.

Bitch.

A painting by Jacques Resch, whoever he may be

Can’t quite fathom what’s going on here – kinda like Hieronymus Bosch meets Escher via Alice in Wonderland…

3 random pieces of psychobabble…

…that seemed somehow relevant this fine Saturday morning…

“Throwing away ideas too soon is like opening a package of flower seeds and then throwing them away because they’re not pretty.”
- Arthur VanGundy

“If you want to build a boat, do not instruct the men to saw wood, stitch the sails, prepare the tools and organize the work, but make them long for setting sail and travel to distant lands.”
- Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

“What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Slaughter is the best medicine

Just had a somewhat Borges-defying moment…having fallen victim to the dreaded ‘O’ virus that’s been doing the rounds, I happened to be scouring the medicine cabinets for any stray paracetamol tablets that might have become separated from the herd when, right at the back of the last cabinet, I stumbled upon a slim volume that must have been lying there for a decade or more. I picked a page at random, and there was a Borges story that I’d lost and searched high and low for years to find again, finally giving up the ghost and presuming it only to have existed in my imagination. Turns out the reason I couldn’t locate another copy was that Borges was just the editor of the anthology – the story was Cocteau’s…

The Face of Death

A young Persian gardener said to his Prince:
    “Save me! I met Death this morning. He made a threatening face at me. Tonight, I would like, by some miracle, to be in Ispahan.”
    The bountiful Prince lends him his horses. That afternoon, the Prince encounters Death, and asks:
    “Why did you make a threatening face at our gardener this morning?”
    “It wasn’t a threatening face,” comes the reply, “but a surprised face. For I met him this morning far from Ispahan, and it is in Ispahan that I must take him tonight.”

From Le Grand Écart, by Jean Cocteau

Don’t think of a white bear

…tell someone not to think of a white bear for 5 minutes and they won’t be able to get polar bears out of their heads…

“The original white bear paper documented the fact that people can, but only for brief periods of time, suppress thoughts of white bears,” Schneider said. “But on removal of suppression instructions, people are typically flooded with the thoughts they were supposed to suppress.”

The bear was chosen because one of the researchers remembered reading that when Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky challenged his brother not to think of a white bear, the brother remained perplexed for quite a while.

“These observations suggest that attempted thought suppression has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy, perhaps even producing the very obsession or preoccupation that it is directed against,” the authors wrote in an abstract for the original paper.

…I have my own version, which you’re welcome to use…if you’re ever doing a final mix of a track, get near the person at the mixing desk and casually say; “Do you think the hi-hat’s a little loud?…nah, I’m sure it’s probably fine…”

…been playing Chopin all afternoon…

“…After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own…”

Damn right, Oscar, damn right…