Sunday, October 21, 2007

Tattoo

When I saw this, I wondered "Does this wrist belong to a girl named Ester Bond?"

(via)

Though I think that if one wished to use a tattoo to cheat on Organic Chemistry exams one might be better off using a programmable one for versatility.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

You may groan now

  1. Yet another unclaimed tubey domain name: wootube.com

  2. If there's a group of psychopathic environmental maniacs looking for a name out there, might we suggest Helter Swelter

  3. I learned that you can request a free personalized phone or email message from Optimus Prime. This gave me the idea to launch a copycat site, where you would receive a phone or email message from the robot's subclinically depressed sibling, Pessimus Secundus.

Cosplay Prime
Cosplay Prime,
originally uploaded by downbeat.

Friday, October 12, 2007

My new album

would be entitled God Saved the Queen and Won a Valuable Prize.

If only I were an English punk rocker thirty years ago.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Grape stomp workout

My latest idea is that a tony spa could make a mark for itself by offering guests the opportunity to crush wine grapes by foot (link broken). There's the aerobic benefit for starters, the way in which it encourages good balance (video unavailable, and the health effects of grape extract (link broken). I think videos of the spa experience would be a must.


Of couse, participants would have to be warned beforehand of the possible ill effects (link broken).

Monday, October 01, 2007

Joyce 40404

I haven't gotten into the Twitter phenomenon because I have not yet figured out why I should care to follow the rambling stream-of-consciousness of someone else, or why anybody would care to follow mine. Then I started to think of someone else has been accused of producing a chaotic flow of images and words - James Joyce - who created a masterpiece of self-absorption in his monumental book Ulysses. Fans of that work yearly commemorate the events depicted there with Bloomsday readings. In a way, blogs and static web content stand in relation to micro-blogs in the same way that traditional short stories and novels stood in relation to Modernist writing. What could be a better subject to take advantage of these ideas than Ulysses in an updated presentation using the wonder of Web 2.0?

Picture this: each of the major characters and a goodly number of the minor ones would be assigned Twitter accounts and those interested in the re-enactment would add them as friends. Early in the morning of June 16th the readers would receive the opening tweets from Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus in the Telemachus episode. Besides their dialogue, they could send out a few links to geotagged images or sound pieces on the Web to further ground the experience. Then they'd follow Stephen and, later, Leopold Bloom around Dublin through their obsessive little observations throughout the day and into the night. Gerty MacDowell would play the key role in Nausikaa (though perhaps not the late Paddy Dignam) and the anonymous narrator of the Cyclops episode too. And of course at the end, Molly Bloom would take charge in the Penelope chapter. Everything would be in real-time and first-person as it should be, and the transcript of the day's worth of transmissions would constitute a record of the event as well.

Those who are not playing parts in the story (the "readers") probably ought to refrain from stepping on the action by sending messages of their own or everything could fall apart. And of course there would be the risk of Twitter's servers possibly not being able to keep up with the heavy load, which would add to the excitement, I think.

If one could pull this off, perhaps the next challenge would be to adapt Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to the Twitter format, taking the form of messages sent over ten years.

Thumbs up
Thumbs up,
originally uploaded by Wexxie.