Art · Nouveau · Ho

Today's interesting-thing-stolen-from-MetaFilter:
The Rings of the Earth: What we'd see if the Earth had rings like Saturn. [YouTube]

Somewhere in a parallel universe, someone is making a video of all the stars they'd be able to see if their planet didn't have rings.

The absolute best thing I have stolen off MetaFilter today is: Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!!!

This is a blog in which comics artists draw their favourite literary characters and authors. I've only browsed for a bit, but I've already found some treasures:

Trim and Uncle Toby from Tristram Shandy, drawn by Donna Barr
Sunday from The Man Who Was Thursday, drawn by Neil Gaiman
Dracula, drawn by Michael Zulli
Jules Verne, drawn by Ted McKeever
Douglas Adams, drawn by Tom Fowler
3 drawings of H P Lovecraft
Alan Moore, drawn by Frazer Irving
Job (looking not unlike Swamp Thing), drawn by John Totleben
Captain Hook, drawn by Linda Medley
Jane Austen's Emma, drawn by Trina Robbins
Victor Frankenstein, drawn by Shea Anton Pensa

Go waste time here. I command it.

At the end of Figaro, after all the traps are sprung, misunderstandings cleared up, and jealous spouses disciplined, there is a very brief, almost frantically festive final chorus.

Questo giorno di tormenti,
Di capricci e di follia,
In contenti ed allegria,
Solo amor puo terminar.

Sposi! Amici! Al ballo! Al gioco!
Alle mine date fuoco!
Corriam tutti a festeggiar!

The next-to-last line means "Light the fireworks!" or, literally, "To the mines give fire!" This used to be an English phrase too:

In giving fire to any great peece of Ordnance, such as Cannon, Culverin, or such like, it is requisite that ye Gonner thereto appointed first see that ye peece be well primed, laying a little powdre about ye touch-hole as a traine, and then to be nimble in giving fire, which as soon as he espieth to flame, he ought with quicknesse to retire back three or four yardes out of danger of the reverse of ye wheels and carriage of ye peece; for oftentimes it happeneth that the wheels or axle-tree doth break and spoile ye Gonner that giveth fire, not having ability to move himself from the danger of ye same; yea, I did see a Gonner slaine with the reverse of the wheele of a culverin, which crushed his legge and thigh in peeces, who, if he had had a care, and nimbleness withal, might have escaped ye misfortune.

So "give fire" basically just meant "light something that explodes." The Italian word mina, "mine", similarly, just meant "thing that explodes." Italian fireworks were known as the loveliest in Europe, and much sought after; the Royal Fireworks of 1749, for which Handel composed the music, were made and given fire by Italians. (The concert pavilion burned down, but so it goes.)
( Click for Enlightenment )

Many, many thanks to all who endured an evening on wooden benches in a cold church listening to silly Baroque ornamentation. You are truly hardcore, and the ghost of Handel smiles on you.
( ...so how did it go? )

Some photos:

A bat skimming a pond (apologies for the Daily Mail link, but it had the most photos, including an interesting one of the photographer's setup.)

Many, many polar bears.

Neil Gaiman's bookshelves! The photos enlarge to the point where you can read the titles.

Neil Gaiman really needs to write a book about a bat and a polar bear who... uh... never meet because they can't live in the same climate zone... OK, maybe not.

The announcement that this year's London Christmas lights will be themed around Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol makes me fiercely joyful for many reasons, including:

*the hope that the lights will include cheery seasonal images of starving street children

*or the Ghost Of Christmas Future, who scared the living fuck out of young, TV-watching me. Seriously.

*an excuse to stride down Oxford Street declaiming "Every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' upon his lips should be boiled in his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart"

*...like I've ever needed an excuse. But still.

If you would like a few well-made comic-book tales about dogs, ghosts, witches and zombies, go here.

If you didn't waste enough of your childhood playing Infocom text adventure games, go here. Look, it's Zork! And the Douglas Adams-scripted Bureaucracy! And Hitchhiker's Guide! Maybe this time I can actually get the motherfucking Babel fish in my ear...

Or if it's been the kind of week where you feel the need for shouty whiteboy rap about punching people in the genitals, just go here. (YouTube, NSFW)

I've posted some of these before, but:
Ikea comic: funny because it's true.
Ikea walkthrough: You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. A skeleton, probably the remains of a luckless consumer, lies here.
Ikea song: just some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen. If you like the song you can buy it here, though obviously you have to put it together yourself.
( Pass the allen key )
Finally, as my friend Rory so feelingly put it:

“Lo there do I see my Alan key.
Lo there do I see my instruction booklet.
Lo there do I see my screwdriver and spirit level.
Lo there do I see the line of my toolset back to the beginning.
Lo they do call to me;
they bid me take my place among them in the Libraries of Valhalla,
where the brave may live forever.”

"If you don't know how to make it, it's magic.
So if you figure out how to make it, it's science.
If you figure out how to make it your way, it's art."

Carla Speed McNeil, Finder

This is a comic you should read. (Current story begins here.) I still don't think of it as an "online comic", because only the pencils go online; for the nice inked version with footnotes, you have to buy the books. (Buy the books.)

So this year's Hugo Awards have been announced [Note for non-geeks: this is like the Geek Oscars.] Many of them fall into the "no surprises there" category. I was pleased to see Girl Genius pick up an award at last, though I think the art holds up better on the web than it does in print.

The MetaFilter thread led me to read two of the winning short-fiction pieces online yesterday, and I thought I'd pass them on:

Firstly, Elizabeth Bear's Shoggoths In Bloom :

The bay is as smooth as a mirror, the Bluebird's wake cutting it like a stroke of chalk across slate. In the peach-sorbet light of sunrise, a cluster of rocks glistens. The boulders themselves are black, bleak, sea-worn and ragged. But over them, the light refracts through a translucent layer of jelly, mounded six feet deep in places, glowing softly in the dawn. Rising above it, the stalks are evident as opaque silhouettes, each nodding under the weight of a fruiting body.

And then, Ted Chiang's Exhalation :

For most of history, the proposition that we drew life from air was so obvious that there was no need to assert it. Every day we consume two lungs heavy with air; every day we remove the empty ones from our chest and replace them with full ones. If a person is careless and lets his air level run too low, he feels the heaviness of his limbs and the growing need for replenishment. It is exceedingly rare that a person is unable to get at least one replacement lung before his installed pair runs empty; on those unfortunate occasions where this has happened—when a person is trapped and unable to move, with no one nearby to assist him—he dies within seconds of his air running out.

This was my first encounter with Chiang's work, and I really like it: he writes with lapidary precision, and the ideas are striking. He seems to produce about one short story a year; the care he takes is evident. I'm definitely getting hold of his book on my next damn-you-Forbidden-Planet-why-must-you-siphon-my-cash excursion.

And finally: Helen Keeble, author of some admirable short stories available at Strange Horizons, is hilariously liveblogging her efforts to get through the new, non-vampirey novel from Twilight perpetrator Stephanie Meyer. Go here, keep clicking "Next", and admire her heroism (or laugh at her pain, whichever).

I got to know Andy Losowsky in London some years back. He then moved to Madrid, then Barcelona. Then, two more friends of his and mine moved to Florence, and Andy went to visit them there.

While there, he took photos of doorbells.

He took to putting the doorbell photos up online with little stories, or descriptions, or single sentences, about the people he imagined would live behind them.

Eventually, Andy self-published a book of the photos and the stories. The Doorbells Of Florence won a prize, got picked up by a publisher, and had a reading (as a sort-of-launch) tonight. Andy is as engaging and funny a reader as he is a writer, and although the downstairs room at Stanford's was suffocatingly hot, it was a very entertaining evening. I heartily recommend this excellent book. Read excerpts here, and then go buy it from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

Andy now lives in America. As an American living in the UK, I can relate to this. My friend Ally Shaw is another traveller: Chicago to San Francisco to LA to London. She, too, has just self-published a book: The Desperate Ones. When I describe this book to others, I usually use the words "poetic cyberpunk." Words like "dystopian" and "apocalyptic" usually make an appearance too. Her city, Pottersfield, can't be found on any map, but it's beautifully, densely imagined-- and it is dying. I'll let her tell it:

Dominion Capital has slated the walled city of Pottersfield for obliteration. Those within must survive or be subsumed. While hackers invent a resistant religion from Dominion Capital's tech discards, they discover survival rests with one man: Rhubarb Ward, a war veteran and ex-con whose military issue implant holds the key to the future of Pottersfield. Rhubarb is newly released from prison when he meets Lola. Fierce, cunning and addicted to the drug blue, she is the secret to his captive past. While the city's wealthiest residents are lifted out, the rest are trapped behind. Among them are a history professor obsessively recording his memories as he forgets them, a suburban runaway compelled by the glamor of implosion and a call girl bent on meeting a new god even if it means martyrdom. Their lives intersect with a certainty that only some will survive to see the strange new world that blooms in the exit wound of the disappeared city.

Podcasts of Ally reading excerpts are available here. On lulu.com, you can buy a copy or download it as an e-book for free. (If you do download it and like it, a donation via the button at Ally's site would be a lovely thing.)

I have a personal bias towards this book, since I helped edit it. Luckily it's the sort of book that rewards multiple readings, as all the spiderweb-like links between the various characters and their stories become clear. It does contain sex, drugs and violence; it also contains some unearthly beauty.

I'd love to know what you think of it. Meanwhile, what are you reading at the moment? Anything good?

Amidst all the talk about the uncertain future of journalism, it's refreshing to have a reminder of what journalists do best. [Stolen from MetaFilter like a thief in the night.]

Peter Davies of the English Democrat Party ["Putting England First!"] was elected Mayor of Doncaster in the 8 June elections. His manifesto included various money-saving promises: to cut Council salaries including his own; to eliminate "PC jobs" from the council; to abolish translation services for non-English speakers; and to stop Council funding of Doncaster's annual gay pride day.

On his first day in office, he gave an interview with the local BBC station. He was asked some questions about how he intended to put various parts of this manifesto into action: Transcript here; MP3 recording here. It's a riot. It is possibly the best thing since Paxman v Howard in '97. Highlights include the characterisation of "PC jobs" as "all these people who are, sort of, controlling thought processes and this sort of thing".

The abstention* and defection of Labour voters in the most recent UK elections has left, not a vacuum, but a sort of political black hole, sucking any kind of crap towards the centre of gravity: witness the two BNP members elected to the European Parliament. Attention, British electorate: if you didn't vote, this is your fault. On the other hand, it is kind of a brilliant move to have sent two BNP guys where they'll be surrounded by contemptuous foreigners and powerless to do anything about it. Hmm. Maybe next election you could send them all there?


*I nearly typed "abstinence." Mm-hm.

Leipzig was amazing, but I don't feel quite ready to write about it yet. In the meantime, here are some interesting animal behaviour links I mostly stole from MetaFilter:

A new way to keep the cat off the kitchen worktop [Page contains embedded video, but no sound]

Camel versus bin. Did you know that the bin is the ancient enemy of the camel? Neither did I. But this young one does.

Ursula Le Guin is famous for the clarity and insight of her writing. Now the world-renowned author of Earthsea and Changing Planes brings us... Cat T'ai Chi.

Do you have a cat or other creature-companion? Post a photo in the comments, will you? I miss my cats.

(Also: YouTube video of a playful baby anteater.)

The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has forbidden a planned gay pride march to take place this Saturday-- the same day Moscow hosts the Eurovision Song Contest final. He has, however, permitted an anti-gay protest to go ahead on that day.

Moscow's police chief, Vladimir Pronin, said “It’s unacceptable – gay pride parades shouldn’t be allowed.” Of course, that was before he got sacked when one of his senior officers went on a killing spree. This Times article suggests Luzhkov's head may be next on the block. Not a moment too soon, methinks.

The Dutch Eurovision entry has threatened to boycott the final if violence is used against gay marchers, as has happened in the previous two years.

The organisers of Slavic Pride speak up here.

Meanwhile, someone needs to sit the Moscow mayor down and explain a bit of history to him:

Tchaikovsky
Diaghilev
Nijinsky
Nureyev
Eisenstein
and more.

I have assembled a collection of links of interest to nerds. If you're not a nerd, then you can skip this post. On the other hand, you are now reading LiveJournal so who are you kidding?

The National Portrait Gallery's photograph of the month is of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie.

Making Reading Fun Through Trickery has been one of somethingawful's finer Photoshop contests. (See also: honesty in fantasy book covers by mightygodking.)

Kate Beaton's Tesla the Celibate Scientist, of which you can buy sepia-toned prints.

The Star Trek Failure Generator: a handy resource for when your technobabble goes wrong. Not, in fact, a page just saying "WILLIAM SHATNER" in big letters.

Mightygodking's Nerdiest Sentence Ever Typed competition. Heavy on the comics and gaming nerdery; after reading the entire thread I swear you'll be able to smell the pungent basement-room-after-6-hour-D&D-marathon aroma. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Lastly: the two extremes of the Web are idiocy and inspiration, and collegehumor has a little of both. Here's We Didn't Start The Flamewar, a little song that tells you everything you need to know about online stupidity. By contrast, if you haven't yet experienced the justly famous Doctor Who/Eminem/Benny Hill mashup, then you're in for a treat: it's guaranteed to lift the spirits of even the most world-weary Time Lord.

(Of course, if you're a true nerd, you'll already have seen all these. In that case, you may now sneer at me. Bring it on, Federationinsigniapants.)

It's May Eve, and I should have found somewhere pleasantly flowery to celebrate today, but I have a disgusting cold. Such is the way of the world.

But a few viruses can't stand in the way of the Mayday partayyy, so here is something seasonal to get you in the festive spirit from my own hometown of Washington DC. I give you... The Foggy Bottom Morris Men! [contains much leaping]

( your friends don't dance and if they don't dance, well they're no friends of mine )

Found via MetaFilter, the unfortunate tale of Tsutomu Yamaguchi:

Mr. Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time for the second attack.

Opinion is divided over whether the 93-year-old Yamaguchi is the luckiest or unluckiest man alive.
( Of opera and the Bomb )

Dead.atyourage.com is morbidly fascinating: enter your birthdate (or someone else's) and it will tell you which notable people died at about the same age.

This week I've outlived Lord Byron, Maximilien Robespierre, Doc Holliday and Nicolas Sadi Carnot. Jackpot!

This webcomic deserves its own post: Family Man by Dylan Meconis. We're in 1760s Germany, and a long-nosed theologian has just been denied his doctorate by the University of Göttingen...

I could go on at length about the understated beauty of the art, the painstakingly researched period detail, the attention paid to simple things like sound effects. But really, all I need to say here is "Go read." Go. Read.