That's How It Happened

Designer Josh Budich has created an amazing portfolio of his Star Wars action figures. Each figure is rendered as a tiny pixelated icon, linked to a photo and details of the figure. All figures are carded natch. He was born in 1977, like me, the year A New Hope came out. Exactly like me, his parents indulged him as a child, buying the original series of figures:

"This early period of unihibited consumerism would build the indestructable foundation that became a lifelong obsession with collecting little plastic-men."

Oddly though his collection starts in 1999, at almost exactly the time I stopped collecting. There's hope for him, and his no-doubt beleaguered spouse yet.

I somehow overlooked this at the time, but Giles Coren's review of Wild Honey, is the funniest restaurant review you'll ever read:

"Wild rabbit and foie gras boudin blanc was a lovely thing, I thought: pale and light and summery on its pillow of broad beans, peas and savory. And the leek vinaigrette was made with baby leeks, which enabled it to escape that texture of fag-packet cellophane one associates with the dish. And there were rich, deeply flavoured gnocchi with anchovy, tomato and Cornish pollock (oh, the sustainability!). And we shared a pretty little black pot of Elwy Valley lamb, made from shoulder and sweetbreads, which was a lovely zig-zagging together of the light and the dark qualities of the animal."

So far, so normal. But Coren has a PoMo trick up his sleeve that Foster-Wallace would be proud of:

"But I didn’t want to do a good review. So I went back with A.A. Gill. Adrian practically invented the shitty review. He can find turd where others find only gold, and could surely help me find a way to whack Wild Honey."

Of course Gill and girlfriend Formby (qv) found plenty to hate:

"He found the braised pig’s head “unctuous”, which is a fair-enough adjective right out of the traditional food writer’s lexicon. But, personally, I think that when it comes to firing off accusations of excessive largeness, pigs’ heads are a bit of an easy target.
On my recommendation (“No, it’s not too foie gras-y”), Adrian’s girlfriend, Nicola, had the boudin. “It tastes like poached penis,” she said, dead-pan, sincere, just being helpful. Adrian laughed. “No, no, it really does,” she said, and gave Gill a little gobble. “God, it does,” he said."

Despite Coren's attempts to sabotage its success, Wild Honey is still doing well, and has garnered raves from every other critic, except of course Gill. His review gives only 3 stars, and concludes "Wild Honey – better if you go with Giles Coren."

Kakorrhapiophobia: an abnormal fear of failure

Panamax: 965ft length x 106ft beam x 39.5ft draft x 190ft height, the maximum dimensions of a vessel that can traverse the Panama Canal.

Idiolect: an individual's unique language patterns, including grammar, pronounciation, idiom, and choice of words.

Paleologism: a word that appears to be neologistic, but which is in fact long used, e.g. "truthiness"

Floorplanner lets you make virtual floorplans. It's like Sketchup for the inept.(via)

Great Nat Geo piece getting cosy with Malacca Straits pirates:

“Shopping,” Batam argot for the lowest level of piracy, is roughly equivalent to robbing a liquor store. Even the smallest cargo ships and tankers carry sizable amounts of cash, used to buy supplies in port and to pay the crew. Often these ships are older and have less security than newer, larger ships. Sometimes, Jhonny says, the captains are running their own scams, conserving fuel by going slow, then selling the excess to passing ships and pocketing the cash. He explained that shopping trips are carried out by teams of “jumping squirrels,” pirates who use wooden boats called pancungs, rigged with powerful engines, to stalk the ships at night and climb up the sides and rob the crew. I tell him I would like to meet a jumping squirrel. “It’s possible,” he said, and dialed a number.

Life in Bagong Buhay prison, now famous for its dancing inmates:

Plumbing is non-existent. There’s never enough food, and the best time to shower is when it rains. It sounds like the perfect example of the worst prison on earth, but it’s actually not so terrible. Because there are no guards—really—the prisoners have to organize things for themselves. They do this along cellblock lines. Although the doors to the cells are never closed, the prisoners operate under the rubric of 13 cellblocks, or brigades, with between 100 and 200 members to each 100-square-meter “home cell.” Every cellblock elects its own bosyo, or mayor, whose job is to keep the peace and solve problems for the prisoners. He gets medicine for the sick, helps fill out paperwork, and organizes ritual beatings for prisoners who get out of line. The beatings are not too brutal, though, because any prisoner can just go join another cellblock if he feels hard done by.

Scratch any earlier claims. This is the stupidest video ever. The "Radical Rodents", claim to be the world's only surfing mice, but they look a lot like rats to me. (via WJF)

The Sun have launched "a battle to win a referendum on the (EU) Constitution". In the process they've created my favourite front page for months. It calls on Churchill's famous "Never...was so much owed by so many to so few" speech, but more subtly suggests that Brown has crossed the floor, as Churchill did, reneging on his political commitments. An instant classic in the annals of tabloid front pages.

You're a cowboy, and get involved in a three way pistol duel with two other cowboys. You are a poor shot, with an accuracy of only 33%. The other two cowboys shoot with accuracies of 50% and 100%, respectively. The rules of the duel are one shot per cowboy per round. The shooting order is from worst shooter to best shooter, so you get to shoot first, the 50% guy goes second, and the 100% guy goes third, then repeat. If a cowboy is shot he's out for good, and his turn is skipped. Where or who should you shoot first?

I really like this puzzle, which can be solved with pure probablity crunching, but is more elegantly solved by simple logical reasoning. (Puzzle adapted from one of a big collection here)

When viral marketing is this funny, I have no compunction about reposting it. On an unrelated note Go Home Productions has released his entire back catalogue as free downloads to mark his retirement.

The Economist don't really provide much analysis of this chart. Prices generally correlate closely with the degree of prohibition, sending Japan and Singapore to the top. Why is the Netherlands somewhere in the middle of the European price range? And why is the UK so cheap? I would guess that our prolific suburban cannabis farms have created an over-supply, relative to our falling demand. (via)

I saw a reference to this video recently, and assumed it was a metaphor, rather than a description of a real eating contest. As my brother put it: "This must be the stupidest video I've ever seen."

I'm assuming this was one badger (and one cat) photographed over many nights with a camera trap. LOLbadger contributions welcome via the comments. (Via hisamichi58)

The English Architecture in Helsinki? Love it.

The Tube Map simultaneously reworked into Burberry Check and cruel social commentary. (from b3ta, with huge high res version)

You wait all year for a new Nike shoe that might be worth owning and then two arrive all at once. I have a sneaky feeling they're both going to be disasterously ugly in the flesh.

Labels: nike

Fantastic slideshow by Turlough, of his belljar observation hive. Over two months the progression shows how the bees build natural combs to occupy the jar, observing proper beespace all the time, without it being imposed on them.
On a related note there's some suggestion that colony collapse disorder is caused by nosema, an old beekeeping scourge.

Labels: bees

I didn't even know this was an art genre, but Deep Linking have book art covered. The picture is of a sculpture created from a single whole book using only scissors. More links and references in Dettmer's wikipedia entry.

Pictures of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, floating on its stilts above floodwaters. (via)

This movie fills me with a mix of utter loathing, and resigned self-recognition. (audio NSFW)(via)

Some highlights of one of the funniest and meanest obituaries ever:

Lord Michael Pratt, who has died aged 61, will be remembered as one of the last Wodehouseian figures to inhabit London's clubland and as a much travelled author who pined for the days of Empire; he will also be remembered as an unabashed snob and social interloper on a grand scale.

Pratt would arrive at country houses announcing that he was en route to another castle or (even larger) stately home, and was intending to stay for only one night. Quite often the "night" would turn into weeks, and sometimes months. Although he was generous with his conversation, gossip and anecdote, many hostesses tired of Pratt's failure to make anything but the smallest contribution to the house or staff.

He was sent to Eton, having already acquired the rotund shape that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

On arriving at Balliol College, Oxford, Pratt took exception to the state of his rooms, decamping to the Randolph Hotel until his mother arrived with bucket and mop to render his apartments habitable.

There followed numerous rows with anyone who crossed him, and many rumbled on until the day he died. Just days before his death he was involved in an argument over a bill with the owner of an off-licence at Dulwich.

He was also a leading light in another Oxford club called the Snuff Committee, the sole purpose of which was to take snuff and drink port. Membership was by invitation only; the only stipulation was that one had to be the son of a landowner.

After graduating Pratt found a position at Lazard Brothers, the merchant bank. Three months into his new job, however, he judged that it would be more agreeable to attend Royal Ascot than to turn up at the office, and his services were dispensed with. He never again sought full-time employment.

Pratt's working day would usually start with a large gin and tonic before he meandered towards White's Club in St James.

Towards the end of his life, however, he found himself barred from one of his clubs. Ironically, this was Pratt's, where he was asked to leave the premises following a spectacular altercation with a waitress.

Pratt was generally ill at ease with modern technology, and even after his motor accident at Oxford he remained a demon car driver, terrifying passengers with his speed and overtaking technique, which he often employed on blind bends at speeds of more than 70mph. Pratt was equally dangerous with firearms. On one drive he shot a fellow gun in the eye, and invitations to shoot dried up.

(via)

"How could two people under constant media scrutiny possibly have carried out and hidden their daughter's body without being seen? If they really had concealed a corpse in their car, wouldn't the smell have been obvious? How could two people unfamiliar with the local landscape have found an eventual hiding place that would still, months later, remain undiscovered? Is it plausible to imagine that, in the moments after suffering the trauma of a dead child, two people could have constructed such an elaborate cover-up plan, executed it coolly and remained steady ever since? Could anybody maintain this front, a global lie, for so long without cracking?"

Any reticence about the excessive coverage of Madeleine McCann has been abandoned by the Guardian with today's Comment from Jonathan Freedland describing it as the human interest story of the decade. The Comment is scattered with question marks as he piles into the speculative clusterf*ck, which of course grants him "complete blogger immunity" from any accusations of hypocrisy. As the headline puts it we're "in real danger of losing our common decency". It should be obvious that 90% of the UK media have already lost their common decency, but the Maddie story now seems to be dragging the Guardian over the edge too.

Slideshow with audio of a wild polar bear playing with huskies.

Video of a policewoman ghostridin da whip in order to apprehend an armed suspect.

"In the end, though music can be brilliant at times, the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement." Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8 (The Onion)

This glimpse of Kanye West's sneaker collection comes from an Interior Design slideshow of his new apartment.

"West's nearly 200 pairs of sneakers are stored on custom lacquered MDF sliding racks in the master suite."

"Nearly" 200 pairs is frankly light weight, especially for a quazillionaire, although it's possible he has more on ice. The shelving system is neat, but true kicksaholics always store their sneakers in boxes, to prevent fading in the uppers and splits and cracks in vintage soles. Strangely he isn't rocking that much heat. He and I do have two neck breaking matches in this one photo alone: the Invisible Woman AF1 Premiums, and the Geoff McFetridge Champion Vandals. Next month in Interior Design I'd like to see inside Dave Chappelle's closet. (via)

I'm not going to recommend Annie Morris' new show at Allsopp Contemporary because a) You, me, and everyone we know can't afford to buy anything and b) The gallery is not so much out in the sticks as a bit further on from the sticks and turn left. It's lurking somewhere in the shadow of Goldfinger's Trellick Tower. The private view was awesome though. Apart from the great art, free booze, and endless schmoozing, the highlight for me was meeting Kirstie "I wasn't born, I was knitted" Allsopp, whom I presume is the sister of the gallery owner. Best of all she swore, very casually, in my presence, which was akin to hearing the Pope swear.

Over the weekend I was kindly gifted two Dorset Naga Chillis. This variety were bred by a couple from Dorset, from Naga Jolokia peppers, and unexpectedly were found to be the world's hottest chillis. I didn't actually intend to cook with them, but thought it would be fun to grow the seeds. By chance though, the GF used one in a chicken marinade, mistaking it for a home grown Serenade pepper. Serenades are a type of New Mexico pepper, scoring 500-1000 on the Scoville Scale, whereas Dorset Nagas score up to 1,600,000. So the Dorset Naga is potentially 3200 times hotter. The mistake was only discovered after the chicken went into the pan. The whole flat filled with acrid choking aerosolised chilli fumes, forcing us to open all the doors and windows. Once the air cleared, the chicken turned out to be surprisingly edible, albeit in a nose-running-sweat-from-every-pore-gasping-for-water kind of way. If you'd like to replicate this experience you can buy your own Nagas direct from Peppers By Post.

(via)

Howto: make rheopectic slime.

Recreating scenes from Ferris Bueller with the help of a movie-accurate replica Ferrari 250 GT California: "I mean, if you had access to a car like this, would you take it back right away?"

A short biography of Roger Lextrait, who lived alone on a desert island for 8 years.

New Foster-Wallace in the form of his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007:

"I’m aware that some of the collection’s writers could spell all this out better and in much less space. At any rate, the service part of what I mean by ‘value’ refers to all this stuff, and extends as well to essays that have nothing to do with politics or wedge issues. Many are valuable simply as exhibits of what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular factsets — whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids’ cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs, the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the revelation that most of what you’ve believed and revered turns out to be self-indulgent crap."

Google have their own Zelig, Tan Chade-Meng, who gets his photo taken with every visiting celebrity.