Very few journalists in any language can compete with Frits Abrahams, who currently writes five days a week for Holland’s best paper, NRC Handelsblad. His current function is that of glocal reporter: documenting clearly and accessibly everyday events that don’t get proper coverage elsewhere and that also happen to be of great importance to the…
One of the first questions (ethno)musicologists ask is, “Hey, but what does it look like?” Turntablism now has its own patch of the curriculum at Berklee (NYT), and this is what it looks like in the Turntable Transcription Methodology devised by John Carpaccio: Here (PDF) is an in-depth description, but you should be able to…
The studied use of archaicisms, vowel transposition and misspelled euphemism means that in spam a couple of hundred English proto-dialects are born and die every day. Here is part of a message received this morning from Jesus: launger eræctoins ma micelnes in eower beran mara sæd betera þe vaigra! When the men in the white…
The most honest blue skies I know from these parts are to be found in the Matisse’s Collioure paintings. The Canon A70 I picked up last summer encourages me to commit a crime often detectable in the photos of other recent immigrants: reducing the light and deepening strategic blues and browns, particularly when the high…
Running or cycling whilst drunk may result in unanticipated (but not always unwelcome) entanglements with trees and shrubs. Mr Kouessi A Rene of Benin has monetised this concept and become a “manufacturer of alcoholics extracted from plants,” which he seems to be exhibiting at the 9th Ghana International Trade Fair. I used often to end…
I assume (because I want to) that Gulliver’s Travel Agency organises theme holidays that commence with a dwarf bondage session and end with a celebrity lunch during which Messrs Yahoo, Jerry Yang and David Filo, reveal the depravity and brutishness behind those billion dollar grins. I wonder (because I have nothing to better to do)…
That’s what this new Dutch website, Recht om te Weten (The Right to Know), aims to tell you. And it’s not the work of some nutter: the Dutch environment ministry is paying for it and it’s being run by a bunch of environmental organisations with support from the University of Nijmegen. What it does is…
“The first Project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.”
Languagehat is evangelising, but, although the goal of providing extended Latin script support is excellent, Gentium still doesn’t hack it as a screen font. Here’s a chunk of Revolutionary Workers Party ideology in 9, 10 and 12 point rendered using MSIE6:
Gadgetopia asks whether we’re not reaching saturation point when even cuddly toy retailers have RSS feeds. Here’s a (Netscape-unfriendly) rendering of Bear St’s: Via The Shifted Librarian.