Fun

Right outside my friendly neighborhood store I found this tiniest of weeds clinging to life by the sidewalk. She’s doomed, I know, but how to tell her?

I’m making a list of fascinating things about the English language. As, say, my interviewer at frog design can attest, I overflow with opinionated passion but suck at showcasing. I overtell and undershow. I’m constantly nagging people with my fawning for English, for its beauty, expressiveness, and flexibility, but when pressed to put my love into reasons I’m as vague and mushy as a Christian.

So I do lists. And this particular one is fairly advanced, with so many items and examples that there’s a multi-leveled hierarchy already. One of its headings is titled “informal, unique, almost idiomatic affixes”—y’know, stuff like she- (“the she-Shepherd“), out- (“innovators out-fail the competition”), over- (“don’t overdo it”), -away (“assume away”), -friendly (“gay-friendly”), -up (“trade up”), and so on. I find most of them not only unique to English but uniquely expressive.

One particularly good example is in the phrase in the title. The full context comes from a verse from Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (you can listen to it here, covered by Rufus Wainwright):

The lyrics manage to portray tragic, flawed love in two lines and it all hinges on that magic “outdrew” verb.

Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.

Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.

Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.

The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.

And as many have pointed out, “definitely for real” synchs up as well. There’s room for love within O/XK-CD.

Via Richard, un bizarrisimo video local: La Tapatia de El Personal. Producido por alumnos del CUAAD ^WP, el video es practicamente una guia sui generis del centro de Guadalajara.

Ah, no se, es tan malo que es bueno… Ademas de que siempre es raro ver cultura local capturada en medios como el video y la musica.

Beautiful? Thoughtful? Well-composed? Ratatouille did much to made me remember how much I’ve always enjoyed food, but Kandinsky in the Kitchen, the abovequoted review of the New York restaurant WD-50 floored me. I had never read food described with such words before, nor had I seen dishes more beautiful than most paintings, nor had I been so enthralled with so original a combination of ingredients (how about a dish made of cured hamachi, lemon leather, cilantro sorbet and paprika ?).

Another great review of the restaurant by The Gourmet Pig, made me realize the restaurant is part of a much wider movement: molecular gastronomy, the application of science to culinary practice. Apparently they can now compress watermelon to give it the texture of raw tuna.

The pursuit of beauty and meaning will never end, will it?

I first saw David Elsewhere in Kinky’s Sister Twisted video:

Who would’ve guessed it? While chess playing programs grabbed all the headlines, the real world changing app was solving crossword puzzles.

(Google stock recently passed $600 for the first time btw.
It begun at $85 a share, in August 2004.)

Statetris, a geographical tetris where states are the blocks. Besides Europe there are versions of Africa and several countries. Even more than its originality or its addictability (no surprise here, this is tetris after all), the most intriguing thing about it is how educational it is. One day with this in elementary school and kids would never get Malta’s position out of their heads. I know I can’t.

21C’s Treachery of Images^WP. From Ben Stiller’s Zoolander^WP. This may well be one of the funniest things ever.