Catherine Price writes in Mother Jones magazine about her visit to the annual convention of the Fellowship of Christian Magicians:
"Why should the devil have all the good entertainment?" asks Kerry Kistler, a chalk artist known for speed drawing canvases that reveal the face of Christ when exposed to black light.
[Via 3quarksdaily]
Rhodri Marsden on The Futility Of Flogging Your Own Music To People You Don't Know Very Well:
One thing that nearly all my bands had in common was a complete inability to get people to give us money in exchange for the recordings we'd made. As I'll explain later, the MP3 revolution – if I'm allowed to call it that – has made that failure even more apparent, and the pain even more acute; it's just few weeks since I went down to my local tip and recycled approximately 1,500 unsold CD albums in order to make room for my girlfriend's burgeoning magazine collection. Her tatty copies of Vogue and Elle Decoration are worth more, square foot for square foot, kilo for kilo, than my CDs. I'd always suspected this, but that trip to Wandsworth dump confirmed it.
This isn't just a nostalgia piece. Marsden also tackles the Web 2.0 dream of artists cutting out the middle man and marketing themselves:
The internet has entirely switched the focus from making music to sales and marketing. While some might say that this is just the harsh reality, it's what you have to do to survive, I say bollocks. I'm not just being romantic about this. There's a choice: play gigs, experience that peculiar bonding you get with fellow band members, feel that curious mixture of love and antipathy you get from an audience – and make no money. Or obsess about selling mp3s – and make no money.
Considering that the article is posted on a site that is replete with posts about 'calculating your Band EquityTM Score' and 'measuring the depth of interaction we have with our audience' the ensuing comment thread is remarkably civil and informative. The entire post is well worth a read.
[Via MetaFilter]
The Wall Street Journal's Photo Journal feature is clearly a clone of inspired by Boston.com's The Big Picture.
At least they're borrowing the good ideas. It'd be nice to see a news site on this side of the Atlantic (like, say, the Guardian) pick up the idea.
[Via kottke.org]
Olympic decathlete of Belarus had some distinctive tattoos.
The programmer who comes up with a generally-applicable version of the YouTube Comment Snob plugin is going to make a fortune.
[Via Daring Fireball]
Last.fm's list of tracks and artists users most frequently delete from their profile is fascinating. Is it really so embarrassing to have played a Radiohead track?
More likely, it's that all other things being equal the artists most frequently played are likely to attract a larger number of deletions than less-played artists. It'd be more informative to see the number of deletions per artist expressed as a percentage of that artist's total number of plays.
[Via Idolator]
Chris Hanretty quotes from the Social History of British Broadcasting:
On Good Friday 1930, in the view of the news editors, "there was no news of the normal type or standard for broadcasting, and as a result no news bulletin was given. The announcer simply declared 'there is no news tonight.'"
Not an announcement we're likely to hear in my lifetime, I suspect…
[Via Adrian Monck]
150 pictures from the Beijing Olympics.1
[Via MetaFilter]
I do believe I've found the perfect desktop wallpaper for my PC at work.
[Via The Daily WTF]
The Jar Jar Binks lollipop. Ewwww!
[Via Wired]
Sorkies of the World, Rejoice!
SAN DIEGO — On day two of the 2008 San Diego SorCon, the biggest Aaron Sorkin convention in the world, screenwriter and producer Aaron Sorkin revealed plans for his next project, an animated continuation of his most popular franchise, The West Wing.
[...]
The new show, tentatively titled The West Wing: The Santos Administration, is the first foray into animated entertainment for the acclaimed Sorkin, who is considered by many to be the most important writer-producer of political and entertainment-industry workplace-comedy-dramas working today. [...]
I, too, would totally watch this!
[Via jwz]
Obama Names Musician Rick Astley as Running Mate:
While the title of "greatest prank ever" remains speculative, experts from the Guinness Book of World Records verified shortly before press time that Obama's announcement likely set the world record for the longest sustained silence from a crowd of over 10,000 people, at roughly over seven minutes.
What would you do if you found twelve pieces of twelve foot long steel I-Beam sitting next to a metal recycle bin? Me, I'm interested in the late feudal eras of Northern Europe so I did the only thing I could think of. I built a trebuchet. [...]
You may not be surprised to hear that beer was involved in what came next. You may be surprised at precisely how beer was involved.
The Bulwer-Lytton results for 2008 are out:
Winner: Adventure
Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay — the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.
Shannon Wedge
New Hampshire
[Via MetaFilter]
It seems to me that these Jaws contact lenses would be better named The Corinthian.
[Via GromBlog]
