I know it's a couple of weeks old now, but Taylor Parkes' review of ITV's World Cup coverage is still well worth a read:

[ITV...], having paid £6 million for his services, devised a show for [James] Corden to front with his quick wit and personal charm and broadcast the results at prime time for the duration of the tournament. And with sapping inevitability, James Corden's World Cup Live was truly, truly horrible, a cack-handed cross between Soccer AM's infantilism and TFI Friday's Class A shoutiness.

Abbey Clancy was hired to do what Abbey Clancy does; the backroom boys worked out some skits about how Uruguay's players had long hair and looked like girls; a polo-shirted audience whooped with well-marshalled efficiency. "Lovely stuff!" barked Corden, banging his cards on the desk. Somewhere in Britain, another library closed.

Ex-footballers with nothing better to do squeezed onto the sofa with sort-of celebs like Denise van Outen and Pixie Lott, the kind of people no one really cares about, without whom no TV show is commissioned ("Have you been watching the World Cup, Pixie?" probed our fearless host. "Well, I saw the England game," giggled the vacant Lott).

Andrew Wheeler quoted a couple of passages from a New Yorker article by Susan Orlean¹ that make me wish I could afford to subscribe to all the magazines that I'd like to read:

[A] mule knows its limits. It is characteristic of the breed to have an inviolable commitment to self-preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness. In truth, it is probably a form of genius. A horse will eat until it founders and dies; a mule will only snack, even if it happens upon an open bin of oats. A horse can be enticed to gallop, fatally, over a cliff. In 1942, the Army was researching ways to deliver mules to combat zones. Someone thought that teaching the animals to skydive would be a good way to do this. As an experiment, twelve mules were fitted with parachutes and taken up in a cargo plane. The first six, caught by surprise, were pushed out the door and immediately fell to their deaths. The next six survived. This is because they must have figured out what was going on and absolutely refused to go near the door.

…

Every mule, then, is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world. It is as if each mule knew that it had one shot at being here on earth, and risky behavior, such as jumping out of an airplane at ten thousand feel, would interfere with that.

– Susan Orlean, "Riding High," in the 2/15 & 22/10 New Yorker

Nice work.

I wish the magazine industry would stop praying that the magazine-as-iPad-app approach will preserve their current business model and come up with some sort of central clearing house to which I could pay a reasonable sum every month in return for online-only access to a certain number of articles per month across multiple publications and publishers. I'm never going to be able to justify paying for subscriptions to the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books and a good dozen other print publications every month² but I'd be happy to pay a few pounds per month to an online library service³ for pick-and-mix access to their contents.

I appreciate that the various publishers would much rather have me signed up as one of their subscribers than get the occasional slice of my subscription when I feel like reading an interesting article here or there, but the net result of their current strategy is that they get not a penny from me. I can't be the only non-subscriber who would send some money the publishers' way if only they'd let me, can I?

1. Not available to read in full for free online. ↩
2. And I don't really want the paper copies of their products cluttering up the place. ↩
3. Perhaps £5, maybe as much as £10. It would depend upon the number of magazines available and how easy it was to browse and access the individual articles. ↩

Scott Rosenberg has posted the first of a three-part series of posts in defence of links:

For 15 years, I've been doing most of my writing – aside from my two books – on the Web. When I do switch back to writing an article for print, I find myself feeling stymied. I can't link!

Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also part of how I read. Given a choice between reading something on paper and reading it online, I much prefer reading online: I can follow up on an article's links to explore source material, gain a deeper understanding of a complex point, or just look up some term of art with which I'm unfamiliar.

There is, I think, nothing unusual about this today. So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link, and found at least partial support from some other estimable writers (among them Laura Miller, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jason Fry and Ryan Chittum). Carr's "delinkification" critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book The Shallows. I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let's zero in on Carr's case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his "delinkification" post. [...]

This first post suggests that some of the studies into the relationship between reading, comprehension and hyperlinks cited by Nicholas Carr weren't looking at hyperlinks as they're used in the vast majority of web-based writing today. I look forward to seeing where Rosenberg takes the argument in his next two pieces.

Tomorrow, in the next post in this series, I'll examine some of the ways links are being misused on the Web today – driven not by some abstract belief in the virtues of hypertext but rather by crude business imperatives. Then, in the final installment, I'll make the case for good linking practices as a source of badly needed context and a foundation for trust.

For what it's worth, when I read Nicholas Carr's post experimenting with delinkification I did consider whether it might be worth adopting the idea, but concluded that it's a technique particularly ill-suited to a linklog like this site.

If I were in the habit of writing longer think-pieces then my gut feeling – based, I'll freely admit, primarily on the way I've learned to read pieces on the web since I first encountered it in late 1992/early 1993 – is that it's much more helpful to have the link appear at the point in the text at which I discuss the material at the other end of the link than it is to require the reader to bounce between the text and a list of links at the end of the piece¹ to get the full sense of my argument.

The key, to my mind, is that it's up to the reader to choose whether to hare off after my link as soon as it appears or to defer following it until they've reached the end of my argument. As long as I don't style my link text in a way that makes it difficult for the reader to skim the entire sentence² I think that readers should be fine dealing with a few links scattered here and there throughout my piece.

1. Or in footnotes/endnotes, or in a sidebar. And yes, I do notice the irony of my placing this text in a footnote. ↩
2. By which I mean, for example, styling the text in a way that jars with the surrounding, non-linked text. ↩

The best joke ever in the footnotes of the Journal of American History:

The best joke ever in the footnotes of the JAH – indeed, the only joke of which I'm aware in the footnotes of the JAH – follows along those lines. Bruce Schulman was critiquing the original transcription of the LBJ audiotapes:

The few transcripts compiled by Johnson's secretaries proved unreliable: one had Johnson refer to a "pack them bastards" waiting outside his office; it turned out to be the Pakistani ambassador.¹⁰

Note 10 reads,

"… As Beschloss notes, the secretary could hardly be blamed for the error. Packs of bastards were far more likely to appear in Johnson's conversation than Pakistani ambassadors."

"Taping History," JAH 85:2 (Sept 1998): 571-578; on 574.

Nice as the default view of David May's photograph of a statue of a Clydesdale horse situated just outside Glasgow is, viewing it at Original size is even better.

In the cropped view offered by my browser window, the full-size image looks more like a pencil sketch that a photograph of a real, three-dimensional object. Lovely work.

[Via MeFi user maudlin, posting to this thread]

Why Facebook would have ruined Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

[Via The Null Device]

NASA have invited the public to choose a wakeup song for the final Space Shuttle flight. So far, it looks to be a two-horse race:

I'm a little surprised that the Star Wars theme has garnered just 0.9% of the vote. I have to assume that once their online fandom gears up they'll crush the likes of Steppenwolf and Rush. Whether the rebel scum can defeat the fandom that managed to get the prototype Space Shuttle named after their favourite starship is another question.

(For the record, my vote went to ELO's Mr Blue Sky, but with just 0.2% of the vote it's got an awful lot of ground to make up.)

[Via The Awl]

Julian Dibbell has produced a readable, insightful profile of 4chan's founder:

Christopher Poole is 22 years old, and as is often true for men his age, his mental life has been punctuated by a series of passing enthusiasms: video games, online chat rooms, Japanese animation. Currently he seems to be going through a Robert Moses phase. On the nightstand in his New York City apartment is a copy of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, a 1,300-page biography of the mid-20th-century urban planner who, in pursuing his vision of a modernized New York, destroyed one neighborhood after another. [...] On a recent Thursday afternoon, as he walked to work past Washington Square Park and observed the sweeping renovations under way there – a controversial relandscaping imposed by current city planners in the face of heavy local opposition – he saw parallels with the old autocrat's imperious approach to such projects. "Robert Moses is probably smiling," he said. "Like, 'Fuck the people – what do they know!'?"

Like many people, Poole thinks there are better ways than Moses's to manage the tangled social, cultural, and infrastructural needs of a community of millions. But unlike most people – let alone most 22-year-olds – he actually has some experience doing just that. Seven years ago, Poole created the website 4chan [...]

Adam Curtis on experiments in the laboratory of consumerism 1959-67:

The widespread fascination with the Mad Men series is far more than just simple nostalgia. It is about how we feel about ourselves and our society today.

In Mad Men we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.

[...]

I have quite a lot of film from the archives that was shot in the Madison Avenue agencies in the mid 1960s, and I thought I would put some sections up. It is great because it shows some of the major advertising men and women of the time, many of whom are the real-life models for characters in Mad Men.

But it is also fascinating because it shows how some of those individuals would go on to play crucial roles in breaking open that static world.

And in a strange way – by achieving that – those same advertising executives would lay the foundations of another static world – the one we find ourselves living in today. [...]

Fascinating. Depressing, but fascinating.

The MESSENGER space probe, well on the way to a rendezvous with Mercury next March, looked back and caught a glimpse of home.

Last.fm's robots.txt file is reassuringly Three Laws Compliant.

[Via currybetdotnet]

Scott Pilgrim should have taken the blue pill.

[Via GromBlog]

Simon's Cat in 'The Box'.

(Previously. And again.)

[Via orbyn.blog]

The Tragic Death of Practically Everything:

Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson is catching flack for the magazine's current cover story, which declares that the Web is dead. I'm not sure what the controversy is. For years, once-vibrant technologies, products, and companies have been dropping like teenagers in a Freddy Krueger movie. Thank heavens that tech journalists have done such a good job of documenting the carnage as it happened. Without their diligent reporting, we might not be aware that the industry is pretty much an unrelenting bloodbath. [...]

[Via Ben Hammersley's return to old-fashioned blogging]

Author Jessica Francis Kane on her quest to find the right place to write:

One of the first essays I ever wrote was about my room. I was in high school, and the class assignment was to write about a place that was important to us. Five hundred words was expected; I think I turned in three times that. I described everything, from the Renoir poster over my bed to the black-and-white satin musical notes mobile over my desk. I delved into the critical importance of each item on my bookshelf and dresser. I highlighted the "I'd Rather Be Dancing" bumper sticker I'd stuck on my closet door (though I didn't end up a dancer). A major theme was my love of the color blue, how it calmed and inspired me. I remember working hard to get my description of the way the sunlight filtered through the blue curtains just right.

The piece didn't have much shape, but with hindsight I see what it revealed: I spent too much time setting up my room! [...]

[Via The Morning News]

It's a shame that Apple Germany have taken legal action to block the production of the eiPott. So cute.

[Via The Null Device]

Epic!

Doctor Who: Every single journey through time detailed…

Here is the fruit of our labour – a list of every single journey through time made by the Doctor, featuring start year, end year, and location.

I still think someone's going to need to invent 7D display technology in order to display the results properly, but I look forward to being proved wrong.

[Via Information is Beautiful]

It's Sexy A-Levels!

It gives me no pleasure to say this, Southern Daily Echo, but this is more like a low rent recreation of the Raft Of The Medusa than it is a celebration of Sexy A-Levels Day.

The BBC Dimensions site could easily have devoured my entire evening:

Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.

Type in your postcode or a place name to get started.

Take, for example, the Apollo 11 lunar landing. I've posted before about a map illustrating how tiny an area Armstrong and Aldrin covered during their various walks across the lunar surface, but seeing the same details superimposed on my local town square or the pitch at St James' Park makes for an even better illustration of the concept.

I do have two small criticisms of the way the site works:

1. The site doesn't remember locations between views.
   Once you pick an event, you're shown the chart of that event overlaid on the image of a randomly selected geographical area and are then invited to enter a post code or place name upon which to superimpose the map. That's fine first time round, but then when you pick another event the site forgets the place name/post code you entered first time round and picks another random location.

   I'd prefer that once you've entered a location the site would remember that location and use it as the default for the next event you selected. I would imagine that most users will want to use the same locale – be it their home, a local landmark or whatever – as the focal point for successive comparisons.¹

2. Sometimes close enough isn't good enough.
   Even when using post codes, sometimes the map that is produced won't be quite centered on the location you entered. Trouble is, there's no way I can find to 'grab' the superimposed chart and drag it to precisely where you wanted it.

   It so happened that the St James' Park image did sit squarely on the pitch. If the image had been centered on, say, the ground's main stand instead I'd have had no way to move the image so that the entire journey took place on the pitch.

That said, it's a sign of how well-done the site is that these comparatively trivial issues are the biggest gripes I can come up with. It's fine work by all concerned.

[Via kottke.org]

1. The site's designers may well have evidence of actual usage patterns that proves me wrong, of course. I can only say that I found myself repeatedly having to enter the same location name. ↩