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| Wednesday, May 14, 2008 |
Hey everyone, the British National Archives have finally begun releasing their UFO files, and even the pope says it's okay to believe in aliens! Woohoo!
However, the University of Cambridge is investigating atheism and has a well-done, detailed website to show for it. I expect the pope is not so pleased about that.
A posthuman Bertie Wooster would probably be an atheist, but he'd be too busy getting into horrible scrapes for anyone to care too much.
Studies are showing a correlation between suicides and disturbances in the earth's magnetic field. Coincidence? Or something more?
If you're not interested in all this intangible stuff and want to get out and see something, don't forget the always-awesome Bay to Breakers race happens this weekend in San Francisco. Also, if you're in Europe and have a sudden yen to see the catacombs of Paris, there's a detailed website to study before you venture underground!
Jinnet @
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| Tuesday, May 13, 2008 |
Well, the reaction to the New York Times article on steampunk has swept around the web, and it seems almost evenly divided between the "wow, that's so cool" group and the "oh, that is SO lame" crowd. Metafilter has a discussion thread that was up to 211 comments when I last looked at it, for example. (It's a bit of a relief to be considered lame again. I was kind of nervous about being among the cool.) However, the Times had originally worked up an article last year, then scrapped it for unknown reasons. But the author's decided to put it online, so now we can all read it and see how the state of the steampunk world was a year ago!
Meanwhile, the Mechanicrawl will be traipsing along the San Francisco coastline this July, regardless of whether or not the masses consider it cool. If you're in the area, go!
Etsy has been championing the steampunk DIY aesthetic for some time, and now they have an official Steampunk Street Team.
What would you have if Helen Keller teamed up with Alexander Graham Bell and got her senses back, plus some weaponry? You'd have the basis for one crazy graphic novel series, that's what you'd have!
I now have a hand-drawn steampunk city of my very own. Thanks, Jeff! This means that we have an extra copy of the steampunk anthology here at headquarters; we're trying to dream up some sort of contest so we can give it away as a prize. Stay tuned.
Jinnet @
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| Monday, May 12, 2008 |
Regardless of how you feel about Wikipedia, they do one thing really well there - constantly updated information on current events as they're developing.
Do you live in New York City? If so, Jason wants to draw you! Also, if you're in or near Brooklyn, you should check out the Reanimation Library.
Doris Lessing reports that winning the Nobel Prize has been "a bloody disaster" for her so far. I think it would definitely complicate one's schedule.
Artists to watch: Lucas Rise creates amazing designs on dressers and other ordinary items, while Nervous System uses science as a basis for intricate jewelry designs.
Drawing Day is still nearly a month away, but it's never too early to prepare! (Especially if you're like me, who can't really draw. We non-drawers need some time to psych up for this.)
Jinnet @
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| Friday, May 09, 2008 |
It's Friday! And I'm going to see Eddie Izzard tonight! So on we go to the links!
Thanks to Brendan, Cassandra and Chris Z. for sending in the New York Times article on steampunk. As Cassandra said, I may have to reject steampunk if it gets too popular...
Cassandra brings the science today with articles about the moon, news that scientists have created a universe smaller than a marble, and a story on how eating the right foods can improve your mental agility. Then she veers away from science to point out that there are instruction videos on YouTube for everything these days, even Wicca! And finally, she brings you a detailed thesis in PDF entitled "Highbrow Films Gather Dust: A Study of Dynamic Inconsistency and Online DVD Rentals."
Holly sends in a really interesting story about two boys with gender confusion being raised in two very different ways. We both think there should be an update story on these boys in five or ten years, to see how they're doing.
And finally, via Scalzi: if a knife fight broke out between the Smurfs and the Care Bears, who would win and why? Opinion among the ranks is divided. I don't know that much about the Care Bears (I tried to avoid them as much as possible in the '80s), so I may be biased, but I think the Smurfs would win. Mass organization tends to wear down the opponent.
Have a spiffy weekend, everyone! See you Monday.
Jinnet @
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| Thursday, May 08, 2008 |
News about and for librarians today, plus a huge list of books as part of a meme. Onward!
The big news story today is the FBI getting involved with the curator of the Internet Archive, and the EFF jumping in to defend the right to privacy. Keep fighting the good fight, librarians.
From the people who brought you LISNews: LISWire! Subscribe now to get all the library news, and get your own library involved.
The British Library has been having all sorts of problems since they let the common people show up. Gee, that's too bad. On the other hand, web users in the UK get to win prizes by using an Indiana Jones-themed search engine from Microsoft, so maybe it all balances out.
Meanwhile, the hottest TV show in Abu Dhabi is similar to American Idol...except that it's called Millions' Poet, and it features competing poets. Yes, really!
Something for the law librarians: lawyers are starting to experiment with using Twitter, and you can now subscribe to an RSS feed for the U.S. Code via Cornell's Law Instiute. This could come in really handy if you're waiting for changes to take effect.
And finally, the meme! As explained via this post, the idea originated from LibraryThing's "top unread books," listed below. "The rules: bold the books you have read, italicize books you’ve started but not finished, strike the books you read but hated (likely for school), add an asterisk to books you’ve read more than once, and underline those you own but still haven’t read yourself." What I have learned from this: I haven't read a lot of "unreadable" books, but when I do read them I finish them, and while I did indeed read and hate some books in school, none of them was on the list. (I had to read a different book by Faulkner for school!) Also, many of these are on my "to read" list, which I hope to get to one day.
My list:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
The Odyssey by Homer
The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ulysses by James Joyce
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
*The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Iliad by Homer
Emma by Jane Austen
Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen
The historian: a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Life of Pi: a novel by Yann Martel
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen
*The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I)by Neal Stephenson
American gods: a novel by Neil Gaiman
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The poisonwood Bible: a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
*Dune by Frank Herbert
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
*The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The inferno by Dante Alighieri
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay: a novel by Michael Chabon
Persuasion by Jane Austen
One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Anansi boys: a novel by Neil Gaiman
The once and future king by T. H. White
Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson
Oryx and Crake: a novel by Margaret Atwood
Dubliners by James Joyce
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Angela's ashes: a memoir by Frank McCourt
Beloved: a novel by Toni Morrison
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
In cold blood by Truman Capote
Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence
A confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Les misérables by Victor Hugo
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman
Beowulf : a new verse translation by Anonymous
*A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
The Aeneid by Virgil
*Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The road by Cormac McCarthy
Possession: a romance by A.S. Byatt
The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
The book thief by Markus Zusak
Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Candide, or, Optimism by Voltaire
Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The plague by Albert Camus
Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
Cold mountain by Charles Frazier
Jinnet @
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| Wednesday, May 07, 2008 |
Okay, how did I not know that there's a pigeon in London with a weblog? I should ask the squirrels in our yard if they want wifi access.
In Houston, the Art Car Parade is set for Saturday; meanwhile, they will be rowing boats in Venice for the Vogolonga race. If you'd rather head to a sci-fi or horror convention, there is now a nifty little convention finder; I put in Cincinnati and found out what was happening around here this summer.
I would love to go to the Impossible Smells exhibition over in the UK. Bunny insists that dinosaurs smell like charcoal. The article doesn't mention whether dinosaurs are included in the exhibit, but I would bet that they are!
And this just in from Cassandra: Hillary Clinton wanted Bill to declassify a huge amount of documentation on UFO sightings. Geez, like Hillary doesn't have enough problems this week.
Jinnet @
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| Tuesday, May 06, 2008 |
Look, a fun LEGO steampunker! This can be yours if you enter the contest that Buy Steampunk is holding in conjunction with Jamie Spencer; send in your own artistic effort that incorporates Jamie's Kriegerhund and/or Dardenbahst LEGO mechas. Oh, and the winner also gets this:
The deadline has been extended to Friday, so send in your artistic renditions fast! The Maker Faire has come and gone, but it looks like it was a fantastic time for all, especially the steampunk types. For me, there's a connection between Rube Goldberg machines and steampunk. Maybe it's all the intricate detail involved in both. At any rate, Gawker has put together a list of the best Rube Goldberg machine videos out there at the moment. Has anyone tried out PMOG, otherwise known as the Passively Multiplayer Online Game? It looks really fun, but I have no real spare time right now... One of the stranger remakings I've seen lately transforms pistols into porcelain art. Soon porcelain rayguns will probably appear on the scene. Not punk, but quite Victorian, this treehouse looks perfect for the post-oil abode. In the meantime, you can still wear funky cufflinks and enjoy the air conditioning while you can!
Jinnet @
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