subscribe, contribute or comment by e-mailing flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Site created 30 May 1999. Home page URL http://www.angelfire.com/grrl/flipsock/
| sneedle flipsock |
27 august 2004: forever blowing bubbles |
flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
|
This week:
TribbiesSo it's true: God hates figs. (thanks, Trevor) Jack Winter's classic New Yorker article, "How I Met My Wife": "She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I’d have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito..." (thanks, Katherine) Things you'd never know without TV: All grocery shopping bags contain at least one stick of French bread. A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds. Kitchens don't have light switches. A detective can only solve a case once he has been suspended from duty... (thanks, Katherine) Pish tish, says Flipsock friend Jonathan, "That's nothing compared to what you learn from watching anime." As evidence, here are The Laws of Anime (Version 6.0), Originally compiled and edited by Darrin Bright and Ryan Shellito: The larger a mechanical device is, the faster it moves. Anything that explodes bulges first. Nearly all things emit light from fatal wounds. Small and cute will always overcome big and ugly... (thanks, Jonathan) Get your John Kerry emoticons (it must be all the botox), and give George W Bush a makeover. This month New York is hosting the Republican party's national convention where, thanks to some non-Republican artist-activists, you can see and play with CoDECK, an interactive video database housed in a 1970s Betamax VCR. (thanks to Trevor, Paul and Katherine) (We previously noted that the Democrats' convention in Boston was not a science fiction convention.) Not just an education... a career: "At Spam University, you'll earn while you learn. Our hands-on curriculum will teach you time-proven spamming techniques: Everything you need to make a name for yourself in the fast-paced spam industry." (thanks, Trevor) If you missed the Third Annual Nigerian Spam Conference in November 2003, you can still read the proceedings (provided you're a Nigerian). (thanks, Trevor) Working with seven other farmers, Haji Mshangama began farming butterflies in Tanzania ten months ago. In June his group sold pupae worth US$500, a staggering amount of money, in an area where many farmers are earning just one or two dollars a day. (thanks, Paul) Raku-Gaki is an indescribably wonderful Flash-based site. It won the 2004 Webby Award for best personal web site. To make the Raku-Gaki site do stuff, wave your mouse around and click when something bulges, glows or changes. (Flash, sound and some adult content) (thanks, Trevor) "I, Robot" is a pretty good movie, but it's a stretch to say it was inspired by Asimov. (thanks, Fraser) On the same site, the recipe for black bean and jalapeno soup sounds yummy. This 70s-style geometric image is not animated: it's your eyes playing tricks. (thanks, Paul) According to the inflatable giant, the World of Pain is upstairs, on the left... (thanks, Paul) "The secret of TAC compression is not that it makes files smaller, but that it makes files bigger, much bigger. This provides the end user with a compression tool to meet almost any need in today's bandwidth and gig overloaded computing world." (thanks, Paul) Frank's Vinyl Museum presents the best songs from We're The Banana Splits: sing along with Fleagle, Bingo, Drooper and Snork. If your memory's a bit rusty, here are lyrics for the Tra La La song. If you listen carefully, you can hear the needle leave the record at the end of each track. (requires Real Audio player) (thanks, Dougi via the flite list at work) I used to love the AdCritic site: it showcased the best TV advertisements from around the world. Then it became a site for paying subscribers only, and another source of regular amusement, entertainment, wonder and appreciation was gone. Fear not, dear viewers! Kontraband comes to the rescue with TV ads, games, movies, words, pictures, animations and other 'fag break' web entertainment. (thanks, Claire) 27 August 2004 | top of page Except the librarians"Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse," declares Kurt Vonnegut. He's giving up on the human race, again and with reason, with one exception:
thanks Warren | 24 August 2004 | top of page Multilingual CatullusRead poems by Catullus in Latin, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Rioplatense, Romanian, Spanish and other languages. You can also use this site to compare versions of the same poem in two languages. Coleridge wrote a poem in praise of Catullian Hendecasyllables. 23 August 2004 | top of page Forever blowing bubblesDid you ever wonder what it would be like to pop a water balloon in space? Or to blow bubbles into a blob of water? (Requires Quicktime or an MPEG player) 23 August 2004 | top of page A lyrical small-town reminiscence... in which nothing ever happens"The movie critic seems perfectly capable of praising 'Spiderman' without thinking that it somehow demeans his critical reputation and makes him unfit for reviewing the next Merchant-Ivory saga about old ladies in India." Similarly, the weekend newspapers' LitCrits should feel able to review The Da Vinci Code without sneering. thanks Fraser and Melissa | 23 August 2004 | top of page IndividualityThe New York Time's "Portraits of Grief" obituaries "were not designed to do justice to the victims in all of their complexity... They aspired to give all Americans the illusion of identifying with the victims, and therefore allowing them to feel that they themselves had somehow been touched by the horrific event... [T]his juggernaut of democratic connection... resulted from a broader demand: the crowd's insistence on emotionally memorable images at the expense of genuine human individuality." While we watch events in Iraq, Colombia has become the hidden front in America's 'war on terror'. 23 August 2004 | top of page A cure for boredomGo to the Wikipedia home page and click the "Random Page" link in the left-hand navigation menu. A ridiculously easy way to learn something new and unexpected about the world. 23 August 2004 | top of page Bring back Leroy BrownGoodness gracious, how audacious: four thieves nicked two Edvard Munch paintings during the Munch Museum's normal opening hours on Sunday. The hunt is on. Elsewhere in Oslo, the Stenersen Museum has been showing some of Munch's graphic art in the dark. Munch painted four versions of The Scream (aka The Cry). The Norwegian National Gallery version, considered the most significant, was stolen in 1994 and recovered a few months later. In 1883 Munch was walking along Ljabrochaussaen, a road in Oslo, at sunset. He felt "a great unending scream piercing through nature" that he tried to capture in paint ten years later. The lurid sunsets of 1883 were an after-effect of the Krakatoa volcano's eruption. What happens to stolen paintings? Occasionally they're recovered: Octave 'The Monkey' Durham and Henk B were jailed last month for stealing two works from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2002. Interpol estimates that art theft is the fourth largest criminal activity after drugs, money laundering and illegal arms trading. 23 August 2004 | top of page Those darned bunniesJaws re-enacted in 30 seconds by the bunnies that previously brought us The Exorcist, The Shining , Titanic and Alien in 30 seconds. (Requires Flash and sound) thanks Andrew | 23 August 2004 | top of page |
2004 flipsocks:17 Dec: the
sock has flipped
Also on this site:articles: listmania: neology: recipe: reviews: Without whom (web):frankenstein
journal (Chris)
Without whom (also):Ramona P Lovechild
|
|
subscribe, contribute or comment by e-mailing flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Site created 30 May 1999. Home page URL http://www.angelfire.com/grrl/flipsock/ |