- This story of Prussian Blue, five years later, makes me happy: you can teach hate, but you can’t necessarily make it stick. [via]
- The Incredible Magdeburg Water Bridge in Germany [via]
- 10 Buildings Shaped Like What They Sell [via]
- Along similiar lines, Product Packaging #2:
Surely there must be a name, in advertising parlance, for the figure of the anthropomorphized food item that happily consumes a non-anthropomorphized version of itself? [via]
- And finally, Le Flaneur: Time Lapse Video of Paris Without the People [via]
various
Wednesday various
- “When It’s Not Your Turnâ€: The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s “The Wire†[via]
- The Content Farm: “Informative articles about every topic, written by people with a passing knowledge.” [via]
- War Dog:
Dogs have been fighting alongside U.S. soldiers for more than 100 years, seeing combat in the Civil War and World War I. But their service was informal; only in 1942 were canines officially inducted into the U.S. Army. Today, they’re a central part of U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan — as of early 2010 the U.S. Army had 2,800 active-duty dogs deployed (the largest canine contingent in the world). And these numbers will continue to grow as these dogs become an ever-more-vital military asset. [via]
- If Housepets Were Libertarians
- And finally…
X-Men: First Class Title Sequence from Joe D! on Vimeo. [via
Tuesday various
- A is for Ackbar [via]
- You’ve almost certainly heard this, but it’s worth repeating again and again and again: Ayn Rand received Social Security and Medicare. [via]
- 8-Bit vs. Reality [via]
- Lost Boys is Michael. A strangely compelling cut of the movie. (See also: it’s shelley duvall! many, many times!)
- And finally, Cat Rambo shares with writers 5 Things To Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs
Halloween various
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Thursday various
- The AV Club on Charlie’s Angels:
If you’re going to have a show that’s appallingly retrograde and anti-feminist, the least you could do about it is have the guts to just go whole hog.
- On The Mentalist:
It’s a sign of how thoroughly played out serial killers have become that, after holding such a dominant place in popular culture fifteen to twenty years ago, they all have seem to have retired to CBS.
- On Dream House:
And of course it’s never a good sign when Elias Koteas is skulking about.
- On Fringe:
When it comes to stories, there are few things more gratifying than realizing the story you thought were being told wasn’t the real story at all.
- And finally, Jean-Christophe Valtat defends steampunk:
Now it is true that steampunk is riddled with every kind of self-duplicating cliches – zombies, airships, clockwork humans, anarchists etc… – but that is a bit like saying that mathematics are riddled with cliches because they are using the same axioms over and over. Cliches (or myths, if you prefer) are technically inherent to alternate-world building, because it would be too complicated and boring to present the reader with a world where everything would have to be explained down to the least detail: you can only present something new if it is delineated by familiar objects, if only for the reader to complete by himself what the book cannot explain or describe. The novelty – in all senses of the term – comes from the collage, the montage, the criss-crossing and hybridation of historical and fantastic references, the spark that comes from banging the cliches together. A steampunk novel is laborious and volatile dosing of the pleasures of recognition and the pleasures of discovery. Then again, the dosing can fail miserably, but it is not necessarily the genre that is to blame. [via]