Made Thing

From Monocle, a video report on Bildschöne Bücher, a small bookshop in Berlin that features only 25 titles at a time.

Lately my inboxes have been hit with spam messages that attempt to tease a click-through by describing an act of violence in the subject line. A sampling:

Boy blinded after perfume bottle explodes
Russian serial killer on the loose
Man killed by flying cocktail glass
High school teacher rapes cheerleader
Horse kicks Ralph Lauren in stomach
Police open fire on elderly in Iowa
Heidi Fleiss found murdered today
US Soldiers blown up by militants
Cats attack schoolkids in town.

I noticed these only three or four weeks ago. Previously, the subject lines on the junk messages I received were straightforward pitches for sexual enhancements or mortgages — with a third, less frequent number of nonsense messages, junk text aimed at poisoning the Bayesian well. Those messages quickly fell victim to my spam filter. These new messages, though, have been annoyingly effective at slipping past. Content-wise, the new ones are shorter — they contain, at most, a single follow-up sentence and link. The link is completely unrelated to the subject, of course — it points to the same boner pills and junk loans as the older messages.

I wonder if the economy and our collective malaise has something to do with the darker tease. When things go badly, are people more interested in violence than Viagra?

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I assumed Jack was using Tumblr or another tumblelog engine because of the way his design distinguishes between link posts and longer, titled entries, but a little URL-prodding reveals WordPress hiding behind the curtain. The implementation is beautiful. I’d love to get a look at his templates.

CMS aside, Big Contrarian is one of the best new weblogs I’ve seen this year.

The news of Randy Pausch’s death has been widely reported, but I’m posting it here so I don’t forget about the YouTube video or pdf transcript of his last lecture, which he delivered at Carnegie Mellon after being diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 47.

You know, I wasted two hours yesterday fretting and complaining about a relatively minor financial blunder. It was a lovely afternoon. I could have taken my family to the park. I could have taken a walk around the lake. I could have done anything.

I can’t help but wonder what Pausch would have done with another two hours.

Here’s an idea.

Given the apparent gender balance among readers of Warren Ellis’s blog, and the propensity with which said readers send photographs of themselves for Warren’s publication and approval, the only reasonable thing for Warren to do is start a televised dating service. I’m talking about a weekly reality TV show where Warren picks two lucky readers from the photo pile, using only his cruel and depraved sense of humor as a matchmaking guide, and then designs a romantic evening out for the two of them.

Warren, of course, will have to go along as a kind of deranged chaperone, hurling death threats at the male half of the couple while feeding psychotropic drugs and endless flattery to the female half. It would be a lot like that show Millionaire Matchmaker, only without any rich people, and with Warren putting out his cigarettes on the contestants when they say something stupid. Because the experience would surely scar the participants so deeply they’d never seek human contact again, thus destroying their chances of ever reproducing, and because Warren, given his boundless energy, could eventually work his way through most of the world in this manner, the show would be called Warren Ellis: Population Zero.

I’d happily pay $2 per episode, the standard fee for a la carte shows on iTunes. I don’t know how many people read Warren’s blog, but even if, say, 10,000 of them were willing to subscribe, that’s a working budget of at least $10,000 per episode, setting aside the other half for distribution and legal fees. Red Bull would be a natural corporate sponsor, since the company is more or less responsible for keeping Warren animate, but I’ll leave those details to the producers.

This, by the way, started out as an entry about my plans to purchase Crooked Little Vein now that it’s out in paperback. I’m not sure what happened.

This stuff was everywhere where I grew up. It twisted up both sides of the quarter-mile dirt road that led to my family’s house, weaving in and out of the rotting cleft fence like a drunk driving home in the dark. We kids ate it in the summer. We’d twist the spiked blossom from the vine (only the yellow, ripened, never the white), pinch the green tip of the stem, and drag the translucent pistil down the ovule until a single drop of nectar swelled and drooped onto a waiting tongue. The smell was thicker than any ordinary flower — headstrong, musky, like sweat off a woman, and on the hottest, most humid days it saturated the air, impossible to resist. Boys weren’t the only creatures who found it so. Every so often someone thrust his hand deep into a vine only to holler and pull back — snakebit.

Honeysuckle weaves its way through the landscape of my current manuscript, too, but until today I never knew that it’s also called woodbine, a word that sat me straight up in my chair when Google led me to it. Some words are not discovered so much as revealed, and woodbine, for me, is one of them. Seeing it triggered a memory: The first time I saw a racy pair of women’s shoes — the heeled kind that sends straps curling up the ankle and calf — I thought of honeysuckle gripping a fence post. The connection felt silly, even embarrassing at the time (I was 12, I think, and watching television), but today it’s clear. Bine is archaic for bind, my dictionary tells me. Woodbine. Honeysuckle. Weird.

The July/August issue of the Technology Review looks inside Twitter’s offices with a photo essay shot by Justin Fantl. Interestingly, the main work area is one long, unpartitioned table. The lack of cubicles keeps the office quiet — people leave the room when they need to make a phone call.

Warning: Link requires registration.

This time-lapse video provides a neat look at the trial and error that goes into page layout.

YouTube - Page design.

Via Miss West.

One of my favorite moments from the Hannibal Lecter books is this snippet about genetics in pigeon breeding. In the excerpt, one of the orderlies who attended Dr. Lecter in prison is recalling a conversation he had with Lecter for Clarice Starling, the FBI agent assigned to capture him.

We were talking about inherited, hardwired behavior … He was using genetics in roller pigeons as an example. They go way up in the air and roll over and over backwards in a display, falling toward the ground. There are shallow rollers and deep rollers. You can’t breed two deep rollers or the offspring will roll all the way down, crash and die. What he said was: ‘Officer Starling is a deep roller, Barney. We’ll hope one of her parents was not.’

Ever since I read this, I’ve found myself categorizing the people I meet as shallow rollers or deep rollers. And, despite the warning, it seems to me that deep rollers almost always prefer the companionship of same.

This Wikipedia entry on roller pigeons has a tiny bit more detail on their breeding, and The New York Times provides an unflattering review of the book the example is taken from. (The reviewer calls the example out as a high point in the novel.)

Shot at work with the iPhone, and massaged in Photoshop for that horror-movie look.

• A slave is imported into the United States every 30 minutes, on average, for the market rate of $90. Good 011 - Modern Slavery - A Primer
• The business of door-to-door magazine subscription sales is largely unregulated, employing criminals and minors in a job that takes both across state lines. What Mainstream Publishers Don’t Want You to Know About Door-to-Door Magazine Sales
• MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia, can be made to authenticate users against ActiveDirectory or LDAP. (This is good news to me because I administer a wiki for instructors and faculty in the English department at the UA.) Extension:LDAP Authentication - MediaWiki
• Posting PowerPoint presentations to the web in an attractive, accessible format is a screaming pain in the rear. I spent three hours experimenting with various options today, before finally posting the original PowerPoint file for PC users (who can use the free PowerPoint viewer if they don’t have Office installed) and another copy as a QuickTime movie for Mac users. My first choice was to convert it to Flash and upload it in only one format, but such conversion quickly proved to be stupid hard, as are most simple tasks in Flash.