Beep beep.

Iambelledejour.com merch hits the fashion pages of The Telegraph, but they don’t seem to have twigged that it’s a spoof.

As Webb says “FFS”.

You can of course get your IABDJ thongs and trucker caps here.

Rockwell Extra Bold is so now!

UPDATE: Got it now – thanks to Anne G, and Robert Andrews!

Does anyone have a scan of the diagram that accompanied a story in Wired 11.06 about the fight for colour spectrum in corporate identity called: “The battle for blue”???

It featured in the Rem Koolhaas guest-edited issue. If you still have it and have an itchy scanner finger or have a digital version of the diagram, I’d be very grateful if you could let me know by commenting here.

There’s a reason…

Found via the Spool, Yoz nails US ‘cyberculture’ journalism and “that whole smartmobs thing” nicely. Go read.

I get so confused now I am in my dotage.

Come back from CeBIT blurry-eyed and bamboozled, only to fire up Bloglines and find that John Gray – author of the laser-guided mememissiles “Straw Dogs” and “Al Queda and what it means to be modern” is also the author of cheesy self-help tome: “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus” and the centre of a controversy.

From The Guardian’s review of “Straw Dogs”:

“John Gray’s political vision has been steadily darkening. Once a swashbuckling free-marketeer, he has, in his recent studies, become increasingly despondent about the state of the world. With the crankish, unbalanced Straw Dogs, he emerges as a full-blooded apocalyptic nihilist. He has passed from Thatcherite zest to virulent misanthropy.

Not that nihilism is a term he would endorse. His book is so remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope. Nihilism for Gray suggests the world needs to be redeemed from meaninglessness, a claim he regards as meaningless. Instead, we must just accept that progress is a myth, freedom a fantasy, selfhood a delusion, morality a kind of sickness, justice a mere matter of custom and illusion our natural condition. Technology cannot be controlled, and human beings are entirely helpless. Political tyrannies will be the norm for the future, if we have any future at all.”

Or if you prefer:

“This powerful and brilliant book is an essential guide to the new Millennium. Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions
— J.G.Ballard”

Not exactly self-help. Or maybe the best type of all if you’re of a gnostic persuasion…

Anyway.

I have had it explained to me that people can have the same name and be completely different people.

Like Donna Summer, for instance.

From the Guardian Onlineblog:

“it’s just won a cool £250,000 in funding from the office of the deputy Prime Minister. Glasses are, I suspect, being raised, even as I type…”

Whooo! Well done Tom(s), James(s) and all involved in mySociety

It’s because it’s got such a good logo of course. 😉

Via Coolhunting – some very, very fine French apparel from La Fraise – including the crime-bustin’, Mac-inventing duo pictured right on the “Streets of Cupertino” t-shirt.

Also, Hammersley and Lowsowsky are flogging Spartacus/literary-spoof/prostitution crossover “MERCH” off of a lorry parked round the back of I AM BELLE DE JOUR (.com). Judoflipping The Spectacle with moveabletype; hilarity ensues!

^ Thaw’s hammer strikes, Kaivopusto area, Helsinki yesterday.

Sorry I can’t think of any more bad Zelda puns…. but…

• Master Sword forged!!! [thanks Lee!]
• Lifeblogwatch
• Opportunitygrrl, because even interplanetary probes need LJbuddies
  

  “OMG, I am soooo dusty and disgusting right now!! I have red grime everywhere, especially under my abrasion instruments! It’s no wonder I can’t grind anything! I find evidence of past water, but I can’t even find a puddle to splash my treads in here! I so need a shower. And a manicure. OMG, what if Stardust saw me like this?!”

  [via memepool]

• “Interview with Microsoft’s typography master”:
  

  “He’s studying how to use multiple screens. In his office he has a second monitor — a projector on the wall — running full time. He uses this second monitor differently from his main high-res monitor. In his studies of human perception he learned that the periphery vision is more attuned to movement. So, he puts his email and his alerts on this second screen.”

• I want to go to GEL
• Big but bonkers indescribable flash movie by Sonia Peng
  

^ From last year’s festivities in London, staged by the Porthcawl exiles…

Today is St. David’s Day; the patron saint of Wales. Much singing and wearing of leeks will take place back home. Finding a daffodil to wear on my lapel might be a challenge in Helsinki, but I’m going to give it a go.

Pictured is St. Davids Cathedral, in a photograph I took there back in 2001.