What's one thing that you'd like to get done this weekend? Is there anything holding you back?
I'm in SF, so my goals are get my talk finished for The ISEA Interactive City Summit, and meet as many people as possible that I know here at Zeitgeist for a burger and a beer. The latter may hold the former back a little… or it may strap the rocketboosters on it. Who knows!
Soda? Cola? Pop? What do you say? Any other regional words that set you apart?
Question submitted by Gladys.
Um.
Colour.
Favourite.
Neighbourhood.
Etc.
Who is your favorite Muppet? Why?
QotD submitted by knitwitology.vox.com.
Zoot. Why? You have to ask?
What's the one CD that will totally remind you of the Summer of 2006?
Well – I've been running a commentary on the sounds of the summer here for a little while, but that's been a track thing. A late-entrant and an actual CD which qualifies it for this QotD is "Coles Corner" by Richard Hawley.
Fiona and myself rented a car last weekend to head to West Wales, and grabbed some new CDs from the top of the ripping pile to use in the rental's CD player.
We listened to this (plus the new Gotan Project, Hot Chip, some others) pretty much the entire ride. It sat well with the scenery.
It's somewhat scottwalkerish, melancholic, a little-bit-country-a-little-bit-rock-and-roll. Wistful and whistle-able. Here's what Pitchfork said.
It was a trip to New York, Seattle and San Francisco in 1997 with my boss.
We boarded the BA plane at Heathrow, and moments after take-off there were human screams and screams of twisted metal as I saw the bulkhead dividers shear in rotation against the movement of the fuselage.
There had been a bird strike in one of the engines, and it had caught fire quite spectacularly during takeoff.
Things calmed down a little as the Captain announced this, and fear turned to grumbling as he informed us that we would be circling over the English Channel to dump fuel and come back into land at Heathrow.
We did so and deplaned back into a welcome from BA ground staff with enough beverage vouchers for the entire manifest of passengers to get thoroughly drunk and get to know each other, which leads to a story for another day…
I've started reading a series of books by Phillip Reeve that I've inherited from Foe.
With her new job producing science exhibits for kids and teenagers, we have a lot of 'books for young adults' in the house under the guise of research.
I finished the first in the series "Mortal Engines" yesterday.
I knew I was going to like it from the the first line… which pretty much pushed all the matt-buttons at once:
"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."
They are pretty standard adventure stories I guess (the kids are orphans of righteous parents – heard that before anywhere?) but the imagination and detail invested in the setting is very enjoyable.
About to start the next one: "Predators Gold", in the hope that there's less of the familiar tropes of youth sci-fi/fantasy and more unfamiliar, fantastic settings…
There was a lunchtime lecture at UCL a few years ago about the mathematics of coincidence*, and how when viewed rationally, most coincidences are quite likely – but for some reason we seem to be wired to project great significance and unlikelihood into them.
Which is the old saw I trot out in reponse to the old saw that it's such a small world.
It was canned before it was shown… And teh internets made it worse by letting us fanpersons watch the unscreened pilot via bittorrent…
Petafloptimism 