thing-a-day derailed; but here's a photo.

The new Art Gallery of Alberta building. I was there on Friday. Randall Stout is the architect. I wasn't sure how I would feel about it (after watching it being built for months and months and months) but standing inside, I was won over.

It's incomplete in this photo, but it conveys a lot of the art-gallery-ness of it.

I hope my fists can fight for two

[Via style files]: "Fractured Fairy Tales" wall display.


This is actually one unit, the individual boxes are attached to each other and to the wall. I just love this, and it seems like it would actually be pretty easy to build, with some basic carpentry skills. (Note to self: develop basic carpentry skills.) The guy who writes this blog, Thomas Wold, is a designer for ReadyMade, and I love love love his projects.

I know it's just a weird form of inverted lethargy, but I feel like taking on some apartnment-y projects: I've been considering making curtains, painting a wall or two, or making a new quilt. This is basically because I am bored, but whatever.

I had a swim, but no shower because there is no hot water in my building today. Denied! As a result, I feel very salty, like in a Kris Kristofferson song [Or, apparently, a Willie Nelson song. My illusions are shattered.]

OMG, internets, the song of the week on iTunes this week is the worst EVER. It's not often that I can listen to 15 seconds of a song and then decide to delete it from my computer FOREVER, but this is one of those times.

I wish I had something to tell you. I wish I had a cool wall installation made of boxes and cabinets. I wish I was a character in Lord of the Rings. (Preferably the movie, not the book, since J. R. R. Tolkien was kind of a mysogynist and would probably make me a giant spider.) I wish for lots of things.

One may think we're doing fine
but if I had to lay it on the line
we're losing ground with every passing day
we're not OK.
-The Perishers

Links for the wise, the proud, and the lonely

From desire to inspire: books on display. I love pictures of other people's bookshelves, although I love them even more when you can tell what books they have. JUDGMENT!

George Orwell Wounded by a Fascist Sniper: George Orwell's essay about being shot. I have a weird fondness for George Orwell that goes back to high school. For a long time I had his 5 rules for effective writing posted like a prayer over my desk, until I realized I actually like using long words where short ones will do. Call it a hapless, perhaps misguided, attempt to gain the approbation of my readership.

From Salon: Craft the Vote!, an article about campaign crafts. The slideshow includes this really excellent DHS alert level "security blanket." I want to make one.



I love, love, love Duck and cover!, a set of scanned advertising and information materials for prefab fallout shelters from the 1960s. (One such image seen above.) Boy, that family looks like they're enjoying the post-Nuclear-apocalypse world. I guess it makes sense, though-- I mean, they are sleeping in bunk beds, and nothing says "fun" like bunk beds.

Also: I went to see Becoming Jane last night, and it was OK I guess, except it kind of pissed me off. If you take this movie as historical fact (which, in my experience, most people who watch biopics do), then Jane Austen was a terrible writer, because her most famous novel was simply a novelized version of her own life (with the role of Lady Catherine De Bergh being played by Professor McGonnagall). I know that a movie in which all a writer does is write novels is boring, but I get so tired of these film versions of female writers' lives in which the whole point is romance. To sum up: "Jane Austen says: 'Boys please!'"

I love the Habitat building in Montreal, so I'm happy to see it getting dugg/delicioused, even under the inaccurate title "What did the architect smoke?" (In spite of the suggestion that Moshe Safdie must have been taking drugs to design it, I think these photos show how livable the building remains even after 40 years... all those patios and windows!)

air miles, terrorists, emo bands, and voyeurism

From Wired: mileage runners find ways to fly cheap, long flights to accumulate air miles. "Of Solomin's five runs to date, one of the more impressive was a trip from San Francisco to Tampa via Los Angeles, San Diego and Washington, then back with connections in D.C., Seattle and Portland. Thanks to his Premier status, he earned double miles for the trip, more 16,000 of them, for just $232."

From Ironic Sans: Terrorist logos. Apparently, if you want people to take your terrorist organization seriously, you need to include guns and/or stars. Or better yet, two crossed guns. Same with emo bands.

One of the things I love about Flickr is that it gives you a chance to peek into other people's houses--albeit, the shots of their houses they think will most impress you. My new design porn is therefore Flickr's Fresh New Spaces pool. And also speaking of design, I am totally lusting after one of these huge 8x13 wall maps--doesn't it seem like something out of a Wes Anderson movie?

Finally, if I was ever home to install firefox add-ons, which I'm not, I would be installing this RSS ticker that updates RSS feeds to your status bar in firefox. Some of us just do not have time to wait for regular RSS feeds--we need a newer, faster instant gratification!

Still no titles for posts. Weird blogger.

did i disappoint you?

A photo-essay on Soviet roadside bus-stops. Some of them are quite striking--a vision of the future, straight from the 1970s. From polar inertia, "the journal of nomadic and popular culture."

Gullible.info is a website of interesting facts. Whether these facts are true seems impossible to determine, but really, does it matter, in this post-modern world? I am listening to John Hodgman's Areas of my Expertise as an audiobook right now (I downloaded it for free from iTunes for some reason, maybe you can too!) and it's great, a compendium of (fabricated) human knowledge. "Now I sense that you have further questions… you are reasonable to ponder, who is this John Hodgman, and how did he come to know so many invented facts?"

I am reading a book a day for reading week, that's the theory. (Young adult books are acceptable for this project, otherwise it seems insurmountable.) On Monday I finished The Garneau Block. Tuesday I finished The Xanadu Adventure, thus concluding my re-reading of all the Vesper Holly books. Yesterday I read The Watsons Go To Birmingham--1963, which was excellent. Today I am hoping to finish Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History. Will she make it? Only time will tell!