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Five things,,,
Jul. 5th, 2012 04:43 pm...of which by far the oddest (via the Ansible) is that Grant Morrison was awarded an MBE in the Queen's birthays honours. King Mob enters the Order of the British Empire - can this be true? (apparently so.)
Photographer Leah Gordon performed a reductio ad absurdum on the fine-grained racial categories proposed by eighteenth century colonialist Moreau de St Méry, seeking out models who matched his classifications and photographing them in elegant Renaissance-style portraits. There's an example in the Guardian.
My inbox is regularly enlivened by the Quotation of the Day mailing list: rarely less than interesting, and with the occasional real gem. As, for example: "A dinner invitation, once accepted, is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend." (Ward McAllister, in Society As I Have Found It, 1890)
One of the highlights of my visit to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley was their Minitel terminal. I remember our incredulity when the French government announced in 1982 that instead of producing paper volumes of phone numbers which were out of date as soon as they were published, it was going to give every subscriber a computer terminal. During my days at the advertising face, I would have to explain to colleagues that the code in the corner of the advertisement (36.15 Renault, for example) was to allow the public to seek more information on Minitel - and later, that one reason why France was slow to adopt the internet was that they already had Minitel. But I never saw a Minitel site, and now I never will, because the system has been turned off.
There's almost certainly at least one other thing lurking in the back of my mind, but I've made a pot of tea and still not dislodged it, so please regard item five as a check digit.
Photographer Leah Gordon performed a reductio ad absurdum on the fine-grained racial categories proposed by eighteenth century colonialist Moreau de St Méry, seeking out models who matched his classifications and photographing them in elegant Renaissance-style portraits. There's an example in the Guardian.
My inbox is regularly enlivened by the Quotation of the Day mailing list: rarely less than interesting, and with the occasional real gem. As, for example: "A dinner invitation, once accepted, is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend." (Ward McAllister, in Society As I Have Found It, 1890)
One of the highlights of my visit to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley was their Minitel terminal. I remember our incredulity when the French government announced in 1982 that instead of producing paper volumes of phone numbers which were out of date as soon as they were published, it was going to give every subscriber a computer terminal. During my days at the advertising face, I would have to explain to colleagues that the code in the corner of the advertisement (36.15 Renault, for example) was to allow the public to seek more information on Minitel - and later, that one reason why France was slow to adopt the internet was that they already had Minitel. But I never saw a Minitel site, and now I never will, because the system has been turned off.
There's almost certainly at least one other thing lurking in the back of my mind, but I've made a pot of tea and still not dislodged it, so please regard item five as a check digit.
