A call for other people's effort - I'm percolating a web project that
requires close-up photographs of the letters A, B, D, E, I, L, N, R, T and
U, taken from obvious or obscure pieces of outdoor writing; I
just need a few good ones of each, for the site's title graphic. I grabbed
far more than I expected to around a smallish village yesterday afternoon
(feeling entirely too guilty about pressing a pedestrian-crossing button
just to get a glowing 'WAIT') - I've got enough, but it'd be good to have
a selection of others, from different parts of the country or the world.
Email
them in in any old format within the next few weeks and I'll use the
most interesting ones, with credit.
[ ]
Ex-smoker Chirac launches a bomb-free war
on cancer, and all power to him. I'd misread the first line
as "fifteen days after kicking a two-packets-a-day habit" -
a pity, really; proposing that his government raise cigarette tax and
clamp down on public smoking would be a great way for a President
to give up.
[ ]
As the Americans continue to raise their flags in that brief,
instinctive Dr Strangelove way of theirs, I'm still waiting for a
dirty great bomb to go off under Baghdad, somewhere. If I
was a violent and paranoid dictator, I'd be rigging at least half
of my drainpipe-legged statues to explode when sabotaged.
[ ]
"BlogNomic is divided into Rounds called Dynasties, each
with a separate winning condition. When a Player fulfills the winning
condition, he/she is named Emperor/Empress of BlogNomic, and the next
round is begun as that Player's Dynasty."
Regime change at BlogNomic; gone
is the blog-content-manipulating prize system, and in comes a cleaner
ruleset and an Emperor with veto power. We're back at the ground floor -
sign up now for the inevitable coup.
[ ]
"I remember sitting next to my mother and watching the
scenery roll by the dusty windows, the columns of soldiers and armor
going the other way, into the city, past the bombed-out villages and
occasional shriveled black thing that might have once been a person.
From time to time, one of the sleek, triangular purple ships of the
aliens would flit by, just above head level, totally ignored by
everyone."
"Barthes saw [Gothic cathedrals and Citroën cars] as "the supreme
creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and
consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which
appropriates them as a purely magical object". I would like to consider
the London Underground Map in the context of Barthes’s list of 'supreme
creations'."
The London Underground Map: Imagining Modern Time and Space -
a wonderful contextual history; how the initial maps were
designed as a way to unify the public's comprehension of a fragmented underground system run by a variety of rail companies, and how a persistent Harry Beck wove the timeless, space-distorting, thoroughly magical Tube map.
There is a very real sense of the cathedral to it; the mock-reverential
Mornington Crescent pilgrimages suddenly make a lot more sense
than I'd credited them with.
And this quote from Beck himself stands out, for all sorts of reasons:-
"If you're going underground,
why do you need bother about geography? It's not so important. Connections
are the thing."
