Incidentally, this blog is six years old today. So cake for everyone.

Iron Man 3. // Filming in infra-red. // Tulip fields, from above. // Abusing Sellotape. // Volkswagen van of note. // Vintage one-wheeled motorcycle. // “Designed to drop from the sky and land prepared for action, the Paratrooper folding bike can tackle any terrain.” // Jeremy Clarkson drives a very small car. // Does your mobile Antarctic research station look like this? // Twelve peculiar cameras. // “Dad, can we have some bat pups?” // Pure White Paper. // Cardboard creations. // How to tie your shoelaces. Because it seems you’re doing it all wrong. // Facebook pranking. // And via MeFi… Things fitting perfectly into other things. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Meanwhile, in the Arts. 

A video compendium of conceptual performance and physical theatre. Contains nudity, writhing and vegetable slurry. 

Magdalena Chowaniec, Amanda Piña and Daniel Zimmermann perform Neuer Wiener Bioaktionismus: “Three young Viennese artists/dancers from Chile, Poland and Switzerland translate the actionist mystery into a vegetarian orgy in which dead carrots take the place of the massacred lamb. A portrait of our time.”

I Demand You Demand My Art. 

The Observer’s Elizabeth Day asks, “Should artists have to work?”

Stipends allowed Bettina Camilla Vestergaard to travel to Los Angeles and spend six months sitting in her car at taxpayers’ expense while “exploring collective identity” in ways never quite made clear. Oh, and doing a spot of shopping. For art, of course. After sufficient time had been spent idling and, as she puts it, “slowly but surely reducing my mental activity to a purposeless series of meaningless events,” Ms Vestergaard struck upon a deep and fearsome idea. Specifically, to let strangers deface her car with inane marker pen graffiti. This radical feat allegedly “explored” how “identity and gender is constituted in public space.” Though, again, the details are somewhat sketchy. The freewheeling disposal of other people’s earnings also allowed Ms Vestergaard to film herself and her friends looking bored, tearing up grass and pondering the evils of capitalism. And, in an all too brief moment of awareness, wondering if what they do is actually any good and worth anyone’s attention. The resulting videos, all bankrolled by the Danish taxpayer and showing highlights of four days’ artistic inactivity, have been available online for over a year and have to date attracted zero comments and no discernible traffic except via this blog.

The Pure Ones Will Guide Us.

Meet Joan Brady: novelist, umbrage-taker, colossal hypocrite.

Corporations, see, are wicked. They “chew us up and spit us out,” and how could anyone with a soul want to be part of that – especially an artist like Joan Brady, for whom purity is everything? Of course, this being the Guardian, Ms Brady’s display of indignation is just a tad selective. Despite the author’s outrage, I somehow doubt that Whitbread will be getting their prize money back. I think we can also assume that our morally lofty wordsmith won’t be withdrawing her novels from Waterstones and Amazon, both of which have no doubt aroused very similar umbrage from many small booksellers. And it’s perhaps worth noting that Ms Brady’s latest novel, The Blue Death, is published by Simon & Schuster, an imposing division of that even more imposing multinational corporation, CBS.

We’re Compensating You for That Face.

Unattractive people need affirmative action too.

Oh, come on. Who wouldn’t want to be regarded as officially ugly?

As usual, I’ve hidden chocolate and booze in the greatest hits. 

A partial snapshot of Twitter in real time. 

Why dogs don’t rule the Earth. // Dubai down below. // Bridging the generation gap with Black Ops 2. // Weird vintage. // Menswear dog. // Can you find Momo? (h/t. MeFi) // Add milk for Scottie pinwheel. // Notable pencil sharpener. // Step-by-step instructions for octopizza pie. // Hey,
it’s Elvis and Priscilla relaxing at home. // Hitler’s
toilet found at last. // Fighting communism with jazz. // Miles Davis, live in Sweden and Germany, 1967. // The searchable Calvin and Hobbes. // Woob: Have Landed. // E.T.A. // An advert for beer. // “Even in the dark you cannot put it on the wrong way.” // And The Lovers present La Degustation.