Magpie plays with dog. // Two computers play rock, paper, scissors. // Find the invisible cow, a game to test your patience. // A house made of silk. // Big fin squid. // Blade Runner in watercolours. // A guide to shooting rubber bands. (h/t, MeFi) // Monitor in motion. // Upmarket dog accessories. // How the Doctor Who theme might have sounded without Delia Derbyshire. // Drum kits of yore. (h/t, Coudal) // Factoid of note. // Luxury yacht pod. // Spectrographic handshake. // Diagnostic bee device looks fabulous, detects cancer. 

Man paints own building. Graffiti vandals devastated: 

The owner of a building in Queens used a crew of painters to work overnight and paint over graffiti on a warehouse in Long Island City, wiping clean a canvas that was used by thousands of artists over the years to transform an otherwise nondescript, abandoned brick building in a working-class neighbourhood into 5Pointz, a mecca for street artists from around the world. By morning, the work of some 1,500 artists had been wiped clean, the Brobdingnagian bubble letters and the colourful cartoons spray painted on the building’s brick walls all covered in a fresh coat of white paint. “We are supposed to be the vandals, but this is the biggest rag and disrespect in the history of graffiti,” said Marie Cecile Flageul, an unofficial curator for 5Pointz.

The moral of the story, gentlemen, is buy your own canvas.

Mark Steyn on America’s throbbingly intellectual Clown-in-Chief:  

As historian Michael Beschloss pronounced the day after his election, he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” Naturally, Obama shares this assessment. As he assured us five years ago, “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Well, apart from his signature health-care policy. That’s a mystery to him. “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working,” he told us. The buck stops with something called “the executive branch,” which is apparently nothing to do with him. As evidence that he was entirely out of the loop, he offered this: “Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, ‘Boy, this is going to be great.’ You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, ‘This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,’ a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.” 

Ooooo-kay. So, if I follow correctly, the smartest president ever is not smart enough to ensure that his website works; he’s not smart enough to inquire of others as to whether his website works; he’s not smart enough to check that his website works before he goes out and tells people what a great website experience they’re in for. But he is smart enough to know that he’s not stupid enough to go around bragging about how well it works if he’d already been informed that it doesn’t work. So he’s smart enough to know that if he’d known what he didn’t know he’d know enough not to let it be known that he knew nothing. The country’s in the very best of hands.

Tim Worstall on why the advice of Will Hutton should never, ever be taken: 

If we’ve got a cost that is higher than the benefit then this is a signal that we should stop doing this thing. Hutton is indeed arguing that the cost of a university education is higher, for many to most people, than the benefit that comes from having one. This is true whoever is paying the bills. Therefore we would rather like to have fewer people going to university… Hutton is arguing that university does not make sense in terms of value added for most students. He therefore proposes subsidy for those students. Which is ridiculous. If the activity is not value adding we don’t want more of it, we want less of it.

And from 1992, via Instapundit, the late Doris Lessing on language, academia and political correctness: 

A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, The Fifth Child, which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on. A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course The Fifth Child is about AIDS.” An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyse a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.

It’s remarkable how often some cultural critics see their own preoccupations in unlikely art forms. As when the film historian Sumiko Higashi saw the Vietnam War lurking somewhere among the zombies and wrote that although “there are no Vietnamese in Night of the Living Dead… they constitute an absent presence whose significance can be understood if narrative is construed.” Or when cineaste Robin Wood informed readers that the zombies’ cannibalistic tendency “represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human relations under capitalism.” Or when a Channel 4 reviewer hailed Danny Boyle’s zombie film 28 Days Later as actually being a “powerful message” about “anger at call-centre queues.”

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

In the culture pages of the Guardian, Charles Firth recounts a tale of exasperation, injustice and heroic suffering. Specifically, his struggle to find funding for an artistic work space:

In 2007, four idiots who thought of themselves as writers scammed an awkwardly inaccessible office in a beautiful old building that had very few tenants… The enlightened trustees were happy to let a group of earnest young writers use the space until a “proper” tenant came along, charging us something like $230 per month.

$230 a month for a large office in the heart of Sydney. A bargain by any measure. One that attracted other Creatives In Need Of Comfort™.

Slowly, other writers came to hear about the space. A well-respected essayist, a proper novelist and a budding popular historian moved in, and the room acquired a certificate of incorporation as a non-profit arts organisation, a set of stern rules (don’t be loud, don’t be messy, don’t interrupt)…

Stern rules regarding mess and noise. I suppose selling out was inevitable. Almost as inevitable as the end of that temporary peppercorn rent.

Meanwhile, the rest of the building had filled to capacity, and the 17 writer-members now had to find $2,300 plus GST per month to cover rent. As I spent increasing amounts of time on administration, my attention turned to arts grants. 

But of course. 

My understanding of the system was that it was there to support those producing cultural works: artists and writers. This proved naïve. The true purpose of arts grants is for one set of arts bureaucrats to provide funding to create a new generation of arts bureaucrats. The qualities most highly valued by funding bodies are the ability to reproduce accurately the funding body’s logo, and to file a report that can be included in their annual report alongside words like “new,” “innovative” and, above all, “successful.” 

Mr Firth, it turns out, isn’t too impressed by socialised arts funding and its box-ticking apparatus – sentiments with which some readers may feel empathy. But those feeling empathetic may want to avoid applauding just yet.

Unfortunately, the Sydney Writers’ Room was none of these things.

Being artistically innovative and successful is something rarely said of office space. Even office space with rules regarding mess.

Its mission was to provide a space that placed no expectation on success or failure. You just had to be quiet and write.

Office space, in short, for those who consider themselves deserving of special favours and perpetual indulgence. Those “legitimately worthy,” as Mr Firth puts it. Not worthy because of what they have produced, but worthy because of what they may produce, possibly, at some point in the future, should muse and ability permit. And so taxpayers must be given the old shakedown, not just for written works they didn’t ask for, but for the potential for works they didn’t ask for, and to ensure the further inflation of Mr Firth’s self-regard. You see, it’s simply impossible to write anything at all unless one has a large office sited in a beautiful old building in the heart of Sydney, all bankrolled indefinitely by the taxpayers of Australia. Bloggers of the world, please take note.

Cat plays theremin. (h/t, CMJ) // Nazis with cats. // Panoramic ball camera. // The interactive periodic table of swearing. Sound essential. // The sound of arrogant dependency. // What Google would have looked like in the 80s. // 4G trench coat with charger. Coat’s “average download speeds range from 3 to 6 Mbps, with spikes as high as 10 Mbps.” // Make your own gin. // Kitchen of the future, 1964. (h/t, MeFi) // inFORM, an interactive dynamic shape display. // Elk starts trouble. // Village of the Damned, 1960. // Virtual anime robot masturbator. // Dolphin masturbates using decapitated fish. // Re-entry. // An advert for tissues.