Further to my post on memorable film titles, here’s a collection of Saul Bass title designs. From Spartacus and Psycho to Seconds and Goodfellas.

The Seconds title sequence can be viewed in full here. More. And. (H/T, Brendan Dawes.)

If yesterday’s ephemera entry on ways to visualise data was of interest, there’s more on the subject here, here and here. The data being visualised covers everything from earthquake activity and email flow to human trafficking. 

The Fidg’t visualiser is particularly lovely. More. And. Related, this, this and this. (H/T, 1+1=3.) 

Brendan Dawes’ distilled films. Taxi Driver, Vertigo, The Conversation; one grab per second, one minute per row, one film per print. More. And. // Via 1+1=3, the making of the Six Feet Under title sequence. Film. // Visualising data. // TV-liquor cabinet combo. A whole new level of kitsch. // Deogolwulf on the wisdom of Richard Rorty. // Mick Hartley on Freud, cocaine and chutzpah. // Shiraz Maher on Hizb ut-Tahrir. “I only hope that our testimonies will encourage those still within Islamist movements to find the moral courage to leave.” // 70,000 Hizb supporters rally in Indonesia. // Man arrested by Saudi religious police for washing car instead of praying. Faints, dies. // Iranian man lashed for possessing Bible. “Security agents accused the man of converting from Islam to Christianity.” // Robert Mugabe inspired to greatness by North Korea. (H/T, Daimnation!) // Life magazine cover browser. 1936 -2007. // The Book Cover Appreciation Gallery. // The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art. (H/T, Coconut Jam.) // Assorted timepieces. // Can a computer keyboard be cleaned in a dishwasher? Apparently so. // Cleaning CDs with a banana. // The Washington Banana Museum. // Via Coudal, the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies. // The Museum of Cocaine. // ReacTable tactile synthesiser. More. And. // Via Dr Westerhaus, Aleksandra Domanovic’s low-budget video for Jamie Lidell’s New Me. // Pachelbel’s Canon in D. (1680) Ah, smells classier already.

Thanks to The Thin Man for directing my attention, via here, to this essay by Bruce Bawer on Johan Galtung and the “peace studies” movement. It’s a long piece, but worth reading in full as it illustrates just how readily reality can be inverted, not least by an unhinged Norwegian Marxist.

“[The] founding father [of the peace studies movement] is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research five years later. Invariably portrayed as a charismatic and grandfatherly champion of decency, Galtung is in fact a lifelong enemy of freedom. In 1973, he thundered that ‘our time’s grotesque reality’ was – no, not the Gulag or the Cultural Revolution, but rather the West’s ‘structural fascism.’ …Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America’s arrogant view of itself as ‘a model for everyone else,’ he’s long held up certain countries as worthy of emulation – among them Stalin’s USSR, whose economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West’s. He’s also a fan of Castro’s Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for ‘break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron grip.’

…In 1973, explaining world politics in a children’s newspaper, he described the U.S. and Western Europe as ‘rich, Western, Christian countries’ that make war to secure materials and markets: ‘Such an economic system is called capitalism, and when it’s spread in this way to other countries it’s called imperialism.’ …His all-time favourite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese loved life under Mao: after all, they were all ‘nice and smiling.’ While ‘repressive in a certain liberal sense,’ he wrote, Mao’s China was ‘endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood.’ Why, China showed that ‘the whole theory about what an open society is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of democracy – and it will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master teacher in such subjects.’”

Looney Tunes characters in skeletal form. Bugs, Daffy, Wile E and a fleshless Road Runner. By Hyungkoo Lee.

More. Also here, here and here.  (H/T, CeeMo.)

Browsing this website’s visitor stats, I discovered two posts that continue to attract an unexpected level of interest. One is a short item on the phenomenon of superhero pornface, which remains a search engine favourite. The other involves a fleeting reference to the hilarious controversial subject of Japanese tentacle porn. I do, of course, feel obliged to cater to my readers’ appetites, even the ones they don’t admit to publicly. Thanks to the wonderful people at Coudal, I stumbled across what cephalopod enthusiasts may well regard as a tentacle pornfest: Poulpe Pulps – Vintage Octopus Pulp Covers. The site, hosted by Francesca Myman, is quite possibly the place to find “hard-to-locate images of science fiction, fantasy, and adventure pulp and comic covers featuring the wily octopus.”

More tentacles at the Octopia blog. An extensive video archive of cephalopods in action can be found here. Related: this, this and this. Knock yourselves out. You know who you are.

Here’s an extract from programme one of Richard Dawkins’ Channel 4 series Enemies of Reason, in which he addresses postmodern emotionalism, 9/11 conspiracies and the egalitarian flattening of values.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

The first programme can be viewed in full, in two parts, here and here. The second programme is broadcast on Monday August 20th at 8pm. Of particular interest are the insights of illusionist Derren Brown, the convergence of environmentalism and ‘spirituality’, Dawkins’ encounter with sociologist Steve Fuller and the description of science as “the poetry of reality.”

Professor D uploaded and disseminated by The Thin Man. Update: Part two is online here.

The photography of Martin Klimas often depicts toys, flowers and figurines being destroyed, artfully.

Have a look. More. (H/T, Coudal.) 

Further to recent rumblings about the politics of Lego, this might amuse. Nathan Sawaya’s Art of the Brick exhibition is currently on tour. The exhibit includes over thirty models and mosaics made entirely from standard Lego bricks, almost one million of them. Among Sawaya’s creations are cats, people, polar bears and a close-to-life-size model of Han Solo embedded in carbonite.

More here and here.

A collection of round-the-houses grumblings and passive-aggressive notes. The first one highlights the problems of collective living and the definition of a full bin. The second is from Nancy to her animated neighbours.

Others concern service at diners, and roommates, prophylactics and Google. (H/T, Coconut Jam.)