no2self.net

• blosxom.ookee.com
  

  The Unofficial Blosxom User Group

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• Anatomical Chart Company – Brain Gelatin Mold
  

  ‘…Fill the plastic brain mold with a customized gelatin mix and a few hours later, out pops a life-size, anatomically correct brain….’ (via Mind Hacks)

• Guardian Unlimited Film | Reviews | White Noise
  

  ‘…He plays an architect – a dream job in films, conferring creativity and class and generally requiring nothing more taxing than standing around pointing at cardboard model buildings….’ Ha! – (via ArchNewsNow)

• SABADABADA
  

  ‘… Look at hundreds of classic Bossa, Balanco & Samba LPs from Brazil, learn about record labels and artists, download selected tracks and share your ideas on the feedback page…’ (via PCL)

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To see the full image when you visit the flickr page, click on the ‘all sizes’ button and choose the original image size. The text should be readable then.

On closer inspection I’ve just noticed that one of the characters looks a bit like Mickey, the star of the Sendak book. It’s a little difficult to tell, as Mickey spends most of the book stark naked, rather than covered in a large over coat like the one he wears in this adventure. It’s surely some sort of parody though.

I’ve been looking through a catalogue of designer chairs and between the pages of photos and construction drawings I found this (click on the images for full size):

It’s a delightfully drawn cartoon depicting three characters clambering over a world rotated through ninety degrees. I haven’t a clue what the dialogue says, if anybody could translate it for me and add some notes to the flickr.com images I’d be very grateful.

Curiously, the final panel in the series looks exactly like the opening panel of the picture book by Maurice Sendak, In the Night Kitchen, which was published around the same period. The furniture catalogue I found it in is from the mid 70′s. Perhaps a translation of the dialogue will uncover the link.

This is all rather neat, as the friend who the owns the furniture catalogue is also the same friend who recommended the Sendak book to me a few years ago; I’m looking forward to pointing out the connection to him when he gets back to the office. In the Night Kitchenis one of the best children’s books my son and I have read, it’s beautifully drawn and I can highly recommend it. Get a copy from Amazon or try eBay, I got a copy on auction for less than £5.

• Wiki Engines
  

  a comprehensive list of different wiki choices

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A note for both parents and designers on the perils of modern health and safety standards; next time you take a child to a playground think about how complacent you and the child become when faced with play equipment that you’ve seen and climbed on a dozen times before.

Here’s landscape architect, Helle Nebelong, speaking at a conference in 2002:

When we renovate public playgrounds and ask the local residents what they want for their play area the answer today is equipment from nature. I think this is a reaction to decades of use of standardised and unimaginative playground equipment.

…

The pre-fabricated playground tries to live 100% up to safety standards. These standards developed, based on horror stories of real tragic accidents Although these are guidelines and as such are useful when combined with common sense, they have, in my opinion, been allowed to go too far. The child’s real need for play and development is set aside with good intentions.

I am convinced that standardised playgrounds are dangerous, just in another way: when the distance between all the rungs in a climbing net or a ladder is exactly the same, the child has no need to concentrate on where he puts his feet.

Standardisation is dangerous because play becomes simplified and the child does not have to worry about his movements. This lesson cannot be carried over to all the knobbly and asymmetrical forms with which one is confronted throughout life.

I found this at work this morning in the report No Particular Place to Go by Ken Worpole. Nebelong works for the Copenhagen City Parks department, let’s hope that she gets a few commissions in the UK in future.

• Wikimedia Commons
  

  ‘…This project provides a central repository for free images, music, sound & video clips and possibly, texts and spoken texts, used in pages of any Wikimedia project…’

• BBC Four Music – The Blues
  

  If you can get BBC4 this is essential viewing – 2 episodes down, 5 to go

• Martin Scorsese : The Blues (as seen on BBC4)
  

  ‘…Under the guiding vision of Executive Producer Martin Scorsese, seven directors will explore the blues through their own personal styles and perspectives….’

• eBay item – CHRIS FARLOWE- STORMY MONDAY 1966
  

  The star of tonight’s blues movie on sale on eBay – I suspect the price is about to go up. Any wealthy benefactors care to treat me?

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• Big Box Reuse
  

  ‘…As K-mart, Walmart etc abandon their sheds … they leave behind a specific building type that is now beginning to be reused in surprising renovations…’ (via The Gray Area)

• Found Photo
  

  my submission to the Flickr group Found Photos (via PCL Linkdump)

• Jesusonic
  

  The Jesusonic is a fully programmable effects processor for guitar, bass, vocal and general use.

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For no better reason than wanting to keep up with the neighbours, I’m writing this evening from the kitchen worktop whilst waiting for some dough to rise, risking the ingress of flour with every key tap. It’s not quite the same as Stuart’s recent entry from the bath, but the acknowledgement of my actions lends a certain character, don’t you think? Mercifully, Stuart is sure to include a description of his state of dress during the event, you may click the link without fear.

I, on the other hand, am completely naked.

Why is it, do you think, that the terrible events of the last week might have had a much greater effect on me than any other piece of news I’ve heard in a long time? I’ve been moved in ways that stories of war, murder and rape – the usual contents of the day’s broadcasts – have never achieved. Am I simply becoming hardened to the truth about the darkness in men’s hearts? Is the intentional causing of pain to others becoming nothing more than a fact of life to be accepted? From the danger I’ve put myself in this week, using power tools whilst half blind from the tears welling up in my eyes as CNN plays in the background, it would seem this is the case. I doubt I’m alone. It’s a pathetic comparison, but when the wave machine at the local swimming pool started up this weekend I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the pool who felt deeply uncomfortable with the idea that we were supposed to be having fun.

Onwards to 2005. The money I had earmarked for some new books and a PDA will be heading to south-east Asia (probably via the charity I added to the linklog a couple of nights ago), so I’ve made a trip to the bookshelf and chosen from the books that I already own in order to create the proposed reading list for 2005. In no particular order they are:

• Thirteen Ways by Robert Harbison
• The Future Of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig
• Jane Eyre by like-you-need-to-ask
• Urban Space and Representation by M.Balshaw and L.Kennedy
• Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric
• Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore
• Faust (Part II) by Goethe
• The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
• Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek
• The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
• What is Architecture? by Paul Shepheard
• Changing the Earth by Emmet Gowin

Some I shall endeavour to make notes about here, other’s I shall keep to myself. I try to avoid Politics (with a capital P) in this journal, so I doubt I shall comment on Moore’s book for instance. I look forward to any further suggestions you might have and any proposals for inter-blog reading groups. The last one was quite successful. I’ve made promises about some of the books in the past but failed to deliver, let’s hope I fair a little better this year. Bachelard is bloody hard to read and I find it’s easy to get distracted from Lessig. I’ve managed two others over the last month – The Paul Jennings Reader and How To Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen – so I shall start with notes on those over the next couple of weeks. Both were a joy to read.

And so to my 2005 resolution. There is only one. At least there is only one that concerns you. This year I resolve to resist the temptation to allow hyperlinks in entries to screw up the structure of a sentence. Hyperlinks aren’t a structural part of a sentence, they are a layer that sits above or below the surface of the words and unlike the way I’ve previously described the relationship between the content at either end of the link I don’t want the act of clicking to deform the delivery of the words.

Here’s an example; a little while ago I wrote about the recent lunar eclipse and in one of the updates I wrote this:

The second trip outdoors only provided more clouds. I never saw the eclipse, unlike Joel and all these smug people.

The reference to Joel isn’t too offensive as there are other entries that had previously qualified who Joel is, but the second? Who the hell am I talking about? Which smug people? It assumes you will click on the link to find out and it assumes you will leave all your reading skills at the door and ignore incongruous sentences that have no relationship to anything else on the page. It’s Bad and It Has To Go. If you catch me making this mistake again, be sure to point it out.

I hope you had a good New Year, I’m off now to put my dough in the oven and wait for a loaf of bread to appear.