when window dressing is taken too literally

random Tuesday bits o' interest

And you wonder why there are so few female film directors....



Sheer brilliance, via We Make Money Not Art:

The Serious Organized Crime and Police Act 2005 prohibits anyone staging spontaneous protests within a 1km radius of Westminster's Houses of Parliament. However, Tony Mullin found a loophole in the law. You can carry placards around those no-protest zones as long as they do not carry any slogan.

On the 20th of June 2007 the students led a group of volunteers on a walk through the exclusion zone carrying blank green placards. Using Green screen technology, he has been exploring how to invite others to add the 'political content' during broadcasting. Basically, the idea is to create a service enabling protesters to use the footage of people carrying the blank placards around the House of Parliaments and add their message onto it afterwards. The video could then be distributed on you tube and other media.

Bear this in mind, next time you're watching CNN:


(also via We Make Money Not Art)



Science and interpretive dance, together at last! (Dance Your PhD competition, Vienna)




Electronic tattoo display runs on blood



The Independent - The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan Ever get the sense that no matter what we can do, it'll never be enough?



Ooh, pretty!

that is not the Toronto way

Katie Beaton strikes again


The above is dedicated to everybody I have ever known from the Toronto area, including my cousins, fellow filmmakers, the original kids in "Degrassi Junior High," and actors I adore. In fact, I can't think of a Canadian actor I don't like; even Jim Carrey blew me away in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." If you can name at least one Canadian actor who's fabulously vile, do let me know.

so I'm a pretentious anachronism

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location (NYT)

Did I miss the memo on semicolons? As in, nobody uses them anymore besides me and a properly educated guy who works for NY Transit? To quote the article, "the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism." PRETENTIOUS ANACHRONISM, Astrid bellows in outrage? Or just good grammar? Jesus H. Also, I can't believe that people are making a big deal about this, and now I'm contributing to the big deal by making a big deal out of the big deal. Sigh.

On a mostly unrelated note, I discovered that if you double click any word on the NY Times website, you get a pop up box with the dictionary definition of that word. It's kind of handy, actually.

my father was a Ten Pound Pom

The £10 Ticket to Another Life

Back in the day, and by "the day" I mean "anytime between the end of WWII and the 1970s," hundreds of thousands of Britons were offered a terrific deal: for only £10, you could send your entire family (yourself included) to Australia, where you could build a new life from scratch, poverty be damned. This was great for people who would've been limited to a lower-middle-class existence otherwise, and thanks to this grand social experiment (limited to white folks, sadly), my dad was able to spend his Christmases surfing; attend medical school for free; marry a hot, brainy chick from Cleveland (hi, Mom!); and become a doctor/professor of medicine/chief of residency/chief of research/etc. with a funky accent.

Because of £10, my dad is now a president and CEO of a successful, ethical, and avant garde biotech corporation, plus he's a wicked rad photographer. Go, Dad! I'm so proud of him; and I'm so cheered by my family's pluck that they could move halfway across the planet for a dream, back when it was still an arduous journey which took weeks, and required living in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but sand, mines, and sheep.

Let me decorate your bachelor pad. Please?

I just sent an e-mail to a friend of mine about how he's furnishing his place (he's lived there for a year and still needs one of everything, apparently). Me being the whimsical type, I sent him some suggestions, and then suddenly realized that HEY: I AM A GENIUS. Here is what I wrote:

I'd expect nothing less than a red velvet couch shaped like a set of women's lips, and a throne or two, and maybe a transparent telephone with glowing neon inside it, and a skateboard ramp. And a calliope. And a few hundred weathervanes. And a ginormous disco ball which reaches practically from floor to ceiling, which -- and I'm just spitballing here -- could have a door on its side, which opens onto a conversation pit INSIDE. And at least one velvet painting of Elvis, because that would be classy.

. . . .

NB: candelabras with bead fringe and bronze naked ladies are always advisable.

Sometimes, I just amaze myself. I totally need my own design show on TLC.

random pop culture stuff

[from Facebook]
Who Were You In a Past Life?
Your Quiz Result:

You were Teddy Roosevelt in your past life!

Of all of your past lives, old Teddy was your most prominent. If your dreams are ever filled with faint visions of conquests, horesback [sic] riding, spelunking, hunting, cigars, governing, masses of people, and quiet studying, these are glimpses into a world once occupied by your 'vessel'. Cherish your past life and invigorate your current one knowing that you embody greatness in all that you do.

---

I'd never seen the words "spelunking," "cigars," and "masses of people" all in the same sentence with each other before. That, coupled with the fact that I saw Sissy Spacek and Adrian Grenier recently WITHOUT requiring someone to point them out for me, makes my life complete. I mean, I NEVER recognize famous people. Huh. Neato.