Links from 2002

The Art of James Bond.

One more before heading off again: Douglas Adams’ The Meaning of Liff online. Back with a new, giuegaue-laden anglepoised early next year. Ah, the joy of laptops.

The WIRE drinking game:

“Are you fed up with the relentless self serving publicity of pop personalities and their innuendo laced tunes? Dane Bowers and J.Lo, we’re looking in your direction. Would you rather listen to two hours of scraping noises punctuated by the occasional whooshing sound, made by a bald guy in a dank basement in Vienna/Cologne/Chicago? If the answer is yes to any of these, chances are you read the WIRE.”

Extensive Samurai Archives.

Ooh, a huge archive of hip hop mp3s, including The Pharcyde and Public Enemy!

Abbie Hoffman’s counterculture text is appropriately available online.

Sato Kenji’s More Animated than Life discusses “the significance of animation to the Japanese and why it is not what Westerners expect”.

Glitch Art: The aesthetics of digital corruption (and my dodgy crash from way back).

A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang.

Beestung features a huge archive of Throwing Muses, Belly, Tanya Donelly and Kristin Hersh mp3s (including live sets, B-sides and rarities).

Exifer for Windows is a handy application for managing the metadata (EXIF/IPTC) of images taken from digital cameras.

“Because many image processing software destroys this metadata when saving such files, the idea was to create a backup of the metadata before editing it in any software, and then, after that to restore it back into the processed file. With Exifer you can do this very easily.”

Incredibly extensive Encyclopedia of Everything Japanese node on Everything2, including sections on history, people, culture, samurai/martial arts, religion, literature, art, food, anime/manga, language, and geography. Yum.

Paul Love are “2 guys from D.C. expanding the horizons of HipHop”. Well hey, that’s news to me.

Foyles have started maintaining a list of their forthcoming literary events. Authors appearing this autumn include Chuck Palahniuk, Jeremy Paxman, Will Self, Donna Tartt, Michael Palin and Iain Banks.

How to keep your immune system sorted.

The Times on the commercial hijacking of Prague.

“Yet precisely because Prague has such a miraculously preserved centre – a time-capsule, unravaged by war, oppression or the high-rise architects who have trampled over the sensibilities of every other world capital – one feels all the more acutely the tensions created by the abrupt westernisation of the past 13 years.”

The survey into life and labour in London (1886-1903).

The Guardian’s Biff cartoons online – finally! You should see the portrait in my attic, lady.

Taoism or Daoism?

“The difference in spelling and pronunciation exists because “Taoism”/”Daoism” are formed from a Chinese word which can be transliterated either as “Tao”, using the older Wade-Giles transliteration system, or “Dao”, using the newer and more preferred pinyin scheme for the romanization of Chinese.”

Pitchfork on How to Survive Without Audiogalaxy.

Plaid DJ mixes available for download, including the unreleased Futura Connect (Mouse on Mars, Autechre, Pierre Bastien, Squarepusher), the Tork Radio mix (Satie, Debussy, Boards of Canada) and the Midsummer Mix (featuring Roland Alphonso’s bizarre dub version of the James Bond theme).

Spotted random art cows around London? CowParade has the answers.

Nobody mentioned that High Jinks had a website. Handy for t-shirts.

Faith Erin Hicks’ comic, Demonology 101.

The (excellent) PowerPuff Girls Portrait Studio.

UK Rail Journey Planner for Palm and PC (i.e. timetables and suchlike). Not free, alas.

The Japanese Speaking Machine.

More MIDI files than you could ever need (or want).

Marcia’s crazy tunes for crazy webloggers.

Wired on the Lowercase sound.

“Created largely by scientists, techies and experimental musicians, lowercase recordings are frequently based on the magnification of minute sounds through a computer, typically a Macintosh.”

Excellent collection of old album covers.

Urban Dictionary, a slang dictionary with a cheeky appropriation of the Dictionary.com design.

Glossary of Oxford terms.

Spoonerism: The accidental or deliberate transposition of the initial letters etc. of two or more words in a phrase. E.g., “You have tasted a whole worm. You have hissed my mystery lectures. You were caught fighting a liar in the quad. You will leave by the next town drain.” Named after Revd. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) who was Warden of New College, although many ‘original’ spoonerisms are now known to be apocryphal.

Skin Deep tattoo exhibition, free at the National Maritime Museum (until 30 September 2002).

Late bar info via SMS. May prevent further ill-considered Tatty Bogle outings.

Review of Sukiyaki, a Japanese restaurant in St Albans.

“There was a time – perhaps there still is – when a bride’s way with pickles defined her negotiating strength in the marriage contract in certain countries in the Far East. On the basis of the pickles we had, the pickler in the kitchen at Sukiyaki could command her or his own price. They were delicate, poised, lightly acid little coils of vivid green cucumber and deep purple radish.”

Commercial Breaks and Beats, a well-organised UK television advert music database.

Fanboy MP3 reconstruction of the unreleased Beach Boys album, SMiLE.

Large collection of Modest Mouse bootleg MP3s.

Which Powerpuff Girls Character Are You?

The Cook Book CD: Libro de Cocina y Musica.

“An indie-pop Japan-o-phile compilation of songs accompanied by vegetarian recipes contributed by the artists. Surprise! It doesn’t suck.”

Exceptionally tiny, customizable radio-controlled cars now available in the UK from Bit Char-G.

“Introducing the world’s Playstation 2 Memory Card Sized radio-controlled micro car from Japan – Bit Char-G (pronounced as ‘bit charge’) … so small that you can maneuver it on your desk around coffee mugs, keyboard & other objects.”

Excerpt from Helen Cooper’s A Chaucerian Year.

“Odd things happen to the hormones in May; and although people did not know about hormones, they were entirely familiar with their symptoms… but May was not entirely good. Some days in the medieval calendar were believed to bring bad luck, and early May is recurrently dangerous.”

The Keo satellite launches at the end of 2003, carrying messages from everyone who has the urge to submit. It’s scheduled for return 50,000 years later.

The Guardian’s Charlie Porter on obsession-inducing 24.

“Most of us never expected to get caught up in a series that covers essentially the same ground as an average Tom Clancy novel … but in 24, where a clock at the bottom of the screen proves that in each episode we see an hour’s worth of real-time action, the subject matter is almost irrelevant – we’d watch golf if it was done with the same suspense.”

“combining the dangers of ‘adrenaline’ sports with the satisfaction of pressed linen“.

Jim O’Rourke, Kim Gordon, Amon Tobin, Jeff Mills, Si Begg, Evolution Control Committee, Cornelius (and many, many more) feature in various gigs as part of the RFH’s (slightly pricey) Ether 2002 festival.

The covers project (“building a database of cover songs… with the intention of creating cover ‘chains'”).

The weblogging world is abuzz with speculation – what is BlogRoots? Oh silly, isn’t it obvious? It’s hair dye – for webloggers!

The Complete Tapehead Columns.