June 2008
Ladyhawke - Paris Is Burning (Cut Copy Remix)
Notes on Catch →
Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum on “which catchphrases should be thrown under the bus”? Basically a whistle-stop tour of current catchphrases and idioms and their shelf-life.
Why Ninja Turtles Don’t Date, and Other Mysteries... →
As the title says: lots of lesser-known trivia about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Including this, which I always wondered about:
The British version of TMNT was actually TMHT, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. At the time, “ninja” was considered too violent for British kids’ TV.
MySpace
I’ve always turned a blind eye to the MySpace hate that floods the web on a daily basis. Partly because I don’t even use it, so what do I care, and partly because there’s a lot of great music on there. But tonight, I tried to sign up for an account, so that I could contact bands (Lilofee prompted this) to ask if they’d mind us putting some of their music on Tuneage, and,...
Lilofee — “Lock and Key”
I would...
Summer
Starbucks. Queuing in line for a mug of tea, eyes fixed on the female barista.
It’s packed today; people nursing coffees, and teas, and frappucinos, and lattes, bathing in the cool air conditioning, escaping the blistering heat of summer.
She’s wearing a white shirt, the top three buttons undone, exposing just the right amount of cleavage. Knee-length skirt, long, brown hair....
Björk and Sigur Rós Team Up For Náttúra Concert →
Björk and Sigur Rós doing a free concert together in Reykjavik to raise awareness of the destruction of Iceland’s landscape is great. National Geographic streaming the entire concert on Nat Geo Music is even better.
June 28th, 7pm to 12pm GMT. Be there.
Annie - Loco
Second single off her new album,...
Someone Hates You Online. Try Not To Be Offended. →
This one is for you, Jakob Lodwick.
Track-By-Track Through Feed The Animals →
DJ Greg Gillis (better known as Girl Talk) talks to MTV about Feed the Animals, and gives a track-by-track rundown, with some interesting tidbits. Not accessible outside the US, it seems, but proxies, and tunnels, et al can help you with that. (via Stereogum)
“The problem I am pointing to, however, is […] a simple problem that...”
– Language Log’s Geoffrey Pullum on a phenomenon he calls “nerdview”.
Beware the Friendly Stranger →
I made a new theme. I originally set out to redesign this tumblelog, but it didn’t quite turn out how I pictured it, so I finished it and made it a theme for anyone to use.
In the end, it actually turned out pretty nice, and I’m using it on my tumblelog after all.
The Evolution of Chinglish →
This article in Wired talks about how “Chinglish” is going to evolve and spread into a legitimate form of English, eventually working up to this final prediction: “Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own.”
My initial instinct was to write it off as hyperbolic nonsense. Even after giving it further thought, I...
Name-Dropping →
Interesting article in the Columbia Journalism Review. Chris Faraone looks at why rappers are identified by their given names, while other performers outside the hip-hop genre are identified by their stage names in the media.
At the Times, the penalty for being a rapper is twofold: you are routinely called out on your birth name (no matter how nerdy and ironic it might be), and you rarely are...
"Has modern life killed the semicolon?" →
It seems strange that people can find so much to write about an item of punctuation (remember that NYC Transit employee and his sign?). Nonetheless, this is a pretty interesting article; lots of things you probably didn’t know about the semi-colon’s sordid past.
Top 5
You know, I was just wondering what the top 5 most played artists of all the people I follow was last week. Not enough to actually go and visit their last.fm pages; just enough to watch it stream by in my Tumblr dashboard, where I hope to see lots of interesting content, creative things, and automatically imported feeds from social networks!
Thanks guys!
Boy 8-Bit - “Bulbs Burn Out”
I’ve been really in...
There's a word for what I want to study
Sociolinguistics.
This also happens to be the word for what I’m looking forward to studying later this year as part of my Linguistics BA!
Legal Tender
I learned something interesting about British coinage today. £5, £2, and £1 coins are legal tender for any amount. 50p, 25p (yeah, I’ve never seen one either), and 20p coins are only legal tender for amounts up to £10. 10p and 5p coins are only legal tender up to £5. And, the biggest surprise to me: 2p and 1p coins are only legal tender for amounts not exceeding 20p. (All notes are legal...
DIY Yahoo! Resignation Letter →
Brilliant.
Matthew Buchanan →
Matthew Buchanan has an excellent Tumblr theme (and a pretty good tumblelog to go with it). The quote posts are particularly great.
Deleted articles with freaky titles →
There is a Wikipedia page for “deleted articles with freaky titles”.
Occasionally Wikipedians lose their mind (especially on April Fool’s Day) and if their posts are good they wind up here. Silliness can come in the form of creativity, insanity, or just boredom. As with other “silly things”, often it seems a shame to delete the best of this humor which has been...
zoya:
SO excited about the Ace of Base sample on the new Girl Talk album
Best bit of the entire album. There’s also a half-Rickroll in there on “Like This” (blink and you’ll miss it) — I hate that the only reason I heard that is thanks to thousands of dickheads with internet access.
Girl Talk's Feed The Animals →
Get it now! Name your price.
any price grants the download of the entire album as high-quality 320kbps mp3s
$5 or more adds the options of FLAC files, plus a one-file seamless mix of the album
$10 or more includes all of the above + a packaged CD (when it becomes available)
The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the... →
Hey, look everyone, another news article about how text-messaging children are killing the English language.
People who don’t write and speak in coherent sentences, Morreau says, don’t succeed in communication. He is especially concerned about “the death of the good sentence” — one that imparts clear and concise information.
And this is where the idiocy of this...
The Man With The Pink Fanny Pack →
Usually, when someone a little out of the ordinary gets on a bus — and it’s a fairly frequent event in Newbury — they’re pretty easy to ignore. They’ll sit down and talk to themselves for a few minutes, then get off at the little corner shop to buy some dog food for lunch, and they’re gone. But when this guy gets on your bus, you are well and truly fucked
Fanny Packs
I know Brits are supposed to call them “bum bags”, but it sounds so fucking ridiculous. “Fanny pack” isn’t much of an improvement, but a monstrously bad name is only fitting for such a monstrously awful accessory.
Submit Your Themes →
Hey, you can submit your own themes to Tumblr Themes and save me a load of work now!
Also: Added fluid/fixed width tags, and fixed a weird thing that made the links render as plaintext in the dashboard.
What’s next?
Custom Tumblr Themes →
I noticed one of the many subpar Tumblr theme aggregators linking to my permalink page styling tip today, and they’d spelled it “Permaling”, incorrectly — and instead of editing it when I mentioned it, they simply deleted the post. And the most recent post states that the guy is trying to sell the site off.
And that’s the most popular theme aggregator at the moment. Says...
Whoops!
→
Apropos of nothing, I decided to re-read one of my favourite McSweeney’s pieces today. And I’m glad I did. Now I’m sharing it with you!
Justice - “Sure You Will”
From some...
Baww
C’mon, tuneage posting Bat For Lashes this week? I just… THAT’S what’s wrong with America, people. It… I’m speechless?
And tuneage is “educating” the tumblr community in music. No wonder 80% of tumblrs are shit. It’s just this big knot of kitsch. It disgusts me?
…
Yep, you clicked that link and found that I posted that video on July 10, 2007. What’s that? Eleven months ago? My...
