Actual discussion with female co-worker:
Her: It’s so cold!
Me: (Looking at handy digital thermostat above my desk) It’s a balmy 73.4 degrees.
Her: I keep my apartment at 79.
Me: There’s just no pleasing those of you who hail from the realms of Tartarus.
When I went to bed, they were estimating 45-60 deaths, but now the estimates are down to 5-15. Which is something.
Video footage of the aftermath:
The explosion evidently registered 2.1 on the Richter scale…
It’s easy to assume that everyone in the world follows Randall Munroe’s geeky online stickman webcomic XKCD, since it seems all my friends do. For those that don’t, last Monday he put up a strip called “Time.” This strip, like his uber-large “Click-and-Drag”, plays with the conventions of the form. “Time” started out with a static, non-gag image with the hover-over label “wait for it.” Since then, he’s updated the image every half-hour to an hour, even though he’s done new strips on the usual M-W-F schedule. If you follow the images in order, “Time” shows two people (which XKCD devotees have dubbed “Cueball” and “Megan”) building a sand castle.
Here’s an animated gif of the images so far:
Here’s a quicker version, which you can also step through, speed up, slow down, etc.
Here’s the explanation page for it, as well as its own Wikia. We now have a real-life version of those people obsessively tracking online image snippets from Pattern Recognition, except we actually know who they’re from.
The obvious metaphor is how time continues to flow and things change when you’re not watching.
As of this writing, the images are still being updated. Munroe could keep updating that one comic for a long, long, er, time, especially if he decreases the update rate.
Conceivably, “Time” could be a long-running conceptual art project and keep updating for the rest of our lives, and beyond, like that German church playing John Cage’s “As Slowly as Possibly” for 629 years…
Because I wasn’t really in a position to post them to Twitter when Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was named Pope Francis:
On the non-snarky side, here’s a video of Pope Francis making his first appearance:
A Swedish shoegazer cover of a Captain Beefheart sing? Check.
Power outage begets dead cable modem begets having to drive to the Time Warner building to get a replacement. So don’t expect much in the way of blogging today…
The search for the coolest Christmas tree is officially over. You’re never going to beat the giant, fire-breathing Godzilla Christmas tree of Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall in Tokyo.
Merry Christmas!
Watching Hammer Film’s 1964 Evil of Frankenstein, several thoughts occurred to me:
Drop me an email or comment if you’d like to receive a copy.
With the NHL lockout looking to drag on indefinitely, America finally has a chance to ditch hockey for another sport.
So below, find a poll on what should be America’s next great sport:
Let your voice be heard! Vote below!
