I’ve always found it kinda strange that there seemed to exist so few photographs of Parisian graffiti from the May ‘68 events. The sheer volume of slogans compiled from that period would imply that there was some visual record but I only ever really saw a few amazing photos from books I own.

Today, I stumbled upon a great, but small Flickr colelction of May ‘68 graffiti and posters.

May 1968 Posters & Tags

Bonus link: Int’l Institute of Social History’s May ‘68 colletion

I am completely obsessed with this MIDI file/song. It’s as if the Shaggs were born a couple decades later and locked in a room with Amigas instead of guitars.

Link: Best Week Ever via Lindsay

This blog is way better than mine: Cake Wrecks

Classic album covers get the Lego treatment

*Maybe not in every instance…

The answers to every New Yorker magazine caption contest

“LONDON –

The expression of indifference or boredom has gained a place in the Collins English Dictionary after generating a surprising amount of enthusiasm among lexicographers.

Publisher HarperCollins announced Monday the word had been chosen from terms suggested by the public for inclusion in the dictionary’s 30th anniversary edition, to be published next year.

The origins of ‘meh’ are murky, but the term grew in popularity after being used in a 2001 episode of ‘The Simpsons’ in which Homer suggests a day trip to his children Bart and Lisa. ‘They both just reply “meh” and keep watching TV,’ said Cormac McKeown, head of content at Collins Dictionaries.

The dictionary defines ‘meh’ as an expression of indifference or boredom, or an adjective meaning mediocre or boring. Examples given by the dictionary include ‘the Canadian election was so meh.’

The dictionary’s compilers said the word originated in North America, spread through the Internet and was now entering British spoken English.”

Link via Lindsay

An amazing collection

This ridiculous National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign ad has no effect on me but to make me really want a decent burrito. Seriously, it’s been a year.

Link to some more inane wastes of tax dollars

“‘I’m flooded with feelings of—for lack of a better concept—incongruity,’ said Jimmie Johnson, the driver of the #48 Lowe’s Chevrolet who is known throughout racing for his habit of handing out copies of Wallace’s novels to his fans. ‘David Foster Wallace could comprehend and articulate the sadness in a luxury cruise, a state fair, a presidential campaign, anything. But empathy, humanity, and compassion so strong as to be almost incoherent ran through that same sadness like connective tissue through muscle, affirming the value of the everyday, championing the banal yet true, acknowledging the ironic as it refused to give in to irony. And now he’s gone,’ Johnson added. ‘He’s taken himself away. We can’t possibly race now.’ …

‘Racing and literature are both huge parts of American life, and I don’t think David Foster Wallace would want me to make too much of that, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance,’ Helton added. ‘That would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever cultural deity, entity, energy, or random social flux produced stock car racing also produced the works of David Foster Wallace. And just look them. Look at that.’”

NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace’s Death
via Laurel

“We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out a the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water.”

Link

Why do I torture myself with these two weather widgets back to back?

See if you can spot me in the Manystuff 2008 Yearbook.

omfg

Marie Claire Photoshop fail

*

Why don’t ‘evening people’ get more credit, asks Alice Wignall

*Photo ‘courtesy’ of Helios Capdevila. (This is what happens to me when I try to go to bed early.)

Brokers with Hands on their Faces

Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi, and Toshihide Masukawa awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries about symmetry breaking.

James Trefil explains symmetry breaking using the snowflake as an example: ‘Both the hydrogen and oxygen molecules are quite symmetric when they are isolated. The electric force which governs their actions as atoms is also a symmetrically acting force. But when their temperature is lowered and they form a water molecule, the symmetry of the individual atoms is broken as they form a molecule with 105 degrees between the hydrogen-oxygen bonds. When they freeze to form a snowflake, they form another type of symmetry, but the symmetry of the original atoms has been lost. Since this loss of symmetry occurs without any external intervention, we say that it has undergone spontaneous symmetry breaking.’

via Treehugger

from Political Wire

Or, if you’re delivering a speech to the RNC, just quote obscure American fascist Westbrook Pegler:

‘In her convention speech a fortnight ago, Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin quoted an unidentified “writer” who extolled the virtues of small-town America: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” (9/3/08) The unidentified writer was Westbrook Pegler (1894-1969), the ultraconservative newspaper columnist whose widely syndicated columns (at its peak, 200 newspapers and 12 million readers) targeted the New Deal establishment, labor leaders, intellectuals, homosexuals, Jews, and poets.’

Some other gems:

‘Jews, he said, could not be the victims of persecution because persecution “connotes injustice… They are, instead, enduring retaliation, or punishment.” (D. Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, Macmillan, 2002, p. 71.)’

‘In 1963, less than 3 months after Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech,” he wrote in a column, “[It is] clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry.” (ibid.)’

via The New Republic

The Venn Diagram HQ has become a sort of design refugee camp since Helios and I started squatting downstairs. I don’t know how much longer my back can handle the sofa…

[Click on the image to view full size]

One of these hamburgers is twelve years old.

1996 McDonalds hamburger