R.I.P. Dancing Banana

Last week, some over-zealous deletionist Wikipedia editors permanently removed the Peanut-Butter-Jelly-Time Dancing Banana entry, thus downgrading the implied cultural significance of this meme.   
You may be thinking:  (A) What is a dancing banana, and (B) Why would I care about its inclusion/exclusion in a open-source encyclopedia?  Answers:  (A) Look it up on Wikipedia… oh wait, never mind… and [...]

White House Brew-hah-hah-ok, ok, we get it, enough already…

What is it about the combination of food and government antics that send journalists into a pun-frenzy?  Never mind the Europeans and their food regulations.   Here’s what the news ticker looks like regarding the whole White House “Beer Summit” silliness:
White House “beer summit” aims to quench racial flap
Beer Diplomacy: The Red, Light and Blue Summit
Beer brewers [...]

..and the rockets’ red glare: Some Favorite Fireworks

Dragon’s Eggs…  they’re just like popcorn, only buttered with a magnesium-aluminum alloy…  Tasty!
Whistlers…  or as D.E.S. would call them, Screaming-Slytherin-Quiddich-Players-From-Hello-Without-the-O
Scrambling Comets…  cf. Whistlers

Salute… used for those grande finales, blinding-Titanium-white explosions of earth-shaking, ear-splitting, bowel-moving power

The World’s Biggest Firework [...]

Oh… Canada.

Here’s a follow-on to last year’s little video tribute to Canada Day:

Living in the U.S. can be a challenge for Canucks. As a literature professor once explained to me, in the American story, a hero’s rite of passage consists of a road trip across the United States and/or losing his/her virginity.  The Canadian [...]

Time Management

“I’m the kind of guy who will spend half a day working out a way to avoid doing something twice.” 
“Yup, I can relate to that. I just did that yesterday.”  
 
Frustrated with his struggle to conform with the world of time sheets and seeking a better way to manage his time, Michael Hunger built himself [...]

Twits

 Twouble with Tribbles-er-Twitters-i-mean-Tweets-wait-uh-what…

(hat tip to Mitch Joel)
There are some really brutal rips on the Twitterati out there, each one less appropriate than the other. Seriously, if you’d of asked me if you could Twitter my Blog ten years ago, I would have slapped you across the face. Today I learned that a person who is [...]

miscellaneous memes

Cleaning my desk yields the following half-baked ideas, scribbled on various scraps of paper:

“A thud is the sound of success in the making.” – M. Lyon
margarita recipe:
2 shots Captain Morgan on ice
1/3 orange juice
1/3 cranberry juice
1/3 pineapple juice
- M. Lowenthal
Use BLOCK letters or script letters on flip charts, to express the character of the words.
e.g. [...]

On Beyond Helvetica!

If you liked the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods , then you will *love*  the Periodic Table of Typefaces.  
 
(Thx SMG)
 Unlike the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (which missed Periodic Tables as a kind of popular visualization method, but let’s not get too recursive now…) the Periodic Table of Typefaces provides some research-based rigor behind its choices of “Popular, [...]

Say the Same Thing, but in Different Words

Here is a powerful short film, Historia de un Letrero (The Story of a Sign),  by Alonso Alvarez Barreda, winner of the Cannes 2008 Online Shorts film competition, sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada:
 
 (tip of the hat to Anne S).
WIRED contributing editor Daniel Pink points to this short film as an illustration [...]

Memes du Semaine: 25 Random Things, and 2 others

 ”25 Random Things About Me”  is the latest in a rash of viral memes where you post a Note on Facebook  following certain instructions, and “tag” your friends who then must repeat the same.  In a recent TIME article, Claire Suddath rips aparts the “25 Random Things About Me” meme,   irritably.  I fell for a previous Facebook-Social-Virus, the “grab the [...]

Barack Obama’s Inauguration Speech: By the Numbers

For some reason that morning, I thought to myself: “He’s going to start off by expressing humility.”  I wasn’t disappointed.. but then again, after doing some quick web research,  it turns out the previous U.S. President’s first inaugural address had a similar expression too.  What was nice, though, was that Obama deliberately used the moment to eschew [...]

Haiku: Ode to a Rhinovirus

 
pit of pitch black cold
yawning open within me
filling with illness