Simons cat

Sweet, funny and true.

The rest can be found here – all delightful.

Helvetica, gods of fonts. I don't like the a.

I finally saw the much-trumpeted film. It was amusing; mainly for the characters in it – and I mean the designers, not the fontface. That helvetica is everywhere is no surprise. It is clean, bland, large, simple and good for signage. Generally.
But the designers was the funniest bits. Some of them are clearly off their rockers, and I love it. Especially Erik Spiekermann is a raving loony, a man with wit, opinions and a careless regards of others. “I am always on time, but always a year late”, he says. He despises Helvetica for having no contrast; no rhythm. He shrugs, and says bad design is everywhere.

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Found

Have found some good pictures out there on the big web. I like the genuinely miserable look on the left guys face.

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Command line silliness

The silliest terminal command to date:

sudo osascript -e ‘say “Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum he he he ho ho ho fa lah lah lah lah lah lah fa lah full hoo hoo hoo” using “Cellos”‘

I know a guy who cannot stop laughing
:-)

Insomnia – nightly expedition and sneaking around on the net

I live in a shithole. I try to ignore that I live in a shithole.  My sleep pattern gone haywire, my eating habits likewise. Time does funny things, and seems to coil and loop. That is why I drove out last night, at three thirty in the morning to capture the early morning light.
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Living in misery – all for the love of a cat

What I will not do for my kitty..
Due to a million things, I now live – temporarily – in a smelly basement in the most boring town in Norway. I assure you, there’s stiff competition. A filthy kitchen upstairs, where cat is not welcome. The first thing I had to do was to scrub the stove. I am not hysterically antiseptic or dainty, but there seemed to be things living there. So, for the smelly basement – the smell sends me back to ireland; a mouldy, damp cat-pee infested mess of old sofas and wrecked furniture. Naked lightbulbs. Concrete floor. Mouldy carpet. Nice…
All because of a general aversion to cats, lack of information and communication.
I could kill to get out of here. I am pissed off. Too pissed off to take a photo of the dungheap.
I have been here less than three nights, and I grow more miserable by the minute.
And to top it off, the wireless connection is atrocious.

I alternately hate and love my cat – I live here for lack of options because I refuse to get rid of her. Clearly love won.

Bollocks.

Crop circles, math and outer space

I know a lot of strange people. Some of them are the kind you might think the most ordinary figures, until.. something seeps out.

I know a guy who believes crop circles are made by creatures from outer space, the «wee folk» or «unidentified streams of energy». That is pretty off, but extraordinary coming from him. He is a great fan of science, in practicality. Read the rest »

The colour blue – the devil, the virgin and the red dyers’ bribes

Today, blue is probably the most popular colour around.
We assosiate good things with it, it represents all sorts of positive things: air, sea, freshness, calm, and a few not so; feeling blue, blue monday. At least in this day and age, blue get a good deal of attention. But it was not always so-
Blue is not an old colour- it is not a paleolithic colour- our ancestors in the caves didn’t have blue. The prehistoric palette was – as mentioned elsewhere – ochre, white, black and iron oxide. Yellow-brown, chalk, ash and rust.
This was the case a few millenia later too- when we settled down and started farming – and dyeing. Until the Middle Ages, these where in fact the main colours around- and social and religious structures and symbolism buildt around them (note that the catholic church still revolves around red, white and black, with green added as a tag-on for «all the other days»).

In europe, the oldest fabrics are all dyed in shades of red. In fact, they say, in Roman times, the latin word for ‘coloured’ and ‘red’ were synonyms. Greeks and romans rarely dyed in blue, but the celts and germanic tribes did – using woad (that yellow plant you see all around temperate europe). Hence, blue was seen as primitive and barbaric.

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Lawnmowerensis

Summer at last.
Weekend at last.
Two more exams.

Beautiful weather, gorgeous peace.

Sitting in the garden reading, taking notes, it begins.
The neighbour fires up the lawnmower. This is, in fact more contagious than ebola in a chicken coop. So the neighbour on the other side thinks «oh, mow the lawn, maybe!» and he fires up his machinery. So then the landlord… and the guy across the road, and the next one up…

So when neighbour number 1 is finished with the mower – thank god!… out comes the bloody trimmer. A high-pitched whine, a teeth-grinding squealing. I brace myself, and see that I could go bonkers, and remember a high quality splatter-film I saw once. It included some deranged caracter, a blade lawnmower and about 30 000 liters of fake blood. I get pictures in my head. I see why people go apeshit on planes or turn up at work with sub machine guns. Simply one bleeding lawnmower too many. Read the rest »

the story of E120 – the colour red

In the series of useless facts and trivia, here’s the story of food additive E120, also known as carmine or crimson.
It’s in your food, lipstick, sweets, meat, clothes, drinks and make up. Chances are, you’ll find it in anything reddish that is not naturally red (forget ketchup – I checked.). And you could say it’s totally organic, if not in line with Buddhist, Muslim or vegan principles.

So sit near the fire, children, and let me tell you the story of spies, bugs, state secrets, indians, daring travel and cacti in the new world.

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