Stemming from a conversation at work and in descending order of likelihood.
Spoiler alert: at midnight, I will watch my first Harry Potter movie. Before tonight, I have never read a Harry Potter book or watched a Harry Potter movie. Until a couple weeks ago, I didn’t know the full name of the movie for which I possess a ticket. Like the people in this Slate article, I might live-tweet or live-blog the whole experience, but with more profanity.
What I know about Harry Potter:
I’m afraid to learn what “hog warts” are.
2011 June 2, 8:46 pm
As my live-tweeting of last week’s National Spelling Bee finals attests, my misspellings outnumbered my correct guesses by a factor of five, which led me to the realization that I am not a good speller. I am merely adept at avoiding typos.
I don’t doubt now that my childhood prowess as a speller contributed to my present investment in design, typography in particular. Christina observed that modern spelling prowess is a byproduct of a sophisticated pattern-recognition regime: the definition, language of origin, and part of speech hint at each word’s constituent roots, prefixes, suffixes, and conjugations. More precisely, having believed from a young age that every letter counts gave me a strong foundation for a career in careful consideration of the glyphs themselves (and spaces between them).
Among the 13 words I spelled correctly were six of the nine food words: cioppino, andouille, profiterole, teppanyaki, ingberlach, and orgeat. My proficiency here, I realized, is due less to patterns I recognize than actual omnivorousness: I have encountered five of these six spelled out on menus, on my grocery receipts, on plates placed before me, and in dishes I’ve served others. Cioppino, like Italian sinigang. Andouille sausage with brunch at the L.A. farmer’s market. Profiteroles, like deep-fried sugar-powdered zeppelins. Teppanyaki, when I first tried kobe beef. Orgeat, an almond flavoring, was one my coworkers at Third Street Coffee didn’t know how to pronounce, one that no one ever ordered, but it was there whenever I emptied, cleaned, and refilled the syrup cabinet. It was happenstance – not methodical curiosity – that helped me spell 13 of the most befuddling English words that challenged spellers that night.
Which leads me back to the (foregone?) conclusion that the greatest preparation for something like the National Spelling Bee, a design career, and lots of other challenges and ambitions is a kind of applied omnivorousness: the ability to synthesize all the info-plankton we’re sucking through the baleen of our formal educations, Google Reader, and just living in the world into exacting compositions of ambergris, one letter at a time.
My personal challenge has not been finding plankton; it’s been strengthening my baleen filter. Preparing for spelling bees by organizing chunks of letters into languages of origin and parts of speech, to be summoned at a moment’s notice, is good exercise.
Next is getting over my fear of the bell.
Related: NPR’s preview of the 2011 Associated Press food guidelines (via Christina).
Tetris used to be a fixture of my mornings, a harbinger of the day ahead. It starts empty, builds rationally, and is led to disarray and disaster through series of unexpected events. There is almost always something left to clear.
Via kottke.
Jon Rafman’s 9 eyes curates the work of the world’s most prolific street photography collective.
via Evan Sharp
With broadband connections and high-definition YouTube and Hulu clips as prevalent as they are, why do people want to watch these relatively grainy, endlessly looping little videos? Part of the answer is that animated GIFs—soundless, coarsely textured, and powerless to describe complex color—appeal to an imperfection fetish like the one columnist Rob Walker recently discerned in the vogue for photographic technologies that simulate the degraded look of Super 8 film and Holga cameras. But the present-day GIF love goes beyond aesthetics and nostalgia. Animated GIFs aren’t just throwbacks—they’re uniquely suited to some very contemporary modes of cultural consumption, and they perform distinct functions that other formats can’t.
—Jonah Weiner
Three Frames deploys art memes. If We Don’t, Remember Me makes them poignant. From Me To You makes them sexy. I’ve been pinning my favorites, anticipating art.
Bridging the line between clothing and architecture, the spacesuit is a portable environment: a continuation of habitable space, safe for human beings, capable of radical detachment from the Earth.
Geoff Manaugh
Based on an interview with the author, I added Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo to my wishlist.
I am now subscribing to Scaffoldage.
(via things magazine)
You are listening to Los Angeles is an astounding single-serving site. Technically, it’s a cloud-leveraged mashup of a SoundCloud file, LAPD streaming audio, Cabin typeface, and a Flickr photo. As an experience, it’s not unlike a Pandora station started by a fan of Heat.
Self-described in metadata as Ambient music and live LAPD police radio. What’s not to like? It could also work with the Jurassic Park theme slowed down 1000%.
(via BLDGBLOG)
(via Christina)
1. Pick a player (last night, it was Sara, since we were at her home).
2. Drink once every time they get a question right.
3. Drink twice every time they get a question wrong.
4. Waterfall when she gets a Daily Double. Start at the Daily Double sound effect, end when Alex deems the answer correct or incorrect.
Optional rules:
5. Having Dan’s knowledge of the categories, we also established a rule that we should drink once every time anyone said the word “Oprah.” Substitute with any word chosen before the show.
6. There is no number 6.
7. I wish I’d thought of this last night: drink every time someone answers with a person’s full name instead of last name only.
I never realized how long Daily Doubles were until I had to drink the entire length of two of them in a half-hour span.
Why did I only now learn this existed? It’s on my itinerary next time I’m in Los Angeles.
(via GOOD)
A couple film-related nuggets I picked up on Clusterflock:
If LeBron James starred in Space Jam 2, he would leave the Toon Squad for the Monstars in the middle of the movie.
Via Clusterflock
“Let’s Enhance” is certainly a direct relative of “You Look Like Shit.”
