shrapnel

Now you too can live on, uh, in the Starship Enterprise.

Sure, by now you’ve all seen the unauthorized Flash video for Radiohead’s “Creep” — which may actually be their best video — but have you seen the operating manual for “Fitter, Happier”?

What about art in the dust on cars?

And people wonder where I get my ideas….

There are collections, of course, and then there are collections. Make no mistake about it, the ones described herein are nothing if not unusual. It takes a certain cast of mind, for example, to want to acquire Napoleon’s or Rasputin’s desiccated penis. The former, if that is what it really is, “was shown in New York in the 1920s, ‘looking like a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace or shriveled eel,’ according to a contemporary account,” and now is in the collection of a urologist whose interest presumably is entirely professional. As for the latter, “Rasputin’s penis was regarded as similarly collectible, and went into an auction at Christie’s in 1995. It was withdrawn, however, when investigations revealed it to be a sea cucumber.”

JG Ballard on modernism.

Hey, if it worked with iTunes….

Last Wednesday morning, between getting on with some work and paying yet more bills, I read a short story by Australian writer Tim Winton. It was called ‘Small Mercies’ and it was about a man whose wife has killed herself, leaving him to bring up their young son alone. It took me 35 minutes to read, exactly the amount of time it takes me to fillet a newspaper. In other words, no time at all. The day’s headlines, however, did not stay with me even half so long as this story. After I had finished it, I went to the post office, where I stood in a long queue. All the time I was queuing and as I walked home afterwards, I was thinking about it: its wonderful spareness, the fact that Winton uses the word ‘brothy’ to describe the swimming pool air when his protagonist goes for a swim. By bedtime, it was still with me. ‘Brothy,’ I thought, as I turned out the light, ‘that is great.’

You, too, can read ‘Small Mercies’. It is in a collection published last year called The Turning. Alternatively, you will soon be able to buy it on its own for £1 at any bookshop. It is one of a series of stories that Picador is publishing as what it is calling a ‘Shot’, or single story.

The strange phenomenon of Toynbee plaques.

The threats never stop. But sometimes they fight back. (Flash animation — hit play.)

No, apparently not.

One of Britain’s most prestigious art galleries put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art.

Blight on the landscape or the new beautiful?

“But the wind farm looks like modernist sculpture!” Exactly. And that’s precisely why so many people are against it. They don’t want the ideology of high modernism disrupting the very different order of the natural world. The metaphysical kernel of truth in the nimby response is: modernist functionalism is an anthropocentric aesthetic of the machine, because it equates value with human interests, and it is mechanistic because it sees natural systems as mechanisms to be mastered, rather than as dynamic, non-linear systems which cannot be controlled. Functionalism is anthropocentrism.

And you thought those guys peeling off their shirts at games were just drunks.

Hughes, 35, is a professional sports fan. He gets paid by teams to do what a lot of us do for fun. He goes to a game and cheers his lungs out until the crowd around him is doing the same. He’s been doing this for 10 years, and he got his professional start in Toronto in 1996, cheering for the Maple Leafs.

He reluctantly admits the job pays really well. “I’ll make anywhere from $1,250 to $3,000 a night,” he says.

Can it really be gym-goers? Science profs and mathematicians everywhere nod in agreement.

The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though—their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires? Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims’ relationships with others—whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves. Perhaps it was there, among the weightlifting and rowing machines, that these Western-based terror cells really set their course.

Can’t afford that new SUV anymore because of the rising price of gas? Just torch it like everyone else.

This trend was spotted by a Southern California arson task force in the summer of 2005 when gas prices spiked. At one point, firefighters responding to a report of a vehicle fire arrived at the Los Angeles River Bed to find two SUVs burning at the same time.

Investigators found the arson-for-hire ring involved a new-car dealership in Cerritos, California. Debt-weary SUV owners contacted the finance manager, hoping to trade in their gas-guzzler for something cheaper. They were then put in touch with an arsonist who told them to leave the keys in the ignition and $300 cash in the glovebox. An arsonist would then take the car to a remote location and set it afire. After the car was torched, the owners would then contact their insurance company and report their vehicle stolen, expecting their debt to be cancelled. Instead, they were investigated for insurance fraud.

By now, everyone knows the sweet smell of new cars is in fact not good for you. But what about the smell of hotels? Or any of the other scents used to establish brand recognition?

Scent may even make a product seem more desirable and expensive. In one example from Martin Lindstrom, the author of BRAND Sense, test subjects were placed in two identical rooms, one with a floral scent and one without a scent, and were asked to look at identical pairs of running shoes. Not only did they prefer the shoes in the scented room, they also estimated their value (on average) was $10.33 more than the shoes in the unscented room.

Blogger Joi Ito, one of the members of the World of Warcraft guild We Know (discussed on Shrapnel earlier), discusses his WoW addiction.

We assemble in-game to mount epic six-hour raids that require some members to wake at 4 am and others to stay up all night. Outside the game, we stay in touch using online forums, a wiki, blogs, and a mailing list – plus a group voice chat, which I’ve connected to my home stereo so I can hear the guild’s banter while I’m cooking dinner. I have never been this addicted to anything before. My other hobbies are gone. My daily blogging regimen has taken a hit. And my social life revolves more and more around friends in the game.