"Theatre directors don't review plays. And film stars don't review the new releases. So why are so many novelists allowed to pass judgement on the literary efforts of their friends?"

Most of the online designeurotic t-shirt selling craze gives me nausea, but I like this one.

The Superest is a never-ending game of one-upmanship illustration. "Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat."

Lately I've been thinking about David Brooks' essay from six years ago, The Organization Kid. "When I asked a group of them if they ever felt like workaholics, their faces lit up and they all started talking at once." Definitely worth a re-read.

"Minimalism in interior design has become a caricature. Everywhere you find shops or hotels with an ambience that makes you feel like you are in a refrigerator." Ha! [via jb]

A short NPR story on the names on paper bags by Barbara Klein: "One of the names, 'Alan Rumbo,' intrigues her. She traces the bag back to its maker, and actually gets to talk to the line worker at the paper bag plant, Rumbo himself, who explains how the name on the millions of bags he makes propelled him to hero status with his kids."

I like Twain in small doses. On The Awful German Language:

An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech--not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary--six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam--that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it--AFTER WHICH COMES THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb--merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out--the writer shovels in "HABEN SIND GEWESEN GEHABT HAVEN GEWORDEN SEIN," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

Now here's some graffitti I can appreciate: roadside storm drains made into little cartoons. Highlights include a mouse eating cheese, an illustration of a smoking guy, and a tv and vcr. If I'm reading the Portugeuse right, it's the work of Leonardo Delafuente and Anderson Augusto.

I'm fairly open to reading 'girly' books every now and then (see my reviews of Heidi Klum's Body of Knowledge, How to Walk in High Heels, and The Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend). A friend of mine got me to read He's Just Not That Into You: The No Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys. It's a quick, fun read, and I think both sexes could benefit from it. Perhaps there are limits to the no-nonsense approach. Co-author Greg Behrendt (writing with Liz Tuccillo) doesn't have a whole lot of room for forgiveness, but you have to admire that he takes happiness so seriously. If you don't set your own rules, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment. There's a lot of motivational talk (you are beautiful, you deserve the best, etc.). But while the message is insistent, the book doesn't take itself too seriously. The end-of-chapter "worksheets" are delightful parodies of the usual junk in self-help books.

Here's a good bit on drug-addled relationships: "So, he's always stoned when he's with you... You're going out with someone that doesn't enjoy you at your full levels. That's tantamount to him liking you better when you're in the other room."

So maybe he's super busy with work and school and gets a little tense and lashes out: "I don't care if he's studying to become the next Messiah. There is no reason to yell at anyone ever, unless you are screaming 'Look out for that bus!'"

On breaking up and futile waiting & wishing: "100% of men polled said that when they broke up with someone, it always meant that they didn't want to go out with them anymore." Cold, hard truth.

On resistance to marriage: "You are allowed to have aspirations for your future and to know whether the relationship you're in is going to take you closer to those aspirations or be the demise of them." And that's just generally good life advice.

Rands tested some pens to try to find that perfect feel. I love how he parried the crucial topic of paper choice: "I’m going to avoid this entire debate and just use a Moleskine simply because if you’re going to have an argument about pens with anyone, chances are there’s a Moleskine nearby."

The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse is a book by Jonathan Selwood. Maybe I have a basic malfunction, but a lot of books that aim for humor are just kind of exhausting. There's some interesting goofy personalities in the book, but they just sort of drift between skits. Ehhhh... I don't like whining about books all that much, so why don't you read the LA Times review instead. I think it's pretty fair.

National Novel Writing Month starts in less than two weeks. Thirty days to churn out 50,000 words. Last year I said, "Maybe next year." I'm not sure what I'm saying this year...

"With pre-production topping out at somewhere over 500 years, BibliOdyssey might well be the slowest book ever published." Looks like a winner.

David Lee King used the new Twitter Tracking thingy to track what people are saying about libraries. That's a pretty cool feature.

Hipster olympics, complete with ironic t-shirt competition. "---and they've gone back to the mirror!" [via moby]

A poem lamenting (and embodying) the quirks of English pronunciation.

So if the worst came to pass, Atlanta could be without water 4 months from now.

Photos of vintage cereal box packaging! [via thmchndstrct]

Andrew Blum has a great article on urbanism, environment, and change: Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change:

We are wedging ourselves between a rock and a hard place: between the pleasures of medium-density living (Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Toronto’s Annex) and the ecological necessity of even more density. When it comes to our homes, we are all justifiably afraid of change, especially when it feels like (or is) destruction. But we don’t often pair that truth with another oft-repeated one: Our way of life is unsustainable. In North America’s most beautiful urban places, we unfailingly fight every new tall building in the name of “quality of life” and the “character of the neighborhood.” We claim to have internalized the idea that it’s all connected, that slowing the warming of the planet is a global project, but the nature in our backyards remains sacred—often to the point, perhaps, of self-destruction.

Photographer Michael David Murphy had a video interview with Alec Soth a little while before Soth's lecture for Atlanta Celebrates Photography.