Layer Tennis is coming: "Two artists (or two small teams of artists) will swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a "volley" and then we post that to the site. A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action, as it happens. The matches last for ten volleys and when it's complete, everyone visiting the site votes for a winner."

For some reason I got to thinking about one of my favorite Seinfeld dialogues this morning. From the Male Unbonding episode:

ELAINE: Come on, let's go do something. I don't want to just sit around here.

JERRY: Okay.

ELAINE: Want to go get something to eat?

JERRY: Where do you want to go?

ELAINE: I don't care, I'm not hungry.

JERRY: We could go to one of those cappuccino places. They let you just sit there.

ELAINE: What are we gonna do there? Talk?

JERRY: We can talk.

ELAINE: I'll go if I don't have to talk.

A pretty good interview with Seth Godin. "The thing is, the stuff that's for everybody is already sold to everybody. So you can't win by being more average than average, because that slot's taken."

You can now buy the Personal MBA Recommended Reading List in one motherlode from Amazon.

Ian Belcher writes about a week at a colonic spa, with a daily regimen of herbal pills and self-administered enemas. [via tim walker]

I was doing a little reading on William Carlos Williams and stumbled on the PennSound archives. They feature a page full of recordings from Williams' poetry readings, as well as many other writers. I don't claim to recognize more than a handful of the names, but they've got volume. At the very least, their manifesto is pretty great.

Helvetica is finally coming to Atlanta in November, courtesy of AIGA-Atlanta. The screening will be at the Rich Theatre in the Woodruff Arts Center, followed by a conversation with director Gary Hustwit.

Back in the summer of 1612, Galileo did a series of daily observations of the sun. His illustrations were reproduced in his Letters on Sunspots of 1613. The work, part of an ongoing scientific battle with Christoph Scheiner, settled a lot of the contemporary debate on sunspots, killing the idea that the sun had minor satellites and proving our universe just a bit more imperfect.

My weekend project: I took those 35 drawings and put them into a big mosaic of sunspots.1 Sort of a comic strip approach. Not as dynamic as a movie, but then again I can't frame a movie and mount it on my wall. If you're so inclined, I also have a giant sunspot mosaic PDF to share with you---20 inches on a side. I had a ton of fun with this thing.

--------- 1. The original scans came from the rare book collection of Owen Gingerich via The Galileo Project. Dr. Gingerich was also kind enough to spare a few minutes on the telephone. Great guy.

How to Be Creative, Gaping Void's long philosophical article on life, money, art, etc.

The other day I hacked a little skit based on Austin's mini-comic about writing with the Fibonacci sequence. So then I got to thinking about other arbitrary limits. What else could I do, just to get the brain wiggling? Still in math mode, my first thought was to do some writing based on pi. Each word would use a digit's worth of letters. A bit random, but it could be fun. As happens so often in Wikipedia, I found another cool thing---an article about piphilology, techniques and devices used to memorize pi. But even better...

That led me to the Cadaeic Cadenza. Mike Keith wrote the full text of the Cadaeic Cadenza with the restriction that each word would have as many letters as its corresponding digit of pi. It's a full 4000 words, and along the way he mimics some other poems like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Jabberwocky. The opening of the book borrows from The Raven. Keith's rendition:

One A Poem

A Raven

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary, Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore. During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap! An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor. "This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".

Check out Mike Keith's page for more (like The Anagrammed Bible). And the Wikipedia entry for constrained writing has a bunch of other great stuff.

Ready? Um. Well...

Well, um, what?

I can't find the tickets.

But they won't let us in without tickets.

I know, I know. I put them on the dresser and the next---

The next thing you know you LOST them.

I swear I looked everywhere.

In my pocket?

You asshole.

Heh.

[exeunt]

One of my weekend projects: a dress shirt photo collection.

Jonathan Corum created a Personal Injury Warning System: "Each symbol is based on an injury I have received, and indexed by the date that I would have benefitted from such a warning."

I saw The King of Kong tonight---easily the most fun I've had at a movie theater in a couple years. I implore you to see it if it comes to your town.

<irony>Links aren't life.</irony>

Jason Kottke has come back to work. And he's still really good at it.

A critical analysis of quirk:

Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing.

An introduction to OpenType. And now I understand.

That's a scribble I did over an hour or so late last night. In my letters I usually play in some way with the grid, or collage with stuff that I cut out form old magazines or textiles or whatever else I have in my files. This time, it was stick figures.

I really wish I'd kept track of my letters better. I know I've done some cool things, but they're with the owners now (as they should be). But I'd love to be able to look back at them later.

So, I'm in the market for a new scanner. Color. Big-ish. Recommendations?

Matthew Stibbe suggested some writer's reference sites. My suggestions: The Online Etymology Dictionary offers a brief history of words. You'll enjoy it if you're just reflexively curious like me. And maybe you don't need to bookmark it, but I like the Plain English Campaign's A to Z of Alternative Words [pdf]. From Matthew's list, I like love want to marry the Handbook of Rhetorical Devices. [that's sort of modern-day metanoia, btw]