An interview with Michael Cook, who explores municipal drain systems and other subterranean infrastructure.

Even people I know who self-identify as urban explorers aren’t at all that interested in undergrounding – especially not in storm drains. A lot of them just don’t see the actual interest. It’s not a detail-rich environment. You can walk six kilometers underground through nearly featureless pipe---and there’s not something to see and photograph every five feet.

Cook has plenty of wonderful photographs and logs of his trips at Vanishing Point.

You don't need a plan, you need skills and a problem. Good stuff. [via svn]

We're making great progress in information design for coffee lovers. There's those mugs that help you match colors, and the illustrated guide to coffee drinks to help you brew.

I've often felt this way: "Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling." G.K. Chesterton, On Lying in Bed.

In the Year 2000 is a photo collection about "past visions of the future," like picnicking with your hover station wagon.

Those mechanical models of the solar system are called orreries.

The greatest classical cd album covers ever. Here's part two. [via alex ross]

Part of my typical weekend routine is to go to the local library to get my fix. Great trip yesterday: aside from picking up a couple dozen cds and some promising fiction, I completely scored in the magazine section. Yesterday when I stopped by I found the latest issues of the New Yorker, National Geographic, Wired, Business Week, Economist, and Real Simple... all of them waiting there, as if they had been set aside just for me to take home. I've never had such luck.

Doing a little housekeeping around here. If this were 1996, I'd be displaying one of those "under construction" gifs.

I like the watercolors of Stina Persson and the way she works in cut papers, papel picado. (And who knew there was a Guild of American Papercutters?)

The Indexed analysis of gym class.

I'd never heard of the Georgia Guidestones, a monument with six 20-foot slabs of granite standing upright, 100 tons of roadside attraction. Inscribed in 8 languages are 10 edicts:

• Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
• Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.
• Unite humanity with a living new language.
• Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.
• Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
• Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
• Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
• Balance personal rights with social duties.
• Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.
• Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature

The monument is out near the city of Elberton, Georgia. Time for a road trip, I think.

A graphic exploring the connected approaches of the Specialist and the Generalist. [via michael surtees]

I finally saw Paris, je t'aime last night, and loved it. (The first time I tried, the theater had a bizarre emergency closing.) Anyway, be sure to check it out if it comes to your neighborhood, and buy the DVD in November.

ATL Creatives is all about what creative people are up to in Atlanta. It's the brainchild of Eric Shoemaker and Rick Hill.

An interview with expert calligrapher Bernard Maisner, who does the usual wedding invitations, window signs, but has also had cameos in major films:

I did writing on-camera for a documentary film about the Oswald/Kennedy assassination by famed German filmmaker Willi Huismann. I had to write like Lee Harvey Oswald live on camera. Writing samples of Oswald were provided to me from the U.S. National Archive and Records Administration. I studied the writing, analyzed and made U&LC alphabet charts from Oswald’s writing, traced and memorized every letter, as well as his combinations of letters, and studied other characteristics of his writing so that I could write the way Oswald did—immediately and without thinking.

The only other book by Don DeLillo that I've read is White Noise, which I thought was rather fantastic. Cosmopolis, on the other hand, I didn't like very much at all. From the review in the Guardian: "Overall, there's a sense of gridlock. Which is apt thematically, but tough on the reader." Have to agree.

Something to listen to this weekend: This American Life, "Blame It on Art". "The darker side of the art world: petty jealousies, competitiveness, failure." Listen also: every other episode. I'm not sure how they keep the show so consistently good.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is coming to Atlanta on September 7. "These two great gamers, one Salieri, the other Mozart, have grown to despise and fear each other and in so doing alienate the only person truly capable of appreciating their own achievement and greatness."

Alright, here's a rendition of my own personal info-designer chart:

• 20% easy access to both sides of the brain
• 30% curiosity about pretty much everything
• 10% drawing and writing treated as equals
• 15% a wee bit of perfectionism
• 10% tech savvy
• 15% sense of humor aka sense of proportion/balance

For those of you just tuning in, I'm talking about how Austin described his self-portrait in response to my snippet referencing Michael Surtees' post about an image from Steven Heller's book, Nigel Holmes on Information Design, which I probably ought to buy.