A paraglider got sucked into a thunderstorm, lifted 32,000 feet above sea level amidst lightning and "hailstones the size of oranges," and survived. This is one of those unfortunate capers I kind of wish had happened to me.

Here's an archive of annotations for Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics. It fleshes out the character relationships, mythology, allusions, references, quotes, and other variety of minutia.

Louis Theroux's debut in publishing has him retreading the ground he covered in the days of his BBC documentaries. In The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures he tracks down his old subjects and finds out what they've been doing since he last spoke with them. Theroux's travels place him in paranoid anti-government communes, porn studios, UFO conventions, white supremacist parades, self-help seminars, and more humdrum locales like ghettos and brothels. Part of the awkwardness of this book, and it seems clear that Theroux wrestled with this, is that he is sometimes unsure of his own role---whether he's doing ethnography by immersion or straight, dispassionate journalism. The struggle comes from his work to maintain relationships that he obviously appreciates (despite their quirks and foibles, his subjects are just human), but maintaining a healthy skepticism. It's a tough balance of challenging his interviewees and basically trying not to piss them off.

I was a bit surprised to find this book is at its best within its more subjective and personal moments. I expected to be more entertained by the sheer idiocy of white supremacist ideologues or what a headcase Ike Turner is, but what I really liked was Theroux's reflection on his own precarious balance of friendship---giving comfort and company to these self-appointed outcasts---with the more professional interests of getting a good story and writing a good book. In the end, what really comes out is not a just a study of these subcultures, but what it is like to actually know them, insofar as an outsider can.

Ah, vindication. When I'm at work, I make a point to take a nap every day. Sometimes I'll even squeeze in a second one. A recent long-term study has shown that "among working men who took midday naps, there was a 64% reduced risk of death" from heart disease. I knew I was on to something! [via kottke]

There's a Wikipedia article that lists where you can find images in the public domain.

A video about adjusting to a new technology called a "book". [via design observer]

LilyPond looks like an interesting musical notation program. It relies on ASCII text input, and translates it into high-quality graphical notation, harking back to the professional engravings of yore. This reminds me of the LaTeX markup and typesetting language---you get to focus on your product and stop futzing around so much with the visuals. I'll have to give it a try. The developers have written an interesting essay about the nuance and perfection that most computer-generated notation lacks, and thus, the inspiration for LilyPond. Typography in music! Sweet!

Jonathan Ley hiked across Iceland last year, and as usual has shared some awesome photos. I am a big fan of his narrative of his Continental Divide Trail thru-hike; I love how he placed thumbnails of annotated photos in the relevant location within the text (for example).

A nicely supersimplified map of the United States Interstate System. There are 16″× 20″ prints available.

Signal v. Noise pointed to a couple cool things the other day. New to me is the Humument, a really cool illustrated treatment/ reincarnation of an old Victorian novel. Check out the gallery. Also getting a blurb are Austin Kleon's blackout poems. This brings to mind that essay in Harper's I linked to the other day, the one about plagiarism, copyright, and public imagination.

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

The Readius looks like it could be a worthy contender against Sony's Reader. It has a cool fold-out screen and packs up to roughly cellphone size. It's half as heavy as Sony's at only 5 or so ounces, and supports ebook, PDF, RSS, podcasts, etc. Pretty nifty.

Comics with problems. A small collection of public service comics that deal with topics like AIDs, diabetes, drug abuse, etc.

Here's a cool animated interpretation of John Coltrane's tune, Giant Steps. "The musical theme defines a space and the musical improvisation is like someone drifting in that imaginary space." Pretty darn cool. I wish there were a full length version---where's the piano solo?

An interview with Cory Doctorow, digesting his new book. I'm looking forward to this new one; I picked it up just after I reviewed (loved) Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Okay, so I'm pretty much amazing. A nice little voiceover parody of a John Petrucci guitar instructional video, working the metronome. He pulls off some nasty chromatic scales.

Paul is going off the Flickr Grid: "My inner geek isn't completely thrilled with my move to Flickr... Part of me thinks that all of the awesome stuff that Flickr enables (community, conversation, collaboration, cataloging, aggregation, and so much more) should be done in a distributed way across the Web." He's doing a great job of documenting the whole techie side of the process.

I lucked out again. Curses is a delightful collection of comics by Kevin Huizenga. This collection fits in the "slice of life" category, but mixed with the occasional bout of the surreal, and thankfully free from most the angst and ennui that crept in some other comics I've read recently. My favorite of the stories was "Jeepers Jacobs," with a sketch about a golfing theology professor who writes about Hell. A close second is "Not Sleeping Together," about passing the time with one you love. I love the artwork---Huizenga draws these clean, spare lines that still feel kind of loose and earthy, somehow. There's some pretty incredible suburban skylines, even managing to make suburbia look kind of interesting. But the art is only half the battle, and the pictures and the words really work so well together here. I think part of it is Huizenga's willingness to put a lot of text in his panels when he needs to. There's no timidity about using a lot of block narration. And the silent panels are able carry their own weight.

I guess the best thing I can say is that I'd want to write comics like this. Well done!

Bonus: A few days ago Kevin Huizenga did a brief interview with Publisher's Weekly.

The Ecstasy of Influence, a new essay in Harper's about plagiarism.

Visual, sound, and text collage‚Äîwhich for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)‚Äîbecame explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concr?®te, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronologies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate‚ÄîIgor Stravinsky's music and Daniel Johnston's, Francis Bacon's paintings and Henry Darger's, the novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged Dickens's Bleak House to write The Bondwoman's Narrative), as well as cherished texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their ‚Äúplagiarized‚Äù elements, like Richard Condon's novels or Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons‚Äîit becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.

"Poetryfoundation.org has invited some of today’s most vital graphic novelists to interpret a poem of their choice from the more than 4,500 poems in our archive, reaching from Beowulf to the present."

This book reminded me how much I love science fiction. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which, per Cory Doctorow's tradition, you can download for free) takes place in a transhuman future. Poverty, scarcity, and sickness have been pretty much eliminated. Our hapless narrator-hero, Julius, has been killed (again) and his rivals are trying to take over one of his pet projects where he works at Disneyland. He fights back with the help of tenuous friendships and ill-formed plans, and it's pretty much wonderful the whole way through. One of the best parts about great science fiction (and I think this one counts) is just taking a few ideas and seeing where they lead, a sort of narrative thought experiment. Luckily Doctorow doesn't get too explicitly philisophical, but there is some great hypothesis-spinning daydream material here. What if we were all networked, able to be really, individually connected to each and every other person? How does society recalibrate value where material scarcity no longer exists? If you could freeze your life for 500 or 10,000 years and wake up later, well... what would that be like? What's the effect on human relationships? All this, and more. Go read it.