Author Vs. Author

Flavorwire has a collection of 30 of the harshest author to author insults. My favorites are the ones where I’m familiar with both the insult-or and the insulted. This one on Don Quixote is my favorite: 

 17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes

“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”

(via Flavorwire » The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History)

by Jonathan Frei

Zinsser’s Relationships

William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, discuses the use of the word relationship to describe the everyday interactions with the people in our lives:  


My problem with “relationship” is that it means whatever anyone needs it to mean. It doesn’t denote a specific act–like, say, “falling in love” or “getting married.” Those bold leaps of faith have long been sung by poets and troubadours. But nowhere in bardic lore is there any word of Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra, or Tristan’s relationship with Isolde, or Romeo’s relationship with the girl on the balcony. Cole Porter didn’t write “Let’s do it, let’s have a relationship.” He wrote “Let’s fall in love.” That’s what people used to do.

(via Zinsser on Friday: Me and My Relationships | The American Scholar)

by Jonathan Frei

Game: Sinuous

This is a simple game that won the grand prize in the 10k Apart contents, that challenged developers to come up with a web-app that took less than 10 kilobytes. 

Sinuous is game built using canvas and JavaScript – no external libraries. The game requires only mouse movement or swiping (iPad/iPhone/Android) as input. Total size: 6.9KB. The goal is to avoid colliding with red dots while looking for green ones. The longer you can stay alive, the higher you will score!

Play the game.

by Jonathan Frei

This up to 1000 years old snow has metamorphosed into highly pressurized glacier ice that contains almost no air bubbles. Thus it absorbs the visible light despite the scattered shortest blue fraction, giving it its distinct deep blue waved appearance. This cavity in the glacier ice formed as a result of a glacial mill, or moulin.

Rain and meltwater on the glacier surface is channelled into streams that enter the glacier at crevices. The waterfall melts a hole into the glacier while the ponded water drains towards lower elevations by forming long ice caves with an outlet at the terminus of the glacier. The fine grained sediments in the water along with wind blown sediments cause the frozen meltwater stream to appear in a muddy colour while the top of the cave exhibits the deep blue colour.

Due to the fast movement of the glacier of about 1 m per day over uneven terrain this ice cave cracked up at its end into a deep vertical crevice, called cerrac. This causes the indirect daylight to enter the ice cave from both ends resulting in homogeneous lighting of the ice tunnel.

by Jonathan Frei

Statue of Soviet US Superheros

A group of pranksters in Bulgaria painted a statue of soviet soldiers to look like a group of All American Superheros. 

Twenty years ago you would have been shot for stepping too close to this monument in Sofia in Bulgaria.

But after the smashing of the Berlin Wall, statues celebrating communist rule appear to be fair game to the graffiti artists of the former Soviet block in Eastern Europe.
An anonymous artist transformed Russian Red Army soldiers from a monument in the city of Sofia, in Bulgaria, into popular superheroes and cartoon characters.



(via Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Superman and friends painted on Soviet statue by the Banksy of Bulgaria | Mail Online)

by Jonathan Frei