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I’ve seen many things online over the years but few as impressive as this simple and unassuming webpage:

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/

Not because of irony, or some boring 404 gag or anything as banal as that; I just love it. It’s so graceful, elegant & simple, and there’s something about its visual & textual language that’s near Biblical, in a quietly Puritanical way. Clearly Random House are as keen to publish quality online content as they are to publish traditional content.

I sincerely hope that dead links & cyber backwaters like this are never lost from the Internet; it would become a much poorer place without them.

inspired by this post on my friend matt pearson’s professional website, i thought i’d have a stab myself at transcoding a william blake poem into code (using actionscript, as it’s what i’m most accustomed to)

var garden:OfLove = getChildhoodGarden();

if (garden.chapel is Chapel)
{  
  garden.chapel.x = garden.width / 2;
  garden.chapel.y = garden.height / 2;
  garden.chapel.shut = true;
  garden.chapel.doctrine = “Thou shalt not”;
  
  var len:int = garden.sweetFlowers.length;
  for (var i:int=0; i<len; i++){
    garden.sweetFlowers[i] = new Tombstone();
  }
  
  var priest:Priest;
  len = garden.priests.length;
  for (i=0; i<len; i++){
    priest = Priest( garden.priests[i] );
    priest.setStyle(”gownColor”, 0×000000);
    priest.walk();
    priest.bind(BRIARS, my.joys);
    priest.bind(BRIARS, my.desires);
  }
}

reality is overrated.

“filtration, as anyone with sunglasses knows, gives magic to the world”
alan sondheim

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today is the 23rd of april: st george’s day, the patron saint of england. the hard, historical facts of the day and the figure himself may well be a little flimsy, but it is a good opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with one of this country’s leading artists & visionaries: william blake.

it is usually the famous two verses from his poetic work ‘jerusalem’ that are quoted on occasions like this:

and did these feet in ancient times,
walk upon england’s mountains green?
and was the holy lamb of god,
on england’s pleasant pastures seen?

etc. i love jerusalem, made it my business to memorise those two fabulous verses years ago, but we are all well acquainted with them already, i think st. georges day is an excellent opportunity to have a look at some of his less well-known pieces.

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the thing about flying is not to realise that it is, in fact, impossible, or then gravity will suddenly notice you again and take exception to being ignored.

so said arthur dent in douglas adams’ ‘so long, and thanks for all the fish‘, the fourth novel in the ‘hitchhiker’s…’ series.

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i’m a fisherman. metaphorically speaking that is; on a practical footing i have no idea of what it’s like to chug out to the north sea with a net and a host of black flags. but professionally, metaphorically speaking, i’m a fisherman.

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Empires come and go; wars, disease and natural disaster decimate communities. Technological changes cause fear and anxiety. But quite honestly people are people, moved by the same old stuff. As much as we think we perceive enormous changes, even day-to-day, history shows us that things don’t really change all that much. Try this for example; its a poem written by Persian poet Abdullah Ibn Al-Mu’tazz, who lived in the then-Persian, now-infamously-Iraqi city of Baghdad, 861-908:

Thank God, the new moon,
    Ramadan has gone.
Quick, lash out the wine;
    The moon’s a silver dhow
Laden with chunks of amber.

Just to be clear, that’s Baghdad over 1,000 years ago. Muslims of that day obviously not wholly dissimilar to almost any young westerner out on a Friday night today.

through the window, those twelve squares
i see a gnarled pear tree with hanging branches
berthold brecht ‘nature poem’, 1937

i was off to the bookshop a couple of weeks ago wondering to myself just how many rectangles i see in an average day when i turned the corner at the top of the stairs to be confronted by this view:

how many rectangles?! answers via the comments link please; correct answers will win the trip of a lifetime to a asylum.

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