With April Fool’s Day approaching, it’s a good time to wonder: what kinds of horrible things will you do to the people you love? At the OUP’s blog, a list of great pranks for inspiration.
Prank Fodder
Party/Animals
For San Francisco readers: There’s a new show of huge, surreal paper mache animal sculptures up at The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (December 4-17th). These paper beasts, featured in the San Francisco Symphony’s performance of Camille Saint-Saens “Carnival of the Animals” and created by local artist Colette Crutcher and her students, will be auctioned off to benefit the MCCLA at a party open to the public on December 17th.
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Going Clear
“While guys spent time in these Seg cells calling out chess moves over the walkways or doing push-ups until their veins bulged from their temples, I was in my cell pecking away trying to create a different world for myself. Some kind of way I felt I could rewrite my future.” For The New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog, Daniel A. Gross tells the story of the Swintec Corporation, the nation’s sole supplier of clear typewriters, whose largest market is prisons. Pair with our own Bill Morris on using his Royal to write.
:) :’) :-)
Two weeks ago, the Internet Gods (meaning: the Unicode 7.0 update) gave us hundreds of new emoji symbols, including the middle finger and peace dove. By now our emoji usage patterns can be used by psychologists to understand our minds. “People who use no noses tend to be tweeting more about… Justin Bieber. They have younger interests, younger concerns, whether or not they’re younger.”
Curiosities: The Life and Times of Fuzzy Dunlop
Dr. Seuss Went to War: A Catalog of Political Cartoons by Dr. SeussThe Philadelphia Inquirer profiles Joseph O’Neill (via).A primer from Bookride for using the web to check the values of old books. “The first thing to remember is that most books are of low value or no value. Some books are worth less than nothing.”The second issue of Wag’s Revue is out, featuring an interview with T.C. Boyle.For fans of The Wire, issue four of darkmatter Journal analyzes the series with essays like “The Politics of Brisket: Jews and The Wire” and “The Subversion of Heteronormative Assumptions in HBO’s The Wire“.The Rumpus gets listy with George Pelecanos’ favorite WesternsThe Second Pass follows up on our “Most Anticipated” list with a few more books to look forward to.
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The Miserable Wonderfulness of M. Houellebecq
The second issue of Chicago’s crackerjack The Point, having thrown caution to the wind, tackles the prickly genius of Michel Houellebecq: “Houellebecq has published four novels, all of them bitter and miserable.”
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Pathological Point-Making
Recommended Reading: Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker on what makes an essay “American.”
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