Walker Crisps has six new flavours on sale: Cajun Squirrel, Builder’s Breakfast (Bacon, eggs, & beans), Chili & Chocolate, Onion Bhaji, Crispy Duck & Hoison, and, of course, Fish & Chips.
Defamer is sucked into the Gawker mothership, no longer an independent site.
The UK government plans to require a passport or other official identity to buy a mobile phone in order to create a national database to ‘combat crime and terrorism.’
Like the other major galleries in London, the ICA has dropped their admission fee to to the galleries and the cafe before 11pm. The cinema still charges cinema prices. Details here
I was too young to read the Golden Age of the National Lampoon but I have always been impressed by its prodigious outpourings of magazines, radio, albums, films, and talent.
First up is an interview with writer Brian McConnachie
Second is an interview with Josh Karp, author of A Stupid and Futile Gesture, a bio of NatLamp founder Doug Kenney.
[Via Mark’s Very Large ]
In 1929, Vanity Fair magazine, the jewel in the crown of Condé Nast’s publishing empire, made typographic history. Influenced by Modern design trends throughout Europe, especially the Bauhaus, art director Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha introduced Paul Renner’s Futura — and also did away with all capital letters in headlines on columns and feature articles. The result was at once jarring and elegant — illustrating the capital M of Modernism, through the sole use of lowercase letters.
An interview with a 27-year-old Columbia student about escaping from her Amish family at 15 so she could continue past grade eight.
What were the positives of growing up Amish?
-Growing up bilingual (Though I didn’t become fluent in English until after I escaped and I was always very self-conscious about my command of the English language)
-The emphasis on the solidarity of the extended family unit
-The emphasis on being hospitable to strangers, helping those in need, whether Amish or “English” (anyone who’s not Amish is “English,” no matter what language or culture he/she represents)
-Building your own houses, growing your own food, sewing your own clothes
These experiences taught me self-reliance, self-preservation, and gave me the ability to relate to non-American familial cultures much better than I might otherwise.
The biggest negatives?
-The rape, incest and other sexual abuse that run rampant in the community
-Rudimentary education
-Physical and verbal abuse in the name of discipline
-Women (and children) have no rights
-Religion–and all its associated fear and brainwashing–as a means of control (and an extremely effective means at that)
-Animal abuse
The annual exhibition of small London rags is Saturday 12 July 2008 at Hays Galleria, London Bridge. Threatening to attend are:
Litro Magazine: is a free monthly publication which features one or more pieces of short fiction to appeal to someone who is on their way to work which take you to places you normally don’t think about visiting when travelling on the Underground.
One Eye Grey: £2.50 London legends, folklore and ghost stories retold for today, in essence a penny dreadful for the 21st century.
The Other Side: Free. The magazine for the Northern Line. The idea of The Other Side is to create London’s first community centred magazine, where readers both on and offline can contribute to the content.
The Pavement: is the free magazine for London’s homeless. As well as investigating issues which are important to the homeless, the magazine also runs an up-to-date listing of basic support services. Plus, of course, brilliant cartoons and features.
Smoke: a London peculiar: £2.90 A magazine of words and images inspired by the city…. a love-letter to London, to the wet neon flicker of late-night pavements, electric with endless possibility, and the soft dishevelled beauty of the city’s dawn. The out-of-shot lives half-glimpsed from a train window, or from a phone number scrawled on the back of a Travelcard, dropped on the night-bus stairs…
NY Times finds great design at London student shows
Emma Weber at the London College of Communication has
made an ethical labeling project combining a bar code sticker that consumers at the supermarket can read with their cellphone cameras, an Ethical Facts Web site and a ratings system which measures, from zero to nine, how the people who made the product are treated, how the product affects the environment and how harmlessly it can be dumped or recycled. The result is a combined “ethiscore”; the pomegranate smoothie in Emma’s example got a ethiscore of 24 out of a possible 27 — a rating likely to impart a righteous glow to consumer and producer alike.
At the Royal College of Art, Valerio Di Lucente, Hugo Timm, Filip Tydén and Erwan Lhussier have re-imagined that pariah of fonts, Microsoft’s Comic Sans, with Serious Sans.
Struggling to understand what could possibly be good about Comic Sans (Serious Sans’ designers) found that the doggedly goofy font’s irregular forms made it one of the easiest typefaces for dyslexics to read. The designers also liked how it undermined the authority — and changed the meaning — of texts set in it.