The FFFFOUND ffffeed brings a lot of joy.

“He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.”

Have a click around the new interactive timeline I helped put together for the Y.

Mapworks and wordworks by Chris Kenny, via Moon River.

This is your Firefox on Wikipedia with Tabs Mix Plus.

This being the season for useless year-end lists, here are the top 100 articles in my 2007 Wikipedia browsing history based on popularity on del.icio.us.

1. Agile software development
2. List of places blurred out on Google Maps
3. Go (board game)
4. Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
5. Graph theory
6. Schmidt Sting Pain Index
7. Hash table
8. Document Object Model
9. Gini coefficient
10. Portal: Cryptography
11. Films considered the worst ever
12. Collyer brothers
13. Rube Goldberg
14. Scoville scale
15. Quicksort algorithm
16. Linked list
17. Ivan Illich
18. Reflection (computer science)
19. Stendhal syndrome
20. 1 − 2 + 3 − 4 + · · ·
21. El Lissitzky
22. Combinatorics
23. Ambigram
24. HyperCard
25. World Heritage Site
26. Seven Bridges of Konigsberg
27. Coral Content Distribution Network
28. Advance fee fraud
29. Pioneer plaque
30. Chiptune
31. Fatal hilarity
32. An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything
33. Lisp (programming language)
34. Manhattanhenge
35. Recursive acronym
36. Haptics
37. Lists of corporate assets
38. Kryptos
39. Image macro
40. List of protologisms
41. Bibliometrics
42. Earworm
43. Kraken
44. Dodecahedron
45. Winsor McCay
46. Paper prototyping
47. Methane hydrate
48. Cryptic crossword
49. Brutalism
50. Mastermind (board game)
51. Orthography
52. Geoduck
53. Ainu
54. Jaco Pastorius
55. Citation index
56. Giambattista Vico
57. Telemetry
58. Brion Gysin
59. Baddeley’s Model of Working Memory
60. Carl Sagan
61. Belphegor
62. Francesca Woodman
63. Metamathematics
64. Speciation
65. van Eck Phreaking
66. Language recognition chart
67. Savile Row
68. The Young Ones
69. Acrostic
70. Aleatory
71. Shmoo
72. Hyperborea
73. List of groups referred to as cults
74. Anglish
75. Rakia
76. English words with uncommon properties
77. Pale Fire
78. CamelCase
79. Hot toddy
80. Turkish Delight
81. Video synthesizer
82. List of anarchist communities
83. David Axelrod
84. Dead drop
85. Yat
86. Sidhe
87. Transatlantic telephone cable
88. Pasta Puttenesca
89. Scrabble variants
90. Received pronunciation
91. Telephone exchange names
92. Schwa
93. Space is the Place
94. Automat
95. Meze
96. Max Fleischer
97. The Scene
98. Philippe Petit
99. Halva
100. Bibliogram

Boston public television station WGBH has started to do what many people long for TV stations and related entities everywhere to do: chop up their archives into short video clips and make them findable online. Open Vault boasts a growing library of clips, mostly from the ’70s. Quick picks:

Nam June Paik’s “9/23″
Featuring the Paik-Abe video synthesizer.

Man Ray, Man Ray
The man and the dog.

“Negro Masonry in the United States”
Chamillionaire wasn’t first.

Robert McNamara reading a Teletype message from Nikita Khrushchev sent during the Cuban Missile Crisis

Free wishlist:
� Embeddable clips
� Better ‘related videos’ functionality
� Tags
� More New Television Workshop video art clips

But WGBH hasn’t stopped at the vault, they’ve also opened up a sandbox of clips for your manipulation in what may be their most visionary move since the hiring of Monty Stark. Break out the video synths (or software).

Books sampled in Marshall McLuhan’s War and Peace in the Global Village (1968):

• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
• The Codebreakers by David Kahn
• The Senses by Otto Lowenstein
• Theories of Personality by Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey
• The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo
• The Human Revolution by Ashley Montagu
• Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White
• Oliver Cromwell by John Morley
• Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
• Robots, Men and Minds by Ludwig von Bertalanffy
• The Human Body and Its Functions by Charles H. Best and Norman B. Taylor
• Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot
• The New Industrial State by John Kenneth Galbraith
• The Artillery of the Press by James Reston
• Art and Illusion by E. H. Gombrich
• Studies in a Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon
• The Life of Napoleon I by J. Holland Rose
• The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G. Chandler
• Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace with introductory material by Leonard C. Lewin
• Man and People by Jos� Ortega y Gasset
• Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
• Walden Two by B. F. Skinner
• “The Human Revolution” from Current Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 3 by Charles F. Hockett and Robert Ascher
• Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships by Eric Berne, M.D.
• History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History by Jos� Ortega y Gasset, with an afterword by John William Miller
• I Ching, Book of Changes translated by James Legge, edited with introduction and study guide by Ch’uchai with Winberg Chai
• Propaganda by Jacques Ellul
• Two-Factor Theory, or How to Turn Eighty Million Workers into Capitalists on Borrowed Money by Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter
• The New Science of Giambattista Vico by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch
• Animal Species and Evolution by Ernst Mayr

See Also: Kung Fu samples used in Wu Tang songs [via Fimoculous], Kon and Amir - On Track Vol. 6 [via Fat Beats on a Bagel Buffet], Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Sigmund Freud [via Paper Cuts via Silliman].

The School of Everything is one of the better ideas I’ve heard for a startup in the last ten years: connecting would-be teachers with would-be students. They want to make it extremely easy to find people near you who can help you learn whatever it is you want to learn. If you think of all the independent teachers who post flyers offering their services in urban areas, and beyond that if you think of all the people with stuff to teach who would never post a flyer but who would get a great deal of satisfaction out of passing along their knowledge to others, you can see that this idea will have legs as soon as it stands up. At the moment, the website is primarily a place to list yourself, and it’s UK-centric.

But damn, what an idea.

Thanks to Esther Dyson for the lead.

BibliOdyssey just brightened things up around here with fresh Athanasius Kircher scans.

Wishlisted: BibliOdyssey the book.

I didn’t want to admit it to myself before, but I’ve been in training for my street Scrabble debut in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. Anagramming, stocking up on brain supplements, the works. Scrabulous on Facebook is wholly to blame. That and the movie Word Wars, which features Marlon Hill, my favorite Pan-Africanist Scrabble player; G.I. Joel Sherman, who’s currently getting the profile treatment by my friend Tom Brennan; and three-time National Scrabble Champion Joe Edley, who will be leading a Scrabble master class at the 92nd Street Y November 4. Read all about him on the 92Y Blog.

That’s an animated gif above of Joe Edley’s 2000 championship game vs. Brian Cappelletto. It’ll stop looping once you get a feel for the blistering rhythm of championship Scrabble gameplay. You can learn from the masters with the NSA’s annotated Scrabble games.

One of UbuWeb’s Featured Resources for the month of October, 2007.

Note: Bylined archival selections are the DJ top-ten lists of the ’00s. I’d be interested in Kenneth Goldsmith’s picks from the New York Times archives for example or BibliOdyssey’s top ten archival resources.

From Crooked House, via Silliman, for Lauren, who had a similar idea.

TimesSelect, the subscription pay-wall system that has enclosed premium content on The New York Times website for the last two years, expired at midnight last night. The gates have been torn open.

Putting aside the liberated columnists, who I look forward to reading again, the truly great thing about TimesSelect was the access it granted to the Times‘ rich archives. Beginning today you still have to pay to download material from much of the 20th century up until 1987, but the public-domain content from 1851-1922 is freely available and searchable and waiting to be mined.

This calls for celebration in the form of downloadable highlights with excerpts.

Joseph Collins’ 1922 review of Ulysses [PDF]:

That [James Joyce] has a message there can be no doubt… [and] he is determined to tell it in a new way. Not in straightforward, narrative fashion, with a certain sequentiality of idea, fact, occurrence, in sentence, phrase and paragraph that is comprehensible to a person of education and culture, but in parodies of classic prose and current slang, in perversions of sacred literature, in carefully metered prose with studied incoherence, in symbols so occult and mystic that only the initiated and profoundly versed can understand—in short, by means of every trick and illusion that a master artificer, or even magician, can play with the English language.

Before proceeding with a brief analysis of “Ulysses,” and comment on its construction and its content, I wish to characterize it. “Ulysses” is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century. It will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais, and “The Brothers Karamazov” Dostoyevsky. It is likely that there is no one writing in English today that could parallel Mr. Joyce’s feat, and it also likely that few would care to do it were they capable.

Oscar Wilde’s Disgrace: A Mother, Wife, and Two Children Must Share His Shame (1895):

Aside from the depravity that it has been necessary to make public in the downfall of Oscar Wilde, people who met him here, and accepted his letters of introduction as an accredited English gentleman, are curious to know something of his family, his mother, his wife, his children, and almost everybody else upon whom he has brought absolute ruin.

CUBISM IS BARRED FROM AUTUMN SALON Special Cable to The New York Times (1913):

“Cubism and Futurism are officially dead. We sealed their fate at the jury meeting last week… Until this year there have been more Poles and Russians on the jury than French, but last Spring, at a secret meeting, a rule was established preventing a foreign majority, for they were first responsible for the freaks, and they are solidly this year for everything freakish, and also everything off color morally.”

Vorticism the Latest Cult of Rebel Artists (1914):

The inevitable paradox has occurred. Futurism is a thing of the past. Vorticism has come.

What is Vorticism? Well, like Futurism, and Imagisme, and Cubism, essentially it is nonsense. But it is more important than these other fantastic, artistic, and literary movements because it is their sure conclusion. It is important not because it is the latest, but because it is the last phase of the ridiculous rebellion which has given the world the “Portrait of a Nude Descending the Stairs” and the writings of Gertrude Stein. It is the reductio ad absurdum of mad modernity. The symbol of the Vorticists is an inverted black funnel apparently spinning on a perpendicular rod. It looks something like an extinguisher and something like a dunce-cap, but probably it is intended to be the portrait of a Vortex.

Bolsheviki Stern Critics of Art: Discourage Mediocrity by Making Painters Scrape Off Pictures Exhibitions Reject (1920):

“Art is greatly encouraged by the Bolsheviki. There are frequent exhibitions, each containing about 1,000 pictures. Therefrom 300 of the best are selected and bought by the State at a handsome price for distribution throughout the country. The rest are burnt—an effective but somewhat drastic method to discourage mediocrity. At least that was the original practice, but recently owing to the shortage of canvas, &c., I am informed that painters of reject pictures now get them back with orders to scrape off their wretched daub and try to accomplish something better next time.

“A sign of the changed times is the great interest taken by the masses in art. One of my friends wrote that literally hundreds of people crowded round him while he was painting a futuristic picture of the market in Moscow. One Philistine, who declared the artist was making fools of them because the picture resembled nothing on earth, was ducked in a nearby horse-trough. Evidentally futurism has come to stay in Russia.

More to come I’m sure.

Seeing recent book art postings Stumbled Upon has led to two discoveries: 1.) StumbleUpon has grown a hell of a lot since the last time this happened, 2.) There is a small but vocal contingent of people who are morally opposed to book art of any kind when it involves the carving and sculpting of books. Book art objects, such as these two by our man Brian Dettmer, are an abomination for these folks because people should be reading books for the love of God, not slicing them up and selling them as art objects.

They have an argument, if you discount the fact that the advent of mass production in the 19th century has ensured that we will never experience a book shortage. And if you’ve never worked at a bookstore, you might not be aware of the standard practice of regularly dumping large numbers of remaindered and stripped books that won’t sell. And if you haven’t tried it yourself you might not know that forcing people to read books takes all the fun out of them.

But what this sentiment illustrates is that books are still venerated cultural objects with a lot of power, and that’s what gives good book art its power. Artists like Dettmer excite people because they allow them to see these sacred book objects in shocking new ways. They’re doing more to bring awareness to books than the book protectors ever will. They’re giving old books new life (not unlike Google, another foe of some in the trade).

Illustration Art blogger David Apatoff:

In the course of just 100 intense years, comic art has put on display the personalities of some deeply odd people who have produced truly excellent but Quixotic art—a far higher ratio than would ever surface through art museums.

Why is this? Perhaps the medium combines the privacy for artists to sit alone at their drawing board, a little incubation chamber for their neuroses and quirks, with a wide daily audience for the resulting work product. Or maybe the pressure of putting out a daily strip for decades simply drove them nuts.

Can’t believe I missed Brian Dettmer in my pompous Book Art All-Stars roundup. He may be my favorite book sculptor of the bunch because he doesn’t add anything to the books or move anything around, he just carves, recontextualizing existing content.

More at the Haydeé Rovirosa Gallery.

Who needs a cut-up machine when you can embed and combine public-domain book-page slices via Google Books?

UPDATE: “Ironics Light and Dark” above had to replaced with “ROBUST RED-BLOODED REALISM” because the 1901 poetry journal I had originally clipped from disappeared from Google’s index. One of the downsides of embeddable book clips. One of the positive sides is the chance discovery of the public-domain version of lit-blogs (the ‘Chronicle and Comment’ section of 1912 back issues of The Bookman) and the fascinating advertisements of The Reader illustrated monthly circa 1907—defending automobiles, selling talking machines, marketing faux hipster beer as baby medicine and making Grape-Nuts manly. Amazing that “predigested” seems to have been one of the most effective adjectives in the copywriter’s arsenal.

UPDATE II: It’s hard to stay excited about embeddable book clips when Google keeps making adjustments to their index that throw your clippings off and render them incoherent. Screenshots are starting to look good again.

UPDATE III: Eight of the books clipped disappeared from Google’s index 1/24/2008, so this mashup is now a giant screenshot that doesn’t link to anything. Thanks Google!

Photo: Flickr user gregw

Back in February, I reviewed all the book-oriented social networks I could find and concluded that what I really wanted was a more personalized version of Google Books. The rich related content with which Google surrounds many books is what makes it so valuable. Compare the book information pages for A History of Underground Comics (for example) side-by-side Mahalo-style on Google Books, LibraryThing and Shelfari.

Today Google Books launched My Library, effectively ending my whining.

Now LibraryThing has a lot of great features and is rolling out new ones constantly—and when it comes to socializing around books, LT and Shelfari are apparently where it’s at—but the one thing none of these bookish social networks offer is full-text search of the books in your collection. Google’s got that and suddenly, for the first time, I’m thinking it might actually be worthwhile to start cataloging my books online. Put in a little entry time and you’ll be able to search the contents of your entire book collection in under a second. They call that a value proposition.

Only problem now is most of the books I’ve been reading lately were published before 1930 by obscure publishing concerns and are as impossible to find in Google Book Search as they are in the real world. But Google’s new embeddable public-domain book-clipping feature pretty much makes up for that.

I can’t stop playing with book covers. The covers, not the books, because novel-reading is for girls. More on the 92Y Blog.

Also can’t stop playing Scrabulous, the Facebook version of Scrabble (thanks, Kristen!). Because I needed another online compulsion and managing eight simultaneous Scrabble games is a great use of my time.

• Stage Nudity: Barely the Beginning
• London’s Switched-on “Radio Love”
• Nabokov’s Complaint—The author of Lolita and Ada in a damning denunciation of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.
• Live Wires—A report on Liberation News Service (LNS), the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), and Intergalactic World Brain (IWB), the three supercharged wire services that supply news to the nation’s 200 underground newspapers.
• Genetic Damage Caused by Coffee
• Stock Trading by Computer—A report on “Instinet,” the revolutionary new system that will eliminate stock exchanges.
• The CIA’s Secret “Streetfighters”—An exclusive report on American operatives now being trained by Scotland Yard to quell urban riots.
• Best-Sellers in Underground Bookstores
• Stimulating Program—A report on Palm Springs’ KPLM-TV’s inadvertent telecast of a stag film.
• Computer Calamities—Case histories of computer malfunctions that resulted in bank accounts being wiped out, elections miscounted, and whole neighborhoods condemned to destruction.

Read the entire 1969 ad dug up by the Times‘ Paper Cuts blog and tell me you’re not ready to send in your $3.99.

Back issues pop up on eBay on occasion but not often. Some charitable soul should do for Avant-Garde what UbuWeb did for Aspen. If I owned any copies I’d help.

For future reference. A brief obsession with Saguaro and phyllotaxis was one of the results of a Tessitura Arts Enterprise Software conference in Tucson last week.