Rethink styrofoam cups

I'm not very artistically minded, but I have a great respect for people who can look at an everyday object and see a canvas.

Check out more of Cheeming Boey's exquisite work in this medium here, or his website here.

Probably much more funny for musicians...

This piece of music is just marvelous. Keep an eye out for details like the tempo suggestion "rigatoni," and the opening dynamics indication "msf," meaning mezzo-sforzando, or "somewhat very very loud."

Full view here.

Rethink Africa

Take a look at Binyavanga Wainaina's excellent piece How To Write About Africa for a snarky take on our stereotypes of the continent and its people.

Here's a taste of how Wainaina tackles the general Western failure to conceptualize Africa with an understanding of its complexity, and the nuance it deserves.

"In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book."

Rethink your bad spelling habits

Print out this handy guide for reference, and stop making dumb mistakes.

I want to be a tough mudder

Forget getting a PhD in political science; this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to be this guy:

Or this guy:

Check out this great series of photos from the Tough Guy Challenge 2010 in England here at boston.com. The American equivalent is the Tough Mudder competition, website here.

Quote: Friday

Today, a double feature from one of my personal heroes: the journalist Edward R. Murrow.

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men - not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."

"We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

Turning the world upside-down

Rethink arbitrary decisions about up and down, as they apply to our maps of this blue marble in space.

Looking for a way to procrastinate?

This synthesizer program is endless fun to play with. The developer did a great job of making it easy to use, and the tones he picked make it simple to create something beautiful. Give it a shot here.

A true war story.

I read this book for an American Literature class about a year ago, and it remains one of my favorites. O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran, writes beautifully, brutally, and honestly about war and about life. This book is a work of fiction, but, as O'Brien says, that doesn't mean it isn't true.

How do you generalize?

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket's red glare. It's not pretty, exactly. It's astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference - a powerful, implacable beauty - and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.

For the creative set...

For people going into design or marketing fields, a resume like this could be a great way to make a killer impression. Check out the whole set here.