"Write now is good."

How data flows, Peeps secrets revealed, and "The Addictionary"

Photo: "binary easter egg" by Rakka

A few sites of note I recently found while surfing:

1. FlowingData is a well-designed and -organized online locale which helps readers

...explore how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better—mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all.

A few entries I like:

-- "Little Red Riding Hood, the Animated Infographic Story"
-- "Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis"
-- "17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe"

2. The Addictionary is a social word site. Users make up words, create definitions for made-up words, vote on other users' humorous wordy concoctions, and connect to others who enjoy doing the same. From their "About Us" page:

The Addictionary is a site for word lovers and those who like to see our beloved English language grow in serious or humorous ways. We built the Addictionary to empower word-play and to help lovers of word-play showcase and market their cleverness and creativity to the world...

If you add a word or definition to the site, drop a comment here. I'll post a link to it so other readers can check it out.

Members of the Twitterati may follow The Addictionary on Twitter. The site's "snowflakes" have a new book out, too—Addictionary: Brave New Words.

3. A view into the secret life of Peeps. Because I always wondered how marshmallow peeps were made, and this photo set answers it for me*:

"How Peeps are made" from The Chicago Tribune (via Chris Glass)

* A video of the entire factory process would be even more enlightening!

The living language of LOLCats

 

Lolcats are all over teh Interweb. Their creators combine extremely silly captions, photos of cute cats (and, increasingly, other animals) and similarly styled fonts to hilarious effect. Also known as "cat macros", these images spread via Web forums, email and now blogs. The popular site "I can has cheezburger" features new and classic versions of these images, and takes its name from the "original" lolcat shown above.

The post "Cats Can Has Grammar" by Anil Dash features an excellent discussion on lolcat grammar and syntax. He picks up on one point that has fascinated me as I've watched these images pop up everywhere:

The rise of these new subspecies of lolcats are particularly interesting to me because "I can has cheezeburger?" has a fairly consistent grammar...

On I Can Has Cheezburger, blog commenters write in what Dash terms "kitty pidgin" in response to posts. As many languages are currently in danger of extinction, it's surreal to see this living slang language evolving and proliferating. I wonder how long it will last — is kitty pidgin a fad, or will it become a firmly established sub-speak of "Web"?

No matter its future, it is presently another example of how, in Blogville, grammatical slanderings and language misuse are getting the big laughs.

Dash also provides a complete round-up of lol sites, and the comment thread brings in some additional lol sites, too. They are worth the trip — I was much more ROFL than LOL after checking them out.

Related posts:

° Passive-aggressive notes = lots of !, bad grammar
° Ali G. and Noam Chomsky discuss language
° "Literally?" No, literally.

When books ATTACK!

On her blog indexed, Jessica Hagy continually devises new ways to illustrate, via simple graphs, all sorts of complex social dynamics.

She calls this above image "Lock the library." I thought: Yes, lock it to protect the books from those who want to censor the ideas they hold. Then I realized how many others want to lock the library to protect others from being exposed to ideas inside the books.

This year's Banned Books Week, sponsored annually by the ALA, takes place September 29-October 6. You may be surprised at what the ten most-challenged books for 2006 are.

Related posts:
° It's Banned Books Week!
° Banned Books Week haiku and thanks
° Banned Books are big-buzz blogworthy!
° Banned books bracelet

Update: Jessica Hagy has a chapter in "The Age of Conversation". Read more about it here.

Sorted book clusters: new stories revealed

Read the titles of the above books in sequence from top to bottom. What happened to The Bathers on A Day at the Beach?

Nina Katchadourian started her Sorted Books project in 1993 and has photographed more than 130 separate book clusters since then.

The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom...Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library's holdings.

Her book groupings tell their own stories and also much about the books' owners. Shark is a New York-based journal of poetry and art. The editors publish it from "a home office lined wall-to-wall with books."

My bookcases need some rearranging. To remove all books from their usual spaces and re-shelve them according to new narratives would make finding one an entirely new challenge.

Via Notebookism.

I want my PTV! (Poetry TV, that is.)

When MTV started in 1981, it revolutionized the way people heard music. For the first time, listeners saw the music along the lines of the musicians' artistic vision. (We rabid fans and true believers didn't realize until later that videos were often more the directors' or their agents' or the record company's p.r. and marketing department's creation.)

With this added visual dimension, we felt closer to the music and the musicians; if the video also featured the band in it, and the lead singer sang right into the camera, many impressionable teens could believe that the band played just for them. These virtual mini rock concerts cemented our love for our favorite songs and singers; even decades later, I can't hear many tunes without also recalling snippets from the accompanying video.

Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, has a series of animations for his poems. They are poetry videos, and when we view them, we understand his poetry in a new way. We see Collins' and his animators' shared visions for his words. He calls his poetry videos "action poems."

Here is the video for his poem "Forgetfulness" animated by Julian Grey/Head Gear:

Which poems would you like to see videos for? Or do you prefer to keep your own images and interpretations of the poems your primary visuals?

Found at Bad Banana.

Is 140 the new 5-7-5? Writing, haiku, and Twitter

Photo:ほたるかな by ionushi

When was the last time you wrote a poem? If you use Twitter, you might be a poet, and you don't even know it.

With Twitter, the public messaging service which limits responses to its question "What are you doing?" to 140 characters, found poems, mostly unintentional, bob in its sea of second-by-second updates.

Structure defines different types of poetry. Sonnets have fourteen lines, and villanelles have nineteen, each with different rhyme schemes. Haiku have three lines, each following a 5-7-5 syllable pattern.

After looking in a book of haiku and counting characters (including spaces between words) in a few, I've found that haiku can fit in the Twitter 140-characters format.

Blogville's resident Servant of Chaos Gavin first introduced me to Twitter by inviting me to join a TwitterPoetry account he set up. It's turned into a continually forming epic poem, written anonymously by those who log in, and each line is 140 characters or less. (If you're interested in joining, drop a comment and I'll forward you the log-in info.)

More poetic musings exists in Twitterland.

Some of the sharpest Twitters (a.k.a. "tweets") I receive are from a cat named Sockington. His Zen feline observations, typed by his owner, fit so well with this format. Some of my favorites:

- Sleeping with my little legs tucked under my head, tongue slightly out
- How am I ever going to learn to write if you won't let me take the pen?
- Does this whole thing make me Cat 2.0?
- Calculated deterministic probability of alternative fuel sourcing... j/k meow

Another Twitterer who excels in one-liner communication is Fake Steven Wright:

- I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
- I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit but it wouldn't matter.
- In school they told me "practice makes perfect." Then they told me "nobody's perfect." So then I stopped practicing.

It takes practice and skill to write something memorable and brief. A thought has to be completely distilled to make an impact or it's ignored. Fluff blows away on the digital breeze; the diamonds stay.

As I Twitter, I'll continue to grind my one-liners, and I'll soon throw in a haiku. After discounting Twitter as one more needless distraction in my media-saturated life, I've come to see its usefulness as an occasional, community-based writing exercise.

Though poets often write about the small moments of everyday life, I'm still not convinced that anyone needs to know that I just took my laundry out of the dryer (one of my first silly "tweets"). I do like the idea of sharing wit and poetry with others, however. My Twitter address is here, if you're interested.

Image above is of "Yosa Buson, great painter, poet and calligrapher, by himself. The haiku says, more or less:
Hours of study..
a firefly coming out
of buttocks?"

Bonus links:
• This blog found me as I finished up the draft of this post. (Serious B.S.P. — thanks, Sharon!)
TwitterKu — unintentional poetry pulled from the Twitter Public Stream

• In honor of Sockington:
Mr. Lee Cat Cam

Passive-aggressive notes = lots of !, bad grammar

Apparently, there are still a few topics that blogging hasn't touched — until now.

Behold new blog passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers.

Nothing destroys precision grammar and correct usage like raw, unmitigated anger. (See the excessive use of capital letters, abundance of exclamation points, and lack of proper punctuation in above "Hot Pocket THIEF!" note.)

If you're a grammar nerd like me, you'll cringe as you read these. Then you'll laugh, because some of these notes are hilarious.

Ever received a passive-aggressive note and still have it? This blog takes submissions.

I wonder — will people start faking these notes just to get featured on this blog?

Cloud appreciation: What a storm chaser sees

The site Extreme Instability is the photographic diary of a professional storm chaser.

As a proud, card-carrying member of The Cloud Appreciation Society, I marvel at what he's captured. The above image is taken from a recent series he shot of a supercell storm above Bucklin, Kansas, U.S.

The site features video and a moment-to-moment journal of his many storm-chasing experiences. This guy has gotten quite close to a multitude of tornadoes — if you've never experienced one first-hand, the site's images and stories will replicate how terrifying it is for you.

UPDATE: Mike Hollingshead of Extreme Instability is working on a book with another storm chaser. Mike states: "It should be out by mid-summer (wild guess). It's mostly just a photography book, with some text. It's through Thames and Hudson in London."

Games writers play

Photo: Scrabbable by sparkypics

We live in a world of writing games.

Standard board games like Scrabble, Balderdash, and Pictionary effectively exercise our writing muscles.

Some of my favorite games are those we find or make ourselves. Here are a few that I play:

- Photo Captions. Find any photo that interests you. Set a timer for 10 minutes. Start writing one-sentence captions for the photo. Stop when your time is up.

- People Writing. Based on the classic cafe game People Watching. Sit in any public establishment which serves beverages and will let you linger. Find a person who intrigues you. Set a non-annoying and unobtrusive timer for 10-15 minutes, and write your imaginings about his or her life story.

- Train Station Poetry. While waiting for a train, look around. Observe advertisements, billboards, newspaper headlines, graffiti. Grab a few phrases that strike you. Write them down in your notebook. Re-arrange them. Add words to connect them. Is anything forming?

The key to all of these: PLAY! Have fun. Be light. Don't judge your work. Let the words flow out of you and onto the paper. This stuff doesn't even qualify as the first draft of anything, though you may really like what you create.

What writing games do you play?

World cultural treasures, now available online

Turning the Pages™, the British Library's online rare books and manuscripts gallery, is an inspiration. It reveals some of the most influential texts in world history. When I stumbled across the site, I felt like I'd found treasure, now open for all to see. It is also one the most comprehensive, beautifully done and easy-to-use multi-media set-ups I've seen online.

Some of the great books featured are:

• Leonardo da Vinci's personal notebook — It's breathtaking to see his scribbles.
• The oldest printed "book" — the Diamond Sutra printed in China in 868. You actually turn the scroll to see the entire work.
• The first atlas of Europe, which Mercator put together in the 1570's
• Mozart's musical diary — This also includes 75 audio excerpts.

There are many additional books featured on the site, and too many great works to list them all.

The British Library has made it fun to look at these books. All items can be magnified; to do so, click the magnify button and drag a large, flat virtual magnifying glass across the map or text. Click the audio button to hear more facts about the notebook, or simply read the text by clicking the text button. The help button is nearby, but the site is so effortless to use, it doesn't seem it will get much attention.

For a quick, wondrous peek, take the online highlights tour. Experts' articles on the works are part of the features section. Block out some free time, and enjoy.

In the excitement of finding this site, I forgot to note where I first found the link...