found distractions
(leoboiko’s tumblər)
I tried my hand at Kindle screensaver wallpapers for the first time. These are intended for 16 shades of gray, 800×600 screens. They look darker on the device!
Sources:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inscription_on_Golden_horn_of_Gallehus.jpg
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/57073527@N03/sets/72157625603881508/with/5273068072/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Runen_Schlagstempel.jpg
- http://sternlab.org/artfortheinternet/2010/11/movable-type-cube/
- http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2012/04/intricate-japanese-movable-type-sets.html
Mary Smith earned sixpence a week shooting dried peas at sleeping workers windows.
A Knocker-up (sometimes known as a knocker-upper) was a profession in England and Ireland that started during and lasted well into the Industrial Revolution and at least as late as the 1920s, before alarm clocks were affordable or reliable. A knocker-up’s job was to rouse sleeping people so they could get to work on time.
The knocker-up used a truncheon or short, heavy stick to knock on the clients’ doors or a long and light stick, often made of bamboo, to reach windows on higher floors. Some of them used pea-shooters. In return, the knocker-up would be paid a few pence a week. The knocker-up would not leave a client’s window until sure that the client had been awoken.
There were large numbers of people carrying out the job, especially in larger industrial towns such as Manchester. Generally the job was carried out by elderly men and women but sometimes police constables supplemented their pay by performing the task during early morning patrols.
Photograph from Philip Davies’ Lost London: 1870 - 1945.
I am delighted by this.
(Source: collectivehistory)
10,074 notes View comments (via neil-gaiman & collectivehistory)
I’ve always found artists’ studios very appealing. They’re places where serious, intelligent adults potter about, focused for hours on rather small formal questions, like the difference between rural and urban colour:
The artist’s studio might be a cluttered pottery room (including…
24 notes View comments (via mrstsk)
Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
[…] If we pause, not merely to note that such old elements have been preserved, but to think how they have been preserved, we must conclude, I think, that it has happened, often if not always, precisely because of this literary effect.”
On mocking Doomsday
So, here’s to another doomsday. Once again it’s the season for mocking; secretly disappointed that nothing adventurous or interesting happened to our ennui-filled lives, we point at those who chose to believe in something—like this guy who quit his job to preach the explosion of Venus—and laugh.
During doomsdays I always recall an offhand comment that grandma let slip once (grandmas being the most hardcore skeptics ever), as the TV man reported on some apocalyptic prediction or another: Bah. The world ends when we die. The shadow in her face lasted but a half-second, but I saw it. And I think: they’re right. All of them. Existence is a game in first-person perspective; when the person’s gone, everything is; the entire Universe will cease to exist—inevitably, permanently, soon.
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction… the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant.
- Ian McEwan, “Some Notes on the Novella”
Read the whole thing here on the New Yorker’s Book Blog, Page Turner. Makes me wish I wrote more novellas.
