paperandglue.net

Some of you readers will be familiar with much of the following content by virtue of following me on Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook. I thought I’d post some of my favourite sights and such from the past week anyway, with a bit of expanded commentary, for my own reference and, hopefully, for the enjoyment of people who don’t actually feel the need to visit every single one of my online haunts.

1. THE CLEVEREST CEPHALOPOD

Octopus carries around coconut shells as suits of armour (ScienceBlogs, Dec. 14)

-Cephalopods are all the rage these days, even when they aren’t exhibiting signs of bona fide tool use. I’m not sure that primates like bonobos, capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees look quite as elegant or mesmerizing when they use sticks or stones to achieve their food-gathering objectives. I’m as wont to anthropomorphize animal behaviour as anyone, so I’ll go ahead and say that it almost looks like the octopus in the video is having fun.

2. INDIE ART AND MUSIC STARS DRAW DAVID BOWIE

Tunde Adebimpe's illustration of Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie

One of my personal favourite indie rockers, TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, is the latest to add to a two-year project collecting 2D interpretations of Bowie. This is inspiring me to knit up the pattern of ZS-era Bowie that appears in the book Knitted Icons. (The book was a gift from a friend, and so far I’ve only made up the Albert Einstein doll.)

3. THE SARTORIALIST SHOWS SOME RANGE

"On the Street....Chapel St., Melbourne"

I don’t regularly read The Sartorialist anymore, mostly because I find his taste to conservative and mainstream to be of any interest to me, but also because the vast, vast majority of his subjects are skinny white people. And believe me, some of my best friends are skinny white people, but I much prefer blogs that feature an unconventional physical type or, better still, a wider variety of ages, genders, sizes and ethnicities.

But! A Twitter friend linked to this post and suddenly my interest in the most famous fashion blogger ever was renewed. This veiled woman is stunningly stylish — a concept which is anything but new to me, personally. I’ve had hijab-wearing friends who were both modest and fashionable, and I see women like this frequently in my everyday life. So, it’s nice to see them represented in such a mainstream venue.

4. EXCELLENT GIG POSTER

Top Canadian music blog i (heart) music had this poster for a gig in Toronto, the illustration of which captured my imagination in a big way. It has many features I like — northern lights rendered as text, a polar bear, and a warmly-dressed little girl, the latter two components combining to form what I choose to believe is a reference to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Unfortunately, I can’t make out the artist credit, so I don’t know who drew this!

5. LET’S ALL LEARN FROM HIS MISTAKE

The story of a guy in Alberta who (illegally) jumped on a train in an effort to speed his trip home on a very, very cold winter night and ended up being stuck in a frozen train car as the train continued to speed up and head of a town caught my attention because I used to live near the town in which it happened. I first heard the story on national CBC radio show As It Happens, where host Carol Off was appropriately sympathetic to the guy, who would definitely have frozen to death on that train if he hadn’t had his cell phone with him (which he used to call 911).

I know a lot of people (based on cursory glance of the CBC.ca comment pages) think this guy is an idiot for jumping on the train in the first place (and using taxpayer resources during his rescue). I certainly don’t disagree that it was a stupid move. (Let’s all learn second hand from his mistake, OK?) But I can’t be too hard on him, because I, too, have done less-than-smart things while trying to make my way home on foot during an extremely cold winter’s night. Something about the cold makes your IQ (or, at least your logical reasoning skills) drop a few points. Granted, I’ve never done anything as ill-advised as jumping on a moving train, but still.