there's hundreds of people frozen everywhere

Merry pranksters Improv Everywhere gathered over 200 people to freeze in place in the middle of Grand Central Station last weekend. I love the freaked out children and the guy who goes up and pokes one of the frozen. Ah, the power of synchronized watches...

symbol: ho

The image above represents the element Holmium as depicted in the Periodic Table Printmaking Project, where 96 artists have come together to support their slogan: "Arts and science: together in college catalogs; together in life."

Via boing boing

there was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go

As someone who has spent some time thinking about how regions (or at least one region in particular) produce distinctive literature, I'm very interested in the unfolding series at the Columbia Spectator: Fifty States of Literature, Starting with Alabama.

let the people listen in

It'll be a miracle if you can hear the commentary on Titlepage above all the litblog buzzin'.

Daniel Menaker, who left his post as executive editor in chief of the Random House Publishing Group in June, is moving online in March to be the host of a new Web-based book show.

The show, to be called “Titlepage,” will feature a round-table discussion between Mr. Menaker, 66, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, and a group of four authors. The first episode will be streamed online at titlepage.tv on March 3. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that it’s much easier to post video online than to get a show on television.

“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel...

The first episode will feature Richard Price, who wrote “Clockers” and the coming “Lush Life”; Susan Choi, author of “A Person of Interest”; and Charles Bock, whose debut novel, “Beautiful Children,” went on sale last week.

(Does it bug anyone else that titles are designated by quotation marks in newspapers? Or is that just an MLA nerd thing?)

smart and pretty, not together!

Via indexed, a continuation of the smart/pretty conundrum:

design-phan

Marshal Zeringue often asks people what they're reading right now, and today he asked my friend Caroline Tiger! But I must have been a lousy friend lately because I didn't know she's had a Philly design blog for over a year: design-phan. Bad, bad me.

givin' gettin' givin' gettin' it on

Neko Case and Kelly Hogan on...Aqua Teen Hunger Force? As sadistic singing sisters? This has been a weird day.

Via thus spake drake

sunday short stack

"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do." - Jean-Paul Sartre (See Fitzgerald on 3 AM.)

• Yesterday at Skylight Books, I saw the impressive multimedia presentation that accompanies Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Edition. A perfect gift for your favorite sarcastic cartographer...
• Retrocrush has video of the 25 greatest duets of all time.
• Sarah Boxer looks at books on blogs.
• Over at Salon, Zach Baron compares the latest releases from Cat Power and Magnetic Fields.
• Is science fiction the last great literature of ideas? Clive Thompson thinks so.
• The Nonist shares a fabulous document from the golden days of baseball when a few f-bombs were the worst of the sport's problems.
• A scary blob has clogged the sewers of Lewiston, Maine.
• Because you can't trust the dopamine high that infatuation triggers in your brain, Steven Pinker suggests you stick with someone who's infatuated with you.
• Neatorama lists 10 accidental product discoveries.
• Click through these Metafiler links (nsfw) to see the way Russian and Israeli children are taught about the birds and the bees.

lucky number three

Today marks the third anniversary of escapegrace's first post.* While I move in and out of devoted commitment to this site, I'm still glad for its presence in my life and continue to be surprised by the joys it brings me. What more can you ask from a long-term relationship?

*Miss you, D.

ouch

The book reviewers in this weekend's New York Times seem particularly ornery.

"...the novel’s prose is so breathless that it simply looks out of shape..." - from a review by Troy Patterson

"...this musing...serves also to illustrate the artless, wordy and underarticulated writing that makes 'All Shall Be Well' such a Black Death of a chore to read." - from a review by Ken Kalfus

Snap.

I rest my case

Ever since I returned to Los Angeles, one pet peeve has slowly moved up to the top of the list: when people -- especially people in New York -- say that there are no seasons in L.A. I tell them that there are most certainly seasons in Los Angeles; they just don't reach the painful extremes that identify seasons back east. I still experience showers where the air beyond the hot water spray is bitterly cold. I just don't have to cover every possible inch of skin to leave the house or huddle for hours under blankets until the landlord decides he wants to turn on the heat. I still get to wear my cute sweaters and scarves; I still get to celebrate that first day in sandals after months of cold and rain. The difference is that I don't have to suffer. This Los Angeles winter is especially real. Last night, I tried to go to a show at The Echo and it was canceled because the band couldn't get through the SNOW.

Image via Metroblogging LA

uncensored gut reactions to the oscars nominations

Performance by an actor in a leading role: Viggo Mortensen in “Eastern Promises” - Hell yeah!

Performance by an actor in a supporting role: Hal Holbrook in “Into the Wild” - Well deserved. He stole this film.

Performance by an actress in a leading role: Julie Christie in “Away from Her” - Sigh. No one else comes close.

Performance by an actress in a leading role: Ellen Page in “Juno” - WTF?

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score): No Jonny Greenwood? He was robbed! (I know it's a technicality - a lame one.)

Original screenplay: “Lars and the Real Girl” - Written by Nancy Oliver - Why did no one see this film? It's adorable.

Overall: Where's Zodiac?

More here...

it's the stupid details that my heart is breaking for

Sometimes all the time I waste on the wide wide world of web proves itself completely justifiable, such as when I find this 2006 VH1 video of Fiona Apple with Elvis Costello performing my favorite EC song ever, "I Want You." It may not be new, but it's new to me. This song has some of the most striking lyrics about betrayal, from the simple question of "Since when were you so generous and inarticulate?" to "The truth can't hurt you it's just like the dark/It scares you witless/But in time you see things clear and stark." Her performance of the song, how much the very act pains her, matches the angry despair of the song perfectly.

sunday short stack

"Never look back unless you are planning to go that way." - Henry David Thoreau

• Is melancholy being annihiliated?
• Maybe it's because you donated your "detritus of soured love" to the Museum of Broken Relationships. (Read more at 3qd via MetaFilter.)
• Someone has translated William Carlos Williams' poem "This Is Just to Say" (I'm the jerk who ate your plums) into lolspeak..."O Hai Just FYI" (via KR Blog)
• The riddle of tick marks vs. quotation marks solved! (via John Hodgman)
• Treat yourself to the sex faces of the men of the Australian Open.
• At the opposite end of the face spectrum, what kind of bad livin' do you have to do to end up with a nose like that? (You know, aside from the forgetting about the corpse kind of livin'...)
• The National Book Foundation has a new blog on the future of literary reading.
• Even more exciting, the Library of Congress has a Flickr page.
  
• The ABCs of New York made me extra eager for summer.

that guy deserves the gold

Via TV Squad, this live action Olympic highlight reel on the Japanese game show Kinchan and Katori Shingo's All Japan Costume Grand Prix is like nothing you've seen before...