Whatever you do, do not click this link and read what you find.
Oh, you disappoint me.
Category: Link Page 21 of 54
Once again, I gather I’m rather late in discovering this, but if you haven’t seen it before, I think you’ll like this:
The Colour-Changing Card Trick, Presented by Richard Wiseman.
If, like me, you’re new to it, you’ll probably do what I did, which was to want to show someone else… which is why I’m posting it here.
Apologies for not embedding it – the Youtube version wouldn’t let me, for some reason.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll no doubt say it many more times: chocolate is an evil which must be stamped out – one bar at a time, if need be.
Anyway, tying together chocolate with the not-rubbish pastime of reading, Galaxy are currently running a promotion where their products have little codes inside the wrapper, and you can enter those onto their website and win a book. As the (swiped from their site) picture shows, they have a million books to be won by the end of August, which is a lot of books. Almost as many as are glaring at me from my ‘to read’ shelf, but that’s not something I ought to get into now.
The thing is, you don’t have to buy chocolate (or, indeed, anything) to enter – if you go to this page and enter the appropriate details, they’ll send you a free code, so you can have a go for nothing. And you’re allowed to request a code every day until the promotion ends, which seems pretty fair to me.
You might want to check the list of books to see if the possible prizes are the sort of book you’d like to read, granted, but if you do win one, let me know, eh ? I’ve tried a couple of times now with no success, and I’m starting to think it’s like one of those Reader’s Digest Prize Draws that we’re told are legit, but no-one really seems to believe in…
I’m sure there’s a whole world of funeral (or, indeed, funereal) music which I’m blissfully unaware of, but surely this album is going a bit too far?
A nice touch is the way a lot of the tracks are listed as being ‘made famous by’ one person, but the version on the compilation is performed by someone else (to my mind, the most egregious example being track two).
The non-original artist nature of some of the tracks (quite a few of them, actually) puts me in mind of the old Top Of The Pops LPs that you see in charity shops or at boot sales – you know the ones, they usually featured a smiling woman in a bikini on the cover.
Or is it just me that recalls that aspect of those LPs? Ah well.
Over at his blog, m’chum Steve recently shared the amusing story of an art student’s work to make a car blend in with its surroundings – if you haven’t already seen the story, I recommend a quick scoot over to look at it. Come back here, though. Please. I get so very lonely.
Back now? Fun story, I think you’d agree. Anyway, within 24 hours of seeing about the vanishing car, I came across a magazine article about Benedict Radcliffe, an artist who, as opposed to making a car disappear, made an illusory Lamborghini, which you can see above. That’s right, the orange ‘drawing’ above isn’t a drawing at all, it’s a to-scale model of the car’s outline which he actually placed on the street.
For more details of how Benedict went about making this eye-startling item, with more pictures, have a look here.
Whilst Neil Tennant is the most obvious example of someone crossing over from writing about music to performing it (from Smash Hits to being in the Pet Shop Boys), it looks as if he may not be the only one.
Presented for your comparison: Roger Daltrey of The Who, and David Hepworth of The Word magazine (a very good magazine – even if it does go on about The Wire to the extent that I sometimes wonder why they don’t just change two letters of the mag’s title and be done with it).
*Apologies to Eric Arthur Blair.
It’s pretty short notice (mainly because I’ve only just spotted it’s happening), but I thought I’d just mention that the BBC Writersroom are holding a session at the Hightide Festival in Suffolk.
The session is at 3.30pm on Saturday 9 May – full details are here.
In this sort of post, this is usually the point where I’d say that you have to e-mail to get your name added to the mailing list, but it seems to be impossible to book online for the event at the moment. If you want to go, it might be worth giving them a call, or perhaps seeing if the Reserve tickets>> button starts working again at some point in the future.
Of course, you could turn up and hope for the best, though I’d only really recommend that if you live close by or are attending Hightide anyway.
I’ve long been a fan of the writing of Joe Queenan. The best of his work, to my mind, is the stuff on film and general pop culture, but his autobiographical writing isn’t so shabby either.
So I was quite interested to see that there was an interview by Queenan with William Goldman, a screenwriter whose CV isn’t what anyone could call shabby – All The President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Misery, and The Princess Bride – in one of the newspapers last weekend. Not interested enough to actually pay for it, mind.
But, through the wonders of the internet, the interview’s now available online (where it’s free to read), and it’s located here.
It’s rather lighter than I’d expected – oh, all right, I admit it, I was kind of hoping for a clash between two fairly-strongly-opinioned men – and not as scabrous as Queenan’s usual style; then again, Goldman knows more about screenwriting and working in Hollywood than many people will learn in a dozen lifetimes, so it’s certainly worth a look.
Will there ever be a post-Final Cut of Blade Runner, reflecting the original vision of Hampton Fancher and David Peoples?
As you might have heard, Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, has a new book coming out in September.
I was very unimpressed by TDVC, and increasingly bewildered and then rather annoyed by the fuss surrounding it, though as M’Colleague pointed out, Brown probably had very little idea that the book would be as popular as it turned out to be, and that he probably wrote as good a book as he could. A fair point, and one for me to bear in mind when I start foaming at the mouth about Baigent and Leigh and how I didn’t believe them either.
Anyway, here’s an interesting – if rather slight – article on authors suddenly becoming successful.
My general feeling is that if you’re going to write for an audience, you have to be aware of the possibility – howsoever slim – that you might find yourself wildly successful and catapulted into the public eye… equally, you have to accept the possibility that you may toil away for years without anyone at all saying they like your work.
And like the final paragraph of that article, I suspect most writers I know would rather have to face the trauma of heightened expectations for the next book as opposed to wondering how the rent’s going to be paid next month.