Link Latte #19

Slipping, slipping…

I keep all these tabs open of interesting things to post and I can’t keep up, and occasionally there’s a browser-accident and I lose them all… which just happened so now I’m doing things from scratch, that I’m finding right now… in the next 30 minutes.

1) Tiny catapult for throwing pies at bees

I don’t care what this is about, the title alone makes in cool.

I’ve been getting into macro photo graphy recently. See?

A couple of seconds later there’s a standoff between bee and spider… and the spider wins, or the bee just gets bored and goes off. Still. Brave spider.

I feel sorry for the bugs in the catapult video, and I must admit I felt a sour pang of betrayal when I found out that the whole thing was actually an advert

2) Hi-Tech-Gothic, Atemporality

One for Bruce Sterling.

Either Gillette or Citroen or someone have turn the clock back and forward at the same time and made an iPod version of the Sedan Chair

Evo : Ora Ïto x Citroën x Mylène Jampanoi for Intersection Magazine from Remi Ferrante on Vimeo.

The Sedan Chair being a grotesque manifestation of a class system gone way over into slimesville. When you start seeing Sedan Chairs around the place, it’s time to start killing the aristocracy.

I still can’t tell if this is taking the piss or not. I mean the design twats in the video… everything is right off the cliche-dial. Still, there it is.

3) Paypal to do micro-payments

Though possibly only for facebook – possibly big news because paypal is the only service I’ve seen that makes it feel like you’re not spending money. There’s a reduced “payment-of-any-kind” hump. But facebook? Are you shitting me?

I don’t get this spending money on imaginary products for imaginary farms thing. Why not spend it on a real farm? Why doesn’t someone set something up so people can invest micro-monies into 1-acre farms in Botswana or somewhere… rather than pissing it up the wall on something owned by some cunt who tried to bribe a corrupt govt to have a privacy bill squashed. Sorry, I call Lobbying bribery now. That’s essentially what it’s come to.

4) Iraq/Afghanistan war bill now estimated at between 4-6 tn

The American military is going to bring the country down, I tell you.

5) Coffee Balloon Gripper

Bet you never saw that one coming. More info here

(via)

6) Child version of dog-cam

Gadget that allows parents to see what a child sees…

… parents that are fucking weirdly paranoid and over-fucking-nosy.

Fuck’s sakes, what are we raising here? Porcelain dolls? When I was a kid we were left out on a mountainside over night so only the strong would survive, or get raised by wolves or whatever. You know what? Fuck safety. Safety’s for fucking molluscs.

7) There are fainting goat kittens

Is there anything the internet can’t do? Brilliant. When I lived on Niue,

View Larger Map

we had a cat called Benjamin who used to do that… but mainly because he was hot and fucked and just couldn’t be bothered standing up anymore. So he used to flop over sideways onto the floor. He was a good cat.

That’s me with trousers on. I used to be blonde.

A supply ship would turn up once every couple of months… with supplies, which included fabric for people to make clothes out of, which being the 70s they did. It wasn’t uncommon in the expat community for people to go to soirees at other people’s houses and find they were wearing the same dress as the curtains. Good cammo etc. If you made a faux-pas, you could just go over and stand by the curtains… disappear until it had all blown over. That’s what used to happen at our place – we’d find people days later, still there, bashfully clutching empty martini glasses… like those Japanese soldiers who carried on fighting world war 2 for decades after it had finished.

Anyway… people don’t make their own clothes any more… so while people might like to think there’s a DIY explosion going on right now, we still haven’t caught up to the 70s.

8) You know those fucking annoying adverts that start at the beginning of youtube videos now?

You can get rid of them by refreshing the browser.