Oddments of High Unimportance

We know the past from literature only the way astronomers know distant galaxies: not directly, but by correcting for what we know to be distortions.

(via How does the human mind handle conflicts of interest? | Barking Up The Wrong Tree)

Durham is growing its own crop of local businesses -- not just local artists and boutique eateries, but also a love of handmade crafts and the pleasure of both making and admiring objects that, as William Morris might say, are both useful and beautiful. The Horse & Buggy Press, a local letterpress, has some wonderful pictures for its Restored Radios exhibit, displaying American radios from the 1930s-50s restored by Asheboro resident Bob Gordon, age 81.

I know these radios were probably mass-manufactured, but damn -- just look at them and marvel at their decoration, their style, their solidity.

Forty years after Alvin Toffler popularised the term “information overload”, we might as well admit this: our efforts to fight it have failed. Unless you’re willing to be radical – to give up the internet completely, say – the recommended cures don’t work.

Resolve to check your email twice daily, and you’ll find many more messages waiting when you do. Go on an “information diet”, and it’s likely to end like any other diet: you’ll succumb and consume the bad stuff, with extra guilt.

So maybe we need to reframe things. The real problem isn’t too much information: it’s the feeling of being out of control. Why not focus, then, on finding ways to feel more in control – even if that’s based, in part, on self-deception?

(via Video Game Review of Slender: The Eight Pages | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review)

classic-hollywood-glam:

vampira

You can’t change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods.

Buckminster Fuller

From Orange Crate Art: Brach’s Halloween Candies

James Wood: “I deface nearly all my books, with both annotations in ink, and lots of dog-earing. I also write to-do lists in the endpapers, or telephone numbers, or names of people I must email. These latter often prove more interesting than any of my literary comments: years later, I stare at them, trying to work out who these people were.”

From Postsecret blog