Saturday 6 + 3 + 1

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Bounce Across the Seine on a Giant Trampoline Bridge
via Flavorwire by Caroline Stanley


After repeated viewings of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, we couldn’t help but fantasise about taking a magical stroll on the Pont Alexandre III, a bridge that many consider to be the loveliest in Paris. A new conceptual design by Paris-based studio AZC taps into feelings of nostalgia as well – albeit of the schoolyard variety. Their winning submission to the “Bridge in Paris” competition turns crossing the Seine into an incredibly playful experience. How so? They’ve dreamed up an inflatable bridge that’s outfitted with giant trampolines that allow you to bounce your way from the Left Bank over to the Right Bank.
Click through to get a better look at the renderings, which we spotted thanks to Designboom, and keep your fingers crossed that someone actually decides to makes this crazy idea a reality!

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Self-immolation is an extreme, extraordinary, and increasingly routine act. It has little to do with suicide and everything to do with politics... more

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A dictionary of contemporary politics
One of the most exasperating things about politics at the moment is the way politicians abuse and twist the language to their own ends, says Bernadette Meaden.
Words lose their true meaning and mutate into what they want them to mean.
Read the full story on the Ekklesia blog where the words/phrases given a more realistic meaning are:

• The politics of envy
• Strivers
• Wealth creators
• A flexible workforce
• Something for nothing
• Something for something
• A modest income

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Down to the River: 1910
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

Detroit, Michigan, circa 1910
“Approach to the Detroit River tunnel”
8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
View original post

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The marketplace in your brain. Neuroscientists say they know something about how people compute value. Why won’t economists listen?... more

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Heru
via How-To Geek by Asian Angel
This game will test your ability to aim accurately, work quickly, and keep focused all at the same time. Just eliminate the entire chain marbles before it reaches the end of the track, but is it as easy to do as it sounds? There is only one way to find out!
Read Asian Angel’s walk-through here or go straight to the game here.

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U-boat beached at Hastings, 1919
via Retronaut by Chris

SM U-118 was German submarine. In the early hours of 15 April 1919, while being towed through the English Channel, the ship ran aground at Hastings, Sussex. Thousands of visitors flocked to see the beached vessel. The Admiralty allowed the Town Clerk to charge a fee for people to climb on the deck.
Two members of the coastguard, William Heard and W. Moore, were tasked with showing important visitors around inside the submarine. The visits were curtailed when both men became severely ill. Moore died in December 1919 and Heard in February 1920. At Moore’s inquest it was heard that a gas, possibly chlorine released from the submarine’s damaged batteries, had caused abscesses on his lungs and brain.
Tourists continued to take pictures of themselves standing alongside or even on the deck of the U-boat. Eventually U-118 was broken up and sold for scrap. It is believed that some of the keel from the submarine may still lie underneath the sand of the beach.
Wikipedia

Sources: Hastings Observer Bygones / Old UK Photos / What's That Picture
Warning: Any one of these links could turn into a serious time-waster!!

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Condemned as a heretic, Savonarola was later considered for sainthood. Though convinced he was a prophet, he was no simple pretender... more

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An Alliterative Apocryphal Alphabet to Dazzle and Delight You
via Flavorwire by Emily Temple
If you’re looking for a way to teach your child the alphabet, we do not suggest Nathan O. Marsh’s Alphabet Apocrypha. However, if you’re someone who thrills at wordplay or enjoys clever comics overflowing with devilish detail, we couldn’t recommend anything better. Marsh’s in-progress alphabet/web comic, which we spotted over at io9, is a brilliant and sometimes poignant satire of – you guessed it – traditional children’s alphabet books, and like many satires, it is much, much more fun than the original.
After all, why have bouncing baby bunnies when you could have bastard badgers and butt biting barracudas over on breakneck bluff? That’s what we thought.
Click through to see a few of our favourites (so far), and then be sure to head on over to Marsh’s website to see more, peruse close-ups, and even buy your very own prints [price appears to be $18 each but not clear until you get to the cart].
My example:


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Keatsian ordinariness is protean and unexpected
via 3quarksdaily by Morgan Meis
Contemplating the tomb of John Keats for the readers of Irish Monthly, Oscar Wilde swooningly lamented “this divine boy” who was “a Priest of Beauty slain before his time”. Critics haven’t spoken that way for a long time, and that’s no bad thing; but Wilde’s sense of a poet doomed and lovely, an aesthetic spirit too good for this life, would prove tenacious despite the changing idioms of the age.
Paul de Man, for instance, a high-octane theorist who couldn’t sound less like Wilde, once confidently asserted that when reading Keats “we are reading the work of a man whose experience is mainly literary”, a man whose life had been chiefly led within the pure mental spaces of art. Wilde did not invent this legend. Much of its popularity must stem from the early and memorable things said by Shelley, who rapturously elegised an otherworldly spirit in Adonais, and by Byron, who entrenched the myth of vulnerable genius in Don Juan even while he was sending it up:

’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.

more from Seamus Perry at Literary Review here.

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