Britt's Blog

Origins this year was delightful, as always.

I got a yeti hat! (Thanks Dani and Amy! Photo Credit: Zach.)

Many fun games, much fun socializing, and less than the optimal amount of sleep, as usual! Read on for details.

Read more

(When exactly did I become such an art enthusiast? )

Check out the work of Ji Lee, creative director at Google Creative Lab.

Do not miss:

• Encaptionating advertisements
• The revolved alphabet
• Some good, old-fashioned rhebus-style wordplay
• The Redundant Clock. (Want.)
• The Lamp Calendar. (Want more.)

Via Unclutter, who, bless their collective heart, doesn’t seem to get it.

Check out this video of “starships.” As I watched, I started at “um, okay, this is kind of cheap and obvious,” around the corner of, “hmmm, it is really well done, though,” to feeling myself being sucked into the illusion. Some of the best stuff is in the middle and end.

More videos available from the artist.

As usual, this comes via Metafilter.

I really can’t describe this first video better than Metafilter’s geoff:

“Monks on Segways, with fire on the top of their heads, playing “Lightning” by Philip Glass.” Although possibly it should be mentioned that one of the monks has a banjo.

goeff also kindly reminds us of Philip Glass on Sesame Street. I remember being utterly transfixed by this as a child before I knew who Philip Glass was, of course. This may explain something about my Akhnaten obsession, although I hadn’t remembered the Sesame Street piece before now!

If you have seen the Watchmen, you may recall Dr. Manhatten’s theme, which is “Pruit Igoe & Prophecies” from Koyaanisqatsi.

I have given up on most of the life-hacky, self-helpy blogs that I used to read religiously during my quest for the perfectly systematized life, but I still read and enjoy Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. Gretchen Rubin has more impressive credentials the the usual blogging phenom. She’s a Yale law graduate who clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In additional to probing contemporary experts on the happy life and interviewing lots of hip and trendy people about their happiness secrets, she plumbs many historical sources.

On weekends, she usually features a thought-provoking quotation, and this week’s resonated with me. It was from Pope John XXIII, of all people, and it was a great reminder of something I’ve been thinking about lately.

From the saints I must take the substance, not the accidents of their virtues. I am not St. Aloysuis, nor must I seek holiness in his particular way, but according to the requirements of my own nature, my own character, and the different conditions of my life.…If St. Aloysius had been as I am, he would have become holy in a different way.

I have a tendency to look at people I admire and think, “X is so good at doing Y… I wish I could learn how to do Y just like X does.”

And while there are some skills, heaven knows, I could work on, it’s also important to realize that it can’t be my goal to turn into X. Nobody expects me to do Y just as well as X, and there are probably things that I can do—or at least that I can learn to do—better than X. And I really should be working on that stuff, more than just trying to become another copy of X.

As Ira Glass so wisely says, “They already have the real Ted Koppel. Ted Koppel is already on TV. They don’t need you imitating Ted Koppel.”

What the world needs me doing the stuff that I am uniquely good at. So my mission shouldn’t be to emulate X in all things that X does well, but rather to be attentive to my own strengths so that I can become the best me I can be.

Yet another excuse for us Old People to look back at the eighties and wonder, what they hell were we all thinking? I blame all the CFCs in the atmosphere (due in no small part to excessive use of hairspray) and the unrelenting stress of Cold War Anxiety.

Anyway, you must watch the literal-lyrics version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” If you are a Young Person, consider it part of your history education. Beloit College students: see if you can get extra credit from your Div II classes!

And don’t miss the literal reinterpretation of “Take on Me,” relinked because the link in my previous post is borked. Sadly, in this version, the last bit of the video is cut off. :(

But, I say again, Piiiiippppppe Wrennnnnch Fiiiiiiiiiiight1!!1!