Magpie Monday

Here are some shiny things that caught my eye recently:

♦ Last year, Neil Gaiman proposed on his blog that people give scary books to their friends and family for Hallowe’en. This proposal has become the seeds of a new tradition, All Hallow’s Read, and people are talking about it. I’ve been giving books for Hallowe’en to my nieces, nephews, and some friends’ children as far back as 1999, so All Hallow’s Read is clearly a tradition I support and endorse.

Might I recommend you get involved with tradition this year by giving someone Halloween, edited by Paula Guran? Here’s the description:

Shivers and spirits… the mystical and macabre… our darkest fears and sweetest fantasies… the fun and frivolity of tricks, treats, festivities, and masquerades. Halloween is a holiday filled with both delight and dread, beloved by youngsters and adults alike. Celebrate the most magical season of the year with this sensational treasury of seasonal tales—spooky, suspenseful, terrifying, or teasing—harvested from a multitude of master storytellers.

With authors like Ray Bradbury, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Charles de Lint, Peter Straub, Sir Walter Scott, H.P. Lovecraft, Nancy Holder (one of my mentors!), Edgar Allan Poe, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Steve Resnic Tem, Peter Crowther, E. Nesbit, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (among many others), you can’t go wrong with this anthology.

♦ My pal Will Ludwigsen has two things over on his blog I’d like you to check out. The first is his Postcard Stories; each week, Will finds a picture or illustration that sparks something in his brain, sets a timer for one hour, and before that timer goes off writes a story. The second is a post with some words from Will about capitalism. I’ve been sort of down on capitalism lately (as some of my students can attest—we’ve had some spirited discussions), what with the economic mess and all, but let’s be honest: I do like to make money so that I can spend that money on stuff for me and for people I like. (Yes, I really like buying books and should be quite sad not to be able to do so.) But when Will said, “I guess that makes me an artisan capitalist. You make good stuff and sell it for money. That’s one of the reasons I’m a writer“—well, that just turned things around for me. I can get behind being an artisan capitalist, no doubt.

♦ Artist Mike Doyle made this abandoned Victorian mansion out of Legos, if you can believe it. Click here to read Doyle’s discussion of the project and/or to buy a print of the image. The house took 110,000-130,ooo Lego pieces and he used only Lego pieces, none of which were altered nor did he use paint or glue. Pretty impressive. Via.

♦ My friend Cameron, who even at his tender age is one of the most knowledgeable people about film I’ve ever met, sent me a link to something really cool: an article about Frederic Brodbeck, who designed a program that creates “visual fingerprints” of films called Cinemetrics. You really need to click through and watch the video—it’s pretty amazing stuff.

♦ Walter Russell Mead calls for a “basic rethink” of the American education system in “Just Because They Start Doesn’t Mean They Finish“:

Modeled after aristocratic and elitists institutions in Reformation England, American undergraduate colleges still accept as a default model four years of full time residential study.  A deep confusion about different kinds of education means that the model of liberal arts education is stretched to fit subjects like “business administration” and “water safety management” which have much more to do with training than with education in the classic sense.

I teach at a liberal arts college, and while I think a liberal arts education is an incredibly valuable experience, I agree it’s not for everyone, nor should it be the only way to personal economic viability. Via.

♦ Outfoxed is a charming webcomic by Dylan Meconis about a fox who falls in love with a laundress. Meconis’s art is lively, and her characters are vivid. Highly recommended. Via.

♦ If you’re interested in super heroes, you might find Mike Brotherton’s post about Superheroic Science of interest; he’s collected a number of links to articles around the interwebs about the subject. Via.

♦ Peter Mendelsund interviews graphic designer Chip Kidd. I’m a big fan of Kidd’s design work on book covers.

♦ If you’re a fan of Ben Templesmith (and if you aren’t, you should be), you might like this 15-minute fan video of Templesmith’s graphic novel, Welcome to Hoxford, which io9 describes as a “werewolf prison riot comic.” Bloody good stuff.

♦ My student Amanda posted this image on her blog, and I liked it so much I wanted to include it here (click the image to embiggen).