Tuesday linkage
- James Murphy, aka LCD Soundsystem, is retiring the band following the latest (incredibly good) album, This Is Happening. What will he do now? Pitchfork interviews him:
I want to do music for the subway– I want to make music so that when you go through the turnstile it doesn’t just go “eeeh!”. Make them all separate tones that are in key. So like during rush hour in big subway stations it would make this kind of harmonic music. Just bad ideas. The only reason to get semi-successful is so you can do that shit.
- Star Wars characters wear haute couture (see right).
- Dutch council is trying to save €400,000 on welfare payments by encouraging unemployed women to find rich husbands. (via chris blattman)
- XKCD surveyed people to get them to give names to colours. Stephen von Worley made a pretty sweet graphic of the results.
- The Orwell Diaries continue. In George Orwell’s liveblog of WWII it is June 22nd, 1940, and France has just surrendered. Earlier in the month, during the Dunkirk evacuation, he was in a rather dark mood, considering he was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War himself:
Always, as I walk through the Underground stations, sickened by the advertisements, the silly staring faces and strident colours, the general frantic struggle to induce people to waste labour and material by consuming useless luxuries or harmful drugs. How much rubbish this war will sweep away, if only we can hang on throughout the summer. War is simply a reversal of civilised life, its motto is “Evil be thou my good”, and so much of the good of modern life is actually evil that it is questionable whether on balance war does harm.
- Finally, are you in the mood to get happy weepy? Check out this video of a baby who was born deaf, and has just had his cochlear implant turned on so that he can hear his mother’s voice for the first time:
