This week 3:AM briefly commends to your attention:
* Wordle - better than tag clouds (sorry, James), Wordle is “a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your cloud with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes”. Above, Melville’s Moby Dick, as created by Steamboats are Ruining Everything.
* The Penguin Paperback Spotters Guild - Masters of book jacketing (witness Great Ideas, Volume III), Penguin Books inspire a devotional following. In the vein of Seven Hundred Penguins, the PPSG Flickr group have your favourites covered.
* Sherlock Holmes - Basil Rathbone; Jeremy Brett; Sacha Baron Cohen? Like Maxim Jakubowski, the very thought of the Ali-G actor in an ulster fills me with dread. I’m taking comfort in Arthur Conan Doyle’s books (the sexy Penguin Reds, of course) before it’ll be too embarrassing to be seen with them in public. From The Sign of Four: “Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff… he thrust the sharp point home… and sank back into the vevlet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”
* Chet Baker / ‘Let’s Get Lost’ - His best album is the 1987 live album In Tokyo, but the definitive Chet Baker tune has to be ‘Let’s Get Lost’, also the name of Bruce Webber’s fascinating documentary on the jazz legend. Difficult to come by for a few years, Webber’s Let’s Get Lost enjoyed a limited run in some arthouse cinemas last month and is out on DVD at the end of July.
* The Wire - Forget Lost and its pretensions, the best literary US TV-drama of recent years is The Wire. And I’ll direct you to Steve Finbow’s piece in LitUp.
First posted: Friday, July 11th, 2008.
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