Starkly quiet architectural imagery. Not recommended for manic depressives. Via AisleOne.

Two radio dramas that I had no idea existed; one by Joel and Ethan Coen, the other by Charlie Kaufman. Both aired on Sirius Satellite Radio three years ago.

Cute, simple tagline: “Twitter + history. And that’s really it.” In reality, just slightly more robust than that: this new service grabs your tweets and formats them as a subscribe-able calendar file that plays nice with iCal, Google calendar, etc. It’s clever, but if there’s a business model in there, I can’t see it. Via John Niedermeyer.

Fearing that the traditional mode of narrative storytelling is increasingly at risk from disruptive new technologies, the Media Lab at M.I.T. is looking at the problem more closely. This article includes quotes from Bob Farrelly (of the Farrelly brothers):

“‘If you go off the beaten path, say, give them something bittersweet, they’re going to tell you they’re disappointed,’ Mr. Farrelly said. He spoke from his home in Massachusetts, where he is working on the script for a Three Stooges picture, and said he missed complex stories like that of ‘The Graduate.’“ Hilarious bit of irony there.

Fresh out of the gate, a new site dedicated to the review of design-related books.

In a tradition of endless repackagings of Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories and novels, it’s probably fair to say that this is the most aesthetically sophisticated. Certainly the fancy-pantsiest:

“Hyland created a cloth-covered hardback with cover imagery restricted to a silver foil-blocked image of Bond’s infamous Walther PPK… A subtle diamond pattern is debossed on to the boards, which combined with deep burgundy endpapers evokes the discerning elegance of Bond’s world. An embossed manila bellyband with typewritten cover information on the label evokes the official documents of the period.”

Appears to be available only in the U.K.; American customers must abide with this plebeian, retro-minded edition.

“All in all, it is, once again, a pitifully bad installation experience. Adobe’s engineers have not learned any lessons from the experience with previous versions. And I suspect that the experience with incremental updaters for CS4 is going to be just as bad as it was with previous versions… Just what will it take for them to address this?”

“CRW’s management has a longstanding, international experience in the risk consulting sector.” Um, yeah, whatever. All I know is the design for this site is superb. The unexpectedly bold navigational roll-overs are fantastic, and the hand-drawn underscores balance the modernist coldness aptly. Via Mike Rundle.

Art exhibition opening tomorrow night at Pierogi 2000 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Working with laser cut museum board and materials typical to architectural model making, Joel Stoehr has created a sculpture inspired by New York City entitled ‘Tower of Babel.’”

If you find intricately built models strangely satisfying, this show looks worth the trip to the gallery. Via Manhattan Users Guide.

“We’ve scientifically determined the maximum amount of time that you should need to make a layout work in CSS: it’s 47 minutes. When your time is up, we’ll even give you the table code you need.” Nine months late on this link, but then again it would’ve been funnier a few years ago anyway.