Smallist

By 2040, according to a study I just pulled from my ass, 95% of the web will be tips or lists, or lists of tips. So here’s my condensed top ten list of tips.

1. Exercise.
2. Eat five portions of vegetables a day.
3. Wait 30 minutes after the five portions of vegetables before exercising.
4. Save 10% of your income.
5. When posing for photos, put one leg in front of the other. It makes you look thinner.
6. Imagine the audience in their underwear.
7. Think about baseball. Or England, depending on your problem.
8. Don’t cross the streams.
9. Never get in a land war with Asia.
10. Be excellent to each other.

That should cover just about it. Am I missing anything?

Tiny sumo matches are all the rage, in a place called Raglan Shire. (is that wash and wear, or dry clean only?) Also in the news, Second Life has newscasts.

Micrography is, obviously, “small writing”, and it has a long history. You can imagine the necessity of efficient use of space when stationery was composed of goatskin or clay, but the reasons for writing tiny changed with the centuries, from novelty to espionage to circumvention of religious law.

Then there’s the German writer Robert Walser, who wrote in a tiny “microscript“of his own devising.

Via BoingBoing.

Earlier this year, The US Defense department issued a warning that Canadian coins might have miniature spy devices on them. It turned out to be spectacularly untrue. The Poppy coins were designed as a remembrance of Canadian war dead, and is the world’s first colored circulation coin. It has a protective coating on the red color to keep it from rubbing off.

But this didn’t stop American military contractors from putting it under the microscope:

“It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source,” wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. “Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top.”

You can’t make this stuff up. Via Metafilter.

The first ballots cast in the French elections belonged to residents of St. Pierre and Miquelon, two tiny islands off the coast of Eastern Canada. The windswept, foggy isles are part of France through and through — they even take the Euro. Their biggest claims to fame are cod, fog, and making a mint during Prohibition, when the isles were used as a storage base for Canadian liquor. A local bar on the island claims to have Al Capone’s hat.

They were pro-Vichy during WWII, and Canada briefly considered an invasion. But in December of 1941, De Gaulle took the island for free France, without a shot, with the strange hybrid submarine cruiser, the Surcouf. Also in tow for the occasion were three corvettes and a New York Times reporter who was kidnapped and smuggled onto the sub after asking questions about the invasion. War is hell.

Today, the islands make their money from fishing, tourism, and aid from the French government, which pours $25 million in aid to the 5,000 inhabitants yearly. But while this might make you or me lazy, it looks as though the residents plan to sponsor a Drive to France contest. This will be a surprise to Google maps; they won’t even let you swim.

For more images, take in the Saint Piere and Miquelon pool’s slideshow at flickr. And Wikipedia’s history page is pretty nifty too.

Remember discussing background text items in 30 Rock? Well, Ward Cleaver wasn’t having no lorem ipsum either. Shorpy took a freeze-frame from an episode of Leave it to Beaver, where Ward is reading a letter, and found the following text:

Another paragraph of stuff. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. My typing is lousy, but the typewriter isn’t so hot either. After all, why should I take the blame for these mechanical imperfections, with which all of us must contend. Lew Burdette just hit a home run and Milwaukee leads seven to one in the series. This is the last line of the filler material of the note. No, my mistake, that was only the next to last. This is last.

It’s like a time-capsule! Via BoingBoing.

Dancer is a 4-inch, 18 ounce Chihuahua. He’s being submitted to the Guiness Book of World Records as the smallest dog. More pictures, and video, available at the Orlando Sentinel.

Via Apartment Therapy, a recommendation of this book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. It’s the story of Frances Glessner Lee, a crime scene investigator who recreated crime scenes in a dollhouse to teach detectives the art of observation. An SF Chronicle story on Lee and the book here. And another, older article with pics here.

Speaking of R2D2, I ran across this R2-D2 mailbox on 6th ave, I think at about 50th st. I assume it’s for the new commemorative stamps. Looks perfect for mailing Death Star plans.

On an editorial note, I think long after people forget all about Jedi and Sith and Anakin and Yoda, they’ll probably remember the R2D2 design. Smeared with dirt, slightly broken down, but lively and determined, R2D2 is a shorthand for the look and feel of the original movie, romantic and dystopian in contrast to earlier science fiction’s utopian modernism. The Millenium Falcon’s pretty cool too.

That’ll get you out of doing the dishes. More pictures, albeit highly compressed, smallish, and watermarked, at trendhunter.