Spode of the Week

note: Just a quick Spode of the Week while I finish my thesis. The House of Spode should return to normal posting schedules shortly.

Hiatus

I will be taking a few days off from blogging as a finish my thesis.

In the meantime, I highly recommend that you check out some of the other sites and blogs I link to.

Currently, I'm ranking my top three in this order. This ranking is solely based on the amount of time I've spent on them in the last couple days when I should have been finishing my thesis.

Power Rankings:
1. XKCD
2. Wooster Collective
3. Pet Duel


I will resume blogging as soon as I've recovered from my thesis. Should be around Friday/Saturday, so look for a late Spode of the Week. Thank you.

Modern Warfare 2 Trailer

I'm putting this trailer up mostly for my friend and guy living next door, the one and only "Dug."

This is a thank you for all the time I've wasted playing Modern Warfare on your PS3.

Sunday Funday

This is an awesome slide show from the Boston Public Library account with 343 incredible vintage travel posters.

Most of these posters are from the 1930s and 40s.

Definitely worth checking out.

note: I spent some time trying to embed the slide show on the House of Spode, but just couldn't figure out how. That's the difficult part of being barely computer literate. So instead I'm just offering a small tasting of the many awesome posters you can see at the Boston Public Library Flickr Set page.


















Again, I highly recommend you check out the full set here.

40 Years of Inflation

Check out this neat-o-matic graphic on the prices for goods during the summer 0f 1969 and 2009 from the Billshrink blog.

Note: Normally I opposed to just lifting material straight from another blog, but since this is mostly just an advertisement for billshrink.com, I don't feel too bad about it. As far as I can tell, billshrink.com is a personal finance reorganization site.

Much has changed since the legendary summer of 1969, both socially and economically. To analyze the variance in purchasing power between then and now, we have compared a number of popular consumer products by price that are still relevant today. The figures from 1969 have been adjusted for inflation to give us a better idea of what the actual cost of each item would be in today’s economy. Given the bleak financial outlook which faces us this coming summer, it does us all a bit of good to look back with nostalgia on a time of blissful optimism and free love.

Spodes of the Week

Despite what everyone has always suspected, professional body builders have insisted that they are true athletes who don't need steroids or human growth hormones to bulk up.



Sure...well then how do they explain this little brouhaha?

According to this article (see below) by the Associated Press, this week's Belgian body building championships were canceled after competitors bolted at the first sight of a doping test.

In light of this news, we at the House of Spode are crowning Belgian body builders, and body builders in general, this week's Spode of the Week. Here's to you Mr. Pumping Iron Belgium...

The Belgian bodybuilding championship has been canceled after doping officials showed up and all the competitors fled.

A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.

"I have never seen anything like it and hope never to see anything like it again," doping official Hans Cooman said Monday.

Twenty bodybuilders were entered in the weekend competition.Cooman says the sport has a history of doping "and this incident didn't do its reputation any good."

During testing of bodybuilding events last year, doping authorities of northern Belgium's Flanders region found that three-quarters of the competitors tested positive.

Awesome How-To Video

There's a great how to video currently up on the new NYT photography blog Lens.

In this video, photographer Tony Cenicola explains how he created the "exploding pie."

The assignment: illustrate an article on the cover of Thursday’s special section, Wealth and Personal Finance, on how the customary asset-allocation pie has been upended by the recession. Tony Cenicola, the master of The Times’s basement photo studio, shows us how he did it.

Mr. Cenicola’s imagination and ingenuity are evident in this four-minute video, which reminds us — in the age of computer-generated imagery — just how convincing three-dimensional objects can be and how they seem much more “realistic” (if you can use that word in discussing a studio shot) because of their unpredictable properties. He also reveals more about his eating habits than we may have cared to know.

Go check out the video on the blog page, it's short and offers a step by step process for blowing up a pie.