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.

Michael Phelps and Straight-Arm Freestyle

This last weekend saw Olympic wunderkind and all-around American hero Michael Phelps returning to swim competition from a three month drug suspension and an even longer post-Beijing break from swimming. Among all the extraneous reporting on the competition at the Charlotte Ultra-Swim were reports on such fascinating and news-worthy tidbits as "Michael Phelps Swims in Torn Suit" and "Michael Phelps appears to have lost some weight" or "Michael Phelps shows up for warm up just 5 minutes before competition starts" and even "Michael Phelps still a popular celebrity at a swim meet."

Truly impressive stuff.

As the competition drew to a close, reports focused on news that Michael Phelps had actually lost two races. Worse, Phelps lost to Fred Bousquet, a dirty Frenchman. The horror of it all!

The Boston Herald reported that:

The Charlotte UltraSwim showcased Michael Phelps’ vulnerability one more time Sunday night.

France’s Fred Bousquet beat Phelps in the 100-meter freestyle final in the last event of the highest-profile UltraSwim ever. Charlotte’s Ricky Berens finished third. Tyler McGill was fourth and Cullen Jones was fifth.

Phelps ended up winning two of the five events he entered at the UltraSwim in his first real competition since the 2008 Beijing Olympics last August, when he won a staggering eight gold medals in eight attempts.

Phelps finished second in two UltraSwim events — losing to Bousquet Sunday and to Aaron Peirsol in the 100 backstroke Saturday_and he dropped out of the final of the 50-meter freestyle. So his final tally here was two firsts, two seconds and one "incomplete."

"For my first meet back, I have no complaints," Phelps said.

Actually, he did. Phelps was angry with himself for the way he swam in the 100-meter final before a third straight sellout crowd at the Mecklenburg County Aquatic Center. Phelps finished in 49.04 seconds, well behind Bousquet’s 48.22.

Buried deep in the story (and all the other stories, do these people just copy everything from each other?) was this little nugget:

Phelps alternated his new, straighter-armed stroke with his old one during the race, flip-flopping between the two several times while he tried to track down Bousquet.

For all the focus on the crowds at the Ultra-Swim, Phelps' suit, his drug suspension, potential weight-loss, rumors about girlfriends, allegations that he once attempted to beat up a certain Nate N. (entrepreneur and co-founder of petduel.com) over a girl, and every other bit of fluff in between, this is arguably the biggest piece of news to come out of Charlotte.

Why would Michael Phelps want to change up his freestyle stroke?

Because he wants to be a sprinter. In an effort to spice things up, Phelps is moving away from his the areas he has been so dominant in, middle distance and stroke events, and moving to the shorter (and more glamorous) sprints.

To succeed in this sprint events, Michael Phelps needs to move adapt his swimming techniques and strategies to maximize his output in the water. In his old events (such as the 200 free), Phelps won by finishing stronger than his opponents. The sprints however, simply can not be won with this technique.

When racing the 50 or 100 free, the swimmer only has seconds to run the full race in, and there simply is not enough pool for some one to make a move in the second half of the race. Instead, the sprints favor those who can punch out their maximum effort over course of the entire race.

In an effort to analyze why the straight-arm technique appeals to Michael Phelps, Brian Palmer analyzes the technique over at salon.com.

In terms of explosive speed, the straight-arm technique has a couple of advantages. Traditionally, freestylers bend their recovery arm — the one that's not in the water—keeping the elbows above the hands. The newer technique, which Phelps used only intermittently in this past weekend's UltraSwim meet, gives the impression of a semi-submerged windmill. A traditional recovery arm is still moving forward when it touches the water. The water slows the hand down and prolongs recovery time, resulting in fewer strokes per minute. A straight recovery arm transitions more quickly to a propulsive stroke because the hand is moving down and back toward the feet almost as soon as it touches the water.

The straight arm also offers rotational advantages. Freestylers don't swim on their stomachs; they knife through the water on one side, then the other. The more quickly they rotate their shoulders, the faster they move forward. The straight recovery arm creates torque on their torsos, turning the swimmer into a flywheel. "Think of a baseball pitcher," says Glenn Mills, a former Olympic swimmer and founder of a popular swim technique Web site. "The windup and kick create a rotation that whips the throwing arm forward." In swimming, "when you throw the extended recovery arm over, it helps turn the torso and pulls the other arm back out of the water."

Most biomechanics coaches agree that the straight-arm technique is potentially faster. The problem is that it requires much more power. The quicker transition from recovery to propulsion means the swimmer's arms must drive through the water that much faster. The swimmer also expends significant energy swinging his recovery arm through the air. Very few swimmers can maintain that level of output over 100 meters. (This may explain why Phelps alternated between his old technique and the new one in last weekend's 100-meter final.

It's also difficult for anyone to maintain proper form when he is working that hard. "Remember," says Russell Mark of USA Swimming, "the propulsive arm is still doing most of the work. If your form under the water suffers, there's no advantage to a straight-arm recovery."

Wolfram Alpha

There's an interesting new kid on the block here on the internet, Wolfram|Alpha. Being the nice guys that we are, the House of Spode decided to go check out Wolfram Alpha.

What is Wolfram Alpha? Wolfram Alpha, which was released just a few days ago (officially launched May 18, 2009), is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram research. What makes it different from Google and other search-engines is that rather than providing a list of web pages that might contain the answer, Wolfram Alpha instead answers factual queries directly through computing the answer from available data.

Here is one very simple example of what Wolfram Alpha can do.



Searching for more complicated things like "caffeine," "IBM," or "war" give you much more intricate and interesting answers, as Wolfram Alpha compiles all available date on the query to calculate a quantitative solution.


Verdict: The House of Spode recommends that you go check it out. It's definitely cool enough to spend a few minutes on exploring. As to actually utility, that remains to be seen. Sure, if the House of Spode ever needs to do some calculus again, Wolfram Alpha will be the first place we turn to. Actually, we'll probably turn to Wolfram Alpha any time we have any science or economics based question, as the answer is guaranteed to be more concise than anything google or wikipedia can bring up. For other types of information ("what were the causes of the civil war?" or "what is pointillism") we'll stick with the tried and true methods.

Governator Speaks at USC Commencement

The Govenator, Arnold Schwarzenegger gave this year's Commencement Address at USC. Despite some initial worries that the trademark Austrian accent might prevent some graduates from actually understanding his address, he performed admirably. The Governator's speech had all the essential elements required to make a good commencement address, including a celebrity speaker, some humor, and an easy to remember and cliched take away lesson.





I wonder how this commencement address will compare with the upcoming address at Dartmouth College on June 14th. The featured speaker will be one Louise Erdrich.

Don't be alarmed if the name didn't ring a bell. As my friend Julia (also graduating from Dartmouth this June) said today "I can't even remember who we have speaking at ours. I just know that she's an alumna with a kid here now and she ALMOST, but not quite, won a pulitzer for a book." (Full disclosure: it was this quote and the Schwarzenegger speech, which she forwarded to me, that were responsible for this post.)

Frustratingly, both Bill Russell and General John Abizaid (ret.) are receiving honorary degrees during this year's graduation ceremony. Bill Russell is the 11 time NBA Championship winning player and coach, who was voted NBA MVP 5 times in his incredible career. John Abizaid was the 4-star general in charge of USCENTCOM from 2003 to 2007.

If you ask me, both Bill Russell and John Abizaid would have made much more interesting and appealing Commencement Speakers. Instead, we get to listen to the winner of the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction speak. The excitement is so underwhelming, I don't know how I'll be able to contain it for another three weeks...

Sunday Funday

Today's Sunday Funday comes from National Public Radio, which is currently streaming the new Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse album "Dark Night of the Soul." You can listen to the entire album on the NPR website. According to the story on npr.org:

The album was initially going to be packaged with a book of photos taken by David Lynch. But now there's word that the music may never be officially released at all.

An unnamed spokesperson for Danger Mouse says that "due to an ongoing dispute with EMI" the book of photographs will "now come with a blank, recordable CD-R. All copies will be clearly labeled: 'For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will."

In addition to Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, other artists appearing on Dark Night of the Soul include James Mercer of The Shins, The Flaming Lips, Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, Jason Lytle of Grandaddy, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Frank Black of the Pixies, Iggy Pop, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Suzanne Vega, Vic Chesnutt, David Lynch, and Scott Spillane of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Gerbils.

So go check it out!

Spode of the Week #2

To make up for the late Spode of the Week, I'm adding a bonus Spodette of the Week. Presenting our honorary co-champion, Ms. Danielle Lloyd, originally of Liverpool.

(photo courtesy of www.chickipedia.com)

Besides being an entirely useless celebrity, essentially only famous for being famous (think Paris Hilton), she also sports one abomination of a tattoo running up her neck. While the Hebrew script could look pretty awesome when properly applied, Ms. Lloyd instead wound up with this on her neck.




What appears to have happened is that in an effort to take some focus of a sex tape scandal, Ms. Lloyd decided in the fall of 2008 to add a tattoo to her neck stating in Hebrew that "Only God Can Judge Me."

Unfortunately for the young Ms. Lloyd, neither she nor the tattoo artist appeared to have done their homework. Instead of saying "Only God Can Judge Me" in Hebrew, her tattoo says that in English, using hebrew letters to approximate the phonetics. Plus, the text (and error) is repeated twice.

Therefore, instead of receiving a cool Hebrew tattoo, Danielle Lloyd now permamently sports (or at least until has it lasered off or she covers it up with another tattoo) on her neck Hebrew letter's spelling out (more or less) "wnly gwd qn jdwg m, wnly gwd qn jdwg m."

Well done Ms. Lloyd, and congratulations on your first ever Spodette of the Week!

For more information check out this site detailing exactly what Danielle Lloyd did wrong.

Late Spode of the Week

Sorry for the belated Spode of the Week awards, work caught up with the members of the House of Spode executive committee and mayhem ensued. But enough excuses, we hereby present this weeks recipients of the Spode of Week award. This award goes to everyone involved in the making of this gem of film, which makes its debut on May 19.





If you've just finished watching the trailer, and wondering what that weird taste in your mouth is, your not alone. We at the House of Spode have determined that what you're currently tasting is the bitter taste of crappy film.

So congratulations to Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, this week's winners of the Spode of the Week award. May the movie by so bad that it becomes a cult classic.

Fridge Anthropology

This is an incredible and thought provoking set of pictures I just ran into on digg. I highly recommend that everyone checks out You Are What You Eat.

We purchase refrigerators the way we fill them: out of necessity—to preserve the milk; to keep the greens from wilting. But from the right vantage point, an open fridge is the perfect staging grounds for a discussion of consumption. And if the aphorism holds true—if we really are what we eat—then refrigerators are like windows into our souls. It’s that sentiment that’s at the heart of Mark Menjivar’s inventive exploration of hunger, “You Are What You Eat,” for which he photographed the contents of strangers’ refrigerators. As you can see, whether it holds neatly ordered rows of labels-out condiments or zip-locked stacks of shot-and-gutted buck meat, there’s almost certainly a narrative to a fridge’s arrangement.

This was my favorite picture, the snake is just one the many ridiculous things that the photographer has managed to capture.





Now go check out these pictures!

Tilt-Shift Fun

This is a great little video I found on vimeo the other day. It does an awesome job showing what tilt-shift photography and effects can do for a film.

Note: This is an actual monster truck rally, not a stop motion film with little figurines. The tilt-shift just makes it look that way, which is pretty awesome.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

George Orwell and 1984

I read a great article recently on George Orwell and the creation of his 1949 masterpiece 1984. It's a fantastic account of the ordeal that Orwell faced in writing his novel. Racing against time, Orwell sequestered himself on the remote Scottish coast in a herculean effort to finish his novel as his health deteriorated.

Here's a long excerpt from the article, which I highly recommend:

He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with "inflammation of the lungs" and told Koestler that he was "very ill in bed". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.

A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US.

Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."

As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."

Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive."

Sunday Funday

The House of Spode is a brand new blog, and to celebrate, we're adding a second weekly tradition. You might be asking yourself, what's the first tradition? Well, the first tradition we created was the mid-week crowning of Spode of the Week. This celebration of idiots and their shenanigans will take place every week on Wednesday. The second, even newer House of Spode tradition is the founding of Sunday Funday. This weekly post will feature something fun, but beyond the limits of just any plain old vanilla fun. No, this isn't going to be any vanilla flavored fun, each Sunday will feature something drawing on all the flavors of the world.

So, without any further ado, here is the first ever installment of Sunday Funday. This week's flavor is zesty lemon, and features an incredible short film (7 mins. definitely worth watching) from the Schweppes Short Film Festival. Enjoy.

These Guys are Awesome...

...as long as they don't take themselves too seriously. Which, based solely on their name, I really doubt they're capable of. Anyways, here are Harry and the Potters, who are playing a free show at Dartmouth tonight at 9 pm in FUEL. Doors open at 8:30.





From The Dartmouth:

Harry and the Potters is the independent project of brothers Paul and Joe DeGeorge, fans of the megapopular novels by J.K. Rowling who began giving spontaneous concerts in their backyard dressed like two Harry Potters in 2002. Since then, the Massachusetts-based band has released three studio albums, “Harry and the Potters” (2003), “Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock” (2004) and “Power of Love” (2006).

The whole show was made possible through the efforts of one awesome dude, Harry Potter super-fan David Schmidt '09.

edit: The House of Spode will be there tonight to check them out. I'm looking forward to some goofy Harry Potter inspired tunes!

Why Wodehouse?

Why Wodehouse? Or perhaps a little more lucidly, why is P.G. Wodehouse the inspiration for the House of Spode blog?

Short answer: Wodehouse's comedic writing provides the perfect means of ridiculing all that which is too self-important and threatening in ignorance. The works of P.G. Wodehouse also serve as a means of celebrating the most important things in life, which frequently happen to be the smaller things (please pardon the cliche). Perhaps most importantly, the House of Spode is an attempt to celebrate the good and ridicule the bad without actually becoming arrogant of our accord.

For the longer answer (which eloquently argues the genius of Wodehouse), I'd like to draw your attention to this short essay by C.A. Wolski.

The typical Wodehouse hero is an Edwardian aristocrat of the idle-rich set who is surrounded by nuptial-mad girlfriends, domineering aunts, soft-headed friends, and phlegmatic butlers-whom they rely on to get out of the jams caused by the girlfriends, aunts, and friends. Plots revolve around the hero trying to extricate himself from an engagement to some horrible young thing, being blackmailed by an aunt into petty (but harmless) larceny, or helping a friend get out of an engagement. In some cases, a bit like a comic Job, the hero is set upon by all three situations at the same time-while never losing his verve or wit.

It is easy to dismiss Wodehouse's work as fluff, considering that the plots revolve around characters stealing cow creamers and prize pigs and trying to escape the clutches of soft-headed girls and menacing, officious romantic rivals. Wodehouse himself described the way he wrote as "making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether."

But there is more to Wodehouse than meets the eye.

Though the reader can't take Wodehouse's plots literally, his absent-minded baronets and young men in spats are, in their own way, serious about the values they're pursuing. The comedy comes as much from the trivial values being pursued (cow creamers, prize-winning pigs, antique golf clubs) as the wrong-headed ways in which they are pursued (petty larceny, blackmailing by means of embarrassingly ridiculous secrets, kidnapping of willing victims and prize pigs). But these characters, for all their lunacy, are serious about what they want and what drives them.

Spodes of the Week

I've been trying to decide who would win the first ever Spode of the Week award. What is the Spode of the Week award? This weekly award goes to the person or people who I judge to have been the biggest idiots/douchebags of the past week. It is through this award that the House of Spode will attempt to fulfill its mission of humiliating those who have gotten to big for their black shorts.

So, far the past couple days, I've been wondering about who my inaugural winner would be. Well today I finally found my idiots. The first ever Spode of the Week award goes to these two idiots, representing the XARM league. Congratulations idiots, you've each been awarded one flying potato to the eye.





While this at first appears to be just a boring run of the mill arm-wrestling match, this is so much more. So, ladies and gentlemen, please join me as we congratulate these two idiots on their first Spode of the Week award.