In ‘Game of Thrones,’ a Language to Make the World Feel Real - NYTimes.com

People have made a career out of this?

“There’s been a sea change in Hollywood. They realize there’s a fan base out there that wants constructed languages,” said Matt Pearson, a linguistics professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He created Thhtmaa (pronounced tukhh-t’-mah), the language of termite-like aliens in the short-lived NBC series “Dark Skies.”

“Game of Thrones,” based on the best-selling series of novels “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin, may be the biggest television showcase for an invented language. The books, which primarily follow feuding kingdoms in the fictional land of Westeros, had a scattering of Dothraki words, but the show’s executive producers wanted a fully formed language.

I remember from my school days, there was a kid who was learning to speak Klingon. Predictably, he came in for a lot of mockery. He’s probably consulting on one of these TV shows by now.

Book Review - 'Asterios Polyp,' Written and Illustrated by David Mazzucchelli - Review - NYTimes.com

Today I read this in a bookshop, curled up in an armchair. Feeling guilty, might have to stump up some cash and actually pay for the thing:

Enter “Asterios Polyp”: a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder. The tension between formalist rigor and emotional subtlety is not just the theme (and method) of the cartoonist David ­Mazzucchelli’s decade-in-the-making opus; it’s basically the plot. The book is a satirical comedy of remarriage, a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology, a late-life Künstlerroman, a Novel of Ideas with two capital letters, and just about the most schematic work of fiction this side of that other big book that constantly alludes to the “Odyssey.”

Asterios Polyp himself is adorably dislikable, an egocentric, condescending, irritable “paper architect” and academic who sees everything in terms of dualities. (“Anything that is not functional is merely decorative,” he declares.) When Polyp’s father came to America, we’re told, “an exasperated Ellis Island official had cut the family name in half.” That name would have to have been Polyphemus, as in the Cyclops. Asterios himself is a metaphorical cyclops, lacking the ability to perceive emotional depth. Even his head is drawn as a two-dimensional construct: half a perfect circle, interrupted by two equally proportioned curves.

The artwork was beautiful, and a world away from Mazzucchelli’s previous scribblings on Daredevil and Batman comics. There are sequences in it that don’t immediately make sense, and then a couple of hours later the meaning becomes clear, sneaking up on you like a pickpocket. I liked it very much.

The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress - NYTimes.com

Move over Minecraft, here’s the new indie cult sensation in gaming:

Dwarf Fortress is barely a blip on the mainstream radar, but it’s an object of intense cult adoration. Its various versions have been downloaded in the neighborhood of a million times, although the number of players who have persisted past an initial attempt is doubtless much smaller. As with popular simulation games like the Sims series, in which players control households, or the Facebook fad FarmVille, where they tend crops, players in Dwarf Fortress are responsible for the cultivation and management of a virtual ecosystem — in this case, a colony of dwarves trying to build a thriving fortress in a randomly generated world. Unlike those games, though, Dwarf Fortress unfolds as a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks that lead, no matter how well one plays, to eventual ruin. The goal, in the game’s main mode, is to build as much and as imaginatively as possible before some calamity — stampeding elephants, famine, vampire dwarves — wipes you out for good.

Confused? Dwarves. In Fortresses. That all you need to know.

Creating Graffiti With Yarn - NYTimes.com

Stitching and bitching takes on a public dimension:

The bronze statue of Rocky near the Philadelphia Museum of Art irked Jessie Hemmons. She found the statue too big, too macho and too touristy, so last month Ms. Hemmons, a 24-year-old artist, bombed him. With pinkish yarn.

Using a stepladder and a needle, Ms. Hemmons stitched a fuchsia-colored hooded vest on the fictional boxer with the words “Go See the Art” emblazoned across the front, to prod tourists to visit the museum that so many skip after snapping their photo with the statue.

She calls the act of artistic vandalism “yarn bombing,” adapting a term for plastering an area with graffiti tags.

“Street art and graffiti are usually so male dominated,” Ms. Hemmons said. “Yarn bombing is more feminine. It’s like graffiti with grandma sweaters.”

Yo Adrienne! How about some matching shorts in Angora wool?

Eddie Vedder, Amanda Palmer and Magnetic Fields Join Ukulele Craze - NYTimes.com

The new saviour of rock and roll is… the ukulele?

The trend, building for a decade and now reaching a saturation point, is being fueled by a mix of Hollywood directors, corporate advertisers, professional musicians looking for a new sound and amateurs who have discovered how easy the uke is to use. Their aims may be completely different — selling deodorant and cars versus thrumming in a Brooklyn bar — but they are united in recognizing that the ukulele offers a folksy, hands-on kind of musical humility that’s hard to find in an age in thrall to “American Idol” and Guitar Hero.

“It symbolizes everything that the grand polished machine of the music industry is not,” said Amanda Palmer, a singer formerly with the punk-cabaret group Dresden Dolls.

Pffft. The US are well behind the curve on this one. Over here we have the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, and they’ve been wowing audiences with their musical schtick for positively yonks.

Elizabeth Taylor - Child Actress to Film Queen - NYTimes.com

Q: What makes this obituary so distinctive?

In a world of flickering images, Elizabeth Taylor was a constant star. First appearing on screen at age 10, she grew up there, never passing through an awkward age. It was one quick leap from “National Velvet” to “A Place in the Sun” and from there to “Cleopatra,” as she was indelibly transformed from a vulnerable child actress into a voluptuous film queen.

A: The guy who wrote it died before his subject…

Mel Gussow, the principal writer of this article, died in 2005. William McDonald, William Grimes and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed updated reporting.

Apparently, the only other Hollywood legend to share this achievement is Bob Hope, who died in 2003. His obituary writer died in 2000.

'You Thieving Pile of Albino Warts'

Currently reading a book of letters by Hunter S. Thompson. Here’s a sample, quoted in a review in The New York Times in December 2000:

”You worthless … bastard,” begins a mock-malevolent letter to his good friend Tom Wolfe, in response to a letter Wolfe wrote him while on a lecture tour in Italy, ”I just got your letter of Feb 25 from Le Grande Hotel in Roma, you swine! Here you are running around … Italy in that filthy white suit at a thousand bucks a day … while I’m out here in the middle of these … frozen mountains in a death-battle with the taxman & nursing cheap wine while my dogs go hungry & my cars explode and a legion of nazi lawyers makes my life a … Wobbly nightmare… . You decadent pig … you thieving pile of albino warts… . The hammer of justice looms, and your filthy white suit will become a flaming shroud!”

Excellent stuff.

A Perk of Our Evolution - Pleasure in Pain of Chilies - NYTimes.com

How chillies got their heat, and why we love them so:

Some experts argue that we like chilies because they are good for us. They can help lower blood pressure, may have some antimicrobial effects, and they increase salivation, which is good if you eat a boring diet based on one bland staple crop like corn or rice. The pain of chilies can even kill other pain, a concept supported by recent research.

Others, notably Dr. Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania, argue that the beneficial effects are too small to explain the great human love of chili-spiced food. “I don’t think they have anything to do with why people eat and like it,” he said in an interview. Dr. Rozin, who studies other human emotions and likes and dislikes (“I am the father of disgust in psychology,” he says) thinks that we’re in it for the pain. “This is a theory,” he emphasizes. “I don’t know that this is true.”

But he has evidence for what he calls benign masochism. For example, he tested chili eaters by gradually increasing the pain, or, as the pros call it, the pungency, of the food, right up to the point at which the subjects said they just could not go further. When asked after the test what level of heat they liked the best, they chose the highest level they could stand, “just below the level of unbearable pain.” As Delbert McClinton sings (about a different line of research), “It felt so good to hurt so bad.”

Once upon a time, in a branch of Nandos, I foolishly opted for the “Brand X” super hot chilli sauce. There were tears, there were yelps of agony, there was theatrical gesticulating. I still wince at the memory.

Op-Ed Contributor - Google's Earth - NYTimes.com

William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, draws an eerie parallel:

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

Cross-reference the above with a skit from The Onion: Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village.