Fed by Birds

Who'd have thought it? I confess to not having got round to finishing or let's face it starting the original - but Mary Ellen Bute's 1965 film, Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, with its mixture of surrealism, TV parody, sci-fi imagery and straight stagey renactment leads you by the hand through the dreaming and waking of Joyce's story - or at least enough of it to be going on with. It's quite a lovely, strange and funny little film, in that swimmy black and white - and hearing the words spoken means they somehow make a lot more sense. (At Ubuweb, via feuilleton).

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This 1862 map of London is detailed enough to give a fascinating insight into what's changed and what's stayed the same, particularly in the outer edges of the capital: looks like I live in what was then a hedgerow. Interesting that while most of the road names in this part of Brixton have gone - Pleasant Retreat, for example, is now not a completely accurate description - the pub names have remained, though many of their crappy DJ-bar interiors would be a shock to a Victorian gent in search of a pint. (Although there are a couple of pubs at the top of the hill where he'd feel right at home.)

The same site points me in the direction of this collection of London maps, where I learn that north Hackney in 1885 looks a Romantic sort of place, with a hermitage and a Gothic Hall beside the marshes, along with lunatic asylums and other large, forbidding buildings such as Craven Lodge.

The British Library has a whole online exhibition devoted to the subject, although sadly I can't check it out properly because they're so up to date what with their Google Map mashups that it causes my browser to quit. Anyone with a computer that's not suffering from overfeeding and heatstroke may have more luck.

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Fans of Hayao Miyazaki's charming animation My Neighbour Totoro might like to have a look at the Totoro Forest Project, a scheme to save the Tokyo forest that inspired Miyazaki's tale of friendly woodland spirits. Two hundred artists have donated work to be auctioned for the cause. (via Things).

Meanwhile, if you're in the UK, the Woodland Trust is looking for friends to help them create the largest new native forest in England.

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Endless fun and time-wasting to be had at Wordle, where you can generate word clouds from your blog or any other bit of text. It throws up all kinds of useful phrases: different versions of the one above produced "oldthink", "giants disappointment", "modern invisibility" and "ears-free living", the last two of which sound like surefire magazine titles to me. Also, "Even addicts started tiny", which sounds like a really sad version of a Herzog film.

Via Hooting Yard, whose word clouds are predictably intriguing.

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A sweet Flickr set (via Drawn).

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After waking up from a dream that I'd found a tiny cottage I had somehow overlooked in our garden, and discovering to my disappointment that it wasn't true, I started thinking about houses you could conceivably not notice. Maybe a living tree house, as above, or a dwelling strung high up out of sight:

But I think this reflective shed is what I'd choose for true invisibility:

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Lovely set of cartoon noises from old comics here (via Drawn!).

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Anyone with any sense likes to knit, and one of its greatest pleasures is discovering new and strange ways of doing things. Designers such as Sandra Backlund (above) are currently pushing knitwear into all kinds of unexpected directions, but even among the V & A's store of wartime knitting patterns you can find small innovations, like the ears-free balaclava - ideal for mobile phone addicts in cold climates:

Or to be really modern you can always extend who you knit for - how about trees:

(Janet Morton, via)

Or giants:

(Christien Meindertsma)

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Some intriguing titles from the University of Alabama online collection (found via Wrong Distance).

All of the above would make ideal summer reading, but this last one I really would like to know more about - luckily, it's still available.

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This video of bioluminescent comb jellies was made by the Vancouver Aquarium - shame about the intrusive subtitles, but the creatures themselves are incredible. You can see more of them in these extracts from the film Deep Blue here.

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Does time's arrow go down, up or sideways for you? Interesting observations here about how the arrow of time goes in different directions for different occupations. For physicists, writing diagrams starting at the bottom of the board, it always goes up; for computer scientists, it goes down as they work down the screen; for Western writers it goes left to right. Bloggers, I can't help thinking, are caught in some strange hybrid world, in which time goes up as new posts pile on top of old, and yet also left to right and down. I'm going to lie down now.

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Chicago, on admittedly just one brief visit, seemed to me a much more strange and interesting city than it's given credit for. Resident Tony Fitzpatrick obviously finds it so, creating a private mythology out of pieces of local ephemera, incorporated into drawn collages. Via Moon River.

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